ShopKeep Talks Merchant Adoption At The Speed Of Technology

The PYMNTS team caught up with experts in the payments field to ask them their views on industry trends, predictions for the coming year and what their ideal payments system looks like.

Here’s our interaction with Norm Merritt, President & CEO of ShopKeep.

Biggest Trends

“2015 has been a year of transition. We’re still in the early adopter phase in terms of merchants who are adopting new technology; a very large percentage of merchants are still on electronic cash registers with the mag stripe terminal — and a lot of them are waking up,” Merritt said. “Whether it’s the EMV liability shift or consumer preference for things like Apple Pay, these are the types of things that are creating disruption in the marketplace and are going to drive a lot of merchants to adopt the newest technology. Once they do, then they realize the power they’ve been missing out on.”

Preparing for 2016 and Beyond

“I think what you’re going to see in 2016 is an increase in technology adoption. The EMV liability shift has come and gone, but there’s a long tail of merchants that don’t even know about it yet, or if they do know, they don’t know why they would make the change. It will take time for people to do that.”

“While they are, we’re going ahead and ‘future-proofing’ their whole business. Not only getting merchants on an EMV-capable reader, but one that has an NFC antenna — so they can take Apple Pay, and Samsung Pay, and Android Pay — and replace the ECR with an iPad that allows them to access the data and information about their business from anywhere.”

The Ideal Payments Solution

“Our target market is people who have brick-and-mortar retail shops; there are about 7 million the U.S. alone. And 40 percent of those are on an ECT; another 40 percent are on PCs. These folks are stuck in the past and they need help bridging to the future, using things like tablets in storefronts.”

“Whether it’s the product — we haven’t taken the old antiquated systems and just plopped them into the cloud; we’ve actually reengineered it and made it easier and simpler for people to access — or it’s customer care, we’ve invested in that from the very beginning … Making that investment on both ends is really an important part of what we are to our merchants: a solution, not just a computer system.”

As President and CEO of ShopKeep, a cloud-based point of sale command and control system for small businesses, Norm Merritt is the architect of the strategy to dramatically grow and scale the business, which launched in 2008. Prior to joining ShopKeep, Norm was CEO and President of iQor, a $500M business process outsourcing firm with 17,000 employees working across 39 centers in seven countries, where he successfully turned the business around and took it from near bankruptcy to a growing business and a successful exit. Norm has also run other companies from startups to established businesses, and has experience working in strategic roles for well-run companies like Disney and Universal Studios.