Square Partners With Digital Signage Company Raydiant

Payments company Square and experience platform Raydiant have formed a partnership that lets Square merchants integrate with Raydiant’s Digital Menus app.

The integration allows merchants to create, schedule and automatically update digital signage connected to their Square point-of-sale (POS) systems, according to a Thursday (Aug. 11) press release.

“Restaurant and retail merchants just endured potentially the most difficult two years of business they’ve ever had,” said Raydiant CEO Bobby Marhama in the release. “They want simple, streamlined processes that keep sales up, employees happy and customers loyal. For the first time ever, this simplification of a tedious back-end process allows retailers to shift their focus from operations to hospitality.”

The companies said in the release the integration will boost efficiency by eliminating manual menu item updates. Merchants also will soon get access to Raydiant’s Self-Service Kiosks equipped with Square’s POS system, which automatically updates item availability and pricing changes.

The companies pointed to research that shows almost 60% of consumers prefer self-service checkout to cashier-assisted options, per the release.

PYMNTS research has found that most consumers — 66% — said self-service is faster than the alternative (even though, on the whole, our research found that only a third of consumers prefer self-service checkout).

Read more: Retailers Have Opportunity to Ramp DIY Checkout Experience

But as we noted earlier this year, a key factor affecting this sort of data is most consumers don’t have access to self-checkout. Forty-one percent of consumers said they don’t use self-checkout because it isn’t an option where they shop.

Breaking down this stat further in terms of the generational divide, nearly half — 46% — of millennials (who tend to favor digital over nondigital) who used traditional checkout said this was because self-checkout wasn’t an option.