Unlock the future of transactions with Ingenico's Tony Walsh in our latest episode, where we explore the revolutionary SoftPOS technology. This innovation is reshaping how merchants interact with customers, shedding the shackles of conventional payment hardware. By leveraging NFC-enabled Android and iOS devices, SoftPOS is not just a glimpse into the future of digital payments, but a stride into a world where mobile and contactless transactions seamlessly integrate into our daily commerce.
During our conversation, Tony illustrates the practicality and versatility of SoftPOS, painting a picture of a business landscape that's both agile and cost-effective. From bustling cafes to expansive enterprise retailers, this technology tailors to the unique needs of any business. Learn how SoftPOS is transforming the restaurant industry by simplifying pay-at-table services, reducing hardware attrition, and envision a retail environment where line busting becomes the norm.
By embracing Ingenico's SoftPOS, we are unlocking payment freedom and taking a significant leap towards the future of commerce. This episode not only educates but also inspires a rethinking of how we engage in transactions, both as consumers and businesses.
Unlock the future of transactions with Ingenico's Tony Walsh in our latest episode, where we explore the revolutionary SoftPOS technology. This innovation is reshaping how merchants interact with customers, shedding the shackles of conventional payment hardware. By leveraging NFC-enabled Android and iOS devices, SoftPOS is not just a glimpse into the future of digital payments, but a stride into a world where mobile and contactless transactions seamlessly integrate into our daily commerce.
During our conversation, Tony illustrates the practicality and versatility of SoftPOS, painting a picture of a business landscape that's both agile and cost-effective. From bustling cafes to expansive enterprise retailers, this technology tailors to the unique needs of any business. Learn how SoftPOS is transforming the restaurant industry by simplifying pay-at-table services, reducing hardware attrition, and envision a retail environment where line busting becomes the norm.
By embracing Ingenico's SoftPOS, we are unlocking payment freedom and taking a significant leap towards the future of commerce. This episode not only educates but also inspires a rethinking of how we engage in transactions, both as consumers and businesses.
Welcome to this special Pulse of Payment series titled Swipe right on SoftPause Unlocking Payment Freedom, a special six-part series brought to you in collaboration with Ingenico, the global leader in payments. Softpause is a revolutionary technology that lets merchants accept payments on any smartphone or device, unlocking a world of possibilities. Join us as we dive deep into SoftPause with Ingenico. Thought leaders, satisfied customers and innovative partners. Discover how this flexible solution can streamline your checkout, expand your reach and deliver a seamless payment experience for your customers, all while moving your commerce forward. Buckle up and get ready to swipe right on SoftPause and unlock payment freedom.
Speaker 2:Today, Tony Walsh, head of retail sales from Ingenico, joins me for our second episode in our Pulse of Payment series focused on SoftPause. In the first episode, we had a great high-level overview from Jason Stanchfield, so I suggest you go listen to that episode, which is episode 298. So, Tony, thank you for being here and welcome to the show. Hey, Greg, how are you? I'm doing great. I'm glad you've joined us. Well, let's go ahead and dive in, If you don't mind. Tell our audience a little bit about yourself and a little about your professional journey as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure this is going to be fun. I'm a native New Yorker, relocated to the great city of Atlanta where I spent 25 years in the payments industry, but during the pandemic I traded the pine trees for some palm trees and headed down to Northeast Florida where I reside now working for Ingenico. Now the past six years heading up our retail sales practice for the United States and then compasses our go-to-market direct enterprise customers as well as our ecosystem solution customers and emerging payments. So the journey has been quite a ride and, seeing the pre-PCI payments to today, we were heavily compliant and it's been such a pretty cool ride.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, just to give our audience a quick reminder, can you tell our audience what SoftPause is?
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, so think SoftPause being where you can take any Android or iOS device that has an NFC antenna or NFC capability and turn it into a payments acceptor. We've got these devices. They're supercomputers that we put in our pockets every day, and there's just a lot of use cases where you can envision hey, wouldn't it be great if I could just take a TAP payment from an IoT device or a card with an antenna on it? So let's just see if we can't find a unique way to embrace the payments industry from a different perspective.
Speaker 2:Okay, and just for even my own knowledge, it doesn't have to be a phone, right? It can be a purpose-built device or some other device, as long as it has the NFC capability. Is that fair?
Speaker 3:Right, so long as it's Android or iOS. Yeah, any device that has an NFC in it. Great question, because it does right, it moves itself right into the tablets or built for purpose. But the tablets that are coming off the shelves today from the large manufacturers are ruggedized. They're ready to be dumped in buckets of water right, so they could survive a lot of use cases. So long as it has an NFC chip in it, let's turn it to a payments acceptor.
Speaker 2:Okay, and you mentioned again the Android and iOS. Now, that's because it has. You have software, they have software that needs to be downloaded. Is that correct?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's just the operating systems that allow for the technology to reside on the device. Really, that's where it's at, and it really was designed to be a mobility use case at first, and so these devices in our pockets are largely iOS and Android, and we see the Android uptick across the retail landscape right now because of the affordability of the technology. Okay, got it.
Speaker 2:All right. So what we're going to focus on is a couple things in this episode. One is the value or the benefits of soft pause, and two are the use cases or, set another way, the types and sizes of businesses that can benefit from soft pause. So kind of with that background, let's go ahead and dive into the meat of the conversation. So what are some of the value, props or benefits of using soft pause?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So think about it this way the largest benefit today I don't want to say large, let's just break these down but if you think about it, the value and the benefit are going to be tangible to the use case. So in many use cases that we've all seen in the retail landscape where we've got a payment device or a paired payment device with the tablet of some type, we see a lot or even in taxi cab services or other use cases where you see a dongle plugged into a socket of a phone, right. We are in those cases deploying PCI estates to the retailers, or to fleets, if you will. In that case we are putting a load not just on cost of buying payment devices and integration and plugging them in, but it's the estate management of all these devices. We need to know where every serial number is in the estate. We need to maintain the estate. The estate would a trip, you know and themselves, and garbage pails in people's pockets and the cars going home from work.
Speaker 3:So part of the value here that is pretty interesting is don't buy that payment, don't buy those payment devices any longer, don't roll out a payment estate when we're seeing more and more of the cards issued with antennas right, so we could take that and flip those cards onto a tap payment. We also are seeing a lot of cards being let me give you an example loyalty gift being provisioned to phones right. So we're more and more as a society utilizing the wallets that are on board our phones to provision different payment types. So as we evolve as a paying society, we're seeing more and more use cases where it's Internet of Things is moving those payment types to your phone so that now we can satisfy many of the use cases 80, 90% with a soft-paste type application. We don't need a physical tap card that goes in. So we've got quite a unique opportunity there from a value.
Speaker 3:Don't roll out hardware anymore. That's kind of the message that we like to talk to our customers about, and it's kind of funny because we get a lot of times hey, aren't you kind of sabotaging your own business? We're in Genico, after all, the largest hardware provider in the world payment technology, but not really right. We're trying to provide convenience and flexibility to our customers. We want to be the payments forward type company, not take it backwards, right. So as we look forward, we are seeing that there's a tremendous push for simplifying the retail landscape.
Speaker 2:So, tony, thanks for sharing that. So obviously, the way you position that is. A lot of use cases, which we're going to talk in more detail in a minute, involve hardware. That hardware could be from the terminals. A lot of people want to call them bricks, which I'm sure you hate that term, but the bricks that sit on countertops, the tablets, the extra things that people or companies have to buy in order to take payments. There's really, I guess, a cost savings component to that, and then the convenience of using an existing device and the flexibility of it Is that kind of a good summary.
Speaker 3:Yeah, great, I mean, if you think about it, we could go and walk together through a traditional retail mall and see probably 30 different use cases for soft pause right In 30 steps. Right, I mean, in reality, if you go walk into an electronic store that has a traditional point of sale and that point of sale has a traditional payment terminal sitting there, that's a great use case for payments, right? But what we're seeing in the retail landscape is that more and more the retailer wants to engage the customer where the customer is shopping. So in a lot of times, shrinking that experience to hey, we're retailing, we're having a conversation and let's go ahead and just purchase this item on the spot. And that requires a different implementation of payment technology and that's where soft pause really can be a big help.
Speaker 3:It's time to market for the retailer, its cost of implementation for the retailer and it becomes a convenience for the consumer in that environment. As we walk through that same mall, we come to the kiosks that have multiple different types of products on it and these folks have to plug in payment terminals and find power to do that and all sorts of other challenges, one that have a soft pause as provisioned or issued by your acquire right to your phone and you can take payments on your phone. So it really enables the retailers and businesses to pick and choose how they want to implement payment technology. So it may not be a one size fit all but it's certainly augmentative or, in some cases, the way to implement the payment technology for card present. So yeah, lots of different ways to imagine the use case of soft pause.
Speaker 2:Right, right, okay. Well, are there other benefits that don't necessarily sort of fit into those buckets that we talked about earlier?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would say if we're thinking about sort of segments that are not utilizing traditional card present payment technology. Great, great example of that is you get some work done in your home by your HVAC or your pool company or what have you, and it's happened to me in the last few months living in Florida. I got my AC fixed right, so sure enough you know. The guy comes as a heck of a job. He's going to take the payment. He uses a pretty sophisticated application on an iPad to kind of explain the work he's going to go through and what's going to happen and how much it's going to cost. So I authorize it by using my finger on the iPad and then the work's done. He shows me what he's done and goes to his telephone or his iPhone and starts plugging in my phone number, tapping it into a phone while I'm sitting there reading it to him. So a couple of things happen in that environment.
Speaker 3:Right there, we've got potential security issues, right. You know, if we're writing down or recording card numbers and expiration date and CV codes, probably a bad thing for the service provider. It's inconvenient for me, the consumer, at that point reading my card number to him. And then, lastly, it's costly. Right, it's costly to do card not present. You know, in the way the Visa, mastercard and all the schemes roll out interchange, the cost of accepting a payment. If the card is entered into any system then the card is not tapped or inserted into a reader. The interchange goes very high. It could be 100, 125 basis points, which in a transaction that's 300 bucks, we could be talking about a 20 to 30 dollar delta in accepting that payment. So it's a cost savings for an industry segment like service providers. So it's interesting that soft pause, as it bridges different types of industry segments or use cases, it presents a different value proposition.
Speaker 2:Right, right, okay. Well, that's a good segue into our further discussion sort of around the use cases, and I think we could talk about a ton of them, but let's kind of think about some of them that might be relevant to most people, especially, you know, the payments people that are listening. That's going to make a lot of sense to them. But one that quickly pops into my head and you kind of mentioned it, but small businesses or startups we used to call micro merchants you don't really hear that term as much anymore but how do you think like a small business or a startup company would use the product?
Speaker 3:It would be the replacement of what we've traditionally seen. Small businesses use a provision application from the play store by one of the large companies. Those companies usually will send them a free dongle that plugs into their phone, or they're writing down card numbers and pressing them into a phone really, really kind of cumbersome use cases. Again it comes back to security, convenience and cost doing business for the small business. But if you think about these segments and the fleets of phones we keep coming back to phone. We could talk tablet and different use cases in a moment. But the large cell phone providers, the large acquirers there's a tremendous amount of phones in the business fleet in the marketplace right now, from landscaping to food trucks to floral design, you name it.
Speaker 3:Right use cases just come flying out and just to take payments has always been somewhat cumbersome.
Speaker 3:Now we see alternative payment methods, like then mo and sell some of these cash app become a little bit more streamlined. But let's be honest, there's a lot of us that want to use the cards in our wallet because we get a benefit from those cards. So you know, using a, c, h applications are Always the best case and as the average ticket increases for the card holder, the better it is to be using a card scheme back payment types. I like to use my miles card. It's not provision to every application of my phone, so I still want to pay with that card. And the small business really doesn't have many opportunities to take that unless they're doing it in that old fashioned, almost going back to knucklebuster days where they're just coming in a car number and there's just a lot of holes in that application. So, yeah, the small businesses, there's just the noodles of the of use cases that we've seen so far and if you look at the trajectory is on a hockey stick up to the right for for soft pause.
Speaker 2:Right, right. Well, another segment and you you've kind of touched on the bone, go a little deeper is is kind of the mobile related businesses. So delivery services, food trucks, service organization. So can you speak to some of those use cases?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, if you think about this, the concept of you calling up and having to again, from a consumer perspective, card holder perspective calling up the local pizza place and having to Read your card number over the phone, versus coming to the walk into the door, getting your pie, go ahead and tapping your phone, a soft pause enabled smartphone and selecting your tip and letting that operator then leave with a card present transaction again. We save some money. We've increased the security, also enables for some data analytics for those small businesses so we can look at payment trends, we can run reports on what payments were happening that day. We could, we could run disputes. So there's a lot of things we can do now that we've that. We've electrified, systemically electrified payment transaction on the smartphone.
Speaker 3:So for that segment, absolutely there's a there's a tremendous impact for them if they, if they look at this and what's really slick about soft pause Is the way that we can customize these payment applications. So large chain, midsize chain, it could be great and tell me pizza, we've got 30 stores in florida. We want to go ahead and have our own payment application on a play store for our drivers. Absolutely, you can do things like that. So the flexibility of this Is really powerful to turn on different features and let the small businesses kinda act like the larger chains and compete on a more level basis. You, I mean, can you build solutions, gotcha?
Speaker 2:okay, yeah, I mean a huge segment of the payment space that gets a lot of attention. A lot of solutions are out. There are restaurants, so how do you see restaurants using soft pause?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm passionate about restaurants using soft pause in that I've watched the pain and suffering it takes for restaurant operators to integrate a payment device and that's largely how pay a table is rolled out in the US in pretty small pockets at this point. The US market, you know, taking a, taking a tablet, building a sled, integrating that payment device to your point of sale, which is residing on that tablet withers through Bluetooth or through Wi-Fi or other technologies, becomes very expensive and then the roll out and execution of it is Always a bit of a challenge. Payment devices in restaurant spaces are plagued with some issues. A couple of them are Are obvious right, the dropping the environment when the payment device goes to a table or gets a drink spilled on them, then a bulletproof, so they're always going to break. So you've got, you know, a very short life cycle, these payment devices. It's a I'm highly attriting a state. So you're rolling out five, ten, fifteen and I've seen up to already in some of our implementations, 50, 60,000 payment devices attached to a, to a tablet. Why do that when we can look at reducing all those costs, taking out the estate that's going to a trip and just cost tens of millions of dollars in some cases and move to a software solution, a solution that can, that can satisfy the majority of the use case.
Speaker 3:For the restaurant operator, yes, is every card going to have an antenna on it. Sometimes even the enabled cards are Broken. I had one for a year that was broken, so I know, I know this for a fact that they got washed. But you can satisfy so for restaurant chain isn't taking, or even a small restaurant operator Isn't taking, pay a table today. But they really want to make that leap. Well, today they're bringing every one of those cards back to the traditional point of sale, inserting it or swiping it in a payment device and bringing back that, that receipt, to the cards holder to tip out and sign. Why not satisfy 70, 80, 90% of those use cases utilizing soft pause. So buying that made for purpose or Off the shelf ruggedized tablet, putting your point of sale to that tablet and enabling soft pause.
Speaker 3:So to me I believe that soft pause can revolutionize how pay a table has been such a long Kind of ramp here in the United States. We see it in other countries. I wouldn't say a pay a table is a Exquisite act in other countries. Like we like to make payments a lot more thick here in the United States, whether it's traditional payments or restaurant payments, but it certainly is a way to satisfy a use case that you want to, and then look at the end of the day, if. If soft pause doesn't cover the basis, which why shouldn't it? There's always the ability to add a peripheral. Should that be, you know, something the restaurant operator needed to do. But my my passion is around looking at the card issuance United States that are enabled when it with NFC and Utilizing soft pause on these tablets. I think that is going to be the quickest, most elegant solution that restaurants can implement for pay a table.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So we've covered sort of the small end of the market with small businesses and startups and mobile and restaurants. What about enterprise or larger companies? Can you give us some examples and use cases where soft pause makes a lot of sense?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it comes down to the same challenges that we've covered. So I think the common denominator here is that the benefits per use case will be overlapping in the response. But I've seen some enterprise retailers if you think about large enterprise retailers they've got usually an extensive estate of Android devices that do multiple things. Most of them is inventorying and scanning of inventory, management of SKUs. You see these people using them in the stores. Well, they already have an estate of Android devices and they have NFC. So here's a way that we can do line busting without having to implement a payment peripheral. So that's a really nice use case.
Speaker 3:Another use case in enterprise is backup. If I'm a high average ticket merchant or if I'm in an area where we've got connectivity issues or we really just want to have a disaster recovery type application, soft pause is great. Fire up the tablet that you have in the store, grab a signal from your cellular provider and transact. So a disaster recovery type of implementation. And then traditional again back to. We're seeing more and more enterprise retailers wanting to transact where the customer stands and not bring them to a point of sale. So point of sale is moving to the mobility use case. Why not have soft pause enabled there. So I think there's a few of those use cases that are more prevalent, but the merchants will invent new ways to soft pause and really be perfect for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you mentioned something I just wanted to kind of double click on. It's not really about the use cases per se, but you mentioned in the US versus other countries. So what's going on in other countries that's different than the US? Is it being adopted more there because there's more devices, or can you explain, maybe, what you sort of were alluding to about the US being different?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think, if you look at any transaction outside of the US, especially Europe, where I've traveled a pretty extensively over the past several years is that we're not really asked to do much at the till other than transact. So you see, a majority of transactions are just a tap and run out of the store, whereas here in the United States, in a retail outlet, you're going to see a full colored, large screen payment device, you're going to be able to apply for credit applications, you're going to be able to do a pharmacy type sign off. All that kind of stuff happens on these large integrated devices. We want to have that same look and feel and we go pay a table. Even so, if you've seen a good implementation to pay a table, you might take a survey by clicking on the numbers of smiles for your service. You can tip out, you can split the tab, all sorts of things you can do, and that's how pay a table is going to work in the US.
Speaker 3:So in Europe, the POS on the personal devices of the servers and, when it's time to transact outcomes, a traditional POS type point of sale device hooked up to either Wi-Fi or 4G, 5g and you just transact there and, because there's that tipping taxes, so there's no tipping makes it a lot easier to implement a pay a table solution in other countries. In the US there's just the levels of complexity just go through the roof. So I think what I'm seeing is that in a nice pay a table application I should be able to pay my part of the tab on a tap with soft pause and hand the device to you. You pay yours and tip out with a tap and off we go. But that's what I see. The difference between the US and other countries is that we love to have a lot of thick tech in the hands of the consumer.
Speaker 2:Okay, gotcha, that makes a lot of sense. Well, this has been a great episode. It's very enlightening and I really appreciate you kind of going deep on these subjects because obviously the last episode was more of a high level. Let's get this series started and really understanding soft pause and the background and everything. So this was good to grow much deeper into the value and into the different use cases. So I really appreciate that. Where can people go to learn more about this solution?
Speaker 3:Well, soft pause in general just Google that, but definitely in genigocom for deep dives into our soft pause implementation. One of the things I would like to say about soft pause and maybe you and I can take a side bet for lunch somewhere one day is that the adoption of this technology, I believe, is going to revolutionize the space, and if we all look at how we transact two or three years down the road, let's make a bet that half the transactions that you do three years from now Greg you got to find me and we'll square this bet up they're going to be through a soft pause type application that we will start to see a change in trending on how retailer, small business, restaurant operators all transact with a soft pause type application.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know I am not one to go shopping very often at all. I get frustrated when there's any sort of line that you have to stand in. I can just imagine these retail companies, larger retailers, you know where there's 10, 20 people deep waiting to line up to pay. It just seems like with technology we have today that kind of and I'm using line busting and air quotes, but call it whatever you want to call it. It just seems like the days of having to stand in a 20-person deep line to pay for something should be in the past, but it doesn't seem to be quite yet.
Speaker 3:I couldn't agree more. The endless aisle application is definitely what we see more and more retailers trying to find their strategy.
Speaker 2:Yeah and somewhat connected. I've even read where some I don't know if it was Walmart's or somewhere they're starting to eliminate sort of the self-checkout. It's not really providing the value and I guess that they expected or wanted it to. So that whole concept of self-checkout being a better way just doesn't. I don't know, maybe it's not resonating either.
Speaker 3:No, I think it is what I think is going to happen, though. The self-checkout is going to stay, but the way that we transact out of that self-checkout might still be. We're interacting with a screen that is a tablet, powered most likely by Android, and in that screen is there as an NFC technology, and it just is going to create a much more elegant and sleek implementation of payments. Where there's not a, I always say they look like Frankenstein's, right. You've got a cash drawer thing, you've got a scanner and then you've got a pin pad and you've got to follow the prompts. And why not just transact and do all of that on one single screen? That's where I see this thing go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you're probably right. That would be a lot more, a lot more simple to execute, you would think. But yeah, let's definitely catch up in three years, if not sooner, and either I can buy you lunch or you can buy me and we'll play around a golf, how's that?
Speaker 3:That sounds good. I don't make bets. I think I'm going to lose, so I'm looking forward to saving your money.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, hey, this has been a great episode and, tony, I really appreciate your passion for this solution. It obviously comes across very clearly of all the use cases and the value that Ingenico and SoftPause can bring to the market. So thank you so much for being on the show today. I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here. Hey, greg, thanks a lot.
Speaker 3:It's been a blast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.