White Paper: The Future Looks Soft(POS)
September 13, 2023
RS2 recently unveiled a new white paper where they talk about soft POS solutions installed on mobile devices and how we will be seeing a lot more of it in the coming months and subsequent years at a global scale.
As technology progresses, consumers have a growing Pool of payment options. It is reasonable that they would become accustomed to the most convenient methods, and in today’s world, that is online payments. Therefore, merchants are trying to replicate the speed and convenience of such payments in-store.
(...)Soft POS offers merchants and consumers flexibility and choice while creating new opportunities for acquirers.
Consumers who visit brick and mortar stores are looking to replicate the speed and ease of use of online payments, including having the option to choose alternative payment methods such as Buy now, pay later (BNPL), account-to-account (A2A) payments, and digital wallets among others. Gone are the days when customers have the patience to stand in long queues.
Consumers don’t want to stand in queues and expect value-added options such as loyalty and delivery to be included in their purchase experience.
Why soft POS and not traditional POS?
Traditional POS is expensive to acquire, and many merchants who have had it for a while might find that the software is old and needs to be either updated or overhauled altogether to work with modern alternative payment options and to keep up with regulations.
For this reason, the white paper states that merchants need “flexible and secure” acquiring systems that can mimic the digital checkout experience in-store.
Soft POS can be easily downloaded in a mobile device by merchants. This makes it easy to install and upgrade and add more functionality as needed. In addition, this is not costly for the merchant, as they are cheap or free to download when used in the most basic function.
They can also be easily integrated with modern all-in-one solutions such as cloud-based Electronic Cash Registers (ECRs).
Since Soft POS is installed in a mobile device, it has the benefit of communicating with other apps, and thus provide customers with the option of doing an online check-out and picking it up at the store.
In short, merchants everywhere are turning to the technology we all can fit in our pockets for payment solutions, and this will open an opportunity never seen before in the world of payments.
Want to learn more? Check out Payments Cards and Mobile’s full write-up here.
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