- Key insights: Global Payments plans to add more conversational AI to its Genius point-of-sale and payments platform.
- What's at stake: It has been one year since the payments fintech launched Genius as a lynchpin in the company's attempted turnaround. But the platform still only contributes modestly to the company's revenue.
- Forward look: Worldpay's 30 largest bank partners will begin selling Genius in the fourth quarter, Global Payments' President and CEO Cameron Bready said on a call with analysts.
It has been just over one year since Global Payments launched Genius, and President and CEO Cameron Bready is counting on artificial intelligence to increase the buzz for the company's new point-of-sale and payments platform.
Genius, along with the payment fintech's
"Genius remains central to our long-term strategy, and we are investing meaningfully in the product to enhance capabilities and open new markets, as well as in marketing, to build brand awareness and mind share," Bready said during the company's second-quarter earnings call with analysts on Wednesday.
One such advancement is voice-ordering technology in the company's new Genius handheld device, which runs the AI model locally on the device to help eliminate latency.
"Its AI-powered voice ordering technology allows servers to have natural conversations with customers while the point-of-sale system quietly builds a ticket in the background, even in high noise environments," Bready said.
Global Payments also added an AI reporting tool, which allows users to ask natural language questions about their own operational data and reports.
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Uptake for Genius has been growing, Chief Financial Officer Josh Whipple said on the call. New Genius locations grew by more than 50% year over year, and almost 25% from the prior quarter. Notably, fast food chains Long John Silvers and Pollo Tropical rolled out Genius at 100 locations and 135 locations, respectively.
Global Payments is also counting on 30 of its largest bank partners to begin selling Genius starting in the fourth quarter, with more to follow. And that it can build brand awareness with clients with a user conference and national roadshow to showcase the technology to its other partner banks later this year.
"Over time, obviously, revenue growth will drift up as Genius becomes a more meaningful contributor to revenue over a longer period of time," Bready said.
But not everyone is convinced that Genius will be the engine that Global Payments believes it can be. Andrew Jeffrey, an analyst with William Blair, said that the Genius rollout might be "too little, too late.
"A robust, software-integrated POS remains the key to winning the highly competitive [small- and medium-business] market," Jeffrey said in a research note. "While Global's Genius solution should benefit from new sales channels, verticals, and payments and software attachments, it is no match for this competition. … Genius is simply not a competitive offering from a technology standpoint and will not become material enough to move the needle to accelerate Global's consolidated organic growth."
