Global Payments' turnaround strategy will get its biggest test in the coming months, as it begins selling its revamped point of sale system while preparing to add acquisition target Worldpay to its business.
The Atlanta-based Global Payments on Friday introduced its Genius payment and merchant services product with a version designed for restaurants in the U.S. and Canada, with other markets to follow in the coming months.
Genius is being showcased shortly following
"We have had a lot of platforms serving a lot of different audiences," Terry Roberts, Global Payments' president of merchant solutions, told American Banker. "The lines between these audiences were getting blurry, and there was not an easy way to divide them."
What is Global Payments' Genius?
Genius, which Global Payments calls a "command center," is a mix of hardware and software that can be updated to add new content or merchant services. Genius combines more than a dozen existing payment products along with new products and upgrades.
Global Payments hopes to convince merchants that this technology mix is flexible enough to adopt new business and payment trends.
"As their businesses grow and change we don't have to come to them and say 'here's another platform,'" Roberts said.
The restaurant version, which launched Friday, manages payments, waitlist and reservations, marketing, loyalty programs and other restaurant functions. The retail version, slated to debut in June, manages orders, tracks inventory, supports checkout, invoicing, reporting and incentive marketing.
Genius for Enterprise, which targets larger deployments such as quick service chains, stadiums and other entertainment venues, is expected to launch later this year.
Genius is part of a long-term
Global Payments faces competition from Fiserv's Clover and fintech rivals such as Block, Stripe and PayPal, which all offer payments and other financial services for businesses, and Toast, which focuses on restaurants.
Global Payments differentiates itself with its support system and by manufacturing its hardware to be configurable, Roberts said. The company designs standalone, mobile and remote terminals with ways to easily add other technology, such as cameras to offer checkout-free payments, he said.
Global Payments challenge
Analysts have been critical of Global Payments in recent months, with Jeffries saying it "struggles to see" how WorldPay and Global Payments are "additive to each other," and KeyBank Capital Markets saying it expects Global Payments' ability to integrate WorldPay to come into question.
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"Worldpay is very complimentary to what we do," Roberts said, adding Worldpay has a strong small-business unit but does not have a unified point of sale product. "We could bring those companies on board in a way that Worldpay could not do on their own."
The all-in-one payment terminals may struggle to sell to larger merchants, which still use more customized point of sale systems.
"Small and medium-sized merchants most commonly use these solutions, both in retail and hospitality spaces," Alan Burt, senior manager and retail technology lead at RBR Data Services at Datos Insights, told American Banker. "These systems combine payments and point-of-sale together in bundled solutions, as a subscription, which can be a flexible and attractive option for independents and small chains. We're not really seeing chains of, say, more than 40 or 50 stores using such solutions."
For Global Payments and its fintech rivals, the race is to have as many products as possible in one system, while building it to be future-proof, Don Apgar, a director at Javelin Strategy & Research, told American Banker. Merchants are in the market for payments technology that doesn't need to be replaced, or come from a bunch of sources, he said.
"The broader the feature set the more businesses you can serve, the deeper the feature set the longer the merchant will have it without having to get a new one," Apgar said.
But managing that size can be difficult for product developers at payment companies, Apgar said, noting there needs to be a balance.
"If you try to do all-in-one in every market, you will have a complicated feature set," he said. "Who is going to train the engineers, and who can possibly sell that?"
