Hey, You, Get Onto My Cloud: Mobile and Cloud Transform the POS
Report Summary
Hey, You, Get Onto My Cloud: Mobile and Cloud Transform the POS
As cloud POS explodes in popularity among smaller merchants, the gross dollar volume of its transactions will be difficult for the payments industry to ignore.
Boston, October 2, 2012 – A new report from Aite Group evaluates the impact of cloud technologies on U.S. point-of-sale product offerings, projects the growth of these offerings through 2017, and provides recommendations on how payments industry players should prepare for the impact of cloud POS. The report is based on more than 30 Aite Group interviews with executives from 23 different players in the mobile POS space as well as a detailed survey of 18 cloud-based POS providers, both completed in July and August 2012.
Cloud POS is a point-of-sale system, provided to small to midsize merchants, that manages data storage and processing outside of a merchant’s POS equipment. Typically delivered via Web page or mobile application, this technology is extremely cost-efficient. The cloud-based approach also opens the door to a variety of new and enhanced features, including value-added services that support merchant marketing, loyalty, accounting, and back-office efforts; it also includes improved reporting solutions that better equip business owners to keep tabs on their business from anywhere in the world. Because of this, it is growing rapidly and is expected to reach nearly US$200 billion in gross processed volume in 2017—up from a mere US$15 billion in 2012.
“Mobile- and cloud-based technologies continue their assault on legacy payment infrastructure,” says Rick Oglesby, senior analyst with Aite Group and author of this report. “Payments industry players need to keep an eye not only on the technological changes that will impact their infrastructure but also on the evolving product solutions enabled by changing technology. The ability to adapt quickly and efficiently could be the key to industry players’ long-term survival.”
Leading cloud POS providers named in this report are GoPago, Intuit, Lavu Inc., NCR, Square, and VeriFone.
This 32-page Impact Report contains 15 figures and two tables. Clients of Aite Group’s Retail Banking service can download the report.