To further solidify its standing as a leading payments player, Global Payments is launching its Genius point-of-sale (POS) system, designed specifically for small businesses.
The company made waves with its $22 billion acquisition of Worldpay, a deal that creates a global payments company serving more than six million customers and processing roughly 94 billion transactions.
The acquisition of Worldpay brings balance to Global Payments’ strong small to medium-sized business (SMB) segment, as Worldpay has a more established footprint among larger enterprises. Genius will be launched under the Global Payments brand and will initially focus on restaurants and retailers within the SMB market.
Tough Sledding
Genius for Restaurants is positioned to meet the needs of restaurants, offering features like waitlists and reservations, reporting and marketing tools, and tableside payments. Similarly, Genius for Retail is designed as a unified solution for retailers, with capabilities to manage orders, track inventory, and facilitate accurate checkouts.
While these solutions may be potent, the highly competitive small business POS market could make it tough sledding for Global Payments.
“Our POS scorecard found that system features needed to be both broad and deep,” said Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research. “Breadth enables you to address as many different types of merchants as possible, and depth in each category is what enables the system to grow with the merchant without the merchant outgrowing the system.”
“Global says that Genius is going to be everything to every merchant everywhere, starting with restaurants,” he said. “I have yet to see a single POS platform that can address the needs of every kind of restaurant everywhere, but if these guys have done it, that’s awesome.”
Maxing Out Features
In an interview with Barron’s, Global Payments CEO Cameron Bready said that Genius can differentiate itself by avoiding the clunkiness that often plagues similar business users. He noted that Genius is built specifically for restaurants and retail, and that its POS system can serve everything from quick-service restaurants to stadium venues to local coffee shops.
“So, feature depth set to max for restaurants, not max out feature breadth and do that for every type of retail and service merchant and you have a POS platform that will collapse under the weight of its own features—meaning that the system will become so complex that it will be incredibly complicated to maintain and update,” Apgar said. “Also, how do you train sales reps to sell something so complex? What about help desk and support?”
