New Concepts in Payment Tech at the National Restaurant Show

Editor’s note: Andy’s earlier report on POS tech from this year’s National Restaurant Show can be accessed by clicking HERE.

BY ANDY FREIVOGEL
SPECIAL TO BARISTA MAGAZINE

Specialty-coffee retailers wringing their hands over the coming sh*tstorm in October 2015 (we’re either calling it “Card-maggedon” or “End Of Payz,” when credit card authorization liability for declined charges will be shifted back to merchants if they haven’t implemented acceptance of EMV cards) will be happy to know that many of their questions will be answered in the June+July issue of Barista Magazine when the new column, “Tech Support,” premieres to address this topic exactly.

Those hoping to put this whole mess behind them by walking the technology exhibition at NRA 2015 (NRA is National Restaurant Association: not “pew-pew” but “nom-nom”) probably left just as bewildered as they were when they arrived. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few cloud-based iPad point-of-sale solutions and one or two traditional premise-based POS solutions, most of the new POS hardware on display was still sporting mag-stripe-only swipes. A few standouts for EMV support, however, included Ingenico, payments processor Cayan, and POS solution Restaurant Manager.

One novel way to sidestep the Cardmageddon is just stop accepting cash and credit cards altogether and move to bitcoin now before The Man figures out how to collect sales tax on virtual currency. Revel POS (which occupied a quadruple booth at NRA 2015) has already built in bitcoin as an accepted payment method.

Ingenio provides a number of card readers, including several which are bluetooth (allowing for an easy connection to an iPad being used for point of sale, for example) and support EMV & NFC. They will be popping up in many many coffee bars over the next six months. — Ingenico provides a number of card readers, including several which are bluetooth (allowing for an easy connection to an iPad being used for point of sale, for example) and support EMV & NFC. They will be popping up in many many coffee bars over the next six months.

One of the only table card readers with EMV support was this Dell tablet in use by Restaurant Manager POS.

Cayan is a payment processor that is leading the charge in EMV adoption. Pictured here is one of their new Genius terminals which supports EMV and NFC ("near field communication") technologies such as Apple Pay. — Cayan is a payment processor that is leading the charge in EMV adoption. Pictured here is one of their new Genius terminals which supports EMV and NFC (“near field communication”) technologies such as Apple Pay.

Yep, bitcoin had a booth at the NRA. We believe at least one of the point-of-sale vendors present at NRA is already accepting bitcoin as payment.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andy Freivogel is founder of the retail-technology consulting firm Science (www.scienceretail.com), which he started after 20 years of work in retail coffee and technology consulting. In addition to guiding specialty and boutique retail customers through the landscape of POS systems, guest Wi-Fi solutions, and PCI compliance, he also enjoys free-jazz, black metal, skateboarding, street art, and cooking West African dishes. Andy and his wife live in Oak Park, Ill., with their two children, a chihuahua, a pitbull, two cats, and a frog.