Seeking to sell hardware and grow revenue, the major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs)—VeriFone, Ingenico, and Hypercom—have developed and begun to implement business strategies that will drive near-field-communication (NFC) technologies into general availability in the United States, opening the door for a variety of new mobile marketing solutions enabled at the POS.

The current inflexibility of transaction-routing infrastructure ensures that existing authorization infrastructure will be unable to handle the new transaction types created by these marketing solutions. This will force the rapid evolution of a new set of hosted transaction-gateway and terminal-management solutions, with revenue opportunities for gateway providers approaching US$0.35 billion annually by 2015. Payments firms that miss the move will take a hit; merchant acquirers, independent sales organizations (ISOs), gateways, processors, and payment networks must develop a strategy that ensures delivery of flexible and centrally hosted POS environments.

A new report from Aite Group projects the deployment of mobile-capable hardware, software, and transaction-routing capabilities necessary to enable point-of-sale-integrated mobile marketing solutions and mobile payments in the United States. Based on more than 50 Aite Group interviews with industry stakeholders conducted from April through July 2011, the report also details the transformation of today’s point-of-sale (POS) infrastructure into tomorrow’s mobile environment.

“Current trends in the payments industry are driving a more complex point-of-sale infrastructure that will require POS services to be offered as hosted monthly services,” says Rick Oglesby, senior analyst with Aite Group and author of this report. “The POS terminal itself may soon become more similar to a cable TV box, opening a portal to a wealth of services to be accessed at the point of transaction. For payments companies, an opportunity exists to be the cable company itself, aggregating the various services in a gateway model and simplifying the way in which services can be accessed.”

Source: Aite Group