EXCLUSIVE: “In a Good POS-ition” – Harry Sohota, Aevi and Alan Moss, Newland Payment Technology in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

Point-of-sale systems are evolving to serve the fluid payment needs of ‘phygital’ shoppers. Aevi and Newland Payment Technology are stepping up to support merchants and ISVs as the retail landscape shifts

For years, the narrative around physical shopping in the UK has been a one-way street – one that led to obsolescence. But retail has evolved. Today, flagship shopping malls and top city-centre locations are thriving while the so-called ‘secondary’ high streets in towns continue to pull down their shutters. Property investors have focussed on quality, and one, FTSE 100-listed Landsec which owns Liverpool ONE and the Bluewater mall in Essex, reported a 5.5 per cent like-for-like increase in net rental income in the 12 months to March 31 as its rents for re-lettings and renewals soared 15 per cent.

So, while the total number of physical shops is falling, the UK’s flagship locations are in huge demand, with the top one per cent of retail destinations accounting for 31 per cent of in-store retail spend, says Landsec. The business, which has 85 per cent of its retail portfolio in this top one per cent, reported that total sales for its retail tenants were up 6.3 per cent year-on-year, while footfall increased 2.7 per cent.

And driving that success has been a shift to a hybrid shopping model, where e-commerce for many retailers is often a dominant channel, but stores have been repurposed as destinations for building brand, physically interacting with products, dropping off returns, click-and-collect and impulse buying. To that end, the point-of-sale terminal is evolving, too, to serve the fluid payment needs of consumers who have an ever-growing range of ways to shop and transact.

“The ISV has the benefit of everything we’ve integrated with at the back end, and our partners such as Newland cover the front-end hardware. We do all the heavy lifting”

Harry Sohota, Aevi

To the web and back

For POS hardware provider Newland Payment Technology (NPT), that means building terminals with functionality to navigate a retailer’s multiple sales channels and offering the flexibility to run apps for functions such as stock management, upselling or customer surveys.

“We’re providing the technology now that provides a very smooth journey from online to in-store and back the other way, because sometimes a store doesn’t have what the customer wants in stock,” says Newland’s Western Europe Managing Director, Alan Moss.

“The merchant may have to go online while still interacting with the customer.  We’ve gone from a past when a POS device was locked down, payment-only, single-purpose technology, to feature-rich multi-purpose solutions.”

Founded in 1994, China-based Newland is one of the world’s payment terminal giants and supplies around 10 million devices annually across 120 countries.

It produces a wide range of POS devices to retail, banks, travel and hospitality, and self-service sites such as vending machines and petrol stations. Whereas once the focus was on transaction acceptance and offering multiple payment methods, the emergence of smart POS terminals means the hardware can be optimised to meet a business’s needs.

To provide this customisation for merchants and independent software vendors (ISVs), Newland works in partnership with payment orchestration provider Aevi, whose vendor-agnostic, Cloud-based platform connects clients to payment facilitators and a wide range of apps that can be deployed on a retailer’s POS terminal.

The model means any ISV or merchant – even the smallest – can provide the payment features offered by the world’s retail giants by customising their POS terminals.

“We’ve gone from a past when a POS device was locked down, payment-only, single-purpose technology, to feature-rich, multi-purpose solutions”

Alan Moss, Newland Payment Technology

Moss says: “From the device side, there’s quite a lot of complexity, everything from EMV kernels [software within a POS that manages the secure interaction between a card/wallet and the terminal], to Android libraries, which all needs to be managed.

“But we do that together with the team at Aevi, so the solution the ISV is tapping into is seamless, pre-integrated and ready to get them into a number of different business use-cases, taking them through that omni-channel experience that they really want to give to a retailer or hospitality service provider.”

Harry Sohota, Aevi head of partnerships, adds: “What Aevi does is pull everything together. We connect the different form factors and use cases in-store so the retailer or ISV can set up their payments process just how they want it.

“What an ISV wants to do is focus on their software, they don’t want to get involved in the complexities that are involved in bringing their software in-store. The idea is they build something once, and when they integrate into Aevi, it’s built for the future. They don’t need further integrations when they move into different markets, which involve different acquirers.

“The ISV has the benefit of everything we’ve integrated with at the back end, and our partners such as Newland cover the front-end hardware. We do all the heavy lifting and the ISV can forget about everything that happens underneath.”

All-in-one package

Aevi, which was spun out of ATM manufacturer Diebold Nixdorf in 2015, provides an offer for ISVs with three strands. Firstly, at the front end, an Android-powered smart POS terminal, such as the devices built by Newland, handles in-person payments. Second, the Aevi Payment Gateway handles money flows, facilitating all major payment types such as contactless, chip & pin and mobile wallets, and providing real-time data insights. And third, the point-of-sale app is customisable so it can carry a customer’s unique branding and be configured to meet
the needs of various merchant types.

Once a POS is brought to market, Aevi provides the orchestration layer that connects partner apps and hardware, enabling seamless deployment and ensuring services can scale across markets and use cases.

Sohota says: “The in-store experience is changing at a fast pace, and retailers are expecting new use cases and form factors that Newland is able to provide. They’re also looking to work with multiple acquirers, and they may want to become a payment facilitator themselves, which adds a lot of complexity.

“They may want a different solution in every market they enter. We cover that. There is no need for them to change suppliers all the time and constantly build solutions.”

The need to facilitate a business’s specific needs across markets is echoed by Moss, who adds: “With Aevi, we have a very powerful platform for taking payments, from on-the-go trading all the way through to classic retail or hospitality. It addresses all those use-cases whilst providing full payment functionality.

“On the device side, with Android, we’ve migrated into feature-rich, multi-purpose soft POS solutions, which can run your payment, either contactless, by card rails, alternative payments, account-to-account, combined with

“We’ve obviously done a lot of work in the past with things like fingerprint, but now we’re looking at palm vein and facial recognition to make the customer authentication process much smoother,” he says. “Then there’s AI. In the future, you’ll be able to ask your payment device, ‘hey terminal, how many transactions did I process today? How many were Mastercard? How many were Visa? How many were account-to-account?’

“So everything online, everything fully secure, everything supporting multiple payment rails, it’s really future-enabled.

“Both Newland and Aevi are coming from a very international perspective, with a solution that can be introduced and certified in the UK, in the main European markets, outside of Europe, in North America, and in Asia,” adds Moss. “So the platform we’ve put together really is powerfully, globally scalable.”

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue #38, Page 28-29