Osama Bedier is intimately familiar with failure in the world of mobile payments.
In 2011, he left a long career at PayPal to oversee the launch of Google Wallet, a service that let people pay for stuff in stores with their smartphones. By 2012, he publicly admitted that, like other mobile services tying to reinvent point-of-sale purchases, Google Wallet wasn't really going anywhere. "Nobody today is delivering any solution that will get scale, including me," he said at the time. Within another year, he had left the company.
A big part of the problem, he says, is the payment terminal, the thing that sits beside a cash register and reads info from credit cards or phones. The mobile revolution has made our phones smarter than ever, but the payment terminal is still in the Dark Ages, as Bedier describes it. They're too limited. No one payment terminal works with all payment services.
It's that disparity, Bedier explains, that has led to the failure of every promising effort to revamp the way payments work, including Google Wallet. "We have a ton of innovation going on, but nothing getting mass adoption. It's all experiments and small examples in different stores around the country," he says.
But Bedier believes he can change this with the flagship terminal of his new startup, called Poynt. On Wednesday, the company is unveiling its first "smart" payment terminal intended for small and medium-sized merchants. Based on the Android mobile operating system, this gadget includes two screens---a main one facing the merchant, and a second, smaller screen for the consumer. It comes with built-in sales-analysis apps. It lets you build and install your own apps. But most importantly, it includes ways to accept a vast range of payment types, from traditional credit cards to the newer chip-and-pin variety, along with several digital options, including NFC (which powers Apple Pay), QR code, and Bluetooth technologies.
The aim is to give more small merchants the ability to accept mobile payments---and help bootstrap the entire market in the process.
This month, Apple reinvigorated the prospect of pay-by-smartphone with the introduction of Apple Pay. But even Apple faces significant obstacles as it seeks widespread adoption---drug stores chains CVS and Rite Aid, for instance, have blocked the service. Bedier believes the new Poynt terminal can help smooth the way for Apple Pay and plenty of other payments services. His single terminal is meant to work with all of them---at least in theory. It will work with Google Wallet and Apple Pay out of the box, for instance, and it should work with CurrentC, the technology apparently favored by CVS and Rite Aid.
At the same time, the $299 terminal will work with chip-and-pin cards. By October of next year, credit card companies are demanding that US merchants accept more fraud-proof chip-and-pin cards. It's a huge transition that will require a huge turnover in hardware. Poynt plans to begin shipping well before that deadline to take advantage of that transition. With a guaranteed market, it seems like a great time to get into the payment terminal game. And for Bedier, it gives Bedier a kind of second chance to make mobile payments a reality on checkout counters everywhere.
