Beyond the swipe: The ubiquitous PoS machine will soon become intelligent

Deployers of point-of-sale terminals are rethinking the way business is done

Until recently, it was difficult to get merchants to accept point-of-sale (PoS) terminals, because there were benefits to be had from non-use: sales numbers, for example, could be suppressed with clever book-keeping. Moreover, deployers were also unable to market the proposition to merchants that were outside the big retail chains, malls, hotels and restaurants, because they were reluctant to bear the cost of PoS installation when the footfall didn’t appear to justify it. 

“Phones have become ‘smartphones’, and TVs have become ‘smart TVs’. Everything is becoming smarter, but we mostly have dumb PoS terminals at outlets,” Manish Patel told Business Standard