Payments: the next frontier for Telecom
Excerpted from TMCNet - September 3, 2009
Eighty-five percent of the small business market is still using analog technology for point of sale applications, and this presents a significant opportunity for competitive service providers, said Charles Wu
Competitive providers could come in and offer those customers the services and connectivity to help them migrate credit card applications onto IP-based connections, and they could offer other voice and data services as part of the deal, Wu said.
“People are doing it,” Wu said. “The technology is there. It’s more of a mindset change, and it’s more of a fundamental business process change” that will be required for this movement to go mainstream.
“To a small business, they love to save $30 on their voice. But if they can’t process payments, they’re out of business,” Wu said. “So you’ll still find gas stations and convenience stores that have dedicated phone lines for each credit card machine.” And a supermarket with five registers may have five phone lines, he says.
Full Story at TMC Net Online
