VeriFone is making good on its original promise to
Now, using the portal — a website where a coder can find registration keys and software packages that integrate into VeriFone's network — programmers can create new mobile applications on top of VeriFone's infrastructure. These applications will be able to work directly with a merchant's existing point of sale software.
"This opens up the market," says Brian Hamilton, VeriFone vice president of recently created SMB Commerce group. "It broadens the scope."
The company announced several software development companies that have been working with an early iteration of the open platform.
Among them, tablet
"This is going to open up the doors" for SAIL, says Ben Harrison, Lavu's senior vice president of marketing, "It's not just to smaller businesses… but also medium-size restaurants and even chains."
Lavu has also been contacted by PayPal, but hasn't yet begun integrating the ecommerce platform with its POS software, says Harrison.
Indeed, few others have opened up their mobile payment software to outsiders.
That could be an important point of differentiation for the payment terminal giant, says Brian Riley, a senior research director in the bank cards practice at CEB TowerGroup
"In order to protect their franchise they really need to have a play in the [open software development] space," he says. "If you look at how PayPal launched their developer portal… they really went out and embraced the community, and that's not been a channel that I think VeriFone has addressed aggressively before."
Andy Schmidt, research director — Commercial Banking and Payments at CEB TowerGroup, also sees a parallel between PayPal's developer portal and the solution VeriFone announced Wednesday. "Open platforms have long been the avenue for allowing developers to build what they want they want, the way they want — giving them the greatest flexibility possible," he says. "From its description, SAIL is very much like PayPal X (now x.commerce) in this regard because it includes all the tools and APIs needed to create a valuable business presence running on top of a robust payments platform."
No doubt, an open platform is key for attracting merchants, says Jim Van Dyke, president and founder of Javelin Strategy & Research.
"It's the same as the Microsoft vs. Apple approach, where Microsoft attracts more techies from companies who want to create a more uniquely seamless experience, for shoppers in VeriFone's case, to compete with a closed first-mover alternative," he says.
Cloud payment platform company Spreedly's chief executive Justin Benson echoed that sentiment.
"Does VeriFone SAIL now [equal] Android and Windows and Square [equal] Mac?" he says. "Square seems utterly focused on making the technology disappear into the background as far as possible and just focus on the user experience."
Benson says he's considering integrating SAIL into his company's software — which consolidates access to many different payment gateways, such as Authorize.Net and PayPal, into a single payment program.
"[But] I think this muddies the water between POS, mobile and online," he says. "The question we have is, 'How many businesses have purely mobile only transactions?'; 'How many have a blend of field, mobile [plus] in store [plus] online?'; [And] 'for the second category is this really viable or will they look for their existing payment provider to help them manage field/mobile based sales?'"
This open platform also provides another important point of differentiation between SAIL and its predecessor PayWare Mobile, which VeriFone still sells to merchants through acquirers who aren't focused at targeting micro-merchants. "The target audience for SAIL seems to be companies and developers building custom mobile commerce solutions for themselves or others, as opposed to Payware Mobile which is more plug-and-play," Schmidt observes.
The new open platform for SAIL also gives programmers the ability to write special code into their software that will allow even casual credit card acceptors to begin taking advantage of merchant loyalty perks offered by companies like American Express and others, says Hamilton.
"If you look at Amex or MasterCard, they are doing things that require card networks to recognize and reconcile down to the individual merchant," he says.
Hamilton says there is a piece of VeriFone's new software that is able to underwrite these small merchants in real time and provide them with a "full-fledged merchant account."
That means that the card associations will now recognize when a transaction is routed through one of these super small merchants, potentially allowing a retailer to buy in to a credit card company service that steers repeat customers back to that seller — an important perk.
In the future, SAIL will start to move beyond payments, says Hamilton.
"Our goal is not just completing the payment, but the other services that go around the customer — your accounting and your inventory," he says. "The idea is to have a comprehensive and cohesive suite of products that is really adding value around all types of commerce at the point of sale."
