The pandemic has upended many business tasks, creating a rush among processors to expand the digital experience without complicating it.
The Amsterdam-based payment processor Adyen on Wednesday linked its point of sale terminal and platform units, making it possible to order and ship Adyen’s terminals to more quickly set up contactless transactions for “curbside” shopping and other digital workarounds.
Adyen is targeting software as a service platforms, or peer-to-peer marketplaces, on-demand services, crowdfunding platforms and other businesses that operate on behalf of much smaller merchants or sellers such as medical offices, hair salons, spas, and golf courses.
Through an API, Adyen allows platform businesses to onboard sellers and support digital payments such as transfers, supply chain transactions and PSD2 compliance. This allows what are usually brick and mortar businesses to operate similar to an online marketplace.
These platforms were able to add payment terminals, but through a separate deployment procedure.
“That was hard to do before,” said Brian Dammeir, Adyen’s president of North America, adding Adyen has combined its platform service and its terminal API to allow platforms to “turn on” numerous merchants for in-person payment acceptance combined with compliance, end user experience and other merchant services. “It’s hard to manage systematic onboarding and easily send terminals.”
At launch, Adyen announced two adopters for the platform/point of sale combo. One is Modernizing Medicine, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based technology company that supports telehealth, digital payments and services for medical providers such as electronic health records, data management and other medical workflows — with a network of about 140,000 health care professionals and 15,000 specialty physicians.
Modernizing Medicine plans to offer Adyen’s terminals through the medical technology firm’s payment platform to support both online and in-office payments through the same back end system that manages the other merchant tasks.
“As these medical providers push more records online and put more forms online, it’s better to directly add payments as part of that solution,” Dammeir said.
Another company, Bellevue, Wash.-based Zenoti, provides cloud-based software for salons, spas and a new set of “post-COVID” services such as automatic check-in, and what it calls “Uber-style” ordering. The Adyen POS integration will support the digital and online payment piece of the broader coronavirus automation package Zenoti is selling to spas that face restrictions that often require a more robust reservation system, limited seating and contact restrictions that can be best served with a contactless payment terminal.
“If you’re working with thousands of salons, you can use an API to onboard all of them and turn on payments,” Dammeir said.
Adyen's tweak comes as other merchant acquirers and payment processors raise funds, add products and revamp technology to reach merchants that have not previously offered digital payments, or are looking for a way to embed new payment technology with other business practices that have been moved online since the pandemic began.
More traditional
The Amsterdam-based Adyen has added myriad clients over the past year, such as
“We’re hoping to bring payments into the overall platform and do so in a scalable way to broaden these services,” Dammeir said.
