5 reasons why banks and telecommunications companies should invest in mPOS terminals

mPOS terminals are rapidly gaining popularity. Small and large businesses around the world have already appreciated the beauty of these systems, connecting sellers and buyers through mobile devices running iOS and Android. And this is not just a fad. Making purchases using mPOS terminals is really more convenient and more pleasant for the buyer than buying in the traditional way. On top of that, with such systems it becomes much easier to keep track of transactions and their subsequent analysis, including trends in consumer demand and, of course, information about geographical location. Anyone who personally tried this would agree with the statements above.
Your attention to the translation of the article , in which David Ingram is trying to figure out why banks and telecommunications companies need mPOS terminals.

1. Buy or develop?

When analytical departments in enterprises are faced with the problem of choice: to buy something or develop it themselves, very often they are inclined to the second option. However, many technical directors in various business areas often witness cases where the choice of the first of the two alternatives, namely, the purchase, turns out to be advantageous in comparison with its own development.

The fact is that when you undertake the development of a particular solution on your own from the beginning to the end, you take responsibility not only for implementing the business logic of the application that benefits your company, but also for the underlying technologies underlying all this. And this is an additional investment of time and capital, which I would like to avoid, otherwise they will remain entirely with you throughout the entire product life cycle. When you buy a platform and build it, you save yourself from a huge amount of “dirty work” both at the deployment stage and during subsequent maintenance. As a result, you get less cost of ownership.

2. Quickly brought to the market - paid off faster.

The time of launching the next product on the market today in the conditions of fierce competition is measured not in months and years, but in weeks. Using a ready-made mPOS terminal saves you time and money that you would be forced to spend on creating a low-level framework, if you were to undertake an independent solution development. This time saving gives you a significant odds when entering the market, while maintaining a fairly high level of service provided. Which, in turn, accelerates the return on investment made in the system. If you delay the moment of entering the market, you can lose the lion’s share of customers, which will have a negative impact on payback. So, a quick entry into the market means a higher return on investment, which is achieved due to the client base, increased income, reduced costs and quality of service.
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3. Do not reinvent the wheel.

In fact, the mPOS system is far from new, some providers have been using it for 3 years or more, and during this time they have gained a lot of experience. So, you and your business will already know how to enter this market correctly. However, every good manager knows that the devil is in the details. As a representative of management, I am well aware of cases when single-line business requirements negate many hours of work done, when the analysis and the solution of the set task occurs literally on the move. The main difficulty lies precisely in the development of every aspect of the solution being developed, including software and hardware (and their interaction), infrastructure, regulatory requirements, documentation and personnel management system. A ready-made high-quality mPOS terminal already has all of the above and ensures the rapid implementation of the solution and access to the market at any moment of the company's activity. Such a solution can vary from the simplest option, which can be deployed and prepared for work in a matter of weeks, to a fully adapted and embedded product in your back office or corporate system.

4. Efficient use of scarce resources.

I do not think that I have ever worked in a business that has surplus resources for development. As a rule, decisions were made daily about where to direct this or that part of scarce resources, and, allocating resources for one project, the company was no longer able to allocate enough of them to another. Using the mPOS terminal ensures that your scarce resources will be directed in the right direction, not to develop a low-level architecture, but to implement and adapt a system that fully meets your needs. I constantly find myself thinking that I am trying to compare this situation with a technological breakthrough in the field of building materials for both ordinary residential buildings and commercial real estate. Where once the builders manually made brickwork, today modular structures are used everywhere, from the combination of which absolutely stunning buildings are obtained.

5. Prefer complex and elegant solutions.

A truly workable mPOS terminal should provide an elegant solution that combines all the most basic components, just as it is implemented in good APIs that allow you to easily integrate new functionality into an existing corporate system. As mentioned above, mPOS is a complete solution. It allows hardware components, such as PED (PIN input device), which is often combined with MSR (magnetic strip reader), as well as software at various levels of hardware, including PED firmware, mobile applications for various devices and platforms, server software applications as well as the usual web services stack, caching, application logic, business logic, database and domain model, plus a physical hardware stack that ensures correctness and stability. In addition, of course, there are APIs and integrable components that allow you to interact with banking systems (these include: payment channels, acquirers, payment systems, etc.) and in many cases also with CRM and financial systems. In addition, control and certificate mechanisms are implemented, applied at various levels of the system, some of which are related to the hardware, others to software, and there are also related to business processes. Of course, you can also integrate solutions from various developers on your side, but this will slow down your entry into the market, increase risks and costs, and, also importantly, this approach is fraught with unnecessary integration problems, which ultimately will have a negative impact on quality. service for end users.

The solution created from the beginning to the end with our own resources is undoubtedly very difficult, and managers should once again think about the benefits of the purchase and further deployment of an integrated mPOS terminal, on which future decisions will be based. The advantages of this approach are many: ranging from quick to market, faster payback and lower operating and ownership costs, ending with more efficient use of scarce resources, flexibility during deployment, a more elegant solution for end users and the ability to expand existing functionality in the future.