Remember when the POS and Payments was Boring?

Post Updated today (5/24) at 3:30 EST. See bottom of post for details

Today VeriFone announced its partnership with PayPal to bring the leading alternative payment brand to millions of checkout lanes. Its cloud wallet promises, not only Google and ISIS, but the established payment networks, a literal run for their consumers’ money. And PayPal is probably not the last new entrant we will see in the bricks and mortar payments and wallets war.

Remember when payments was boring? I can’t. It’s been exciting for a while. There’s so much great stuff happening that it’s difficult to keep track. Smart phones, Cloud, NFC, apps, alternative payments and more are changing the face of payments and bringing the consumer – merchant interaction to a new level. Payments is becoming just part of a bigger, richer conversation occurring at the point of sale that connects traditional brick and mortar merchants, and consumers, with the power of online resources.

What’s the latest guesstimate on the mobile payments potential? Juniper Research puts it at $670B over the next three years, I think.

OK, so the $670B question is, “Who is going to win this payments bonanza?”

Everyone! The consumer; the merchant. That’s the beauty of it. This brave new world of mobile commerce is too large and innovative to have only one winner. I firmly believe in a multi-app, multi-technology future where competing players and business models will co-exist and either compete or complement each other. Consumer and merchants will be able use different services, try new approaches and leverage these services to have meaningful interactions.

Best of all. This is all coming together at the point of sale. In the same way that the combination of smart phone and cloud is becoming the platform of choice for consumers to manage their lives, the combination of point of sale and cloud is becoming the platform of choice for merchants to manage the relationship with their most important assets: their customers. That’s why we have been calling this merchant-customer relationship, the “Point of Interaction” for a while now. It’s the app revolution coming to merchants, and we are happy to enable it…

UPDATE: Today PayPal held a press conference and announced a list of 15 merchants targeted for the rollout. Twelve of the merchants named are Tier 1 merchants and VeriFone will enable 10 of them. Some of these VeriFone-enabled brands include Abercrombie & Fitch, American Eagle Outfitters, Foot Locker, Jos. A. Bank and Toys “R” Us among others.

For more information about our announcement with PayPal, please visit us here on the web.