The Genius of POS Development

Global Payments Inc. last month began showcasing a point-of-sale payment technology it called its Genius platform. The big processor said the technology is a revamp of a previous product and would roll out domestically in May as a common brand, with an international rollout late this year.

That Genius brand name struck us as vaguely familiar, but we couldn’t put our finger on it. So we began doing a bit of research in our own archives. That effort yielded an interesting story—and showed how short our memory is. Still, a brief history of this product might be of some interest to payments nerds.

In 2013, a company called Merchant Warehouse launched a product suite it called its Genius POS platform. A fair number of our readers may recall Merchant Warehouse and its leader, Henry Helgeson. Two years later, Merchant Warehouse rebranded itself as Cayan, a name perhaps a few more of our readers might recognize.

Well, in 2017 the big processor TSYS coveted that technology enough to lay out a cool $1.05 billion to acquire Cayan. Perhaps yet more readers will recall TSYS. The Genius platform finally arrived at Global in 2019 when that company bought TSYS.

And now  the platform has attracted a “very positive” reception from clients in the early going, Cameron Bready, Global’s CEO,  told equity analysts during an earnings call last month. Global in September had already said it would position more than a dozen point-of-sale products and services under its Genius brand.

“We’re bringing a replatformed Genius to market” for retail and restaurants, Bready said during that call, adding these services are where the company is “investing the most.”

With the rollout, merchants and independent sales organizations “may not require new hardware or software” to adopt Genius, Bready added. “We didn’t invent Genius de novo,” he said. “It’s anchored in solutions we have in the market today.”

The product suite represents technology for both restaurants and general retail, altogether representing as many as 16 POS platforms, Bready estimated.

Altogether, initiatives like Genius represent an important strategy for Global, executives on the call were careful to point out. “We see value in relationships beyond core [payments] acceptance,” noted Bob Cortopassi, president and chief operating officer.

It’s interesting how platforms evolve and can form the foundation of payments strategies. But the history of Genius, we think, is particularly interesting. Helgeson, by the way, wound up as CEO of the processor Bluesnap.

Payments technologies don’t typically follow such a circuitous path, though the best of them, of course, are likely to survive and thrive. We’ll see now how the reborn Genius fares under the management of Global.

—John Stewart, Editor john@digitaltransactions.net