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Payment processor Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) on Thursday unveiled a line of point-of-sale terminals and services for small and mid-size businesses, and took its Vital brand out of a 13-year retirement as the name for the new product suite.
The cloud-based Vital POS has three major components: Vital Mobile, an EMV card reader for a merchant’s smart phone or tablet; Vital Plus, a replacement for countertop POS terminals and electronic cash registers, and Vital Select, a full-featured POS system for businesses with one or more physical locations.
In addition to their payment functions, all three products include back-office features such as analytics and reporting, inventory management, tax accounting, time-clock and employee-management functions, pricing and discount controls, and other features, according to TSYS. Pricing of the POS system was not immediately available.
“We currently have nearly 800,000 merchants in our portfolio and each of these three products is designed for the specific needs of different sizes of businesses,” a TSYS spokesperson tells Digital Transactions News by email.
Columbus, Ga.-based TSYS, one of the nation’s biggest merchant acquirers, now has a system that competes directly with the likes of First Data Corp.’s Clover, Square Inc., and Poynt, all of which offer small and medium-size merchants business-management software apps in addition to POS hardware and payments software.
“Vital POS offers everything one would expect from a Square or Clover, but surpasses them with extraordinary back-office and business-management capabilities offered for a very affordable monthly fee,” the spokesperson says. “Another key selling point of Vital POS is that it is based on a unified platform. This provides business owners with a single, unified experience across all of our products.”
Vital uses technology TSYS obtained last June when it acquired Jacksonville, Fla.-based iMobile3, a provider of POS products and an app marketplace for mobile phones and tablets, for $13.4 million in cash.
Vital Processing Services was the name of a 50-50 joint merchant-acquiring venture TSYS and Visa formed in 1995, with Visa providing the front-end services and TSYS doing the back-end tasks. TSYS bought out Visa’s share in 2005, including rights to the Vital brand, and renamed the business as TSYS Acquiring Solutions in April 2006.
The spokesperson says “Vital is an extremely powerful brand that reflects and embodies the value and importance of the product set we are now delivering … the Vital name also resonates very well in the industry.”
