Verifone's June Felix, GM Europe, featured in the January 2015 edition of Payment Cards and Mobile

1. pos terminals
payments cards and mobile | January | February 2015 www.paymentscm.com34
Check-out wars: Joining the dots
The noise surrounding omnichannel commerce and the role of the point of sale
is deafening. PCM met with June Felix, Verifone’s new European president to
understand how the company is rising to the challenge.
A
midst all the excitement around
start-up payment and financial tech-
nology companies and particularly
around the pace of change at the point of
sale, one of the veterans of the electronic
point of sale space has been quietly re-
making its business.
That company is Verifone, one of the
world’s largest manufacturers of payment
devices with just under 19 percent of the
global market and a company that is at the
forefront of the fast pace of change at the
check-out.
With so much change, for a company the
size of Verifone, direct competition with the
smaller, nimbler start-ups in the point of sale
industry is a challenge. With over 26 million
terminalsatretailoutletshowever,thecompa-
ny’s response relies heavily on existing, often
entrenchedrelationshipswithawiderangeof
retailersandmerchants,byre-positioningthe
businesstofocusonwhatthefirmreferstoas
‘connectedcommerce.’Essentiallythismeans
leveraging the firm’s connections with its
customers – merchants – across all the chan-
nels through which they sell and, through
greater use of technology, helping retailers
to improve consumer spend and their own
relationships with their customers.
June Felix, the new president of Verifone
Europe, has been charged with the role of
helping the company make the leap from
hardware manufacturer to technology solu-
tions vendor. Formerly with IBM and more
recently managing director at Citi Enterprise
Payments where she was responsible for
building the bank’s commercial healthcare
payments with a turnover $5.2 trillion. Felix,
who joined the company’s European base
in London in May 2014 says that’s it’s her
background in understanding the customer
journey that attracted her to her new role at
Verifone.
Speaking at the Cartes Show in Paris in
November, she pointed out that “it’s a com-
mon mistake made by businesses today to
approach omnichannel payment in silos. The
consumer wants it to work – hence our vision
forconnectedcommerce,wherewearework-
ing with partners on terminals, e-commerce
and beyond” a move that sees the company
business model shifting rapidly away from
salesofhardwaretoprovidingsolution-based
sales and value-added services.
This shift in approach is providing the
company with an opportunity to innovate
andworkinpartnershipwithretailerswheth-
er to improve the security of payment trans-
actionsortomakebetteruseofthepayment
infrastructure to deliver information about
loyalty, offers and specific campaigns while
the customer waits at the petrol pump or at
the check-out.
Specific examples include development
of technology architecture that separates
consumer payment data from the physical
POS to deliver encrypted data directly to the
merchant’s payment processor, in response
toincreasedcustomerconcernsaroundpay-
ment security, and a partnership with pump
manufacturers Gilbarco in the US to make
customers aware of specific retailer promo-
tions at the store.
Making greater use of what Felix calls
‘pivot points’- where consumers are waiting
to pay – including petrol stations, taxi pas-
sengers sitting in taxis, and at the check-out,
givesVerifonethroughitsinstalledhardware,
the ability to speak directly to the consumer
and is a source of optimism about the future
for the company. Felix’s aims include dou-
bling their European business within five
years as well as to grow the media offering
in partnership with retailers and further
reduce the company’s traditional reliance
on hardware sales – ‘globally, services make
up 40% of Verifone’s business. Our managed
paymentserviceshandle300milliontransac-
tions per month for clients, similar in size to
Paypal,’ enthuses Felix.
It’s a tall order and with smaller-leaner
start-ups more able to adapt and meet the
needs of new, smaller merchants, the point
ofsalemarketplaceismorecompetitivethan
at any time in the last two decades. If the
companycanconvinceitsexistingcustomers
of the value of Verifone’s new omnichannel
approach and make it work, Felix’s optimism
looks well-placed. ■
June Felix, President,
Verifone Europe