BUSINESS Link-up between POS payments company and Vend to transform ecosystem

SOUTH African point of sale payments company Yoco this week announced it had expanded its POS integration offering to include Vend, which is expected to radically alter the local retail and hospitality ecosystem.

The Cape Town-based company – which recently achieved a milestone of 10 000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the country using its POS payments platform – said Vend was one of two integrated cloud-based POS solutions now available for Yoco merchants. The other is TabletPOS (powered by iKentoo), made for the hospitality industry.

It said the integration of the retail management software – which lets retailers run their business in-store, online, and via mobile – would enable South Africa-based retailers with multiple locations or more complex operations, which use Vend’s sophisticated inventory and retail management, to process payments with Yoco.

Yoco co-founder and chief business officer Carl Wazen said: “The needs of an SME are always evolving and it’s important that the systems and the people supporting them evolve with them.”

SMEs are big business in South Africa, contributing close to 50% to gross domestic product and drivingemploy- ment. However, due to their size, fragmented nature and general unpredictability, they remain overlooked by large financial institutions because it has not been economically viable to reach them from a cost and risk standpoint.

By expanding access to card payments in the SME segment, Yoco was contributing to the growth of underserved segments of the economy, at a time when it was urgently needed.

The fintech company said through the integration partnership, the seamless transaction flow between Vend’s TabletPOS and Yoco’s payment solution would give retailers the opportunity to provide a superior customer experience at the point of purchase, in addition to performing automatic reconciliations between the POS and the payment system, saving valuable time and allowing for more control.

Traditionally these capabilities have been accessible only to large, multilane retailers, which could afford to do a custom payment integration with their POS systems.

Offering extended POS integrations brings a change of pace to the hospitality and retail industries. The company said with more than 82% of its merchants coming from these industries as well as the health and beauty sector, the delivery of solutions for such merchants remained a priority.

“It is extremely important that we provide our merchants with an offering that goes beyond just payments and transaction processing.

“Integrating payments and POS alleviates some of the biggest pain points that business owners and their staff face – things like cash-up time, the complexities around manual reconciliations, which are prone to human error, and payment fraud.

“We will continue to seek ways to further enhance our merchants’ experience through these types of partnerships, and in doing that, strengthening the SME ecosystem as a whole.”

This is the first time Vend has integrated with an African POS payments company.

Director of payments at Vend Chris Connelly said the company had been looking for a best-of-breed South African partner.

“We were quickly drawn to Yoco, not just because they are a fast-growing leader in the industry, but also because they share our values of innovation and helping businesses succeed and grow.”

Any economic plan, whether published by the government, academic or private sector, makes it clear that a healthy SME sector is considered the cornerstone for reducing unemployment, increasing productivity and catalysing innovation.

The challenging economic environment in South Africa creates a context for SMEs to play a meaningful role in an economy looking to reinvent itself. About 80% of consumer payments in South Africa are still made in cash.

Yoco – which employs more than 70 people in Cape Town and Johannesburg – earlier said by digitising payments it wanted to drive the formalisation of SMEs and move into offering complimentary services driven by software, ultimately becoming the operating system for the contemporary SME.

Its vision is to be the first real pan-African player servicing the untapped SME segments. sizwe.dlamini@inl.co.za

Carl Wazen