Spindle Serves Up Smorgasbord of Merchant Services

Spindle was at ITEXPO Miami last month talking about its full-featured restaurant and retail commerce portfolio. CEO Bill Clark spoke on camera with TMCnet’s Erik Linask (News - Alert) about the Spindle platform’s functionality and the company’s partnership with Clear2there.

Four-year-old Spindle got its start delivering a payment processing platform. It then expanded its portfolio via the acquisition of Yowza!!, which brought to the table a consumer shopping application. More recently, Spindle added a point of sale platform for merchants, Clark explained, explaining that Spindle’s cloud-based approach to PoS enables it to provide a broader set of services and to add features on an ongoing basis more easily. It also allows for support of mobility, including the use of tablets at restaurant tables, for example.

As for the partnership noted above, the companies in December forged a relationship through which Spindle offers its solutions to Clear2there’s (News - Alert) national network of communications service providers, and through which Spindle channel partners can provide Clear2there’s remote business monitoring and management applications, and video surveillance services to merchants. Clear2there, which has a network of about 150 regional telephone companies and service providers, offers the above-noted solutions as well as M2M, smart business, smart farm, and smart home applications.

Clark mentioned that a lot of the telecom providers in rural areas are delivering alarm services, landline connections, Internet access, Wi-Fi, and even some cloud solutions to businesses, but that until now point of sales solutions have largely been left to credit card processing companies or local banks.

“But the installation and the maintenance and servicing of a mission-critical solution like point of sale is best done by the local telecom or service provider,” Clark said.

He added that as U.S. merchants upgrade to EMV, many of those businesses will look for new IT partners, which will open the door for companies like Clear2there and Spindle to win their business. (EMV, or Europay, MasterCard (News - Alert) and Visa, is a set of smart card payment and acceptance device specifications. They were developed to define a set of requirements to ensure interoperability between chip-based payment cards and terminals.)