Today no-fees mobile payment provider LevelUp announced it has partnered with three new point-of-sale (POS) solutions, MICROS, POSitouch, and Dinerware POS Systems. LevelUp was previously integrated with four POS systems, including iPad systems Revel and ShopKeep, which represented five percent of the U.S. market. With these new partners, LevelUp now integrates with 35 percent of the POS market in the U.S.
LevelUp’s goal is to be the most universal way to accept and make mobile payments. The company providers hardware to merchants that lets them accept mobile payments in-store, whether or not they integrate with their POS system or not. Consumers pay via LevelUp’s mobile apps, which leverage NFC technology and QR codes. As we’ve reported before, LevelUp’s solution doesn’t charge merchants or consumers any fees, while other solutions like Square and PayPal Here charge 2.75 and 2.7 percent per transaction.
“Out of the businesses that we work with…a huge population of them are represented by MICROS, POSitouch and Dinerware,” Christina Dorobek, LevelUp’s VP of Partner Development, said in an interview about the new partnerships. “We were able to work with them to get access to their API, and to build an integration between their API and our API to allow the transaction process to be even easier and faster for businesses and customers.” MICROS has 300,000 customers globally, POSitouch is installed in over 20,000 locations, and Dinerware focuses primarily on the restaurant industry, with all three partners catering mostly to restaurants, hotels, and retailers.
Merchants don’t have to integrate LevelUp with their POS system, and can instead just use the standalone hardware, which includes an Android phone that lets merchants scan QR codes to process purchases. To integrate LevelUp with their POS system, existing merchants would install LevelUp, and trade their existing hardware for a 2D barcode scanner. Then merchants select LevelUp as tender when processing a transaction, and a customer would scan their phone using the barcode scanner.
Once integrated, their POS system would then track LevelUp purchases and integrate data from LevelUp’s loyalty program. LevelUp’s revenue model relies solely on its loyalty program, with the company taking a fee for each dollar that is a result of a LevelUp offer or loyalty campaign. Now existing MICROS, POSitouch and Dinerware customers can also get access to LevelUp’s loyalty features, although large POS systems they already have built-in loyalty features and other third-party loyalty integrations.
There are over 4,000 merchants using LevelUp in the U.S., which range in size from small mom-and-pop shops to large chain retailers. Dorobek said they’ll be working to promote the new POS partners within their existing client base (about half of which don’t currently use a POS system), and will be working with those partners to find ways to promote LevelUp’s solution to their customers.
Last week LevelUp announced its white label program to allow merchants to build custom-branded apps using LevelUp’s payments infrastructure, and the company also announced in September that it would be adding NFC support to its payment terminals (they’re rolling those out to merchants this fall). Dorobek said that while for the rest of this year they’ll be focused on these new partner integrations, next year they’ll be looking to add more partners, and ultimately making sure they integrate with any POS system their customers are already using.