SoftPOS boom gathers strength with rollouts from Fiserv and ACI Worldwide

The news: Fiserv and ACI Worldwide launched new softPOS solutions, per press releases.

Fiserv-owned Clover added Tap to Pay on iPhone. Through an integration with the Clover Go iOS app, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can accept contactless payments on their iPhones without any additional hardware.

• Clover is a formidable powerhouse: It processed $232 billion in gross payment volume in Q4 2022, a more than 15% increase year over year (YoY).
• Adding Tap to Pay on iPhone can help Clover grow payments volume and build out its merchant acceptance business, which made up 42% of its adjusted revenues. It estimates the vertical will be worth $10 billion by 2025.

ACI Worldwide launched Tap to Pay on smartphones and tablets for mid-size and large retailers. ACI used MagicCube’s i-Accept solution for the rollout. iAccept is device-agnostic, so it works with both iPhones and Androids.

• i-Accept expanded beyond SMB functionality last June, adding capabilities to serve enterprise and big-box retailers.
• The tie-up opens up its partners to larger payment volume opportunities. ACI Worldwide’s total revenues hit $1.4 billion in 2022, up from 7% a year prior.

The bigger picture: SoftPOS solutions are becoming popular because they let merchants accept contactless payments without purchasing new hardware. And Apple’s Tap to Pay on iPhone rollout kicked the space into overdrive.

• The previously Android-only function is now available to the roughly half of US smartphone users with iPhones, enabling higher penetration. We expect 130.1 million people in the US will use an iPhone this year, per our forecasts.
• This should boost merchant adoption: More than 34.5 million merchants globally will deploy softPOS by 2027, per Juniper Research—rising from just 6 million in 2022.
• Since Tap to Pay has historically targeted micro-merchants, tie-ups like ACI’s with MagicCube will help test the potential of expanding to larger merchants to supplement softPOS growth.
• And the expansion will flourish on the Android side as well. Just last week, Block’s Square Software enabled Tap to Pay for Android users. And Stripe introduced Tap to Pay on Android for merchants using Stripe Terminal in February.

SoftPOS’s growth will help global contactless payments volume skyrocket: It’s expected to increase from $4.6 trillion in 2022 to $10 trillion by 2027, according to Juniper Research.

This article originally appeared in Insider Intelligence's Payments Innovation Briefing—a daily recap of top stories reshaping the payments industry. Subscribe to have more hard-hitting takeaways delivered to your inbox daily.

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