A confluence of events that are coming to head in the last year and coming year is creating significant opportunities in the retail point of sale space. The ret

A confluence of events that are coming to head in the last year and coming year is creating significant opportunities in the retail point of sale space. The retail technology stack has become pretty stale in the last 10 years. What you see at many retailers is decade old technology. The existing legacy players have carved out their domain and have fought hard to fight off any change. All this is changing due to a number of events that are coming to head now. * EMV liability shift in October 2015 is forcing merchants to upgrade their payment terminals. When merchants are upgrading, they all want to future proof their investment. So, they are all looking at the latest and greatest technology. The new Verifone and Ingenico terminals are filled with every type of technology that they can think of. This includes wifi, BLE, high res lcd screens, etc. In addition, both Verifone and Ingenico have opened up APIs for third parties to write apps for these terminals outside of the secure PCI sandbox. Then you have newcomers like Poynt that is trying to disrupt this entire space. * Windows XP deprecation: many of the existing pos, like micros and Aloha, run on top of Windows XP. With the Windows XP deprecation, retailers are required to upgrade their pos to maintain PCI compliance. Instead of spending thousands on upgrading to the latest Micros and Aloha POS, they are now looking at tablet based and cloud based pos systems. This allows companies like Revel, Square, and Clover to move into the space of existing legacy players. The largest challenge for these newcomers (that many underestimate) is the depth of software in the aloha/Micros pos. These pos not only handle order management and payment, but they also run the entire store operation (ie inventory, payroll, scheduling, etc). For a newcomer to come in, it's very high cost to replace all of these functionalities. At Money2020, one of the speakers stated "Changing a Pos is equivalent to changing the way they run the business" * POS as a platform. Micros and Aloha treated their platform as an ecosystem that they wanted to protect. They make it very difficult for third parties to innovate on it. For example, to get access to the Micros SDK, it requires a $25k license plus $1k per deployment. This is a great barrier to entry for startups. The new players have all created open ecosystems to enable third parties to write apps on them. Verifone, Ingenico, Poynt, and Clover have all gone as far as to create an app store to enable third parties to sell and distribute their app. Where we are at now in the pos space is where we were then in the mobile space when the iPhone first came out. There are lots of opportunities to innovate in this space. Lots of developers and startups are waiting at the gate for the entire retail technology stack to refresh to get into this space. Definitely very exciting times.