AI-Enabled Semi-integrated POS

Semi-integrated Point of Sale (POS) solutions provide a seamless experience for the customer at the point of sale. From the point of sale system, the merchant or the clerk sends the (sale/refund) transaction to the payment terminal, and the customer would finish the transaction in a secure card environment via the payment terminal. Traditionally the payment terminals are secured and disconnected from any other system, in order to isolate the payment environment and make sure the card data is securely entered to the payment terminal. However, merchants often demand a seamless and integrated connection between the payment terminal and their point of sales system, so they can streamline various transaction flows, such as sale, refund, authorization, authorization adjustments and reconciliation of the batch and daily transactions. 

In the market, there are a great number of diverse point of sale systems using various technologies and in different industries; for instance, healthcare, car rental, airlines, hospitality, dental clinics, full service restaurants vs. fast food chains, they all use different point of sale systems suitable for their unique business needs. Some may use Windows, some use iOS or Android software and some are even web based. Connecting all these various POS systems to the payment terminals that come in different shapes and forms is a complex and expensive task. Each connection would have to go through a custom integration, regression and integration testing. This work had only been financially justifiable for large merchants with a great number of point of sale systems (often in tens of thousands or more). However smaller merchants with fewer deployments were left behind and would not get a seamless integration for their point of sale system, because the economics of a custom integration is not there for small merchants. 

To solve this problem for smaller merchants, ONTAB has designed a universal adaptor system for managing the integration between any point of sale system and the payment terminal. We achieved this by applying AI directly into the integration layer. 

ONTAB’s AI application would analyze the incoming requests from the point of sale system  and in realtime map the request to a corresponding request that the payment terminal would accept and understand. This would eliminate the need for custom integrations with each and every point of sale system out there, while allowing the merchants to experience a seamless, integrated payment flow with their point of sale system.