SoftPOS is shaping the future

The Certification Journey

SoftPOS has undergone significant evolution as a product. The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) has established various operational frameworks for SoftPOS, initiating its certification journey. PCI compliance is a crucial requirement within the payment industry, particularly for security-focused banks. Payment product providers are keen on ensuring that any solution meets the highest security standards possible.

In recent years, PCI SSC has released various guidelines and versions of PCI operational frameworks. The first framework was SPoC in early 2018, and the latest was CPoC at the end of 2019.

Previously, the SDK approach was outside the scope of PCI certification frameworks. Visa created a framework called Visa 1.8 to launch certain solutions with Visa-approved SDKs before the full MPoC standard was ready.

With an SDK, contactless payment acceptance became feasible within any new or existing application.

Use Cases and Opportunities

After briefly reviewing the certification requirements for SoftPOS, let’s explore the areas where SoftPOS has achieved success.

SoftPOS has provided a low-cost payment acceptance option to the market, particularly benefiting micro and small businesses. It is even feasible to make payments using SoftPOS at a market stall.

With SoftPOS, any bank can become a payment provider. Traditional banks and neobanks can now accept payments directly through their existing mobile banking apps. Monzo and Revolut have launched SoftPOS applications in the UK. Various banks from OTP Bank in Hungary and Intesa Sanpaolo Group in Italy have also entered the market with their own solutions. Adding SoftPOS to a mobile banking app appears to be the preferred choice for many other banks.

Corporate (large retail) companies have also joined the SoftPOS journey. Initially, SoftPOS was targeted at “on-the-shelf” devices. Over time, broader use cases emerged. SoftPOS is now also being used to process payments for delivery services.

Despite being a very new technology, these examples demonstrate the many different applications of SoftPOS.