Payments acquirers are swallowing offline technology, whether it’s the restaurant POS rollup by Shift4, the restaurant POS rollup by Global Payments, or every technology company trying to become a payments company (which we don’t blame, because payments is easy and generates pure margin while software is much more difficult). Tech distribution, in other words, is being consolidated by merchant acquirers.
Payments companies don’t invest in R&D because they really have no reason for R&D: commoditized product (and calling it a product is being really generous) + guaranteed demand = zero required innovation. Not a bad spot to be in except that there’s a good amount of churn due to the lack of differentiation.
When is your article about Gravity Payments coming out?
Why would I write about Gravity? There are plenty of statists in North Korea with missiles