FROM OUR COLUMNISTS
FOR THE RESTAURANT POS, SIGNS OF LIFE AFTER DEATH Tech Check: The device that once ruled the counter is fading as more business shifts to off-premise. But it’s getting a second life that could be more vital than the first.
BY JOE GUSZKOWSKI
CLOVER UNVEILED A NEW POS SYSTEM AT THE NATIONAL RESTAURANT ASSOCIATION SHOW THIS YEAR. | PHOTO COURTESY OF FISERV
F irst, the bad news—and “news” is definitely a stretch here: The restau - rant point-of-sale is dead. In the restaurant industry, busi- ness has been shifting away from the POS for years. Today, three-fourths of all orders are for to-go, according to recent data from the National Restaurant Association. In the process, that box on the counter has lost its role as the central clearinghouse for restau- rant transactions. “The point of sale is really a tentacle,” Krystle Mobayeni, head of restaurants for payments processor Fiserv, said during the National Restaurant Association Show earli- er this year. “It’s a channel. It is not the cen- tral operating system.” She agreed with the contention that the
POS, as we once knew it, has gone belly-up. And now for the good news: In this case, there is life after death. The restaurant POS, finally free from its mortal coil on the coun - ter, is beginning an expansive second life, one that centers on hospitality and intelligence rather than simply processing transactions. Mobayeni was at the show in part to help promote a new product from Fiserv called Clover Hospitality by BentoBox. It is being marketed as a POS for upscale restaurants, but Mobayeni thinks of it as a commerce platform. If she could have gotten away with calling it that commercially, she would have. “It’s doing the function of on-premise, and people know what that is instead of call- ing it an omni-commerce platform,” she said. But, “we’re not trying to create a different
language right now.” Fiserv acquired Mobayeni’s BentoBox in 2021, and its online ordering and marketing software form the foundation of the new Clover Hospitality. But the system’s most interesting innovations are actually on the on-premise side—the stuff that traditionally falls under the purview of the POS. Historically, Mobayeni said, the POS has been a back-of-house, operations-focused tool. With Clover Hospitality, she wanted to reimagine it as customer-facing. “When you think of the diner as an actual stakehold- er, how does that change the [POS] experi- ence?” she said. That approach resulted in Clover Hospi- tality’s most notable innovation: a feature that allows customers to enter their payment
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RESTAURANT BUSINESS JULY 2025
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