Point of Sale Industry

NathanielTurner

If the creek don't rise i will be taking a position doing pos support. Just looking for some insight on the underlying tech of the payments industry.

stuh84

NathanielTurner wrote: »

If the creek don't rise i will be taking a position doing pos support. Just looking for some insight on the underlying tech of the payments industry.

Theres a lot to it, and it differs from country to country. While one will be based on the APACS standards, another will use ISO standards (this is the data format of the individual authorization for payment requests coming through).

For POS in itself, it tends to be a bit hub-and-spoke in the architecture, with either an acquirer (some bank, say Barclays or American Express), or some form of central network provider who will provide links into multiple acquirers. I work for one of these multiple links/transport network providers (Transaction Network Services if you are interested), and the whole goal of what we do is take payments/auths/batch traffic, and pass it on to the many acquirers we have links into, rather than each POS terminal, or provider of POS terminals requiring a dedicated link into each of them.

The kind of tech you'll see is a massive range, because it can be anything as modern as the latest Cisco and Juniper kit doing MPLS backbones, on the same network as X25 and PSTN dial solutions. Where I work is strange because its very like a service provider infrastructure, as we are technically the same, except rather than for video, voice, web data etc, we are doing it purely for transactions and financial data. At the same time, some of the methods to get in and out of the acquirers/transport networks are what you'll never find in almost any other industry as it has long since been replaced.

Let me know if you have any further questions, thats a summary of what I see in the industry.

NathanielTurner

Thanks for the info
Wanting to see what direction I should take concerning my studies. Wondering should i focus on the Microsoft side of things or should i focus on networking specifically. I like networking better than active directory/servers etc

stuh84

NathanielTurner wrote: »

Thanks for the info
Wanting to see what direction I should take concerning my studies. Wondering should i focus on the Microsoft side of things or should i focus on networking specifically. I like networking better than active directory/servers etc

It depends what area you will be in, but theres not a lot of Microsoft/sysadmin in the POS industry (or at least, not providing anything to the POS network, only a standard enterprise environment of providing desktops to people), whereas networking will get you involved in the actual POS network itself.

NathanielTurner

Ok cool beans and thanks for your reply

I spent the majority of my career providing desktop and basic desktop support.
I've done pos early in my career and enjoyed it . I left for a state job doing support for a govt agency which ended up being a bad move. I figure at least to finish up my mcsa just in case I need to go back to a msft environment. The networking aspect of the pos and payments industry intrigues me,

PhildoBaggins

The networking side of a payment processor can be insane. I worked over 4 years at a top POS support / payment processing / giftcard processing company.

We are ae talking double redundancy over double redundancy, quadruple redundany main frames processing over octuple redundant circuits spread throughout the country. We supported, leased, frame, dial (heavily), x25, mpls, cable, dsl, echosat and hughes sattelite

Priston

There's also the IBM side of POS