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.