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POS Altruism At Its Best

Written by Evan Schuman
March 22nd, 2007

What a wonderful, altruistic POS market we have. When execs at VeriFone saw that rival POS vendor Hypercom was potentially being distracted by an almost 10 percent drop in its stock market price earlier this month, they wanted to help out.

So VeriFone pointed out the challenges–and added news about the rumors that its rival is up-for-sale. It then altruistically offered to pay for all of Hypercom’s customers to move to VeriFone, if they do so “by the end of July.” I guess the rationale is that Hypercom could focus on its efforts better if it wasn’t being constantly distracted by noisy customers.

“VeriFone is committing a multimillion-dollar software investment to fund conversion of all currently operational Hypercom customer applications and network interfaces to VeriFone platforms. There will be no fees to any current Hypercom customer for this development,” said the Verifone statement.

Just in case the subtlety was lost on any IT execs, Verifone plunged the knife deeper, in a statement attributed to VeriFone CEO Douglas Bergeron: “During the past several weeks, we have been in contact with many Hypercom customers who are concerned about the company’s future and speculation about a possible sale. Many of Hypercom’s existing products are not PCI-compliant and cannot be sold after the end of this calendar year. Hypercom’s newer products that are PCI-compliant remain largely unproven and lack bank certifications in many geographies.”

Can’t you just feel the love?

Posted in IT Strategy/Industry, Payment Systems
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