S1 (NASDAQ: SONE), a leading global provider of financial services and payments software solutions, today announced that Waitrose, the supermarket chain of the John Lewis Partnership, has gone live with the S1 Retail Payments solution as part of a major point of sale (POS) and payments infrastructure project to enhance payments capabilities across its 227 UK supermarkets.
S1 counts five of the top 10 UK retailers as payments customers.
The selection of S1 followed a thorough vendor evaluation process designed to ensure that the new payments system measured up to Waitrose's high standards of customer service.
S1 successfully proved superior levels of system availability, scalability, and reliability for its end-to-end multi-channel retail payments solution. The S1 software solution consists of a central transaction switch and back-office system, plus an intelligent in-store payments component, which was installed on the supermarket's approximately 4 000 tills.
Providing excellent customer service is key to the Waitrose brand. Kevin Berry, Systems Director of Waitrose, explains: “It is important to Waitrose that our new system process card payment transactions at all times, providing the high quality of service expected by our customers. S1 offers a flexible payments platform that integrates easily with our EPOS application and helps simplify compliance with banking standards.”
Having historically used a payments infrastructure wholly sourced from a single supplier, Waitrose wanted to move to an environment that allowed it to select best-of-breed solutions for both hardware and software, and accommodate future payments and service evolution. S1 was selected as an ideal payments software partner with which to realise the benefits offered by this new approach and unlock greater efficiency and innovation across payments processing.
Francois van Schoor, Divisional President of S1, comments: “As a leading supplier to top UK retailers, S1 is well acquainted with the payments environment that Waitrose operates in. Decoupling the payments component from the EPOS application brings many benefits, including easy integration of new PIN entry devices and the flexibility to offer new customer services and payment types at the checkout. Waitrose will have control over all its payments processing by managing the entire S1 payments platform centrally from its head office in Berkshire.”
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