Stripe, one of the leading payment providers for online and platform businesses, today announced “Stripe Terminal” to tackle the merchant challenges around in-person payments. Stripe’s solution combines several of the technology components that go into in-person payments and works to abstract the complexity away for merchants and developers.

In-person payments are operationally challenging for merchants. Retail payment leaders working to support their business’ omnichannel efforts and global expansion ambitions consistently run into a complex maze of in-store (AKA, card-present) payment stack providers, including payment processors, local acquirers and gateways, terminal hardware, and middleware that must all be integrated and certified to their POS system. As our “The State Of Retailing Online 2018: Store Investments, Business Objectives, And Mobile” report pointed out, omnichannel is still very much a work in progress for many retailers: Only 35% of retailers say they have the right technology to execute a consistent omnichannel strategy, and just 33% have clear visibility into consumer behaviors across channels.

Competitors and retailers should take notice. Not having in-person payments has pretty much cut Stripe off from the $3.5T US transaction volume that happens in in-store environments. The retail sector is now a clear target for Stripe. Further, Stripe is looking to internationalize Stripe Terminal for merchants in all the geographies where they accept payments. This gives global merchants the potential to have one payment provider for all their online and in-store transactions globally (a desire we hear from a lot of merchants). Although initially the product will be targeted for smaller enterprises, global enterprise retailers should keep a close eye, as this product is being designed with the global enterprise retailer in mind.