London, 17 October 2017 STS, a leading payments acceptance software specialist, celebrates as it turns 20 today. Twenty years ago Steve Turner founded Smart Technology Solutions Ltd and started developing point of sale payments software from his garden office in south London as he heard from retailers that they needed more advanced payment solutions and at a lower price point in order to migrate to Chip and PIN technology. STS built a team of specialist, highly dedicated, software engineers who developed Emvelink, an award winning application that allowed large merchants with integrated POS systems to quickly and securely process chip card transactions. This helped retailers enhance security, improve customer service and prevent fraud.
STS quickly became known globally as EMV Chip card acceptance software specialists; establishing a reputation for delivering high quality software products and allowing merchants to have independence from payment terminal manufacturers, gateways and acquirers. The company has sold over 150,000 software licenses to date and its products have been chosen by leading grocery chains, specialist retailers, quick service restaurants, the largest warehouse club, the UK’s major motorway service station operator, European airlines, international airports, forecourt retailers, local councils and by a major road toll operator, to name but a few. Emvelink and chip card acceptance marked the first chapter in the life of STS.
In 2008 the company entered its second phase of evolution with the development and launch of G8, a high performance payment application that simplifies card acceptance in-store or from business premises, separating the payments processing logic from EPOS or business applications. G8 allows merchants to continue benefitting from independence from other stakeholders in the payments value chain and improve their commercial negotiating position. Over the last 5 years thanks to the flexibility of G8 and the ability to support cloud deployments, STS has been able to deliver multiple highly-complex payments acceptance implementations. The most recent example being the delivery of a world first, true multi-merchant payments solution that allows multiple airlines to share a payments acceptance infrastructure within airport terminals.
The third and latest chapter in the evolution of the company came earlier this year with the launch of PayOp. This powerful terminal and payments operational management system offers traditional terminal management functions, such as device firmware updates, along with advanced features such as asset tracking, transaction analytics and operational insight. Payment operational management toolsets have largely been ignored to date and deployers of payment terminals have been locked into a single device manufacturer as TMS systems failed to offer multi vendor support. This has created a market opportunity that STS can now address.
“Throughout our twenty years existence we have been totally focussed on delivering highly innovative and advanced payments acceptance software products that allow businesses to accept consumer payments efficiently, securely, and reliably.” says Steve Turner, CEO, STS who continues “This has only been possible thanks to the outstanding employees that have been part of the STS team both now and through the last 20 years. It is thanks to their software development excellence, professionalism, integrity and efforts that STS has become known as the company to turn to for solving complex payments acceptance projects.”
STS was recently featured in the Technology Edition of the UK’s 2017 Parliamentary Review. Featured companies were selected based on excellence in their arena, and to act as examples to their peers. The Parliamentary Review recognised STS’s payments software excellence and the article explained how the company took the decision to become Product-Led.
STS is well positioned to have a great future and looks forward to continuing to work as a strategic partner to business solution providers who serve the merchant community.
About STS
STS is a leading payments acceptance application developer with unrivalled EMV expertise. Although the company is based in the UK, we have supplied over 150,000 merchant implementations located around the world across multiple industry sectors. We offer merchants independence from payment schemes, acquirers, gateways, PSPs and device manufacturers, thereby generating financial savings and maximising their payments flexibility and future choices.
We are a product-led company that invests heavily in developing high-quality payments acceptance applications and features in order to remain at the forefront of payments innovation. This started with EMV Chip and PIN payments in which we became a global market leader and now includes contactless, in-store mobile payments, payment cloud implementations and the management of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Our applications are designed to allow partners to establish competitive advantage. We have earned a reputation for trust, honesty and integrity by continually delivering high quality software and excellent support throughout our 20-year heritage.
Contact details:
Bing Dai, Senior Channel Manager, STS
+44 (0)20 8680 0252
bing.dai@stspayments.com