The way Global Payments sees it, big brands shouldn’t be the only ones having all the tech fun.
Chris Siefken, president of restaurant POS at Global Payments
“With our Genius platform, we can do things like capacity understanding,” said Chris Siefken, president of restaurant POS at Global Payments, a leading payment-solutions provider, in an interview. “We can predict when food will be done so the delivery driver is not waiting around. One thing those delivery folks don’t like is having their drivers waiting. Typically, a small business wouldn’t have access to that kind of capability.”
Capacity understanding is just one facet of the Genius POS platform, which the company rolled out in May. It started with offerings geared for brands in the U.S. and Canada and has been expanding internationally since. Coming later in the year, Global Payments will launch Genius for Enterprise across multiple countries. This solution will serve the needs of the most demanding environments with large footprint and complex kitchen workflows, such as large QSR chains, stadiums and venues.
Brands using the platform receive solutions for handling reservations, processing payments, optimizing marketing, and more. The company has a wealth of experience working with top brands like Whataburger and Dutch Bros. And while it won’t screen calls from more goliaths, Siefken is casting his gaze at smaller outfits.
“We’re taking some of our key learnings and bringing them down market,” he said. “We can do all kinds of interesting things around menu customization, which can provide opportunities to upsell. We can guide people through discovering a menu. We can help small brands flip it on like a switch.”
This includes tools for helping managers figure out the often confusing nature of tips: how they are pooled and divvied up. Bring up this topic to a lot of operators and they may break out in stress hives. Global Payments can ease the burden.
“That’s an area where we’ve got some pretty good sophistication from our work with our enterprise customers,” he said. “We ask a few questions about how operators pay them out and build a program around it. We make the process simpler.”
Like a lot of tech solutions, the company deploys AI. It intends to add to its Agentic AI capabilities as consumers and employees become more acclimated with it. Siefen has been keeping an eye south of the equator for a sense of what may be coming next for AI and ordering.
“In South America we see a lot of people ordering with AI bots on WhatsApp,” he said. “A group may have a group chat with a local restaurant and build an order and pay for it directly in the chat experience. We think that’s super interesting and something that hasn’t really taken off in the U.S. yet, although I would say it is coming. At one point Taco Bell had an integration with Slack. The goal is to make everything super easy for consumers.”
While also making life super easy for restaurants. And that includes the small fries.
“We’re democratizing the point-of-sale,” he said.
