Turning credit card terminals into a recurring-revenue business

The customer

A POS company whose terminals had to work anywhere

This RevX customer builds mobile credit card terminals for merchants, the kind of devices that take a payment at a food truck, a pop-up shop, a market stall, or a delivery doorstep. Their whole promise is that a merchant can accept a card anywhere, without depending on a venue's Wi-Fi or a wired connection.

Delivering on that promise means the terminal has to carry its own connection. LTE is what makes a mobile terminal genuinely mobile: it authorizes a transaction in seconds, stays up when local networks don't, and works the moment it's switched on. Connectivity isn't an accessory to this product, it is the product.

The challenge

Connectivity made the product work. It also created a business to run.

Putting an LTE radio in every terminal solved the merchant's problem and created a new one for the company. Each terminal now needed cellular service that had to be sourced, provisioned, monitored, and, crucially, billed for, every month, for every merchant.

One terminal is a sale. A thousand terminals is an operation. Every merchant needs activations and plan changes, usage tracked, failed payments chased, service suspended and restored, and every carrier charge reconciled against every bill, month after month. For a POS company, that's a telecom back office it never set out to build. And scaling only raised the stakes:

• Resellers and merchants. Terminals reach end users through resellers as well as direct, so the platform has to bill and manage subscribers across the channel, not just one account type.
• Recurring, not one-time. The opportunity was a monthly subscription per terminal, but only if the billing behind it was accurate and automatic at scale.
• A payments company, not a telecom. Their expertise was payment processing. Building a carrier-grade billing and connectivity operation in-house would have pulled focus from the product and capped how fast they could grow.

Why RevX

One platform to connect, manage, and bill every terminal

Instead of assembling connectivity, billing, payments, and support from separate vendors and stitching them together, the company ran the entire operation on RevX.

• Connectivity across markets. RevX manages the cellular service behind every terminal for resellers and end user merchants, with the flexibility to use your own connectivity providers, or ours.
• Subscription billing at scale. Each merchant is billed automatically for their terminal service, with taxes and fees handled, so a growing base of merchants doesn't mean a growing billing headache.
• Payments and collections. Recurring charges, retries, dunning, and suspensions for non-payment run automatically, and RevX's own payment processing is PCI compliant, a natural fit for a company in the payments business.
• Subscriber and device management. Merchants, terminals, plans, and usage live in one system, complete with an end-user portal to activate and suspend service on demand, so merchants manage their own accounts without a support call.
• Packaged solutions. Manage entitlements and bill for packaged solutions, so hardware, connectivity, software, and services can be bundled and sold as one offer.
• Full channel management. Manage ISOs, VARs, MSPs, and end user merchants in one system. Additionally, branded landing pages can be provided for large, high-volume resellers with their own products and pricing plans.
• Value-added services. Flexibility to entitle and bill for value-added services beyond connectivity, including Device-as-a-Service, loyalty and rewards programs for example, so each terminal can carry more than just a data plan.

Because RevX arrived as a ready-to-run platform rather than a build, connectivity and billing stopped being a bottleneck and became infrastructure the company could grow on.

The outcome

A payments business with a recurring-revenue engine underneath

With RevX running connectivity, billing, payments, and subscriber management, the company turned a one-time terminal sale into an ongoing monthly relationship with every merchant, without building the telecom operation that would normally be required to get there.

The result is the shape every connected-hardware company is aiming for: a product that works anywhere, a subscription business, and a team focused on growing the business rather than on carrier management and operations.