Waitrose Live with S1's Retail Payments Solution
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.
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 multichannel 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.
Kevin Berry, systems director of Waitrose, said: “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 them 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.