Finding a payment solution that can work for a company like Subway, which has 42,500 restaurants owned by nearly 21,000 franchisees, can be a tall order. But by working primarily with Worldline, a payments and transactional services company, as well as Amadis, a payment software technology company, the Connecticut-based chain rolled out a multi-country payment solution.

It took three years, but the companies pulled it of by focusing on standardization.

"We started working initially on this project with Subway and with Benoit (Benoit Lamoureux, who is in charge of payment products at Subway) through consulting activities," Emmanuel Haydont, Amadis CEO and co-founder, said in a phone interview. "We were trying to find solutions to the issue of deploying global POS payments solutions internationally. We were excited at the idea of an emerging standard in the payments industry."

With Amadis' help, Subway technically changed the standard, Lamoureux said.

"We received a working device from Worldline that used the standard, and it took us a week to integrate the device into our ecosystem," he said

The Worldline device helped the deployment of a global universal standard between the POS system and the payment acceptance system. It offered greater flexibility for Subway, especially for the franchisees.

"We knew we had the standard and we implemented it on our side… and though our POS is different at Subway, we conformed to the actual nexo standard," Lamoureux said. "The device from Worldline was a plug and play and it was the first time that we implemented a payment device that only took us a week…it was out of the box and really fantastic."

The Worldline device has a transaction processor and an e-commerce payment solution, which is contactless and accepts GooglePay, ApplePay and just about every other type of payment.

"Instead of having to customize payment acceptance for each country, language, currency and device, this standardized solution allows Subway's franchisees to quickly respond to fast-changing consumer payment trends and a myriad of local regulations that vary from country to country," Stijn Gasthuys, Worldline Global's VP global sales and verticals, merchant services, said in an interview. "The platform will help restaurants overcome restrictions and consumer anxiety due to COVID by delivering a safe and more comfortable dining and eat-in experience."

The idea of a global standard may sound simple, but it took the expertise of many on the Subway, Worldline and Amadis teams to make it happen. The standardized solution made it easy to operate within the sandwich chain's international payment infrastructure, and it offered franchisees a reliable payment acceptance system that would provide a faster deployment on a global scale.

The solution was a groundbreaking idea that no one in North America had yet tried, according to Lamoureux.

"We should not minimize the significance and gesture of risk that Benoit and Subway took to decide to proceed in implementing and deploying a payment solution based on the nexo global standard," said Gasthuys. "Approaching payment architecture and payment solution solving really has not been done before and to this scale and being leaders in this initial wave of retailers to execute this way should be acknowledged as future focused and industry leading with regards to Subway."

Lamoureux credited the fast deployment due to the plug-and-play design and the use of the standard communication protocol between a standard POS system from Subway and the payment device and application from Worldline.

Creating a standardized solution
But why create a standardization solution? Couldn't they just find one payment solution that would fit across the board?

"It is almost impossible to get one solution. There is no payment processor — even if they think they are — that is completely global," Lamoureux said. "It's impossible to find one vendor that will cover globally, so that's the challenge we have in a global company like Subway. Before we started the project, Subway was integrating systems one at a time. It put a lot of pressure on our testing environment and we had to retest every time we had a new version."

When Subway decided to standardize the payment solution it was not only for the actual integration, but also to standardize testing. Then, according to Lamoureux it was just a matter of finding the right vendor in the right country.

"When we go through our RFP we require a vendor to provide us a payment solution that will support the universal standard," Lamoureux said. "So far, every time we just test our code base and we are sure that all devices deployed are working the same. That is a major improvement in the industry."

Although Subway did not provide specific costs regarding the rollout, Lamoureux said it paid for itself within the first year.

"We just integrated 32,000 of the 42,000 stores," he said. "All of these stores are now on the standard. I'd say that's a pretty good achievement."

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