FIME today announces its successful collaboration with AEVI, a subsidiary of Wincor Nixdorf, to support the development and roll-out of the world’s first payment terminal product based on the Android operating system (OS). The tablet point of sale (POS) device, called‘Albert’, gives merchants a complete solution to manage a range of business functions and accept a number of different forms of secure payments. The solution is already live and in use by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, since 2015.

Albert offers a wide range of benefits to retailers across industries. Firstly, they can fully tailor their POS device by only running specific applications that are required for their business. Should their business evolve, they can access the dedicated app store to download additional apps, or develop new apps to answer a specific requirement. On top of this, the tablet device accepts all standard payment methods that are compliant with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) requirements: EMV chip and PIN, swipe and sign and near field communication (NFC) contactless payments.

"Albert is a significant milestone in the expansion of cashless payment acceptance,” comments Tomasz Kobylarz, Global Product Manager, at AEVI. “We set out to revolutionize the POS experience and needed a partner with experience across a range of disciplines to support us from the start of the project, right through to certification and launch. We have collectively succeeded in changing how retailers interact with their customers by offering a more powerful, open platform which can adapt to changing needs, and provide real-time analytics and business insights.”

FIME provided consultancy and project management services throughout the development and roll-out of the product. It supported AEVI during the radio frequency antenna design to enable contactless payments acceptance, and the EMV Level 1 payment terminal kernel development.

Amadis provided EMV Level 2 technology in addition to integration services using its Agnos EMV Level 2 EntryPoint Contactless Stack, which covers all major payment scheme kernels. For this project, Amadis also developed a specific Android API to bridge the EMV NFC card payment acceptance services with the Albert marketplace application environment.

Finally, FIME managed the compliance testing of the complete solution, using its qualified test tools, to ensure alignment with a range of international payments standards.

“Delivering a world first is always exciting and it was extremely satisfying to help bring Albert to life,” adds Mikael Berrebi, Vice President of EMEA at FIME. “Lots of companies and departments were involved, we needed to combine a great deal of functionality into one handheld device and something like this had never been done before on Android. Albert represents a pivotal point in POS development; the consumer interface just took a leap forward and we’re proud to have been on the front line.”

Some of Albert´s key features include: the options of e-mailing receipts and invoices, allowing customers to open accounts they can pay off later; recording and tracking daily, weekly and yearly payments; and collecting valuable business analytics and insights.