How Tech Partners Can Give Merchants Seamless Payments AND Grow Their Own Revenue

The future of in-person payments is not another terminal. It is an integrated solution, where the software a merchant runs their business on, the payments they take and the device in their hand work as one. For merchants, that means less to manage, a smoother experience and more value from the tools they already use. For independent software vendors (ISVs), it opens up new revenue, built into the product they already offer.

Making that real takes three parties working together. SUNMI provides the hardware. Mollie enables payments and monetisation. The ISV brings everything together for the merchant. The result is a simple proposition: one device, one integration, one partner.

The problem: separate solutions for everything

Merchants want in-person payments that connect directly to their dashboard, their accounting and their POS. A unified experience beats juggling a separate terminal, a separate contract and a separate support line.

ISVs see the opportunity too. Many category-defining software companies, particularly in the US, have made embedded payments a crucial part of their revenue, and the appetite in Europe is real. But building payments in-house is a multi-year detour, and merchants expect their software provider to carry the compliance, hardware and payment risks that come with it. The question is no longer whether to offer payments. It is how to offer them without becoming a payments company.

SUNMI: one device that is also the terminal

Breadth matters because a hospitality platform does not have one hardware need. It has four: a handheld for the waiter, a countertop unit for the bar, a kiosk for quick service and a tablet for reception. With SUNMI, all of these are Android and SoftPOS-ready, so the ISV builds its app once, integrates once, and chooses the device per customer instead of per contract.

Mollie: one partner that takes on the work, not just the transaction

Mollie is a European payments company, founded in Amsterdam in 2004 and now serving more than 350,000 businesses across the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland. Many payment service providers hand over an API and leave the hard parts on the platform’s side. Mollie Connect for Platforms[1] takes on the full-service model:

• Regulatory compliance, including AML, PCI-DSS, PSD2 and DAC7 requirements
• KYC verification, including customer screening and onboarding
• Proactive risk management, including underwriting, monitoring and dispute handling
• Loss protection covering fraud chargebacks, insolvency and negative balances

The practical effect: the ISV is not taking on a payments operation. It is taking on a revenue line.

The ISV: bringing it all together for the merchant

Today, a merchant using an ISV’s software and taking card payments typically has two suppliers, two devices, two support lines and two contracts. With SUNMI and Mollie behind the ISV, they have one of each, and the one they call is the ISV. In practice:

• Onboard the merchant. Co-branded onboarding, pre-filled through the Client Links API or embedded in the ISV’s dashboard. Mollie runs KYC and verification.
• Ship the device. SUNMI hardware is purchased through a distributor and delivered to the merchant.
• Activate. The ISV generates a pairing QR code via API and displays it in its own interface. The merchant scans it and the Mollie Tap app activates on the device.
• Take the first payment. Contactless, on the device the merchant already has in hand.

Compare this with the dedicated terminal model: order hardware, wait for delivery, wait for acquirer onboarding, wait for configuration, then send someone to install it. That is a process measured in weeks. Here, the merchant can be trading much faster, on a SUNMI device that may already be running the ISV’s software, with no terminal certification on the ISV’s side, no payments engineering and no second support number.

And the upside: monetisation that sales teams can actually use

A better merchant experience pays back for the ISV too. It earns a commission on the in-person payments merchants process on hardware purchased through it, which supports conversion, retention and lifetime value. Mollie Connect offers two ways to earn, depending on how much commercial control the ISV wants:

Revenue share. Mollie sets the payment-method pricing and manages invoicing and customer support. It suits partners who want recurring revenue without managing pricing or billing.

Buy-rate. For platforms with more mature commercial operations. Mollie agrees wholesale buy rates per payment method, and the platform sets its own customer pricing by adding markup and application fees. Pricing can be segmented by customer, volume, product or market, and configured with no code, so a sales team can build it into a proposal without waiting on development.

Onboarding is built for scale as well, with a hosted flow, an embedded component or (for licensed partners) a reliance model, plus API pre-population, bulk creation for migrations and progress monitoring through to activation.

The checkout is no longer a place. It is a moment.

And it can happen wherever the customer is ready to pay. The companies that make that moment effortless will own the relationship around it. One device, one integration and one partner is how an ISV gets there.

If you are an ISV exploring embedded payments and SoftPOS in Europe, we would be glad to show you what SUNMI and Mollie can do together. Get in touch with the SUNMI Europe team to start a conversation.

---

👉 Learn more about Mollie SaaS Solutions