Verizon Business To Offer Fiserv’s Clover Touchless Payment Services

Verizon Business customers will now be able to utilize Fiserv’s Clover Flex point-of-sale devices to conduct touchless payments, in addition to Fiserv merchant services such as debit and credit card processing.

Customers will also be able to use Fiserv’s (Nasdaq: FISV) services to process payments made online, in-person or via a mobile device, the companies said in a statement.

The Clover Flex device supplied to Verizon (Nasdaq: VZ) customers will be embedded with a Verizon SIM card to facilitate transactions through the Verizon network. The Clover platform and merchant services will enable businesses such as restaurants to offer a completely touchless ordering and payment experience for their customers.

According to a recent Verizon survey, 55 percent of small business owners expressed concern about how they would provide delivery services while complying with social distancing regulations.

The Clover platform currently encompasses more than a million distributed devices, allowing customers to pay using a debit card, credit card or mobile payment app such as Apple Pay, Samsung Pay or Google Pay. The platform processes more than $130 billion in annualized payment volume, according to Fiserv.

Fiserv has been actively seeking to help small businesses weather the pandemic, including developing a new platform to facilitate PPP loans and offer personalized POS support.

In October, Fiserv CEO Frank Bisignano told analysts during the company’s third-quarter earnings call that Clover was one of the company’s key focus areas.

“While the growth rate [for restaurants] has not fully recovered to pre-COVID levels, it is impressive given the economic environment,” Bisignano said during the call. “And considering that COVID tends to [affect] small and medium-sized merchants, which are later in the recovery cycle, we continue to expand the breadth of services to cover merchants with innovative solutions that enhance convenience like scan to order, which was launched recently to allow consumers to scan a QR code to order and pay directly from their table, or integrated payments.”

Verizon Business has also been focusing on assisting businesses with coping with the pandemic. In July, the company rolled out its inaugural small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) resource hub. The “one-stop destination” combines Verizon’s various pandemic SMB relief offerings with important information to help small companies.

The company also introduced Comeback Coach, which links certain small companies with top influencers in the SMB space. The mentorship initiative will be captured during the next couple of months, with the first episodes to be unveiled in August. The Comeback Coach destination will also encompass a collection of SMB offerings from Verizon, like Localworks, BlueJeans, OneTalk, MDM (Mobile Device Management) and Mobile Security.

The offering came as a Verizon Business poll showed that “64 percent of small business owners indicated they would find a resource hub dedicated to supporting and reviving small businesses once the pandemic subsides helpful.”