The company that read your card at the checkout counter started in Honolulu, making devices that checked whether a check was good. VeriFone was founded there in 1981. It spent several years inside Hewlett-Packard, then came back out as an independent business backed by private equity. By the spring of 2005, chip cards were spreading across Europe and Asia. Every merchant needed hardware that could keep up with the card networks, and VeriFone wanted to sell it to them.

A Clerk's Phone Call, Replaced

The bet was that the moment a customer pays should be fast, cheap and trusted. Early VeriFone devices replaced the phone call a clerk made to check a card. Later models added PIN pads, receipt printers and secure software. VeriFone sold through banks and payment processors as well as directly, so its terminals spread far beyond any one retailer. That installed base was the quiet engine of the business. Every upgrade cycle turned old terminals into new orders.

A Ticker Called PAY

VeriFone priced its offering at $10 a share in April 2005 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker PAY. It bought Lipman Electronic Engineering in 2006, then pushed into taxi screens and mobile payments. Newer readers that worked with phones squeezed the old terminal business. In 2018 Francisco Partners took VeriFone private in a deal worth about $3.4 billion.

Cover: Money, plate five from Intimacies, Félix Edouard Vallotton. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for money changing hands (payments).