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customer and transactional information is vital to
maintaining the trust of customers, investors, and all
other stakeholders."
Elliot Bunney, senior strategy manager at Worldpay,
concurred with researchers that data breaches can
wreak havoc on a brand's reputation, stating restaurants
and hotel brands are hardening their security postures
following years of bad press about high-profile data
breaches.
"Security has always been an issue in the hospitality
industry, but not long ago it was lower down on the
investment list," he said. "Merchants didn't care about
data breaches but history has done a lot to change that,
with data breaches occurring on a massive scale."
Tech that just works

Bunney also mentioned that implementation has
become less of a pain point for hospitality stakeholders
in recent years.

"Implementation for hotels and restaurants at scale is
easy when you partner with the right people," he said.
"I remember installing restaurant solutions in my early
payment days that could take up to six or eight hours to
complete. With today's plug-and-play solutions, you no
longer need to close the restaurant for an installation.
You do that in an hour before it opens."

Wall agreed, stating, "There's no closing the hotel;
we'll do this off hours, before you open," he said.
"People who haven't invested in payment technology
in a while are really surprised by not only how quickly
and efficiently we can implement, but also by the fact
that there's limited training; everyone knows how to
use a credit card machine; everybody knows they can
tap their card or watch or phone. There's this common
knowledge in the industry about how these things
work."

Esten said easy integration was one of the reasons
behind starting Toast. "Our founders wanted to create
a consumer mobile app," she said. "When they couldn't
integrate all the legacy technology, they decided to
build a POS from scratch. Ten years later, after building
all that tech, they joke that they finally got to launch
the app."

The interview is available at https://corporate.freedompay.
com/virtual/freedompay-next-level-commerce-live-from-
hitec-2/.

Dale S. Laszig, senior staff writer at The Green Sheet and founder
and CEO at DSL Direct LLC, is a payments industry journalist
and content strategist. Connect via email dale@dsldirectllc.com,
LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/dalelaszig/ and Twitter https://
twitter.com/DSLdirect.

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