Payments processing giant Fiserv is beginning to sample the high-end restaurant business with its point-of-sale service Clover.
The company has already signed a luxury restaurant in Brooklyn, according to comments from the incoming CEO during its quarterly earnings call Thursday.
Clover Hospitality, as the service will be called, will debut at the National Restaurant Association Conference on May 17 in Chicago, and Fiserv's president and incoming CEO Michael Lyons gave a brief description of that effort during the call.
The service is “a new point of sale system designed to meet the needs of upper-market restaurants,” Lyons said.
The Italian restaurant Lilia is Clover Hospitality's first client, he said. The Brooklyn staple is located in Williamsburg, an affluent neighborhood renowned for its hipster dining scene, and is the kind of restaurant that doesn't bother putting prices on its menu.
Milwaukee-based Fiserv's move into the high-end restaurant space mirrors that of the luxury credit card network American Express, which bought the reservation and point of sale service Tock for $400 million in June from website builder Squarespace.
New York City-based Amex has taken several other steps over the past year to give its card holders greater access to exclusive restaurants.
In terms of its first-quarter financial performance, Fiserv reported net income of $851 million, about a 16% increase over the $735 million reported for the year-earlier quarter, according to its earnings presentation. The payment processor's first-quarter revenue also grew, albeit more slowly, rising 5% to $5.13 billion.
