Surefire POS — bank compatibility

Surefire POS is a point-of-sale system for retail, built by Surefire Software. the Melbourne company quietly running the tills at Officeworks and Liquorland.

Certified on Linkly, running on premise. Linkly reaches more acquirers than any other middleware in the market, which is why most POS start there.

The Linkly integration runs on premise.

Surefire Systems started in Melbourne in 1999, began with grocery retailers, and grew into enterprise retail POS for chains — its own line is "for 10 or 10,000 stores". The customer list is the headline, because it is the sort most POS vendors can only dream of: Officeworks, Optus, Foodworks, Liquorland, Ritchies Supa IGA, Spotlight, Anaconda and The Reject Shop, plus local councils using it for self-service bill payment. Microsoft Australia wrote it up in 2016 for the Officeworks mobile POS and the Optus Retail Assist work on Azure.

That is a different kind of vendor from most of this list. The product set is POS, back office, head office, business intelligence, self-checkout and mobile POS, supported across Australia and New Zealand, and the buyer is a retail chain's head office rather than a shop owner. Which means the way you would actually encounter Surefire is as an employee of one of those chains, not as someone shopping for a till. The company says over 20 years supporting Australian retail chains.

Two loose ends we could not close. Ownership is unclear — one database lists the company as a subsidiary without naming a parent, and no acquisition is on record. And the site footer links to IT Visions in a joint statement about multi-store retail without explaining the relationship. Note also that this record's vendor name, Surefire Software, and the Surefire Systems that holds the customer list appear to be the same business, but no page states it outright.

Surefire Software also has Surefire Android POS.