Front Retail POS — bank compatibility

Front Retail is a point-of-sale system for hospitality, built by ICG Software. Spanish, family-run out of Lleida since 1985, and the brand you would actually be buying today is HIOPOS.

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.

ICG stands for Iniciativas de Comunicacion Geminis — the legal company was constituted in 1992, but the group dates itself to 1985 and is still led by founding president Andreu Pi Pocurull. It runs out of Lleida in Catalonia, with facilities on the Torrefarrera industrial estate. The group claims presence in more than 70 countries across five continents and 25 international concessions, up from more than 50 countries and 16 concessions in its own 2011 corporate dossier, which also claimed tens of thousands of clients.

FrontRetail — ICG writes it as one word, not two — is the retail member of a family of trade-specific tills: FrontBoutique, FrontShoes, FrontSport, FrontMarket, FrontStyle and FrontPerfum, with FrontRest as the hospitality sibling. The retail build covers cash management, multi-buy promotions, items tracked by barcode, reference, serial, size, colour and brand, customer files with sales history and reservations, gift and prepaid and points cards, and head-office-to-store communications for centralised stock and reporting. Target trades were boutiques, perfumeries, supermarkets, greengrocers, bakeries, shoe shops and salons, plus chains and franchises.

It looks legacy. The FrontRetail brochure is still sitting on ICG's servers but the name has gone from the current homepage and group pages, which now lead with HIOPOS and HIOPOS Cloud, the CashDro cash machines, and ICG's own terminals, scales and kiosks. We also found no ICG office, subsidiary or distributor in Australia on any of their own pages — so local support is a question to ask early rather than late.