Merlin POS — bank compatibility

Merlin POS is a point-of-sale system for retail, built by GPK Group. The IGA channel's IT contractor, and Merlin is its own POS — built in-house and sold with the store fitout.

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.

GPK Group is a managed service provider whose real niche is independent grocery. It is a Metcash preferred supplier and an MGA Platinum Partner, and it sells the lot into IGA-type stores: Merlin POS front office, back office and head office with a supplier-rebates module built specifically for grocery, plus self-checkouts, checkout hardware, CCTV, alarms, networking and comms. It is the single contractor for a store build rather than a software vendor you bolt on. Founder Grant Klaaysen is still CEO, Meg Klaaysen is CFO, and it runs five offices across Docklands, Sydney, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane with 200-plus business customers.

It registered "Merlin POS" and "Cobalt Retail" as business names on 20 September 2022, and "GPK Merlin" in March 2021. In December 2018 it bought Geek IT, a South Australian MSP founded 14 years earlier by Jon Paior, specifically to get South Australian coverage for its growing POS base across the Australian Independent Grocers network; terms were not disclosed. In 2017 it claimed to be the first Australian MSP offering Microsoft Azure Stack private cloud.

Named accounts include Ritchies IGA, which gave GPK Contractor of the Year at its 2026 supplier awards in Queenstown, and Morgan's IGA, a customer of more than 15 years, along with Mitsubishi, Metcash and Jim's Group. One thing to check before assuming provenance: a separate South Australian company, Merlin Software Pty Ltd, runs merlinpos.com.au — which redirects to merlinsoftware.com.au — and sells a retail system called Cobalt RMS. Both companies use the names Merlin and Cobalt, and nothing public connects them.