SmartQ POS — bank compatibility

SmartQ POS is a point-of-sale system for retail, built by SmartQ – Bottle Lab Technologies. Bengaluru-built cafeteria tech that ended up as the in-house technology arm of the world's biggest catering company.

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

The Linkly integration runs in the cloud.

SmartQ is the trading name of Bottle Lab Technologies, registered on Sankey Road in Bengaluru. It was built for the corporate cafeteria problem — the queue at lunchtime in an office food court — and the product set runs from a workplace food-ordering app to cashier-less cafeterias, self-ordering kiosks, automated billing kiosks, contactless prepaid cards and menu displays. The POS piece is real rather than marketing: the company ships Time2eat POS, Time2eat kiosk and Time2eat ORT.

Compass Group's India business took a majority stake in March 2021 — stake size and price never disclosed — and SmartQ now describes itself flatly as the technology arm of Compass Group. That rollout was pitched at Compass client sites in the UK, India and New Zealand, with the US, Japan and Singapore to follow. Its own site claims 400-plus clients, 1,500-plus vendor partners, 14 countries and 29 Indian cities, though third-party profiles give different numbers, and the founding year is reported as both 2014 and 2015 depending who you ask. Founders listed are Krishna Wage, Hardhik Sheth, Abhishek Ashok and Keshav Meda.

The thing to understand is the sales channel, because it is not a normal one. This is not a product you buy as a cafe owner; it arrives because Compass Group runs your staff canteen. We found no evidence of an Australian deployment, so if it is being offered to you here, the question is who is actually contracting it and who supports it locally.