Tower (Retailer) POS — bank compatibility

Tower (Retailer) is a point-of-sale system for general retail, gifts and homeware, newsagencies and retail, and 1 more. Forty-odd years of specialty retail software out of Hawthorn, and Constellation bought the lot in January 2025.

Tyro only. Tyro is its own middleware and its own acquirer, so this one comes with the bank attached — moving bank means a new integration.

Tyro rates it a Premium partner — their top tier.

Retailer is Tower Systems' core point of sale. The company goes back to 1981, when Mark Fletcher built an accounting system for newsagents on his kitchen table; the first employee came in 1982, the first POS system in 1994, then Windows POS and the acquisition of RED Software between 1998 and 2000. Tower bought its own office building in Hawthorn in Melbourne in 2003 and moved to larger Hawthorn premises in 2009. Retailer version 3 was a complete technical redesign shipped in 2020, and the last few years have added invoice automation, self-checkout and ChatGPT-based tooling.

The vertical list is the business model, not marketing. Newsagents, bike shops, jewellers, toy shops, gift shops, pet shops, firearms dealers, garden centres and twenty-odd more specialty segments. These are shops with supplier-specific stock files and awkward stock rules, and that is what Tower sells — a set of pre-built verticals rather than a generic till you configure yourself. They also run a training academy and a customer-driven feature request platform called Software Ideas.

Ownership changed recently. Vela APX announced the acquisition of Tower Systems on 21 January 2025. Vela APX is a division of Vela Software Group and Constellation Software (TSX: CSU) — the same operating group that took over AdvanceRetail in 2022, so Constellation now holds both ends of Australian and New Zealand specialty retail POS. Tower's general manager Gavin Williams stayed on through the deal.