A seamless payment experience on Subway®’s strategy menu.

Challenges

With a network of thousands of Franchisees in Europe and globally, Subway®’s challenge was to build a homogenous ecosystem to offer an omnichannel solution to manage information, consolidate payment reports and deliver crucial insight, as well as assist in the decision-making process to its constantly growing number of business partners.

Worldline integrated their payment solution with the Subway® POS infrastructure for Franchisees to address these needs. Deploying a cohesive payment solution across 16 European markets is still underway; it is complex both logistically and technologically, not least to ensure that each market is provided with a localised solution.

Considering the magnitude of the project, Worldline incorporated time and project management to be able to plan, test, and implement both hardware and software across several markets at the same time. The readiness of terminals was of crucial importance as these had to be paired with the availability of language-specific hotlines to be able to address ad-hoc problems in the early stages of implementation. The specificity of local payment markets such as Germany, brought compliance challenges, problems with settlement currencies, and different scheme fees to add to the complexity in this major undertaking.

Payment tools for the job.

At the end of 2019, the partnership was agreed with IPC Europe1, an independent non-profit making organisation owned by Subway® Franchisees across Europe. As well as the purchasing, management and supply of Subway® approved food, packaging and equipment, IPC Europe also provides support with commercial services and technology solutions.

As a result, Worldline is incorporating several software and hardware- based solutions to address Subway®’s challenges across 16 European countries, starting with Integrated in Subway® ECR: YOMANI XR Pinpad and YOXIMO Mobile Flex as portable backup terminals, paired with an excellent user interface and a new advertising opportunity at the POS. To target guests ordering from home to have their food delivered or pick it up by themselves, Worldline piloted an integrated e-commerce solution into the Mobile Order solution in September 2021, which was completed in Q4 2021, allowing guests to choose from a variety of local and international payment options, to pay for their meals. For Subway® Franchisees, the Worldline implementation team created an onboarding Portal that operates in 8 languages. Finally, Franchisees can use the myPortal reporting tool that grants them access to customised transaction reports, dashboards, financial reconciliation, and the overview of the entire terminal infrastructure.

Expanding the payments offering to Subway® guests.

With its massive infrastructure and immense experience in the payments industry, Worldline has the capacity to serve customers around the world and to provide a seamless payment experience. Bringing in a comprehensive e-commerce and payment solution to Subway® across 16 European countries was logistically challenging but is set to boost Subway®’s customer base and ultimately allow their guests to buy food easily.