Verifone Brand Guidelines: A Hawaii Start, the ZON Terminal & Francisco Partners

A Hawaii company named for a telephone product.

Verifone was founded by William “Bill” Melton and incorporated in Hawaii in 1981, according to English Wikipedia. It took its name from its first product, a telephone-based transaction system: “Veri-” from verification and “fone,” a shortening of telephone.

The timing suited it. Wikipedia says that in 1981 Visa and MasterCard began offering merchants discounts for using newly developed automated authorization on larger card purchases, which opened the way for an industry of point-of-sale authorization devices. Verifone introduced its first point-of-sale product in 1982, keeping costs down by outsourcing production, and in 1984 introduced the ZON credit card authorization system. In 1985 it moved its headquarters to Redwood City, outside San Francisco.

Growth followed through the late 1980s. Wikipedia says Verifone entered the international market in Australia in 1988, bought the transaction automation business of Icot Corp. in 1989 and placed its millionth ZON system in Finland the same year. It went public in March 1990. As the card market matured it pushed its systems into restaurants, cinemas and taxis, Wikipedia says, and rolled out its Gemstone line, which added inventory control and pricing. It opened facilities in Bangalore, Singapore, England, Dallas and Fort Lauderdale alongside its Hawaii and California sites, and in 1994 built a plant near Shanghai to add production capacity. The same year it opened a research and development centre in Paris, to be close to smart-card work in France and the rest of Europe.

Countertops, PIN pads and the web.

Verifone’s terminals came in named generations. Wikipedia lists the ZON Jr of 1984, the Tranz 330 and ZON Jr XL of 1987, the Omni 460 of 1991 and the Omni 3200 of 1999, followed by the Omni 3700 family. In 2004 came the Vx line, also called VerixV: countertop models such as the Vx510 and Vx520, and portable ones such as the Vx670, a handover terminal for paying at the table. In 2005 Verifone released the MX 870, which Wikipedia calls its first full-colour terminal and the first of an MX 800 series of multimedia devices for multi-lane retail. The VX Evolution line followed in 2010.

In the mid-1990s the company also looked beyond the counter. Wikipedia says it bought Enterprise Integration Technologies, the developer of the S-HTTP protocol for web transactions, in 1995, invested in Melton’s later venture CyberCash, and in 1996 announced a palm-sized smart-card reader for home computers, the Personal ATM.

Verifone has reworked its identity twice in recent years. On 3 November 2014 it launched a new brand — a new logo, website, creative and voice — created by the New York consultancy DeSantis Breindel, which presented it that week at Money20/20 in Las Vegas and CARTES in Paris, according to the consultancy. English Wikipedia says the company, known as VeriFone Holdings until it became VeriFone Systems in 2010, rebranded that year as Verifone with a lowercase “f.” On 30 June 2023 the company announced another new logo, brand identity and global website, with iconography it said conveyed the “connected, modular and evolving” nature of payments, and called itself the “Payments Architect and Commerce Expert.”

Today’s device range, as the company’s website presents it, centres on Victa, a family with portable and mobile models that the company says is powered by Qualcomm processors, alongside biometric payment devices, the Verifone Tap software and the Commander site controller for fuel stations.

How terminal makers present themselves.

Payment terminals are made to be handled, and their makers tend to show them in use: a countertop unit beside a till, a PIN pad turned towards the shopper, a portable terminal carried to a restaurant table, an unattended reader fitted to a vending machine or a fuel pump. Product pictures move between that wider scene and the close-up — a card or a phone held over the contactless symbol, a receipt coming out of the printer, a total on the screen. Some pages open a device up into an exploded diagram of casing, screen, keypad and board.

Much of what these companies sell cannot be photographed at all. Their websites set hardware beside software, device management and payment services. Ingenico’s current site groups its devices by use — portable, countertop, PIN pad, mobile, self-service — before it names a range, and Verifone’s places its Victa devices alongside software, payment processing and controllers for fuel stations.

The trade meets at fairs, and launches are timed to them. Verifone presented its new identity in November 2014 in the same week as Money20/20 in Las Vegas and the CARTES show in Paris, according to the consultancy that designed it, and Ingenico showed new terminals at EuroCIS, the retail-technology fair in Düsseldorf, in February 2025, the German trade title IT Finanzmagazin reported.

Ingenico and Verifone have each changed owners more than once and kept their names. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it, which ranges it sells and how its identity has changed — and keeps the companies’ own claims apart from what independent sources report.

HP, the stock market, then private equity.

Verifone has changed hands several times. Wikipedia says Hewlett-Packard acquired it in a stock-swap deal in April 1997 and sold it to Gores Technology Group in May 2001, and that GTCR Golder Rauner recapitalized it in 2002 before it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2005. As a listed company it completed its purchase of the Israeli terminal maker Lipman, owner of the Nurit brand and the British firm Dione, in November 2006, and bought its smaller competitor Hypercom in 2011. In 2009 it joined Hypercom and Ingenico to found the Secure POS Vendor Alliance.

In August 2018 Verifone was taken private by an investor group led by Francisco Partners, a technology-focused private equity firm, and including British Columbia Investment Management Corporation, after a deal announced that April, the retail-trade site iXtenso and the European Vending and Coffee Service Association reported, carrying the company’s announcement. Mike Pulli became chief executive and described the aim as turning Verifone from a terminal sales company into a provider of payments and commerce solutions.

The same owners remain. In April 2025 the company said Francisco Partners, British Columbia Investment Management Corporation and other existing shareholders had made a new preferred-equity investment; that announcement was datelined New York City and quoted chief executive Himanshu Patel. Its 2023 rebrand announcement was datelined Coral Springs, Florida.

For a design guide, Verifone shows how a terminal maker can carry one coined name — from “verification” and “telephone” — across more than four decades and several owners. Compare Ingenico, a co-founder with Verifone of the Secure POS Vendor Alliance, and PAX Technology, another payment terminal maker. For this guide we use a cobalt blue, graphite and a cool mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Verifone’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.