Spire Payments Brand Guidelines: Hypercom’s UK Heirs, the Genesis Range & Castles

Out of Hypercom, in the summer of 2011.

Spire Payments was a British maker of card payment terminals with a short, busy history. It grew out of Hypercom, the payment-terminal maker that VeriFone bought in 2011. English Wikipedia, citing the announcements of August 2011, says that as VeriFone completed the purchase, the private investor KleinPartners Capital acquired Hypercom’s UK and Spanish companies, and Kazem Aminaee, formerly president of Hypercom for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, formed Spire Payments from them.

The UK register shows the legal shell. Spire Payments Ltd was incorporated in England on 14 June 2011 under a temporary shelf-company name and took the Spire Payments name on 2 August 2011; Companies House classes its business as the manufacture of computers and peripheral equipment.

American Banker, profiling the company in September 2012, wrote that Spire had “come onto the payments scene in August 2011” with executives and staff who had previously worked for Hypercom, that it then operated mostly in the UK and Spain, and that its range covered countertop terminals, retail terminals with PIN pads, separate PIN pads and wireless terminals. Aminaee, its chief executive, had also held senior posts at Ingenico and Gemalto, the paper said. The same article described how, during the London 2012 Olympics, Spire used runners, rollerbladers and cyclists to deliver orders and parts through streets closed to traffic. In September 2012 the company announced a partnership with Newland Computers to develop future products and a new terminal line. Aminaee told the paper that Europe’s terminal market essentially had two large players, VeriFone and Ingenico, that customers wanted a choice, and that plans were under way for southeast Asia and Latin America but not yet for the United States.

Thyron, Altius, the Middle East and the Genesis range.

Spire expanded through acquisitions. In March 2013, The Paypers and PYMNTS reported, it acquired Thyron Payments Systems, a British mobile-payments company founded in 1989 whose PosMate reader was aimed at small businesses such as plumbers, builders, gardeners and mechanics, letting them take card payments through a phone or tablet. In April 2014 American Banker reported the purchase of Altius Plus, a Romanian developer of terminal applications formed in 2006 with a staff of more than 30, mostly research and development engineers, which became Spire Payments Eastern Europe. By then Spire also sold in Scotland and China, had partnered with Keycorp Services to reach Australian merchants, and had been named sole supplier of chip and PIN devices for Smart TPE, Crédit Agricole’s mobile point-of-sale service in France.

In November 2014 Spire bought the electronic funds transfer division of STS, which supplied payment devices to more than 40 customers in the Middle East, and opened an office in Dubai, with an application-development team and a terminal repair facility in Jordan, American Banker reported. The same report noted a deal to supply Indian Overseas Bank with more than 7,500 mobile devices in the Chennai region.

The products had short, systematic names. A review by Mobile Transaction, first published in 2019, grouped them into Bluetooth mobile readers such as the SPm2 and SPm20, which paired with an app; traditional terminals, which Spire called “POS end points,” such as the SPc5 countertop unit, the portable SPg7 and the SPp40 PIN pad, designed for privacy at PIN entry; and a newer smart range named Genesis. The Genesis devices ran from the palm-sized SPx1, with a camera for barcode and QR scanning, to the SPx3, which combined a till display and terminal on an 11.6-inch touchscreen with a rotating stand.

Design and documentation.

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.

Administration, and a sale to Castles.

Spire reached real volume. The Nilson Report wrote in October 2020 that Spire had shipped 382,253 POS terminals the previous year, to clients in the UK, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Iraq, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, and that it also offered terminal management services and a payment gateway.

The company did not survive as an independent business. Companies House records that Spire Payments Ltd entered administration on 14 January 2020. That year the Taiwanese terminal maker Castles Technology acquired Spire’s business and assets in an all-cash transaction whose value was not disclosed, the Nilson Report and The Paypers reported in October 2020; The Paypers said Castles planned to keep investing in Spire’s products and in the partnerships the two companies had built with merchants, retailers and local partners. The administration ended on 26 January 2021, when the old company moved into creditors’ voluntary liquidation, and the register still listed it as in liquidation in 2026.

The Spire name has since faded from the counter. Mobile Transaction, updating its review in 2022, noted that the Castles brand had replaced Spire’s. Spire Payments no longer trades as a company; its terminals live on through Castles, which took over the business in 2020.

For a design guide, Spire Payments shows how a terminal brand can be built quickly from an older company’s people and products, with a clear naming system across mobile, countertop and smart devices, and how it can be folded into a buyer just as quickly. Compare Castles Technology, which bought the business, and Verifone, which bought Hypercom in 2011. For this guide we use a deep violet, an off-white and a muted brass with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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