PAX Technology Brand Guidelines: A Shenzhen Terminal Maker Listed in Hong Kong in 2010

A terminal supplier to China’s card networks.

PAX Technology was founded in Shenzhen, in southern China, in 2000, according to English and Chinese Wikipedia and the company’s own press material. It makes payment terminals, PIN pads and point-of-sale hardware and software. The listed parent is PAX Global Technology Limited — in Chinese, 百富環球科技有限公司 — and Chinese Wikipedia says the group has its headquarters in Hong Kong, while its research and operations are based mainly in Shenzhen.

Its first big customers were Chinese. English Wikipedia says PAX was chosen in 2002 as a supplier of card terminals for China UnionPay Merchant Services, and in 2004 for the Bank of China and the Bank of Communications. Chinese Wikipedia adds that in 2001 PAX became the first Asian terminal supplier to gain EMV 2000 approval, the card-chip standard of the time, and that in 2014 it became a technical associate of EMVCo, the body that manages the EMV specifications.

The listing came on 20 December 2010. A PAX press release from that day says the company’s chairman, Tiger Nie, rang the bell at the Hong Kong exchange as the shares began trading under stock code 327. In the same release the company said it had ranked first in China by sales volume of card terminals in 2009, and eighth worldwide by shipments according to the Nilson Report.

Two years later Nie described a fast climb. Speaking at an investor conference in Shenzhen, reported by NextInsight on 15 January 2013, he said PAX had moved from seventh to third place in the world in two years, and that much of that growth came from acquisitions — “we have bought a rival or two,” he said. The same report says PAX had raised its research staff from 203 at the end of 2011 to about 300, and that Nie began his career as an engineer in the information technology department of China Merchants Bank.

From countertop terminals to Android.

PAX’s early business was the card terminal used at bank and shop counters in China. In 2013, NextInsight reported, Nie named Brazil, Russia, the Middle East and Africa as new export markets and said the company’s countertop and mobile terminals were in use in more than 75 countries.

The turn came in 2016. English Wikipedia says PAX announced a partnership with Samsung that year so that its terminals could accept Samsung Pay, and later the same year unveiled its first Android smart terminal. Chinese Wikipedia names that device as the A920, launched in 2016, and says it did well in international markets. The company’s site now lists later models under the same number, among them the A920Pro and the A920MAX.

Today the PAX site groups its products into ranges. Android SmartPOS covers mobile, mini and countertop machines such as the A80; there are multilane PIN pads, an unattended payment range in the IM and SK series, and Android cash registers in the E-series; and a “Classic POS” range keeps models such as the S920 and the Q30 PIN pad. In North America the US arm also lists Elys, a range that includes a workstation, a mini unit and a tablet. Software is listed alongside the hardware, under names such as MAXSTORE and GoInsight.

Chinese Wikipedia says that PAX shipped more than 10 million terminals in a single year for the first time in 2018. The company’s own site now says it has delivered more than 100 million terminals to over 120 countries since it was founded. Chinese Wikipedia lists branches in Florida and Georgia in the United States, in Milan, and in South Korea, Japan and India.

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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.

A Hong Kong listing with a Florida office.

PAX’s North American business is based in Jacksonville, Florida, according to its US website. That office drew attention in October 2021. On 26 October 2021 Krebs on Security reported that US federal agents had searched a PAX Technology warehouse in Jacksonville, and that investigators had told the local station WOKV only that they were carrying out a court-authorised search as part of a federal investigation. English Wikipedia also records the search.

The company continued to trade on the Hong Kong exchange. Its shares are still listed under stock code 327, as PAX Global Technology, and Tiger Nie is named by English Wikipedia as group chief executive and chairman.

The name itself is short and plain. The company writes it in capitals, as PAX, and uses PAX Technology for its regional businesses and PAX Global Technology for the listed parent. In Chinese the group trades as 百富 (Baifu). The PAX name is unrelated to the gaming expo of the same name, and to other companies called Pax.

Its product names follow the same plain logic: a letter for the range and a number for the model, from the S920 and the Q30 PIN pad to the A920 and the A80. The unattended IM series and the E-series electronic cash registers follow the same pattern.

Where the terminals are made is not set out in the sources used here; Chinese Wikipedia places the company’s research and operations mainly in Shenzhen.

For a design guide, PAX shows how a terminal maker can grow from one country’s bank counters into a global range by keeping names and forms simple and letting software carry the change. Compare Castles Technology, a terminal maker from Taiwan, and Ingenico, a French maker of the same kind of device. For this guide we use graphite, a deep red and a warm grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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