One of the more thought-provoking conversations I had recently was with Tomáš Debnár founder of Slovakian POS provider Papaya POS on a webinar I hosted for MPE.
His central argument was. “Payment is the least interesting moment in a merchant’s day.” Merchants don’t wake up thinking about card acquiring. They think about whether they’ve ordered enough milk, whether they’ll have enough staff for the lunch rush, which products are selling, and why profits were down last Tuesday.
Payments only become interesting when something goes wrong as we’ve seen with the recent Worldpay outage in the UK. Millions of merchants suddenly became very interested in payments, but only because they stopped working.
Assuming we’ve got the basics right – and that’s not a trivial ask – the real value should lie in everything around the payment.
Papaya has spent the last 13 years building software that runs restaurants and retailers in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. It started with the cash register but now manages inventory, staff, kitchens, reporting and business analytics. Every transaction feeds data back into the system.
Papaya has launched a new product called Open Market, designed to automate procurement between merchants and suppliers.
Today, many independent restaurants still order supplies through phone calls or WhatsApp messages. Orders are disconnected from the sales data sitting inside the POS system.
Papaya wants to close that loop. Its software already knows what the merchant sold yesterday. It can estimate what they’ll sell tomorrow. It can identify which ingredients are running low. The next step is for AI to recommend, or eventually place, the order automatically with the most appropriate supplier.
Tomas shows the payment becoming one step in a much larger workflow:
Sales → Forecast → Inventory → Supplier Selection → Order → Payment → Analysis
For me, this is a much more interesting use of AI than optimising fraud screening or generating yet more marketing copy nobody is going to read.
Tomas believes most PSPs should partner rather than attempt to build merchant software themselves. After spending 13 years refining workflows and supporting merchants on the ground, he argues that operational expertise is much harder to replicate than payments infrastructure. Papaya is already offering its AI procurement capabilities on a white-label basis for PSPs and ERP providers that want to expand beyond payments.
The story also highlights why Central and Eastern Europe is becoming an unexpectedly fertile source of merchant innovation. Countries such as Slovakia introduced mandatory fiscal reporting systems years ago, forcing even the smallest merchants onto digital cash registers. That created a rich stream of operational data long before AI arrived and catalysed a technology ecosystem that made the most of combing Android SmartPOS devices and cloud APIs.
Whether Papaya succeeds in scaling Open Market remains to be seen but it’s a potentially very interesting model for others to follow. The company is beginning with a small beta involving merchants and suppliers before expanding into Poland, Austria and Hungary.
