Vending machines, EV chargers, parking kiosks, laundromats – the places where we spend money without ever speaking to another human are multiplying fast. But the technology powering those transactions hasn’t always kept up. Lynda Clarke, General Manager UK at Nayax, is working to change that.
With over 15 years in fintech and senior roles at Barclaycard, Elavon, and Network International, Lynda brings serious industry weight to a market at a genuine tipping point. Nayax has just launched VPOS Media 4 in the UK – a PIN-capable payment terminal built for the new generation of unattended commerce, from high-value kiosks to EV charging points. We sat down with Lynda to understand what’s driving this shift, what operators need to know, and why the humble payment terminal is becoming something much more powerful.
Q. Before we get into payments and tech – tell us a little about your journey. How did a career in fintech lead you to the world of unattended commerce?
I’ve worked in payments for over 15 years now. Barclaycard first, then senior roles at Elavon and Network International, and then Tribe Payments as COO, where I helped scale the business through a period of rapid growth. Different businesses, but all of them taught me how much of this industry comes down to the people and the culture you build around it.
In August 2025, I joined Nayax to lead the team in the UK. I’m still at the heart of the merchant end of payments, but this is an area growing so much faster than any other part of acceptance I’ve worked in.
The self-service industry spent two decades being best known for crisps and coffee, but it’s now moving into EV charging, parking, forecourts and kiosks – all areas where the amounts being spent are much higher and the technical requirements are completely different. It’s a very interesting problem to work on, and one the industry hasn’t finished solving.
Q. For someone who’s never heard the term before, what exactly is “unattended commerce” – and where do we encounter it in everyday life?
Unattended commerce is any transaction where there’s nobody there to take your money. No staff, no till, nobody to ask if something goes wrong.
You’ve almost certainly used it several times this week without calling it that: the supermarket self-checkout, the machine in the multi-storey car park, the coffee point in the office, the click-and-collect locker, the laundromat, the EV charger. And if you’ve bought something from a vending machine in the UK, there’s a reasonable chance you tapped a yellow card reader to do it. Those are ours.
In fact, the scale of the unattended commerce sector surprises a lot of people. The Vending & Automated Retail Association puts vending, coffee services and automated retail alone at £3.78 billion in UK revenue in 2025, and around 80% of transactions on cashless-enabled machines are now cashless.
I think there’s still an important educational piece to the conversation around ‘unattended’ commerce. Most people still associate the word with an old chocolate bar machine in a corridor, when in reality the sector now covers rapid chargers at motorway services, automated car washes, workplace micro-markets, hotels that check you in without a front desk and much more. All these examples work on the same principle, but they ask very different things of the technology sitting behind them.
Q. We’ve had contactless payments for years now. What’s actually changed in the last few years that's making operators upgrade their hardware?
There are four main things happening at once, and it’s the combination of them that’s forcing the issue for most operators.
The first is customer expectation. People now expect to pay with their preferred method, whether that’s a contactless card, phone or digital wallet. They don’t expect to need cash, wait in a queue or spend time working out how a terminal operates. The payment experience needs to be quick, familiar and reliable, wherever the transaction takes place.
The second is transaction value. A vending purchase is a small amount of money. Charging an electric vehicle or paying for a day’s parking is not, and the gap between them is wide enough to change what the terminal has to do. A lot of the estate out there was designed for the small end of that range.
The third is connectivity. A lot of unattended hardware was installed with 2G or 3G SIMs, because at the time that was the sensible, cheap choice for a device sending small amounts of data. Those networks are going away, which turns a connectivity decision made a decade ago into a hardware replacement programme.
The fourth is compliance. Security and authentication requirements have moved on considerably, and older devices can’t always be brought up to standard with a software update.
Sitting underneath all of that is a commercial pressure that has nothing to do with payments at all. Labour costs have risen sharply, and businesses want to trade for longer hours without staffing them. Self-service is how they do it. But once you’ve decided to run a site unattended for 24 hours a day, the payment terminal stops being a peripheral and becomes the only member of staff you’ve got.
Q. The VPOS Media 4 supports chip-and-PIN in fully unattended environments – no human on the other side of the till. How does that actually work securely?
VPOS Media 4 uses PIN-on-Glass technology, which allows customers to enter their PIN directly on the terminal’s touchscreen. Although the keypad appears on a screen similar to a smartphone or tablet, the PIN-entry function is built into and protected by the device’s certified secure payment hardware.
As soon as someone enters their PIN, it’s encrypted inside the device’s secure hardware at the point of entry. It’s never stored in readable form or made available to other applications running on the terminal. The device has tamper detection built in, so if it’s opened or interfered with it wipes its encryption keys and stops taking payments rather than carrying on regardless. VPOS Media 4 is certified to PCI PTS 6.x, which means it has been tested by independent laboratories against the payments industry’s requirements for PIN entry and device protection.
Operators can also monitor terminals remotely and push software updates over the air, so a device in a car park in Glasgow can be checked and updated without anyone driving to it.
Q. There’s a lot of talk about PCI DSS and Strong Customer Authentication. In plain terms, what do these mean for a business running, say, a fleet of EV chargers or kiosks?
PCI DSS sets out how card data has to be handled – meaning where it’s stored, how it’s moved around and who is allowed near it. Operators sometimes assume that’s their supplier’s problem, and it isn’t. If you run a fleet of chargers, you are responsible for the security of the payments taken on them. The way to keep that manageable is to make sure card data never reaches your own systems at all, which is what a certified terminal encrypting at the point of capture does for you.
Strong Customer Authentication is the requirement for certain payments to be verified in two ways, usually something the customer has and something they know. Contactless sits under an exemption from that, and until recently the exemption was fixed and predictable: £100 for a single transaction, and £300 cumulative or five consecutive taps before a PIN is required.
That changed in March 2026. The FCA now allows banks and payment providers with strong fraud controls to set their own contactless limits rather than everyone following one national figure. Most haven't moved yet, and £100 is still the norm in practice. But the direction of travel is clear, and it has a consequence operators should be thinking about now: the point at which a customer is asked for a PIN is becoming issuer-specific and less predictable.
So, if you’re planning an estate today, you can’t safely design around the assumption that your transactions will always sit below the contactless threshold. Even on a low-value site, PIN needs to be there as a fallback. I started out on a support line, so I know what a failed transaction costs somebody. The difference with unattended is that nobody rings you about it, because the customer is standing in front of a machine with no one to ask and they simply leave. That’s why your payments partner is so important.
Q. You’ve described the VPOS Media 4 as turning “the point of sale into a point of engagement.” What does that look like in practice – what can a machine actually do beyond just taking a payment?
Let’s start with the obvious. There’s a colour screen on the front of the machine, but between transactions it’s often little more than an idle display. That’s a piece of retail space the operator already owns.
It means the terminal can display pricing and promotions, run multi-buy offers, sign customers up to a loyalty scheme through a QR code, and change all of that remotely across an entire estate. In a lot of operations today, changing a price still means sending somebody out to each machine.
For example, an office coffee service with a predictable quiet period can run a discount in that window and only that window. An EV charging site can show the driver exactly what they’ll pay before the session starts, which deals with one of the most common complaints drivers have about public charging.
There’s an operational side to it as well. You can see what’s selling where in real time, you get told a machine has a fault before a customer finds it, and over time you build up a picture of which sites are underperforming and why.
The shift is that the terminal stops being a box that takes money. On an unattended site, it’s the only thing you own that talks to the customer.
Q. The UK is shutting down its 2G and 3G networks. A lot of people don’t realise how many payment terminals still run on those. How big a problem is this for operators – and how urgent is it?
Most of the 3G switch-off has already happened, with Vodafone and EE completing theirs and the other networks following. 2G is the one that still has dates to come, with EE starting in May 2029, O2 from that summer and Vodafone during 2030, and all of them have committed to government that nothing will be running beyond 2033.
So, it’s not an immediate crisis, but it is something operators need to start planning for. Unattended terminals tend to stay in service for many years, which means a device installed today would likely still be out there when those final deadlines arrive.
The first step is simply to find out what your existing terminals are connecting through. Estates often grow over time, so you may have a real mixture of hardware and connectivity across different sites without necessarily having a single view of it.
Once you know what you have, you can build any upgrades into your usual replacement plans and tackle them gradually. There’s plenty of time to do this properly, but far less room for manoeuvre if everyone leaves it until 2029.
Q. Nayax works across EV charging, parking, vending, laundromats and more. Are the payment challenges different across those sectors, or is it largely the same problem wearing different clothes?
The plumbing is common, but the consequences of failure are not. Every one of those sectors needs the same underlying things: a terminal that stays up, remote management, certification, reliable connectivity. Past that, they diverge more than people expect. Vending runs on pennies per transaction, so the cost of acceptance matters more than almost anything else.
EV charging has a problem that is genuinely its own: you don’t know what the transaction is worth when it starts. The driver plugs in, and the final amount depends on how long they stay and how much they take. So, you hold an amount and settle the real one afterwards. Get that wrong and drivers see money held on their account for days, which is one of the fastest ways to lose them. Add certified energy metering and rules on price transparency, and it’s a considerably more complex payment than it looks from the driver’s seat.
With parking, you’re often dealing with peaks (such as a car park emptying in a very short window after an event finishes) and the system either copes with that or it doesn’t. Laundry is different again, in that your customer is generally there for the length of a wash cycle whether they like it or not, which is more time than almost any retailer gets with somebody.
So, it’s both. One platform can cover all of it, but not with the same settings or the same assumptions about what a transaction looks like.
Q. You’ve launched market-first products before – including the first acquirer-owned Android POS in the MEA region. What does it take to bring a genuinely new product to market in a regulated industry?
Patience, mostly, which is an underrated product skill. Certification timelines in payments cannot be compressed. That sounds like a constraint at the end of the process, but it works backwards through everything. You’re making design decisions long before launch knowing they’ll be locked once certification starts, so the discipline is in getting the thinking right early. The cost of changing your mind later is enormous.
The second thing is that you have to get the product into the real world to find out how it can be improved. Laboratory conditions won’t tell you how a screen behaves in direct sunlight on a forecourt, or in a sub-zero car park, or what happens when the signal in a basement is marginal.
The toughest part of a market first, though, is that there’s no precedent to point at. Everyone you’re dealing with – regulators, acquirers, certification bodies, your own risk function – works from what has been done before. When you’re first, you’re asking people to make a judgement rather than follow a template, and that takes far longer and far more conversation than anybody plans for.
It also helps to launch in phases rather than everywhere at once. VPOS Media 4 was deployed in Australia, Europe and Japan before arriving here, which means UK operators are getting something that has already been through several regulatory regimes and a lot of real sites.
Q. Nayax reported 32% year-over-year revenue growth in Q1 2026 and now has over 1.5 million connected devices globally. What does that scale mean for what you can offer UK operators specifically?
It comes down to three things for a UK operator. The first is that the integration work is already done. Nayax has connections to more than 80 merchant acquirers and a long list of payment method integrations, all built and certified. For a UK operator, that means the answer to ‘can you support this acquirer, in this market, with this payment method’ is usually yes, and usually without a project attached to it.
The second is that research and development is funded by global volume. The scale of the installed base pays for the engineering, so a UK operator with a small estate is running on infrastructure built to carry 1.5 million devices. Same certifications, same platform, same security work.
The third is that other markets do the testing. Many tweaks and improvements that could have been made to VPOS Media 4 have already been flagged somewhere else and been made.
For context on the numbers you mentioned, we reported $107 million of revenue in the first quarter of 2026, 32% growth year on year and organic growth of 26%, and the installed base passed 1.5 million connected devices across around 120,000 customers.
What that lets us do in the UK is take a longer view. We’re not chasing this quarter’s deal, so we can invest in sectors like EV charging where the market is still forming.
Q. You’re a vocal advocate for women in leadership and regularly mentor the next generation of fintech talent. What's one thing the industry still needs to get right?
Sponsorship, as distinct from mentorship. We’ve become reasonably good at mentoring women in this industry. There are programmes, there are networks, there are senior people giving their time, and that is real progress from where we were. But mentoring is advice. Sponsorship is putting your own name behind someone in a room they aren’t in, when there’s a cost to you if it doesn’t work out. That second thing is much rarer – and it’s the one that actually moves people into senior roles.
The numbers say the gap is still there. Research from the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum found women hold just 19% of top leadership positions in major financial institutions. At this point, that isn’t a pipeline problem. There are plenty of capable women in these businesses… it’s a question of who gets put forward.
Progress in this industry doesn’t come from gatekeeping. It comes from being generous with your time, your knowledge and your influence. When people feel supported and included, they think bigger and lead with more confidence, and the business gets better decisions out of it. When we give, we all gain.
