The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has slapped a penalty of Rs 4.48 crore on point-of sale (POS) terminal provider Verifone India for abusing its dominant position and imposing restrictive deals for providing software development kits (SDKs) to developer Atos Worldline India which operates in the areas of hi-tech transactional services, consulting and technology services. Download the CCI order here (pdf) Atos in India is a third party processor (TPP) for financial services and also develops value added services such as loyalty programmes, gift cards, bill payment, top-up, money transfer, dynamic currency conversion. As a third party processor, Atos tracks the flow of events between a card holder swiping his card and finally receiving a printed receipt at POS terminals and relies on regular updates of Verifone's SDKs. The director general (DG) of the CCI reported that during the period of investigation i.e., from 2010 to the date of filing of information in 2012, there were mainly two players in the relevant market, Verifone and Ingenico. In terms of the number of POS Terminals sold, the market share of Verifone was 57%, compared to 43% of its nearest competitors. In the same period, banks procured about 5.8 lakhs of POS Terminals which belonged to Verifone, and only procured 50,000 terminals from Ingenico. Accordingly, the market share of Verifone in terms of sale of POS Terminals to banks is estimated around 70% vis-à-vis 30% of Ingenico. Atos' allegations in the case Atos alleged that following Verifone's acquisition of Venture Infotek in August 2010, Verifone issued a termination letter for its SDKs in September…
