Verifone

William Melton founded the company in Honolulu in 1981. The pitch was that shops shouldn't have to phone the bank to check a card; the ZON terminals read the magnetic stripe and dialled the issuer themselves over the phone line. By the 1990s Verifone owned the American market.

Hewlett-Packard bought it in 1997 for around a billion dollars, convinced it would be the hub of e-commerce, and sold it on in 2001 once that conviction had cooled. Verifone swallowed rival Hypercom in 2011 and was taken private by Francisco Partners in 2018. Its great rival was, and still is, Ingenico.