1/22/2025
By Ashish Aggarwal
Hospitality: where payments are still analog at the edges
Walk into a busy bar on a Friday night or a neighborhood restaurant at lunch and the same pattern repeats: staff juggling multiple devices, re‑keying amounts between systems, and queues forming when terminals freeze at exactly the wrong moment. The experience feels modern on the surface – tap‑to‑pay, sleek terminals, QR codes – but behind the scenes, most of the infrastructure was never designed for high‑intensity, hospitality‑specific service.
That gap matters because hospitality is one of Europe’s largest payment categories. At EUR 880 billion in annual in‑person payments volume, the hospitality sector already matches the scale of the entire online payments market in Europe, yet roughly 85% of this volume in continental Europe still runs over non‑integrated setups sold by banks, ISOs and PSPs. In other words, the majority of in‑venue spend still flows through fragmented systems that were never built for modern, software‑driven operations.
Why hospitality needs its own payment layer
Hospitality businesses are unusual compared with many other brick‑and‑mortar categories. They operate on thin margins, live or die by table turns and service speed, and face intense peak‑time pressure – the full restaurant at 8pm, the bar right before closing, the café rush every morning.
Generic payment systems treat a restaurant much like any other merchant. Orders and payments travel across disconnected systems; staff move between POS screens and standalone terminals; and valuable customer interactions end when the receipt prints. For operators, that means slower service, higher error rates and missed opportunities to turn a first‑time guest into a repeat customer.
Regulation is now adding urgency to this shift. A growing number of European countries are moving towards mandating integrated payments, with direct data feeds into tax authorities to combat tax evasion and money laundering. That creates a powerful tailwind for solutions that can tightly couple point‑of‑sale data and payments while preserving flexibility for merchants and partners.
Payments infrastructure for hospitality has to start from a different brief: be built around peak service, integrate deeply with existing POS and workflows, and create new ways to extend the guest relationship beyond the moment of payment.
What Klearly is building
Klearly is a hospitality‑first payments layer designed for restaurants, bars and clubs, built to sit on top of existing POS infrastructure rather than rip it out. By integrating with local POS providers and running on existing hardware, Klearly lets teams modernise their payments experience without a disruptive hardware replacement cycle.
Crucially, Klearly brings the advantages of embedded payments to in‑person hospitality. Over the last decade, many players have solved embedded payments for online acceptance; Klearly is, as of today, the only device‑agnostic, in‑person embedded payments platform seen in Europe – able to work across POS systems and payment terminals rather than tying merchants to a single stack.
The platform focuses on three things that matter most in hospitality:
- Service flow: removing the need to re‑enter amounts on separate terminals and reducing friction at the end of the meal or round.
- Reliability at peak: delivering a payments experience that works under pressure, when every frozen terminal or extra tap is felt across the room.
- Relationship‑building: using the payment moment as a starting point for richer and deeper engagement between the restaurant and its guests, rather than the end of the interaction.
Today, more than 4,000 merchants in the Netherlands process payments through Klearly, with nearly EUR 1 billion in annualised volume running across the platform, and the company is now expanding into Italy and Belgium. That combination of deep product fit in one market and early signs of repeatability across new geographies is exactly what PayPal Ventures looks for at this stage.
Why we led the Series A
When we first met Sam Koekoek and the Klearly team, what stood out was not just their product velocity, but their insistence on being hospitality‑only. In a market where it is tempting to be “for everyone”, Klearly’s decision to say no to adjacent verticals in order to solve the hardest hospitality problems resonated with our belief that category‑defining infrastructure often starts with sharp focus.
We also share their view that the most durable positions in payments increasingly come from being an orchestration layer rather than a commodity acceptance point. Klearly does not try to replace every system in the stack; instead, it connects to the POS, leverages existing devices and gives operators and partners a more integrated way to run service and take payment.
Finally, the team pairs deep in‑person payments experience with an operator’s eye for hospitality, choosing messy, high‑throughput environments where reliability, service speed and partner alignment really matter.
The next decade of payments innovation will not only be about optimising online conversion, but also about re‑architecting the high‑intent, in‑person experiences that define sectors like hospitality. Klearly is one of the clearest expressions of that shift, and PayPal Ventures is excited to partner with Sam and the team on the journey ahead.