Payment Processing National Restaurant Association Show Takeaways

Research evidence excerpt

Payment Processing National Restaurant Association Show Takeaways

J P M O R G A N North America Equity Research

18 May 2026

Payment Processing

National Restaurant Association Show Takeaways

Earlier this week, we attended the National Restaurant Association Show in Payments, Processors & IT Services

ACChicago where we walked the floor, met with a range of POS providers and Tien-tsin Huang, CFA

gathered industry tidbits from sales teams, developers and channel partners. (1-212) 622-6632

Overall energy felt high and booth traffic across names in our coverage was strong tien-tsin.huang@jpmorgan.com

(Square and Toast in particular with large, prime-positioned footprints). AI was Connor Allen

omnipresent in marketing, but in most conversations it still came across as a “nice (1-212) 270-2895

to have” rather than a “must have” for restaurants today, though we expect that to connor.allen@jpmorgan.com

change in the next year-plus as ROI becomes more provable and workflows Charles Pearce, CFA

become more embedded. In the interim, we saw AI showing up more tangibly via (1-212) 622-4368

charles.pearce@jpmchase.com

“behind-the-scenes” enablement (e.g., voice capture/order entry, content

Abbey Hochreinergeneration). Notably, we did not get the sense that memory cost/supply was

(1-212) 270-5798

disrupting developer progress or go to market efforts. Competition in SMB abbey.hochreiner@jpmchase.com

remains fierce, with historically enterprise-leaning players increasingly moving J.P. Morgan Securities LLC

down-market and sharpening hardware + pricing/value propositions, though we

left incrementally positive on Square and Toast, who both felt to have an early lead

on AI initiatives and opportunity to expand reach with new drive-thru technology.

• Block’s Square.