Gas Pos of North Little Rock has teamed up with cloud communications platform Twilio of San Francisco to deliver a new method for retailers to accept and process FleetCor/Comdata and WEX/EFS fleet fuel card transactions.

Gas Pos provides a point-of-sale system and chip card readers to independently owned gas stations. The “Pos” in its name stands for “point of sale.”

It was founded because of a mandate that gas stations install chip card readers at their pumps. If they don’t do that by October 2020, they’ll be liable for any credit or debit card fraud that occurred at their pumps. Before, card companies like Visa and Mastercard were liable for most fraud.

The stations were faced with one very expensive option: replacing pumps. Gas Pos is working to offer a better, more cost-effective option.

Its new product, named for its first customer, Steve, is a virtual payment network that leverages Twilio’s global communications platform to perform point-of-sale transaction processing on existing payment networks.

Gas Pos said it also performs that processing at a fraction of the cost and with fewer restrictions while offering tracking and reporting capabilities.

“We see this as an opportunity to right a wrong and open up the network,” Gas Pos CEO Joshua Smith said in a news release. “To provide innovation in a market that hasn’t seen much change. To make businesses more efficient and provide the market a chance to work better. I hope other networks with similar issues replicate our success with off-the-shelf tools and turn their market upside down.”

For truckers, paying for fuel remains a swipe-and-go process, and trucking companies will retain their payment system advantages.