NRA 2025: Union Square Hospitality Group Pilots “Checkless Payments” With Fiserv’s Clover
For decades, Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG) has been known for setting the standard in fine dining, with creative and wildly popular NYC restaurants that include Grandrcy Tavern, The Modern, and Manhatta. Now, Danny Meyer’s pioneering company is aiming to rewrite one of the most enduring and cumbersome rituals in hospitality: how we pay.
At Manhatta, the sleek, skyline-view restaurant perched 60 floors above Lower Manhattan, guests are now quietly skipping the usual routine of flagging down a server and waiting for the bill. Instead, they’re opting out of the check entirely, allowing diners to pay digitally and depart on their own terms — no ceremony, no delay.
This frictionless payment experience — dubbed Checkless Payments — is the centerpiece of a first-of-its-kind partnership between USHG and point-of-sale technology company Clover, under parent company Fiserv, which this week launched its new Clover Hospitality platform at the 2025 National Restaurant Association Show. The initiative could signal a fundamental shift in how full-service restaurants approach technology, service, and the guest journey.
“USHG has always championed technology that enhances hospitality and advances touch,” said Meyer, Executive Chairman and Founder of USHG, in a press release announcing the initiative. “With Checkless Payments, we finally have a solution to the least hospitable part of the dining experience: waiting for the check.”
Reinventing the Last Touchpoint
The idea for Checkless Payments came out of a conversation between Meyer and his friend former Fiserv CEO Frank Bisignano, who wondered why the end of a great meal so often felt like a hassle. When Krystle Mobayeni, the former BentoBox founder and now SVP and Head of Restaurants at Fiserv, took the reins, that vision began to take solid shape.
“I’d been thinking about how to connect the dots between digital and on-premise experiences,” Mobayeni told Hospitality Technology in an interview at Clover's bustling NRA booth. Mobayeni’s team, working closely with USHG Chief Technology Officer Kelly Macpherson, reimagined not just the technology, but the operational choreography required to make checkless dining work. “One of the most important challenges was figuring out what servers say when they’re not dropping a check,” she said. “It’s those tiny hospitality moments that define the experience.”
After a series of friends-and-family tests at Manhatta this spring, the feature is now fully live, with plans for future rollout across the USHG portfolio and ultimately to Clover Hospitality customers nationwide.
A POS Built for Today
Checkless Payments is part of the broader vision Fiserv’s Clover is launching under the new Clover Hospitality brand. Unveiled on May 17 at NRA, the system is Clover’s move upmarket — targeting high-volume, high-touch restaurants with a fully integrated platform designed for resiliency, guest intelligence, and front-of-house empowerment.
The system leverages the robust ecommerce and digital marketing capabilities of BentoBox, which Fiserv acquired in 2021, and now extends that logic to the in-person experience. The result: an omnicommerce toolkit that spans websites, ordering, reservations, loyalty, marketing — and now POS and payments — all tied together through one intelligent system.
“What would a point-of-sale system look like if you built it today?” Mobayeni asked. “It would be diner-centric, not just staff-centric. It would provide real-time insights for front-of-house teams, and it would never go offline.”
Indeed, Clover Hospitality includes features like localized mesh networking — so tablets and terminals stay in sync even during WiFi outages — and can optimize table turns and service quality, personalize service based on diner profiles, and integrate loyalty and intelligence
For Clover, already powering over 125,000 restaurants across North America, the launch of Clover Hospitality marks a strategic pivot. With fast-casual and quick-service well-covered, the company is now taking aim at the white-tablecloth tier of hospitality — a market where technology is often viewed with skepticism unless it enhances the intangible quality of the guest experience. Checkless Payments is one of the most noteworthy examples of technology's potential to enhance, rather than detract from, the human touch in dining.
