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Don't touch, contactless is on its way >More
ACK work with The Works >More -----------------------------------------
IFSF standard now supported for simple integration in fuel forecourt
market >More ----------------------------------------- Windows CE support announced for ACKTerm >More ----------------------------------------- IP Connectivity, the ACK view
Increasing numbers of Merchants are now looking to take advantage of
their investment in broadband technology. Adding EFT to this investment
can pay dividends in speed and running costs. >More |
In this months edition......
Roving pinPAD, many to few As a development led company we a challenge and a major customer recently gave us the challenge of designing an enhancement to our product which whilst it meets their need will have potential in other areas. The requirement was born out of the nature of their business. In a typical branch they may have 5 or 6 sales consultants with a low daily average number of sales but high value. The question was posed to us, ‘can we share a single pinPAD such as the Verifone Xplorer Bluetooth device between many users’? After some thought the concept of the Roving pinPAD was born. The concept is that the EPoS application sends both the value of the sale plus a unique reference such as an invoice number to the ACK application, ATS, were they are stored together pending the next action. The sales consultant then takes the Xplorer from its cradle were it will be displaying the message ‘Please enter TRN’, (Transaction Reference Number). Once the TRN is entered the pinPAD then brings back the previously stored sale value associated with that number and the sale continues with the customer confirming the amount, inserting their card and entering their pin. This of course has potential in many other similar situations, we have already had interest from one luxury goods supplier looking to take the payment process to the customer based around the same principle.
It is of course possible to turn this solution around the other way and have many pinPAD’s being serviced by a single till. The obvious application here is in the hospitality industry were the TRN could be the table number in a busy restaurant for example. This solution is also not exclusive to the Verifone Xplorer it works just as well with the Secura tethered pinPAD. This new feature is under QA test now and due for general release at the end of June. Estate Wide Configuration Manager One of the big issues when rolling out a large estate is the management of the site specific EFT information. This requires careful control as having the incorrect configuration within a store can lead to many issues from delays to the initial deployment through to reconciliation problems at the end of the trading day. It can also present issues when it comes to field replacement of failed hardware or general configuration changes such as a switch to a new acquirer. At ACK we have been getting involved with larger and larger contracts in the past year, the biggest, due to start roll out within the next few months, involves 2,000 plus locations. Other players in this industry have adopted centralized solutions, EFT switches, in these situations. We’ve always had a concern about this policy as it creates a single point of failure once deployed, obviously redundancy can be built in but it always comes at a price. Secondly with more Merchants adopting the policy of using a managed service provider (in so doing helping with the PCI DSS accreditation) it is possible to make each location completely autonomous from the main network, so a single store may lose EFT capabilities but not the whole estate. So in staying true to our principles we have had to think carefully of how large estates can be managed. Clearly one of the methods used by EPoS providers when rolling out a large estate is to create a ‘Golden Build’ that is common to every location and we have therefore taken a similar view. The Merchant specific information always remains the same across the entire estate, card schemes accepted, etc. So our answer to this is to create an Estate Wide Configuration Manager which contains all the information required by all the stores. It sounds excessive but in fact the only additional information is the site specific information such as Merchant ID, Terminal ID, machine names, etc which even on a large estate does not amount to much additional data, a very small price to pay for the high level of control this utility gives. The Estate Wide Configuration itself starts life as a spreadsheet containing all the information required for the whole estate. This is then converted into the Estate Wide Configuration file which can then be deployed to every location. Our EFT application, ATS, will then identify itself to the Estate Wide Configuration Manager by using its machine name whereupon the site specific configuration is built for use at that site. The ATS EFT application then uses this file for daily operation. In the event of any global changes all that is required is for the new Estate Wide Configuration file to be distributed to each store and the process is repeated. This fully automated feature is in field trial now and will be released before the end of June. Here we grow again! Our financial year closed at the end of April with yet another rise in revenue and growth for the company. Two years ago we set ourselves a 20% growth per year target. In both years we have now exceeded this target. The past year has been another difficult time for retailers, lots of confusion in the early year as the EPoS provider market went through some consolidation and regrouping, leaving some Merchant plans on hold whilst the dust settled. More confusion about the requirements and deadlines for PCI DSS not to say the expense for many once they actually started on the task. So against this backdrop we are very pleased with the result and would like to thank those customers and partners who have contributed to this growth. The coming year is starting off with a positive note, four major contracts with tier one merchants have been secured and roll outs planned to be completed within this financial year. Growth is expected through closer work with our partners, through recognizing the needs of the market and reacting with innovation, not ‘me too’ products and through the continued development of our existing and target customer base. ACK has strength in its products, the team that writes the code, the team that supports it and our willingness to think beyond the accepted way of dealing with card acceptance. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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