| ACK Home | ACKnowledge - Card processing news from ACK |
 | ACK Limited - Intelligent EFT Solutions Welcome to the November edition of ACKnowledge, the ACK newsletter designed to keep you informed of issues arising from within the card processing industry. There are many new challenges facing retailers in relation to card acceptance and ACK solutions continue to evolve to meet these demands. |
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ACK News Sharing pinPAD's Roving PinPAD, many to few A new feature added to the ACK product range allowing a single pinPAD to be shared between many tills or a single till being accessed by many pinPAD's. Great for use in applications where the transaction numbers are low but the sale value high or perhaps the reverse scenario in hospitality sites where a single till could support a number of pinPAD’s distributed around table waiting staff for example. -----------------------------------------
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......
ACK left unattended! This last month has seen three of our integrators roll out pilot semi attended projects or SACAT’s (Semi Attended Customer Activated Terminal) to add to the IT industries acronyms. Two leading supermarkets now have a SACAT trial in place with full support for Chip & Pin provided by use of our product ATS (ACK Terminal Server). Early indications are that customer acceptance is high although there is a bit of a North/South divide on take up with consumers in the South accepting the technology more readily but never the less usage increases week on week. Our third unattended project involves a fast food outlet. The system allows consumers to choose the meal of their choice (along with all the extras and upgrades!) via a touch screen. On completion the sale is paid for via ACK Terminal Server and the order sent through to the kitchen. This was trialled on two busy motorway service sites and a third will be going live this month. We are already aware of a number of other opportunities for this type of solution ranging from entertainment venues to delivery companies so 2008 will be a good year for ACK in this marketplace. ACK Partner gains PCI DSS compliance ACK have had a long standing relationship with Vodat since its inception in 2002 and long before that with its founders in their former working lives who have a wealth of experience and knowledge in the retail industry. Vodat International has become the fastest growing and biggest supplier of private, managed networks to the UK retail market. They provide services to retail companies with estates ranging from 20 to over 1,000 stores. With significant expertise in both retail services and IT, they are dedicated to realising the potential of Broadband for retail by introducing innovative solutions that make the best use of this technology. Currently they have installed and are supporting over 4,000 retail sites, some with just a managed wide area network, but the majority with VoIP, EFT and other applications/services provided by Vodat. As a managed network provider focused on the retail industry Vodat have always taken the issue of security very seriously. The network solutions that Vodat put together carry sensitive data both in terms of credit card transactions and corporate data. The advent of PCI DSS has of course helped to focus the entire retail industry on the implications of this data being accessed with malicious intent by anyone from the criminal fraternity to disgruntled ex employees. Against that background Vodat began the task of gaining PCI accreditation in August of last year and gained the certificate in August 2007. ACK have a direct connection with Vodat through their use of our product DQS, Deterministic Queuing Server. This product is used in the core of the Vodat network, managing the contention of multiple retail sites vying for connection to the banking network for card authorisation. Clearly such a key component came under some scrutiny during the PCI DSS accreditation process but presented no problems to the security auditors. ACK are also working with Vodat on another service using one of our products, BDS, Bulk Delivery Server. Having now gained PCI DSS compliance Vodat are aware that the security levels they can now offer probably exceed anything that a retail organisation has in place. Clearly for some merchants having control over the credit/debit card submission to the bank is a high priority, it is their money after all. For this purpose BDS was developed.
Running BDS in house of course presents merchants with the security
issue by having potentially millions of card transactions on a server
located in the heart of their network. Vodat have therefore now made it
possible for merchant specific installations of BDS to be hosted within
the security of the Vodat PCI compliant network. In this way a merchant
can be confident that access to card holder data has now become very
restricted, that control over access is limited against defined
conditions and security procedures rigorously enforced against the
requirements of the PCI standards. For more details on Vodat International please visit www.vodat-int.com or call 0161 406 1820
We are now at the final stages of code development to provide Contactless payment capability within the ACK suite of software. It has been a troubled road with many parallels to the introduction of Chip & Pin a few years ago, evolving hardware, evolving standards, evolving test procedures but that past experience has stood us in good stead and we’ve missed most of the pot holes. So the time is now close for those with an interest in this technology to consider the next steps. For those users of ACK code already supporting Chip & Pin there will of course be some work to complete but this should be relatively minor. In order to achieve this the core elements remain in the same format, although an upgrade to the latest release will be required. Consideration will need to be given to the till operation and the required responses when payment by Contactless is made as opposed to cash. Till receipts will also need to be amended to give the required details when a Contactless payment is made or in fact to give the cardholder the choice of actually being issued with a receipt in the first place. ACK will be putting together a Software Development Kit which will provide our integrators with the required code and updates, access to the development team to assist with the inevitable technical questions, access to test host systems and most important of all the bank accreditation testing. Once complete the Contactless module will be a licensed option as part of the existing Chip & Pin products. Special pricing will be available encouragement for early adopters covering both the SDK and initial licences. You should also be aware that the Banks are also offering incentives to merchants who embrace this technology early on. If your customer market fits the benefit profile for Contactless then now is the time to start considering the next step. STOP PRESS - ACK's Contactless software will once again be supporting the work of Visa International and Wincor Nixdorf in promoting Contactless at this years Cartes Exhibition in Paris this month on stand 4 J 032 Fixed cost IP Authorisation update with ReD Card authorisation via IP has been available now for some time. On the ACK web site we have outlined how this can be achieved from using a corporate based wide area networking through to use of the general internet and managed service providers. Traditionally IP based authorisation techniques have been used widely by large multi site retailers. However there is an increasing demand from retailers at the other end of the spectrum, single store or small chains. With this in mind ACK have been working with one of our managed service provider partners, ReD (Retail Decisions) to come up with a solution that will have appeal to this sector with simplicity of installation, support, fixed costs and provide a high level of security. We are pleased to announce this work has now been completed with the launch of the ReDLink service. So how does it work? The ReDlink service is based on a technology designed by an organisation called Datawire. Datawire have devised a service which significantly has gained PCI DSS accreditation. In operation once a request for authorisation is passed to the ACK application we set up a link to ReDLink via any internet connection available, specific ISP’s or VPN’s are not required, and establish a secure path by the exchange of encryption keys. Depending on how the ACK application has been configured this can give a significant advantage in that the transaction is secure from the PoS thereby ensuring that any clandestine monitoring of EFT traffic passing over the LAN will reveal nothing. Once the transaction has been passed to ReDLink its path through to the bank is monitored and steps taken to ensure that the EFT packet is routed via the fastest path thereby ensuring optimum performance. Having provided the authorisation (or not) back to the merchant the next task is to ensure that the transaction log is delivered to the bank. This is a simple routine whereby the ACK transaction log is secured and then ‘pushed’ into ReD at regular intervals for them to consolidate and send onwards to the bank for settlement thereby saving on the traditional overnight polling charges in some cases. Clearly this solution will provide cost savings in that existing communications methods become redundant such as high cost ISDN lines and in some cases dedicated modem lines for the overnight poll. Efficiencies in the speed of authorisation, typically 3 seconds, will improve the customer experience and potentially lead to increased sales.
What is needed from ACK? Simply an additional module to add the ReDLink function. This gives you further options within the communications set up element to select the service and changes to the batch transfer options for the transaction log file. For more details on the costs involved with the ReDLink service please contact Chris Hyde directly on 0118 946 9233 or chris@ackltd.co.uk -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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