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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.

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Don't touch, contactless is on its way >More

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ACK work with The Works >More

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IFSF standard now supported for simple integration in fuel forecourt market >More

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Windows CE support announced for ACKTerm >More

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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

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Contactless Update

The push towards the Contactless continues to gather pace and although from the outside it looks to be a quiet revolution in the coming months the volume will be increasing as the launch gets closer. As many of you will know ACK took a strategic decision to be in early on this innovative payment method, three stands at Retail Solutions were showing the fruits of our work. Wincor Nixdorf were showing the first fully integrated EPoS application using the ACK Contactless module alongside ACK Terminal Server handling regular card transactions. Next month ACK Contactless will be on show again at the Barclaycard sponsored Thames Festival. Barclaycard are using this event to promote their combined Credit, Contactless and Oyster card, with the brand name of One Pulse. You will also start to see the branding from Barclaycard of One Touch which covers the Contactless element of the regular credit and debit cards they will be issuing. There will be a number of other names used to promote contactless payments and they include: MasterCard PayPass, Maestro PayPass, 'Tap and Go', Visa payWave, 'Wave and Pay'.

There is considerable activity going on right now setting up all the test environments within the Banks to allow us to gain the required accreditations and we hope to be starting that work within the next few weeks. We are now starting to hear of major Merchants who see the rewards that Contactless can bring them getting very keen to be part of the London launch.

Merchants will start to see activity from the Banks promoting Contactless and some significant marketing campaigns will launch in September to make them aware of the coming revolution in low value payment. Consumers will start to see their new cards arriving with Contactless capabilities as the banks re-issue cards to those living or spending in the London launch area with a very rapid expansion of coverage nationwide during 2008.

Our work in developing the ACK Contactless module continues to advance although the pace is now determined by the card schemes and banks testing requirements. Clearly this will be resolved in the very near future so we expect our project to end its first phase, hopefully by the end of this month. Looking forward we are anticipating new hardware from the traditional pinPAD manufacturers to combine both chip & PIN and Contactless in a single unit. There will be interfacing and more testing work to be done when this happens but from an integration point of view selection of these new products will remain a simple configuration option.

More information on Contactless can be found here;

Barclaycard >Here

Streamline >Here

Vivotech hardware is distributed by ACK partner Secure Retail >Here

Hand held EPoS with ACK EFT solutions

This market has been around for some time but tended to be a niche area for a lot of users. For years the concept of queue busting has been around but hand held devices and their connectivity capabilities or lack of have been a drawback along with limitations of payment and the need to provide a secure method for taking Chip & Pin transactions also limited their appeal. In recent times we have heard of retailers looking to replace the traditional counter top EPoS system in part as an image makeover, showing a technology aware and forward thinking company, in part as a move to take the payment experience to the customer but overall in the right circumstances gain efficiencies.

Some time ago ACK worked with Bristol Office Machines (BOM) to integrate ACKTerm with their PinPos hand held EPoS hardware. This innovative solution used the power of a hand held PC along with the widely recognised Dione Secura pinPAD neatly packaged together. One of our integrators has now had success with that combination at a major sporting venue.

But the market for hand held is maturing and both Fujitsu and Canon have released products that are designed to provide full EPoS capabilities with a pin entry device built in. This has required ACK to develop an interface into the STS EMV kernel used within these devices. This work is now in the final stages of development and we will soon start on the bank accreditation work. Already one of our integrators has a taken an order from a major High Street retailer that will see over 200 units in operation during the coming year.

Sarian Systems Provide Resilient IP Routing of Card Data

ACK have a long history of working in partnership with Sarian Systems. Both companies are engineering led and have a history of innovation and technical advancement. With the growing need and reliance on IP and broadband services Sarian have recognised resilience is the key to success. ACK have been using the Sarian 6000 series router in a number of test environments and recommending it for those customers looking for a robust and flexible IP router but what about the resilience angle?

The Sarian 6410 Router answers this question by combining broadband connectivity with back up provided by GPRS. Quite simply if the broadband service goes down everything carries on via the mobile network. Clearly security will be an issue when sending sensitive data such as card transactions via the general Internet. This can be solved in a number of ways.

First, dependant on the Merchants network topology use can be made of the Virtual Private Network capability within the Sarian 6410. If the EFT traffic is usually routed via head office and then out into the banking network then this carries on just the same over mobile as it did via broadband.

Secondly if the Merchant is using a managed service provider for connection into the banking world then card data is secured through use of protocols such as HTTPS and fixed IP addressing, a well tried and tested option.

Finally ACK have added, independant of data communications hardware the Datawire protocol offered by ReD in the form of ReDLink, which provides Merchants both security and performance enhancements for connections made via any type of Internet link. The Datawire protocol will ensure that card data is encrypted during the authorisation phase using PCI DSS approved techniques and then once committed to the Internet the routing of the request is monitored and re-routed if needed to ensure that response times are kept to a minimum.

Sarian Systems >Here

Sarian routers are distributed by ACK partner Secure Retail >Here

ACK add another satisfied customer to the list - Options Mail Order

Options have been very successful specialist developers for all business-to-consumer and business-to-business mail order, direct marketing and distance selling enterprises. Their products have been used by many market leading companies, in sectors as diverse as fashion, books, gifts, gardening, consumables, wine, specialist tools and equipment and third party fulfilment. However many of these customers also have a High Street presence and it made sense for the Options solution to cover this sector of their customers business, hence the development of their new EPoS product.

Many merchants operating in the mail order business have been used to the services that organisations such as Datacash can offer through their managed services, easy reconciliation, fraud management and PCI compliance being just three of the keys. Again there is a clear benefit in combining the needs of customer not present business with chip and PIN users. The partnership approach of ACK and Datacash were able to meet these needs.

Options have integrated the standard ACK product, ACKTerm into there EPoS product. Thanks to its simple interface this work took the Options software developers a matter of weeks to integrate, there was little need to involve the ACK development team. Once the integration work was completed we were able to perform our tests on the solution to ensure it met the needs of our generic accreditation and Options were ready to roll out their first live customer.

It is a consistent message from ACK that integration with ACKTerm is a simple process allowing integrators predictable development costs and launch times; Options have proved this for us once again.

Chris Andrews, Managing Director of Options said ‘It is always good when companies deliver on their promises. ACK’s expertise and professional approach has delivered on there promise of a swift and simple integration with ACKTerm. As a result we have been able to make commitments to our customers and look forward to a profitable future for us both’.

ACK wins again

The ACK success and growth continues this month with a major travel company committing to a significant role out of over 1,200 points of sale. More detail on this win will be revealed in future issues of ACKnowledge. Chris Hyde, Sales & Marketing Director of ACK said ‘We are delighted with this order, along with other successes this year it gives us a firm base to again exceed our financial targets and see us firmly established within the high value sector of the EFT software market. Key to this win was the strength of our Partner and our talented development team demonstrating not only their flexibility and innovation but the technical superiority of the solid base our code is based on’.

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