If, like me, you attended the recent Retail Solutions event in London you would have seen stands promoting contactless payments. I've reviewed this technology in its own right in previous newsletters and highlighting the benefits: speed of payment, zero cash handling costs for the merchant, convenience for the consumer, blah, blah.
Contactless payments was the hot topic at Retail Solutions this year, seen on stands as varying as Visa’s, Barclays as well as the hugely popular ‘Store of the future’ stand from Fujitsu (Radio One managed to omit that fact too and focussed on their excellent ‘does my bum look big in this’ mirror).
We are seeing a lot of our retailers clambering for our Touchlink technology (seen on Fujitsu and Visa’s stands) however the activity in the integrated sector seems a bit more muted compared to the noise we are seeing from other European markets.
It seems that contactless is the word of the week in the payments industry, everyone is talking about it, but no one is quite sure what they are going to do about it, I guess everyone is waiting to see who jumps first.
Personally I think that it is a fantastic idea and has the potential to remove lots of little irritations from everyday life, and the one that really bugs me is queuing (which you will have picked up on if you read last quarter's article on hand held POS terminals).
I made three mistakes this weekend, the first was agreeing to go shopping with my wife, the second was opting to drive into central London on a drizzly day near Christmas and the third was entering one of London’s biggest department stores on a drizzly day near Christmas.
When looking for a partner, we felt that STS stood out as regards to providing a fully accredited and compliant EMV Level 2 kernel that integrates seamlessly and easily with our own customer present card processing solutions.
Motorola Solutions was one of the market leaders in developing handheld terminals, barcode scanners and enterprise mobility solutions, until it was acquired by Zebra Technologies in October 2014. Together, the companies will provide industry leading data capture; mobile computing; speciality printing and asset tracking solutons and services. In the past, Zebra (formerly Motorola) has developed mobile computers, such as the MC55, MC70 and MC75 and its DCRx00-200R device which is an EMV-based payment snap-on.
Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions (TGCS) is a leading provider of payment solutions that are designed to help retailers manage and process card and other forms of electronic payments in an ever-changing market environment. From the 1980’s onwards, TGCS (formerly IBM Retail Store Solutions division until Toshiba TEC purchased them in 2013) started to automate the payment process with innovations such as swiping the magnetic stripe on the card and then enabling online authorisation of card transactions.
GuestLogix Inc. is the leading global provider of onboard store technology and merchandising solutions, which help airlines and other travel operators create, manage and control onboard retail environments tailored to their needs and their passengers. Serving approximately 90% of the North American airline passenger traffic and 40% of the global airline passenger traffic, GuestLogix has become a trusted onboard transaction processing partner to airlines around the world.
The flexible architecture of G8 enables our Unified Payment Service to isolate completely the card payment environment from the merchant's environment, including their POS solution, by facilitating a direct IP connection from the in-store payment device to Vodat's PCI DSS compliant data centres.
STS are true EMV experts. They played a critical role in the UK’s migration to Chip and PIN. If you are looking for flexible and field proven smart card solutions then you should check out STS’ highly innovative payment products.
