The use of credit cards in the United States is rising, and new payment options like Apple Pay and Android Pay are gaining popularity. You can bet consumers paying at parking meters, vending machines, or pharmacy-pickup windows will start to expect the convenience of these multiple payment options.
The deadline also applies to unattended environments such as vending machines, kiosks, and other forms of self-service. Business owners who have invested in unattended payment solutions should upgrade their technology to accept EMV chip cards for the same reasons attended merchants do – to guard themselves against credit card fraud.
Consumer adoption of secure near-field communication (NFC) technology, such as Apple Pay, Android Pay, and Samsung Pay, is also on the rise. Unattended payment solutions need to adapt. NFC technology is expected to bring about a behavioral change among consumers and help drive people to begin using their smart phones to pay for goods and services. By upgrading your unattended payment solutions to accept NFC payments, you can keep up with consumer demand and the evolving payment landscape.
Closed-loop cards are gift or credit cards that can only be used at a specific merchant or location. Enabling acceptance of closed-loop cards within unattended payment environments provides customers with the option to redeem these cards even when they’re not interacting with a store employee or at the standard checkout counter. This encourages greater impulse purchases and allows consumers to leverage the merchant’s loyalty programs in order to receive rewards, offers, and discounts on an ongoing basis.
Every unattended solution, whether it is a vending machine, a ticketing kiosk, a retail pharmacy dispenser, or a parking meter, involves many different technologies, and often many different players. System integrators or value added resellers (VARs) are typically the ones that bring all of these individual elements together to form a complete solution that meets the unique business needs of specific merchants, industries, and market segments. It’s imperative for unattended-payment solutions to be easy to integrate with and to fit seamlessly into whatever environment or setting the solution is being designed to address.
Unattended-payment solutions go through a lot of wear and tear. Thousands of people use these self-service solutions on a regular basis, while some environments, such as outdoor parking systems or ticketing kiosks, are also exposed to weather that can potentially damage the machines. It’s important to have a durable solution that can withstand these conditions by meeting ingress-protection (guard against environmental elements such as water, dust, etc.) and shock-protection (impact/ force) standards.
Customers who buy big-ticket items from vending machines, such tablets, mobile accessories, smart phones, and pharmaceutical products, must be certain that there won’t be any foul play from cybercriminals while completing these sizable transactions. Many payment-solution providers offer additional security measures such as point-to-point encryption (P2PE) and tokenization. P2PE helps protect the card data from cybercriminals as it travels from the point of payment through authorization, and tokenization helps protect the card data while it’s stored in back-end systems.
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