Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
By Kevin Woodward
@DTPaymentNews
Acquirers that service merchants that still use dial-up point-of-sale terminals have a new option for connecting these no-longer-mainstream devices to processors with the launch of a new product from Transaction Network Services Inc.
Announced Tuesday, the service from Reston, Va.-based TNS provides acquirers with one connection to two different networks to carry dial-up payment transactions. The service relies on multiple telecommunication firms for the redundant coverage, TNS says. Payments consultancy First Annapolis Consulting estimates that 30% of the installed based of U.S. POS terminals are still dial-up machines.
The TNS service provides these merchants with a backup connection, but the acquirer only has to hire one vendor for the service, says Tiffany Trent-Abram, TNS vice president of global product management. Despite the surprising percentage of merchants retaining dial-up terminals, the volume of Internet-based transactions has grown so much that the dial-up volume for many acquirers no longer warrants managing multiple vendors, Trent-Abram tells Digital Transactions News. “[A number of processors] still have this remaining estate of dial-up terminals they want to be able to support,” Trent-Abram says. Pricing is on a per-transaction basis paid by acquirers, she says.
While the volume of dial-up transactions on a global level continues to dwindle, acquirers still need to provide recovery services and do it via multiple telecommunications firms, she says. These dial-up devices typically are connected to a physical phone line rather than a cellular connection, she notes.
TNS introduced a dial-up service for transactions in 1990, just as the terminalization of merchants began in earnest. In 2008, it launched a service to convert data from dial-up transactions to ones that are Internet-based. TNS continues to use that technology for the new service, Trent-Abram says.
