ICS developed high volume, outdoor, unattended, full payment media kiosks for the car wash Market.
  • Self Service Automation with the Payment Kiosk, removing labor as a bottleneck, increased typical wash volume by 2.5x. Significantly reducing management demands and increasing profitability.
Credit Card was easy, EMV in an unattended environment is very difficult.

ICS integrated into 6 different unattended, EMV solutions. They all had significant limitations.

  • Card in early, before programming reader for debit or credit, would result in a 2-minute timeout.
  • Swiping, instead of dipping, would cause the transaction to fail and timeout.
  • Removing the card early would result in a timeout.
  • Prompts on the pin pad would be missed by the cardholder and the transaction would stop.
  • Timeouts and double billing, could not be resolved due to the lack of visibility and control over the transaction process. The lack of any type of diagnostics in third party systems made diagnostics and improvements to the payment application impossible. Issues were not resolved, frustrating our customers.
ICS decided to make its own payment application in order to address the deficiencies found in other systems.

ICS built its Unattended Payment Solution based on:

Transaction Processing Requirements
  • Progress states – We need to know what state the reader is in and what events the reader is expecting.
  • Error codes – We need to know if an event, such as removing the card, is occurring. If an event happens out of sequence, when the reader is not expecting that event, we send commands to the reader to “recover” the transaction so the transaction progresses seamlessly to the cardholder.
Diagnostic and Support Requirements
  • Adding full logging of all commands to and from our .dll and from the .dll to and from the card reader and processor allows for confirmation that transactions processed correctly and diagnostics are simplified.
Deployment Requirements
  • Terminal Management Services (TMS) was necessary to monitor the health of all readers.
  • Provide PCI mandated Reboots and tamper monitoring.
  • Provide the ability to easily update thousands of terminals.
PCI Compliance
  • We designed a secure solution to make PCI compliance easy for Merchants.
  • Modified SAQ C worksheet reduces the number of questions requiring attestation.
  • Each question on the SAQ has an easy to understand explanations.
  • QIR certified support staff is on hand to assist the Merchant.
  • Integration partners are out of scope and never touch cardholder data.
  • Cardholder data is never present on the MS Windows host.
Conclusion
  • ICS developed its own robust EMV solution out of necessity due to the failure of other solutions in the Marketplace.
  • ICS offers the most robust error handling, offering full control over the transaction process. The card reader is sent corrective commands as necessary to complete a transaction.
  • The cardholder will also receive the proper instruction, if necessary, to complete a transaction successfully. It is not always the reader that needs corrective action.
  • The solution is also easy to deploy and support.
  • We designed a secure network to reduce fraud, make PCI compliance easy.
  • ICS does Unattended Payments Better. That is why we are bringing our Solution to the Payments Marketplace.