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Posted by Monty Solomon on November 22, 2007, 12:24 pm
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After the Meal, the Credit Card Scanner Is Served
By FLORENCE FABRICANT
The New York Times
November 21, 2007
THE waiter gives you the bill. You check it and then, right at the
table, you swipe your credit card in a portable device. A receipt
pops out, you sign it, and you are on your way.
These wireless handheld devices, which save time and are meant to cut
down on fraud, have been used in European restaurants for the past 10
years. They were introduced in the United States about two years ago,
and they are just inching into use.
In New York next month, Vento Trattoria, part of the B.R. Guest
restaurant group, will install a system for processing credit cards
at the table. It will be a pilot program, but the company's
president, Stephen Hanson, is eager to have it in place.
"Ninety percent of my business is credit cards, and processing them
takes too many steps," he said. "Even if it costs money up front
you'd save time and motion."
The devices look like calculators and are similar to the credit card
gadgets at supermarket checkout counters. They are made by several
companies, including VeriFone in San Jose, Calif., whose systems and
equipment for credit card transactions are in many American
restaurants.
Another company, Cyndigo, based in Fullerton, Calif., has developed a
portable credit card scanner not much larger than a BlackBerry that
fits neatly into a restaurant check holder.
Grant Drummond, the director of marketing communications for Ingenico
in Toronto, which has been selling the systems in Europe and Canada,
said that about 2,000 American restaurants are now using his
company's system, mainly chain restaurants and places on the West
Coast.
Pay-at-table systems quickly gained acceptance in Europe, said
Douglas Bergeron, the chairman of VeriFone, because the incidence of
credit card fraud and identity theft was greater than in the United
States.
"A restaurant is the only remaining place in the retail economy where
the card disappears, where you actually hand it over and the
transaction is not processed right in front of you," he said. "There
is an opportunity for it to be copied and skimmed."
Those who have used the systems in Europe may wonder why it has taken
so long for them to show up here.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/dining/21hand.html
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Posted by John L on November 22, 2007, 10:06 pm
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> Those who have used the systems in Europe may wonder why it has taken
> so long for them to show up here.
The article missed the key fact that most Visa cards in Europe are debit
cards, and have embedded chips that track the available amount. So the
machines there have historically worked offline, doing the transaction
with the chip in the card, then reporting the transactions to the bank in
a batch at the end of the day, probably by plugging the machine into a
phone line or, back when phones didn't work so great, maybe even taking
the machine to the bank.
Here in the US where phones were more reliable and widely available,
credit card transactions have been verified online with the bank, which
means that the machine needs a cellular modem or wifi. That's practical
now, but it wasn't practical ten years ago.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor
"More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.
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