Ocius Provides Healthy Solution For Fitness Club
With recent changes in fraud liability, the club now recognised that it was liable for credit and debit card fraud for the first time, and so a solution needed to be found to address this. Commidea demonstrated that its Ocius system offered the club the ideal solution. A genuine pre-approved Chip & PIN solution, it requires no bank testing and can be integrated with virtually any POS, providing the club with a simple to use solution without the expense and aggravation of the approvals queue and, more importantly, without having to change its existing POS setup.
Commidea, working with Qube EPOS, integrated its networked Ocius 3750 solution utilising VeriFone Omni 3750 terminals, with the existing Uniwell range of EPoS tills situated in the reception and hospitality areas of two of the clubs.
This unique ‘plug and play’ style integration eliminates the need for changing POS setups, installing specialist networks or additional PC hardware. All that’s required is a new Ocius terminal and Commidea’s I-Link software, connected to one of the company’s card payment processing systems.
“When it came to choosing a Chip & PIN solution, one of the overriding deciding factors was the ability of the Ocius system to be simply integrated with our existing POS setup,” commented Next Generation’s Malcolm Williamson. “Eliminating the need to install a new EPOS system as well as having to gain bank approval for the system has saved us considerable financial outlay, time and valuable resources.”
Next Generation, who in time will be rolling the Ocius solution out through their other clubs and their hotels, are utilising Commidea’s ‘hosted’ payment server solution, ICP, for card payment processing and authorisation. This enables them to communicate transactions from their clubs to Commidea’s central servers via ADSL. These transactions are then processed in real time utilising Commidea’s central processing service which obtains authorisation from the bank before returning the results in as little as 4 seconds.
This unique method of processing credit and debit cards not only offers Next Generation one of the fastest methods of authorisation but also significantly reduces the need to operate their own card payment processing system, and the associated IT implications such as training, system or communication failure, administration or software updates.
Developed to EMV I & II specifications, Ocius can also be used in conjunction with Commidea’s WinTI card payment processing system. A wireless Ocius solution, utilising either GPRS, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi technology, is also available, ideal for hospitality, mobile retailing and queue busting applications.