This article originally published in Self-Service World magazine's special section, FOCUS: Retail Self-Service, January 2007.
Case study:
While the majority of Americans have the financial structures in place to make e-commerce and pay-at-the-pump transactions, unbanked and underbanked consumers historically have had to rely on alternative and often costly payment methods.
With the launch of prepaid cards in the early 1990s, the unbanked and underbanked consumer gained access to financial services otherwise out of reach. Prepaid cards helped meet this demographic's financial-payments need, but as useful as prepaid cards are, they have a reputation for being difficult to acquire and expensive to reload, with hard-to-monitor account balances.
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Minneapolis-based Ready Credit Corp., founded on the principle of aiding the underserved financial segment, knew the problems had to be addressed to give unbanked and underbanked consumers full financial freedom.
With this in mind, the company began developing a prepaid-card kiosk designed to dispense, load and track prepaid-card account balances.
Armed with an idea and an implementation plan, Ready Credit representatives began to call solution providers across the United States looking for a technology partner. That is when their relationship began with Dayton, Ohio-based NCR Corporation.
A solution for all seasons
NCR had experience creating and delivering the software and hardware needed for a full-scale, prepaid-card self-service solution. For more than seven years the company had been deploying similar technology in its EasyPoint Xpress bill-payment kiosk, and more recently with its line of EasyPoint Xpress check-in and check-out kiosks for the hotel industry.
"We were able to repurpose our current bill-payment solution to meet Ready Credit's needs for
accepting payments, posting and dispensing cards," said Mike Webster, vice president and general manager for self-service at NCR. "This approach, in which we draw on our knowledge base and create something new — combining experience with innovation — is appealing to partners like Ready Credit. From a development standpoint, both parties have fewer variables and fewer risks."
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| The ReadySTATION dispenses and loads prepaid cards and tracks account balances, creating a financial-services access point for the unbanked and underbanked. |
One benefit for Ready Credit was NCR's ability to create a solution from a holistic approach, an important factor in terms of service, maintenance and hardware uniformity. Another benefit was that NCR could provide a road-tested hardware and software platform designed for consumer ease of use.
NCR representatives worked directly with Tim Walsh, Ready Credit's chief executive officer, on the solution and how it should work.
"NCR really brought a wealth of knowledge to the relationship in terms of their understanding how consumers interact with payment and/or self-service devices," Walsh said. "We worked very closely with them and developed all of the functionality jointly, as well as the customer interface."
Ready Credit's kiosk, the ReadySTATION, is touted as a way for retailers to give unbanked and underbanked consumers financial services in a user-friendly format. The ReadySTATION is deployed in convenience and grocery stores, conducts transactions in English or Spanish, and features a cash acceptor and touchscreen prompts. Consumers also are able to acquire a ReadyCARD Prepaid MasterCard in less than a minute.
"That's really what we were striving for: a positive, user-friendly experience, which meant reliable and fast technology," Walsh said.
On the back-end, NCR provided Ready Credit with the ability to change ReadySTATION network functions from one centralized location, as new federal mandates and consumer demand dictate. Each ReadySTATION also is equipped with wireless modem network communications and firewall capabilities, making ReadySTATIONs placement easy for retailers and payment transactions more secure for consumers.
A goal of the technology behind the ReadySTATION is to provide scalable, intelligent services that use hardware and software that include the flexibility of international deployment. More importantly, the ReadySTATION has become a financial-services access point for underbanked and unbanked consumers, giving them the instant credit they need to conduct self-service transactions in their daily lives.
