Payment processors are the backbone of the electronic payment industry. The ability to manage the day to day operations and support communication between merchants and hosts is mission critical. One of the major business issues facing processors is merchant retention. Maintaining that merchant base is an expensive endeavor:

• Resources spent developing specialized applications
• Time spent developing merchant portfolios
• Investments made in products that address the various needs of merchants
• Efforts used developing campaigns and promotions to ensure merchant satisfaction

Even with those efforts, there could be an estimated loss of 5% to 20% of the merchant base. One Hypercom solution was to design and develop systems/ products using processor business requirements. Systems that focused on the:

• Prevention of slamming at the merchant location
• Differentiation of processor through unique merchant programs
• Reduction of merchant help desk calls

As such, Hypercom terminals will:

• allow application and table downloads from a secure terminal management system
• prevent unauthorized changes using our data encryption
• be installed and deployed with these capabilities (to prevent unsupervised changes at merchant locations).

Hypercom software applications provide secure, complete terminal management systems and allow for encryption key generation and secure program downloads.

Processors are also constantly looking for new sources of revenue. The market is extremely competitive, where pennies per transactions makes the difference between securing new business and losing existing business. With newly emerging credit and debit markets such as QSR, there are new requirements for speed and cost per transaction. Unfortunately, dial networks that support the processor industry today are old, slow and expensive to maintain. Hypercom network technology addresses these issues and provides the processing industry an opportunity to position itself for future new market segments.

A processor who deploys and maintains a Hypercom network can realize savings by as much as 60% per transaction and could provide emerging markets the performance they require while offering attractive communication rates. As new applications requiring higher bandwidths enter the market, Hypercom network technology will be able to handle these requirements and enable processors to offer such applications without worrying about network capabilities.