This is what Bernard Zimmermann, Director of POS Solutions published at his company blog today:
After what happened last week where many of my clients got cut off EFTpos. It is a concerning when now EFTpos is between 25% to 100% of a retailers’ income, there were two major outages once with Westpac last Tuesday and almost everyone down on Thursday. This week CBA went down on Monday morning. That is three major outages in less then a week.
I do not think it is fair. Many retailers are paying extra to do their EFTpos with the majors and they should be getting reliable service.
Anyway we got concerned so I decided to ask Tyro about their record.
This is their response.
Dear Bernard,
100% availability and PCI PA-DSS certified
I hope you are doing well. It is absolutely amazing to see the escalating numbers of EFTPOS outages, glitches and failures that major retail banks deliver and the disruptions it causes to businesses and consumers. It is not rocket science, but only requires an investment into innovation and infrastructure to make the payment system resilient.
Bernard goes on to republish the full email from Jost Stollmann, CEO of broadband EFTPOS provider Tyro.
The correspondence Bernard quotes was sent by Tyro to all their software partners. I confirmed this with Tyro. I and several colleagues at Tower Systems received the email from Jost. It was not sent in response to a request from POS Solutions.
I felt it important to share this and set the record straight.
So what
I don,t really get what the problem is ,so he received the same reply as you ,don,t really see what Record needs to be set straight heRe .
Shaun and P. Neither Bernard nor I asked Tyro a question. Tyro send an email out to all software company unrequested. POS Solutions decided to make out that they approached Tyro about this and tyro responded to them. That’s not what happened.
i don’t really think it matters who asked a question or not ,to me it looks like a great add for tyro from both parties
Tyro announced unavoidable fee increases today. We’ll have to revisit the surcharge issue.
i know its been discussed here before, but anyone charging a surcharge? Fees now costing me $400+ a month. Am loathed to introduce a surcharge but its now back on the radar for me as well.
We currently charge 10c for any EFTPOS under $10 (we waive if Customer gets cash out). Aust Post +1%, +1% Amex. Lotto +1% Visa & M/Card, +3% Amex. With recent changes we will consider increasing 10c to 15c for transactions under $10.
We used to charge 3% for AMEX. Amex kept trying to get us to drop the surcharge by offering to reduce their fee to onlt 3 times of that of Visa & master card if we complied. What a joke. We have since flicked them as pretty much every one with an AMEX card also has either Visa or Mastercard and tracking Amex payments from an accounting point of view was a pain.
As for a fee on other cards, I want to charge, my wife does not but this may re-ignite the debate between us.
We only add a surcharge if people purchase bus tickets or recharge for
phones. All other transactions we just
cop it sweet. We add $1.50 to the tickets
and very rarely have a customer who complains. If they don’t like the extra charge they usually find the cash.
and soooo ! what is your point Mark except to say he is a competitor.
Interesting note on tyro,
If merchant copy prints as approved and staff are not watching customer, the customer can press stop and if they dont want a receipt and walk out then the transaction is reversed and customer does not pay even thou merchant copy is approved. This happened to us today and all tyro support could say is “tough, customer has the right to cancel transaction”. I am glad i kept bank eftpos until i was sure of new tech, i will be sending tyro back on monday.
Michael, I’ve had Tyro I my shops for years and have never experienced that. I’d rather the Tyro, speed, accuracy and lower costs.
agree, has its pros just wish it did not have that particluar con !
i dont agree that once the merchant copy is approved that you can change it, if customer does not want to continue then do manual reversal, not just reverse the transaction without the operator knowing, with the keypad hidden it is easy to do.Should need operator to reversenot customer,thats all i am saying.
As I mentioned – had Tyro for years (in several newsagencies) and never had this problem. Once they enter their pin I turn the terminal to me as they have no need to access it. Process.
Thank you Michael for letting all of us know that this could happen. I’ve never experienced this , but clearly there is at least one very savvy individual out there who knows how to exploit the system. With social media the way it is, all his 3000 facebook contacts will now also know how to rip us off….. pity tyro has the attitude that it’s “tough” – might just come back to bite them in the long run.
Lets watch and wait to see how this plays out. Do you have security vid over your counter Michael, can be useful.
h, let’s see what Tyro says for itself on this. My experience with them is that they provide better customer service than the big four banks.
if this is correct, it is a flaw in their system and MUST be rectified. No amount of support from you Mark can diminish the seriousness of this system failure. We need some official notive from Tyro on this issue.
And Rick why not wait and see what Tyro says. In the meantime, I’ve had it for years and never had a problem. But I run my counters with rules.
Maybe it is just a counter procedure that we should follow, or a change that tryo can make either way i think it is worth letting agents know…. looking at the tyro keypad it seems that they have designed it to not be moved all the time, similar to fuel stations where customers do all the entering of details.
Also on tyro, did i get faulty paper rolls or do they not print the redline on the roll when it is getting low ???
H,
Yes i have 2 cameras watching tills and counter and one focused on customers face.
I have never seen customer before.
Folks,
I am the CIO at tyro payments.
Michael can I trouble you to contact me directly (phaig@tyro.com if this doesn’t show up addressable.)
We take seriously this issue you raised, and will investigate incidents of this. It is usually unintended action from cardholder, and can be resolved, but we certainly want to identify deliberate perpetrators of this.
We are readying a patch, which will be available shortly. I will update this blog when available. We will automatically upgrade your terminals.
Am happy to answer any questions you may have on this.
Thanks for the speedy attention Peter
Hi Peter,
Thanks for your response,
I will contact you shortly.
Regards
Hi All,
Just like to thank Tyro for their speedy service and help with the customer cancelation problem. An update has been done and the glitch seems to be fixed, once approved customer can no longer cancel, just like to thank customer service for his help, My tyro machine never made it too the postbox due to their prompt fix of the problem.
Thanks
An update which I promised…
Michael is referring to a new release, which involves a quite large upgrade of the terminal, which will roll out over time.
In the interim, we have created a smaller patch, to enable the faster deployment to all locations. This has now passed early customer test, and will commence rolling out to all customers on 11.08.03 or earlier from tonight.
Please leave your eftpos terminal powered on to get this update.
The actual behaviour change is that it will now ignore the STOP button press on the terminal once a transaction has been approved. In the rare case where there is a need to VOID the transaction, use the VOID function on the terminal.
To confirm that you have the fix, the terminal info receipt will show a version of
11.08.04 or a release greater than 11.14.00.