SYDNEY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--New Zealand’s leading electronic payment network, Paymark, is partnering with Transaction Network Services (TNS) to reinforce its EFTPOS services with a new range of alternative, feature rich and highly reliable payment solutions.
The agreement will enable Paymark to extend support for its popular dial up service to merchants in New Zealand by another three years, with the option to extend well into the future. Paymark will also be able to introduce new wireless and IP POS services, as required by its merchants, thanks to TNS’ Global Wireless Access and TNSLink for Retail solutions.
Shane Ohlin, Chief Information Officer at Paymark, said: “We are delighted to be working with TNS to strengthen the New Zealand marketplace. We are dedicated to providing a high quality range of payments access services to support our merchants across the country.
“IP Dial remains an important access option for our customers and TNS shares our ongoing commitment to this technology. Partnering with TNS allows us to enhance our existing dial up offering while strategically expanding our portfolio and future-proofing our business with new wireless and IP offerings. It is important that we can be agile and responsive to changing market dynamics and we’re confident our agreement with TNS puts us in a strong position. We expect to also reduce our operational and support costs as working with TNS will help to streamline our infrastructure.”
TNS’ Global Wireless Access is a managed roaming wireless POS solution which will offer merchants greater security, coverage and reliability. It combines strongest signal detection with data roaming to overcome traditional blackspots allowing merchants to transact.
The TNSLink for Retail solution will replace Paymark’s OneOffice and RetailZone services for large merchants and offer additional functionality, including secure high speed bi-directional connectivity support for time reporting, inventory monitoring and other back office applications in addition to handling the POS transactions taken instore.
John Tait, Managing Director of TNS’ Payments Division for the Asia Pacific region, said: “We’re delighted to be working with Paymark and boosting the services it offers. Paymark is the leading processor in New Zealand and currently handles 75% of all card transactions in the country. This network includes 140,000 EFTPOS terminals across 80,000 merchants and sees approximately 1.2 billion transactions worth $60 billion carried each year on behalf of more than 50 card issuers and acquirers. We are excited at the role we will play in supporting this significant level of activity.”
New Zealand’s consumers are some of the world’s biggest users of debit and credit cards. Debit card usage, in particular, has soared over the last 30 years, fuelled by low fees and high consumer adoption.
Mr Tait said: “A number of New Zealand telecommunications providers have tried to move businesses off dial PSTN access as they seek to end of life their core infrastructure in favour of new IP and 4G/5G wireless networks. TNS is committed to being the ‘last man standing’ globally in providing dial POS solutions and supporting the long tail of merchants who are still gaining the benefits of this legacy technology. This new agreement with Paymark reaffirms this and demonstrates our continued investment in being a leading solutions provider for New Zealand.”
TNS’ Dial solution provides high availability with advanced node and circuit redundancy, back-up and flexible routing capabilities. It has been designed to deliver all types of transaction traffic, including credit and debit cards, pre-paid mobile top-ups, gaming, alarms, inventory control, order entry and other transaction-oriented applications. It delivers shorter and more cost effective transaction times than general purpose network service providers and supports all known POS protocols. Near real-time visibility, monitoring and reporting is provided by TNSOnline.
The TNSLink for Retail solution uses broadband with 3G/4G back-up or multi-network 3G/4G to provide failover and enable stores to continue to operate if the primary means of connectivity becomes available.
TNS’ Global Wireless Access can provide significant cost and time savings by allowing the bulk provisioning of SIMs, and the use of an advanced management and diagnostics portal gives flexibility and control over SIM deployment.
Since it was founded in 1990, TNS has secured a strong payments heritage and expanded to provide services in more than 60 countries across Europe, the Americas and the Asia Pacific regions. The organization is a Level 1 PCI DSS certified service provider and its secure network is supported 24x7x365 by TNS’ Network Operating Centers around the world. For more information about TNS, please visit www.tnsi.com
ENDS
About Transaction Network Services:
Transaction Network Services (TNS) is a leading global provider of data communications and interoperability solutions. TNS offers a broad range of networks and innovative value-added services which enable transactions and the exchange of information in diverse industries such as retail, banking, payment processing, telecommunications and the financial markets.
Founded in 1990 in the United States, TNS has grown steadily and now provides services in over 60 countries across the Americas, Europe and the Asia Pacific region, with our reach extending to many more. TNS has designed and implemented multiple data networks which support a variety of widely accepted communications protocols and are designed to be scalable and accessible by multiple methods.
About Paymark:
Paymark is New Zealand’s leading electronic payments company. For the past 26 years we have served hundreds of thousands of New Zealand merchants through our safe, secure and reliable infrastructure.
Paymark covers more than 140,000 terminals, accounting for in excess of 75% of the New Zealand payments landscape. We process around 60 transactions every second of the day.
