Area banks offer compact wireless credit card terminals

Millwood Golf & Racquet Club in Ozark held a golf tournament June 1, and officials wanted to set up a temporary pro shop in a part of their clubhouse that didn’t have access to a phone line, which is needed for a traditional credit card terminal.

Following a call from Karen Cummins, director of accounting for Millwood, Great Southern Bank solved the problem with a compact wireless credit card terminal.

“I thought it was great,” said Cummins, who said Millwood would likely buy a couple of the units after a successful trial. Millwood processed about 20 transactions through the wireless terminal that day, according to officials.

Cummins called David Pollock, Great Southern’s director of merchant services, about a month ago, and Pollock ordered a test unit from Woburn, Mass.-based Way Systems Inc., which has been making the wireless units since the company was founded in 2002.

While wireless credit card terminals have been around for seven or eight years, Way Systems’ units are more portable than their predecessors, according to Randy Wheeler, chief marketing officer and head of global sales for Way Systems.

He said his company has sold about 20,000 units, which are the size of a cellular phone and retail for $800 to $1,000. Wheeler said the units are ideal for use in taxis, limos, traveling flea markets and by pizza delivery drivers.

“It’s just the latest and greatest,” said Pollock, who is offering the product to the bank’s roughly 1,000 credit card customers on a request basis.

Other banks in town offer the same technology. Commerce Bank, for example, offers two versions of wireless terminals – a larger unit that it’s offered for two years and a smaller unit that it’s offered for a year. The smaller unit is made by Greenwood Village, Colo.-based CellTrek, according to Regional Sales Manager Gail Gauert, who would only say the retail price to bank customers was “negotiable.”

Business must buy the wireless units from banks or independent sales organizations, which sell them at an undisclosed markup from the manufacturer, according to Way Systems’ Wheeler.

The newest wireless units transmit data via cell phone towers, so they can be used practically anywhere. That convenience comes with a small price increase, of course – transactions cost about a nickel more than their hard-wired counterparts, according to Pollock.