Credit Cards in the ‘Cloud,’With a By JoeWenzl


When was the last time you actually paid cash dollars for something? Fast-food lunch? Nope. Aquick gas fill-up? I


don’t think so. A song off the Internet? Not a chance. Parking your car? Think again! Using a credit card to pay your parking fee has become


commonplace as an expected payment method. Just as you would pull out your credit card to pay for that purchase at the shopping mall, you as a parking patron expect to have the opportunity to pull out that same credit card at some point in the parking process – either at a payment station or in an exit cashiering lane. To the parking operator, accepting your credit card has


much evolved from the old days of using the knuckle-buster imprinter or the dial-up credit-verification modems. Remember when the cashierwould use a printed “black list” booklet to see if your credit cardwas stolen? With today’s technology, use of a credit card is fast, efficient-


ly using high-speed network connections and data communica- tions afforded through the Internet, and using payment security methods conceived and approved by the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council. So what’s the recipe? How do we best combine a credit card,


a big dense “cloud” (otherwise known as the Internet) and the PCI’s security standards into a gourmet meal suitable for any- one’s palate? The answer is easy – hire a good chef! OK, the analogy was to get your attention to what might


appear on the surface as a rather mundane subject. But let’s face it – the Internet is as much a part of our daily lives as eating and sleeping. Sowhy not utilize a good thing to our advantage? The mix starts with the basics.What actually happens when


your credit card is read at a parking payment device? It reads your credit card information, including the account number and expi- ration date, puts those data into a credit card approval request, and communicates thatmessage to the payment gateway. The solutions differ considerably among vendors, but the


common pathway is for the request to be received by a payment processing company. The payment processormanages all interactions between the


merchant (the parking facility), themerchant’s bank and the cred- it card company. The payment processor receives a fee for each transaction it receives andmanages – a cost that is typically nego- tiatedwith themerchant. Once the credit card request is approved, the response is


communicated back to the payment device, the transaction is completed and the patron exits the facility. The completed trans- action is communicated to the facility management system’s rev- enue control, to be reconciled at the end of the daywith data from the payment processor. Essentially, the operator of the facility wants to ensure that


the revenue charged to a credit card as reported by the parking software has been successfully communicated, cleared and deposited into their banking account by the payment processor. So how can the Internet help in this process? Let’s focus on


three features and their respective advantages: • Security – Protects the patron’s credit card information and


limits operator liability. 28


Reconciling, According to Joe…


So if Iwere to use one of those “cloud” com-


puting services and not communicate or store any credit card information onmy network, just how, Mr. Smart E. Pants, do I reconcilemy revenue infor- mation ormanage exceptions such as charge-backs or disputed fees, huh? The answer is quite simple and rather elegant. The POS (point-of-sale) sends the credit card


request to the service provider. Rather than sending a responsewith the actual credit card data, the service returns a unique serial number, or “token,” representing the crucial credit card data associated with that transaction. All the actual credit card data are nowstored


within the Internet “cloud,” and themerchant is free to store the returned token in their transaction revenue data and archive it for future reference. Any charge-back or disputed fee is easily submit- ted using the token. If the data containing the token are hacked, they are useless to the hacker. Whether through a parking lane interface, a


hosted service provider or back office solution, the use of credit cards in the industry will continue for the foreseeable future. Up-and-coming pay- ment methods such as pay-by-phone are starting to take hold. But as long as a parking fee is determined by


the duration that a patron parks, and steady vehicle throughput is a crucial need, the credit cardwill continue to be one of the primary paymentmeth- ods in the parking industry. – JoeWenzl


Parking Today www.parkingtoday.com


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