Customs Duty Payment Kiosks Upgraded to EMV While Passing Ten-Year Milestone
November 14, 2017 – YORK, PA. Bermudians love to travel and shop, in fact Bermuda residents are among the most traveled populations in the world. In 2006, Bermuda’s H.M. Customs authority recognized the need to help speed travelers through the arduous task of completing a declarations form and paying duty tax. HSBC, the world’s largest bank, and their Bermuda branch saw the opportunity to help the local government and commissioned Livewire Digital to create new self-service terminals to electronically calculate and pay for the duty tax assessed on purchases made abroad.
Since going live in May of 2007, over 100,000 travelers have used the kiosks annually to complete the declarations process and pay their duty tax via credit card. The kiosks have undergone several minor hardware and software upgrades throughout the past ten years, although the most significant upgrade for security purposes has just been completed. When EMV payment technology became readily available for the self-service market in 2016, HSBC and Livewire began the planning process to update the outdated card swipe equipment with new EMV-based processing that offers point-to-point encryption of card data and secure chip-and-pin security to card holders. The duty payment kiosks now feature Ingenico smart terminals to allow payment via card swipe with signature, chip and pin entry, and NFC/contactless reading. Livewire’s payment gateway partner, FreedomPay, provides the PCI certified process that ensures complete security of HSBC’s customers’ payment card information from the point of data entry to the card processor’s servers.
“It’s great to see systems such as this evolve to continually improve security and the customer experience” said David McCracken, Livewire Digital’s President and CEO. “It’s hard to imagine that these kiosks have been in place for over ten years now and required very little TLC throughout that time span. I believe that points back to the robustness of the original process that HSBC and Livewire designed together, as well as the self-service hardware and software expertise that Livewire has built over the past twenty years.”
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