ICICI launches portable POS; patrons at hotels to benefit

• In order to do away with inconvenience around entering secret PIN number for card transactions in hotels, a point-of-sale operator backed by the country’s largest private sector lender ICICI Bank today said it has launched a portable machine.
• ICICI Merchant Services, an alliance between ICICI Bank and electronic commerce and payment services company First Data, plans to replace 25,000 machines located in the hospitality sector enterprises with the portable hand-held machines, it said in a statement.
• It can be noted that starting December 1 last year, the Reserve Bank has asked for the secret PIN to be entered for all card payments at merchant establishments.
• For the hospitality sector, this is resulting in customers being made to walk to the centrally-located POS machine and enter their PIN number or worse, share it with the hotel staff attending to them.

• A customer will be presented the machine at the table in order to authorise a transaction rather than the current practice of going to the cash counter where the point-of-sale (POS) machines are generally kept.
• This solution will boost card transactions, as now over 70 per cent of all cards in India require PIN authentication in order to successfully complete a transaction.
• ICICI Merchant Services currently has two lakh POS machines in force across the country.