Millions of cash- and coin-operated vending machines, laundry equipment and arcade games, not to mention food service and delivery operations, are ripe for an upgrade to cashless technology, and Malvern-based payment pioneer USA Technologies is hot on the pursuit with a win-win combination: a comprehensive cashless — and even contactless — solution that not only saves retailers money in processing costs but also generates more sales and greater spending.

All together, those 13 million to 15 million machines rake in some $120 billion in sales every year.

It’s “one of the biggest, last opportunities of cash-based businesses that (card associations are) trying to migrate into electronic payments. The great thing is that it’s largely untapped — we believe the total penetration so far is less than 10 percent.

So USA Technologies is in a unique position with our solutions,” Senior Vice President of Sales and Business Development Michael Lawlor said in a recent interview published by PYMNTS.com.

“The whole self-serve retail sector is uniquely different than the traditional brick and mortar retail business in terms of what it takes to implement and deploy electronic payments,” he added. “But that’s what we’ve built our systems and network architecture around.”

Those systems take the work out of accepting credit cards, debit cards, prepaid loyalty program cards and mobile wallets and streamline the wireless reporting and interchange in a way that has netted vending client businesses 25 to 30 percent savings on their processing charges.

“We have one client for whom we’ve reduced their processing cost by 35 percent, saving them $40,000 annually, Lawlor noted.

Then factor in an increase in sales and higher average spend amounts due to the added convenience and you have a compelling case for conversion to USA’s cashless offering.

And that’s just the start.

“Once they’ve incorporated cashless payments, there are other benefits that come along with having a wirelessly connected machine. They can extract other data from the machine, like inventory levels, to run their business more efficiently.”

USA Technologies’ next endeavor is to further integrate all the consumer data its terminals can collect with companies’ loyalty initiatives so they can take their engagement with customers to the next level and better utilize incentives and rewards.

Beyond that, the Chester County firm is also ready for the coming wave of mobile payments.

“We probably have some of the largest deployments of mobile payment acceptance across the U.S. market,” Lawlor said.

Read more about the cashless payment opportunity and how USA Technologies is bridging the gap at PYMNTS.com here.

________
Top photo credit: mikeywally via photopin cc