I asked Intrix/Transcend for a list of chip card devices they support and the reply I received was they don’t have any and don’t have a clear plan to do so, at least with the Tessitura integration. They did say they are “in talks” with Tessitura to make things work with future versions, but the path was unclear. The questions I have are for Transcend users: is your plan to continue to use Transcend? And for Tessitura: is your plan to completely separate from Intrix and force everyone to move to Element? Element by the way costs quite a bit more at least from what we’ve gathered.
Thank you,
…Dave
Hi Dave,
Intrix has been a good partner over the years, however when we began our Next Generation work several years back we evaluated them along with other payment providers and ultimately selected Element as our partner in the US for new payment processing initiatives. Element was, and continues to be, ahead of Intrix in their ability stay current with rapidly changing payment industry requirements. We do continue to stay in contact with Intrix, and for self-hosted organizations we are still supporting the locally installed Transcend, however at this time there are no plans to integrate advanced capabilities (tokenization, EMV, hosted payments, etc.) with the locally installed or hosted versions of Transcend. As you mentioned, Intrix has not currently started work on an EMV solution so for our user base it would not make sense to devote resources to an integration where key components would not be available in a reasonable amount of time.
To your comment about Element costing more than Transcend, I will say that early on we did cost models of internally operated Transcend compared to Element's hosted service, and it is true that depending on your volume levels the cost will be more for some and less for others. It is important to say that Tessitura Network made a strategic decision that for security reasons going forward we only wanted to use hosted payment providers (as of July 2015 we mandated all US RAMP organizations move to Element as a major step towards reducing sensitive cardholder data in that environment). All hosted providers we have ever spoken to, including Intrix with their hosted solution, use a similar transaction activity pricing model and comparing that cost structure with the flat annual maintenance organizations pay for the internally operated Transcend software is a bit apples to oranges. That flat annual software maintenance price model is not one we would likely find with any hosted provider.
We will shortly be sending a similar message to all Transcend users and are always happy to discuss further.
Ron
Thanks Ron. Very good info and I appreciate your response. I will share this with our group for further discussion.