TGI Fridays, Zinburger adopt Ingenico pay-at-table devices

U.S. restaurants for years have been experimenting with novel EMV payment approaches ranging from tablets to apps, but two major U.S. restaurant chains are opting for basic hand-held terminals from Ingenico.

TGI Fridays and Briad Group’s Zinburger Wine & Burger bar will use one of Ingenico’s most widely deployed wireless payment terminals at a total of 80 U.S. restaurants, Ingenico announced this week.

The move satisfies the need for U.S. restaurants to accept EMV cards in pay-at-the-table environments where consumers keep control of their cards, unlike the pre-EMV U.S. approach, where waiters take the card away to a register. The EMV liability shift went into effect three years ago, but many restaurants still have not replaced their payment terminals.

The palm-size 10-ounce iWL252 device TGI Fridays and Zinburger restaurants will use accepts chip, magstripe and contactless cards and contains a built-in printer, similar to devices restaurants have been using across Europe, Canada and Asia for many years, said Mark Bunney, Ingenico North America’s go-to-market strategy director, in an interview.

“The hand-held terminal is a pretty straightforward approach and it’s been used very effectively in a lot of U.S. airport restaurants to speed up the payment process for travelers that are in a hurry,” Bunney said.

Ingenico’s terminal can reduce the steps required for a waiter to deliver the bill and collect the payment from about 12 interactions to seven, on average, according to Bunney.

Posera, a Canadian software provider, creates the middleware that connects Ingenico’s devices to restaurants’ POS systems, he added.

Ingenico has shipped a total of about 10 million similar devices, primarily to restaurants, over the years.