Hospitality company Whitbread Group is expecting to make
savings of £1m a year by the end of the year following the roll-out
of a company-widepayment system.
The company is rolling out the payment system across 1,500
locations across its Costa Coffee, Beefeater, Brewers Fayre and
Premier Inn businesses.
"We now process a greater volume of [payment] transactions,
which has allowed us to gain a preferential rate for [banking]
payment services." said Stephen Deakin, project manager at
Whitbread Information Systems.
Whitbread has been working on the project for two years. It has
allowed it to replace old banking terminals - which required staff
to key in customers' credit card details manually - with wireless
chip and Pin readers.
The project has simplified the way Whitbread balances the books
at the end of each day, said Deakin.
"We used to poll data across 500 sites at the end of each day,
which made it difficult to investigate where a reconciliation error
had occurred. We are now trickling data through to Fidelity, which
means we have greater visibility of all the transactions and this
makes it easier to spot problems," he said.
Deakin said Whitbread is now 90% of the way towards PCI
compliance, as the suppliers and the payment system are
PCI-certified.
Whitbread has used Smart Technology Solutions's Hostlink
software, a product that runs an application on chip and Pin
readers, to link card authorisations with IBM's StorePay, payment
processing software.
The system sends payment transactions to Fidelity National
Information Services, which provides its payment services once a
customer's card has been authorised by chip and Pin readers.
Once complete, Deakin said Whitbread would be able to run data
analysis to measure
business metrics such as the number of people in Premier Inn
who also eat at the Whitbread restaurant next door.
The company completed the roll-out of the unified payment system
to 500 Costa Coffee outlets in November 2007. This month it is due
to finish the roll-out across 500 Beefeater restaurants. By the
fourth quarter of 2008, Deakin expects to have 500 Premier Inn
hotels running the payment sytem.