CPI drives the future by bringing new cashless and payment connectivity solutions to ICE

Crane Payment Innovations (CPI), a Crane Co. company, showed at ICE why its technology is renowned for defining the future of payment systems in the global gaming industry. Alongside its extensive product range for coin and banknote validation, CPI took the opportunity to showcase the Easitrax Connect platform and the CPI Ticket Purchasing Kiosk.

The best known CPI solution in the gaming industry is the SC Advance™, the preferred banknote validator at countless gaming locations across the world. In addition, most major gaming machine manufacturers prefer the SC Advance™. This is because how well a banknote validator works makes a direct impact on the player experience and, ultimately, an operator’s potential to earn revenue. The SC Advance™ offers outstanding performance with the industry’s highest first-time acceptance rates of valid street-grade banknotes and its capabilities to reject sophisticated frauds.

CPI now offers operators a unique hardware/software platform that combines the power of SC Advance™ with real-time payment connectivity so that operators can manage their floors and their cash more profitably than ever before. This global solution, which CPI launched to the European market at ICE, is called Easitrax Connect.

Easitrax Connect offers an extensive range of features and benefits, and the software has been designed to work intuitively. It provides operators with a real-time look at how all their banknote validators – and even machines – are performing.  Operations can now be streamlined and simplified. The drop can be managed to ensure that no full cashboxes negatively affect machine play because Easitrax Connect will send a real-time warning as the cashbox volume approaches capacity. Any suspicious note activity is also immediately registered, enabling operators to react straight away. Maintenance issues can also be prevented before they even occur, helping to make machine downtime an event of the past. 

“Easitrax Connect is simple to install. There are just three elements to it,” explained Anette Jauch, CPI sales director for EMEA Gaming. “First, you need our small Universal Connectivity Box that easily attaches to our SC Advance banknote validators. Then, you bring the hardware online by connecting it to a casino’s Ethernet network.  This is what enables the real-time data to be shown on the final piece of our Easitrax Connect solution – our mobile-friendly web application. That’s it. The UCB is future-proof to connect to other devices later down the road – like cashless and mobile payment devices.”

Cashless has become the buzzword in the payment systems segment. CPI showcased its Ticket Purchasing Kiosk that enables players who don’t carry banknotes or prefer cashless methods of payment to purchase TITO tickets with debit and/or credit cards. Players can simply select the amount to be deducted from their card, and this amount is paid out by the kiosk as a TITO ticket, which can then be used for play at the slot machines. The heart of the device is the CPI card reader – a proven solution as there are over 400,000 of these in already in operation outside the gaming industry.

“Operators can now get so much more value out of the data that the SC Advance provides thanks to our Easitrax Connect platform. Whether coins, bills or cashless – we have developed the solutions that provide optimal return on investment. We have our eyes on the future with cashless transactions and connectivity, and at ICE we brought this all together,” concluded Jauch.