Catering to shoppers on the go is nothing new for Brookstone, a U.S. specialty retailer located in the nation's busiest airports as well as in major shopping malls and lifestyle centers. If you used your Visa chip card at one of its 200 U.S. stores this holiday season you may have noticed something a little different about the transaction: speed.
Lines will be moving faster in Brookstone stores with the help of Quick Chip, a technology developed by Visa in April 2016 to speed up purchases made with chip cards. With Quick Chip, customers can dip and remove their chip card from the terminal in about two seconds or less, without waiting for the transaction to complete. The quicker dip harkens back to the speedier magstripe days, but offers greater protection against counterfeit fraud. Here’s a look at how Brookstone shoppers are benefitting from this new technology.
Brookstone partnered with Aurus, a payment platform provider, to implement Quick Chip before the 2016 Holiday Shopping Season. Visa developed the technology in a way that only requires merchants to install a software update to the payment terminal. Aurus with its semi-integrated payment platform is one of the leaders in implementing Quick Chip with over 7,600 other terminals across the U.S., including department stores, health and beauty shops, electronics retailers and quick-service restaurants.
Quick Chip not only helps to speed up transactions, but the technology also simplifies implementation and accelerates development, terminal testing and certification. The Quick Chip specification is available free-of-charge to payment processors, acquiring banks and other payment networks to offer to merchants.
