New Canaan in the fiscal year just ended did about $1.7 million in credit card sales, among registration online for Recreation Department programs, Waveny Pool passes, Transfer Station fees and Lapham Community Center offerings, officials said Tuesday.
For credit card processing in-house, the town used “old cheap magnetic stripe readers,” according to Assistant Recreation Director Bill Kapp.
“Quite frankly, this is something that we should have upgraded one year ago when the [payment card] industry said, ‘Go to the new chip and readers,’ ” Kapp said during a Board of Selectmen meeting, held at Town Hall. “We have been patiently waiting for our software provider to provide us with coded devices. Well, that failed. And in failing, the second part of this request is to ask that we change our gateway provider to someone new.”
Kapp and Recreation Director Steve Benko appeared before the selectmen to request that the department enter into a hosted-services agreement with King of Prussia, Penn.-based CardConnect for credit card processing. The board—First Selectman Rob Mallozzi and Selectmen Beth Jones and Nick Williams—voted 3-0 in favor of the change.
The town will lease seven new machines at $25 per month, Kapp said, as opposed to purchasing them at $875 per unit and risking breakdowns as well as changes in technology that could quickly make them obsolete.
The selectmen asked whether the funds were in the budget (each of the departments has a line item for banking fees), whether the new vendor agreed to changes in the existing agreement regarding confidentiality and identification (yes), whether the new provider has additional fees (no the overhead costs will actually come down, saving 2-plus percent in sales transactions), why the Transfer Station needs two machines (because they have two computers in their office where transactions are processed and each one needs a machine) and whether the new devices are going to transition smoothly with the existing software (yes it’s a USB plug-in).