Agent Systems

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Description

The Agent Transaction Manager (ATM), our product for secure, high speed management of electronic payments, is the only commercially available product that provides support for both traditional (credit/debit card authorization and settlement) and emerging non-traditional electronic payment methods on a single platform. We can quickly implement an electronic payments system using credit/debit cards, smart cards, or customer operated terminals, gain certification for credit and debit merchant accounts, and most importantly, keep up-front implementation costs low.

The VEI specification allows these networked vending applications to be based on an open, non-proprietary standard. This standard protects the investment each customer makes in these systems. In the past, each equipment manufacturer supported a different set of communications protocols and messages. These proprietary protocols and messages were incompatible with the protocols and messages of other manufacturers. This situation made equipment additions to existing systems difficult, resulting in high support costs, and high costs for replacement equipment.

Agent Systems has worked with numerous smart card manufacturers for over ten years. In the next year we will be seeing important progress made in the moving of smart cards into the mainstream of mass transit fare collection. The Smart Box? Validating Farebox was designed from the start to easily integrate with any type of electronic stored value instrument chosen for use in the mass transit industry.

There is no question that fare collection in the future will make more use of non-cash payment. Agent Systems was a pioneer in non-cash payment systems and today our mass transit networking systems are regarded as the best in the industry. We provide an essential coin and bill handling component which can be interfaced to and interoperate with ticket and pass handling systems provided by others.

The innovations outlined in this paper go a long way towards solving decades-old problems in mass transit fare collection. As operators of mass transit agencies, revenue managers, and producers of fare collection equipment, we all owe it to the public to provide better service at a lower cost in tax dollars and we should all look forward to implementation of these types of systems.

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