Heartland Payment Systems Inc. is updating its offerings to what it views as a final frontier of micropayments: commercial laundry machines.
The Princeton, N.J., card processor last year introduced and tested its WaveRider Laundry System, which enables laundry-facility operators to accept credit and debit cards.
Heartland is providing a proprietary card reader, software and card-processing services with the system, Ron Farmer, Heartland's executive director of micropayments, said in an interview. That package enables the company to offer the service as a lower price than others that offer products piecemeal.
The complexity of working with multiple vendors is "one of the problems that have hindered [services] like this in the past," Farmer said. "In our case, one call gets it all [done], and I think that puts us at an advantage."
Heartland announced on Monday an upgrade to its laundry system, which enables operators to manage machine deployment and facilities online from a remote location.
This version "is mostly about a much easier installation and setup for the laundry operators so that they can speed up the deployment of these devices because consumers are really demanding an ability to pay with something other than quarters," Farmer said.
Heartland last year promoted its system to interested laundry operators at trade shows. Since Jan. 1, laundry operators have deployed some 2,000 machines equipped with Heartland's system, Farmer said. The company plans to more than double that total by the end of the year.
Farmer estimated there are some 4.5 million laundry machines in the U.S.
Laundry operators may choose to include coin acceptance on machines.
"We're seeing that about 50% of the operators that are deploying these machines do it card only, and the other 50% are doing card and coin," Farmer said. Heartland includes coin acceptance for unbanked consumers.
"Vending machines, parking meters and laundry machines all provide a good opportunity to capture micropayments," Adil Moussa, an analyst with Aite Group LLC, said in an interview.
