INSIDE Contactless powers cashless payments at Thailand school
08 September, 2008
category: Contactless, Education, Financial
The International School of Bangkok in Thailand has tapped INSIDE Contactless to implement the school’s first cashless payment system. INSIDE partner Vertical Payment Solutions has integrated the CAMPUS payment application into the identity cards carried by students and staff, which enables them to tap their smart cards to buy food at the canteen, purchase uniforms and stationary, make photocopies, print documents and purchase items online or from campus kiosks. Parents can also add funds to accounts, set daily spending limits and monitor student activity such as tracking attendance or banning certain food items to promote healthy eating.
Based on INSIDE’s PicoPass contactless memory technology, the CAMPUS smart card stores the cardholder’s personal information and provides access to a cash value that can be topped up using payment gateways integrated into the CAMPUS Online web page or from cash acceptors built into the CAMPUS kiosk. The CAMPUS payment arrangement allows schools to participate in the program at very little setup cost, and once the system is operational it is self-funding. The Australian School in Singapore, the first to use the CAMPUS system, has been set up as a showcase for the CAMPUS solution.
“INSIDE has worked very closely with Vertical Payment Solutions as our partner for this project to help adapt our PicoPass cards for a variety of proximity and vicinity contactless applications within the campus and to ensure that our various reader solutions provided the performance and security required for each application,” said GOH Say Yeow, executive vice president of sales and managing director for Asia Pacific at INSIDE Contactless. “PicoPass is the open-standards solution of choice for dual protocol (ISO 1443-B, ISO 15693) use in a broad range of low-end ID, access control, stored value and other applications, and we are excited to have it play such a pivotal role in this cashless campus payment system.”
“With more than 1000 students and staff converging on the canteen at meal times, long lines at the cashier were commonplace, but now a quick tap of the CAMPUS Card is all that’s necessary to purchase a meal, relieving this congestion while helping us reduce our administration costs by eliminating cash from the canteen,” said Stephen Lehmann, director of information technology at the Bangkok school.