STRATEGIC PARTNERS
Tidel tweaks its popular Ignition Series and Chameleon to offer its distributors and their customers more freedom of choice.
February 19, 2001
With an eye toward added flexibility for its distributors and their retail customers, Tidel Engineeringintroduced revamped versions of its popular Ignition Series ATM and Chameleon at the recent National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) Show in New Orleans.
With the Ignition Series, Houston-based Tidel concluded that one machine was better than two. The new is2000 gives deployers all of the options previously found on both the is1000 and is6000 models.
ISOs can outfit a machine to their customers' liking -- choosing from one to four cassettes, a monochrome or color screen, one to four megabytes of memory and modems of varying speeds. Tidel also switched dispensers, from the two different De La Rue models used on the is1000 and is6000 to a single Fujitsu dispenser on the is2000.
"It can be built to spec without having to change platforms or dispensers," said Mike Hudson, Tidel Engineering's executive vice president and COO.
Hudson contends that upgrades aren't as simple with other popular retail ATMs. "If you have a Mako or a MiniBank 1000 and you want to add an advertising program, you have to replace the whole unit (with a 9600 or a MiniBank 2100)," he said, mentioning two of Tidel's closest competitors. "With ours, you just replace the display and board."
Tommy Glenn, president of Jackson, Miss.-based Financial Technologies, one of Tidel's biggest distributors, said that the added flexibility could be a strong sales tool. "It gives you an opportunity to sell to all the different components of the market, whether they're looking for more functionality or whether they're very price driven."
Using the same components and the same systems makes it easier for Tidel's distributors to service and manage the machines, Hudson added.
Glenn lauded Tidel for incorporating the changes while maintaining a similar look and feel with the is2000. "We have customers with a few hundred Tidels. They can add these in, and they'll look the same as the terminals they already have," he said.
Another major change sure to be welcomed by distributors: Tidel adjusted the pricing in response to the downward pressure of the market. According to Hudson, distributors can buy an is2000 comparably equipped to an is1000 for about 20 percent less wholesale.
Tidel also made some modifications to the Chameleon, its advanced-function ATM that runs on a Windows NT operating system. Perhaps the most significant is a reduction in footprint, so that it can easily replace any other Tidel terminal or one of the company's competitors. And like the is2000, distributors will have more options when configuring the machine – a choice of five dispensers, for example.
A more significant development than the physical changes, however, is the partnerships the company is forging with third parties like San Jose, Calif.-based Ten Square and Irving, Texas-based ACE Cash Express.
Ten Square, a digital media company, will help deliver ATM advertising, including full-motion video, to Tidel's machines. A full-motion video/coupon demonstration, featuring Ten Square technology, was a prominent feature at the NACS booth.
ACE, the country's largest owner, operator and franchiser of check-cashing outlets, is conducting a pilot with 10 Chameleons and will process all check-cashing transactions that originate at Chameleon terminals. Tidel aims to launch check cashing in the first quarter of 2001.
According to Glenn, interest in the Chameleon will grow with the announcement of these partnerships. Advanced functionality is a way for ISOs to differentiate themselves in the increasingly competitive ATM world.
"We've all thought it would be a good idea to have terminals that could deliver multiple products and to do it through the Internet because of the broad potential functionality it gave you, but no one's ever had a deliverable product," he said. "Through these partners, I think (Tidel) is going in the right direction. Having a product to deliver makes it valuable."
Tidel is opting for a "very staged release" of advanced applications as the market for them develops, said Mark Levenick, Tidel's president and CEO. It makes little sense to offer a product if the market and the infrastructure aren't there, he added. "Why spend the money putting an optical scanner in a device if there's no revenue stream there?"
Bill payment and money order dispensing are likely candidates for the next round of new applications, Levenick said.
With the Chameleon, he added, ISOs will have the ultimate opportunity to differentiate themselves by creating their own software applications using standard development tools. Tidel will assist its distributors "in every way we can," he said.
Levenick compared advanced functionality at the ATM to the early days of retail deployment. While it's a product that many retailers want, they'd rather let a third party -- i.e. an ISO -- take care of most of the details. Retailers began signing ATM contracts en masse only when ISOs offered turnkey programs in which all they had to do was provide a phone line and make a monthly lease payment.
He predicted that adoption of advanced functionality will follow a similar course. And as with early retail deployments, manufacturers will help ISOs develop the business. "What worked before will work again," he said.
Both Hudson and Levenick anticipate that Tidel will have a record year when unit sales for 2000 are tallied. According to Hudson, Tidel sold 12,500 units in the fiscal year and expects to reach the 14,000 mark for the calendar year.
A large number of those units were purchased by Tidel's biggest distributor, Philadelphia-based Credit Card Center. Recently, CCC announced that it was shifting a portion of its business to Dayton, Ohio-based NCR. Richard Kallok, CCC's operations director, said that the addition of NCR won't necessarily mean a reduction in business for Tidel, however, as CCC intends to buy a large number of terminals from both manufacturers.
Hudson said that Tidel is "continuing to build and develop relationships" with distributors and expects to announce some exclusive relationships in 2001.
