Thursday, June 27, 2019
Irfan Nasir, head of solutions development and deployment at Ingenico, said the EPA-registered technology is currently in pilot with a leading healthcare provider. In a June 24, 2019, statement to the press, Nasir mentioned that the antimicrobial additives are injected into the plastic moulds and capacitive screens of the devices to provide cleaner surfaces in places where patients and families congregate, which may include waiting rooms, pharmacies and checkout counters.
Noting that patients spend an average of 20 minutes in hospital waiting rooms, he said, “In a waiting room, when a patient is making a payment or filling out a form on a tablet, they shouldn't have to worry about new risks coming from the device in front of them.”
Mark Bunney, director of go-to-market strategy at Ingenico, pointed out that healthcare facilities frequently use harsh chemicals to clean traditional POS devices, which can cause device plastics to break down. Ingenico’s antimicrobial devices do not require this type of treatment and consequently have longer lifecycles, he stated.
“Ingenico takes a verticalized approach to understanding market dynamics and customer needs,” Bunney said. “When the hotel and lodging space wanted to create RFID room keys at the POS, we developed that capability. When the healthcare market needed to reduce infectious bacteria at the POS, we created antimicrobial terminals.”
Consumer environments are changing, Bunney noted. Growing adoption of tablet POS, touchscreen and smartphone payments solutions means people are touching things more and companies are taking different approaches to maintaining clean workplaces and high-contact surfaces. By limiting the spread of microbes, Ingenico solutions can protect a variety of public venues, he noted.
Mobility has been a top concern for healthcare solution providers; having stationary and portable solutions will help Ingenico’s antimicrobial solutions scale, Bunney stated. “We will make these solutions available to our entire partner ecosystem, enabling all industries, from food service providers to retail merchants, to enhance the check-in and checkout experience,” he added.
J. Brian Merena, executive vice president at Tempus Technologies, an Ingenico partner and retail POS software developer, observed that Ingenico’s new solutions are a timely resource for the healthcare industry, where patients and their families can be exposed to new bacteria and infections. “The check-in and checkout environments are certainly not immune to these risks, but this can be avoided,” he said. “It's become more and more important we work with an innovative payments partner like Ingenico to bring solutions with antimicrobial product protection to these settings for our customers to inhibit the growth of microbes on common touch surfaces.” 
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