POSA (Point Of Sale Activation) at a glance

From : intelecard.com.

POSA is a generic term that describes the many different types of transactions and services available at the point of sale that support the sale of stored value products. Thus, POSA is not only about activation, it also refers to balance inquiries, refunds, voids; refresh, report printing and can even include services, such as real-time web-based queries.

1. All offline POSA solutions are some type of PIN-printing solution.

2. Offline POSA solutions cannot provide as many features as complete online solutions.

3. Large national retail chains require online solutions because they demand a full suite of POSA features, often including in-store refresh and other custom transactions. Most of these solutions are host-to-host.

4. Payment card emulation solutions, often referred to as Visa emulation or debit card emulation, are online solutions, but because of their underlying technology, can provide only limited features.

5. PIN-printing devices eliminate the need to produce cards with individual encoding thereby reducing the cost of the card stock or eliminating it all together.

6. Some PIN-printing devices connect online to an intermediate computer system and thus are hybrid systems because they can provide real-time web-based transaction reporting but not true online functionality, such as in-store refresh or balance inquiry.

7. PIN printing almost always requires the retailer to own a special PIN-printing POSA terminal.

8. Online POSA can be integrated into existing POS software or loaded onto existing POS equipment.

9. POSA is complicated. All of these rules are generalizations.