Working at the bill face
The problems that confront makers and users of cash handling systems, particularly those geared to dealing with notes or bills, are not going to go away no matter how technology tries to level the playing field by offering more processing power for fewer bucks to the makers of hardware. Bill validators are literally the gatekeepers of what goes in to a casino’s cash handling system, and have to deal with a group of variables that combine together to make matters surprisingly complex. Other bill handling equipment down the line, including automated sorters and counters, has to deal with a similar set of difficulties, but will be dealing with validated bills rather than random currency that has come in off the street.
So what are the challenges faced at the bill validator slot? First, the customer standing in front of a slot that takes paper currency needs to feel comfortable and confident that the cash proffered is going to be accepted. Like most people, players can take some rejection, but keep spitting perfectly valid bills back at them, and they will soon loose heart. Similarly, once a note disappears from view, the player wants the appropriate credit, and prompt resolution of any dispute that results from a jam. To keep customers happy, bills need to be accepted readily.
One of the hurdles bill validators need to clear if casino operators are to be kept happy, involves rejecting counterfeit currency. Bill validators rely on drawing a note mechanically over sensors and then comparing what they ‘see’ with what they expect to see, before making a very quick decision whether to accept or decline. An immediate trade-off is posed between being super-cautious about only accepting valid bills and being ‘fuzzy’ enough in the bill recognition process to accept the real-world condition of players’ valid currency.
The physical size of paper currency varies from country to country, and national banks regularly revise designs for notes, and tinker with denominations too, which adds headaches for manufacturers of validators. Of course, even with the latest set of reference designs for the paper currency being accepted on board, a bill validator will not be dealing with mint condition notes, but ‘street’ bills, that can be defaced and damaged in myriad ways, from scrawled count figures added by bookkeepers, through rips and crumples to general grime and dirt.
Apart from needing to be capable of upgrade to keep them abreast of data on new note designs and on new counterfeits on the street, bill validators need to be physically maintained, cleaned and repaired like all equipment with moving parts that works in a potentially dirty environment.
And as is the case with almost all the kit on the casino floor, operators generally want to reduce machine downtime and reduce maintenance costs, so facilities that help them manage their stock of bill validators, ideally anticipating problems before they arise, are likely to be welcomed.

Acceptance rates – myth and magic
The percentage of (valid) bills accepted, or acceptance rate, is the basic benchmark that seems to be applied across the board. Caution may be needed, however, in comparing manufacturer’s figures and expecting to be able to compare like-for-like.
MEI, for instance extracts audit data from validator hardware, and believes that using the number of motor starts to calculate Acceptance Rates delivers the purest count. Okay, so everything is tracked including those times when the player tries to feed a player card or other inappropriate item, which accounts MEI quoting acceptance rates in a range between 97 percent and 99 percent, while in some real situations, 100 percent acceptance rates are achieved, it claims.
‘First Time’ are apparently important words when it comes to comparing acceptance rates between manufacturers, and it is always going to be difficult, in the uncontrolled environment of a casino floor, to know how many refusals result from genuinely unacceptable bills…
Acceptance rate may not be such a major factor today, when keeping tabs on how equipment is working, minimizing the time and cost of maintenance and maximizing machine uptime are the main points of differentiation among savvy operators.

Collecting data along with cash
For all but slot hall applications in developing markets, casino slot machines will feature bill validators with stackers. The stacker or cashbox inside the machine becomes a small, portable safe for the cash. The secure cashbox not only receives the money, but retains it and allows for easy and quick extraction of the cash from machines by the drop team on the casino floor. Essentially, a quick swap with an empty cashbox means that machine downtime is minimal, and the cashbox will be taken back to the softcount area where its contents will be counted.
Increasingly, it looks as if cashboxes will do more than collect the money, but will be harnessed to collect data about the machines in which they sit and deliver it, with cash, to the operator.
JCM’s Nieman feels his company still has the lead, with its ICB (Intelligent Cash Box): “Our ICB is the most advanced, most secure cash box available and gives full reporting and asset tracking that is not available on competitive products,” he says.
“The ICB is the very heart of the entire casino’s accounting system, from slots and table games to the back office. Because the ICB automates the cash handling process, time spent in the entire process – from count room to cage to accounting – is dramatically reduced.
“For example, after our ICB was installed at her property, Linda Canada, general manager of Fire Lake Casino in Shawnee, Oklahoma, said: “Right away we saw changes in the number of employees it took to drop the floor. We reduced our staff in the pull and count by five; this means we reduced the drop/pull staff requirement by 45 percent after installing ICB. The streamlined drop processes allowed me to reduce our pull and count staff expenditure by $125,000 per year.”,” Nieman reports. But JCM doesn’t have the market to itself…
“Given our expertise in security and acceptance, extending beyond the game and into the soft count room is a natural progression for MEI,” explains Mark Greenawalt, MEI’s European Gaming Director. “Our Easitrax system has been introduced at several casinos to rave reviews and will be launched internationally soon.”
RFID technology allows operators to align a cashbox with a particular slot machine. The cashbox knows how much money is inside and communicates that to the soft count room without the need to open the box. Manual writing and wanding are eliminated. The result is a reduction in required labor and an increase in efficiency.
“The amount of detail that can be extracted, and the ease in which the system operates is revolutionary,” says Greenawalt. The slot manager, just through the process of dropping cash, will know exactly what is happening on the floor – the quantity of 20-, 50- and 100-denomination notes, which assets those came from, how many jams and the acceptance rate from each machine, and latest version of software throughout the floor.”
The first US casino to go live with Easitrax was the Four Winds in Michigan. “That installation has allowed us to verify the value of this product,” says Greenawalt. “Now, as casinos hear about the results at Four Winds and subsequent installations, they are lining up around the world to be next.
“Easitrax provides the means to quickly get detailed information collected, collated and into the hands of the slot manager to take immediate action,” says Greenawalt. “It is consistent with what our customers have come to expect from MEI. We may not have been the first to market, but our product has redefined expectations from the industry.”

Diagnostics, maintenance and on-floor upgrades
The MEI Portable Programming Module (PPM) and Support Tool Suite (STS) system allows new software to be loaded from a hand-held device into a bill validator in under 25 seconds, according to Greenawalt.
“It also allows operators to take audit data directly from the slot machine. So instead of just allowing you to put data in, information can now be extracted from the bill validator to track performance and properly check the acceptance rate (by calculating the number of motor starts compared to the number of stacked notes).
“The other thing STS provides is the ability to troubleshoot potential problems. Diagnostics are provided to review the motors and sensor performance while the unit is still inside the slot machine. This service helps create the greatest amount of uptime and, as a result, the greatest opportunity for players to play. It’s another feature that sets MEI apart from the competition.”
Money Controls' makes similar claims about the Ardac Elite EP, its single-button, battery-powered, hand-held device, as Group Applications Manager, David John, explained: "With this device, new note tables can be downloaded to an Ardac Elite bill acceptor in ten seconds. What's more, it enables data from up to 250 different machines, including acceptance rates and denomination of notes, to be extracted and analysed on a simple-to-use Excel spreadsheet."
"We also supply an equally simple-to-use, PC-based, service tool which allows a casino to diagnose and recalibrate units in the unlikely event of a repair being required."
As an alternative to on-site updating, some operators, particularly those with multiple sites, are already taking advantage of the easy download of new Money Controls note tables by simply updating remotely from a central server.
CashCode is no newcomer into the payment systems field. In fact CashCode started its operations in Canada in 1985. Over the years CashCode had been admired by many companies, but most notably in 2006 When Crane Co., a 150-year old $2.5B manufacturer of highly diversified engineered products purchased CashCode. The acquisition was a strategic one which led to the formation of a new entity, Crane Payment Solutions.
National Rejectors Inc, a German maker of coin validators, change-makers and cashless payment systems for a variety of applications, and Telequip, which provides standalone and embedded coin dispensing solutions across a broad range of retail and hospitality markets, are the other two companies that form Crane Payment Solutions with CashCode.
CashCode’s international strength in the casino bill validator market is centred on its range of FrontLoad validators. The company has been successful in many global markets including South America, South Africa as well as Eastern Europe. CashCode’s products verify bills and stack them into a lockable-removable cassette. The unit is secured inside to the back wall or sidewall of the host machine, providing easy front access to the cassette when the machine is open.
While the current FrontLoad series of products is available in a wide range of configurations, capable of supporting different protocols, the range divides into two basic groups: fixed width and multi-width. Fixed-width FrontLoad validators are available with 67mm or 71mm width options, while multi-width validators use patented self-centering transport guides that automatically adjust to, and align bills of different widths even when fed at an angle - ideal for countries that don’t have a standard width for all their bank notes. The multi-width validator can deal with bills between 62mm and 85mm width. Software updates can be delivered via Smart Stick, and CashCode quotes an acceptance rate of 98 percent or greater on first insertion of bank notes or barcoded tickets.
According to Sim Bielak, CashCode’s VP, Global Gaming, the next generation FrontLoad validators is being designed to further benefit operators and OEMs alike. “This product has been under development for some time and currently being tested at various properties worldwide. We conducted many VOC (Voice of the Customer) sessions to ensure we encapsulated the features required in today’s competitive marketplace. The result will be a product that will deliver improved performance on slot and table games and deliver incremental increases in revenue for casino operators.”

Towards the future – full face, full colour
Money Controls' Ardac Elite bill acceptors take a different approach to bill validation – rather than sampling areas of a note, they take a whole image of both sides of the note using six different wavelengths of light. This has some interesting spin-offs, not least the facility to display a full-colour image of the last note inserted on a standard PDA within a couple of seconds of plugging it in to a validator unit at which there is a bill dispute in progress with a player. Clearly, this can save opening the machine or peering through a window in the cashbox to see the last note accepted, which could lead to less player disruption or machine downtime.
The PDA link shows useful and unique potential, according to David John of Money Controls, but integration with the whole backoffice system in a casino is the company's focus: "The fact that we can send an image to the backoffice system will appeal, for instance, in those jurisdictions where operators are required to hold on to TITO tickets, and currently warehouse them: with Ardac Elite a date- and time-stamped image could be sent to the backoffice system for electronic storage, negating the need to keep the tickets themselves. This is just one possible use in a server-based environment. There are all sorts of other things we are working on – it's up to our imagination and the casino's imagination as to what they can use the information for. We do provide a lot more information on each bill or ticket than any other bill acceptor, and are discussing with operators and OEMs how we can best use the data which Ardac Elite is able to gather."
"It's early days yet, but Ardac Elite is certainly the bill acceptor for server-based gaming – it's the only one on the market that gives you a full image of both sides of the note or ticket," he says. "This technology was developed initially to deliver the first-time highest acceptance of street-grade bills and highest detection of frauds, but we soon realised it had the potential to deliver added-value to operators as they move to server-based gaming."


Towards the future – managing tables like slots?
JCM’s innovative product Trident goes further than being a bunch note feeder that can be used on table games, according to the company’s Tom Nieman. “Often people refer to Trident simply as a bill validator for a table, but that is the very least of its job. Just like you wouldn’t run the slot side of the casino floor without an entire system, that’s the idea behind Trident for the pit – to bring real time, baseline reporting to the pit for the very first time. And we’re talking complete reporting from its bill validator to the back of house reporting and everywhere in between. The Trident system will capture all cash and non-cash events at the table (open / close; marker, marker buy-back; credits, fills and so on),” he says.
Clearly there are significant advantages to be gained from Trident’s facilities, not least of which is that regulators will love fully accountable table games that are operated in a parallel way to slots, and operators will find a great deal of accounting headaches are automated, freeing up staff to concentrate on players and the pit rather than back office concerns.
And Trident is developing its capabilities according to Nieman: “Trident has been coming along very well since we first introduced the initial concept a few years ago. We have been getting invaluable customer feedback, which has led to improvements and expansions in its capabilities, the wing-mount vs. in-table mount is just one example. With the feedback from the beta sites, we have been able to expand Trident’s reporting capabilities, and built in expandable options for the future, meaning that an investment in Trident now will not only bring an incredible system to the pit, but will also open up a world of possibilities for an operator in the future."

TITO

TITO: more than just coin-free – colour and real-time coupons are just around the corner…
Question: What does a Las Vegas taxi driver have in common with an Australian manufacturer of coin recognition equipment?
Answer: They both agree that Ticket-In, Ticket-Out ‘sucks’, although they reach their conclusions from very different perspectives.
The taxi driver, who used to be a regular slot player and who meets, greets and talks to a vast number of casino customers year-round, feels that the experience of playing slots has been much diminished by the TITO. The ‘old days’ of sitting in front of your favourite slot with a bucket of coins were the good days – and you got to hear the clattering cascade of coins every time a slot paid out. The sound of jangling coins encouraged you to keep playing, and the clatter of a hopper emptying on the machine you were playing was part of the reward for winning, the driver explains. Older slot players miss these elements, he says.
And TITO isn’t all its cracked up to be from the casino operator’s experience, according to a coin accepter manufacturer we spoke to. According to Astrosys, the company behind the MicroCoin coin validator there are hidden costs in running TITO, which can include the cost of warehousing redeemed tickets and keeping records on top of the material costs involved in printing them in the first place. “TITO is more expensive than people think it is,” argues Robert Bird, Group Marketing Manager for Astrosys International.
Coin-in is becoming almost extinct in some jurisdictions, which Bird, unsurprisingly, finds troubling – for over four and a half years, the Astrosys Microcoin QL has been the default unit for IGT’s small coin offering. “There should be the opportunity for the average punter whatever they want to into a slot machine,” he argues. If the player has coins in his or her pocket, then the slot should be able to take them. But in Vegas, at least, coin-in and coin-out have pretty much disappeared, to the chagrin of Bird and at least one taxi driver…
And not all casino operators are keen to go coinless. According to Bird, one Canadian casino company decided they wanted to take coin out, ran some tests and found that coin was contributing to the play, so decided not to replace their Microcoin QL units with ticket printers.
That said, with the exception of Australia, TITO is either dominant or making serious headway on gaming floors throughout the world, and is generally popular with operators because it reduces the headaches and costs of paying out on the floor with coins and notes. And it’s about to become an integral part of the whole networked, server-based casino floor and is poised to start playing a major role in targeted player promotions, according to both the leading manufacturers of printers, FutureLogic and TransAct.
John Edmunds, Vice President of International Sales at FutureLogic agrees that investment is required by operators who adopt TITO, but costs are small compared to the cost of handling coins, storing them and doing a hard count. In a large casino operation, coin hoppers could be holding a substantial asset, maybe up to $1million, just sitting on the casino floor. “Coin-in is here for a while,” he argues however. “Coin-out is being phased out – and hoppers are being replaced by printers – TITO frees players up from having to carry buckets full of coins and can increase take for the operator by up to 12 per cent.”
But what is causing most excitement is the potential that TITO offers operators for delivering targeted messages to players, such as promotions that help manage the flow of people around a resort and make the most of capacity at quiet times.
Futurelogic’s aim is to help operators turn their slots into marketing kiosks using PromoNet, a software system the company has developed that allows coupon designs to be created, then linked to triggers such as time of day, or player activity such as length of play and wagering activity, and then built into campaigns. Coupon designs and triggers are downloaded into GEN2 printers on the slot floor via a promotions server, which is also linked in with redemption terminals and player loyalty servers. As the triggers are hit, FutureLogic's GEN2 printer delivers coupon-based promotions to players via the slot they are playing.
A coupon in the hand has a higher perceived value than a comp on a player loyalty card, according to Edmunds. “Players can walk away with something new in their hand,” he explains. “Players can’t see what is on their loyalty card, and they forget what they have seen on screens, they want reminders…and some players won’t have loyalty cards, so how do you market to them?”
While Futurelogic's is working with regulators on approvals for PromoNet and is expecting to trial the system later this year, Transact has taken a different approach.
"We work with the system providers," explains Tracey Chernay, TransAct's Senior Vice President Sales and Marketing. "TransAct makes the printer that the systems providers integrate for a full solution. As server-based gaming expands, the ability to print promotional coupons from the same printer as the ticket is exciting. The concept of real time coupons targeted to players by demographic or their preferences is a strong offering that can drive results."
Thermal printers can deliver impressive-looking coupons, which don't have to be monochrome. For instance, TransAct's Epic 950 printer offers two-colour ticket printing capabilities and can communicate with the game and with the casino's player tracking system. According to Chernay, colour printing hasn't yet caught on in the TITO market, and that's a view shared by John Edmunds: "The media needed to print in black and another colour is very expensive," he says. Operators facing blank ticket costs that are three or four times higher than those for black-only printing aren't fired up by the technology - yet. According to Edmunds, the price of two-colour ticket blanks will need to come down so that they are around one-and-a-half times the price of mono media before casino operators will start using the benefits of two-colour TITO. That said, FutureLogic’s GEN2 printers can deliver mono tickets, or use stock that allows either blue or red to be used with black.
As ever, reliability, convenience and the minimum downtime alongside cost savings are what operators are looking for.

Kiosks

Keeping staff costs down, machines up and running, and players on the floor playing them rather than using gaming time to queue at the cage are key aims for all casino operators.
Kiosks, or at the very least bill-breakers which change larger denomination notes into smaller bills or coin, as well as coin-counting and bill counting equipment, all are components of an automated, more cost-effective cash-handing system that saves employee time and reduces errors, leading to cost savings.
At the simplest level, a kiosk can be an attended jackpot payment system, but self-service kiosks can include an ATM, be self service, and include all cash, player card and ticket functions that are needed, including opening new (anonymous if required) card accounts and issuing player cards, charging or recharging cards, and redeeming tickets and winnings on cards or tickets for cash or bonuses.
Giesecke & Devrient’s Casino-All-In-One Kiosk (Caion for short) can grow alongside an operator’s needs, as the company’s Josef Schoettl explains: "Caion can fulfil all requirements for a casino in terms of automated cashier requirements in each stage. For example, Bavarian casinos are still gambling with coins and they do have a lot of hand plays and jackpots to pay out. We use this machine as a terminal for the employees to pay out for the slot machines, so the employees go to the machine take the jackpot and hand it over to the customer at the slot machine. Later on, if the casinos decide to go coinless, they can just switch over to a customer terminal, to a self-service terminal.”
The Polaris Scorpion has been designed to be a casino kiosk that has a small footprint and that can deal with chipcard and ticket systems for use by customers, and be used as an jackpot payment system by casino staff. It can also be linked in as a satellite to the Polaris Redemption Center. “We make everything ourselves in house, rather than tailor ATM machines, and this means we can offer German quality and flexibility,” says Erik de Kat, who heads up International sales and New Business Development for Hess, the company behind Polaris.
“But we offer German quality at competitive prices – what casino operators need is high quality equipment, but the more machines on the casino floor, the better access the customers have to card or ticket redemption facilities, and our competitive prices is winning us orders.”
The Polaris, too, can grow alongside an operator’s needs and links in with casino management systems from the major suppliers, according to de Kat.
Meanwhile the Cummins Casino Transaction Kiosk, or CTK, is a customer-operated device that offers bill-breaker, coin issue and ticket redemption functions only to customers, but that can be linked with up to 49 other CTKs in a network that allows for remote management, so the operator can monitor real-time currency levels, generate reports and resolve questionable transactions.

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