Taxis go high-tech

TAXIS in Cyprus are slowly embracing technology used by their European counterparts by installing in-car equipment to accept credit card payments.

Sotiris Tsigarides, head of Finlandia Taxis in Nicosia, yesterday told the Cyprus Mail that he had installed three machines into his cars. Named TaxiTronic, they have been brought from Barcelona in Spain and serve a variety of uses, with the aim of meeting all the taxi driver’s needs.

Tsigarides installed TaxiTronic into his cars nearly a year ago, but said he has so far been unable to use the credit card payment facility due to problems with the GSM modem, which is connected to the CyTA network.
It has not been all bad news, though, as the system is hooked into Finlandia’s central controlling system, making bookings easier to manage, enabling drivers to print out receipts for customers and able to receive SMS messages. It also comes with a Global Positioning System (GPS), which will be used in the near future for satellite navigation purposes, once the roads on the island have been electronically mapped.

However, the equipment does not come cheap. A taxi meter terminal, GSM modem, bar code reader, printer and antenna costs approximately £1,500.

Once the credit card system is up and running, Tsigarides forecasts no problems with fraud, saying the system runs flawlessly in many countries around Europe, including Spain and Italy.

But he was critical of the monopoly exercised by JCC Payment Systems, Cyprus’s only credit card payment processing company, saying he had had to wait six months before they gave him the green light for the use of TaxiTronic.

“There should be another company like JCC in Cyprus, to offer some competition. This would speed up decisions.”

Finlandia, however, seems to be in the minority when it comes to using the new technology. Orphanou Taxis said that “very few customers ask to pay with a credit card and they are nearly always foreigners. We do not see any benefits in installing the equipment and have not looked into it”.

VIPS, another local taxi firm, had not even heard of the technology.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.