Is TITO about to transform the street market or do players still prefer cash? Simon Liddle considers the future of payments within the street gaming market.
TICKETS have been widely prevalent in the international casino industry, but have largely remained on the periphery within the street market… until now. As operators seek to streamline cash handling and free up capital, does ticket-in, ticket-out technology offer the ideal solution? It is a concept that is beginning to find its ways into larger gaming halls and arcades in certain jurisdictions and could very well be applied to gaming machines found in pubs and bars. The question is, will players be willing to set aside the notion of playing with and being paid out in coins?
In the US, the majority of the 950,000 slot machines in operation, the bulk of which are in casinos rather than street locations, are now equipped with the TITO system. Players insert their bills into a validator at the machine and are paid out in tickets that can then either be redeemed at the cash desk or terminal, or inserted into another machine. TITO largely eliminated the need for coins, although some venues will still cater to the minority of players who prefer to play with coins. Since the 1990s and the introduction of the system in the US, TITO is now commonplace in casino markets around the world and widely accepted by players.
For operators, the main advantage to implementing TITO is removing as much cash as possible from a machine and reducing the “dead” cash on site, said Aristidis Tsikouras, managing director of Gauselmann Group subsidiary GeWeTe, the Germany-based cash-handling solutions company. GeWeTe has been at the forefront of cash-recycling technologies, with its Cash Recycler cabinet able to cater to a variety of payment options.
“By removing the cash-out element of the machine, the down time of machines has decreased considerably, thus reducing service charges due to component failure,” he said. “Each payout is now a quick and secure printing of the ticket. The players don’t have to wait for coins to be paid out or hand-pays to be made, making it a more discrete process for the player.”
Tickets are a secure transaction and are monitored by the host system to ensure no copies can be redeemed, reducing fraud, he explained.
Fellow German company Crown Technologies, part of the Austrian gaming giant Novomatic, has installed its SlimChange redemption terminal, featuring a TITO system, at Kurhessische Spielbank in Kassel. One of the largest slot floors in Germany and the first in the country to introduce TITO, it has seen a strong acceptance rate among players. The benefits for the operator itself, said Crown managing director Heiko Busse, are clear.
Read the full article in the February issue of InterGame
