Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | March 2012 28 TransAct T ransAct Technologies says Asia is in the race to be the next region to launch the company’s ground-breaking Epicentral®Print System for casinos. Epicentral works in conjunction with TransAct’s Epic 950® ticket printer—a product that is already widely installed in many slot machines in Asia. Epicentral allows casino operators to create promotional coupons and marketing messages for uncarded as well as carded players and print those promotions in real time at a slot machine, an electronic table game, or even at a live table in properties where ticket-in/ticket-out technology is available on live games. The system also works with the casino operator’s own database, rather than trying to create a new database from scratch. Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut in the United States recently equipped 1,100 of its slot machines with Epicentral—as TransAct’s test site—and printed close to half a million coupons during the test. And in early February, Nisqually RedWind Casino in Olympia, Washington, introduced Epicentral to all its 975 slots. TransAct has targeted European casino markets for the next phase of Epicentral’s launch. But Tracey Chernay, Executive Vice President, Sales & Marketing, says there’s a chance Asia could beat Europe to the punch. Inside Asian Gaming spoke to her at ICE 2012 in London to learnmore about the Epicentral marketing campaign andTransAct’s growing portfolio of technology partners. IAG : What’s the next phase of Epicentral’s product launch? Tracey Chernay : Europe was the next logical step after North America, and Asia will be next after that. We’re very active in the Asian market as you know—in Macau and elsewhere—and we feel that Epicentral is a perfect fit for those customers in Macau, for example. We’ve got a number of active prospects there. So the race is on. We’ll see whether it’s an Asian casino or a European casino that’s next to launch Epicentral. What are the key points for the industry to understand regarding Epicentral? Epicentral is a way for casinos to take their existing Epic 950 printers and turn them into networked printers that print promotional coupons, marketing messages and to communicatewith theplayers directly at the game while the player is playing. What sort of promotions can be delivered? Any number of incentives can be provided. It might be to move an uncarded player to being a carded player. It could be for entering people into slot tournaments or for keeping your players playing longer. Is the fact that Epicentral will work with existing Epic 950 printers an important selling point? We’ve said all along that the 950 is dual port and will support coupon printing. We’re simply asking customers to leverage the investment they have already made with their existing TransAct Epic 950. With the Epicentral System they don’t have to take their existing printer out. What else have you been exhibiting at ICE? We also have at ICE a simple ‘ticket out’ solution featuring our Epic 950 printer that we’re offering in conjunction with Eurocoin for the pub [slot games] and AWP [amusement with prizes] market in Europe. It’s a ticket validation and payment system called ThomasPay. Eurocoin bought Thomas and its kiosk systems several months ago. Now Eurocoin has developed the [ThomasPay] pay station, the ticket pay and integrated them with the Epic 950. So we’re excited about it. How does it work? It’s for an existing AWP machine or an older slot that’s not equipped with a ticket printer. It allows the venue to offer a ticket out solution that is fully part of a Epic Performance TransAct’s Epicentral ™ Print System is coming to Asia very soon TransAct’s Tracey Chernay The Epic 950® ticket printer