Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | March 2014 28 FEATURE L ast month’s ICE Totally Gaming expo in London witnessed the launch of a new brand promising the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio of cash management solutions for gaming, financial, retail, transport and vending markets. Crane Payment Innovations, or CPI, was born of the recent acquisition of MEI by Crane Co., consolidating the note and coin products offered by MEI and Conlux, as well as Crane Payment Solutions’ Cashcode, Money Controls, NRI and Telequip brands. “The MEI side is predominantly cash, currency, physical bills and notes, while CPS is primarily coin products,” explains Tom Nugent, CPI’s new president of Gaming and Retail—the position he formerly held at MEI. “By bringing those together, we’re able to offer our customers a portfolio of technologies and service all of their needs.” Born of Consolidation Tom Nugent, Crane Payment Innovations’ president of Gaming and Retail, extols the virtues of being bigger and broader in the automated payment systems field Crane Payment Innovations held a launch event at last month’s ICE Totally Gaming expo. “The combined knowledge of CPI allows us to offer customers the personnel, experience and products to find solutions that impact the bottom line,” adds Mr. Nugent. “And, ultimately, that is how we should be measured. We aspire to set a new standard—driving transaction, asset and maintenance efficiencies into customers’ operations.” While mergers inevitably lead to speculation about removal of duplicate product lines across the two companies involved, Mr Nugent stresses that CPI’s inclination is to maintain a diversity of offerings. “We know there are some minor overlaps and we will take a hard look at that, but our mantra is ‘customers first; no customer left behind.’ So if somebody is enjoying a certain technology the last thing we want to do is take away something that works for their business. We put in a lot of effort to make sure our customers are satisfied with the technologies we’re bringing.” The new entity will enjoy expanded capabilities, according to Mr Nugent. “My engineering team grows by 40%. Now we have the ability to develop new technologies together whereas perhaps we were previously both developing competing similar technologies. We’ll also have more capability on the sales side and the tech support side—the way we interface with our customers. We’re just broader and stronger.” Whereas MEI was previously owned by private equity firms, “Now being owned by a public company and one that’s aggressively investing in this space is very exciting for us,” adds Mr Nugent. “If you look at what Crane has done and how many acquisitions