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Beginning in January, University of Maine students will be able to use their debit or credit cards at all dining venues on campus.
Benny Veenhof, director of technology management at Auxiliary Services, said dining services at the university has been aiming to make this change for a while. Veenhof said the problem was with Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards that made the use of debit and credit cards unavailable in dining’s sytem until this year.
“Many payment application vendors had to rewrite a lot of their software to be in compliance with new payment application data security standards,” Veenhof said. “Blackboard, our vendor, was listed on the PCI security standards Web site to be complaint as of July 17, 2009. The university was then able to upgrade the MaineCard system to this new system.”
Director of dining operations Kathy Kittridge said once the university upgraded to this new system, it purchased the software needed to fix the current one and now has to wait.
“What happens is when you swipe a credit card, the number [of the card] doesn’t get stored anywhere, and that’s called PCI Compliance. We didn’t have the software that could do that on our old registers, and that was sort of a newer compliance issue. So we purchased the software this summer in August, and now we’re waiting on the software company to install this piece for us, which is supposed to be completed and ready to go by January,” Kittridge said.
Kittridge said there is no specific date for the debit and credit card system to begin in January; dining services is ready to accommodate the new system at any time.
“If it’s ready sooner, we’re ready as far as taking them sooner,” Kittridge said, “but it’s just a matter of getting the last piece of the software in place.”
Since dining services is self-operated and not funded by UMaine, Kittridge said it will cost a little more to add the system and that after each swipe of a debit or credit card, dining will be charged between 20 to 70 cents. Kittridge hopes the new service will increase business enough to cover the new charge.
“Every time there’s a transaction, there is a cost to dining services,” Kittridge said. “We don’t anticipate raising [food] prices to cover it; certainly that is not the plan. The plan is to make it more convenient so that hopefully it will generate enough additional revenue to cover the costs of the transactions.”
Ross Wolland, vice president of Student Government Inc., said it is rare for students to not own a debit or credit card, and the new system will be a helpful convenience.
“Debit cards are just extremely prevalent in our society today. Most students don’t come to campus without a debit card or a credit card,” Wolland said. “I think it’s important that when they get here, that we have a system that they’re used to. It sort of becomes inconvenient to make sure that you have dining funds or cash on you just in case you go to the Union. So it’s just good to have it.”
Bangor Daily News