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Case study: Hungarian café rolls out electronic payment

By Retail Technology | Friday July 4 2014

Historic Café Gerbeaud’s new payment infrastructure offers lower commission fees and Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC)

Originally founded in Hungary over 150 years ago, Café Gerbeaud has evolved from humble origins into a tourist hotspot that has survived changes in ownership, moves and two world wars.

Now present across Europe, Gerbeaud's remains a key destination for visitors to Budapest seeking old school elegance, welcoming over 350,000 customers through its door each year. 

Today, Café Gerbeaud offers a full range of hospitality: the café itself with its turn-of-the-century elegance and atmosphere, the bistro with foods prepared by an in-house butcher, the 1 Michelin star Onyx Restaurant and numerous banquet and reception halls available for private hire.  

Getting tech savvy

“Café Gerbeaud is steeped in history and is now a ‘must see’ destination in Budapest,” commented Attila Niszkács, key account manager at Café Gerbeaud. “However, even an institution with such a rich sense of tradition needs to operate as efficiently as possible in a modern and competitive retail environment.”

The café realised that many customers wished to pay electronically and started to seek an electronic payments provider.

Following a competitive tender process, Swiss-based processing company SIX Payments Services was commissioned to implement a new electronic payments infrastructure for the business. 

The new solution delivered reliable and innovative payments systems as well as several other key features including international foreign exchange processing.

“When beginning the search for an electronic payments provider, there were several important criteria that needed to be met including experience, sector expertise, international payment capabilities and the ability to cope with increased seasonal volumes,” explained Niszkács.

Keeping costs down

Lower commission fees were a key attraction to Gerbeaud’s. With such a high proportion of its clientele coming from abroad, the café was keen to keep the cost of transactions on foreign cards to a minimum

The availability of Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC) was also significant as although Hungary is part of the European Union, it has not adopted the Euro. The ability for customers to view the bill in their local currency is a major plus. 

Café Gerbeaud is using SIX DCC-enabled premium terminals and there are future plans in place to implement a Virtual Point of Sale (VPOS) solution so that advance payments for table reservations can be made via internet.