'Chip & PIN' at the practice
In the UK over 7,000 Dental Practices accept cards as a form of payment for their treatments.
Iain High, managing director at Anderson Zaks, explains some of the new options now available to practices for taking payments, and how they could, potentially, be saving significant sums.

To accept card payments in your Practice you will need to set up a merchant facility, through a card processor who will capture the payment transaction details from the cardholder, and settle the funds to your bank account. This standard card processing service includes set up and installation of a payment terminal, which is provided through a range of fees to you the merchant.

With over 94% of the UK adult population holding either a debit or credit card, it is no surprise that practices with private patients take on average 1,000 card transactions a month. With this in mind, anything that can reduce the cost of handling cards is therefore welcome.

In High Street retail most department stores, supermarkets and fashion chains deploy an ‘integrated ‘ solution for card acceptance. This means that their point of sale system (equivalent to a dentists practice management system) is integrated to incorporate a PIN pad and the direct communication to the card processor is via broadband rather than a dedicated PSTN or ISDN line. This technology is now available to dentists. The first practices using this solution report that they will be saving anything up to £100 per month in terms of payment terminal charges, telecoms and practice labour costs.

The first Practice Management solution provider deploying this service is Stevenage based, PracticeWorks which is the worlds’ largest supplier of dental practice management software and digital imaging systems. Neil Sanderson, who is Sales Director at PracticeWorks confirmed that his customers are seeing significant savings and says, “We will be fully launching this service at the BDTA Conference this November to all PracticeWorks users now that we have approvals from the UK acquiring banks to offer this service.”

The majority of British Dental Association (BDA) members use RBS WorldPay’s face to face product Streamline for their card processing.

A spokesperson from RBS WorldPay commented, “We are delighted that BDA members can be offered a lower cost , secure PCI-DSS approved method of processing their credit card transactions with our bank.”
The system being offered by PracticeWorks has been developed with Anderson Zaks, one of the UK’s leading providers of integrated payment solutions.