One Stop, the Tesco-owned convenience store chain, says it has made significant savings by using its existing systems as the basis for its chip-and-PIN infrastructure.

The company says it has saved £250,000 by adapting the existing electronic point-of-sale (Epos) equipment and systems to protect against liability for processing any fraudulent credit card transactions.

'One of the key requirements for us was that we had to be able to use what we already had in a cost-effective way,' said One Stop IT director David Anderson.

'Essentially, we are using the system we already had, but enabled to do chip-and-PIN. The Epos system we implemented in 2000 had components that were not designed with chip-and-PIN in mind.'

The retailer worked with Epos vendor Anker to update the system in its 516 stores with new card readers and routers, along with some system re-configuration work. And it says staff prefer the new authorisation process.

'Most of our customers pay by cash,' said Anderson. 'So we had to be very careful about our choice of investment, given that credit card use is not as much compared with some larger supermarkets.

'Chip-and-PIN is a challenge for all convenience store businesses,' he said.