High-street retailer Uniqlo has cut the cost of processing credit card transactions by 90 per cent by upgrading part of its store network to broadband speeds.

Mark Bulmer, Uniqlo IT and property manager, says the company had already realised significant benefits by upgrading its stores to a managed ADSL virtual private network last year, but continued to use dial-up for card transactions.

‘We experienced significant downtime in processing credit cards. The ISDN charges for dialling up each time a card was swiped was also expensive,’ said Bulmer.

Uniqlo decided to bring its network card transaction processing up to the same standard as the rest of its store communications to comply with new chip-and-PIN till facilities.

The clothing firm worked with vendor Itim on the till deployment and telecoms service provider TFM is managing Uniqlo’s IP-based authorisation network connectivity from Tiscali.

‘We have taken 10 to 15 seconds out of every transaction. When you consider we process about 20,000 card transactions a week, it adds up to a lot,’ he said.

‘This upgrade will pay for itself within a year.’