CrossCheck, Inc. opened for business in 1983. In those days, almost every merchant accepted checks at the point of sale. Merchants that took credit cards were using a “knuckle-buster” with multi-part carbon forms to process a transaction. They put the card in the holder, ran the imprinter back and forth over it, extracted the forms, sorted them, and sent some to the bank and others to the processor. Two years earlier, the card associations announced that transactions over $50 which were processed with a point-of-sale system would get discounted pricing. Early POS systems were priced at $900, which the average merchant could not afford. But something happened in 1982: Verifone rocked the merchant world with a POS terminal that cost only $125, the ZON. This changed everything.
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