Debit / ATM / Check Card
A plastic card with a magnetic stripe about the account holders banking institution that acts as cash for the user. Cash withdrawals are posted directly to the holder’s account and the amount is immediately withdrawn from the account of the user. These cards are used in ATMs as well as accepted in all types of retail stores. They only require the user to have a PIN number. The user’s signature is not required.

Physically the card is an ISO 7810 card yet its functionality is like a check and it is often referred to as check cards.

Process: The customer's card is swiped through a card reader or inserted into a chip reader and the merchant usually enters the amount of the transaction before the customer enters their account and PIN. There is usually a short delay while the EFTPOS (Electronic Funds Transfer at Point of Sale) terminal contacts the computer network (over a phone line or mobile connection)
to verify and authorize the transaction. Merchants can also offer "cashback"/"cashout" facilities to customers, where a customer can withdraw cash along with their purchase.

Deploy (er)
Deployer refers (depending on the context) either to the institution where the kiosk is installed and/or the institution investing in a kiosk network. These may be different and in that case deployer always means the institution with the majority financial stake in the kiosk network.

Device Middleware
Integration involves a type of middleware that can‘talk’ to different systems. Device middleware enhances the capability of devices such as ID scanners, check readers, fingerprint scanners and cameras such that their data can be used by the software for logical decisions.

Discover
Cards are issued by a bank owned by Sears. All Discover purchases are authorized by Sears. Most petroleum cards, if they are even authorized, are authorized by the petroleum company itself. There are exceptions. Fraud on petroleum cards is so low that the main reason for authorization is to achieve the float reduction of electronic settlement.

EFT
Acronym for Electronic Funds Transfer. EFT indicates the computerized means used to transfer funds between entities giving rise to the almost cashless society that we have today. Electronic funds transfer or EFT refers to the computer-based systems used to perform financial transactions electronically. EFT can indicate cardholder-initiated transactions, where a cardholder makes use of a payment card or electronic payments by businesses, including salary payments or electronic check (or cheque) clearing.

Embossing
Creating raised letters and numbers on the face of the card.

Enclosure
A box, case or stand designed to hold and protect computer equipment being placed in public or hazardous environments. They are also called Kiosks.

Encoding
Recording data on the magnetic stripe on the back of the card.

Encoding Standards

Track 1 is encoded at 210 bits per inch, and uses a 6-bit coding of a 64-element character set of numerics, alphabet (one case only), and some special characters. Track 1 can hold up to 79 characters, six of which are reserved control characters. Included in these six characters is a Longitudinal Redundancy Check (LRC) character, so that a card reader can detect most read failures. Data encoded on track 1 include PAN, country code, full name, expiration date, and "discretionary data". Discretionary data is anything the issuer wants it to be. Track 1 was originally intended for use by airlines, but many Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) are now using it to personalize prompts with your name and your language of choice. Some credit authorization applications are starting to use track 1 as well.

Track 2 is encoded at 75 bits per inch, and uses a 4-bit coding of the ten digits. Three of the remaining characters are reserved as delimiters, two are reserved for device control, and one is left undefined. In practice, the device control characters are never used, either. Track 2 can hold up to 40 characters, including an LRC. Data encoded on track 2 include PAN, country code (optional), expiration date, and discretionary data. In practice, the country code is hardly ever used by United States issuers. Later revisions of this standard added a qualification code that defines the type of the card (debit, credit, etc.) and limitations on its use. AMEX includes an issue date in the discretionary data. Track 2 was originally intended for credit authorization applications. Nowadays, most ATMs use track 2 as well. Thus, many ATM cards have a "PIN offset" encoded in the discretionary data. The PIN offset is usually derived by running the PIN through an encryption algorithm (maybe DES, maybe proprietary) with a secret key. This allows ATMs to verify your PIN when the host is offline, generally allowing restricted account access.

Track 3 uses the same density and coding scheme as track 1. The contents of track 3 are defined in ANSI X9.1, "American National Standard-Magnetic Stripe Data Content for Track 3". There is a slight contradiction in this standard, in that it allows up to 107 characters to be encoded on track 3, while X4.16 only gives enough physical room for 105 characters. Actually, there is over a quarter of an inch on each end of the card unused, so there really is room for the data. In practice, nobody ever uses that many characters, anyway. The original intent was for track 3 to be a read/write track (tracks 1 and 2 are intended to be read-only) for use by ATMs. It contains information needed to maintain account balances on the card itself. As far as I know, nobody is actually using track 3 for this purpose anymore, because it is very easy to defraud.