A Global Leader in the Design, Manufacture, and Sale of NFC Based Secure Cashless Payment Products and Solutions: On Track Innovations (OTI) Ltd

“We offer complete certified and pre-certified cashless payment solutions for unattended retail markets.”

While the global level of cash payments still remains very high at the level of 85% of all consumer transactions, the world is steadily pacing towards cashless society concept. A cashless society is a society where currency notes or cash money are not used in monetary transactions. Established in 1990 OTI is a pioneer and leading developer of cutting-edge cashless payment technologies.

Payment as a Lifestyle Enabled By OTI

One of the leading fintech companies, OTI focuses on three major verticals, those being vending, Micro Markets and self-checkout kiosks, and Smart ATM’s. The company has a worldwide presence with its headquarters and R&D center based in Israel.

It has three major divisions. Its main division serves the unattended retail markets with cashless payment and telemetry products and solutions. Secondly, it deals with ticketing for mass transit systems, operated by the company’s wholly owned subsidiary, ASEC. The third division is in commercial fuel management systems, where OTI PetroSmart has developed a world class Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI) solution, called EasyFuelPlus. Beyond these three main divisions, two years ago, OTI established the Internet of Things (IoT) division, or more specifically, Internet of Payment Things (IoPT). It has developed unique technology which enables cashless payment or contactless payment by rings, clothing, fitness bands and other wearables. In fact, it can convert nearly any existing product into a cashless payment device, with minimal or no design changes.

Deep Dive into OTI with Shlomi Cohen, CEO

What’s trending in the cashless payment market? Where’s OTI’s strongest hold?

In the fueling business, we are already operating in more than 40 countries. With the IoPT, we can see that the market is booming. We currently have a few commercial pilots that we believe will soon materialize. We can see that cashless payments in the IoPT and the unattended retail markets have become more and more significant in developed countries, in particular the US, Europe, and Japan, where we are experiencing our greatest growth.

What’s the current competitive market landscape?

When we are considering our competition, we need to look at it on a matrix that’s based at one end on the verticals. That is, vending, kiosk, IoPT, ATMs and fueling. On the other end the geographic region. The European market is more fragmented, and we have several competitors in each country. And then looking at North American, there the market is well developed and while we have relatively less competitors, they are all well established. Apart from some obvious technological advantages, such as our dual EMV/FeliCa readers, our competitive advantage lies in the modularity and scalability of our systems which can be customized for each client’s specific requirements, and ensures quick time-to-market. OTI is positioned in a perfect way to meet the current secure payment trends, including the fact that markets are moving towards a cashless society.

Who are some of your important strategic partners?

An important strategic partner is Billing Systems in Japan. For OTI, Japan is currently one of the most sizeable end-markets, and we believe it will only get bigger over the next few years. OTI is the only company outside Japan to offer a dual EMV/FeliCa certified reader(Uno-8) and our accompanying controller/gateway (GoBox).

More recently we announced our new agreement with Dover Fueling Systems (DFS), which includes their subsidiaries OPW, Tokheim and Wayne Fueling Systems, that will spearhead our efforts into the North American market for our full range of AVI Fuel Management solutions.

How does IoPT and wearable payments relate to security?

Our cashless payment solutions are based on highly secure NFC technology, technology OTI has pioneered and lead the world in for more than 26 years. NFC stands for Near-Field Communication, and is the most secure cashless transaction technology available today.

Discuss about your products or business segments that are most profitable

The most profitable division today is our Automated Vehicle ID (AVI) solution – EasyFuelPlus – used for fleet fuel management. This is followed by our vending telemetry solution – ot iMetry which is also segmented to the IoT and M2M (Machine-to-Machine) markets. We believe that wearables are the next-big-thing in the payment industry and this is why we focus on providing innovative and consumer centric solutions for this segment.

What’s your vision for the future of the company?

Part of our future will be based on organic growth and part of it will be based on non-organic growth. The current payment methods and the way we are implementing payment systems is going to change in a dramatic way in a couple of years. And when you consider all the components and variables, OTI is in a perfect position to be a significant market leader today, and in the years to come.

A Piquant Insight of the Wit

Shlomi Cohen, CEO: Cohen joined OTI in August 2015. Previously he acted as the president and CEO of RayV (acquired by Yahoo!), a leading online video-streaming solution. Prior to that, he was part of the global management of NICE (NASDAQ: NICE)a publicly traded billion-dollar software company, in the position of EMEA President. Previously Cohen held senior executive sales positions with leading technological companies including being head of the global broadband solution division – Nokia Siemens Networks, Siemens Communications (Frankfurt: SIE), BATM Advanced Communications (London: BVC) and Eldor Computers.

“We have built an international reputation for reliability and innovation – deploying hundreds of solutions for banking, mobile network operators, attended and unattended markets (vending), mass transit and petroleum.”