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This paper analyses several aspects of a private payment system for enterprises.
It defines the different building blocks of a payment system and presents a proven solution.

Introduction
Within many enterprises, workmen and employees  enjoy the facilities of local catering and of vending machines offering drinks and snacks.
One can imagine that all these products can be purchased with cash money. To avoid cash all over the place -with its related problems- a private payment system offers the solution. In addition a private payment system may support social schemes  like free drinks or differentiated prices in function of the category of users.
In most enterprises employees have a badge to identify themselves, to get access to buildings and parkings and to facilitate time registration.  Preferably the private payment system builds on the existing badge in order to avoid confusion and additional investments in cards.

Private payment system variants
There are two conceptual schemes:
In account based systems (equivalent of Bank card) a central server keeps track of all accounts and transactions. All payment terminals need to be online with the server. The server must be secured and protected against crashes, viruses and attacks. Possibly all consumptions can be prepaid or post processed together with the loan administration. Besides of a more complex infrastructure, this approach may imply an important responsibility and administrative overhead for the IT and HR departments.
In debit-systems (equivalent of Proton), the money is as anonymous as Proton or cash. Everyone is responsible for his own card. The responsibility of the Enterprise is limited to assuring the correct operation of loading and debiting the e-purse.
The simplicity of the debit-system with the corresponding lower investment cost and lower operational cost are the main reasons why most enterprises choose for the e-purse based private payment system.

E-Purse technologies: the success of Mifare
There are different possibilities to organise an e-purse on a personnel badge: using a magstripe, a chip card or a contactless smartcard.
Mifare has become the proven industrial standard for smart cards:
- Mifare is supported worldwide by over 500 manufactures.
- Mifare has an installed base of more than 500.000.000 cards.
- The Mifare smartcard is based on RF, has no hard contacts and therefore promises a larger life time expectation.
- The Mifare standard supports a secure way to share a badge between different applications of different providers without the risk that one application jeopardises the security of the other application.
For new projects in access control or time registration most specialists in this domain will promote or at least support this standard. Being convinced of the customer value of this industrial standard, Antenor recommends the use of Mifare cards for new private payment systems.

Payment System Components.
A private payment system can be built up using following components:

- The cards
The personnel cards must hold the e-purse. New cards with preformatted e-purse can be delivered.
If Mifare cards are already in use, an e-purse on the existing cards can be formatted, provided access to free sectors is granted.

- Payment Stations   
At the borders of the payment system, real public money needs to be converted to private money on the e-purse. This is done at an Antenor reloader which may accept cash (coins and/or banknotes), Proton and/or Bancontact.              

- Payment terminals
For POS of restaurants or shops a payment terminal is connected to the cash register using a simple payment protocol on a serial connection. If required, these cash-registers can first read the type of user to differentiate prices between staff, contractors or visitors.
Most vending machines for snacks, cold or warm drinks have a standard MDB or Executive payment interface. Antenor can deliver and install specialised payment terminals on all these automats.

- Administrative tool 
To initialise and verify  the e-purses, a simple yet effective SW tool called Card-manager can run on any windows based Workstation.

 
Conclusion.
Antenor together with its technology partners and its partners in access control, time registration, catering and vending  can implement complete private payment systems adapted to the small, medium or large enterprises.
Based on  open standards, the systems  provide a future proof solution and allow gradual implementations.