ETA on EBT? Also - What's up with the open wifi restriction?

Merchants Poynt Smart Terminal
#1

We were sold on a Poynt Terminal after being assured by the vendor that it fit two very important requirements for our Farmer’s Market:

  1. Support for EBT - SNAP clients are an important part of our community
  2. Support for public hotspots - we operate in a public park area with a free, city supported wifi hotspot.

Turns out Poynt can’t do either.

Open Wifi is blocked by the device. The open wifi restriction can be worked around by sharing the ethernet port on a wifi-connected laptop and connecting the Poynt base with a cable. This is a silly restriction that limits the device and doesn’t increase security one bit. All Poynt data is handled over TLS so there is end-to-end security, and my understanding from the API docs is that certificate pinning is required, so MitM attacks shouldn’t be an issue, even with open wifi.

The EBT issue is real disappointment since we called tech support before market to assure it was setup right and was only told it wasn’t supported after we failed to run an EBT card during market and called tech support back to see what the problem was.

So, we still like a lot about the Poynt and would like to see it work for our usecase, but have to ask if there is an ETA on EBT support and could there be an option to turn off the open wifi restriction?

#2

Wendy,

Re: public hotspots – completely understand your situation. You’re correct that there is end-to-end encryption from Poynt to acquiring bank. Same with pinning – it does indeed make it far more difficult to MiTM. That being said, connecting a payment device to an insecure network goes against PCI guidelines and recommendations.

Thanks,
Neil

p.s. Good grief, sorry for the delayed response.

p.p.s. Re: EBT, if you haven’t talked to anyone here yet, please shoot me an email at neil@poynt.com and I’ll connect you to the right team.