NRT Technology Corp. is headed by (left to right) Vice President of Sales Rosa Laricchia, President and CEO John Dominelli and Executive Vice President Ray Deffner.

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Even with the odds stacked against the players, casinos still put a lot of cash into their hands every day. That means hundreds if not thousands of transactions a day. Up until several years ago, those transactions were handled by casino employees in the cages – gamblers turned in their buckets of coins from slot machine winnings to the cashier, the cashier counted them and then paid the winnings by hand.

NRT began automating the casino payout process in 1999 with the help of a former customer, Ray Deffner, who now serves as NRT’s executive vice president.

Originally specializing in the retail point-of-sale market, NRT developed a jackpot payout system. “With our system, casino attendants use the intuitive ATM interface to enter key information such as the slot ID and the winning amount,” the company says. “QuickJack then sends a message to the slot management system for validation of the jackpot. If the slot management system confirms the jackpot, the monies are dispensed to the attendant. This only occurs once the slot management system has posted the jackpot payout to revenue.”

It wasn’t until NRT Technology Corp. began developing solutions for the gaming industry that this model changed and casinos began noticing increased efficiency and decreased labor costs.

Deffner says he was a customer of NRT dating back years before he began working for Casino Niagara in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, in 1996. He says he turned to NRT many times for retail point-of-sale systems and saw the potential to apply the same technology to the gaming industry.

“The products were replacing the manual efforts of the cashier, so in doing so we were able to bring that functionality closer to the employees’ workstations and reduce the need for centralized cashiering cages,” Deffner says. “It was a tremendous labor-saving device.”

In 2000, NRT put its expertise in automated point-of-sale systems to work on developing the QuickJack ticket redemption system. QuickJack machines operate on the same principle as an ATM, accepting a barcode ticket from a slot machine or other automated casino game, validating with the casino host system and then automatically dispensing the winnings. The system rolled out in 2000, and Deffner says since then, casino customers have reported labor cost savings of up to 75 percent.

NRT says that in addition to faster payouts and lower labor costs, the QuickJack system also takes up far less space than a traditional cashier cage. The QuickJack system also permits patrons to withdraw cash from their bank accounts, exchange currency, redeem patron points, generate comps  and purchase event tickets.

High Rollers
NRT was a pioneer in bringing automation to the casino industry, according to Vice President of Sales Rosa Laricchia. Because of that, the company’s customers include some of the biggest names in the gaming world.

“When it comes to ticket redemption technology, we’ve got most of the major corporate casinos and high-profile independent casinos,” she says. “So just based on that … we know we have the largest market share.”

Whether it’s for the gaming, retail or petroleum products markets, Laricchia says the key to success for NRT is always the same: flexibility, customization and close attention to customers’ needs.