Modernize Your Business With Cutting Edge Hardware & Technology

Learn how upgrading your hardware and technology can help you stay ahead of the competition, streamline your operations and elevate your customer experience.

Ian Hamilton: Welcome. Thanks for spending the time with us. 

We'll be together for maybe about the next 20 or so minutes to talk about the right upgrades, the right hardware to kick off 2025 on the right foot. I can't believe we're talking about it already, but 2025's coming fast and as it approaches, it's a good time to make sure your car wash is equipped with the latest tools, strategies, and technologies that's going to help you stay ahead of your competition. Consumer expectations have changed, they've leveled up even, and we've developed, at DRB, products to help you meet those expectations and to provide an experience that's easy for your customer when they visit your wash.

So today, we're going to talk about how hardware plays a crucial role in meeting and exceeding those customer expectations. How modernizing your customer experience and future-proofing your business helps you wash more cars, delight more customers, and create organic loyalty through an exceptional customer experience. So, before we dive in, a couple of housekeeping things here. Use the Q and A. If you have a question or a comment or, "Hey, why can't I hear what's going on today?" We've got folks monitoring the Q and A to get you help. So, it should be down there at the bottom of your screen. If you don't see it, try clicking view options and then exit full screen. This will put the webinar in a smaller window and sometimes that Q and A button will pop up at the bottom. We'll also be recording today's webinar, and it's going to go out to anybody who registered for it. 

So not just if you showed up today, but also if you know you had a site manager at another location who got tied up in something, but they did register, they're going to get an email with the recording as well as today's Q and A, and the answers to the Q and A. Again, if you're having any technical difficulties, pop those in the Q and A. If you've got questions throughout our conversation today, pop those in there too and we'll take some time at the end to answer as many as we can. 

And now, it's my pleasure to introduce some of our experts at DRB and technology, so I'm excited to be joined by these folks. And Gifford, I'll pass it to you to go ahead and introduce yourself.

Gifford Fitzgerald, Payment, Senior Director of Payments: Great, thanks Ian. Hey everyone, really appreciate you making the time for the discussion today. My name's Gifford Fitzgerald, I'm on the product team with Shelly and Alex, and I lead our payment strategy and product management efforts across all of our solutions.

Shelly Ewing, Senior Director of Wash Systems: Hey everyone, I'm Shelly Ewing. I am also, as Gifford said on the product management team, I'm Senior Director of Wash Systems. I've been with DRB for about five and a half years. I'm really excited to be here with you guys today and just wanted to thank you again for joining us.

Alex Mereness, Director, Product Tunnel Solutions: Hey everyone, my name's Alex Mereness, also on the product team here at DRB. I think I've gone on about six and a half, almost just short of seven years here at DRB. So really, again, excited to be here today. Talk about some of the new hardware and capabilities that come with that hardware. Yeah, let's get into it.

Gifford: Alright well, we're going to get going with EMV and to ground everyone on what we're focused on here today. 

This is the payments terminal technology that shifts from reading the Magstripe on the back of your credit, debit cards to now reading the chip card that's on the front of probably most cards in your wallet, as well as supporting the ability to tap your card or tap your phone with Apple, Google Pay. And this is really geared towards customers that are on SiteWatch, Magstripe today, things to be thinking about as you evaluate and consider, and then ultimately move to our EMV solution. 

EMV has been a hot top payments topic now for over a decade. We saw most major non-fuel merchants move to EMV back around 2015, and then fuel merchants began to implement in 2020, 21. And so, we're now at a a point where most merchants and most cards are going through the EMV process with carwash lagging behind. You know, if you think about your own personal buying experiences, almost everywhere you're going now, you're either inserting your card, you're tapping the card or maybe even your phone. It's really what you and your consumers have become to get used to and expect to see, you know, anytime you're making a payment. And we see this in the data. Over 90% of all card present transactions now are going through EMV in the US, and over 50% of Americans are using some form of contactless payment, whether it's tapping their card or tapping their phone to do their day-to-day payments. Another great benefit when you think about EMV is it makes it harder to counterfeit cards. If you have any challenges around card present fraud, implementing EMV will help to bring that fraud down on your one-time non-subscription transactions. 

We also know that in 2027, MasterCard is going to start letting banks and credit unions issue their credit and debit cards without a mag stripe. So, without having EMV in place, this could potentially start creating friction as your customers are trying to figure out how to pay and why their chip card's not working, creating holdups and queues in your lines. Visa, MasterCard are notorious for assessing higher fees on technology that they're trying to sunset. This is true with EMV and Magstripe. We've already seen them start assessing higher fees on certain Magstripe transactions at the fuel pumps, and we expect to see them do similar with Magstripe transactions in general, including at the car wash in the upcoming years. 

One more great benefit with EMV is it makes it easier to become PCI compliant, and it helps you to avoid the fines and risks that come with not having that compliance. Shelly is going to talk about upgrade opportunities next. As you think about upgrades, EMV is a great piece of functionality and another enhancement that you should be thinking about as you're looking at those upgrades. 

So, in summary, you know, lots of good reasons to think about and move to EMV in the near future. It's going to improve the customer experience. It's going to create better customer loyalty. It's going to help drive down the fraud you're seeing and help get your customers through the sales process a lot quicker as the rest of the industry moves to this technology. So, with that, I'll hand it over to Shelley.

Shelly: Thanks Gifford. That was really, really helpful. Pull up my quick notes here just so I have them. Andy, very, very helpful. That EMV is such a hot topic, and that presentation was just very, very helpful. 

Based on what Gifford just shared regarding the criticality of moving to EMV, and the important timelines for adoption and compliance, like he said, I'd like to take a few minutes to talk about the importance and benefits of upgrading your XPTs. We do realize that upgrading XPTs can be a significant investment when your expertise is delivering an exceptional, acceptable level of performance. And of course, there's some downtime required. But upgrading your hardware can bring a wide range of benefits, some of which you already heard about from Gifford, including enhanced performance and productivity, increased security and higher levels of compliance, improved and faster communication and processing speeds, and therefore a better experience for your employees and customers. 

If you still have XPT 10.4's or XPT 2012's, this might be the perfect time to capitalize on your investment and refresh your lanes and migrate to EMV all at once. The XPT 5+ is the latest version of our self-serve car wash, pay station, or XPT for use with SiteWatch and Patheon, point of sale solutions. It helps to optimize throughput and reduce labor costs while making your staff greeter positions more productive. Retail customers will appreciate shorter lines and the convenience of self-pay with both contact or contactless payment methods. Some other things that the XPT 5+ has, you know, different than our previous versions are a 15-inch optically bonded brighter display screen works better in the outdoors and reduces glare, protects from water, etc. And of course, that screen is used for your wash selection sale of prepaid gift cards and unlimited plans, as well as promoting special offers or rewards or even notifications or messages to your consumers, like an upcoming expiration or renewal date for their club plan. It also provides improved positioning for the EMV card readers for ease of reach and use when making those credit card or mobile payments. The XPT 5+ also supports barcodes or SMART codes for wash redemption and of course cash and coin options are also available. 

The XPT 5+ is weather resistant and does include an internal heater. It also includes a color security camera and a solid-state memory backup to protect your investment data and information. The newly modern design promotes maximum uptime through improved serviceability and supportability with much more of a modular approach to hardware. LED lights inside activate when the main door is open to easily view and replace internal components and also to identify connector locations for easy and quick access to minimize downtime when repairs are needed. With those advantages and improved features over our previous versions of XPTs, it's time to get the most out of your technology investment and consider refreshing your unattended or semi attended lanes with the XPT 5+ and enhance your customer's experience while increasing productivity and throughput. With that, I'll turn it over to Alex to talk about enhancements with our fast ID cameras for vehicle and consumer identification, as well as advancements in our tunnel controller, Alex.

Alex: Awesome, good information, Shelly and Gifford in payments. I'm glad I'm not in that world. I know that there's a whole nest there to deal with. I get the easy stuff. 

So, we've talked about payments, we've talked about pay stations, let's talk about customer identification. The Vega 11, which you can see they're up on the screen. It's our latest and greatest license plate reader. Most of you guys know that as LPR. It's our hardware that now comes packaged with AI capabilities. The advanced license plate recognition system offers significant improvements in accuracy, but not just accuracy. It also reads plates quicker. On the accuracy front, we have seen reads up to 99%, excuse me, 99.9% accurate. So, it's pretty impressive. We hear about AI all the time where, you know, some of us are using it almost daily at this point. It just made sense to try to roll that into license plate recognition. 

So, the real question is, what does this mean for you? Well, it means less troubleshooting in the member lanes, excuse me, less troubleshooting member issues in the lane. A smoother and faster experience for your customers. And it also means that the system is way more agile in recognizing new plates. In the LPR world, anytime you have a new design that's always a challenge, the system needs to learn how to recognize it and distinguish the various characters and other items that are on the plate. With AI capabilities in our AI firmware, the camera will actually automatically start to adjust to those new plates, which is just, it's fantastic and leads to improved performance. Lastly, the Vega 11 brings a more rigid design, making it more durable and reliable than ever before. Couple other key benefits that I really think are important to call out by integrating our Vega 11 with Patheon, you not only get the power of AI LPR, but you also get the ability to capture every plate and tie that transaction to the history of that plate. 

So, this capability enables you to know your customer without actually formally knowing your customer. The result of that is you gather better consumer data, and it enables you to bring more targeted marketing capabilities. When you couple our AI LPR with Patheon and our new marketing automation platform Catalyst, it brings capabilities like you've never had before into a single and unified solution. So, it's just really awesome stuff there. 

We got some great new features coming out with Patheon and Catalyst that are going to allow you to get really targeted with your marketing efforts. LPR is a critical piece of being able to market to those customers that you don't formally have. You know, as I said earlier, Vega 11 enhances your operations, and it unlocks data capabilities that RFID just can't. It will never be able to achieve it. We have a great offer on adding LPR to your site that we'll share at the end of this webinar. Don't wait, take advantage of this offer and immediately leverage the benefits of AI LPR. When it comes to data collection, the longer you wait, the further behind you are. Go ahead and move on to the next slide here. 

Alright, so we've talked about the front of the house, but what about the back of the house? As you all know, your tunnel controller is a vital piece to keeping operations running smoothly. Do not wait for it to leave you high and dry. No one likes deploying what I call orange cone technology on their busiest days due to equipment failure. With DRB, we offer our enhanced and reliable, excuse me, we offer enhanced efficiency and reliability with our latest watch tunnel controller, the TCS 2. 

There are some key changes in the TCS 2. We really focused on bringing simplicity, some new capabilities and increased serviceability along with some redundancy in the system. So again, I'll lean back on what does that actually mean to you? One of the neat things that we have is we've added a conveyor enabled board and it allows for better detection of engaged e-stops. We have all probably been in the wash where the conveyor is not turning on, and you're running around trying to figure out what e-stop might be engaged. Well, with the conveyor enabled board, we can actually tell you what e-stop is causing the conveyor, preventing the conveyor from turning on. You can also display low oil, excuse me, low air and oil alerts. And when those alerts are active, it will automatically disengage the conveyor. We've increased the relay capacity with eight more relays, but yet four fewer relay cards, which is neat. We've also simplified the back office by integrating the PC directly into the TCS 2. So you no longer have to have a separate and dedicated computer in your back office. You can go straight to the TCS 2, the panel's included there. You can make your configuration changes as long as, you know, reviewing any wiring changes that you may need to make. Additionally, the TCS 2 has a built-in battery backup. This is critical because when you have power outages or any kind of blips in power with PC electronics, you really run risk of shorting those out and corrupting the file operating system. And so, having this backup battery enables the system to stay live long enough to properly shut down and it prevents it from really unnecessary damage. 

Another big thing here is installation and serviceability. We designed this with a modular design in mind and we also included terminal, excuse me, socket terminal types, which makes it a little bit easier for wiring. You don't need a bunch of special tools and, you know, it doesn't take having an engineering degree to service the system. So we have another incredible offer for customers who still have the TCS 1. I won't steal Ian's thunder here. I'll let him share the details of the offer, but I can tell you that you shouldn't wait to upgrade until you're forced to. I know it's hard to, you know, want to shell out money if your current system's working. The neat thing about this is, you know, you can take advantage of this offer, have the TCS 2 on hand and you can, you know, swap it out when the time comes or when it makes the most sense for you. But if you know you're going to have to upgrade at some point, it makes sense to take advantage of the offer now, save some money. And with that, I will pass it back over to you, Ian.

Ian: All right, thanks. I get the fun stuff. Well, not what Shelly Gifford and Alex covered wasn't fun, but I get the really fun stuff with the offer. So Alex, Shelly Gifford, thank you for joining us talking about some of these exciting new things with the hardware. And as Alex said, to steal his thunder, I'm not too proud. It is the right time to upgrade. It helps keep you competitive. 

As the market becomes more competitive, you're going to protect your future self and you're going to be able to provide exceptional customer experiences. Hardware plays a crucial, crucial, crucial role in all of that. And we, at DRB, are here to help you upgrade, taking advantage of special offers so you can kick off 2025 on the right foot. Again, with these unprecedented offers for the year end. And we also have special financing opportunities. 

So to kind of bubble up some of the offers we've got going right now related to what we talked about today, for current DRB customers, if you've got an older XPT, the 2012 or the 10.4, now's the time to upgrade for sure. You can trade in your old pay station and get over $11,000 off on an XPT 5+. And that also is going to come with free decals, comes equipped with EMV, and again we do a special financing available too, if you have questions about that. We're also offering an LPR trade-in promotion. So if you currently have a Vega 1 camera running LPR, you can trade that in to get the Vega 11, which is what Alex focused on with the AI piece. The Vega 11 will come with the artificial intelligence firmware on it, bumping up those read rates, helping move lines through. And you're going to save 30% on the upgrade to a Vega 11, the AI LPR by trading in your old Vega ones. If you don't have LPR today, I'm getting a little out of order on my slide here. But if you don't have LPR today, don't worry, you still have the opportunity to add LPR and save right now. So if you don't have LPR, don't have a Vega 1 to send in, you can order a new LPR installation and save 20% on the hardware as well. And not to forget our TCS 2, that one is 15% off the hardware upfront, and you're going to get an additional four relay cards included at no extra cost. These are great offers. 

If you are not a DRB customer right now, and you feel like you're missing out, we have special offers for you guys too. Get in touch with us or we'll follow up after the webinar as well with everybody with the recording. Some of these offers captured that we want to share with everybody, and we want to help anyone at the car wash get the most out of their technology investments, including the LPR installs, the TCS 2, EMV conversions or EMV add-ons for new builds and things like that. So thank you. And with my spiel now over, we're going to hop into the Q and A. So let's see here. We've got some good questions coming in. Alright Gifford, I think I'm going to start with you if you're up for it. So one of the questions we got is around tablets and EMV. So wondering if you could tell us a little bit. I'm going to ask you to focus on the SiteWatch side with EMV and then I can sprinkle in some stuff on the Patheon side if that sounds good.

Gifford: Absolutely.

Gifford: So the short answer is yes, we do have an EMV solution for tablets. Our overall EMV offering solves for your unattended needs at the kiosk. We have attended payment terminals as well as ones that work directly with the tablets. We have a number of customers that are using in the field today. So they're tried and proven. So if you're interested, you know, follow up with us afterwards, and we can share that information with you.

Ian: Thank you, Gifford. On the Patheon side of this as well, we are bringing tablet to Patheon in the near future. We're also going to have special EMV readers that are going to work with tablets on that front too. So there's a lot to come. I don't want to tease too much. I'm sure everybody here knows Dave Kaczynski at this point. Don't want to steal his thunder too much on the Patheon tablet front, but we're excited to share more about that coming soon. Chris, I see some of your comments here in the Q and A. I believe we had someone reach out to you in the chat to collect some more info, but we want to make sure we follow up with you offline after the webinar to address some of those EMV issues you might be having. But to sprinkle in a little bit, sometimes the SiteWatch version you're on could limit your speed, and I'm looking at Shelly Ewing so I don't put my foot in my mouth too much here. So if anyone else is having those issues, feel free to follow up with us afterwards or call into the Knowledge Center at DRB, and we can help get you taken care of there. One of the other questions coming in pretty consistently is around AI LPR and who it's available for. So I was going to steal Alex's thunder on this one too, but I'm going to let him get the final answer on this one.

Alex: Hey, you said you weren't shy about stealing thunder. No, so I'll jump in on this. So I see a couple questions coming in around the AI LPR. Yes, it does work with SiteWatch. There's a couple things though, it really depends on what camera version you have. So some of you out there may have the Vega 1 camera. Part of the reason why we put together the trade-in opportunities to get you to the Vega 11 camera where we can actually apply the AI LPR firmware. So it will work with SiteWatch, but you do need to have the Vega 11 camera. And you know, the other thing to consider there is if you're currently running SiteWatch, there are some extended capabilities that you'll get using the LPR camera, and the data that you acquire from the camera when you have the Patheon point of sale. So I would really encourage you to get with your sales rep and just talk about some of those enhancements and determine if it's, you know, a good opportunity for you to learn a little bit more about Patheon and what LPR combined with Patheon and Catalyst can do for your site. So again, in summary, yes, you can use the AI firmware with SiteWatch, but you must have the Vega 11 camera. Hopefully that answers it.

Ian: Thank you, Alex. And I did see one other quick question. There was a question around do we offer trade-in, I think it's for the Tattile LPR camera, and that is what we are referring to here. So Vega one and Vega 11, Vega 11 being the newer version. We do offer a trade-in program, and that's part of the offer that's gone out. We will summarize the details of these in the follow up email. Perfect, thank you Alex. Other one coming in from Travis here. Gifford, I think I'm going to tee this one up to you as well. Could you talk about Washify and EMD or Tap-to-pay with Washify at all and what the future looks like for that?

Gifford: Sure, so we're working on both a new chip card reader and NFC tap reader solution for 2025. So going into Q1, Q2, you'll hear more about the chip card reader. And then NFC is going to be a fast follower second half of 2025. Very focused on this from a Washify payment standpoint to get us all to a better solution that works better for the customers.

Ian: Awesome, thanks Gifford. And Steve, going to answer your question here on the, I think we answered it, but just to revisit really quickly. If you do have a Vega 11 currently and you're on SiteWatch, you're not sure if you're on AI-LPR just yet. Again, there are some factors with SiteWatch version and things of that nature. So we've got your name written down, we'll follow up with you or you can call them into the Knowledge Center at DRB. They can check what version of SiteWatch you're on if there's a necessary upgrade on the SiteWatch version. Shelly, did I miss anything on that front? Yeah, there's also a specific version of firmware on the camera. So both of those can be checked by support though, but we need those both to be aligned and then it will be active.

Shelly: Yeah, I would suggest if you currently have a Vega 11 camera and whether you're on Patheon or SiteWatch, and you know, you want to make sure you're taking advantage of the latest and greatest AI firmware, touch base with our Knowledge Center let them know that that's what you're trying to do and we can make sure that we're configuring things right on our side and that you have the proper setup and answer any questions you have there.

Ian: Alright, I think we've got time for one or two more. So the last, well, actually I'm looking at the time. My goodness, we'll do one more in here. So, good question coming in. Alex, I'm going to position this one to you. Can we use LPR and RFID together?

Alex: Yes, we have a total ID solution. As a matter of fact, we have many customers who opt to do that. So they get the benefits of LPR while also getting some of the benefits of RFID particularly through the migration process as you start to move from RFID to LPR. So you can use them in tandem. That's worked out really well for many of our operators. Again, great opportunity to get with your sales rep, figure out what it'll take to get LPR added to your site while maintaining the RFID readers as well. And again, I believe we call that our total ID solution, so, yep.

Ian: Awesome. Thank you, Alex. Well folks, we're coming up on time. 

So, to wrap it up, thank you again for joining us today. Reminder, the recording's going to be sent out as soon as we get some of the stuff buttoned up on it. There's some sort of technical process that it has to go through, but we'll get that sent out to anybody who registered. But for those of you who joined us today, thank you for spending the time. Whether you're on Patheon, SiteWatch, Washify, or whatever system you're using, and wherever you are on your software and hardware journey, DRB would be happy to help enhance your experience, enhance the operation you're running today and help enhance the consumer experience you provide. So thank you again. I always forget to jump to the big old thank you slides. I'm going to do that. And if you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us and have a great rest of your day. 

Thank you.