Tyro to remediate merchants impacted by three-week terminal outage

Australian merchants left without a working Tyro Payments (ASX: TYR) EFTPOS machine during a three-week-long terminal outage in January will be remediated as part of the company's plan to "make good".

The company has invited all financially impacted merchants to register with Tyro to enable remediation claims to be assessed.

To date, a total of 3,656 Tyro customers have registered, with claims of financial loss for more than 888 merchants already settled.

Affected customers can take up two remediation proposals from Tyro, namely an 'accelerated path assessment' (a simple remediation solution via a merchant service fee rebate over a designated period if loss is assessed), or a 'case managed path assessment' (a more tailored remediation solution).

In addition to the above, terminal rental charges were waived for impacted merchants in January.

So far, 973 merchants have responded wishing to pursue the 'accelerated path' option, and 76 are looking to take up the more tailored remediation option.

Tyro CEO Robbie Cooke hopes the process will "make good" on the drawn out outage of merchant terminals in January.

"I am profoundly sorry for the disruption the event in January caused some of our customers," Cooke said.

"In our 18 years of operation we have not had such a situation occur and, as a team that has always taken much pride in providing the best customer experience possible, the incident did not sit comfortably with us and we took immediate action.

"Since resolving the operational issue, our focus moved to making good to those merchants with claims of financial loss and the establishment of a remediation process to provide a prompt and fair resolution for those merchant claims without the delay, uncertainty and cost incumbent in legal proceeding."

The outage of terminals in January meant thousands of Australian businesses did not have a method to accept card payments, in some cases for weeks.

Tyro said the outage was due to an issue in specific versions of the terminal platform software supplied by Worldline, the manufacturer of the machines.

The outage led to short seller Viceroy Research releasing a damning repot into the issue, suggesting the payments processor was downplaying the problem.

Shares in Tyro are down 0.26 per cent to $3.83 per share at 10.36am AEST.