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Payments processor Tyro (ASX: TYR) has emerged strongly from a trading halt this morning after issuing a response to claims made by a short seller last week, rejecting Viceroy Research's "false" report.
Despite the positive sentiment expressed by investors with shares up by more than 16 per cent this morning, a number of customers will not see a resolution to EFTPOS machine outages until the end of this week.
According to Tyro, the report issued by short seller Viceroy contained "significant false claims and assertions", most of which have been rebutted by the company today.
Viceroy's report, released on Friday 15 January, alleged Tyro was downplaying the 'bricking' of EFTPOS terminals.
In particular, Viceroy alleged approximately 50 per cent of Tyro's terminals were impacted by the outage; in contrast Tyro claimed only 30 per cent of customers have been hit by the issue.
As advised to the ASX today, Tyro claims just 15 per cent of merchants remain impacted.
Of those customers, just nine per cent are without a functioning EFTPOS terminal and are the focus of the company's recovery and repair effort.
"We expect the incident to be resolved by the end of this week and we will continue to do everything we can to expedite this timeframe," says Tyro.
Tyro also rejected several other claims from Viceroy's report, including that the payments processor would have to spend $12 million to replace impacted terminals.
"The repair involves collecting the impacted terminals from the field and implementing an immediate software update," Tyro said.
"If the terminals were not in a disconnected state this fix would have been achieved via a remote download.
"There is no capital-intensive terminal repair or replacement required of the nature suggested in the Report."
According to an update issued to impacted customers, Tyro says it is aware of customer demands that it "make amends" for the EFTPOS outage.
"We understand that our impacted customers are very keen to hear about how we will make amends for the disruption," says Tyro.
"Once the issue has been resolved, we will turn our attention to this, and we will genuinely consider all options.
"We will also be talking to you about the steps we have taken to ensure this doesn't happen again."
Shares in Tyro are up 16.81 per cent to $2.71 per share at 11.18am AEDT.
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