New in Infinity – August 2023

Here’s new functionality across the Infinity platform that will help you unify your physical and digital channels and deliver to changing customer needs. 

Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality. 

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PRODUCT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Streamline stock sorting by setting preferred sort criteria 

It’s now easier to sort and find stock items in Infinity using the criteria that makes the most sense to your business. When you browse for items in the inventory, your previous sort selection will be retained for the next session. So, for example, if you prefer to sort items by description, they will automatically be sorted in that order the next time you open Infinity.   

Empower store staff to control stock at new stores 

We’ve streamlined the effort involved in creating a new branch by providing a choice of which stock items will be sent to the store. When inventory items are copied from a source branch to the new branch, you can choose to only send the active items, or decide to set them all active and send them all. This empowers store staff to decide which items they want to keep, giving them more control over their stock. It also means your Head Office staff no longer have to be involved in setting up the inventory for a new store.  

Manage financial risks by setting store-specific cash limits 

Keeping cash in the cash drawer can be one of the most important financial and security risks your stores face on a day-to-day basis, and those risks can differ across branches. You can now empower stores to handle those risks in the way that meets their needs by allowing them to set their own cash drawer limits.   

Keep promotions running smoothly during franchise ownership changes 

Changing franchise ownership in the middle of a promotional cycle can be disruptive and potentially cost your stores valuable revenue. You can now minimise that disruption by easily transferring existing pricing and promotions when a store moves from one cluster in your organisation to another. This saves you having to recreate the promotions and means offers keep running without missing a beat. 

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INVENTORY

Make supplier searches easy with non-case sensitive name check 

We’ve improved the user experience when creating purchase orders and receipts by making the supplier name check non-case sensitive. This means that you will find the supplier without any trouble when there’s a difference in the capitalisation of their name on the item record and the supplier record.   

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CUSTOMERS & LOYALTY

Speed up loyalty prepay enquiries with full transaction info 

Your Loyalty support staff can answer Loyalty prepay customer transaction enquiries more quickly now that they can see more details about those transactions, including the date, the receipt number and the external transaction code.    

Improve efficiency during cents-per-litre rule searches 

Searching for specific cents-per-litre rules has been made more seamless and less time-consuming now that fuel administrators can easily filter and sort them.   

Customise error messages when external fuel balances unavailable 

Your Loyalty program administrator can now be warned that a customer’s external partner cents-per-litre fuel balance is currently unavailable using an error message that meets your customised business needs.  

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POINT OF SALE

Boost sales by providing customers with estimated arrival dates 

Securing a sale can sometimes come down to being able to tell the customer that the item they really want to buy will soon be available. Infinity now allows your store staff to see more details about the estimated arrival date of goods on purchase orders, as well as quantities on draft orders, allowing them to drive sales by giving customers the information they need to make purchasing decisions.  

Seamlessly switch POS stations for faster transactions via auto-logout 

At busy times, your sales staff may need to switch between POS stations to process a high volume of transactions quickly, while also allowing you to keep track of who processed the sales. To meet these simultaneous needs, Infinity can now log users out after a set amount of time, rather than locking the entire station. This keeps the sales process moving while not compromising on the audit trail. This feature is also useful between shifts if a user forgets to log out and means the next user can log in without having to involve a manager in unlocking the station.  

Customise age-check policies store-by-store 

If your business sells items that have an age restriction and you use Infinity’s advanced age check module, age policies can now be set on a store-by-store basis. This is especially useful if your stores operate as franchises and franchisees want to apply different policies. So, for example, one store can decide to age-check everyone who looks under 30, while another store decides to check everyone who looks younger than 25.  

Enhance fuel transaction monitoring by identifying legitimate test deliveries 

Monitoring fuel transactions using Digifort DVR is easier now that the video footage identifies the pumps used for test deliveries to ensure they were legitimate. 

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INTEGRATIONS

Republish cloud event sales invoice transactions effortlessly 

Cloud event sales invoice transactions can now be republished to either RabbitMQ or Azure should they need to be resent to the system that consumes them, ensuring that all transactions are sent and accounted for.  

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TECHNOLOGY

Support for latest Microsoft technologies 

Infinity now supports SQL Server 2022, the latest SQL Server version available from Microsoft. Note that SQL Server 2016 and higher require a 64-bit operating system.  

Faster POS setup with accelerated data replication 

Infinity Point of Sale will be ready to use much sooner following improvements to the setup process. Accelerated data replication can reduce the time it takes to perform the initial setup data synchronisation down to just a few minutes, depending on network speeds and the amount of data involved.  

Reduce costs with enhanced Wishlist integration 

Infinity’s integration with the Wishlist company now supports a multi-tenanted back-end.  

Effortless safety sheet distribution with API integration 

If you sell dangerous goods, distributing material safety sheets across your business can now be done via an API back-end, optimising the management of these documents and saving you the trouble of having to make them available on a site-by-site basis. 

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To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us. 

If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

New in Infinity – May 2021

Here’s new functionality across the Infinity platform that will help you and your team deliver the frictionless experiences your customers expect.

Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.

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INFINITY API

Better management of products sold 

The Products API now supports an expanded range of Infinity’s standard product management functions. The additions increase control over the selling of certain products, to ensure that business rules can be met and the correct products are selected while processing transactions. 

 You can use it to define and view: 

• The sites where a product can be sold.   

• The date range between which a product can be sold. 

• Whether the product must be the only product in a transaction. 

• Whether each unit of a product must be on a different transaction line. 

• Whether the product can only be paid for using certain media. 

 Make future product changes 

The new Products Planned Changes API allows you to take advantage of Infinity’s batch updates function to make changes to products that will take effect at a future date and time. Customers whose master product details are managed in systems outside Infinity can use it to create, overwrite, retrieve and delete future-dated changes. 

 Offer multichannel payment options 

Infinity Sales Orders API now supports websites sending payments for existing orders. Customers can pay for their in-store orders online, giving them more flexibility when managing their orders and offering a seamless purchasing experience.  

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INVENTORY

Tailor labels printed for stores 

Infinity Labels now allows retailers to change the order that labels appear on screen, meaning you can print labels in the order that makes sense for your store layout. For example, you can decide to sort labels by description rather than by SKU. 

Easier de-allocation of stock from locations 

Finding items to de-allocate from a location has become easier and less time consuming now that stock items that are listed alphabetically on the Items Location screen, are also listed in that order on the De-allocate screen. To reduce errors and increase accuracy when de-allocating items from locations, Infinity can be configured so that all items are deselected by default and users need to select the items that are to be de-allocated. 

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Tax-free items retain status throughout order process 

Infinity can now process tax-free sales orders from creation to completion. Items logged as tax-free through any channel will retain their tax status throughout the lifetime of the order. 

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PRICING & PROMOTIONS

Increase promotion options for branches 

Businesses that use branch clusters in conjunction with rules-based pricing can now configure Infinity to add items to pricing groups and promotional rules even if those items belong to a higher level cluster than the local branch, or belong to no cluster. This gives you greater flexibility in the promotions you can offer your customers. 

Remove inactive items from searches for more accurate promotions 

The Rules Based Pricing item search experience at the Back Office has been improved so that users no longer see a list of search results that includes inactive items when they are creating a promotional rule or adding items to a pricing group. This ensures that the correct products are added to promotions and prevents confusion when unexpected products are listed. 

Increase the number of discount options you offer customers 

Businesses that use customer discount groups as a way to group customers can now use these discount groups to create pricing rules for the TRADE condition type when using the standard rules-based pricing procedure. This extends upon the existing customer category options already available so that a customer can belong to two different groups, with pricing rules able to be defined for each.   

For example, a trade customer can receive a standard discount because they are a gold-tier customer, as well as discounts on a particular range of products because of their business type and discounts on a set of products that they have negotiated directly because of a piece of work they are doing. 

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POINT OF SALE

Deliver staff reminders more frequently 

You can now update the reminders your store staff see throughout the day so that they keep pace with the changing needs of your business. Until now, reminders would be updated only when users started up the POS. Now when you add a reminder at the Back Office or Head Office, it will load at the POS when the operator logs in and after a transaction is completed.  

Control the visibility of branch stock levels 

Multi-branch businesses that include standalone outlets can now prevent those outlets from seeing stock levels at other branches, allowing you to maintain branch confidentiality across your organisation.  

Tailor the way you view search results 

You now have a greater choice of how you view Advanced Items Search results at the POS. Instead of viewing search results as thumbnails you can now choose to see all results in a list, which is useful when dealing with numerous results. You can also customise the columns listing the search results and the search criteria in a way that makes sense to your business and add search filters for these columns. 

Improve visibility of cash positions in stores 

If your business uses MESM Cash Management, you can now use it to receipt cash from the bank for your float and deposit cash in the bank, giving your Back Office staff an easy way of recording these transactions. You can also keep on top of your current cash position by seeing the amounts at all cash drawers as well as in the safe at a glance. 

Increase control over returns refunds 

The Returns Extended functionality can now prevent POS users from editing the unit price when completing a returns transaction if they do not have the authority to do so. If the unit price needs to be changed, the operator will need to get permission from a more senior staff member, thereby helping to prevent incorrect refund amounts from being given. 

Give customers BP fuelcard payment option 

If you are a New Zealand fuel retailer using PC-EFTPOS, you can now offer BP fuelcard as a payment method, allowing you to add more customers to your customer base.  

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ADMINISTRATION

Increase security by increasing password strength 

Access to POS, BOS and HOS can now be made more secure through the use of password policy complexity. When implemented, your users must create strong passwords with at least three different types of character (they can use upper and lower case letters, numbers or special characters). 

More control for head office when closing branches 

You can now disable branches centrally from Infinity Head Office, allowing you to: 

• Reduce the reliance on manual tasks when closing a branch. 

• Gain greater control and flexibility when it comes to branch management. 

• Shut down a branch more quickly, safely and efficiently than ever before. 

Your staff have to be specifically given permission to do this, meaning that admin users can enjoy greater control over branch management while other users cannot accidently close a branch. 

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TECHNOLOGY

SQL 2019 users will no longer get a "Login failed for user error" when the correct SQL user and password are entered. This applies for the following scenarios: 

• When upgrading Infinity and the SQL user connecting to the database is not the standard Infinity SQL user. 

• When the Infinity SQL user already exists, you are installing Infinity again and the correct SQL password is supplied during installation. 

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To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us. 

If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

New in Infinity – April 2021

The latest enhancements across the Infinity platform to help you and your team work more efficiently and create frictionless customer experiences.

Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Extend visibility of orders to branches and regional managers

The Order Orchestration Dashboard now has a read-only mode available at branch or head office level. This extends the visibility of orders to additional staff, giving them the ability to view but not update orders. At branch level, only orders within the region of that branch can be viewed. A regional filter at head office gives regional managers an overview of orders within their region.

Easier edits to orders during picking

It is now possible to view and edit an order from Pick Manager.  This simplifies the process of managing an order if there are any issues during the picking process, freeing up time and making it more likely that an order is updated correctly.

Better management of delivery and pickup times

When an order for collection has been picked via Pick Manager, it is now possible to prompt the user to enter a delivery or collection date and time.  This enables stores to schedule preferred times for the order pickups, for example, during non-peak trading times. The customer should be contacted to discuss the scheduled pickup time. This update also gives stores more information for managing their orders.

Easier selection of preferred suppliers

It is now possible to prevent a supplier from being automatically assigned to an order line for one or more branches. When enabled, the supplier is instead selected by the branch that will fulfil the order line if the order line cannot be fulfilled from store stock. This ensures that the store that fulfils the order line makes an active decision about where to source their stock and means that the supplier selected is more likely to be the best for that specific order in terms of cost or time to deliver.

Improve data integration with external systems

When adding or updating a sales order, non-printable characters entered into the order notes will no longer be saved to the database. This limits the risk of sales order integrations to external systems failing due to un-recognised characters and reduces the time spent correcting these issues. 

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PRODUCT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Faster selection of products

For companies that sell non-barcoded products, or services with various options that can be selected, a new mode of the Infinity Options and Links product selection wizard allows you to navigate through the available options to select an existing product. This makes it easier for staff and customers to understand, simplifying the transaction and reducing time. It also allows you to analyse sales to find the most popular options selected and use this knowledge to update and improve the options available and drive more sales.

Easier management of duplicate barcodes

When managing item master data imported and exported to/from spreadsheets using Infinity ETL, it is now possible to import items with duplicate alternate barcodes.  This sometimes occurs when suppliers re-use a barcode on a different product. This new option frees up time spent adjusting data so that the barcodes are unique and the import is successful.

Improve data, stock and reporting accuracy

A new validation prevents child items from being re-activated unless the parent item is active.

Faster price updates

The Inventory Review module allows branches to choose whether to apply a recommended retail price change or to keep their own price.  For companies who use this module, entering price updates at head office is now faster due to recent optimisation of this module, freeing up some of the time spent administering data.

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PRICING & PROMOTIONS

Better visibility of promotions and pricing options

New functionality helps users to upsell during a promotional period or when there is different pricing for an item at higher quantities. This function shows the user when Pricing Scales or Product Sets are applicable to the current sale. An indicator can be configured to appear on transaction lines where these pricing options are available and staff can click a button to view further details. 

Improve POS scanning accuracy

When a survey notification prompt appears on the POS screen and an item is scanned, Infinity no longer closes the prompt. This means that staff will not accidentally miss scanning an item into a sale, thinking that they have already done so, reducing revenue loss and improving stock accuracy.

Prevent unintended updates to pricing conditions

Infinity head office users can no longer create pricing conditions for their cluster for a promotional cycle that belongs to a parent cluster. This means that if a promotional cluster is updated, there are no unintended updates to pricing conditions at a lower cluster level.

Faster repricing

RBP Engine has been optimised to reprice large quantities of items with quantity breaks instantly. Repricing is now faster, creating  a faster customer experience.

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POINT OF SALE

Give customers Openpay payments

Infinity can now accept payment by Openpay in Australia. Openpay is an online and in-store payment solution that lets customers purchase now and pay later, with no interest. 

Reduce queue times with new search capabilities

You can now configure a POS button to call an advanced item search for a particular department, sub-department or class only. This is useful for quickly finding products of a particular type that are not barcoded at the point of sale, reducing queue times.

Another new feature is useful for quickly finding commonly sold products that are not barcoded. Advanced Item Search can now be configured to automatically show the top 5 selling items on opening.  If Advanced Item Search has been restricted to a particular department, subdepartment or class, then it will show the top selling items from that department, subdepartment or class. 

Enhance Slyp digital receipts

The Slyp Integration has been enhanced to enable better matches to EFTPOS transactions and now Australian retailers who use Linkly (formerly PC-EFTPOS-AU) can use Slyp to deliver Digital Smart Receipts to their customers' banking app.

Add VDMS vending machines

Infinity is now integrated with VDMS vending machines. Infinity can check the inventory levels in the vending machine and disallow a sale if there is not enough stock.  It can also check whether the vending machine door is open and disallow a sale if it is. Upon completion of a sale containing a VDMS product, the product is automatically issued from the vending machine. 

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INVENTORY

Faster generation of purchase orders

The performance of automatic purchase order creation by date range in Infinity has been significantly improved, which frees up time spent waiting for purchase orders to be generated.

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TECHNOLOGY

The Infinity Cloud Events Service can now publish heartbeat and sale transactions events using the Cloud Events v1.0 standard format either via Rabbit MQ or via cloud-hosted API.  These events can be used to integrate sales transaction data to other systems, for example, analytics, electronic marketing systems, financial applications and alerting systems.

The Infinity Cloud Events Service heartbeat processor now states whether the back office and/or station database connectivity (linking) is healthy or not. If its unhealthy, it will list the back offices and/or stations that are unhealthy.  This information can be used to raise alerts if a branch is not linking.

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OTHER

When viewing and searching for invoices using the Invoices API, you can now retrieve fuel sale and fuel discount information.  This is useful for providing this information to other third party systems, such as enabling a customer to view their transaction details.

The configured Maximum Sale Value can now be set to a decimal value. This feature helps support controls related to Anti-Money Laundering legislation, where businesses need to complete a series of person checks if the sale is $10,000.00 or more.

For companies with a large volume of transactions, it is now possible to schedule a task overnight to purge data older than a given number of days from the head office database rather than using the standard Infinity database clean-up which is not run at a scheduled time. If a company wishes to reduce the length of time that data is kept in the head office database, then this process can also be used to incrementally reduce the number of days of data held in the database, without having to reduce the data lifespan parameter each day. 

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To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us. 

If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

New in Infinity – January 2021

Here’s what’s new in Infinity to help you and your team create frictionless experiences for your customers.

Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.

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CUSTOMERS & LOYALTY

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Create a tiered loyalty program

A customer’s loyalty category can now be changed using the Loyalty API, giving you the ability to implement an integrated, tiered customer loyalty program. For example, if an existing customer signs up to be a VIP customer online, the Loyalty API will send updates to Infinity Loyalty and the customer will receive their new offers and rewards. This also allows an external CRM system to re-classify customers.

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Generate and track loyalty offers in external systems

You can now create loyalty offer codes in external systems (such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud) and make those codes available in Infinity to generate targeted offers, while keeping Infinity as the single source of truth. This means that when a Loyalty customer wants to redeem an external offer, your store staff and website can identify it by either reference, and the offer can be marked as redeemed in the external system when it is consumed in Infinity. Store staff can also identify the offer by both the Infinity offer description and the external reference.

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Retrieve fuel discounts faster

Support office staff who need to search through large volumes of cents per litre (CPL) fuel discounts can retrieve those transactions faster and more efficiently. Search results are now organised into manageable chunks in a paged format. Staff using Infinity Loyalty and external loyalty systems can take advantage of this enhancement. 

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PRODUCT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Maintain accurate supplier information

Users are now warned if they try to use a product’s primary supplier as an alternate supplier as well. You can also use the new Duplicate Supplier Product Code Report to keep an eye on any double-ups and correct them.

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INVENTORY

Simplify goods receipting of packs

Your staff can now use pack details to receipt against invoices, simplifying the process by saving them the trouble of having to calculate the sell units that have been delivered.

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Send customers progress updates for online orders

Keeping your customers informed about the status of their orders is now much easier following enhancements to Infinity Messaging. You can now send customers notification emails to show the status of their orders, such as completed and shipped, delivered or ready to be picked up. You can also send emails with pick-up reminders and when customers cancel orders. Order documentation can be attached to the emails to remind them what they have ordered.

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PRICING & PROMOTIONS

Faster creation of branch-specific promotions

If your multi-branch business doesn’t already use Infinity’s branch cluster functionality, you can still create pricing rules for branch groups. This means you no longer have to create promotions branch by branch, saving you time and ensuring greater accuracy.

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REPORTING & ANALYTICS

Accurate data for aged trial balance reports

You can now report on historical aged trial balances for a specified date and time. Infinity allows you to capture a snapshot of these totals at crucial moments, such as month-end. This is particularly useful if you run month-end a few days later, but still need accurate data. The report works in conjunction with the Infinity SQL Job Service, which has been enhanced to include an Aged Trial Balance processor.

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POINT OF SALE

Assign accurate reasons for cash transactions

Assigning reasons to POS transactions has been enhanced so that you can now set up separate reasons for cash pick-ups and deposits. This means your store staff can provide more clarity about the reason for the withdrawal or deposit, such as “float top-up” or “window cleaner payment”. 

Easier access to customer pricing

It’s now easier for users to see customer pricing that applies to items when using the Advanced Item Search. If you use customer pricing in conjunction with single unit promotional pricing, a red border around the item’s tile in the search results lets staff know that it has been repriced, allowing them to tell the customer the actual price they will pay for an item.

Better visibility of customer wishlists in stores

Using in-store wishlists has become more seamless now that users don’t have to add an item to a sale in order to see a customer’s existing wishlist.

Faster retrieval of epay receipts

You can now configure your printed receipts to show the epay transaction reference, so if the original epay receipt is lost you can get the transaction reference from the sale receipt or the reprinted sale receipt.

Simpler customer refunds in stores

Store staff can now use Infinity’s Returns Extended function to search for transactions using eternal transactions references, such as those on warehouse dispatch documentation, as well as Infinity reference numbers, making it faster and simpler to find transactions to refund against. 

Easier attachment of dangerous goods certificates

If you sell dangerous goods, you can now attach a certificate type to more than one product type across a tiered product inventory. This is useful in situations where a customer who holds an advanced certificate needs to buy a product type that requires a lower-level certificate. Infinity now allows the advanced certificate to be attached to products at all lower levels.

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TECHNOLOGY

Help to disable TLS 1.0 for PCI compliance 

If you need to disable TLS 1.0 to meet PCI requirements, Infinity Core now supports using an alternate database provider that will connect to the SQL database with TLS 1.0 disabled. Prior to this change, disabling TLS would stop any connectivity to SQL Server databases.

Infinity Core is the first module to be updated and Triquestra will be working through the wider product suite to enable and validate operations without TLS 1.0 enabled.

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To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us. 

If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.