Think
One word, written on an easel in Dayton.
Why the domain is thinknps.com, and why an office at 10 Sugar Camp Circle is a strange and appropriate place to run a payments company.
Desk placard, IBM Corporation. The word started one mile from this office.
Why thinknps.com
One word, written on an easel in Dayton.
In December 1911, a sales manager at the National Cash Register Company stood in front of a room that wasn't going anywhere and told them the trouble was that nobody was thinking hard enough. Then he wrote a single word on the easel.
"We don't get paid for working with our feet — we get paid for working with our heads."
His name was Thomas J. Watson. He carried that word with him when he left Dayton for the company that became IBM, and it hung on desks for the next eighty years.
THINK
We took the domain because it's the actual job. Anybody can quote you a rate. The value is in thinking about the transaction before it becomes a chargeback, an audit finding, or a batch that didn't fund.
The ground we stand on
The point of sale was invented down the street.
-
1879
A saloonkeeper gets tired of being robbed
James Ritty, who ran a bar on Main Street in Dayton, patents a machine that records every sale out loud and in ink. He calls it the Incorruptible Cashier.
-
1884
National Cash Register
John H. Patterson takes majority control and renames the company. Over the next forty years NCR turns Dayton into the place the world buys its cash registers — and invents the modern sales organization to do it.
-
1911
THINK
Thomas J. Watson writes the word on an easel at an NCR sales meeting. He takes it to IBM three years later.
-
1934
Sugar Camp
Sixty cabins go up on the wooded hillside NCR used as its sales-training camp, housing the men learning to demonstrate a register door to door.
-
1943
Six hundred women, and a secret
The Navy takes over the cabins. Roughly 600 WAVES move in and work three shifts a day, six days a week, at the Naval Computing Machine Laboratory in NCR Building 26 — assembling 120 code-breaking "bombes" that crack the German four-rotor Enigma. Most of them didn't learn what they'd done until a reunion in 1995.
-
Today
10 Sugar Camp Circle
National Processing Solutions works out of a cottage on that same ground. Different machines. Same question: did the transaction go through, and can you prove it?
A Navy WAVE at a bombe. 120 were built in Dayton; each weighed over two tons.
WAVES in formation at Sugar Camp. Sixty cabins, four bunks each — twelve women at peak.
NCR demonstration script: "Now, sir, this register makes the entries."
The original point-of-sale terminal. Ours boot faster.
See for yourself
Hear it from the people who'd be handling it.
Two short spots from the NPS team — one on who we are, one on the phrase that costs Western Ohio business owners the most money.
Get started
Send us a recent statement.
We'll read it line by line and tell you what you're actually paying — including the fees that don't have obvious names. If we can't beat it, we'll say so. Free, and there's nothing to sign to get it.