Crane Payment Innovations Brand Guidelines: MEI, NRI, CashCode & Crane NXT

A new name built from an acquisition.

Crane Payment Innovations, usually shortened to CPI, is a young name with old parts. Its parent, Crane Co., was founded in Chicago in 1855, according to the company’s own boilerplate, and by the early 2010s it already owned a group of payment brands run as Crane Payment Solutions. In December 2012 Crane announced that it would buy MEI, the payment-systems business that had begun life inside the confectionery maker Mars.

The purchase took a year. The European Commission cleared it on condition, and Crane completed the acquisition of MEI Conlux Holdings on 11 December 2013, after two Crane Payment Solutions products were divested at the Commission’s request, Vending Market Watch reported on 28 February 2014.

Crane then used the deal to create a new name. In February 2014, in a release datelined Malvern, Pennsylvania, the former MEI base, and carried by the trade site Parking.net on 20 February, it launched Crane Payment Innovations, combining the Crane Payment Solutions brands CashCode, Money Controls, NRI and Telequip with MEI and Conlux. “We’re building a new, integrated business that will combine the strengths of MEI and Crane Payment Solutions,” CPI’s president said at the launch. The release called the “I” for Innovations significant, and that corporate and customer-facing functions would be brought together over time.

CPI’s own brand history gives the same picture, describing the company as “created in 2014” and drawing on the heritage of NRI, CashCode, Telequip, Money Controls, MEI and Conlux.

Validators, recyclers and coin mechanisms.

Each of CPI’s inherited brands has its own story, as the company tells it. CPI says NRI was founded in Germany in 1959, developed an electronic coin validator in 1972 that was installed in ticket machines for the Munich Olympic Games, and joined Crane in 1985. It says NRI’s coin validators, coin changers and hoppers went on to serve many industries. It dates Money Controls, a British maker of coin hoppers, note acceptors and pay-out units, to 1967, joining Crane in 2010; CashCode, a Canadian bill-validator maker, to 1991, joining in 2006 along with the coin-dispensing brand Telequip, founded in the United States in 1974. CPI credits CashCode with a front-loading bill validator in 2000 and with bill-recycling technology from 2003.

MEI began as Mars Electronics International. CPI says Mars, Inc. founded it in 1969 in the United States to improve coin recognition for vending machines; English Wikipedia says the business began operating in Great Britain in 1965 and in the United States in 1967. Both agree on what followed: MEI bought the Japanese coin-mechanism maker Conlux in 2003 and left Mars ownership in 2006, when, according to CPI, it was bought by Advantage Partners and Bain Capital. CPI says Nippon Conlux, formerly Nippon Coinco, made Japan’s first coin mechanism in 1967, a machine it says is registered among the industrial-technology history materials of the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo. Later arrivals, by CPI’s account, were the Swiss vending-payment maker Microtronic in 2017, Cummins Allison in 2019 and Crane Merchandising Systems, the vending-machine maker, in 2020.

The product range follows those roots. CPI’s catalogue lists note validators such as the SC Advance and Talos, the BNR Advance note recycler, coin validators and hoppers, cashless card and mobile readers, the JetScan and JetSort cash-processing machines from Cummins Allison, and the CoinMax self-service coin kiosk. The company groups its customers into retail and self-checkout, self-service kiosks, gaming and casinos, vending, financial institutions, and transport and parking, where it names ticket vending machines, parking kiosks and toll booths as uses.

How cash handling makers present themselves.

Cash-handling makers sell machines that most people meet without ever choosing them. Their products appear in bank lobbies and in the walls of branches, behind teller counters as cash recyclers, beside supermarket tills as coin counters, and in the printing halls where banknotes are made. The maker’s name is often a small plate on a large machine, so the brand does much of its work in brochures, trade stands and service contracts rather than on the street.

The machines themselves come in families. NCR’s first serious ATM generation, the 5070 of 1983, was developed at its Dundee plant in Scotland and came in lobby and through-the-wall versions, with modules that could be taken out for repair or refilling, according to English Wikipedia. That modular build lends itself to cutaway diagrams, which trace the path a note takes through a machine from cassette to dispenser.

Trade fairs and bank technology conferences are where new machines are shown. Diebold demonstrated a cash machine prototype at the American Bankers Association’s annual meeting in 1966, and in October 2015 showed two ATM concepts at the Money20/20 show in Las Vegas, English Wikipedia says. The ATM Industry Association gives its own awards, which makers list on their websites.

Ownership in this sector changes often. Diebold took over Germany’s Wincor Nixdorf in 2016, NCR split off its ATM business as NCR Atleos in 2023, and in February 2026 the cash carrier Brink’s agreed to acquire NCR Atleos, ATM Marketplace reported. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where its machines are made — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

Inside Crane NXT.

The parent company has since been reshaped. On 30 March 2022 Crane Co. announced a plan to split into two listed companies, with its Payment and Merchandising Technologies business, which included CPI, to become Crane NXT, while the Aerospace & Electronics and Process Flow Technologies businesses kept the Crane name. The separation was completed on 3 April 2023, and Crane NXT began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker CXT on 4 April, according to its press releases. Crane NXT is based in Waltham, Massachusetts; CPI says it forms the group together with Crane Currency.

Crane NXT has kept buying. Its press releases record the completed purchases of OpSec Security in May 2024, of De La Rue’s Authentication Solutions business in May 2025 and of the Italian inspection and traceability company Antares Vision in April 2026. In August 2026 it named a new president of CPI, who also leads the group’s Detection and Traceability Technologies segment.

CPI presents itself as one global brand. Its website gathers the older names into a single “brand history” timeline and keeps separate support channels for CPI, Cummins Allison and Crane Merchandising Systems, while the vending machines are now marketed under the Crane Convenience name.

For a design guide, CPI shows how a group can fold several specialist names into one corporate brand while keeping product names such as JetScan and Talos in use. Compare Cummins Allison, the counter maker it absorbed, and De La Rue, whose authentication business joined Crane NXT. For this guide we use a deep teal, a coin amber and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Crane Payment Innovations’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.