Califronia-based e-security vendor ValiCert has launched e-Pay Secure, a suite of products and services designed specifically for banks, payment networks and processors for trusted business-to-business (B2B) and consumer e-payments. Sanwa Bank is to pilot the new solution in the delivery of hosted payments services for its corporate customers.
ValiCert says e-Pay Secure is ideal for institutions that partner with payment processors and for banks that are building improved payment systems, and supports a variety of e-payment scenarios, such as Identrus Eleanor for conditional B2B payments, Visa-authenticated payments for consumer transactions and bank-to-bank settlement and cheque imaging.
"One of the biggest obstacles to small and medium enterprises is the total cost to implement e-payment functionalities to their Web applications," says Noritoshi Murakami, senior manager, e-commerce banking department of Sanwa Bank.
He says Sanwa will use the ValiCert infrastructure to help merchants deliver secure online payment processing services.
ValiCert has ramped up its campaign to promote the new product bundle by announcing partnership agreements with interbank payments network Swift and enterprise systems vendor Unisys.
Version 4.1 of ValiCert Validation Authority software is fully interoperable with Swift's TrustAct service for secure delivery and receipt of bank and corporate messages over the Internet. TrustAct is also the foundation for Swift's e-Payments Plus, which enables banks to provide their corporate customers with Web-based payment initiation and assurance services. ValiCert Validation Authority, a component of the e-Pay Secure solution, enables banks to confirm the identity of corporate users over the Internet.
In a seperate deal, ValiCert and Unisys are combining to co-promote e-Pay Secure alongside Unisys' e-@Action Payments Cartridge, which uses rules-driven workflow to provide streamlined payment initiation services for banks and their corporate customers.
Both IBM and Unisys are currently building complete Eleanor B2B solutions utilising ValiCert e-Pay Secure infrastructure. These solutions will offer conditional payments and time-dated guaranteed payments features to banks and financial services organisations.
According to TowerGroup, the global banking industry spends approximately $10.8 billion worldwide annually on information technology for payments processing, which represents approximately 12% of the industry's total current annual spending of about $88.8 billion.