Acculynk Inc. is banking on its relationships with major U.S. retailers to help it secure card-network partnerships in the international market to deploy PaySecure, its Internet PIN-debit product.
The Atlanta-based company has formed what it is calling the International Internet PIN Acceptance Consortium. The body’s main objective is to enable secure Internet transactions across international borders by establishing PaySecure as the standard for processing Internet PIN-debit payments.
Merchants expanding outside the U.S. are finding problems with enabling remote transactions in some countries, explains Acculynk CEO Ashish Bahl. “Many of these countries don’t have developed credit card schemes,” he says. “And a lot of countries that have debit cards are only PIN-enabled.”
Acculynk enables consumers to use PIN-debit cards to make purchases online by integrating its PaySecure software into a merchant’s online-checkout system. After a consumer enters a card number into a designated field, the system determines whether the card is eligible to be used with a PIN. The consumer has the option to complete the purchase as a signature-debit transaction or as a PIN-debit one.
With PIN debit, a virtual PIN pad that appears on the screen scrambles the numbers as a safety precaution each time the consumer enters a digit. The issuing bank’s brand also appears at checkout, providing additional peace of mind for the consumer.
American Airlines Inc. is one of the first major companies to publicly support Acculynk’s international push.
“Having this type of consortium is important to the airline industry,” Frank DiNuzzo, American Airlines managing director of market performance, said in a Nov. 29 press release. “PaySecure’s innovative [service] for facilitating Internet PIN-debit acceptance in the U.S. offers a simple, cost-effective model that can readily be established as a standard for international e-commerce.”
DiNuzzo was not immediately available for additional comment.
Acculynk already is testing the international market as a result of an agreement with Evertec Inc. in Puerto Rico (
Evertec, a merchant acquirer and transaction processor, owns and operates the ATH PIN-debit and ATM network in Puerto Rico. The deal will make some 3.5 million debit cards eligible for PaySecure purchases at merchants who support the technology starting Jan. 1.
Acculynk also has verbal agreements with networks in three countries spanning Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region. “We’re on their roadmap for deployment in 2012,” Bahl says.
Philip Philliou, a partner with the consulting firm Philliou Partners LLC in New York, believes Acculynk is pushing into the Latin America market at just the right time.
“In markets outside the U.S., like Brazil and the rest of Latin America, the move toward online is growing exponentially, and consumers are facing all the same challenges American consumers had several years ago [with online shopping],” he says.
Latin American consumers are seeking to make online, debit-based purchases and want security around those transactions and a simple way to complete them, Philliou says.
Acculynk purposely is avoiding Europe because the region’s Single Euro Payments Area system is still in flux, Bahl says. SEPA is an initiative the European banking industry launched in 2002 to link Europe’s disparate national payment systems into a standardized system usable for cross-border debit transactions.
The European Commission has revised the deadline for banks to support SEPA credit transfers and direct debits to the end of 2012 because banks were unable to meet the original December 2010 deadline (
Bahl’s plan is to approach European countries only after Acculynk establishes itself in other regions.
“If we have phenomenal case studies in Latin America and some of the other markets, we can take [PaySecure] to Western Europe,” he says. “I feel supremely confident we’ll bypass the bureaucracy [happening there now].”
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