The way Norse Corp. CEO Sam Glines sees it, his card data security-software company has connected a major dot in offering a full payment-gateway service.
When they launched Norse two years ago, Glines and his partners did not foresee becoming a full-service gateway provider. But the company’s April 24 announcement of the nGate Payment Gateway launch strengthens the IPViking fraud-security services the company introduced last month, Glines tells PaymentsSource (
“I would not have guessed we would be offering a full payment gateway, but it just made sense based on what we were seeing and what our potential clients were saying,” Glines says.
Many of those prospects wanted to incorporate IPViking into their payment systems, but it called for a complicated process to establish the connections to various gateways, Glines notes. In addition, some were saying they wanted to offer all types of payment methods instead of committing to a single system or gateway, such as PayPal Inc., Glines says.
The new nGate cloud-based gateway software provides the ability to process payments made at point-of-sale terminals or online, while accepting payment cards, including those for health savings accounts or non-U.S. transactions, as well as checks or automated clearinghouse transactions, Glines says.
In addition, nGate connects with IPViking, which tracks and documents suspected or known fraudulent Internet protocol addresses before the cybercriminals using those computers even attempt a transaction, he notes. In turn, Norse keeps a database of bad IP addresses to alert clients when a cybercrook attempts an attack from one or more of those locations, he adds.
“We go behind enemy lines, so to speak, in searching out the bad IPs,” Glines says.
St. Louis, Mo.-based Norse also developed a connection with Intuit Inc.’s QuickBooks accounting software for creating customer invoices or obtaining other customer data “with one click of a button,” Glines adds.
U.S.-based independent sales organizations and processors will have immediate access to nGate to sell to clients, Norse noted in a press release.
Norse establishes cost-per-transaction fees with clients, taking into account the fraud-protection and gateway services for both online and brick-and-mortar retailers, Glines says.
Beyond e-commerce and POS security, Norse intends to further reduce fraud in mobile payments, Skip Foss, Norse chief product officer, tells PaymentsSource.
“Mobile-payment applications are not always generated by reputable sources,” Foss says. “Anyone can make a payment software and go wild with it, which brings fraudulent ‘botnets’ designed to shut down entire networks into the mobile-pay space.”
Norse plans soon to announce software for mobile-payment protection, he adds. “We are prepared to deal with threats to mobile payment security,” Foss says.
Merchants like a one-stop-shop offer for payments and fraud services, which should make Norse’s nGate an appealing option, Julie Conroy McNelley, senior analyst and fraud expert with Boston-based Aite Group, tells PaymentsSource.
“It’s a natural progression for Norse Corp., but fraud requirements don’t stop at IP address screening,” McNelley says.
Norse likely will find itself building a strategy to address how to fill in the remaining pieces of the fraud-security puzzle, she suggests.
“The new gateway is great news from a payment-service perspective, but Norse will have to augment services or partner with other providers to go deeper into and address a whole range of security needs,” McNelley contends.
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