As online gaming operators struggled for the better part of the last year to find a way to exist and still keep their customers happy and maintain a good relationship with credit card companies and issuing banks, one payment solutions provider has found a large sector of the marketplace switching to its system.
Officials with Gateway Financial Services Ltd., a multi-national company, feel a major selling point for their product is the ease of integration for operators and the robustness of the system.
They also say that those operators who have switched to the Gateway System have found a lower rate of chargebacks compared to the previous systems they were using.
The Company
Headquartered in the Turks and Caicos Islands, British West Indies with offices in Switzerland and Canada, and servers and banking affiliations in Cologne, Germany, Gateway is among the top global e-commerce providers.
Gateway leveraged its experience in the gaming marketplace and as more operators switched to its system, increased its staff more than 30 percent in the last two months alone.
Company reps say Gateway's edge is its private corporate structure, which, they say, enables the company to offer absolute client security and confidentiality.
All rolling reserves are held by Deutsche Bank. To further enhance the security of the Gateway process, a licensed trust company is employed to co-administrate all merchants' financial accounts. It is this relationship that has created what Gateway feels is the most secure settlement process in the online industry.
Creating financial solutions for Internet gaming is the primary focus for Gateway in e-commerce.
To provide the merchant with seamless processing Gateway formed an exclusive strategic alliance with Pago, a leading e-commerce acquiring institution in Germany.
With al these systems in place Gateway can offer its clients a system designed to deliver speed and accuracy in a user-friendly environment.
The Products
Gateway's proprietary processing software, POS Server, is a culmination of years of research and development in the fields of electronic transaction processing and encryption technologies. Officials feel the unique modular architecture of the software provides the highest level of robustness and scalability available, ensuring that Gateway can handle any peaks in volume.
The POS server software is able to fill that need with a server-based transaction processing system that is designed to enable businesses to authorize, process, and manage credit card transactions in a real-time, online environment.
These transactions can be conducted from any computer with an Internet connection and a Web browser. The POS server aims to eliminate the need for complex software, large databases and heavy-duty processing at the client site. All payment operations are handled by Gateway's 24/7 high-security payment servers, located in the company's Internet data centers.
Using Gateway's encryptor/decryptor module, registered merchants transmit transaction requests, both sales and credits, to Gateway over the Internet. All relevant information for both the processing of the transaction and retrieval purposes is included in the encrypted transaction. Once the transaction is authenticated, it is submitted for authorization. Response codes are then communicated back to the merchant indicating a successful or declined transaction. In the case of a decline, the response code will indicate why the transaction failed. Gateway also provides the user with multi-currency flexibility.
Through the password-protected portion of the Web site, merchants can log into the Gateway database and retrieve transaction logs/reports. With 'drill-down' capability, these reports give the merchant valuable information for the day-to-day management of their businesses.
The reports, which can be configured to suit the needs of the individual merchant, display transaction volumes, frequencies, related fees and other transaction processing costs.
Customer disputes or questions concerning credit-card charges need to be addressed quickly and efficiently. As such, Gateway has built a querying tool that enables the merchant to search for various transactions using multiple search criteria. Search results can then be selected for full transaction history details, giving the merchant the information it needs to service its customers.
With the Gateway application software maintained on Gateway servers, new payment technologies, standards and services are automatically implemented as they emerge.
Customers keep the same interface, but are able to stay on top of the latest technologies and ahead of the
Internet-commerce curve. This saves time and money by allowing them to focus on managing their business.
The system is designed to integrate new technologies without requiring the customer to change interfaces, which ultimately saves time and money by enabling customers to focus on their businesses.
Regardless of Web site size or hosting environments, as transaction volume grows, the Gateway service scales right along with the client.
The Future
Officials with Gateway feel the worst of the transaction problems for online gaming operators is behind them.
They feel credit card companies and issuing banks have begun to monitor gaming transactions more closely and are not just randomly giving denial of service messages when a transaction goes through. They also feel the education process of operators (understanding who customers are and where the money is coming from) was a main goal of the credit card sector when they tightened the restrictions on Internet gambling businesses. According to Gateway, now that operators are using more caution in accepting charges, and have managed to curtail the amount of chargebacks in the industry to an extent, operators can look forward to a brighter future.