An integrated online payments service that allows businesses to accept and manage payments with the most modern credit card technology is to be launched today by Powertranz Ltd.

The young Bermudian company partnered with First Atlantic Commerce to launch the new platform, called Powertranz, which will be available to merchants throughout the Caribbean.

Powertranz is described as a robust payment gateway that provides integrated point-of-sale/card-present transaction processing, including EMV and Payment Card Industry-validated Point to Point Encryption), via Powertranz’s partnership with Bluefin Payment Systems, for merchants across the Caribbean.

Chris Burns, chief executive officer of Powertranz, said the Caribbean region lacked a truly integrated EMV solution. Point-of-sale software and payment terminals did not have access to the required integration points. EMV is the technology behind chip-and-pin cards.

“With the deployment of Powertranz, we have solved an important issue that existed in the Caribbean for many years,” Mr Burns said. “We have removed the dual entry requirement, which significantly improves a merchant’s ability to reconcile transactions.

“And thanks to Bluefin, we can provide PCI-validated point-to-point encryption solutions within point-of-sale environments which not only greatly reduces the merchant’s PCI scope, but also gives them industry-leading protection from costly data breaches. This is a major step forward for the Caribbean payments industry.”

Ronnie Viera, chief operating officer of Powertranz added: “We are extremely pleased that, after three years of design, development and testing, Powertranz is now available to the market. The new gateway was built with a fully redundant systems architecture using the latest in technology.

“As well, we have released a state-of-the-art merchant portal web application to provide merchants with deep insight into their transaction processing activity.”

PCI validated P2PE encrypts card data at the point of contact with the payment terminal, removing all clear text credit card data from the merchants’ systems.

This largely reduces PCI Scope and protects merchants from credit card data breaches, which continue to trend upward on a global scale.

The platform’s key features include:

• Full integration between POS software and payment terminal

• Elimination of price and credit card data manual entries

• Elimination of costly dual-entry mistakes

• Cleansed transactional data sent back to POS software in real time

• Protection from costly data breaches

• Sensitive card data encrypted at all times

• Improved ability to reconcile transactions

• No requirement for POS software vendor to do costly EMV certifications to processors

• PCI Validated P2PE protection on each transaction

• PCI authorised scope reduction

• Powertranz has a website at www.powertranz.bm