ANZ opens first eGate to clients

ANZ has launched the country’s most advanced Internet-based payment gateway – the first to be owned and managed by a bank.

Developed by Sydney-based Creative Digital Technology (CDT), ANZ eGate supports credit-card payment, using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption, and is the first to offer deferred trade terms settlement.

In the future, it also will be able to clear Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) account payments. ANZ eGate will securely process and manage both business-to-business and business-to-consumer transactions.

ANZ business e-commerce head Mike Irvine said the service would be most valuable for medium-to-large merchants with high transaction volumes.

“ANZ eGate provides the facility to record the amount or credit that has been allocated, keep a track of purchases made against that, and then settlement can be made later under the due terms,” Mr Irvine said.

The eGate system was introduced to organisations recently, including Internet communications company EISA, which expected to process more than 50,000 payments each moth through the service.

Scheduled to be available at the end of November, the system will have a monthly access fee and a transaction fee, depending upon the volume.

“We think this will be priced very competitively with respect to other offerings in the market,” Mr Irvine said.

ANZ eGate can also integrate with non Internet-based commerce systems such as Interactive Voice Response, call centres and point-of-sale systems.

The bank plans to extend the number of payment options, the geographical scope, the multi-currency capacity and also provide for value-added services such as receivables and payables management.

CDT chief operating officer Philip Burton said there was an agreement with ANZ for ongoing developments to eGate – based on the company’s ActivePayment multi-payment gateway.

CDT is looking to licence the product globally and a number of banks in the US are evaluating the technology.

The company will also open its first US office in the next few months, and was the first Australian company to offer SET-enabled products for purchases over the Internet.

Taronga Park Zoo was the first Web site in the country to adopt the SET technology earlier this year.