Singapore, April 16, 2002: GPayments, the Sydney-based Internet Payments company, is launching a new product, ActiveCheckout, at Cards Asia.

ActiveCheckout is a software applet for cardholders making Internet purchases. It provides security, convenience and compliance with the new authentication standard from MasterCard – Secure Payment Application (SPA).

ActiveCheckout supports cards from multiple credit card issuers and can provide password protection for online credit card payments. Real-time authentication with the cardholder’s issuer reduces the incidence of online credit card fraud and increases the cardholder’s confidence to make online purchases.

As an additional benefit, ActiveCheckout also provides the cardholder with automatic form-filling at ANY merchant website. This can reduce the time it takes to make an online purchase by up to 4 minutes.

ActiveCheckout is the first SPA-enabled applet that is freely distributable to cardholders. It is simple for cardholders to participate as it automatically installs into a cardholder’s browser as a browser plug-in.

MasterCard developed SPA as a solution to the problem of online credit card fraud for banks, merchants and cardholders. It is a global authentication standard, announced in March, 2002.

GPayments has been working closely with MasterCard since May 2001. Based on its previous experience in Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) and electronic wallets, it was asked to participate in the development of SPA compliant products. GPayments became a licensed MasterCard SPA implementer in November, 2001.

It is expected that ActiveCheckout will experience rapid take-up throughout the Asia Pacific region which is currently experiencing high levels of online fraud. A number of issuers and merchants are already planning to support the new standard. ActiveCheckout can be downloaded from http://www.gpayments.com.