Mumbai, May 11: Credit card users no longer need to fear transacting on the Internet. HDFC Bank on Thursday launched a payment gateway for enabling secure online, real-time e-shopping allowing card users to shop on the Web.The first such transaction in the country was logged on Thursday on the easy2shoppe.com shopping mail, enabled by the bank on a VISA card. The bank has already tied up with 15 portals and is in talks with many others to offer business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce transactions.The portals, which have joined hands with the bank, include VSNL, Satyam, Indiainfo, Fabmart, Mantra Online, CyberITMail, Cricketnext, Indiacar, IndBazaar and Traveelanza.
"The bank's gateway for online card transactions is a Globeset product marketed worldwide by NetLife. Since the bank has not yet launched its credit card, our role provide a secure gateway to customers will be in the role of a acquirer bank. Both VISA and MasterCard users can access the site for making transactions," the bank's country head (marketing and retail assets) Neeraj Swaroop told The Financial Express.
The customer entering the card card number will enjoy the relief of his card number travelling in a secure mode to the site and then to the VISA/ MasterCard host server. On acceptance, the message is sent back to the site instantly without being visible to the shopping site or any other third party. The customer receives authorisation within seconds on his screen.With the launch of the gateway, the bank has a comprehensive payment acceptance solution enabling card transactions on the Web. This provides a secure end-to-end e-commerce solution that performs real-time verification and online order processing leading to payments.
The card details of the customer travel in a secure encrypted channel to VISA for authorisation and the customers receive an online confirmation of the transaction. These details which pass through the bank's gateway into the VISA are completely secure as the channel has no human intervention and adequate firewalling to restrict unauthorised entry.
"The customer knows whether his transaction is an authorised payment. The 128 bit encryption allows complete security," said CN Ram, head (infotech) in HDFC Bank.
The gateway is a fault tolerant 24*7 payment processing system. It has a 128 bit secure socket layer (SSL) protocol. This offers a high level of protection to the credit card number of the customer as each bit of data is randomly encrypted from the customer browser and flows through this secure channel to the merchant storefront and to the VISA and MasterCard servers. The bank offers a direct debit option allowing customers to pay for the goods or services by a secure password enabled transfer of funds from their to the merchant's account.
Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.