Net payment company Cha Technologies Inc has snared former Mastercard and National Data Corp exec Heidi Goff to be CEO. We figure it must be looking for a hit record or a buyer. The New York company is vying with rivals such as Qpass to establish business-to-consumer payment systems for purchases under $20. Cha’s 1ClickCharge aggregates small purchases. It requires no merchant side hardware or software but works from a client applet. Cha says the Electronic Commerce Modeling Language (ECML) does two things for it. First, it validates the single-click market it’s trying to build and second, it will enable it to handle hard goods sooner than it thought it would be able to.
Meanwhile, IBM Corp is now offering a Java-based Micro Payments electronic payment system which it claims will enable businesses to sell content, information, and services over the web for cents or fractions of a cent. It says Micro Payments enables an e- commerce site to bill actual cost for any item available on that site, rather than having to round up or down to the nearest value. IBM says it includes an automated compiler tool for creating click and pay links in HTML. It has three components, a billing server, merchant, and buyer. IBM says the billing server sends on a daily basis a credential to the buyer. The buyer sends a signed message to the merchant and attaches the billing server credential to prove his identity. The merchant sends back the required pages, or the merchant may decide to verify the purchase order online.
Micro Payments components include a payments billing server which handles all server and client management functions including adding, disabling or deleting clients, setting credit limits and commission rates. A Merchant Server enables developers to create HTML page per fee links which can show account balances, deposits and orders. A Micro Payments client wallet for Windows 95 is downloadable for opening and using accounts.
