Redwood City, California-based Verifone Inc, best known as a manufacturer of point-of-sale terminals, has embarked on a push into the Internet market. It has established an Internet commerce division to develop secure payment methods for computer networks and has an agreement to acquire Enterprise Integration Technologies, a fellow Californian software and consulting firm, specialising in electronic commerce on the Internet. Verifone will buy the company for $28m in shares. The moves are designed to bring Verifone’s payments expertise to bear in emerging on-line networks, said the company. As well as security, Internet transactions need a system for settlement, chargebacks and disputes, which are precisely the things Verifone has been doing at the merchant countertop, Roger Bertman, vice-president and general manager of the new electronic commerce unit, told American Banker. The company’s strategy is to deliver software and hardware that combines with Internet browsers and processors to create a payments in frastructure. Meanwhile, Verifone has been pursuing other initiatives to accelerate the growth of secure payments over the Internet. Last July it became a sponsoring member of the Oracle Corp-led Object Definition Alliance, a coalition of companies from the electronic payments, financial services, information technology, entertainment, telecommunications and retailing fields, formed to create technical standards for electronic commerce over such channels as the Internet and interactive television. In the same month the company joined CommerceNet, a consortium of government agencies, educational institutions, technology companies, and banks, that wants to facilitate business-to-business commerce over the Internet.
