As part of the overall agreement, and to cement this important alliance, VeriSign intends to make a $20 million equity investment in eONE Global and its SurePay business.
VeriSign and eONE Global, through eONE’s operating company SurePay, LP, will integrate their respective B2B solutions to deliver and co-market a best of breed offering via SurePay’s patent-pending end-to-end payment solution to business-to-business exchanges, enterprises and financial institutions, and will jointly market VeriSign’s Payflow managed payment services to online merchants. SurePay, an Internet gateway services provider for First Data Corp. (NYSE: FDC), will market VeriSign’s managed payment gateway, as SurePay’s premier payment gateway offering, to First Data’s financial institution clients and other distribution partners. As the majority owner of eONE Global, e-commerce and payment services leader First Data has extensive distribution channels including relationships with 2.5 million merchant locations and more than 1,400 card issuers. Additionally, VeriSign will integrate First Data’s patented VirtualApp technology, an online merchant account application and decisioning tool, into its merchant payments platform and will also market First Data’s payment processing services to its customers, including its substantial domain name customer base.
As part of the agreement, eONE Global and its operating companies, including SurePay, will use VeriSign’s range of Internet trust services, including managed PKI services and website digital certificates.
The SurePay payments solution, to be marketed by both SurePay and VeriSign, is an end-to-end online offering targeted at enterprises, public and private B2B exchanges, net market makers, systems integrators and other technology companies. Leveraging First Data’s expertise and processing technology, the SurePay solution is an integrated suite of products that will include: Registration, authentication, trade financing, secure payments processing and settlement, and customizable reporting, which can be seamlessly integrated into an enterprise’s or exchange’s existing software.
SurePay and VeriSign will also jointly develop tools to enable developers to integrate SurePay’s B2B solution with third-party point solutions in order to route information and payment data between relevant parties in an XML format. SurePay will continue to pursue its strategy of partnering with financial institutions and point-solution providers to complement and complete its end-to-end offering.
Ric Duques, chairman and CEO of First Data and chairman of the eONE Global board, said, What’s most important here is that leading industry players are coming together, bringing their respective ‘best in class’ offerings to fuel both the growth of the business to business as well as online commerce between merchants and consumers. Instead of searching for what is the ‘right’ solution, those financial institutions and third-party providers, we believe, will have unquestionably the leading ‘industry’ solution.
