First Atlantic Commerce Ltd. (FAC), a leading international, Internet multi-currency payment and fraud management solutions provider, celebrates its tenth year anniversary in March 2008.
Hamilton, Bermuda. March 26, 2008. First Atlantic Commerce Ltd. (FAC), a leading international, Internet multi-currency payment and fraud management solutions provider, celebrates its tenth year anniversary next month.
An innovator in the world of e-commerce, FAC was established as a payment gateway in 1998 during the dot-com boom to service merchants in need of offshore credit card transaction processing.
FAC was instrumental in the development of e-commerce in Bermuda, and consulted with Government concerning the adoption of the Electronic Transactions Act (ETA) of 1999 and the Standard for Electronic Transactions (Code of Conduct) of 2000.
Further, in 1999 FAC worked with Bermuda-based law firm, Appleby Global, to write a Private Act of Parliament specifically geared for electronic commerce business, enabling FAC to offer unique corporate structures via Segregated Cell legislation to their customers. FAC was the first electronic commerce payment company to ever have a Private Act of Parliament approved by the Bermuda Government.
A Segregated Cell or “Virtual Corporation” allows ecommerce merchants to obtain an Internet merchant account from a Bermuda-based bank without the requirement for full Bermuda incorporation (as mandated by the Credit Card Associations), an innovation that saves qualifying merchants time to market and money required to establish and maintain a separate corporate entity in Bermuda.
When the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, many payments gateways and Internet merchant service providers could not cope with the immediate down-turn in the industry. But FAC looked outside of traditional offshore payment gateway services to new channels for revenue stream while the world watched the fall out from 9-11.
The company expanded to work with acquirers in the Latin American Caribbean Region including banking giant, ScotiaBank International, for Caribbean credit card processing. And in 2003, FAC successfully launched its services in Europe where it now works with several European banks for online merchant acquiring.
FAC was the first payment gateway to be certified in the Latin American Caribbean Region for MasterCard SecureCode payer authentication solutions in 2004, and in the same year, FAC completed certification with Visa and MasterCard EU and CEMEA regions for Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode™ payer authentication solutions.
By mid 2007, FAC certified to Visa in Israel to expand into the Central and Middle European ecommerce payments markets, and expanded into the Asia Pacific with its Pan Asian acquiring solution launched in Mauritius.
Last year, the company also expanded its fraud and data management services to include IP Geolocation, Geo Compliance and Geo Marketing services to add to its suite of consumer authentication solutions including Address Verification, Security Code Validation, Consumer Card Authentication and 3-D Secure™ Payer Authentication solutions.
Over its history, FAC has been featured in prominent global publications including The Wall Street Journal, Toronto Globe and Mail, The Financial Times, and European CEO Magazine, where FAC’s CEO, Andrea Wilson, won European CEO’s Ecommerce and I.T Business Leader award in the Spring of 2005, and was named Overall Business Leader of the Year in December 2005.
Unique to FAC is their ability to break apart complex payment solutions to individual stand-alone services, which means that merchants, processors and acquiring banks can use any one (some or all) of FAC’s fraud and data management services independently of FAC’s payment gateway solution.
“We wanted to ensure we could provide the broadest range of solutions specifically tailored to meet individual client online payment or risk management needs and we can do that by simply offering a specific piece of the payment solution”, notes CEO and co-founder of FAC, Andrea Wilson.
“It’s hard to believe that it has been ten years since we started this business. A great deal has happened in the card processing industry and the Internet generally in ten years, and we continue to turn out industry leading and innovative products and solutions to meet the unique payment and risk mitigation objectives of our clients.”
FAC currently averages one million transactions per month in processing, and the numbers are climbing.
To mark its success and a decade of being in business, FAC will unveil new corporate branding along with a revamped website and fresh marketing collateral later this Spring.
About First Atlantic Commerce
Headquartered in Bermuda, and established in 1998 to create secure card-based payment solutions for e-businesses, FAC provides powerful technology designed to work with most merchant platforms, including Microsoft®, UNIX, and LINUX platforms. FAC’s cGate® technology offers service, flexibility and security to adapt to many business and bank acquirer requirements. Business solutions such as 3-D Secure™ Payer Authentication, IP Geolocation, Virtual Corporations and offshore multi-currency payment solutions are available in various international jurisdictions.
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