iovation is announcing a new partnership with Failsafe Payments, a leading merchant service provider that connects online merchants with worldwide banks, payment processors, shopping carts, and e-commerce payment alternatives.

I recently sat down with Failsafe’s chief operating officer, Patrick Sallnert, to discuss some of the top online payment challenges facing today’s merchants, its integrated e-commerce platform, Certo Payment Gateway, and how our partnership will help provide safe and secure online payment services for merchant customers.

Max Anhoury: We are very excited to be partnered with Failsafe Payments and your Certo Payment Gateway. Would you please tell our readers about Failsafe Payments and how it got started?

Patrick Sallnert: Failsafe Payments was created in 2007 as a regular billing company by a very experienced team within e-payments. Our goal early on was to make it easy for merchants to find suitable billing solutions along with an easy API or payment page integration along with excellent customer support. In 2008, we established Failsafe Payments North America with an office in Cleveland, Ohio, and it was around this time I started to think about the product that would later become Certo Payment Gateway. (more…)

While online payments is the fastest growing segment of retail and payments, it also continues to be one of the riskiest. As cyber criminals step up their game and adapt new techniques to defraud online and card-not-present (CNP) merchants, payment providers and online retailers must take steps to protect their networks from organized fraud rings. (more…)

Last week, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) released its 2009 Annual Report on Internet fraud activity, and the results were staggering. According to the report, in 2009 U.S. citizens lost nearly $560 million to online scams. That number more than doubled the $265M in online fraud losses reported in 2008. The IC3, which tracks worldwide complaints of Internet fraud through its Web site, also said the total number of complaints in 2009 jumped 22% compared to 2008.

In the article, “Internet fraud’s U.S. price tag put at $550 million,” Donald Brackman, director of the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), said the growing figures can be largely attributed to increasingly sophisticated online schemes and cyber criminals’ ability to hide their true identities online. (more…)