Your New Pal?

Now more than ever online gaming operators need a friend in the payment transaction industry.

On Sunday one of the leading alternatives for I-gaming operators, PayPal, officially ceased allowing merchants to use its system for e-gaming transactions as part of a plan to avoid "high risk" areas.

"We want to get 40 to 60 percent of the market."

-Clark Russell
VASpay

Seeing an opening in the marketplace, Payment-Zone Inc. has introduced a payment system designed for the online gaming industry that it's boldly billing "your new pal."

The company has created what it claims is the first "e-cash payment system that fully embraces digital certificate (signatures) technology."

VASpay is a "Virtual Account System" that uses certified digital signatures and PIN codes to authorize each transaction. It can be accommodate a wide variety of e-commerce transactions, but is initially being targeted for the online gaming community.

Clark Russell, a spokesperson for VASpay, said the system is designed to support all transaction sizes.

The key to the system, Russell said is, is a public key infrastructure (PKI), which provides the technology and infrastructure needed to enable use of public-key encryption and digital signatures in distributed applications on a significant scale.

The main function of PKI is to distribute public keys accurately and reliably to those needing to encrypt messages or verify digital signatures, which can then be used to sign transactions or to authenticate people's identities prior to granting access to systems.

The process employs digital certificates issued by an enterprise certification authority (CA) to users who register with that CA (an e-gaming operator). Issuance of a certificate requires authentication of the user, usually by a registration authority (RA).

The scope of PKI also extends to functions such as certificate renewal, certificate revocation and status checking, and user private key backup and recovery.

PKI allows operators to conduct business electronically and give them assurances that the person sending the transaction is actually the originator and the person receiving the transaction is the intended recipient.

Russell said PKI has become the foundation for all application and network security, and he has lofty goals for VASpay once the technical merits of the system are understood.

"We want to get 40 to 60 percent of the market," he said. "With PayPal going away there still isn't a clear leader for payment transaction for this industry, and I am confident our cutting-edge technology will give us the advantage in becoming the new leader."

All transactions through VASpay are processed and posted in real time to the VASpay accounts, creating, as Russell puts it, "true e-cash."

With the ever-changing environment of the payment industry in mind, Payment-zone, based in Curacao, has combined the benefits of its jurisdiction with the secure VASpay system.

Russell feels the combination of a strong jurisdiction and key banking relationships throughout Europe and the United States will position Payment-zone to become the preferred global payment processing company.

"We believe that we have developed and implemented one of the most secure and safe online payment systems available on the Internet today," he said.