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Royal Bank Offers Online Credit Card Processing

Instead of having to turn to third-party online payment providers, such as US-based Cybercash Inc. or Canada's E-xact Transaction Ltd., customers of the Royal Bank [NYSE:RY] can hook up their Web sites to the Royal's new e-SELECT service.

The bank said the e-SELECT system will work with most of the popular online "shopping cart" applications or can be integrated into customized order-taking applications built by Web developers. In addition, it will enable merchants to accept most major credit cards.

Beverly Frid, part of the Royal bank team behind the new service, told Newsbytes that e-SELECT gives merchants a one-stop approach to both their merchant account and the transaction processing. In addition, she said, the bank-hosted approach to the virtual point- of-sale terminal means credit-card numbers are handled "in accordance to bank-security standards."

Referring to some recent high-profile incidents of bulk credit- card-data theft online, Frid said: "Most of the bad press (for online payments) is not so much to do with picking off transactions on the fly, but with people hacking into servers where card numbers have been stored."

She said the e-SELECT approach quickly gets encrypted transaction data into the bank's own systems.

Rival CIBC is one Canadian bank that has also tried to simplify the process for merchants who want to get up and running with online payments. But CIBC, Canada's second-largest bank, turned to Toronto-based Nobil Information Technology Corp. and its Payway system rather than develop its own.

The Royal's e-SELECT has a $500 (Canadian dollars) setup fee - $750 if the merchant wants to be able to process both Canadian and US currencies. Afterwards, merchants pay a monthly fee that begins at $40 for the first 30 transactions, then 84 cents per transaction thereafter. A busier site might pay $130 a month for the first 250 transactions and 50 cents for each additional sale.

Merchants must have a Royal Bank Internet Visa Merchant Account to use e-SELECT.

More information, including e-SELECT's technical specifications, can be found at: www.royalbank.com/merchantservices.

Reported by Newsbytes.com, www.newsbytes.com.

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