Commonwealth Bank unveils new online payment gateway - eVolve
A new range of payment services for online merchants has been unveiled by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA).
Called eVolve, the new payment gateway service is said to have been purpose-built for the CBA and, in a first for the industry, is being offered in conjunction with a new bank-hosted
web service known as eVolve iSHOP.
Commonwealth Bank General Manager Merchant Services, Dominic White said that “eVolve is designed to be a simple, low-cost way for small businesses to get onto the Web in a way that works for them.”
At its most basic the new service is called eVolve SINGLE and is effectively a virtual EFTPOS terminal.
For businesses needing a more sophisticated solution, able to support processing of multiple payments at the same time, the bank is offering a service called eVolve MULTI.
“eVolve caters for true eCommerce Merchants, bricks and mortar businesses and billers with complex and diverse requirements” said Mr. White,
adding that “the Bank is proud to deliver a big business solution at a small business budget”.
eVolve joins a range of other online payment gateway services offered by the bank, including BPOINT for online bill payments, and the Commweb payment gateway service for larger merchants.
The CBA’s VirtualPOSBatAuth product is believed to now be redundant, and to have been replaced by eVolve. But that is yet to be confirmed with bank officials.
Other aspects of the new service also remain to be confirmed, such as an itnews report that eVolve had been developed in a partnership between the bank and Mastercard,
with Melbourne based Premiere Technologies commissioned to do
the actual coding.
Certainly it appears that the CBA has commissioned the building and development of eVolve , rather than just re-branding an existing payment gateway service.
This is strongly implied in comments from Dominic White in the statement the bank released last week announcing the commercial launch of eVolve,
“The temptation for financial institutions tends to be to white label existing packages from various service providers. Commonwealth Bank eVolve moves away from this model” he said
eVolve also breaks the mould for bank-supported payment gateways by offering a hosted on-line shop as an option.
Costing around $70 per month, the eVolve iSHOP service offers merchants an integrated shopping cart, online catalogue, and payment gateway.
And with all components hosted at the bank the solution is obviously very secure.
Of course, as a template solution, there are bound to be some limitations on the number of products and/or pages that the bank will host for its eVolve iSHOP customers.
The bank may also find it has to impose some technical restrictions on what merchants can add to their web pages, both so as to ensure site security and so as to make the service manageable.
(There appears to be no information yet available at the bank’s web-site on what those limitations might be.
But anyone with a special interest in those issues may find some clues by looking at the German ePages software that eVolve iSHOP is believed to have been built on.)
For further information an informative flash demo is at
http://www.commbank.com.au/guides/evolve/player.html
For more information on the CBA’s payment gateways generally go to
www.commweb.com.au
See also www.commweb.com.au
www.bpoint.com.au
www.epages.com.au
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