CyberSource combines a wide range of services into a single solution that covers everything from payment processing to fraud management.

by Jeff Goldman [March 14, 2007]

CyberSource was founded over ten years ago as an online software merchant, but it was the company's proficiency at processing transactions that drew the most attention. "So that became the business, ultimately, of CyberSource: not selling software online, but helping other merchants sell everything online," says Bruce Frymire, the company's director of corporate communications and investor relations.

As the company grew, it opened offices in the UK and Japan, and built its portfolio. Over the past ten years, CyberSource's range of offerings has expanded beyond just merchant services to cover everything from fraud management to a wide range of professional services.

According to Mike Orlando, the company's director of strategic markets, it's about covering every stage of the transaction, from determining whether an order is authentic to ensuring that all revenue is correctly managed. "It's looking at all aspects of the payment pipeline and ensuring that you as the merchant of record are getting the most out of that order," he says.

CyberSource 1295 Charleston Rd. Mountain View, CA 94043 Tel: (650) 965-6000 e-mail: sales@cybersource.com Contact Us form

And Orlando says that's what makes CyberSource stand out from the competition. "Most of our competitors look at just one component," he says. "They may be a good payment company, or they may be a good fraud and risk services company, they may be a good processing platform, but they don't look at all of the aspects of what it takes to take and manage a payment."

A single interface
The company handles not just credit card and ACH transactions but also alternative payment solutions like PayPal and BillMeLater. And all payment types are handled through a single interface. "We aggregate those different payment types to the appropriate provider, and then provide a single repository for the data for them," Orlando says.

That single web-based interface is called the Enterprise Business Center. "It not only allows a merchant to see historically what they've done with us, it also allows them to manage their account with us, and it allows them to manually process transactions if that's something they need to do," Orlando says.

Recurring billing
For ISPs, CyberSource's Recurring Billing solution enhances both the security of the data and the reliability of the transactions themselves. "Because our systems are PCI-compliant and are secured through our architecture, an ISP doesn't have to worry about storing consumer data in their own environment," Orlando says.

The system allows an ISP to set an individual profile for each user to determine how, when, and how much that user is billed. "And it allows them to change that profile on an on-demand basis," Orlando says.

Orlando says most ISPs find that they're able to capture 10 percent more subscriptions annually through CyberSource's system than they would on their own. "In a lot of merchant environments, a transaction may fail because the processor wasn't available at that time or the card issuing bank wasn't available when the original transaction went through," he says. "We have tools in place to programmatically scan for those types of failures and retry automatically, where a lot of merchants don't."

Fraud management
In helping manage fraud, CyberSource adds to the usual types of verification with a service called Decision Manager. Accessed through the Enterprise Business Center interface, Decision Manager allows a merchant to create profiles around orders that should be automatically approved, rejected or reviewed. "That might be based on order value, the bill to/ship to information, the time that the order came in, or any inconsistencies in any order information that was presented," Orlando says.

And in addition to the merchant-created profiles, CyberSource's own Advanced Fraud Screen scoring algorithm runs tests on 150 different aspects of each transaction.

CyberSource's professional services division also offers Fraud Screen Tuning and Analysis to help ensure that a merchant is making the best possible use of the available data. "We help them understand the metrics around whether or not the tools that they have deployed are successful for them, and what they need to change either in our environment or theirs to make those tools more effective," Orlando says.

Fees and partnerships
Orlando says the company's fees are intended to be as straightforward as possible. "There's a monthly minimum fee, where a merchant would get a base level of transactions for that fee, and then it's transaction-based beyond that," he says.

In addition to providing ISPs with merchant services, CyberSource offers a range of partnership options that allow an ISP to offer such services to its customer base. "We have pretty robust reseller programs that allow them to either include that as part of their service offering, or refer those customers to us and participate in a revenue share," Orlando says.

Beyond everything else, Frymire says CyberSource's key aim is to make things as simple as possible for its merchant clients by combining everything into a single offering and a single interface. "As e-commerce has gotten far more complex over the last few years, what we're really bringing them, among other things, is simplicity," he says.

— End