About e-Path Pty Ltd

e-Path Pty Ltd is an Australian and global provider of its brand marked manual credit card payment gateway service. e-Path Pty Ltd is an Australian registered company and is 100% Australian owned and operated.

How it all started - a brief background of the e-Path initiative

In 2004 an IT specialist programmer and a now retired bank manager, both brothers, decided to embark on a journey to engineer a payment gateway system, from the ground up, that aimed to eliminate recognised main root causes of vulnerability and risk inherent within the current third party online credit card processing system.

The enormity of the challenge to devise a completely new system to accept credit cards online was well overshadowed by both brothers' genuine determination to establish a safer and less expensive method of accepting credit cards online - one that would help to finally turn the tide in the fight against online credit card fraud and online identity theft once and for all.

It was clear that such a bold objective demanded a completely fresh and clean-slate approach, without the restriction or limitations of being tied into current aging processes, procedures and protocols, of which, by the nature of their very mechanics, are largely responsible for facilitating the majority of online credit card fraud in the world today.

Good things take time

The planned six month development time frame together with the perceived costings of the project quickly proved inadequate as opportunities to incorporate new and emerging security provisioning were seized upon as the venture progressed. The heavy investment delivered, and so near two years after the project was commenced e-Path was proudly launched in January of 2006.

Almost immediately the industry began scratching their heads trying to determine how best to deal with a gateway system that did not communicate with existing online internet based merchant account facilities.

Being the first payment gateway of our type meant there was no precedent the industry could use to judge or assess e-Path by. Therefore, it became a serious challenge to break down resistance to change from within an industry that had been totally built upon allowing only one type of online credit card payment gateway system from the very beginning.

Manual systems that captured credit cards online that then enabled offline processing were certainly nothing new. However, a proper online credit card payment gateway that used full strength and multiple instances of asymmetric cryptography (2,048bit encryption) on an individual per gateway basis - completely different for each gateway; that provided the PCI DSS compliant and THAWTE SSL protected environment for each gateway; that did not require bank merchant accounts to be sitting open and accessible to the world wide web; and that totally eliminated the need to permanently store any credit card or transaction data online; was totally new. This mix of both well established and new generation security bundled in a single payment gateway service had not existed before e-Path.

Banks: security more important than profits

Despite the criticisms occasionally directed towards the banking industry from time to time, our experience is that banks do very much view the long term security of their own merchants and cardholders as being far more important than any potential minor reduction in revenue they may experience when their merchants choose to utilise the less expensive e-Path PCI compliant manual payment gateway teamed with a manual merchant account facility.

The fact that banks can now themselves reduce their own exposure to direct risk by supplying manual merchant accounts to allow only their own merchants to effect the charge of credit cards well away from the risks of this activity being performed 'live' and anonymously on the open internet is a major step in reducing one of the most serious of all core vulnerabilities.

Although e-Path is not a 'live' third party payment processing gateway and thus has no physical or electronic connection to any banking service, today e-Path enjoys a considerable level of support not only from the banking industry here but now also from many banking and merchant account provider organisations outside the shores of Australia.

Objective accomplished

While our work to address the issue of resistance to change/improvement from within the industry is still an ongoing one, e-Path now provides business owners all over Australia with a safe and secure PCI DSS compliant method to receive credit card payment authorisations from their websites and shopping carts for manual processing into their merchant account facilities.

e-Path also provides our payment gateway service to business owners outside Australia that have merchant account facilities with banks in New Zealand, United Kingdom, Europe, South Africa and the United States.

Online business owners, their online credit card paying customers and even the merchant account providers themselves from all around the world are now benefiting from completely new levels of protection and security via a new system that was very proudly conceived and engineered right here in Australia.

Today e-Path, combined with the vigilance of those who use e-Path as their payment gateway, is indeed slowly but surely making a highly tangible contribution towards ending online credit card fraud as we know it. To see exactly how we do this visit e-Path Security.


See also ...
The e-Path Credit Card Payment Gateway
Credit Card Payment Gateway Security
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