CardinalCommerce Announces an Entry in Online PIN Debit

CardinalCommerce Corp., a major player in the business of enabling alternative payments for merchants and processors, entered the nascent business of online PIN debit on Tuesday with a product it says requires little to no integration work by merchants, gateways, processors, or networks.

The Mentor, Ohio-based company says it has signed an electronic funds transfer network for its new Universal PIN Debit Solution (UPDS) and is talking not only to other networks but also authentication providers and merchant acquirers. The network will be announced next week, the company says. Ultimately, Cardinal says, UPDS will also be available for transactions initiated on mobile devices.

This latest entry comes at a time when EFT networks, banks, and merchants are showing increasing interest in letting consumers use their PIN debit cards to buy from e-commerce merchants. A number of enabling technologies have been introduced over the past three years or so, including products from Acculynk Inc., HomeATM, and Verient Inc. Acculynk has signed nine networks and five processors and independent sales organizations, with the latest being JetPay, announced on Tuesday. Verient is the provider of the technology behind the NYCE network’s SafeDebit service (Digital Transactions News, July 9, 2009).

The UPDS service’s edge in this increasingly crowded field, Cardinal says, is that it supports virtually any authentication technology, making it possible pass transactions without requiring cardholders to enter PINs. UPDS is built on the existing Cardinal Centinel platform, which supports a raft of alternative-payment programs as well as online authentication technologies such as Visa Inc,’s Verified by Visa system. With this spade work already having been done, the company says, it can support a variety of tokens, one-time passwords, or other authentication devices. “Cardinal is including the ability to add the particular authentication [service] the issuer prescribes,” says Janet L. Kapostasy, vice president of global financial institution services at Cardinal. “This is a new and important feature, a game-changer.’

Steve Mott, who has followed the movement toward online PIN debit for years as principal of the Stamford, Conn.-based payments consultancy BetterBuyDesign, says this is important because many networks have refused to adopt PIN debit for e-commerce on the grounds that they don’t want to encourage cardholders to enter their PINs on PCs. Supporting other authentication systems that tie into the real PIN on the back end, he says, could overcome this problem. “CardinalCommerce is in a pretty good position because it can accommodate literally dozens of authentication choices,” he says.

At the same time, UPDS requires very little integration work. Some 60,000 merchants are already integrated into Centinel, with about 50,000 dialing into it every day. That makes them almost instantly eligible to use UPDS. Likewise, the company can leverage rails already built to processors, gateways, and networks “Plug-and-play is a good description,” says Paul Turgeon, an EFT expert with Chicago-based Payments & Processing Consultants. Cardinal retained Turgeon to advise it on UPDS.

Cardinal has finalized pricing for UPDS but will not disclose it publicly. Transactions are not yet flowing, but the company’s goal is to announce a new network or other provider partner each week between next week and Christmas, Turgeon says.