Tapping Its Security Reputation, Brink’s Teams with 2Checkout To Offer Online Payments

Hoping to build off its security reputation, The Brink’s Company announced Tuesday it launched Brink’s Checkout, an e-commerce payment service in conjunction with 2Checkout.com Inc., an e-commerce payment-services company.

The famed armored-car company will market and sell Brink’s Checkout, while 2Checkout will provide the payment processing, oversee the merchant application and underwriting process, PCI compliance, settlement, customer service, and other payment-related functions.

Brink’s Checkout enables online merchants to accept credit, debit, and PayPal transactions in 26 currencies and 15 languages. It is available in 196 nations. 2Checkout developed the currency and language detection component.

Brink’s Checkout charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, with no monthly fees or other charges. Discounted pricing is available for merchants with more than $50,000 in monthly transactions. Brink’s Checkout works with more than 100 shopping carts.

“Online merchants are looking for trusted partners,” says Nasser Chanda, president of Brink\'s Global Payments. Brink’s is based in Richmond, Va. “We feel our name adds some credibility to their sites.” Brink’s also is attracted to e-commerce because it is a growing market, he says.

Brink’s Checkout offers merchants two ways to use the payment checkout service. One is a two-step process. After tapping the buy button on the merchant’s payment page, another page opens, which can carry the merchant’s branding, where the transaction is completed. In the other model, a small pop-up box appears above the merchant’s checkout page with dialog boxes to type the payment card data. Each method works on a variety of devices, adapting it to the screen size, says Kevin Gallagher, senior vice president of business development at Columbus, Ohio-based 2Checkout.

Though Brink’s Checkout is available internationally, Chanda says U.S. merchants may be among the first to use it.

Brink’s Checkout also includes 2Checkout’s fraud- prevention service, which can help reduce fraudulent charges and chargebacks.

The service incorporates hundreds of factors to generate a score for each transaction, says Tom Dailey, 2Checkout’s chief executive. That may include if the device previously has been used on the 2Checkout network or a data partner’s network, transaction size, the platform used for the transaction and the geographic location of the Internet protocol address, he says. Too high a score can cause a rejection of the transaction or send it to review by a fraud analyst, who works within any customizations that mostly larger merchants may have, the Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. rules, and 2Checkout’s own risk threshold, he says. The analyst then decides on whether to let the transaction proceed.

Though this is a new service for Brink’s, it is not the company’s first foray into electronic payments. About five years ago it opened a walk-in bill-pay service in Latin America, and has since expanded it to offer mobile-phone top-up and prepaid cards, Chanda says.