Security issues prolong PayHound .Net migration

Anyone who uses eBay regularly is probably aware of PayPal. The US payment processing intermediary provides a secure conduit between consumers and retailers -- so effectively that it was recently acquired by the astronomically successful online marketplace.

UK-based PayHound competes in the same area but has kept a lower profile as it mainly provides an anonymous or 'white label' service to banks, adopting the branding of the particular financial institution licensing its technology.

The company has also offered a live person-to-person payment service for the last two years in the UK -- with around 100,000 users -- that allows account holders to transfer money to merchants, banks or individuals through their online PayHound account.

The company's current product, Enterprise Payment Platform 3 (EEP3), was built using Microsoft's .Net architecture to take advantage of Web services and to ease integration with other banks' and merchants' systems.

Nikhil Rajwade, PayHound's principal architect, said that one of PayHound's main customers, ING bank in Amsterdam, is a major .Net user, which played a part in the company's decision to move to the platform.

"Our product is a payment engine that allows you to process money from one account to another very seamlessly. But it's a stand-alone product and requires integration into other services, which can be done fairly easily with .Net," he said.

PayHound did look at building their platform using J2EE technology from Sun and IBM but found that their development costs would have been too high.

"One of the major influencing factors behind our decision to choose Microsoft was that the cost of the infrastructure required to develop and maintain a secure enterprise solution in J2EE, including the costs of WebSphere and supported services, were too prohibitive," said Rajwade. "We were able to get a working .Net prototype within three months. The initial projections for J2EE were more like eight months. That was quite remarkable."

PayHound would have begun developing in .Net from the day the company first launched in 2000 but the immaturity of the platform meant it wasn't robust enough for the security levels required by the financial services industry.

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