| Capita’s hosted solution leads the way Capita’s managed service has been established since 2001 and includes a range of products to process card payments via the internet, touch-tone telephone, SMS text, speech recognition and on-site Chip & PIN. Managed by a dedicated team, the solution is used by over 170 organisations, who between them take over 1.1 million payments each month with a total value of almost £82 million. Our solutions provide the latest card fraud protection measures as standard including 3D Secure (Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode), Card Security Code validation and Chip & PIN. We were the first of the major suppliers to the market to introduce each of these important safeguards. |
 |
It is now finally being recognised by other suppliers to the Local Government sector that when it comes to cost of ownership, speed of deployment and compliance with banking regulations, a managed solution far outstrips the traditional site-based offering.
In response to this realisation, other suppliers are struggling to catch up and launch their own managed service solutions. However, they face a number of key challenges including the need to migrate existing customers from a site based to hosted service. Until this conversion program is complete, their customers will have to wait until they can reap the benefits of a managed service approach and when their migration actually starts they not only face the disruption and associated cost of conversion but also ‘waiting their turn’ in the inevitable queue.
Customers whose conversion is delayed or who choose not to migrate to the hosted service will have the responsibility and overhead of implementing new measures around card security to their on-site systems.
In order to allow our customers to use a Capita on-site solution to take card payments whilst removing card detail from site, we introduced Secure Bureau Service (SBS) in 2008.
This fully managed and accredited solution removes the requirement for specialist on-site card processing software, hardware or infrastructure and any storage of sensitive cardholder data, thereby significantly reducing customer liability in respect of PCI DSS.
Card details are captured in either Capita’s Counter Receipting or Paye.net products and the service then seamlessly connects from that application to our managed APACS service using a secure web connection. This then connects via our Application Programming Interface (API) to the bank to carry out payment authorisation.
This service is also available as a secure interface to third-party applications, where it is available in either Portal or Web Service form – allowing flexibility at the front-end in conjunction with a secure PCI DSS certified card authorisation facility.
With the ever increasing need for security around card payments, growing numbers of our customers are choosing
to move from site-based card processing APACS solutions to this newly-introduced service. In April 2009, the service was used by over 40 organisations to take nearly 650,000 payments with a total value of more than £13 million and these figures will grow significantly as the many customers at various stages of implementation go Live with the
new service.