Peppercoin Launch Small Payment Service

Peppercoin 2.0 is the first small payments solution that enables card associations, banks and payment processors to offer merchants the ability to handle and profit from low-value transactions. It is a small payments offering for the financial services industry that reduces transaction processing and customer service costs while driving additional traffic to the payments network. Peppercoin 2.0 utilizes Peppercoins patent-pending Universal Aggregation technology to aggregate low-priced transactions across many consumers, merchants and payment providers. With Peppercoin solutions, financial services organizations can quickly address emerging markets and easily convert cash transactions into electronic payments. Peppercoin achieves this massive increase in the scope of transaction aggregation in part by re-architecting the way small payments are processed. Peppercoin moves the bulk of processing from the payment network core to the payment network edge, while maintaining the secure and trusted payment system controls provided by the core. Simplifying Small Payments: The Small Payment Gateway Payment providers and banks confront two obstacles in their efforts to process small payments: the high cost of processing each individual payment, and customer service costs that can be many times the cost of an individual transaction. With Peppercoin 2.0, those obstacles are eliminated. It provides: - A transparent interface-Peppercoin easily integrates into existing payments networks and does not require consumers to open new accounts or prepay. Consumers just enter their credit or debit card information with the online merchant as usual, or swipe their card through a reader, and the transaction is automatically processed by Peppercoin. - The ability to support all payment models-Peppercoin handles payments for any mix of business models, from pay-per-use to subscription services-and both credit and debit cards. - Reduced customer service costs-The cost of customer service must be reduced to make the sale of low-priced content profitable. By utilizing automated, online customer self-service, integrated bill presentment and automated pre-dispute resolution, Peppercoin helps dramatically reduce the overall cost of handling small payments. Peppercoins solution is comprised of a Small Payment Gateway; an associated Customer Self-Care Module with merchant-configurable business rules; a Merchant Aggregation Service, which enables merchant accounts to settle payments (each Small Payment Gateway is associated with a Merchant Aggregation Service); and a Consumer Aggregation Service, which authorizes consumer spending (pre- or post-paid) and bills the consumer. Peppercoin 2.0 can be deployed internally or as a hosted service for use in pilot programs. The Merchant Aggregation Service is a software product, which along with associated instances of the Small Payment Gateway and Customer Self-Care Modules, will be available for license by Acquiring Banks and Payment Processors. The Consumer Aggregation Service will be available for license to Issuing Banks. Peppercoins architecture quickly and easily integrates into existing payment processing systems. Solutions will be available for pilot programs with payment companies in Q4 2004.