GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 32 - June 2015

Putting a charge in payment processing At ICE Totally Gaming in February, payment services provider SafeCharge debuted its new card-issuing solution, which allows the company to issue debit cards that players can use to make depos- its on online gaming sites and that online gaming sites can use to pay players and affiliates. In April, SafeCharge announced it would manage StarsCard, a prepaid MasterCard debit card for the U.K. mar- ket, using its new card-issuing solution. Players in the U.K. will be able to deposit money from the card and withdraw funds directly onto it. GPWA Editor-in-chief Vin Narayanan caught up with Shemer Katz, general manager of SafeCharge Israel, at ICE to discuss the Pay.com card-issuing solu- tion, risk management in payment pro- cessing, payment processing on mobile platforms and what Katz wanted to be when he grew up. What is SafeCharge? SafeCharge is a provider of payment services, risk management and payment technology for the online gaming indus- try, forex and binary brokers. We've been in the industry since 2000, and we restructured to the current structure of the company in 2007. We focus our efforts on technology. We invest a significant part of the company's revenue back into our IP infrastructure and technology development. What is unique about SafeCharge? We understand the challenges of our cli- ent in the particular sector we serve. We're not just a general-services payment pro- vider. SafeCharge is intended to provide the best service possible to this specific in- dustry. So we tailor the solutions and the technology with a lot of know-how and expertise in the (online gaming) sector. What is different about serving the on- line gaming industry compared to serv- ing traditional e-commerce clients? I'll give you one example that explains it simply — risk management and fighting fraud. Our negative database of fraudu- lent credit cards includes millions of re- cords of fraudsters who have already tried to deposit with the online gaming merchants who we serve. So we have a consolidated database of all the fraudu- lent transactions and credit card numbers. If the fraudster comes again to a differ- ent sports betting website, the operator already has the details of the credit card in our negative database. So it's not a general-purpose negative database, but it's specifically of fraudsters in the online gaming industry. EXECUTIVE'S CORNER