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CardSystems Solutions have gone away (not)

Dear reader (whoever that lone soul may be),

Remember my ranting about CardSystems Solutions ? The credit card processing company that, due to gross incompetence, managed to make 40 million credit card numbers and their details available on the net ?

Seems that the fat lady sang and the sigar was smoked after all – when you check their website out, the only text you can see is that the assets of CSS have been bought by ‘Pay By Touch Payment Solutions’.

Pay By Touch is the global leader of biometric authentication, loyalty, membership, and payment solutions. The privately held company is dedicated to being the preeminent global authentication and payments network, providing the most secure, convenient, and cost-effective electronic transaction solutions for businesses and consumers around the world.

So CardSystems is a goner, no longer to be seen. Or is it ?

When you click on the link on the CSS website, you are redirected to a new website : Pay By Touch Payment Solutions. There you can read the news section, including a press release dated december 9, 2005, where PBT has bought over CCS (for stock and some cash.

Since it’s a press release, I’ve been so bold as to quote it here almost entirely.
Notice the subtitle ! Underlined parts are added by me.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PAY BY TOUCH COMPLETES ACQUISITION OF CARDSYSTEMS SOLUTIONS
Pay By Touch payment processing products to become more robust

SAN FRANCISCO – (December 9, 2005) –Pay By Touch TM, the leading provider of biometric authentication, loyalty, membership, and payment solutions, today announced it has completed the acquisition of substantially all the assets of CardSystems Solutions, Inc., a leading end-to-end payment processing provider with approximately 120,000 merchants to which Pay By Touch will have immediate access.

To complement the acquisition, Pay By Touch also announced that several industry-leading executives from CardSystems have been appointed to lead Pay By Touch Payment Solutions, a newly named business unit with responsibility for the Pay By Touch payment-processing unit (formerly known as iPAY) and the new
CardSystems assets.

“CardSystems’ assets complement Pay By Touch’s existing payment-related products and services and provide a ready-made path to reaching more merchants and banks to further realize our vision to change the way the world pays,” said John Rogers, founder, chairman and CEO of Pay By Touch. “To that end, the acquisition
allows us to provide a richer and more comprehensive suite of end-to-end payment processing solutions.”

Under the terms of the deal, Pay By Touch will assume responsibility for all CardSystems Solutions, Inc. assets and for payment relationships with 120,000 small and medium-sized merchants. The deal was completed primarily for stock and some cash. CardSystems provides integrated payment solutions to associations,
financial institutions and independent sales organizations (ISOs), and retail merchants. Through these payment solutions, CardSystems processes more than $18 billion in Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, online debit, and EBT transactions annually.

So if I understand their press release correctly, the beast lives on. Not just the feet and the body, but lots of the braincells have been recuperated as well – it just received a new name, that’s all.

I hope that Pay By Touch has the sense to do thorough security checks at irregular intervals and make certain that their new business unit has a tad more security added to it’s system than the previous incarnation.
And that they are honest enough to cough up to the fact if or when something happens…

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