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Online Issues Trends Feb08 Industry Insider: First Atlantic Commerce
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| Industry Insider: First Atlantic Commerce |
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One of the defining moments of Andrea Wilson’s career: Receiving a call in 1998 from an online merchant looking for assistance with credit-card processing. “In those days, Bermuda didn’t even have an ISP—there was no Internet here,” says Wilson, who was working for the island nation’s Butterfield Bank at the time. “What the merchant was asking was completely foreign to me,” she remembers. “I had no idea how to go about helping them.” Wilson didn’t just pass the call on to someone else at the bank—or, worse, pass it on to another financial institution altogether. Instead, she called First Data, where Butterfield had its card-issuing portfolio. The Colorado-based merchant processing services provider put Wilson in touch with a developer who gave her a crash course in online credit-card processing. Not long after, she used that knowledge to launch her own company dedicated to the same task: First Atlantic Commerce Ltd., (FAC). “We were one of the early entrants into the market,” Wilson says of FAC, which was the first international payment gateway certified to the First Data platform 10 years ago. Today, FAC is a decidedly different beast. “We’ve obviously had to change our model over the years, as we went through the peaks and valleys of the dot-com boom and bust,” Wilson says. Download the full PDF |
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