The significant further development of this service is in response to intense demand from the UK retailers and Banks, who recognize that the management of fraud is pivotal to maintaining profit levels, customer loyalty and trust.

The Atos Worldline Internet Payment Service is a secure, real time, on-line credit and debit card payment service with built-in fraud protection and detection solutions that helps companies minimize the fraud risk associated to on-line card payment transactions. The service has recently been enhanced to provide greater capacity for processing higher volumes of transactions, improved levels of security as well as a higher quality of service. Additional functionality has also been added to support payments made via mobile phones.

"On-line shopping has grown significantly in the last few years and with it the associated CNP fraud, which is beginning to seriously impact on-line retailers' business performance," said Peter Phillips, director, Atos Worldline in the UK. "We believe that with the Atos Worldline Internet Payment Service, we can help retailers as well as banks more securely manage their payment service to reduce fraud, improve cashflow performance and profits, while providing a high quality service to their customers."

The Atos Worldline Internet Payment Service manages payments from Visa, MasterCard, Switch, Delta, Solo, Electron, JCB, American Express and Diners and is capable of processing transactions in 19 currencies and 16 different languages. It has received AIS/SDP certification from Visa and MasterCard, which imposes additional security constraints to protect bankcard numbers during e-transactions. The service is approved and recommended by some of Europe's leading bank acquirers providing pan-European coverage.

Atos Worldline provides electronic payment services, Customer Relationship Management and e-Services including internet, voice and mobile. Today, Atos Worldline is securing as many as 2.5 million transactions a month from over 4,500 sites; additionally managing over 700 million loyalty card transactions, 13 million bank card transactions, 400 million authorisations, 1 billion payment transactions, 22 million mailboxes and over 200 million SMS messages from its processing centres in France, Germany, the UK and Austria.