E-commerce payment solutions company First Atlantic Commerce has been chosen to process the online credit-card payments for car hire giant Avis.

The contract is the latest feather in the cap of a Bermuda company that has established a growing reputation for ingenuity since it was set up nine years ago.

Founder and chief executive officer Andrea Wilson said the Avis deal illustrated how the company has been able to flourish in a highly competitive industry to the point that tens of millions of dollars worth of online transactions are processed through its Island-based computer systems every month.

"We can't compete with the bigger companies, like VeriSign, PayPal and Chase Paymentech, purely as a dot-com payment processing company," Ms Wilson said. "So we're always looking for something that nobody else is doing."

Avis's specific need was to be able to perform online transactions through its web-site in local currencies for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. The big US processors said they could do it only in US dollars. FAC was able to devise a system to allow transaction in the local currencies, working with its Bermuda banking partner Capital G.

"We find a way if it's technically possible," Ms Wilson said.

What helped FAC to clinch the Avis contract was the added value it was able to offer in the form of a system that allowed the car hire company to know where its customers were booking from.

Called IP Geolocation, it tells the merchant in which country or region the customer is based and the data it produces can be used for marketing purposes.

"It allows Avis to track traffic on its web-site," Ms Wilson said. "Knowing where their customers are coming from allows them to create marketing strategies and campaigns, based on that data."

FAC is now working on setting up a similar service for Budget, a car hire firm in the Avis Group.

FAC also offers payer authentication services. For example, Visa's CVV2 and MasterCard's CVC2, which require payers to enter the security number printed of the back of their card, is part of the service. But FAC also includes a mechanism that compares the zip code on the payers' billing address to check whether it matches the shipping address.

While none of these measures is a guaranteed defence against fraud, they are all extra layers of security to protect merchants, banks and cardholders, Ms Wilson said.

FAC does not require its clients to take a package of all the services it offers. For example, it deals with payer authentication for air ticket bookings made through Banco Santander in Latin America, even though it does not do the payment processing. That kind of flexibility is a major selling point.

Two years ago, Ms Wilson was named Business Leader of the Year by European CEO magazine, just months after she won the Leadership Award for IT/E-Commerce from the same publication, beating out computer manufacturer boss Michael Dell, among others. The publicity gained from those awards helped to raise awareness of FAC and what it offers.

She won the awards for her "outstanding contribution to secure and safe e-commerce payment processing transactions", having become a respected expert on prevention of online credit card fraud.

The accolade helped to overcome the uncertainty some potential clients have in dealing with FAC. "People often think that offshore means illegal and we have to convince them that what we do is legitimate," Ms Wilson said. "Of course, it's up to the companies to file their tax returns in their own jurisdictions. We don't offer tax advice."

FAC works with banks in Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia, through which it can help merchants set up e-commerce programmes, that can be multi-currency and multi-jurisdictional.

Processing their online transactions through an offshore bank can help many companies avoid some of the restrictive regulations in their own country and give them more options in terms of currencies.

For example, FAC's latest expansion was into Mauritius. Working with a partner bank on the Indian Ocean island has enabled FAC to offer an ideal platform for Asian e-commerce, as the bank can clear Japanese yen, Hong Kong dollars, Singapore dollars and Australian dollars, among other currencies.

This enables a company based anywhere in the world to deal with customers in Japan, for instance, through e-commerce, without having to set up a physical company there.

All of FAC's processing goes through its Bermuda-based computer systems located in Cable & Wireless's e-commerce hosting facility, which is rigorously audited by both Visa and MasterCard once a year.

The company employs 18 staff, including two in Canada, and intends to open an office in London later this year to help deal with European clientele. Many of its technical staff come from Canada, though it also has Bermudian personnel working in business development, marketing and accounting.

Ms Wilson boasts that FAC has never suffered an outage, even during Hurricane Fabian in 2003 and the Island-wide power cut following the Belco fire in 2005, thanks to its fully redundant power supply.

Asked how she saw the future panning out for FAC, Canada-born Ms Wilson said the long term was impossible to predict. "Our business is like being on a treadmill going at 100 miles per hour. Things change so fast that 'the future' is three months," she said.