Ten years ago when Andrea Wilson received a phone call asking for help with online purchasing, Bermuda did not even have an Internet Service Provider at the time, but that did not deter her.

Over the course of a decade, Mrs. Wilson has steered First Atlantic Commerce (FAC) into a global online credit-card processing company which averages one million transactions a month and has contracts with big name companies like Mastercard, Visa, Avis and the Jamaican government.

Next month the e-commerce company will celebrate its 10th anniversary.

It was founded in 1998 during the early days of the American Dot Com Internet boom. Mrs. Wilson, who was working at Butterfield Bank at the time, received a call from a stranger asking her if she would be able to assist his online company with credit card processing.

Although she had no clue what he was talking about, she decided to find out more about the Internet. She contacted firms she worked with in the US and was put in touch with a developer who gave her a crash course in online credit-card processing.

Soon after on April 15, 1998, Mrs. Wilson and the CCS Group set up FAC and it was acquired by Capital G Ltd. in 2002. It was the first international online payment gateway to certify with First Data Merchant Services in the USA, linking Bermuda banks to First Data for Internet Merchant credit card processing.

At first it focused on dot com businesses, but when that market crashed and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 saw Internet business halt the company decided it had to evolve.

"We did not do a single transaction for 10 days after 9/11, Mrs. Wilson said. "No one was sure how safe things were and everyone was worried.

"One of our strengths is that we are versatile. After the dot com businesses failed we decided to get into consultancy and risk management as well as credit card transactions.

"We work with governments and companies that will always need credit card book such as hotels, airlines and car rentals.

"We also offer services that others don't, or parts of services they can't. European companies are not able to do address checks on American credit cards so we provide them with a service where we do the verification."

Currently FAC provides transaction processing services for Jamaica's government, which accounts for more than four billion Jamaican dollars a year.

FAC was also the first payment gateway to implement payer authentication solutions with Mastercard for the Latin America Caribbean region.

Not content with that, the company is looking to expand its services around the globe.

It has become certified with Visa in Israel to expand into the Central and Middle European e-commerce payment markets and is currently certified as a multi-currency payment gateway in Mauritius, which they hope will be a launching pad into the Pan Asian region.

And Mrs. Wilson has been recognised as, in 2005 the publication European CEO awarded her Business Leader of the Year award for outstanding contribution to secure and safe ecommerce payment processing. The publication praised her for being innovative and making e-commerce available to businesses of various sizes.

"We've definitively accomplished a lot over the years," she said. "none of it would have been possible without the staff. We have 18 people working with us and it is amazing how much we get done."