CyberSource
More info
- Creator
- William McKiernan
- Released
- Owner
- Visa
- Type
- Payment gateway
- Website
- cybersource.com
One of the web's first payment gateways, now Visa's own front door to e-commerce.
Founded in 1994, when it was still an open question whether anyone would ever type a card number into a browser. In its early days the company was tied to the software.net download store, and it made its name selling what that store needed itself: card authorisation, sales-tax calculation and fraud screening as a service.
CyberSource bought rival Authorize.Net in 2007, and in 2010 Visa bought the lot for roughly $2 billion. It was an unusual move: a card network owning a gateway suddenly sits on both sides of the table. These days it is mostly an enterprise choice, sold on its Decision Manager rules engine and tokenisation rather than on simplicity.