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Company Overview
Company History
Protx was formed in 2001 by a group of private investors to acquire and develop secure payment technology.
Following the development of a state-of-the-art payment system, the first challenge for the new company was to gain approval with the merchant banks to act as an approved payment processor.
Between 2001 and 2003, Protx met this challenge and gained approval with all the major merchant banks to facilitate secure online transactions. These banks included: Lloyds TSB Cardnet, Bank of Scotland, Barclays Merchant Services, HSBC, NatWest Streamline, American Express, and Diners. Today, Protx maintains its relationship with these banks and has since gained approval with JCB, Alliance and Leicester and Bank of Ireland.
In June 2003 Protx adopted a simple and straight forward pricing policy which was specifically designed for the SME marketplace. Protx was the first PSP to offer a simple monthly fee with no transaction charges to its customers. This pricing policy, combined with the high levels of service provided by the Protx dedicated support team, led to a rapid expansion in the number of merchants using the Protx payment gateway.
In 2004 and early 2005, Protx developed and released new features and services to the payment system such as transaction risk management with The 3rd Man, and the fraud prevention schemes Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode (3D Secure). Protx provides this additional functionality at no extra cost to its merchants.
From late 2005 to the present day, Protx has continued to invest in technology to provide its customers with a highly resilient, reliable and functionally enriched ecommerce payment platform. This includes the build of new data sites with hardware and software architecture designed to scale up to the increasing needs of Protx customers.
In June 2006, Protx was one of the first payment service providers to achieve Level 1 compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Protx continues to employ the most stringent levels of fraud screening and security standards, and updates its PCI compliance on an annual basis.
In November 2006 Protx was acquired by the Sage Group plc and is now a division of Sage (UK) Limited.
Today, Protx continues to offer additional services and added benefits to its merchants, such as the ability to take telephone payments from within Sage 50 Accounts software in September 2007, and the integration with PayPal in May 2008. In the future, the acquisition by Sage will allow Protx to integrate payments into other Sage accounting software. This will help the company to diversify into new markets and offer payment solutions to larger businesses.