Protx System Upgrade: Now Live!

We are pleased to inform you that last week Protx successfully completed our latest VSP Payment Gateway upgrade with zero downtime involved. As a result, we have introduced some great new features and made improvements to the system that will benefit you directly.

Protx regularly update our payment platform in order to utilise the latest technology, respond to customer feedback and keep in line with the card scheme requirements.

Benefits of this latest Release:

As part of the upgrade we have introduced a wide range of new features that have been requested by you to improve your day-to-day use of the system. This time round you will see some enhancements to the functionality of VSP Admin:

• Extensions have been made to the VSP Admin transaction list page, for example Authenticated transactions that have been Cancelled or Archived will now show alongside those waiting Authorisation.
  
  
• There is now a record of which user has performed different functions (such as Refund, Repeat) in the Transaction Detail screen.
  
  
• Improvements have been made to the VSP Admin Batch reports allowing you to view any re-sent payment files thus simplifying bank reconciliation.
  
  
• The CSV reporting function has been extended to include Deferred transactions awaiting release and to allow you to sort the order of your transactions.

We have also extended the fraud screening tools available allowing you to place further restrictions on the orders you accept and reduce the number of chargebacks you receive:

• 3D Secure is now available to Bank of Ireland merchants, and 3D Secure rounding amount errors have been corrected.
  
  
• You can now block specific ranges of Customer IP Addresses (or countries of origin) and particular card ranges (or issuing countries of origin) allowing you to prevent repeated fraudulent purchases from particular locations or card numbers.

Some changes have also been made to Continuous Authority transactions to reduce their failure rate. For example, the expiry date is no longer checked on this transaction type. However, you will no longer be able to submit Maestro and Solo cards to Continuous Authority accounts because this is against the card scheme rules.

Other benefits of the upgrade include fixes to the formatting of the Vendor email template and Japanese Yen formatting errors, improvements to the payment systems to prevent the doubling up of single quotes (') in the name and email address fields and the correction of content type errors in emails hosted by Mac email clients.

Further details of the upgrade can be found on our forum by clicking on the web address below:

https://support.protx.com/forum/Topic5903-31-1.aspx

We hope that you will benefit from these new features. As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated and if you have any suggestions on additional ways we can improve our payment system please email us at feedback@protx.com

Message to Protx Customers

Hello,

First of all, a big thank you to everybody who participated in the research survey we sent out in November. We had an outstanding response with over 2,000 of you providing your views and experiences as Protx customers. I wanted to share the results with you and let you know about some of our plans for 2008.

I have taken the time to read through the results of the research and the associated comments, and I have taken your feedback on board.

I am delighted to see that over 30% of respondents think that their customers have come to know and trust Protx. What's more, 46% rate security as the most important factor when choosing a Payment Service Provider and a substantial 98% agree that Protx does meet their expectations of security.

Some 36% of you are so happy with us that they would be extremely likely to recommend Protx to a friend or colleague. We will therefore be launching a customer referral scheme over the coming months that will give our customers the chance to benefit from any business they refer to Protx.

For those respondents not entirely happy with the Protx service, customer support was highlighted as the main area in need of improvement. While 77% of respondents are satisfied with the current levels of support provided by Protx, 12% are fairly or very dissatisfied, and 51% think that our support service could be improved with quicker response times. This is something I have treated as a priority since taking over as Managing Director of Protx last October. My main aim this year is to improve the quality of support you receive, and to significantly reduce call wait times.

To achieve this goal we have invested heavily in our support service by appointing a highly experienced Customer Services Manager and establishing an additional location in Newcastle. We have doubled the size of our support operation in the last couple of months and we are continuing to recruit. We will be monitoring our response times to see what effect this has but I am positive the increase in resource will cut waiting times considerably and improve the quality of support you receive.

We will be sending out a follow-up research survey later in the year so you will have the chance to air your views on whether or not you think that the service has improved.

Protx has grown rapidly and we now have over 16,000 customers. This year we want to improve customer communications. As well as improving our responsiveness through customer service, we will be introducing a fresh new format for our customer newsletters. I hope that you will take the time to read these as they will include relevant information such as fraud screening advice and industry news as well as advance notice of upcoming changes regarding your Protx account. We will also be updating the protx.com website to provide more information about our services and how customers benefit from them.

Finally, if you feel that there are any issues that I have not addressed or if you would like to give your feedback to me directly, then please contact me by email, at simon@protx.com.

Kind Regards

Simon Black

Managing Director