“Adding iDEAL further increases the international reach for our clients' websites,” Rand Pate, Epoch's director of communications, told XBIZ. “It will be a nice addition to our clients' billing portfolios and their 'bread and butter' credit card processing.”
iDEAL adds a direct link to systems of participating Dutch banks — including ABN, AMRO, Fortis, ING, Rabobank and SNS bank — to a website. At checkout, visitors can select the iDEAL payment button and choose their bank, which will take them to the banking environment they are familiar with to make a payment.
Payments are authorized and transferred to the merchant in real-time and cannot be reversed.
iDEAL processes transactions in real time using two-factor authentication.
“Two-factor authentication was one of the reasons we like iDEAL,” Pate said. “Since the consumer is using that system to authenticate directly with his or her bank, and the bank authenticates the transaction, there are no chargebacks.”
Roughly 63 percent of Dutch households may make online purchases with iDEAL, the company said.
“Epoch clients can add iDEAL for no additional fee, and it does not require any special backend development,” Pate said. “It simply increases their sales. Clients who have opted to add iDEAL will automatically see it added as another payment option on their payment pages when we detect that the consumer is from The Netherlands. For those that want to link directly to an iDEAL payment page, we offer that option as well.”