E-commerce gets creative touch

By Paul Montgomery

Pioneering Australian e-commerce developer Creative Digital Technology (CDT) has created three companies to deal with different parts of its diverse product set, with one of them aiming for a listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange later this year.

CDT is the only Australian developer to have competed against the likes of Microsoft, Open Market and IBM with e-commerce merchant server applications. These are now called ActivePayment and NCServer, which the company will continue to sell as an "eCommerce operating system". Its Web site security application, SecurePage, will be developed under a new division.

The third business has been launched as a wholly-owned subsidiary called GPayments. Steven Dujin, business development executive at GPayments, said the new company would aim at integrating ActivePayment with electronic bill payment technologies for the financial services industry.

"GPayments will focus on all types of financial processing, including banks, ISPs, telcos and other providers. Most of the organisations who process transactions are banks, but that doesn't preclude telcos from doing it," said Mr Dujin.

The company will develop financial applications for specific industries, including advertising, superannuation, taxation, health, car fleet, stock market and call centres. The applications will allow real time transactions linked with the financial institutions' back end systems with integration work done in conjunction with the banks' IT department and GPayments staff in a six to 12-week implementation, according to Mr Dujin.

"ActivePayment sits at the bank, interfaces with its legacy system, and tells the merchant that a transaction has been processed," he said.

A fourth division within CDT is in development on a secret project, which is understood to be a solution for content management for business-to-business portals. Mr Dujin made no comment on the nature of the projects of this division.