A beautifully restored palazzo in Strait Street, Valletta, just a block away from St George’s Square and the President’s Palace, will today be inaugurated by Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi as the new offices of Credorax.
This is actually the third office that the company has had to move into in Malta. The previous office, into which it moved a year and a month ago, was just right for the 20 employees the company had then but then became far too small for the 60 it now has and those it intends to employ in the near future.
Credorax provides online payment processing and acquiring bank services under one roof, to a diverse range of online merchants worldwide.
It provides superior customer experience backed by next generation technology. Its customers enjoy seamless integration of its payment services, excellent rates, high transaction approval rates and a wide range of value-added customer services.
As the first end-to-end integrated financial institution for online payment services, Credorax is built from the ground up for serving online merchants, offering them services to proactively monitor and react to the health of their online business.
Credorax is a licensed financial institution and a Visa and MasterCard principal member.
In an interview given to this paper, Credorax’s founder and CEO, Benjamin Nachman, said the company presents itself as a digital acquirer: it uses the new technology to present an e-business platform. Thus, it embodies the new age of international business while it competes with global and established companies, mostly banks such as Barclays and HBOS who are less agile in the e-business culture.
When accepting payments online, two major entities are involved in connecting to credit agencies (such as Visa and MasterCard); the Payment Gateway and the Acquiring Bank.
The Payment Gateway collects personal and payment information from the customer and passes it on to the Acquiring Bank. The Acquiring Bank then connects with the relevant financial institution to obtain transaction approval. Upon that approval, the money is then transferred to the merchant account.
Credorax is the first acquiring platform originally designed for online commerce and a principal member of Visa and MasterCard, enabling it to uniquely offer both Payment Gateway and Acquiring Bank services, under one roof. This special union provides merchants with three distinctive advantages: significantly higher approval rates, dramatically lower transaction fees and fully comprehensive end-to-end services from a single provider.
Credorax is today licensed in the principal countries where Visa and Mastercard operate. It is licensed to operate in all EU’s 27 countries but is also present in other parts of the world, including the US and Japan.
Its vision is to become a world’s global acquirer. Online sales open up a whole new world of possibilities and an unimaginably wide audience for merchants. Addressing customers worldwide and receiving payments in their preferable currency and payment method, greatly increases sales for merchants in all verticals. Nonetheless, online selling does have its risks.
Credorax continuously improves and updates its risk management processes and tools, ensuring that online sales transactions are always processed with optimal security.
Today, the company employs 114 persons mostly in three major offices around the world: in Valletta, Boston and Tel Aviv together with other smaller offices. It hopes to open in Tokyo soon.
Credorax was born from an idea that was developed by Mr Nachman in 2007, but it really got off the blocks in 2009, got its first licence in 2010 and began having an active presence as from 2011.
Why Malta?
It was quite natural to ask Mr Nachman why he chose Malta.
A lawyer by profession, he had come to Malta many times for legal business. What struck him and attracted him to Malta was that he needed a country that was a member of the EU and also English-speaking. Previous to that, he had been to other countries in Europe such as Germany or Switzerland but he found great difficulty in managing because the language used, especially in legal terms, were incomprehensible to him.
Then he also found that Malta was attractive not just because English-speaking but also because it had institutions that were very accessible, state-of-the-art and tailored to favour business – from the government to MFSA, and so on.
Thirdly, the Maltese he dealt with were good representatives of a very civil society who delivered what they promised, when they promised and at a standard they had promised. Malta was thus an obvious choice.
Having a formal education in law and being a member of the Law Society in the UK and of the Israeli ba,. Benjamin has considerable experience over the last 10 years as a leader, manager, projects execution, lawyer and consultant. Benjamin has dealt with dozens of complex transactions, IPOs, M&As and similar deals, mostly in the internet and high-tech fields.
Mr Nachman has special expertise of the on-line payment solutions market, and has done extensive work in the e-commerce arena, working with banks and On-Line Processing Gateways.
Prior to leading Credorax, Mr Nachman was a senior executive at BizChord Limited payment gateway, board member of the Microde Group and a partner at Reifenberg, Eckstein, Nachman & Co and board member at Testwiz Limited. Mr Nachman was also a senior consultant to IPOs in AIM, OFEX and NASDAQ, and consultant to multi-million dollar M&A.