There have been rumors that a major UK Payments Service Provider (PSP) are planning on entering the Irish Market. I can confirm that Protx intend to start operating in Ireland. Protx are in the process of rebranding to SagePay and once this is completed they plan to launch as SagePay in Ireland.

For those of you who have are not familiar with Protx here is a bit of history. Protx were established in 2001 and they have grown to be a leading UK PSP.  They targeted SMEs, a market often overlooked by the larger payment processing companies. In 2003 Protx introduced a new pricing structure that consisted of a fixed monthly fee with no transaction charges. This was a big selling point and it allowed Protx to rapidy grow their customer base of SMEs. It has been reported in the media that during 2005 they were adding new clients at a staggering rate of 350 a month.

In 2006 Protx was acquired by the Sage Group for £20 million. The Sage Group is a global provider of business management software solutions. This acquisition has allowed Sage to integrate Protx with their software and allow clients to process payments taken by telephone from within the Sage 50 accounts software. In 2006 Protx were one of the first PSP's to achieve level 1 PCI compliance. Protx have a video on youtube that will give you more of an insight into Protx/SagePay. The video is described as "an insight into the world of online payments", realistically it should be described as a marketing video for the SagePay re-branding exercise.

The arrival of Protx/SagePay in the Irish market should prove to be interesting. Our source was unable to provide us with exact details of their pricing at this time but it was confirmed that the service offerings will be exactly the same as those currently offered in the UK. Looking at the Protx UK website now I can see that their small business package is £20 a month and this gives up to 1000 transactions in a quarter. After watching the marketing video and reading about their pricing models I expect you'll be watching to see how their Irish launch goes and what pricing they go with.

This post is not intended to be a marketing or sales advert for Protx/SagePay launch. After all WebPayments.ie is an independent web site, we give you the information and you make the decisions. Now that we have looked at the pros of Protx/SagePay lets look at the cons.

The first item that I would like to look at is customer service. Irish merchants have become accustomed to customer service that is of the highest standard. For example when you need to contact the main Irish PSPs you get through to an actual person who is knowledgeable, wants to help you with your issue and in some cases remembers you. There are no machines, no pressing 1 for sales, 2 for support and in my experience you are very rarely left on hold. If most or all of your business is generated online then being able to talk to someone when something goes wrong is very important. If you are not able to process payments then you will be losing money, customers and potentially damaging your reputation.

Here in Ireland we do not know how Protx do business, this is going to be a concern for their target market. How will Protx build trust here? All of you UK readers that use Protx, we would like to hear about your experiences with reliability, integration support, after-sales or anything else we might find useful.

Those of you involved in the Payments Industry will probably remember the Protx outages that occurred in August of 2007 and again in April 2008. They were big news stories at the time. I will not go into detail on these here as there is plenty of discussion on this topic available on the Internet.

To conclude Protx/SagePay entering the Irish market can only be good for Irish Merchants, competition in any market is a good thing. Protx/SagePay may not have the best reputation when it comes to reliability of service based on their previous troubles but the decision as to which PSP to use should be based on what is important to your business. For some businesses price may be the most important factor.

The key thing is to figure out what is important to your business and then see which PSP best matches the needs of your business. Use our Provider Comparison section to compare the offerings from PSP's currently serving the Irish market. We are developing an easier comparison chart for you, so any suggestions you have are welcome.

Dave

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