In order to understand the current situation in the sphere of electronic commerce as a whole one should understand essence of payment system. Payment system is a set of mechanisms, rules, standards and tools which are used for the exchange of financial values, money between the parties in fulfilling their obligations.
Perfect Money claiming to be the future of electronic payments, should minimize delays in payments and take a small fee for payment transactions. It consists of a number of elements: the payment system participants, financial institutions, funds transfer, and communications between the accounting system; different cash and other instruments, legal framework, contractual relationships.
Participants in the payment system are: a payer, a payee of funds, a payer bank, a payee bank, the center-place where payment instruments are exchanged between banks, a control member which sets rules and methods of payments. Central Bank is usually the control member, an agent for settlements of interbank payments. It develops and puts into action rules of payments, systems controlling cash flow, the audit systems, includes new calculation’s tools in turnover, provides credit resources necessary for a system, oversees the payment system participants etc. Any payment transaction has two sides – the flow of information containing details of payment and the flow of funds, which are always intertwined, but can move in different ways and have a gap in time.
After this brief excursion into the concept of Perfect Money payment system, let’s look how it works in the Internet.
In the first instance to the payment instruments one includes various electronic payment systems to pay for goods and services via the Internet. Clearly, the opportunity to immediately pay for a purchase not only convenient for millions of Internet users, but also greatly increases the turnover of trade because a client, as usual, does not want to waste his/her time and it is more probable that he/she will refuse from buying something than lose ten minutes. Of course, one can try to use a credit card, but it is improbable for several reasons: first, common people are afraid of information disseminated by numerous newspapers and magazines in the pursuit of the facts, that such way of keeping money is rather unsafe. Hackers all around the world spread their nets, and just wait for someone typed in his/her name and credit card number to take hold of this information. However, in reality, today, the possibility that someone will intercept such information (with minimal care for user’s part, of course) is much less likely than a brawl, for example in an office of a bank. Read the rest of this entry »