Assist Assist

ASSIST, a Russian Internet payment provider, was founded in 1998. ASSIST meets all the requirements of VISA, MasterCard, Diners Club, Discover, JCB and American Express. is PCI DSS certified, has 3D-Secure, Verified by VISA, Master Card Secure Code, and ensures a high level of payment security.

The company's clients include: St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, SCC, Russia Ural Airlines, AK Siberia, Belavia, Bolshoi Theater, Russia Mariinsky Theater, Theater and Entertainment Box Office Directorate, Kassir. Ru, Ozon.ru, Google Russia, SONY branded online store, Mosfilm film concern, NEVA travel agency and many others. ASSIST has a customer base of over 2,500 companies. Assist Specialization - Online Plastic Card Payments. Her clients include an airline and an S7 online retailer. Ozon.ru

History

2011

• In June 2011, Pavel Vrublevsky, CEO of the Chronopay payment system, was arrested on charges of organizing a DOS attack on Aeroflot's online payments.

• In July 2011, ASSIST passed another annual PCI DSS certification. ASSIST annually confirms compliance with the standard by auditing SRC Security Research & Consulting. Within the framework of continuous long-term cooperation with SRC, the preparation and passage of audits, as well as quarterly scanning of networks, are an integral part of the set of measures to ensure the security of data holders of bank cards developed by ASSIST. PCI DSS certification is mandatory for companies working with international payment systems.

Also, at the end of July, Assistant released the 500,000th Assist ID identification card. Since the beginning of 2011 alone, more than 70 thousand cards have been issued, absolutely safe for payment in online stores. The technology was introduced in 2005 for those customers of online stores who were distrustful of online payment by bank cards, fearing fraudsters. Having received such a card, the buyer may not be afraid that Assist ID will be stolen from him, unlike stealing a regular payment card number. But even if this happens, the fraudster will not be able to take advantage of it. Why? When the Assist ID is activated, the payer's credit card is "linked" to the ID card. We can say that the ID card is a protective shell of a conventional bank card. By entering your bank card information once on the secure page of Assist, a provider whose security is confirmed by certificates of international payment systems and 13 years of impeccable reputation, you can pay for purchases on the Internet in one click without filling out many fields, and without fear of losing your bank card data. It looks as presentable as a regular bank card, which you can leave at home using Assist ID.

In October 2011, a new version of the ASSIST hardware and software complex was presented. The changes affected both the hardware and software parts of the system. The hardware has increased computing power, reserved communication channels, and several independent data centers located in professional data centers have been put into operation. As a result, the total performance of the complex increased by an order of magnitude, the number of system failures sharply decreased, the operation of the system became as reliable as possible. The new version of the ASSIST hardware and software complex is multi-bank, that is, it has the ability to integrate with any bank in any region and distribute customer payments to various banks included in the system. Also, this system is multi-currency, multilingual and meets the requirement of multi-brand. The latter requirement is due to the development of the business of payment gateways attached to the technology platform.

"First of all, this is not a product modification, but a completely new system. Of course, all the best that was in the previous version was transferred to the new one. In this sense, a certain continuity has been preserved. However, what we offer today should be considered as a fundamentally new product created on the basis of new technologies, taking into account the 13-year experience of our company, "said Sergey Zhirikhin, Marketing Director of Assist.

• • In addition to processing the transaction (payment) system itself, the company has developed a system for automatic monitoring of fraudulent transactions. The fundamental difference between classic monitoring systems and the one that Assist is ready to offer to the market in the near future is that the new system can most likely evaluate a transaction for fraud before sending an authorization transaction to the bank. The system has three modules. The first is the module of neural analysis. In collaboration with scientists at St. Petersburg University, a neural network has been built that detects the likelihood of fraud of a particular operation passing through the system. The second component of the system is the statistical analysis module. This is a database statistics model that online estimates the likelihood of fraud. The third module is the standard scoring model, which, by analyzing the criteria system, also assesses the degree of risk of a particular transaction. Based on the results of the assessment of all three subsystems, a decision is made to block a specific transaction, skip or issue information about it to an online store as suspicious. Currently, the automatic monitoring system is operating in test mode as part of the new ASSIST complex. The company plans to fully launch the system in December 2011. From the beginning of next year, the Assist company will be ready to offer an anti-family system to third parties.

2010

• Assist has been suspended, representatives of two payment systems told Vedomosti. Assist technical specialist confirmed: due to a hacker attack, the payment service has not been functioning since 19.30 Moscow time on Thursday July 15, 2010. Payments through Assist have yet to go through on Friday night. Managers of several companies told Vedomosti that on Friday they could not pay for tickets booked on the Aeroflot website using plastic cards. The problem is on the side of Assist, said an Aeroflot employee. The representative of S7 Kirill Alyavdin also knows about the problems of Assist, but the passengers of this airline, according to him, had no difficulties: Assist promptly provided it with a reserve payment channel.

It is impossible to accurately assess the damage caused to the system itself: Assist does not share financial indicators. The manager of one of the Russian payment systems estimates the damage to Assist at tens of thousands of dollars per day. But the loss of Assist customers can be more serious. Earlier, Aeroflot representatives said that in 2009, passengers booked monthly tickets via the Internet for about $20 million, that is, for $ 660 000-670 000 per day. This year, tickets for $1 million are booked daily through the Aeroflot website, the manager of one of the processing companies estimates; and due to the attack on Assist (Aeroflot accounts for up to 90% of the turnover of this system), funds from plastic passenger cards do not go to the airline. A source at Aeroflot agrees with these calculations. At the beginning of 2009, passengers booked about 30,000 tickets daily via the Internet, in the summer this figure rose to 40,000. The average ticket price for Aeroflot is $260. This means that in 2009 Aeroflot received card payments of $0.78-1.04 million on the Internet every day.

• On July 26, Aeroflot announced the restoration of the service for buying air tickets via the Internet after a failure on July 16, when a DDoS attack on the Assist payment system began, the acquiring services of which are used by Aeroflot's partner in this service, VTB24 Bank. Aeroflot's statement states that the company considers it an unacceptably long weekly period for eliminating the consequences of the attack and decided to change the acquirer. Now its functions will be performed by Alfa-Bank.

According to one of Assist's competitors, the volume of sales of Aeroflot air tickets via the Internet was $1 million. At the same time, the acquiring commission was 0.3-0.5%, i.e. the payment system cooperation with this client brought $30-50 thousand daily. According to experts, Aeroflot was one of Assist's largest customers.

Another Assist client, S7, is also not going to abandon this payment system, its representative Kirill Alyavdin told CNews. The acquirer promptly provided S7 with a backup channel during the DDoS attack, however, this airline uses Assist services only to accept American Express card payments. At the time of publication, the acquirer itself did not answer CNews questions.

2003

In 2003, ASSIST connected electronic payment systems such as WebMoney, Yandex.Money, CreditPilot and E-Port. Thus, electronic wallets have been added to the standard set of credit cards (VISA, MASTERCARD) to resolve the issue of micropayments (i.e. payments of 3 euros or less).

In August 2003, Assist created and launched a technology for safer and more convenient payments with bank plastic cards based on the Assistant ® ID. The technology has aroused wide interest among banks and cardholders and has become widespread among customers of ASSIST stores, both in Russia and around the world.

In December 2003, the ASSIST system was certified using 3D-Secure technology (VISA) together with the Baltic Bank (St. Petersburg). The ASSIST electronic payment system became the first Russian PSP (Payment Service Provider) to support the Verified by VISA cardholder authentication program.

2002

Using the ASSIST payment system, Alfa-Bank for the first time in Russia used SET™ technology to make payments via the Internet. And in March 2002, ASSIST became the first Internet payment system in Russia to implement web services for its customers in the Russian-language Internet.

In April 2002, the ASSIST project was separated from Reksoft. Technical Support has been expanded and a credit card transaction monitoring team has been set up. A specialized methodology for additional fraud monitoring offered to online stores was created and worked out.

1998-2001

Assist was created by the St. Petersburg company Reksoft. ASSIST was commissioned in April 1998 as an Internet payment gateway. One of the main tasks of ASSIST was to provide credit card payments for the online store o3on. O3on and currently one of the key clients of ASSIST.

The full commercial launch of the ASSIST electronic payment system took place in April 1999. At the same time, negotiations began with a number of large banks and processing companies. In 2000, ASSIST joined Alfa-Bank and banks serviced by STB-Card processing, and at the end of 2001 - to the UCS processing center.