AssuredCard | AssuredCredit | Milinx | Maynard Dokken Credit Debt Payment Solutions | Financial Institutions Registration | Web Portal Gateway

Assured Card Corp created a Credit Debt Payment Solution and Technology  with Institutional Registration & Web Portal by 1998.

It was 1994 and after four years of working with corporate security issues in the rating agency and financial institution marketplace I realized there was a missing product. One that worked to reduce the exponential costs to consumers for missing payments or going over credit limits. A product that included advice.

It should be noted after our 1994 launch financial institutions started to adjust their products and services to deliver similar solutions. We felt we had accomplished our goal.

By 1998 we had provided credit debt solutions for over 10,000 clients and realized we needed to focused our resources to complete the digital technology solution through AssuredCredit which had launched the first Hosted Online Payment Gateway.

In March 2000 Maynard L. Dokken and Milinx filed a Patent for secure universal transactions through an online payment gateway. This created what we now call a Merchant Payment Gateway or eCommerce Hosted Online Payment Gateway.

I was very fortunate that this period from 1990 to 1994 gave me deep insight into the credit ratings market. It was also a period of tremendous change as the old Receivable Trust model had changed to a Master Receivable Model which meant that authorized financial institutions such as banks that had credit card franchises such as MasterCard and Visa could simply swap receivables in and out of these Trusts instead of having to recreate from scratch. The growth of this credit market was accelerating.

Our first idea was to focus on a network of satellite units for AssuredCard with PC terminals throughout North America within a secure network to accept registrations and payment requests at AssuredCard. Hypercom and Lipman Engineering required a physical card for processing. Online terminals only required keyboard credit card and payment data. If the account was already created and accepted the user could make a payment request of make a payment to the card. It was our first model for expansion. The challenge became regulatory. We continued development of the terminal and the first operable version was released ready in 1998 with version 2 in 1999. It facilitated the development of a hosted version.

Banks needed a way of limiting their exposure to potentially costly clients that did not want to pay their debts. We saw a product was needed for the customers that did pay their debts and it had to work within the legal framework of the day. A rainy day product that would stop the increased cost of interest caused by a missed payment or other triggering event. Some cards had low interest rates which could increase 10%+ on one event including going over their balance. Even with a $1,000 balance this was an extra $100+ a year.

Verifone had created a network of processors starting in 1981 and in 1994 competition entered the market including Hypercom and Lipman Engineering. The genie was out of the bottle and adoption was accelerating. We had to be quick into the market.

We launched in 1994 a product that had a legal profile that worked within the framework of 1994. We provided credit advice for an annual fee and a free credit payment product. This allowed the company called Assured Card Corporation to process customers with an eye on possible credit risks manually.

"We needed a way for applications and payment requests to process efficiently!"

The adoption of our product was faster than we expected. The need was significant as many consumers did not understand the risk to their credit if they missed payments. That it could not only effect the cost of their credit card product also their car or home interest rate. We had a low $29 annual fee and low interest rate. We launched an affiliate market program that generated significant inquiries into the product. We needed a way for all those interested to register without creating an ever increasing overhead which meant the profits were being absorbed by human resources. It was 1996 and we needed a self serve solution versus in-house portal and gateway. We created a development group called AssuredCredit in 1997 to advance the online payment gateway.

By 1997 a Financial Institution Registration with customer Online Payment Gateway was launched from the online payment portal and gateway. We did not foresee that we were actually developing the first eCommerce Online Payment Gateway which evolved from the ASP project portal and technology in SuccessInc. We were simply developing technology for commerce and consumer payments.

The first step was to understand the market and what technology was available which was done through AssuredCredit. With knowledge from research from 1990 to 1994 in the Corporate Intranet and Rating Agency portal security we understood the security issues particularly with customer financial information. The mandate was to create an Intranet for payments. This evolved from 1997-1999 Web Portal Gateway to Hosted eCommerce Online Payment Gateway accessible to everyone with an internet connection. The online merchant payment gateway with commerce services was born.

In terms of security we knew we needed to update and integrate the backend for online services. We had implemented what was the best possible structure for security using two separate networks. One with newly released Windows NT which had access to the internet and the other network using Novell NetWare for customer registration and payment requests. This was developed our first in-house version in 1994-1995. We linked the two together in a secure manner with the Novell PC Terminal interface taking the application or payment request and NT processing into a database and ACH. The record was then removed from the Novell systems.

AssuredCredit created a new framework for credit and online authentication through development of the Hosted eCommerce Online Payment Gateway. This facilitated creation of a scalable hosted version of the payment gateway in Milinx.

As we advanced the payment gateway we developed commercial relationships with Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Oracle and Cisco. Milinx was launched as an ASP with SaaS, PaaS and IaaS services (named from the Minix backend of SuccessInc) in 1997. We merged into the market entity in 1999 and together with CreditAssure Financial as the partner gateway for financial institutions the next generation of technology had begun.

Maynard L. Dokken