Patented Payment Security Platform

Securter Systems Inc., a fintech company building payment security technology for card-not-present transactions, the category where most online fraud and chargeback losses land.

Superscript was Securter's development partner from concept through patent filing. We built the proprietary risk engine, native iOS and Android applications that read EMV chips over NFC, the backend payment infrastructure, and the web interfaces for merchants and administrators. The premise: use the cardholder's own phone to prove the physical card is present during an online purchase.

Online card fraud works because the card number is both the identifier and the credential. Anyone holding the number can spend it, and when the charge is disputed the merchant absorbs the chargeback. In-person payments solved this years ago with the EMV chip, which proves the physical card is present at the moment of purchase. Online payments never got that.

Securter's answer was to bring chip verification into the online flow using hardware most people already carry. That raised four problems at once.

Hardware and cryptography. Reading an EMV chip over NFC from a consumer phone, across two mobile platforms with different NFC behavior and different secure element access, then moving that data into an authorization decision inside the transaction window. PCI scope. Any system touching card data inherits compliance obligations. That shapes the architecture from the first commit. Retrofitting data containment later is expensive and usually incomplete. Patentability. The approach had to be defensible, which meant the IP strategy had to develop alongside the engineering and inform it as it went. Enterprise-grade at seed stage. Early-stage company, but the buyers were banks, processors, and merchants. The platform had to survive their security reviews.

A dedicated senior team owned the full technical build.

Risk engine. Proprietary risk management algorithms scoring transactions in real time, combining chip verification with contextual signals to reach an approve, decline, or challenge decision inside the authorization window. Mobile EMV reading. Native iOS (Swift) and Android (Kotlin/Java) apps that read EMV-enabled cards over NFC and handle the cryptographic exchange with the chip. Native on both platforms, because NFC and secure element access tolerate abstraction layers poorly. Backend payment infrastructure. .NET Core services on AWS with PostgreSQL, built for secure transaction handling and PCI-aligned data segmentation. Merchant and admin interfaces. React applications for transaction monitoring, configuration, and administration. Patent strategy. Michael Shmulevich served as VP of Engineering and worked with the founding team on IP strategy, mapping which parts of the architecture were defensible and shaping the implementation around them. Two patent applications came out of that work. Engineering process. Source control, CI/CD, automated testing, and security controls in place from the start.

Patented approach to mobile-verified card payments. Two patent applications filed. The IP is the durable asset from the engagement, and it outlived the company's commercial window.

Complete platform delivered. Risk engine, two native mobile apps, backend infrastructure, and web interfaces, working as one system rather than four projects that met at the end.

Client assessment. Steve Epstein, CEO of Securter Systems: "What makes them unique is their experience and ability to deliver an actual product."

What happened after. The product did not reach commercial production. Market conditions shifted and the company did not carry it forward. We publish the case study anyway, because the engineering is a fair sample of the work: a system that had to satisfy PCI obligations, hold up under a processor's security review, and be novel enough to patent, built by people who had done each of those before.