by filling a void in the global electronic world.

Bermudian Peter Durhager has teamed up with Jaun Prado to form Promisant, a company that will specialise in electronic payment processes.

Mr. Durhager told The Royal Gazette that Promisant was concentrating on a neglected area of electronic commerce and said he was confident that the company would collect profits in the region of $4 billion in as few as three years.

Meanwhile, Promisant has enjoyed rapid physical expansion in less than two months.

"We have gone from two guys and a white board to almost 30 people in the last 45 days,'' Mr. Durhager said.

"We have opened the Bermuda office, we've opened our Atlanta office, we're opening our Toronto office this month, we're opening in Miami and we're opening in London this month,'' he said.

"We've got a team in South America right now and a team in Europe and a team in Asia.

"So you know this thing is going global out of the box,'' he added.

Promisant intends to create an infrastructure specifically suited to the new demands and challenges of buying goods and services on-line.

Mr. Durhager said advancements in on-line technology were really only being made in "the front end of the business'' and that was where the funding for on-line sellers was going as well.

The effort "is going into the look and feel of the websites, it is going into distribution'', said Mr. Durhager.

"If you're Amazon.com, it's going into branding and marketing -- trying to create new names from new players to be branded and recognisable against the old names in the bricks and mortar environment.

"Yet there are new requirements that are emerging in the entire infrastructure behind the `buy' button,'' he warned.

And Promisant aims to correct inadequacies in current systems which do not allow for the situations that could arise as merchants enter the global market place.

Bermudian on-line shoppers will have experienced several on-line sites where they were unable to buy goods because their credit cards carried a Bermuda address.

Problems have also emerged when shoppers ask on-line merchants to send goods to an address that does not match the one on the credit card and further challenges arise with currency conversions.

Mr. Durhager said Promisant would provide a structure which would allow these types of transactions.

"People take for granted that when they click that `buy' button, the whole host of things are going to happen,'' said Mr. Durhager.

"But there hasn't been, at this point, significant investment and attention focused on that, particularly in the international market,'' he added.

Mr. Durhager pointed out that the future growth of North American businesses would be dependent on their ability to branch out to new overseas markets in Asia, Latin America and Europe.

Durhager behind `Promisant' idea "Those markets do not have the payment processing infrastructure and the sophisticated financial services and support infrastructure to support that growth,'' he said.

Setting up operations in different countries created challenges for a company's systems, continued Mr. Durhager.

He said: "If I'm a bricks and mortar store like the Gap and I want to open up in a new market, I would send a team to the new market, hire people who speak the language, establish a relationship with the banking community in that currency, rent floor space and so on.

"But there seems as though there should be some value, some benefit in the on-line world for not having to go do all that,'' he continued.

"But the reality of it today is that all those major brands that are crossing borders still go out and create relationships in each of those countries.

"They create banking relationships, infrastructure relationships, web hosting, they customise their website to that jurisdiction, they create relationships with telecommunications companies and host their website there.

"They get a payment gateway to support their payment transactions, maybe a payment processor, maybe a bank, but none of them, none of those things talk to each other,'' he pointed out.

"So the Chief Financial Officer and the people sitting back at corporate are going `oh my God, we've got this explosive growth in our on-line business but it's done nothing but complicate our lives in terms of adding levels of complexity'.'' Promisant's services would simplify that, said Mr. Durhager.

"We're saying one banking relationship, one payment processing relationship, one jurisdiction in which all of this traffic, all of this data, all of these financial transactions and all of the information that goes around that, comes together,'' he said.

Another problem merchants found with electronic payment processing -- something Promisant would address, said Mr. Durhager -- concerned information "around'' the financial transactions.

"One of the things that's so critical right now is the information around the financial transactions referred to as exhaust information,'' he said.

"That is often worth as much, or more in aggregate, than any of the individual transactions themselves.'' Mr. Durhager said he would only reveal the company's progress in the future when it had occurred.

"We've been very, very quiet about what we're doing, not because we don't want to tell people about it,'' he said, "as much as because there's an awful lot of people talking about an awful lot of things.

"We're trying to make sure that we are only communicating as and when we are able to deliver real value,'' he continued.

"We're trying to do it all globally at once. That's why we're taking a very methodical quiet approach to this so that when we pull the cover off it, it's not a flash in the pan that leaves everybody disappointed and everybody wondering what the hell is going on in Bermuda.''