HDFC bank payment gateway hosted by a third party.

Randomed by Rituraj / at 2:51 PM / /

Recently, while I was trying to buy something online, I selected the payment option as HDFC payment gateway. I was redirected to this page which looked totally like the HDFC bank netbanking login page. But I noticed that the address of the page did not have "hdfcbank.com/randomcrap" but, instead, was something like "fssp.com/randomcrap". I instantly thought that I was being conned but upon doing some research before actually making the payment I found out that HDFC bank's payment gateway is hosted by this third party service provider called Financial Software Systems PVT. LTD.
Now, at first I was confused as to what the difference is between FSS and, say, Paypal. Well, the difference is that FSS just implements that infrastructure required for a process of money transfer from a customer to an HDFC bank account owned by the merchant. FSS does not, at any point, have possession of the money at any point. Paypal, on the other hand, handles your money as well as the infrastructure needed to implement the entire process. However, this does not mean that HDFC bank (or any bank) is just like Paypal sans the self-implementing payment infrastructure. Paypal is NOT a bank because, I think, Paypal does not lend the money held under your name with them. While this not the only difference, it's the most fundamental difference.