VeriSign Swaps Payment Biz For $370 Million

Once again, eBay has made an acquisition; this time the online auction service has purchased VeriSign’s payment processor business and will merge it with PayPal.

VeriSign’s departure from the payment processing industry will be cushioned by a cash and stock deal with eBay for $370 million. eBay, which recently purchased VoIP provider Skype for $2.6 billion, will add the VeriSign business to its PayPal offering.

Also, VeriSign gets a significant boost to its authentication tokens business, as Computer Business Review reports eBay will use VeriSign products and services to provide online security for its users. Up to one million authentication tokens would be purchased and used by eBay.

VeriSign competes with RSA Security on authentication tokens, and lags behind RSA in the market for them. eBay’s deal would get more tokens into use, and that could help VeriSign gain some ground in the authentication market.

After picking up blog ping service Weblogs.com from Scripting News, the CBR report said VeriSign may follow that purchase up by acquiring Moreover. Moreover provides feeds of news headlines that can be customized by topics and displayed on a web site.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.