If you are a regular reader of the papers you might think there were only two types of internet businesses.

One forlorn group comprises those companies that are struggling to survive after being battered by the invisible hand of the market. We have seen the debilitating effects of this ourselves. A couple of our own retail partners have already fallen by the wayside or are treading water as they try to secure further funding. The other group are those that find themselves targeted for lapses in internet security.

A recent television news report focused on the security of online banks following recent attempts to defraud Egg. For the average viewer it must have been scary stuff as the report appeared to demonstrate how relatively easy it might be for a hacker to infiltrate a computer and access passwords and other confidential information.

We have an insight into some of the security scares because of our relationships with online retailers. It has provided us with a more in-depth version of events than can be gathered from the morning's headlines. In many cases, the situation is not as serious as the media make out. In one reported case, where limited personal details of two customers were mistakenly made accessible for a short time to visitors to one leading retailer's website, the customers involved were relatively unconcerned.

In fact, they appeared more annoyed at being disturbed in the middle of the night by tabloid journalists investigating the case than the error itself.

It is not that hackers are not an issue. We assume that rools will be targeted by hackers, so we are building our systems to withstand attacks accordingly. Currently we have 237 different security processes and procedures in place to address this. There will be many more by the time we launch.

In several ways the rools service has been designed to offer greater protection to our users than existing means of payment. Online retailers, for example, bear the cost if a credit card payment that they have accepted turns out to have been made fraudulently. With rools, the technology means that all transactions are authorised in real time - so-called "charge-backs" - are no longer an issue for the retailer.

However it will be our ability to build trust in the rools brand among consumers that will be a key to our success. One important element of this is the security of the service itself. Although the consumer rarely suffers directly when online services are exposed, scary media stories do mean that everyone in the dot.com world has to work that bit harder to build the necessary trust.

Adam Hamdy and Guy Mallison are the co-founders of rools, a service that enables teenagers to buy online without a credit card