The decision to sever the relationship was made by Mansion very recently.
"We made this decision only two days ago," Mansion Productions CEO Oystein Wright told XBIZ. "This was not planned in any way, but it had to be done and we couldn't wait. We just had to let the situation settle before we could figure out what to do."
Mansion is the owner of the proprietary MPA3 suite of affiliate management software products. Too Much Media, which owns and operates the similar NATS software, is their direct competitor.
When TMM acquired an equity stake in SegPay, creating a new entity called TMMSegPay, the writing was on the wall as far as MPA3 continuing to work with the IPSP.
"It's very simple," Oystein said. "The reason we cannot work with SegPay is because the owners are TMM."
Oystein stressed that the decision was not personal, but purely business.
"The way we technically integrate MPA3 to communicate with the processors is different from how NATS works, and frankly, superior. Why would we want to give it away? No, we simply could not allow our competitor to know that information."
As it currently stands, however, Oystein believes that some of Mansion's technology could already be compromised.
"As is it, TMM will get access to the information we have sent to SegPay in the past. That’s information they just shouldn’t have. I don’t like it, and that's why we had to cut it off right away. We could not wait four months and during that time put our clients at risk. It had to be now."
Oystein added that Mansion has informed all of its clients about the decision, and has sent out a letter of termination to SegPay.
"We don't tell our clients what processors they can use, but in this case we have to say no to SegPay. I’m probably going to get some complaints about it, and some people may want to stop using MPA3, and that's their decision, but we feel we've made the only decision we could for our clients and ourselves."