Privately held Melbourne based SecurePay is buying the bill payments business of listed Sydney based company, CommSecure. The sale is subject to shareholders' approval at an extraordinary general meeting scheduled for 17 December.It should return at least $1.8 million to CommSecure, although the exact amount is contingent upon performance and may be either more or less than that figure.Most important however is that the money will fill the revenue hole left earlier this year when HSBC dumped its CommSecure supplied share-trading information service. But it will also see CommSecure reduced to little more than a corporate shell.Without CommSecure's bill-payments business, and no customer for its share-trading information service, there is precious little left to CommSecure. Indeed, just a few, sundry gold and mining-related assets, remnants of the company's former ASX identity as the Welcome Stranger Mining Company NL.Moreover, CommSecure's founder, and developer of many of its e-commerce systems Raymond Loyzaga, is no longer either an executive director or working for the company.Peter Townley, CommSecure's chief executive officer, said that there are two parts to the electronic bill paying and presentation business being sold to SecurePay."We have a number of utilities, local governments and businesses that use our services to integrate their customers' billing and payment over the Internet including full receipting.""Our other services are more specialized and B2B oriented for customers like Axa and MLC."According to the company's latest annual report (i.e. for the year to end June 2007) these various bill-payments services accounted for 45 per cent or around $1.65 million of the company's total $3.67 million service revenues.Rob McIntyre, CEO of SecurePay, said there were no special conditions about the deal."We've entered into a heads of agreement with CommSecure Ltd to buy their EBPP business."It's an unconditional agreement but because CommSecure is an ASX listed company it has to get the approval of CommSecure's shareholders."CommSecure has been under a trading suspension since it lost HSBC as a customer and last traded at three cents per share.According to the information memorandum posted by CommSecure at the ASX, there were other businesses, as well as SecurePay, that were interested in buying its bill payment business.However CommSecure's business is a good fit for SecurePay and just the latest in a growing list of acquisitions by the Melbourne based company. Earlier this year SecurePay bought online shopping software developer, Gate13, and last year acquired the Camtech on-line payments business from listed company Keycorp.According to SecurePay's Rob McIntyre, the company once had 25 per cent of its equity held by Cashcard and then, after the sale of Cashcard, by its new owners - US giant First Data International.But the equity, held in the form of a convertible note, was bought back from First Data. And as a result, First Data no longer has any interest in the company. ** Stewart Carter is editor of the industry newsletter, The eCommerce Report.