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Fortis has proven in recent months to be one of the country’s most active payments providers when it comes to extending capabilities for independent software vendors, and now it has expanded further in that business with its acquisition of VIP Integrated Payments in a deal announced Wednesday. Terms were not released.
Novi, Mich.-based Fortis, which in October changed its name from Fortis Pay, sees in Lakewood, Wash.-based VIP an opportunity to add on further capabilities in the valued-added reseller business in particular. In this highly competitive channel, providers can weave in payments capabilities for resellers of business software.
“We are thrilled that VIP’s exceptional team and array of solutions will become part of the Fortis family,” Greg Cohen, Fortis’s chief executive, said in a statement. “Joining forces means both organizations will continue to expand on the exceptional service they are already known for.”
VIP’s chief executive, Miah Green, and his executive staff will stay on, according to the announcement. “Businesses will benefit from the innovations our organizations will continue to roll out as we offer a modern, fully integrated commerce and payment-facilitation experience,” Green said in a statement.
Its emphasis on payments integration for software developers has paid off in recent years for Fortis. Processing volume has grown 46% over the past year, all of it organic, that is, from existing operations, according to the company. That growth excludes business from EpicPay International LLC and Change Merchant Solutions LLC, a pair of companies Fortis in May agreed to acquire. Revenues have quintupled over the past two years.
Fortis does not release absolute numbers, though Cohen told Digital Transactions News in October volume is now “well north of $15 billion,” with a merchant base of some 20,000 businesses, with many in the health-care, specialty retail, and business-to-business categories. That volume would rank Fortis among the top 40 merchant acquirers in the country, according to data from The Strawhecker Group. The company says that in the past few months it has entered the Canadian market and introduced more than a dozen integrated software partnerships.
To help manage that growth, Fortis on Wednesday also announced a pair of executive appointments. Guy DiMaggio, formerly an executive with such companies as Vantiv, Western Union, and iPayment, has taken on the chief operations officer role. And Raj Pannu is now vice president of business development for Fortis’s lodging business. Pannu formerly has worked for Chase, First Data, and Elavon.
