Henry Helgeson’s Return as a Payments Chief Executive Signals Bigger BlueSnap Ambitions

As a payments executive, he started an independent sales organization in 1998 that 19 years later would be acquired by Total System Services Inc. for $1.05 billion in cash. Now, more than four years since Henry Helgeson held a position at a payments company—other than as a board director or investor—he has returned as chief executive of BlueSnap Inc., a Waltham, Mass.-based payments provider.

With ambitions just as significant now as they were 26 years ago, Helgeson joined BlueSnap in February with a plan. Indeed, for the 49-year-old Helgeson, his return to operations is personal.

“While I was on the sidelines, I realized I’m a better operator than a board member,” Helgeson tells Digital Transactions News. “I really missed being with and running a team.” In the past few years, he’s served on the boards of BillingTree, which was acquired by Repay Holdings Corp. in 2021, Infinicept, and Payroc, where he remains a board member.

While Helgeson cast his eye on potential payment companies, the BlueSnap board was looking to make a change. As Helgeson describes the situation, the BlueSnap board and Ralph Dangelmaier, whose LinkedIn profile says he was BlueSnap chief executive and board member from 2013 through 2023 and a strategic advisor since January, wanted to make a change to help advance the company and scale it up. “To take the company to the next level they were looking for new leadership,” Helgeson says.

Other pieces of his search aligned, too. “I kept telling everybody the new frontier in payments was international, payment facilitation, and business-to-business. I’d been saying this for years before I found BlueSnap. When the board called me, it checked all the boxes,” he says. “This is where the high growth is in the payments space.”

His expectations are to grow BlueSnap, which has 300 employees across seven international offices.

To do that, he is tasked with turning the company into a partner-centric operation that knows how to work with partners and drive revenue alongside them, he says. “To do that, you have to structure the team right, there’s an organizational chart to refine, there’s a culture that goes along with it.” His experience growing Merchant Warehouse from a point-of-sale terminal reseller to its eventual formation as Cayan and developing the Genius POS software before its sale to TSYS will likely prove valuable. Genius launched in 2012. Global Payments Inc. acquired TSYS in 2019.

BlueSnap’s updated goals also include revising its appetite for risk. “For this risk profile, we want to be more down the center of the fairway,” Helgeson says. “We are working through what that portfolio looks like.” Its current roster of clients includes Ford Motor Co., business-management software provider Monday.com, and online registration-services provider Regpack. Other goals include bringing on more acquirer partners domestically and internationally over the next 18 to 24 months, Helgeson says.

Longer term, Helgeson is eyeing growing BlueSnap akin to international payment processor Adyen. Amsterdam-based Adyen processed just over $1 trillion in volume in 2023. And that came through providing services similar to BlueSnap’s, he says. As a private company, BlueSnap does not release financial or processing figures.

BlueSnap’s board, as might be expected, backs Helgeson on these objectives. Two of BlueSnap’s board members also invested in Cayan. “They have similar mandates—grow as fast as you can and as responsibly as you can,” he says.

Helgeson’s arrival at BlueSnap comes as the company already has what he calls a great reputation. His job is to build on that.

The prospects for success, as Helgeson sees it, are akin to some of his experiences at Cayan. “The Cayan years, for a lot of us, were some of the best year of our lives,” he says. “Leaving that behind was a tough trade. It’s opportunity [is] recreated here.”