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It’s been a busy June for Fortis Payment Systems LLC. The payment facilitator and independent sales organization announced Thursday it is moving into Canada, has acquired payments provider SmartPay, and has added new funding and settlement capabilities.
Also Thursday, merchant processor FreedomPay Inc. said it is integrating Visa Inc.’s tokenization services into its offerings.
The move into Canada is Novi, Mich.-based Fortis’s first expansion beyond the United States. Fortis said it will offer Canadian merchants credit card acceptance, acceptance of Canada’s Interac debit cards, and, in the future, electronic funds transfer services for business-to-business and recurring-payment clients.
Back in the U.S., Fortis, which has made acquisitions in the past, said its deal for Santa Barbara, Calif.-based ISO SmartPay enhances its presence in integrated payments, enterprise software, and what it calls “ERP (enterprise resource planning) ecosystems.”
“SmartPay was founded to bring enhanced technology solutions to the small-business community, and brings its exceptional team, productive customer relationships, and rich capabilities to Fortis,” a Fortis statement says. SmartPay founders and former managing partners Mike Sheffey and Nate Schloss will join the Fortis leadership team as part of the acquisition. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Fortis also announced a new service it calls Secondary Amount, which allows its integrated software partners to assess and collect platform fees when processing payments. Users can designate a platform or other type of fee to be assessed as part of a single transaction and deposited separately. Secondary Amount is available in the Fortis application programming interface (API) suite.
Meanwhile, Philadelphia-based FreedomPay said in a statement that Visa’s tokenization service will provide its merchants with “network tokens across card brands, helping to keep merchants compliant with cross-border and in-region data and privacy regulations, while helping merchants qualify for lower interchange rates for certain Visa network tokenized transactions.”
FreedomPay said additional features also will be enabled without requiring changes to merchants’ systems, such as supporting card-on-file use cases with digital-wallet taps as well as token life cycle management.
“By partnering with Visa for network tokenization, FreedomPay will provide merchants with more flexibility and geographic coverage, including in harder-to-access regions, when managing customer and card data,” FreedomPay chief technology officer David Knowlton said in the statement.
