A Complex Set-up Process Inspires the Launch of ‘Payment Facilitator in a Box’

Payments consultants Todd Ablowitz and Deana Rich are out to prove you don’t have to spend months or years setting up to be a payment facilitator. In fact, this week the duo launched a product they informally call “payment facilitator in a box” that lets outfits start underwriting, boarding, and processing merchants within a few weeks.

“Depending on the complexity, it can be as little as three weeks including testing. Naturally, it depends on complexity and needs of specific [payment facilitators],” Ablowitz tells Digital Transactions News.

On Wednesday, Network Merchants Inc., a payments gateway provider based near Chicago, announced it has integrated the product, formally called Infinicept. A Chicago-based facilitator called SwervePay is using Infinicept as part of NMI’s services to support a growing roster of merchants.

Ablowitz, president of Denver-based payments consultancy Double Diamond Group, and Rich, president of Rich Consulting, Van Nuys, Calif., have personally invested in Infinicept LLC along with the product’s developer, Longview, Texas-based iClassPro Inc.

Infinicept is aimed at a class of payments companies that came to prominence first with PayPal Holdings Inc. and then years later with the emergence of such companies as Square Inc. and Stripe Inc. Since then, independent sales organizations and independent software vendors have started adopting the merchant-aggregation model that lets sellers process transactions on the aggregator’s merchant account. All told, the model holds the potential to generate more than $4.4 billion in payment volume by 2021, according to Ablowitz.

But while the model quickly sets up merchants for card acceptance, it can be a lengthy process for the aspiring payment facilitator, or PF, to prepare to service those merchants. “We have seen so many payment facilitators who developed their system for a long, long time,” says Ablowitz. “I was talking to an investor in a PF. This investor told me they had a large team of highly qualified, creative, hardworking software developers, and it took them a full year to get their systems set up.”

The “payment facilitator in a box” concept may also help with booking the flood of new merchants payment networks hope to connect globally in the coming years. Last June, Mastercard Inc. announced it planned to link 40 million micro-merchants within five years, for example. “The biggest remaining challenge is the amount of “stuff” the PFs need to build to launch their business. Our product solves that problem,” Ablowitz says.

Still, while Infinicept (the name is an abbreviation of “infinite acceptance”), may allow PFs to start booking submerchants more quickly, it’s by no means a cinch that all acquirers will buy into the idea in preference to working with traditional ISOs.

“As far as market demand, I just think it’s going to take a long time before we start seeing an uptake unless the [payment facilitators] bring new functionalities and a competitive advantage that are necessary for merchants or acquirers,” notes Adil Moussa, principal of Adil Consulting, an Omaha, Neb.-based firm,, in an email message. “Replacing an existing processor is not an easy task. Most acquirers are in multiyear contracts and have invested significantly in their current set-ups. Additionally, changing a system that isn’t broken is seen as a risk.”

If Infinicept catches on, though, it could lure acquirers as much as merchants. “We built this platform to marry the highest and newest technology, and a very old-school world in electronic payments,” Ablowitz says. “So, tech companies that want the slickest tech and [application programming interfaces] can have it, while it plays nicely with the more traditional payments companies.”