FortisPay Is Now Fortis, Signaling Its Stress on Payments Integration for Business Software

As trends such as payment facilitation and integrated payments continue to unfold, at least some payments providers are giving more thought to long-held branding strategies. The latest example is that of FortisPay, which on Tuesday announced it is dropping the “Pay” and is now in the market simply as Fortis.

Under new chief executive and payments-industry veteran Greg Cohen, the 11-year-old, Novi, Mich.-based company came to the conclusion that its growth in weaving payments into business software indicated a new identity. “We are a guided platform for software,” Cohen says. “Our job is to take payments and make it invisible. It just happens within the software.”

That emphasis on payments integration for software developers has paid off in recent years. Processing volume has grown 46% over the past year, all of it organic, that is, from existing operations, according to the company. Revenues have quintupled over the past two years. Fortis does not release absolute numbers, though Cohen says 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.

Now, by dropping the “Pay” from its name, the company is signaling its emphasis on partnering with providers of business software says Cohen, who took on the CEO title in July after having assumed the role of executive chairman in October 2019. “We’re grounded in payments but now we’re [also] grounded in a payments-enablement platform,” he says. The platform, he adds, provides a “single integration point” for multiple scenarios. “It’s a platform where you can walk, jog, or run,” he says.

Cohen is a veteran in the acquiring business, having served in high-level roles with such firms as Paya, iPayment, Cayan (now part of Global Payments), Verifone, and Moneris (now part of FIS Inc.). Now, by stressing Fortis’s role in making payments “just happen within the software,” Cohen is out to ratchet up growth through its work with business-software developers. “Our job is to make software providers stronger,” he says. “We make their software stronger.”