Going Beyond the Gateway, NMI Acquires A Payment-Specific Services Firm in IRIS CRM

As part of its strategy to expand its offering of multichannel payment technology, payment-platform provider NMI announced Tuesday the acquisition of IRIS CRM, a merchant-services customer relationship management and merchant-management platform that services clients in the payments industry. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

The addition of IRIS CRM gives NMI a payments-centric CRM application that integrates with NMI’s payment-gateway services. That combination is expected to add value to NMI’s technology offerings beyond gateway services by enabling NMI to engage in merchant prospecting and management and onboard merchants faster. NMI acquired gateway USAePay almost a year ago. As a result, NMI partners will be able to sign up a merchant and accept payments with the processor of their choice, as well as add touchpoints throughout the customer lifecycle beyond payment processing. 

“This extends our offerings to include merchant-management touchpoints—such as managing sales leads and tracking customer interactions—as well as supporting acquirer onboarding through underwriting and onboarding,” NMI chief executive Vijay Sondhi says by email. “Merchants are increasingly demanding an all-in-one software solution that provides both signup and processing capabilities. This acquisition allows us to meet that demand and go beyond our core payment gateway services to seamlessly onboard merchants and allow them to monetize their payments more quickly.”

In addition to the sales-lead management, other capabilities IRIS CRM brings to NMI include document collection with electronic signature capabilities, direct-to-processor onboarding, automated transaction reporting, residual income calculations, tracking of customer interactions, and the ability to support acquirer onboarding through underwriting and onboarding. Such capabilities are important in the evolving payments-processing technology landscape and are not possible with other CRM platforms, as they are not geared to the payments industry, according to NMI. 

As part of the deal, Dimitri Akhrin, president of IRIS CRM, will continue in his role and remain a stakeholder in the merged company, NMI says.

“IRIS CRM offers a wealth of features for clients in the payments industry specifically, and this deep knowledge of the payments space has allowed them to create and perfect reliable business-management tools to serve this industry well,” says Sondhi. “IRIS CRM’s payments-specific solution…will help us bring more value to our existing customers and give us the ability to sell to new types of customers seeking an effortless payment-enablement experience.”