How New Capital Positions Fortis to Pursue Faster Growth

Fortis Payment Systems LLC early Thursday announced it is receiving a capital infusion from a new investor, Audax Private Equity, as well as from an existing investor, Lovell Minnick Partners. The amount of the investment was not disclosed.

A privately held company, Fortis actively began seeking new investors about six months ago to help grow its business organically and inorganically, Fortis chief executive Greg Cohen tells Digital Transactions News. The capital infusion will be used to improve Fortis’s technology and distribution, and deepen ties with the company’s existing channel partners, Cohen says.

Cohen says the time is ripe for Fortis, a payment gateway and merchant acquirer that helps businesses accept payments, to accelerate growth. Many competitors have encountered difficulty raising capital in recent years, he points out. Some of the difficulties rivals have encountered are due in part to their respective business plans, according to Cohen.

“Since 2020 we’ve seen companies, in some cases, build or spend simply for the sake of doing so,” says Cohen. As a result, their “access to capital has dried up to a certain extent,” he adds.

Cohen says that during the same period Fortis has grown its business 12-fold. That growth, he says, has positioned the company to attract new investors and raise capital from existing ones. “Investment in this market is not what it was five years ago, and we see an opportunity to use this capital to go on the offensive when many of our competitors are on the defensive,” he says.

Plans for growth include expanding into geographic regions where Fortis does not do business, as well as tapping new market segments, such as embedded payments for business-to-business suppliers. Opportunities within B2B and business services, which represent about 40% of Fortis’s business, include invoicing and account-receivables solutions. B2B and business services are a growing portion of Fortis’s business, says Cohen.

B2B payments represent a $100-trillion market, Fortis estimates. “The deeper we get into B2B, the more growth opportunities we will see, as well for our software partners,” Cohen adds. “We can open up our ecosystem to plug in to these opportunities.”

On the consumer-payments side, Fortis will continue to look for growth opportunities around such technologies as tap-to-pay, mobile commerce, and card-not-present solutions. Health care and hospitality, two markets Fortis already serves, also offer strong growth potential, Cohen says.

Other growth opportunities will come through mergers and acquisitions. “There’s no reason to stop doing strategic mergers and acquisitions,” Cohen adds. 

Fortis says it recently surpassed $30 billion in volume. But “this [capital infusion] is not just about growth, but also about finding opportunities to help our partners grow and improve the customer experience,” Cohen says.