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Lighthouse Network, the company behind such acquiring and point-of-sale brands as Harbortouch and POSitouch, announced Monday it has purchased Shift4 Corp., a Las Vegas-based payment gateway, for an undisclosed amount.
Allentown, Pa.-based Lighthouse also announced it would adopt the Shift4 name, rebranding itself as Shift4 Payments. It was only in 2017 that the Lighthouse Network name was introduced as the umbrella organization for Harbortouch.
“Shift4 Payments will replace the Lighthouse Network brand at the top of the organization and power the payment-processing services for the company’s Harbortouch, Future POS, Restaurant Manager, and POSitouch product brands,” a press release from Lighthouse stated.
“This acquisition is transformational for our organization as it enables us to power our industry-leading POS brands with a best-in-class payments platform that is second to none in terms of security, reliability, and functionality,” said Jared Isaacman, Lighthouse founder and chief executive, in the press release. The rebranding to Shift4 Payments reflects the company’s commitment “to powering all the leading software brands with premium payment-processing services,” he said. The former Shift4 Corp. also has 300 software integrations with independent software vendors and merchants.
“Lighthouse Network was created just six months ago as a temporary brand to organize the product brands we have assembled,” a Lighthouse spokesman says in an email to Digital Transactions News. “The purpose of Lighthouse Network is to provide shared services and resources to these product companies. There is no greater contribution Lighthouse Network makes to these companies than empowering them with payment processing services. Since payments are core to our organizational mission, we felt that the payment processing brand should live at the top of the organization which is why we are assuming the Shift4 Payments identity.”
Because Lighthouse Network has been a behind-the-scenes entity, powering the customer-facing brands, “This enables us to rebrand Lighthouse Network with limited visibility to our customers that could cause confusion,” he says.
In addition to its gateway services, Shift4, which processes more than $60 billion annually, has 11 patents for its technology and is known for providing tokenization services. The combined company will process more than $100 billion in annual transactions, Lighthouse says. It also will process more than 1 billion annual transactions for almost 200,000 merchants. The new entity has eight offices in the United States and Europe, and works with more than 7,000 sales partners.
Dairy Queen, Red Roof Inn, and Caesars Entertainment are among the combined company’s customers.
