Pineapple Payments Furthers Its Expansion With Its Deal for 1st Payment Systems

Payments provider Pineapple Payments announced Friday it has acquired 1st Payment Systems, a provider of private-label payment processing and omni-channel payment technology for integrated software vendors (ISV) in the powersports and health-care industries. Terms were not disclosed. 

The acquisition strengthens 1st Payment’s ability to service its customers by leveraging Pineapple’s Transax platform, which Pittsburgh-based Pineapple acquired in 2018. 1st Payment will have access to Transax’s features and application programming interfaces to create more targeted services for its customers and increase ISV partnerships and referral relationships. 

One tool 1st Payment is expected to leverage is Transax’s invoice-manager application, which allows merchants to establish a customer portal through which consumers can view and pay invoices.

“We have specialized expertise in serving fragmented industries, but we’ve never had in-house technology. That’s what Pineapple brings to the table.” Brandon Kaylor, president of 1st Payment said in a prepared statement. “Coupled with [Pineapple’s] dedicated marketing and support, that’s what’s going to help us deepen our industry partner relationships and expand our offering.”

For the independent sales organization Pineapple, the deal is a way to build out its overall business, something the company’s management team, which includes chief executive Brian Shanahan, have done in previous ventures such as CardConnect Corp., says Peter Michaud, director, consulting for The Strawhecker Group. CardConnect was eventually acquired by First Data Corp. in 2017 for $750 million. “The people behind Pineapple are entrepreneurs that know the ISO market and have built businesses this way before,” says Michaud. “This deal is not surprising.”