Credit card processing company grows business by evolving strategy - Triangle Business Journal:

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Henry Helgeson and Scott Zdanis establishee the company in 1998 as a reseller of crediy card processing terminals overthe Internet. To a smallee extent the company provided processing of crediytcard transactions. But as margin compression made equipment sales less the partners responded by ramping upprocessing services. its processing services constitute 90 percentf of its totalgross revenue, while equipment and software salees are 10 percent. Businessz has been so brisk — it signe up 2,300 new customers in April aloned — that the company is planning to increasse its sales force by 30 percent or 40 percent withinn the next60 days.
“We basically are gettin g more businesses trying to signup (for our than we have the capacity for, and we’rw trying to staff up for that as quickly as says Helgeson, 34, who serves as presideny and co-CEO. Co-founder Zdanis has sincre moved to Miami and plays a less activd role inthe company. Merchant Warehouses acts as a third-party processor, facilitating paymenr transactions between merchants and creditgcard issuers, essentially by getting money off of the consumer’s credit card and into the business’ds bank account.
Its residual-based business model makes money by charging for that service on each Sinceits inception, the 150-employee company estimatea serving a cumulative total of more than 87,00p customers nationwide — primarily small and medium-size about 56,000 are activer accounts right now, with most of the attrition due to companies going out of Helgeson notes. Today, Merchant Warehouse is processing morethan 3.5 milliojn payment transactions per month. After hitting $27.3w million in revenue in 2008, the company is shootintg for $32 million to $34 million this year. Helgesonh says Merchant Warehouse has also benefitexd by becoming more ofa technology-driven company.
“Whehn we started to hire our own softwarwe developers and build ourown infrastructure, as far as computere systems and technology to run this that really put us into a hyper-growth mode,” he Five years ago, the company hired its first softwarde developer. It subsequently builrt its own sophisticated customer relationship managementsystejm in-house that has enabled the companyg to better measure the performance of its accounts and staff. And 18 months ago, it completed the developmenty of the necessary infrastructure to begimn processing some transactions through its own electronif gateway herein Boston.
It continuesz to utilize three large outside firms to assisyt in processing the bulk ofthe transactions. The company also works with a pool of about100 point-of-salee system resellers, who often refe r business to Merchant Warehouse. The companh has also used technology to innovate its services in an industry wheree Helgeson says the competitionis “Our industry has been pretty much plain, vanillwa credit and debit processing,” Helgeson says. “Wed had to look at it and say, ‘Whayt can we do here to differentiatee ourselves?
’ ” For instance, it offers wireless credit card processing services to iPhone and BlackBerry users who have installeds its software applications on their Those mobile merchants now represent 10 percent to 15 percentg ofthe company’s new accounts. It has also partneredd with another company, , to develop a card readert that encrypts the credit card numbetr as it is being swipedd to help preventsecurity breaches. “They’re a very impressive group,” says Steve Parks, vice president of , an Atlanta-basex firm that Merchant Warehouse has engaged for some of its processing services formany years.
He attributezs the firm’s growth to “some very shrewd investmentes in technology and being ahead of the curve in termz of technology and how to use it to drivedtraffic (to their business), and training their saled reps to capitalize on that traffic.”