An Interview with Boost Payment Solutions, a Leading Fintech B2B Acquirer in America
- Samuel Feldman
- Aug 31, 2021
- 4 min read
The only fintech acquirer exclusively focusing on the B2B marketplace, Boost Payment Solutions is revolutionizing the industry.
An Interview with Dean M. Leavitt, Founder, and CEO of Boost Payments Solutions.
What is Bass Boosted Solutions?
Boost Payment Solutions is a leading B2B acquirer providing organizations with ground-breaking solutions and technology to optimize commercial card payments and acceptance, making the migration of paper-based payments to electronic alternatives easy and seamless. Boost Intercept, the company’s innovative payment platform, streamlines commercial card payments by eliminating the need for suppliers to manually process transactions or access card data, expediting reconciliation, and reducing the cost of acceptance. Boost Intercept enables suppliers to optimize their card acceptance by supporting virtual and single-use cards, without the need to log on to multiple portals, “hunt down” card data and manually process transactions, all of which are resource-intensive and present potential data security issues.
What inspired the idea behind Boost Payment Solutions?
Before starting Boost, I had been in the payments arena for over 20 years, focusing exclusively on the consumer end of payments. During that time, I had seen many failed attempts by companies big and small, well funded and not, to go after the B2B payments arena. I started focusing on why there were so many failures. What were they doing wrong? Why is it so hard? It quickly became apparent that they were taking consumer-related B2C solutions, pricing constructs, marketing, sales strategies, and technologies and just throwing them in a bag and writing B2B on the front and going to market. It just was not working because there's a very significant difference between B2B transactions, especially at the enterprise level, and consumer transactions. So I started Boost to focus just on B2B and to focus on it in such a way that we attended to the specific nuances of the B2B marketplace. Ultimately our business began to morph from a service organization into a technology platform. We started delivering products and solutions that directly reflected what we heard in the marketplace regarding where the friction was and where the more cumbersome functions needed to be automated. This continues to this day. You are never done in the fintech business. You have to constantly keep your ear to the ground and continue to evolve as the marketplace evolves.
Why did you decide to enter the B2B market rather than the C2C or B2C market?
There was a vacuum in the B2B market, an absolute vacuum of players and technologies focused on B2B. Yet, the market size absolutely dwarfs consumer transactions, depending on what data you look at. According to the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, about $4 trillion of payments were made on consumer cards in the United States. In the same period of time, there was $21 trillion of payments made among businesses. Globally, it's closer to $120 trillion. The percentage of those transactions that have become digitized via card or any other digital payment method is minute so that the TAM (totally addressable marketplace) is so vast. You combine an absolute vacuum of players serving the marketplace, coupled with such an expansive TAM, deciding to dive into the market was quite natural. Since day one, we have been maniacally focused on B2B, and we plan to continue doing that.
What separates you from the rest of your competitors in the B2B space?
We certainly track a lot of the players that enter the market—many of the players that do come into the B2B payments arena actually become partners of ours. For the most part, entities that play in the payments arena sit on one side of the equation or the other. They are either sitting on the AP (accounts payable) or the AR (accounts receivable) side. The buyer side or the payee side. A lot of players have gone to both places. What makes Boost so unique is that we have positioned ourselves as a bridge between the two. So we have contractual relationships and technical connectivity to both buyers and suppliers and both issuers and acquirers. So that is a unique positioning that we set up from day one, knowing that the only way to serve the enterprise level of payments properly is to bridge the two worlds together. So that's why in our marketing materials on our website, you see images of bridges all over the place. It is not just a coincidence.
What are your future ambitions/vision for the company?
We continue to grow and develop. We recently raised a round of capital from a San Francisco-based private equity fund, our Series C round. The primary purpose of that round was to hire nearly doubled the size of our organization over the next 24 months. A lot of that focus is on our international growth. We are currently in about 40 countries, but in many of those countries, we do not actually have boots on the ground. We service those countries from afar or from adjacent regions, and we've just recently hired several team members in Mexico, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Western Europe, and the UK. We continue to build out our footprint, both in terms of functionality and personnel. So that was a big deal for us and continues to be a big piece of our aspiration. We want to really grow our footprint and have our international revenues, which now represent less than 10% of the company's overall revenues, grow towards 25% or more over the next couple of years. We are also adding different types of vertical strategies to the mix. We have selected a handful of specific verticals that we are going to dive deeper into by bringing on subject matter experts to the mix as well. The broader answer is that we want to continue to grow and create opportunities down the road. Perhaps an IPO? The goal right now is to develop, dramatically increase top-line revenue, and build a profitable business that then provides companies with functionality and optionality.
About Dean M. Leavitt
Dean is the Founder and CEO of Boost Payment Solutions, a global leader in business-to-business payment technology. With over 30 years of experience in the financial technology and payments arenas, Dean has founded and/or managed both private and public companies. Dean currently sits on both the Global and European Advisory Boards of Commercial Payments International and previously served two terms on the board of the Electronic Transactions Association. Dean has received numerous industrial awards from his peers and currently resides in New York, where he has lead the team at Boost over the twelve years since he founded the company.
Comments