ConnectBooster has introduced a new service designed to help MSPs safeguard electronic payments for their clients.
Called Secure Payments and available at no cost to members of ConnectBooster’s Rev partner program, the new offering includes tools for identifying payment-related vulnerabilities in a customer environment and then eliminating them via the vendor’s end-to-end payment processing system.
ConnectBooster announced the new service during Kaseya’s ConnectIT conference in Las Vegas, where Brady Nash, the company’s CEO, delivered a keynote this morning.
The assessment portion of Secure Payments searches end user infrastructures for unencrypted payment card data on their endpoints. Over 88% of businesses have such data, according to a recent report from compliance and security vendor SecurityMetrics.
PCI DSS requirements obligate companies to protect primary account numbers in their possession. Leaving card numbers and other payment-related personally identifiable information exposed can result in fines of up to $500,000 per incident. Secure Payments is designed to shield end users from that liability by collecting and routing encrypted payment information without ever storing it locally.
“Our approach around payment data security is never have that data inside of their environment at any point, meaning there’s no data to steal,” says Brady Nash, ConnectBooster’s CEO.
The result for channel pros, in addition to more secure customers, is a new revenue stream, as ConnectBooster collects a fee every time an end user processes a transaction, just like other participants in the electronic payments ecosystem, and shares a portion of it with their partners.
“Every time their clients take a payment, they’re going to get paid,” Nash says. Those individually modest fees can add up to a substantial income source, he notes.
“If the average MSP has a hundred customers, it wouldn’t be crazy to say that it’s worth tens of thousands of dollars of passive recurring revenue,” Nash says. That money is almost entirely margin as well, he continues, because ConnectBooster operates the infrastructure, handles customer service, and resolves support tickets.
“The idea behind Secure Payments is to give MSPs the knowledge and the information, but limit the amount of work they have to put into it,” Nash says.
The system also protects MSPs from the finger-pointing and reputation damage that almost always follow when payment data gets stolen, he adds. “If that business has a breach, whether it’s right or wrong, who are they going to blame? They’re going to blame the MSP.”
For ConnectBooster itself, selling Secure Payments through MSPs, who are already responsible for other dimensions of end user security, is a logical strategy for reaching a vast addressable market.
“This channel, we believe, will be the largest distribution network for payment processing in the world,” Nash says. “We believe it’s going to be weird for businesses to not be getting their payment technology from their technology provider, whether that’s their internal IT team or their MSP.”
Secure Payments builds upon ConnectBooster’s original service, which is designed to help MSPs collect payments from their clients faster, more efficiently, and less expensively. According to Nash, it also addresses a security need that no one in the electronic payments industry is properly addressing at present.
“There’s a huge disconnect between security technology providers, the payment processing providers, and the businesses that are using the [payment] products,” he says. “Everyone’s trying to pass the buck.”
The Federal Trade Commission received nearly 400,000 reports of credit card fraud, typically involving stolen account information, in 2020.
