How a Bay Ridge company is helping 100,000 businesses process payments

Over 100,000 businesses that use credit cards to process at least some of their payments are now served by a system made by a local company that manages every aspect of credit card revenue 24/7 on behalf of the companies that process credit card payments.

Bay Ridge’s IRIS is a B2B company serving B2B companies that serve a giant B2B company that makes it easier for all of us to buy stuff.

Credit card provider, Visa, contracts with organizations, usually within banks, called “Independent Sales Organizations” (or ISOs). These banks actually process the payments made with Visa credit cards.

ISOs (called MSPs by MasterCard) are businesses with relationships with banks that set up merchant accounts with businesses that want to accept credit or debit cards. Dimitri Akhrin ran one of these companies and was very successful at it, but he realized that technology could make its work more efficient.

The problem was that selling merchants on the service, managing those relationships, tracking their payments and solving their problems once on board all relied on different systems fed to the ISO via different sponsor banks.

Staffers at Akhrin’s ISO were burning a lot of time logging in and logging out of disjointed systems, which led Akhrin to create a new SaaS company called Integrated Reporting Is Simple, or IRIS.

As Akhrin tells it:

The systems provided by a bank are typically very clunky and require logging into several different portals throughout the day to perform different functions. IRIS puts a beautiful wrapper around those systems and provides access to the functionality all through a single portal.

IRIS puts everything from the help desk, the sales flow, new client onboarding, underwriting, metrics and reporting into one dashboard. The system also makes it possible for an ISO to make a sales metrics dashboard available to its clients, so they can quickly see how much money they are making (and spending in fees).

The milestone IRIS just hit is onboarding enough ISOs that, together, they were serving more than 100,000 client businesses. Akhrin hopes to get that to 200,000 next year.

Akhrin is a Bay Ridge native. IRIS’s sister company, Akhrin’s ISO, BAMS, plays an active role in efforts to spur economic development in the neighborhood.

IRIS has 15 employees and has thus far been wholly bootstrapped. Were it to take on an investor, it would do so more for relationships than for money. Akhrin wrote us, “An ideal partner for us is someone that brings connections and expertise, plus the capital and expertise in a particular vertical or geographic location to execute ideas.”