Say goodbye to Merchant Warehouse and hello to Cayan, as the Boston-based ISO and technology provider changes its name to fit its changing business model.
Cayan will still sign up merchants for transaction services, but the company will emphasize transaction processing through its Genius platform, payments gateway and other offerings, said CEO Henry Helgeson.
I went into meetings and had to spend 10 minutes explaining what we do because the name no longer fit the company, Helgeson said in a phone interview. People often thought we were an equipment supplier.
The company chose the Cayan name because no one attaches any other meaning to it, he said, noting that the word serves as an empty vessel that can accommodate changes in the company.
The branding change marks the culmination a two-year process that shifted the company from an acquirer with technology on the periphery to a business with technology at its core, he said.
Part of the emphasis during that transition focused on processing mobile payments, Helgeson. He declined to comment on whether Cayan is becoming a full-service transaction processor that doesnt rely on third-party processing functions.
During the period of change, the companys tech staff increased six-fold and now numbers about 100. Altogether, the company employs a total of 333 people.
Amid the tech-oriented changes, the company opened a Belfast, Northern Ireland, office with a staff of about 56.
The Genius platform that the company now offers is designed to process payments in any form. Besides using the platform itself, the company offers it to other ISOs.
To get out the word on the rebranding, Cayan operated war room with a dozen staffers posting the news on social media and through email messages and phone calls to affiliates, partners, ISOs, agents and other resellers, Helgeson said.
A few of the companys larger partners head about the name change in advance, but most learned of the decision this week in a war room blitz.
The war room staffers were also devoting much of their energy this week to finding and eliminating the old company name from social media and websites.
Weve found that you have to set aside about a week and do nothing else when its time for a rebranding, Helgeson said.
In some ways, the companys original name had been outmoded even before the recent foray into technology.
Helgeson and co-founder Scott Zdanis started the business in 1998. To lower costs for payments terminals and printers, they offered the equipment on a website. The name probably seemed appropriate for the company at the time
However, the firm soon changed course and began producing technology to facilitate payments.
The tech products it created became known by the names Transport, BinSMART and MerchantWare Mobile.
The Genius customer-engagement platform soon followed, making its debut a couple of years ago. At the time, Helgeson described it as the first acceptance service designed to handle current and future types of payments.
The company began hiring software devlopers about 12 years ago.
