ConnectBooster Secure Payments Platform Hides Info From Hackers

“We‘re never going to outpace the dark web,” said Dan Austin, executive vice president of ConnectBooster. “They’re always going to find better solutions. What we have to do is find ways where they can’t find information.”

ConnectBooster, a Fargo, N.D.-based provider of secure payment solutions for IT services firms, is launching a Secure Payments initiative to combat against threat actors stealing payment information stored on SMBs’ payment systems.

The assessment tool streamlines and enhances the sales process, in turn helping MSPs increase their cybersecurity capabilities while driving new recurring revenue streams.

“We‘ve recognized recently, especially with the onset of cyberattacks in the small to medium sized business arena, it‘s an unmanaged threat today that’s not being handled,” Dan Austin (pictured), executive vice president of ConnectBooster, told CRN. “The bad actors, they’re not going to go to enterprise businesses as much because that’s not their feeding ground. They have access to imperative data that’s centered around payments.”

There’s about 480 attacks on small businesses every minute, specifically related to their payments data, Austin said. More than 80 percent of small to medium sized businesses that get attacked by ransomware are out of business within six months.

“The reality is that 88 percent of businesses that service small to medium sized businesses have unencrypted payment data on their systems and devices,” Austin said. “If any of those get breached, the average suck out of the bank account, from a fee perspective, is $50,000 to $60,000, and that money doesn‘t come back,” he said.

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Last year alone, there was information on 500 million credit cards found on systems and devices at the SMB level, Austin added.

“We believe that SMBs are going to continue to grow to be the heartbeat of commerce,” he said. “That industry is going to increase and there‘s going to be a greater dependency on solutions that MSPs can provide that help them better facilitate security at the payments level.

“We‘re never going to outpace the dark web,” he said. “They’re always going to find better solutions. What we have to do is find ways where they can’t find information.”

The Secure Payments platform is currently in open beta and will be launched in the first quarter of 2022.

ConnectBooster arms MSPs with peer-to-peer encryption devices, tokenization strategies, EMV chips, PCI DSS (payment card industry data security standard) policies and procedures and fraud detection.

“We feel like there‘s a rallying cry that we need to help the MSPs and develop programs for them to not only get paid for managing this process, but provide better service offers,” he said.

For Mike Bloomfield, president of Tekie Geek and a ConnectBooster partner, using the Secure Payments tool is another way for his business to make monthly recurring revenue by doing “absolutely nothing” other than referring business over to ConnectBooster.

“I take advantage of this for payment portal needs, credit card processing, web design, marketing and more. If you aren’t in the program, you are missing out on free money,” he said.

The initiative has a series of audits that ConnectBooster developed as well as technology, hardware and device partnerships.

“We‘ve created a middle layer that allows businesses to get paid faster,” Austin said. “We actually provide complete transparency and automation.”

The tool also takes business’ accounts receivable from 45 days to as little as five days.

“We‘re coming out of an era which really limited the ability to interact. We have technologies to allow that, but how do you get in front of mass amounts of people?” he said.

ConnectBooster has experienced very similar revenue growth that MSPs have experienced since the onset of the pandemic.

“I don’t want to make light of the fact that this was a very serious issue across our globe, but the reality is that when you go from an office environment, where everyone needs to be in an office, and then you go to a virtual environment, industries like ours benefit from that,” Austin said. “These two years are going to be fantastic years from a growth perspective.”

There’s also a lot in store for ConnectBooster in 2022. The team will spend the year providing training for their customer base, and for those that want to be future customers, and developing products and services to better support that.

“We’re really helping arm the MSP and the channel with best-in-class security payments solutions,” Austin said. “We feel like we need to create a rallying cry within the channel. The rallying cry needs to be, ‘how do we create a secure environment for our customer base so that they go to sleep at night knowing that their payments processing is locked down and secure?”

The challenge will always be how to better equip the channel with services, systems and strategies to better secure the environment.

“We need to have better services that help protect them. We need to give the toolset to the MSPs that service them,” he said. “Our challenge is just getting the word out and not creating buzz around security, because there‘s enough buzz around security, we need to create buzz around the solution. And we have the solution.”