Today, payments infrastructure platform Finix is expanding its offerings — and growing its Cincinnati presence — with an in-house professional services group designed to help SaaS providers and independent software vendors become their own payment facilitators.
The new Finix Professional Services group will bolster the company’s existing platform of APIs and dashboards built to ease the customer payment experience. The group comprises executives from renowned payment processing company Worldpay and Cincinnati payments advisory and consulting firm Fintech 513. According to Finix Co-Founder Sean Donovan, these experts “wrote the book on payment facilitation.” Their experience building and scaling payment-tech companies like PayPal will give current and new clients the tools they need to own, manage, and monetize their payments.
“This model increases operational efficiencies and revenue for our clients,” said Angie Ammon, former Fintech 513 managing partner who joined Finix to launch the professional services group as vice president. “It creates even more efficiencies by bringing these services together under one roof.”
Increased efficiency and revenue growth are music to any business owner’s ears, but what does that actually look like in practice? Finix client Clubessential, which provides technology systems for country clubs and resorts, is the perfect anecdote.
“We enable companies like Clubessential to not only handle the day to day operations of a gym or country club, but bring those payments in house,” Donovan said. “This includes how they charge members, how members access amenities, the facilities and restaurants onsite.”
The new group will work in Finix’s Cincinnati office, where 12 of the company’s 35 employees are based. (The rest are based in San Francisco, the company’s headquarters.) Donovan, a Cincinnati native, hopes the company’s Queen City presence will grow in tandem with the business.
“We have plans to expand to 75 [employees], and with some of those new roles, we’re open to Cincinnati,” he said. “One of the great things about Cincinnati is we can find some pretty established and significant talent here.”
While they’re not at 75 employees yet, Finix’s latest successes prove this company’s on the rise. In July, the company secured $17.5 million in Series A funding to “help us continue to build the best payments infrastructure possible and expand our worldwide footprint,” according to the Finix blog.
This is just one of many milestones for the four-year-old startup, which was conceptualized when Finix’s two co-founders saw a hole in the evolving market. With Donovan’s background in payment experience with companies like Fifth Third and Finix CEO and Co-Founder Richie Serna’s Silicon Valley tech expertise, these two formed a startup “with a point of view that software companies were becoming payments companies,” Donovan said.
With the typical startup hurdles in the rearview, Donovan and Serna have reached another major milestone they’re particularly proud of: a prestigious roster of top-notch clientele.
“We over-focused early on to make sure we were in a spot to establish those big companies,” Donovan said. “We’re truly in this enterprise space, touching billions of dollars per year while creating new revenue drivers for massive companies.”
“One of the great things about Cincinnati is we can find some pretty established and significant talent here.”
As Finix scales up to exciting new heights, Donovan knows the company’s Midwest values — from the company’s office in Columbia-Tusculum to his roots near Pleasant Ridge — will keep the team grounded and poised for positive growth inside and out.
“My family has a long-standing family business in Pleasant Ridge, and just growing up with that and seeing the impact of being able to hire people and create new jobs is something I wanted to contribute to,” he said. “That’s now what we’re officially able to do. We’re not just creating jobs, but technology jobs that are already doing great things in the Cincinnati startup community.”
