For most local merchants payment processing is a necessary evil. Without it they cannot accept credit cards, but beyond that convenience, they get little else in return for the 2-3% of revenue they give up. They get churn and burn sales reps constantly knocking on their doors over-promising and under-delivering. They get convoluted and impossible-to-understand fee structures. And they get a monthly statement that offers little to no insight into their business. There are multiple billion dollar companies servicing this sector, but there has been little to no innovation by the slow-moving giants.

At the same time, online businesses have become increasingly effective leveraging customer transaction data to gain better insight into their business. Which customers return the most? What is the demographic profile of our best customers? What is the longer-term value of newly acquired customers? In turn, they use that insight to improve the quality of their customer experience and ultimately increase revenue. By bridging the gap between payment processing and customer analytics, local merchants should benefit in the same way as their offline counterparts.

Today we are announcing Shasta’s latest investment into Swipely, a company that fixes this problem. Like the large incumbents in this space, they offer the convenience of accepting credit cards, but they don’t stop there. They provide fully transparent pricing explanations without any hidden fees. They integrate into all major point-of-sale systems so merchants don’t have to tackle the hassle of ripping and replacing hardware and retraining employees. They offer near real-time analytics for owners and managers to assess the health of the business and serve up actionable insights to grow the business. For the first time, a local merchant can see who their best customers are and have a way to communicate with them. They can understand if their marketing campaign actually worked. They can learn what time of day customer traffic is light and launch campaigns to drive business during those hours. It finally brings the power of data to the offline world, ultimately translating into happy customers and more revenue. And they do all of this at the same or lower price compared to a merchant’s existing processor.

When Angus Davis founded Swipely a few years back the company launched with a completely different product. But like all exceptional entrepreneurs, he rapidly iterated the direction of the company. They quickly moved on from failed experiments and doubled down when ideas worked. He did this once before when he and his co-founder transformed the consumer voice service TellMe into an enterprise IVR system, a transformation that ultimately led to an $800M acquisition, and now he’s at it again. He’s surrounded himself with a great team. A team that is building world-class technology products, and a team that knows how to build the scalable sales machine necessary to successfully sell into local merchants. And it’s working. They have signed up merchants processing over $700M in payments annually, up nearly three-fold in just four months. We expect great things from Angus and team, and we’re absolutely thrilled to partner with them to help the company achieve its potential.