Thompson Street Capital Partners (TSCP), a private equity firm based in St. Louis, has announced that its portfolio company EchoSat has acquired the SmartLink™ division of Heartland Payment Systems, one of the nation’s largest payment processors. With the addition of Heartland SmartLink’s Secure Payment Gateway (SPG) and managed network services, EchoSat will serve more than 21,000 merchant locations in the petroleum/convenience store, quick service restaurant and supermarket industries. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
EchoSat operates a high-speed, redundant SPG network that allows merchants and businesses of all types to transmit vital payments data securely on any broadband connection accessed via digital subscriber line (DSL), cable, wireless or satellite. EchoSat also offers PaySafe SPG, a managed firewall solution that provides network segmentation, security and redundancy for payments data while protecting Internet Protocol (IP)-based point-of-sale systems from external and internal breach. Critical payments traffic is isolated to EchoSat’s SPG network and backed up with high-speed cellular connections from each retail location.
Mark Carl, CEO of EchoSat said, “EchoSat has been a partner and supplier of Heartland, providing the core of the Heartland SmartLink secure payments solution since its inception in 2010. Heartland has always been at the forefront of payments security, and we look forward to assisting them in continuing to deliver innovative security and redundancy options to their merchants and retailers through our SPG and PaySafe SPG products.”
“We are excited about acquiring the SmartLink division of Heartland and the increased scale this transaction adds to EchoSat,” said Tom Wimsett, Chairman of EchoSat and a 30-year veteran of the payments industry. “However, we are most excited about our new partnership with Heartland and their proven ability to successfully sell and help expand our managed firewall and network solutions.”
