Connected.co
Merchant Services for High-Risk Businesses

There is a popular adage that says good lawyers run away from risk, while good businessmen run toward the risk factor as they believe there is no reward gained without taking a risk. Along the lines of this approach, the finance aficionado JW Epply, CEO of Connected.co, has an in-depth knowledge and more than a decade of expertise in steering his company to meet the needs of today’s high-risk verticals like the payment and card industry. Connected.co provides global banking solutions, advanced gateway technology, and proprietary risk management services to online merchants worldwide. By utilizing their vast network of domestic and international banking relationships whole-hog, the firm specializes in managing merchant accounts for high-risk merchants.

Connected.co's state-of-the-art payment gateway platform has made it possible for merchants to route transactions advantageously, submit authorizations promptly and process their payments reliably. Using this platform, the merchants can customize exactly how to route transactions based on data such as currency, locale, traffic source, product type, cardholder affluence and more. All of the internal and external processing connections in the payment gateway platform occur in sub-second real time. This happens in a layered approach, combined with risk, antifraud and chargeback mitigation tools to allow transactions to have the best chance of payment approval smoothly without placing the merchant at higher risk. “Our system has access to data which many of our competitors simply do not have, allowing our merchants to take advantage of approval rates on all of their traffic sources,” notes Epply.

Epply believes that the future of risk and chargeback avoidance lies in the realms of authentication and advanced techniques such as customer pre-profiling, multi-factor authentication, and identity verification. “This will allow our banks to accept transactions which were previously declined because they will know more about the customers in real time.” In a nutshell, Connected.co provides additional data obtained from the deeper insights of transactional data, not only in traditional reporting formats but also in analysis and projections, enabling merchants to make better-informed decisions and strategies for monetizing their products and services.

We believe that the future of risk and chargeback avoidance lies in the realms of authentication and advanced techniques

In recent examples, Connected.co assisted a merchant in fantasy sports space with their merchant services, as the client faced payment related issues in their game sites. The general way that fantasy sports markets work is by rewarding an individual in case of winning their game. The merchant’s both incoming and outgoing cash flow transactions were varying amounts—in many cases, their outgoing payments were higher. They wanted to streamline their cash process to keep a track of the transactions processed. Rising to that need, Connected.co had to tailor their platform according to the needs of the merchant with advanced features like pay-out through ACH processing or accept money through credit cards for the pay, thereby paving way for smooth transactions. The company’s state of the art gateway along with advanced reporting tools and true fraud prevention techniques gave the merchant complete visibility and insight into their business.

Connected.co is all set for a number of exciting developments on the near horizon. The firm adds features, functionalities and new connections each quarter so that their experience is in a constant state of progressive improvement. The firm’s routing engine will be seamlessly incorporated with 2nd generation 3D Secure functionalities in the latter part of this year. As a result of which, new, proprietary and cost-effective mitigation tools will be available exclusively to the firm’s payment gateway clients in addition to the innovative use of new technologies like expanded high-performance reporting feature.