Pineapple Payments is the recipient of a 2017 Innovation Award from the Pittsburgh Business Times. This is the first year the PBT’s has held the Innovation Awards and we are thrilled to have been honored with one of the inaugural awards. Check out the PBT’s amazing write-up below, featuring our very own Brian Gross!
Innovation Award winner: Pineapple Payments
By Richard Cerilli – Special Projects Editor, Pittsburgh Business Times
Pittsburgh, PA (December 7, 2017)—Few people consider what it takes to make debit and credit cards work seamlessly for the customer and the vendor when they make purchases.
Up until recently, a small number of companies and banks have dominated those transactions.
But Pineapple Payments, founded last year in Pittsburgh, is working to make a name for itself by taking an innovative approach.
Brian Gross, chief technology officer for Pineapple Payments, said the company analyzes each potential customer, looking at its business, how it operates when accepting payments and how payments are accepted from customers. “Then we’re able to make a flexible plan that fits,” he said. “We’re the only ones in this space taking this approach.
”The company provides key business-driving analytics to make important financial decisions for its customer, allowing them to take payments from their customers online, in-store and on-the-go with cloud-based software.
“The most important thing is that we really take a consultative approach with our customers,” Gross said. “We don’t like to talk about price first, which is what the industry is based on at this point. We don’t want to talk about rates until we’ve discussed the value we provide. By talking about value instead of pricing, it changes from a budget conversation to more how can we help with things like security and data.”
Currently, Gross explained there are two types of companies in the marketplace.
“There are payment technology platforms like Square and Paypal that are behemoths,” he said. “You’re talking about billions of dollars invested, millions of customers, billions of dollars flowing through their platform, and they’re gaining market share every day. On the flip side, you have very large banks and credit card processors in the more traditional sense.”
He sees Pineapple Payments in a position between the two approaches.“We like to see ourselves somewhere between the traditional payment space and the newer-age technology companies,” he said.
Pineapple Payments
11 Stanwix St., 12th Floor, Pittsburgh, PA 15222
Phone: 412-235-7235
Website: pineapplepayments.com
Top officer(s): Brian Shanahan, CEO; Brian Gross, Chief Technology Officer, bgross@pineapplepayments.com, 412-235-7235
What the company does: Provides payment processing solutions, specializing in omnichannel payment acceptance tools for merchants
Employees: 50+
Check out the original PBT article here.