Eckoh (LON:ECK), the secure payments group, is accelerating US growth plans with the US$5.6mln acquisition of Product Support Solutions (PSS).
The deal, which is being financed via an existing bank facility, gives it a significant footprint Stateside where it was already gaining traction, although PSS is also active in Australia and here in the UK.
It supplies services into contact centres for blue-chip firms such as Genesys, Aspect, Avaya, Microsoft and Nuance.
Eckoh is paying a total of U$7.6m for PSS, which has around US$2mln of cash on the balance sheet. Last financial year the firm turned over US17.4mln, making a pre-tax profit of US$1.2mln.
Chief executive Nik Philpot said: "PSS is a unique business with a highly experienced workforce and quality service offering, making it a trusted partner to a number of large enterprises in the US, UK and Australia.
"This acquisition not only significantly expands our presence in the US market, a key part of our growth strategy, but it also strengthens our scale and product proposition, with excellent cross-selling opportunities across the enlarged customer base.
“It therefore represents exciting progress in our aim to become a dominant and best in class provider for contact centre and payment protection solutions.”
In a recent interview with Proactive, Philpot said he was looking to extend the company’s presence in the world’s largest market, giving it a platform for its flagship CallGuard product as well as its traditional contact centre technology.
The patented CallGuard platform allows users to key in their own card details when a transaction is done over the phone and so prevents human access to personal information.
There is peace of mind too for the companies that use Eckoh’s services based on the knowledge that the company is compliant with the industry-agreed Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.
“If they can outsource to someone like Eckoh, it makes the compliance process much quicker and typically cheaper,” says Philpot said in the Proactive interview.
“It took us the best part of three years and over 10,000 man hours to become PCI compliant and at that time were just a one location 100 people business.”
The take-up of CallGuard has been remarkable and the company has over 50 customers for the product, mainly here in the UK.