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Industry Insider
Evolutionary Change
CHARGE Anywhere grows from its “core brain” to bring clients the
full spectrum of wireless payment services
By Bryan Ochalla
CHARGE Anywhere may have gotten its start activating
and deactivating wireless POS terminals for
banks and ISOs, but it’s come a long way since then.
Eight years after this South Plainfield, New Jersey-based
company first opened its doors, it now offers its client
base “a whole host of services that are based around our
core brain,” says Founder and President/CEO Paul Sabella
of CHARGE Anywhere’s payment gateway, ComsGate.
Specifically, CHARGE Anywhere
offers its customers—which include
banks, ISOs, processors, and
even mobile networks—a PCI PA-
DSS-certified software solution that
works with e-commerce, POS terminals,
smartphones (Apple, Android,
BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile
devices among them), QuickBooks,
and Windows, and basically enables
merchants to process credit card and
ACH payments anytime, anywhere.
The product’s smartphone capabilities
are especially important to
both clients’ and the company’s success
moving forward, says Sabella.
“In a way, it’s like we’ve gone back
to our roots, to doing mobile wireless
credit card transactions—only
this time it’s not so much about POS
devices as it is about mobile devices
like smartphones and tablets.”
That said, he and his crew aren’t
going to stop supporting less-newsworthy
technologies any time soon.
After all, CHARGE Anywhere’s support
of QuickBooks continues to “be a very popular product
for us,” says Sabella. CHARGE Anywhere has “10 or so validated
payment applications for different POS terminals as
well as for PCs and QuickBooks” that, among other things,
help keep banks and ISOs from losing merchant accounts
to the likes of Intuit and other competitors.
“The platform we use
now help customers
with the four key
components of
payment processing
business: face-to-face,
e-commerce, backoffice,
and mobile.”
—Paul Sabella, Founder and
President/CEO
Slew of Solutions
There are other reasons banks, ISOs, processors, and more
continue to approach CHARGE Anywhere long after it was
founded: the company’s card-issuing and database-management
products, which promise to reduce administrative costs
and streamline reporting for merchants seeking to provide
private-label card programs; its check and ACH services, which
increase a merchant’s payment-processing options; and its
hardware solutions, which include an array of mag-stripe readers,
mobile payments peripherals, SIM cards, and terminals.
And then there are CHARGE Anywhere’s merchant billing
services, which Sabella considers to be a key differentiator
between his company and its many competitors. “We
provide end-user billing, collection, and remittance, which
is something most other gateways don’t provide.”
Defining Differentiators
In addition, he says, many customers are attracted to the
fact that the company’s “connectivity is much broader than
most of our competitors.
“We have connections to over 30 different platforms,
so if you need flexibility to move transactions from one
platform to another, or you need to move merchants from
one platform to another, that can be a good reason to use
CHARGE Anywhere,” says Sabella.
Other differentiators of note relate to the company’s support
of a wide range of devices and its ability to offer “all of
the services that you might otherwise have to get from a
number of different companies,” Sabella says. For instance,
in many other cases, “if you want point-to-point encryption,
you have to find another company to help with that. Or if
you want e-commerce gateway services, you might have to
go to yet another company to help with that. But you can
get it all from us.”
Has it always been Sabella’s goal for CHARGE Anywhere
to become the one-stop shop that it is today “Actually, we just
kind of evolved into it,” he admits, especially after the company
branched out into the e-commerce and mobile markets.
Thanks to that evolution, though, “we ended up with the
platform you see now,” he adds, which is “one that saves its
customers money and time by helping them with what I
consider to be the four most important components of payment
processing—face-to-face business, e-commerce business,
back-office business, and mobile business.” TT
Bryan Ochalla is a contributing writer to Transaction
Trends. Reach him at bochalla@yahoo.com.
36 October 2012 | Transaction trends