Alternative Payments CEO: MSPs Must Automate Back-Office Operations To Scale

‘We want to ultimately help MSPs operate more efficiently, operate more profitably and have a much better understanding of their business,’ says Baxter Lanius, Alternative Payments CEO.

Alternative Payments is looking to help MSPs automate more of their businesses beyond billing and payment collection, expanding its platform into financial operations, business intelligence and back-office workflows.

The New York-based AI-powered B2B payments vendor sees an opportunity to address operational challenges that often get overlooked as MSPs invest in service delivery, technology and helping customers navigate AI adoption.

Baxter Lanius, founder and CEO of Alternative Payments, said the company’s next phase is focused on helping MSPs automate their internal business processes.

[Related: Alternative Payments CEO: ‘We Aim To Be The Financial Technology Backbone For MSPs’]

“We found that MSPs are very focused on service delivery, and they’re very focused on how do they provide best-in-class services to their clients? How do they provide best-in-class tools and software and hardware to their clients? How do they help clients transform in the AI age?” Lanius told CRN. “But oftentimes they forget about the mid-office and back office of their business, and that’s where we found there to be a lot of pain and friction.”

Those challenges include moving money, closing monthly books, tracking profitability, and understanding how effectively techs are being utilized across customer accounts.

“The next chapter of Alternative Payments is really fixated and focused on this broader mid-office, back-office tech stack around operations and finance, which are often forgotten-about functions for MSPs but critical to scale and critical to exit,” he said.

The approach is to connect the systems MSPs already use and reduce the manual work required to move information between them. Alternative Payments integrates with PSA platforms and accounting software, helping MSPs eliminate repetitive data entry and streamline financial workflows.

Lanius said the company wants to move beyond providing software toward a more connected, automated environment.

That means giving MSPs better visibility into the financial performance of their business, especially at the customer level. Lanius said one of the biggest challenges MSPs face is understanding which customers are profitable and which ones are eating into margins.

“Nine times out of 10, and I would even argue 99 times out of 100, if your business is not as profitable as it could be, that is driven from a handful of less profitable clients,” he said. “And your focus really needs to be on those less profitable clients, and understanding are these clients that I can make more profitable or are these clients that I should actually get rid of because they’re generating $1 of revenue, but they’re also generating $1 of cost.”

The opportunity becomes even more important as MSPs consider acquisitions and eventual exits, Lanius said, arguing that operational efficiency and profitability influence business valuations.

“At the end of the day, more efficient, more profitable MSPs will get sold for significantly higher multiples than less efficient, less profitable MSPs,” he said. “If you could understand the level of detail and granularity around profitability and use AI tooling to help drive impact and drive value gains and create value for your business, you can then position yourself for the future.”

That broader strategy includes the company’s latest launch of its AI-powered financial intelligence tool Alti. Launched in October, Alti combines accounts receivable, accounts payable and financial analytics in a single platform. It integrates with PSA, accounting and business management systems including QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, ConnectWise, Autotask, HaloPSA and SuperOps.

The platform also allows MSPs to ask questions about their business using live financial data, generate dashboards and recurring reports, identify overdue invoices and examine customer-level profitability. It can also suggest next steps and prepare actions, including customer follow-up emails, for approval.

Lanius said opportunities include understanding client profitability and technician utilization, with the platform offering more than 120 performance indicators.

Anthony Birone, founder of Independence, Ohio-based Alternative Payments partner ElasticIT, said the best part about Alti is that it “helps great technical owners become great business operators.”

“It gives us the operational insight to run a best-in-class MSP while staying focused on what made our business successful in the first place,” Birone told CRN.

And Alternative Payments plans to take that automation further with pricing benchmarking in the first quarter of 2027.

“We want to ultimately help MSPs operate more efficiently, operate more profitably and have a much better understanding of their business,” Lanius said. “It’s not just about identifying where there’s friction or where there’s an opportunity to improve. It’s about giving MSPs the tools, the data and ultimately the automation to actually do something about it.”