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I've learned from my mistakes, and I now have implemented Maurice Greifer
a real strategy for much better communication. Simple Maverick Payments
strategy – call your merchants every few months to say
hello. And, if you want to be really crazy in this technology 1. I'm most pleased about all the developments we've
world, write a hand-written note to thank your clients for made with our proprietary dashboard, which is both
their continued partnership with you. merchant and partner facing, along with being used
internally by our team. Our enhancements have
4. Social media – my VCR if I had one (for those old made underwriting and onboarding faster, most
enough to remember them) would still be blinking, importantly, and we have some great things in the
as I'm the worst at social media. However, hire a works for 2023 that will allow us to board merchants
professional or sales agency to help with your social almost as quickly as a payfac, but under the FSP
strategy. For example, our Keep The Fees business model.
(which I just mentioned focuses on the tattoo industry)
is all about beautiful art and graphics. Our tattoo shop We've done a great job at making our partner-facing
clients are true artists and are beyond proud to display dashboard more robust, so it acts a lot more like a
their work on our social media feed. Each month, shop CRM where agents can manage everything from
owners directly Instagram us that they want to sign end-to-end and even white label it, which enables a
up with Keep The Fees. turnkey payments solution for sales organizations
looking to scale.
One caveat emptor (using this expression from my
college days): you must be consistent with your social We will also focus a lot on our payment gateway
media presence as it may take months to develop an and overall API library next year, which is all
authority position of trust within your niche. proprietary as well. Making improvements to our
API and other gateway capabilities, such as multi-
Over the years, I have tried Facebook advertising and currency processing, will allow us to secure new
other organic paid strategies with little success. My ISV partnerships and other opportunities such as
acquisition cost became expensive, and I found that enterprise merchants and covering more complex
many merchants were shopping around and speaking use cases.
to various ISOs, and our close ratios were small
relative to our capital outlay. We wouldn't be where we're at without an amazing
team though. We started to offer remote positions,
3. Protecting Data – I wish I were smart enough to which has allowed us to attract top talent, and overall
maturely answer this question. I have no clue and am have grown our team significantly in the last year.
happy to learn from others. We're hiring in all departments, so we're excited to
grow our team to over 100 people next year, which
1 and 2. As I look back on 2022, I'm pleased about is pretty awesome to see as a family-owned and
the prospects of four opportunities that should have operated business.
exponential growth in the coming year:
2. There are a lot of emerging technologies that I am
a. I'm incredibly excited for the ToolBox acquisition, keeping my eye on and excited to see how they evolve.
as I know the new management team (friends of Between biometric authentication, AI, embedded
mine for 20+ years) will help grow this concept finance, machine learning and real-time payments, I
started a few years ago into a meaningful solution. think we'll see these all become more significant next
year. For us as an FSP and from an implementation
b. KeepTheFees—what started out over a cup of standpoint, real-time payments are very interesting
coffee with a tattoo artist friend of mine two years along with embedded finance.
ago will in my mind become the leading payments
company in the world for this niche market; There are many use cases for RTP, and with the
Fed launching FedNow in July, it will definitely be
c. ERC Advisors USA—I recently started this a significant factor, as there's already been a lot of
company and already am working with many
ISO, MLS to create a new compensation stream adoption with The Clearing House's RTP network.
Also, I think there will be a lot of consolidation in the
and provide real money to their merchants;
fintech space which will accelerate the convergence
d. Alternative Merchant Processing—my high-risk of embedded finance solutions with more traditional
business of 15+ years continues to grow as our banking products.
bank relationships provide a home for these hard
to place merchants. 3. I think our industry does a great job at creating the
technology to protect cardholder data and stop fraud.
The challenge seems to be educating merchants on
why this technology is valuable, why they need
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