JetPay

Bipin C. Shah, a payments industry veteran who consulted on the Heartland Payment Systems IPO, founded JetPay in 2003 as a publicly traded roll-up of payment processors and payroll providers. The original strategy was to combine merchant acquiring, a proprietary payment gateway, and prepaid-card payroll services — creating a vertically integrated platform that served both the transaction-processing and human-capital needs of mid-market businesses. Shah served as Chairman and CEO throughout the firm's pre-acquisition history.

NCR Corporation acquired JetPay in December 2018 for $184 million in an all-cash transaction. The deal retired JetPay as an independent public company and integrated its merchant-acquiring and payment-gateway platforms into NCR's enterprise point-of-sale and digital-banking ecosystem. The payroll and HR-services unit was also absorbed, positioning NCR to bundle employee-management tools with its retail and hospitality hardware.

Revenue came principally from transaction-based fees on credit-card, debit-card, and ACH processing for a base of thousands of small and mid-sized merchants, supplemented by recurring subscription fees from its payroll and HR-services division. At peak, JetPay was processing roughly $10 billion in annual transaction volume, with additional income from prepaid-card programs distributed through employer clients. This split between volatile card-processing fees and steadier payroll subscriptions gave JetPay a more diversified income profile than many pure acquirers.

JetPay's merchant portfolio concentrated on brick-and-mortar retail, quick-service and full-service restaurants, and e-commerce merchants — all classic high-transaction-volume environments for card processing. The firm also had meaningful exposure to field-services businesses and professional-services firms through its payroll relationships, which often served as the entry point for converting an employer's HR client into a merchant-processing client.

JetPay maintained direct certifications with Visa, Mastercard, and major debit networks, meaning its proprietary gateway routed transactions without relying on third-party processor gateways for connectivity. This direct certification gave the firm more control over authorization speeds and interchange optimization, features it marketed to mid-market merchants as comparable to what much larger acquirers offered. The network-certification status also made JetPay an attractive tuck-in target for an enterprise acquirer like NCR.