Alan Griefer built a family business for the business of getting paid

Alan Griefer has a microphone in his hand, a cake within reach, and a balloon arch doing rather more than the architecture requires. In the photograph, shared by Maverick Payments in January 2026, the founder is standing in an office kitchen. Behind him, gold lettering supplies the sort of affectionate billing usually reserved for a retirement roast. The business of getting paid has paused for the business of wishing the boss a happy birthday.

It is a useful place to meet him. Corporate portraits have excellent posture and very little plot. Here there are colleagues, candles, and a working environment that has briefly surrendered to decoration. Griefer’s career stretches back to a payments venture established in 1993. The photograph catches that long professional life at an unusually accessible angle: a person at work, surrounded by evidence that other people work there too.

1993: before the dashboard

Griefer co-founded BankCard USA with Shawn Skelton in 1993. That date places his payments career well before the familiar rituals of buying from a phone. The company’s business covered accepting card payments for a broad assortment of merchants, including retail stores, mail-order sellers, telephone orders, trade shows, and internet businesses. Even that list captures a commercial world in transition. The storefront and the website were becoming neighbours on the same application form.

By December 2008, Griefer was identified as BankCard USA’s president in an announcement about a partnership with Connection Marketing. The immediate concern was click fraud: advertising clicks that cost a business money without bringing it a prospective customer. BankCard USA announced work on a protocol to identify the problem and made a defensive guide available through its website.

That episode offers an early glimpse of the problems occupying his professional attention. Accepting a transaction sits inside a larger business. Before the payment comes advertising, customer acquisition, and the expense of attracting somebody who might buy. Fraud could consume the budget before a merchant ever had a sale to process. Griefer’s public comments addressed that practical exposure, rather than restricting the conversation to what happened at the terminal.

The announcement does not need embellishment to make its point. In 2008, he was already dealing with the awkward meeting of digital commerce, customer costs, and trust. Those subjects would remain recognisable as the equipment changed. A business can replace a card reader much more readily than it can replace the money spent finding a customer.

A family business learns to write software

Maverick’s current company history dates its founding to 2011 and describes its beginnings as an independent sales organization. Griefer is its founder and chief executive officer. The business subsequently developed into a full service payment provider. Its headquarters are in Calabasas, California. Beneath the succession of industry terms lies a fairly concrete ambition: give partners more of the tools required to bring merchants into payment processing and manage their accounts.

By November 2014, Griefer was signing a reseller agreement as Maverick Bankcard’s CEO. In April 2016, he became a director of Maverick Payments Limited in the United Kingdom. These are quieter milestones than a launch party, but they give the career a useful outline. There is a company to run, commercial paperwork to execute, and responsibility that extends beyond the sales conversation.

The family connection gives that outline another dimension. Ben Griefer is now Maverick’s president and chief operating officer. Maurice Griefer, Alan’s son, has recalled working with his father and brother at the company. In Maurice’s telling, the business was something he had encountered long before he became an employee. There was a professional world already in motion, close enough to visit and eventually to join.

Family businesses have a ready-made cast of characters. Their more interesting question is what those characters do together. At Maverick, part of the answer was a commitment to proprietary technology. By 2019, Alan was publicly discussing the company’s investment in its own systems. Software was becoming part of how a business with sales experience organized the work after the sale.

The glamour of a missing document

The details of that software are pleasingly resistant to glamour. A merchant fills in an application. Missing information prompts an alert. Underwriters and agents need to exchange notes. Once an account is operating, someone needs to request a change, raise a support ticket, or respond to a dispute. A dashboard gives these tasks somewhere to happen. Nobody has ever ordered champagne because a form asked the correct follow-up question. The person handling the form may still be grateful.

By 2019, browser access and automation were already central to Maverick’s approach. The appeal is understandable without pretending that software abolishes difficulty. A clear application can reduce a round of correspondence. A shared record can make a conversation more useful. A tool that puts account information within reach changes how much time somebody spends looking for it.

For Griefer’s story, the significance is the move from selling a service to organizing the repeated tasks around it. The merchant’s relationship continues after approval. So does the partner’s. Each account introduces future questions, administrative changes, and occasions when a human answer matters. The work has a longer life than the moment that first appears on a sales report.

The numbers arrive

In 2021, Maverick entered the Inc. 5000 at No. 566. Griefer’s response included a short sentence: “I could not have more pride.” The rest of his comments connected the result to technology and support for merchants and resellers. That pairing is consistent with the earlier operational story. A company selling payment services was trying to compete through both the systems it offered and the help surrounding them.

The following years brought further appearances: No. 304 in 2022, No. 206 in 2023, and No. 443 in 2024. Four consecutive entries provide a clear, bounded achievement. They belong to the company and its team, with Griefer at the head of the business. The numbers should also be read for what they measure: positions in an annual growth ranking. A change in position alone cannot tell the entire story of a company’s performance.

In the 2022 announcement, Griefer said, “Maverick is positioned for long-term growth and success.” His explanation again touched on technology, support, and relationship management. In 2023, he emphasized the team’s dedication and the offering for merchants and reseller partners. The emphasis remained collective. Growth arrived with a business argument about how the company served the people using it.

“I could not have more pride.”

Alan Griefer, on Maverick’s 2021 Inc. 5000 appearance

The people beside the founder

Maurice’s recollection supplies a scene from an earlier chapter. As a teenager visiting his father’s first payments operation, he remembered a busy sales floor with roughly seventy-five salespeople. He described the energy of the place. It is a more tangible introduction to the industry than any definition of acquiring: a room full of people, a business being pursued conversation by conversation.

He later started at Maverick the day after graduating from college and spent twelve years there. Looking back, he described joining when only a few people were involved and watching the company grow while working with his father and brother. The recollection belongs to Maurice. It also places Alan inside a family history that was unfolding alongside the company history, with shared work providing the setting for both.

Other public glimpses bring the staff into view. Alan and Ben hosted Maverick’s 2024 holiday celebration at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. The evening included employee awards. An automotive museum is an agreeable setting for a payments company: a building full of intricate machinery that people usually admire without asking how every component works. For once, the machinery was available for inspection and the employees could enjoy the party.

In a March 2026 post, employee Adam W. T. thanked Alan and Ben for supporting his participation in a leadership development program led by Gregory H. Patton. He described the challenge of returning to that kind of study many years after college and presenting a capstone with colleagues. It is one participant’s account, but a specific one. Support for employees becomes easier to understand when there is an actual course, an actual presentation, and somebody describing the effort involved.

Back to the microphone

Griefer remains Maverick’s founder and CEO, with Ben beside him as president and COO. His career connects a 1990s merchant services venture with a business now built around partners, software, and account operations. Its human detail comes from the people who describe visiting the office, joining the company, taking a course, or being thanked at an awards evening.

Then there is the birthday photograph. The microphone suits a career that began around sales conversations. The cake belongs to a different category of company obligation, one with fewer underwriting requirements and rather firmer expectations about sharing. Together they offer a compact picture of Alan Griefer’s working life: a business to lead, people assembled around it, and a brief interval in which getting paid can wait until everyone has had a slice.