David Decker and the business of saying yes

David Decker’s complaint about his industry was wonderfully plain: too many payment companies treated the merchant as a transaction. A shopkeeper became a sale, the sale became a contract, and everyone seemed to hope the telephone would never ring again. For someone building a merchant-services business, this was a useful irritation. The customer, inconveniently, intended to keep running a business after signing the paperwork.

Decker had seen a version of that world from inside. Before he co-founded Complete Merchant Solutions, he and his fellow founders worked in sales for a merchant-services organization that failed. He later described its treatment of employees and customers as a lasting lesson in how to run a company badly. Ambition survived the experience. His account made clear that ambition needed some manners.

“Too many companies in our industry view the merchant as a transaction.”

David Decker · 2012

That early argument gives his career a useful starting point. The business that became Nexio would grow, take institutional investment, face regulatory scrutiny, combine its brands, and eventually appoint a successor to its founder as CEO. Through those changes, the question of whom a processor serves, and on what terms, remained central.

Before the banks, a batting average

Long before payment processing supplied his professional vocabulary, Decker played third base. His BYU baseball biography lists Herndon, Virginia, as his hometown and Oakton High School as his school, where he earned letters in both baseball and basketball. He was born in Malad, Idaho. Geography had already given him a little variety before entrepreneurship got involved.

The college record has substance. In 1997 he hit .420, with 71 hits in 169 at-bats. The NCAA’s final Division I batting list placed him 29th nationally. BYU records another season in 1998, when he hit .331. Those figures deserve to remain baseball figures; they have no obligation to explain a future company’s growth rate.

The more personal connection was to the place. During his BYU years, Decker became attached to the Provo and Orem area. His later business would be based in Orem. The university connection also continued beyond the playing field: BYU Marriott lists him in its Entrepreneurship Founders network, with membership dating to 2014.

A business built around the bank conversation

In 2008, Decker, Trever Hansen, and Kyle Hall launched Complete Merchant Solutions. Decker served as president. Their previous sales experience was a beginning, though the company’s direction soon widened. Jack Wilson joined in 2009 and became CEO; Decker credited him with helping turn attention from physical retail toward ecommerce and with stressing the importance of the banking relationship.

The distinction mattered to the way CMS presented itself. Decker described a company able to discuss a merchant’s particular circumstances directly with its bank partners, rather than simply pass along a refusal. The proposed advantage was room for a more detailed decision about a business that did not fit an ordinary checklist.

That room came with responsibility. He described CMS putting reserves behind its decisions and accepting liability as part of the arrangement. A more accommodating answer could carry a more expensive consequence. The elegance of saying yes depended on doing the unglamorous work beforehand. In this trade, the fine print has a perfectly respectable claim to being the plot.

Growth acquires a boardroom

By spring 2010, a local startup feature listed CMS with 26 employees and $2.5 million in first-year gross revenue. The company identified registration as a Visa and MasterCard bankcard processor as an early breakthrough. These were practical milestones: permission to operate, people to do the work, money coming in.

Two years later, the growth was conspicuous enough to put CMS at No. 19 in an Inc. ranking. The figures reported at the time were 7,531 percent growth over three years and $17.9 million in 2011 revenue. A business launched by salespeople had become a business whose expansion attracted attention well beyond the next merchant appointment.

The next substantial change arrived in April 2016. GCP Capital Partners, Western Heritage Capital, and Performance Equity Management acquired a significant stake. The founders retained substantial ownership. The announcement gave each of the three a distinct title: Decker as president, Hansen as chief operating officer, and Hall as chief information officer.

CMS was then reporting more than $2 billion in annual payment-processing volume. The noun matters. Processing volume counts money moving through the business’s services; it is a different measure from the revenue the business keeps. It provides a sense of the activity CMS handled without turning every customer’s dollar into a dollar earned by CMS.

Decker emphasized choosing suitable investors while continuing to deliver affordable, reliable, secure processing. The company already had technology products and relationships with independent software vendors. Institutional capital entered a business whose pitch increasingly involved integrating payments with the software merchants used to run their operations.

The cost of getting the judgment wrong

A payments company’s history also includes the businesses it agrees to process for. In December 2020, CMS and its former CEO, Jack Wilson, settled Federal Trade Commission charges involving processing for fraudulent schemes. The FTC alleged that they knew or should have known the schemes were defrauding consumers. The settlement included a $1.5 million monetary judgment and restrictions on processing practices.

Decker, speaking as CMS’s CEO, said the matter concerned three former clients that the company had stopped serving four years earlier. He argued that resolving the dispute served CMS and its customers and described plans to continue improving compliance and fraud-prevention tools. The company’s announcement said neither CMS nor Wilson admitted the allegations.

The distinction between the people involved matters: the settling defendants were CMS and Wilson. The episode belongs in an account of the company Decker helped build, with the allegations kept distinct from admissions. It also gives weight to the responsibility behind the early promise of flexibility. A merchant’s access to payments affects more people than the merchant.

Two names become one

In December 2022, the company addressed another complication: its own identity. CMS and Nexio had been working alongside each other for years. One supplied processing and sales-enablement services; the other had been developed to meet technology needs. The decision was to bring them together under Nexio.

Decker’s explanation was practical. Bringing the brands together should make processes simpler and services better for customers. The combined offering covered payment processing and technology for merchants, independent sales organizations, and software businesses. Its scope included payments across channels and currencies, along with software for managing payment and sales operations.

There is a recognizable progression here, from understanding a merchant’s circumstances to building systems that can handle more of them. A direct conversation with a bank and a software connection solve different parts of the same commercial problem. The merchant still needs a dependable way to get paid while keeping the rest of the business moving.

Pancakes before the next chapter

For a smaller glimpse of Decker at work, consider a public LinkedIn post about development leaders and pancakes. He praised a photograph, invited people to join the company, and attached hashtags for demo days, company culture, and servant leadership. One commenter described a long-running tradition of cooking pancakes for development demos.

The post’s appeal is its scale. A breakfast cannot carry the burden of proving an entire corporate culture, but it can show what a chief executive chooses to applaud. In this instance, it was technical leaders associated with feeding their colleagues. Corporate values occasionally get a better outing beside a griddle than on a wall.

There were also roles outside the operating company. Decker has been an angel investor and adviser, and his career biographies include an Awardco board position. BYU Marriott lists him as managing partner at Decker Enterprises. Those activities place him in the company of other founders as well as the merchants and banking partners of his payments career.

In September 2023, Nexio named Roy Banks its next CEO. Banks had been on the board since 2018, bringing familiarity with the company as well as experience running payments businesses. Decker stepped down and remained a director. The change preserved a connection to the founder while placing day-to-day leadership in other hands.

The succession marked a different kind of company milestone. Founding attracts a date; ownership brings signatures; running the business produces years of decisions. Eventually the role itself can change. For Decker, the CEO’s chair gave way to a board seat at the company whose story had begun with three founders in Orem.

His early objection still makes a useful closing thought. A merchant keeps operating after the sale. So does a company after its founder hands over the executive role. In both cases, the arrangement earns its value in what happens next.