Jimmy Nafso has had an unusually varied set of customers: hotel guests, shop customers, software businesses, and people who came to bounce on trampolines. Put those businesses beside one another and the executive biography becomes rather less predictable. Payments may now be the main subject, but there is a considerable amount of life on the other side of the checkout.
In April 2024, Nafso sat down for an episode of Fortis’s Embedded podcast with an interviewer who could dispense with some of the introductions. The host was his younger brother Timmy, also a Fortis co-founder. Timmy introduced the conversation on LinkedIn with the affectionate pleasure of interviewing his big brother. The episode’s title, From Family to Fintech, did a fair amount of explanatory work.
By then Jimmy was Fortis’s president, having previously served as CEO. The company he helped start in 2010 had moved into payments embedded within software. His own route there began in businesses where the customer arrived in person. It is a useful place to begin his story, before the investment announcements and the expanding vocabulary of financial technology.
A hotel education, followed by a payments business
Before entering payments, Nafso spent ten years owning and operating hotels and retail locations in Metro Detroit. He holds a Bachelor of Science from Michigan State University, an MBA, and a Certified Hotel Administrator credential. The hospitality qualification is a small detail that earns its place in the larger picture. His professional background included the operation of the businesses that would later become customers for payment services.
He founded Cambridge Payment Systems, a credit-card processor focused on lodging. Cambridge was sold to iPayment at the end of 2007. That gives the early career a clear progression: running customer-facing businesses, building a payments business for a particular industry, and selling it. Fortis came next, co-founded in 2010 with a group that included Nirav Shah, Timothy Nafso and Samir Pimputkar.
Hospitality also ran through the founding group. The company’s early description of its service borrowed the phrase “white glove,” language more readily associated with a hotel than a software integration. In a 2018 discussion of Fortis’s hotel work, Timmy connected the founders’ hospitality experience to their aim of delivering the kind of service merchants would expect as hotel guests.
The hotel focus had practical substance. Fortis helped hoteliers deal with chargebacks, including the handling of reservations, no-shows and card transactions. These are unglamorous details, but they occupy real working days. A room booking carries more conditions than a simple exchange at a shop counter. Specializing in lodging meant paying attention to those conditions as well as the payment itself.
The trampoline chapter
Nafso’s career has another setting, considerably louder than a payments office. He became CEO of AirTime Trampoline & Game Parks in 2014. A 2015 Michigan business profile listed three sites in the state and 30 full-time-equivalent employees. The business had been founded in 2012, and its offering included birthday parties, school events and corporate team building.
AirTime’s parks featured wall-to-wall trampolines, dodgeball and basketball. Music was part of the proposition. There is something pleasantly literal about a company whose customers expect an uplifting experience and receive a floor designed to provide one. For Nafso, it was another operating business with an audience quite different from a software developer evaluating payment capabilities.
In May 2017, AirTime appointed franchise executive Sam Lundy as chief operating officer. Lundy would work closely with Nafso on strategy and execution. The company listed locations in Grand Rapids, Troy, Sterling Heights, Westland and Novi, with Ann Arbor on the way, and offered franchise opportunities in the United States and abroad. The scope had moved beyond those three Michigan sites listed two years earlier.
This chapter gives some welcome texture to the career. Cambridge and Fortis place Nafso within the payments industry; AirTime places him in family entertainment. The titles share familiar responsibilities, but the businesses require different things from their customers. A birthday party and a payment integration are unlikely to feature in the same sales presentation. Both, however, belong in his biography.
Capital arrives, with a service promise attached
On December 17, 2019, Lovell Minnick Partners announced a growth investment in Fortis. Nafso was CEO. The Novi-based company was already working with developers, software providers and channel partners across North America. Its proprietary Zeamster platform supported payment experiences integrated into software and enterprise resource planning systems, the tools businesses use to manage operations.
Nafso described the investment as a way to enter additional markets and continue developing payment solutions. He also addressed existing customers, promising continuity in the company’s service. That pairing was deliberate in his public statement: expansion would come with an assurance about the relationship already in place. More capital was joining a business with an established customer proposition.
Trevor Rich and Greg Cohen joined the board. The announcement brought together financial backing, software capabilities and a founder still talking about customer attention. Fortis was building a business around developers as well as merchants. That widened the audience: the company could serve the people creating business software, whose own customers needed a way to accept payments within it.
There is a certain satisfaction in this kind of work when it is understood through an everyday task. An invoice needs paying. A sale needs recording. Software already holds part of that activity. Putting payment capabilities into the same setting is the practical idea behind the terminology. For Nafso, the business now reached beyond the lodging processor of his earlier career.
A new CEO, and a continuing founder
In July 2021, Fortis announced that Greg Cohen, its executive chairman, would become CEO. Dennis McLaughlin joined as CFO and Ashley Usher as chief innovation officer. Nafso, described in the announcement as co-founder and executive officer, welcomed Cohen’s experience in growing platform businesses. He was particularly warm about the relationship already established at board level.
“His support at the board level has been tremendous.”
Jimmy Nafso, on Greg Cohen’s appointment, July 2021
The transition is a significant part of the story because it separates two roles that a founder’s biography often compresses into one. Nafso helped establish the company and led it as CEO. Cohen then took the CEO position, while Nafso continued within the leadership. Fortis’s current executive page lists him as president.
The company’s next milestones belonged to that broader team. In October 2022, Fortis announced it had surpassed $20 billion in commerce transaction volume, an 80 percent increase over the previous year. It was also expanding its API offerings and merchant capital service. The figure describes payments flowing through the business, rather than company revenue or a founder’s personal wealth.
Commerce transaction volume, with an announced 80% increase over the previous year.
The rent payment stays inside the app
A residential partnership supplies a concrete example of the work Nafso was discussing as president. In July 2022, Zonetail announced an agreement with Fortis to let residents pay rent and maintenance dues within its mobile platforms. Property managers had asked for payments to sit alongside the app’s communication features. Their residents already used it for building information and services.
Mark Holmes, Zonetail’s CEO, explained the request in wonderfully ordinary terms. Property managers wanted tenants to use one app to communicate and pay rent, rather than download a second one for payments. Nafso described the planned integration in terms of greater capability for property managers and greater ease for customers. He also saw it as a route further into residential property.
In September 2023, Zonetail announced completed payment integrations with Fortis and Yardi. The sequence turns an industry phrase into a recognizable action: someone opens the application they already use for their building and pays a recurring bill there. The ambition has an everyday scale, even when the businesses behind it process large sums.
Two brothers, one conversation
The 2024 Embedded conversation returned to the person inside these business developments. Jimmy is the oldest of five siblings. Timmy, the host, is both his younger brother and a fellow founder. Their episode covered Jimmy’s path from traditional merchant services toward embedded payments, including a more consultative approach to helping businesses choose payment solutions.
The discussion also addressed the importance of human connection and partnerships as AI and other technologies develop. It is a subject with a visible place in Nafso’s working history. Hotel operations, specialized merchant services and software partnerships all appear along the route. In the brothers’ conversation, relationships became a subject of their own.
The next phase, and the people doing the work
In March 2025, Audax Private Equity and Lovell Minnick Partners announced a joint investment in Fortis, completed on March 11. The stated plans included product development, acquisitions and infrastructure. Nafso welcomed Audax publicly, looking back on nearly fifteen years since the company’s founding and more than five years with Lovell Minnick.
“We couldn’t have done it without our hard working and dedicated team members.”
Jimmy Nafso, March 2025
In July, Fortis announced its acquisition of Serve First Solutions, adding B2B payments experience in areas including wholesale, distribution and manufacturing. Nafso welcomed the incoming business and its team publicly. The company’s expanding scope now included businesses a considerable distance from the hotels of his earlier career.
That distance makes the starting point worth remembering. Nafso’s career began with operating businesses, then moved into serving their transactions. It has included a sale, another founding, amusement parks, new investors and a change of CEO. His comments at the 2025 investment milestone gave the last word to the team. After all the changes in the business, people still had a place in the sentence.