Kevin G. Jones remembers a ski trip on which staying upright turned out to be a questionable measure of progress. Five friends went to the slopes. Everyone fell on the first day. By the third, two had stopped falling altogether. Jones and his friend Travis Mash were still making regular appointments with the snow.
They were also attempting the black diamonds. Jones later made the trip into a lesson for his employees: judging progress by the absence of mistakes can reward people for choosing easier ground. It is a pleasingly inconvenient idea for anyone who has ever mistaken an immaculate performance review for a full account of someone’s potential.
He grew up in North Carolina’s High Country and has described skiing with friends and family as his happy place. The mountain anecdote supplies an unusually useful introduction to a payments executive. Jones wants people to try difficult things. His career also shows a considerable appetite for the unromantic work that lets them try again.
In 2018 he founded Celero Commerce. By August 2026, after Deluxe acquired the company, he had become president of Deluxe’s Merchant Services division. Between those dates sit acquisitions, software, community banks, and tens of thousands of business customers. The more personal story is about whom he brought along.
Before Dallas, a debt of gratitude
Jones’s childhood setting was a Christmas tree farm in North Carolina. His mother, a single parent, worked two jobs to help him become the first person in his family to attend college. He wanted to become a CEO before he had much understanding of what the job involved. The ambition came with a practical obligation: make her sacrifices count.
He studied at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science. Banking came next. In his account, the young banker developed a reputation for turning around struggling operations and gravitated toward products that generated income beyond interest. Payments offered a route into that work.
A recruiter contacted him in late 1999 about building a Paymentech channel serving community banks. Early in 2000, he and his wife moved to Dallas. He has called it the best career decision of his life. The explanation he gives is strikingly populated: Eddie Myers, Dan Charron, Mike Duffy. He remembers an organization through the people who taught him how to operate within it.
Paymentech gave him a model of discipline around projects, product priorities, finance, and decisions. That training matters to the story of a founder who likes to talk about permission to fail. Permission requires someone to keep track of the consequences. Even a black diamond has a marked trail.
A second chance, with expectations attached
One of Jones’s more revealing management stories concerns an employee who nearly lost his job. At 27, Jones was overseeing ten bank branches. A bright but underperforming colleague had become a problem for his own results and for the people around him. Jones confronted him with both a warning and a possibility.
He believed the employee could become one of the region’s strongest performers. He also made clear that leaving for a role that suited him better was an option. The employee stayed, improved, and eventually took responsibility for hiring and training across Jones’s region. Jones later described him as a trusted adviser who remained part of his professional life at Celero.
The story gives some texture to the word “culture,” which can otherwise drift through corporate prose without touching the furniture. Jones’s version involves individual attention, demanding standards, and the willingness to discover that a disappointing employee has more to offer. His telling leaves the colleague unnamed. The transformation carries the point without turning someone else’s early difficulties into a public identity.
In his writing on followership, Jones adds another restraint on executive ego: CEOs answer to boards and investors too. Accountability belongs alongside experimentation. Owning a mistake helps an organization find the problem and correct it. A leader who makes room for candor must also make it useful.
Permission to experiment comes with an obligation to own the result.
Jones’s approach, in practice
The company was new. The relationships were seasoned.
After Paymentech, Jones worked on the strategic partner channel at First American Payment Systems. He also served as president of SignaPay. In 2013, he and Andy Meadows started Anovia Payments. The company grew organically to more than 10,000 customers, and its eventual exit delivered an 8.5-times return to investors.
Those experiences gave Celero’s founder several views of the same industry: the structure of a large processor, the work of developing partnerships, and the demands of building a company. They also produced a pool of colleagues willing to work together again. In a later interview, Jones counted seven Celero leaders who had shared one or more earlier companies with him. Three relationships went back to Paymentech.
Celero’s formation was announced in December 2018 with backing from LLR Partners and an investment in UMS Banking. UMS supplied core processing infrastructure; co-founder Joyce Gaines would continue working alongside the team. The business began by joining existing capabilities and relationships.
Jones also carried forward a mentor’s name. Celero’s Duffy Award honors Mike Duffy, whose personal relationships with employees had made an impression on him. Naming an internal award after a former leader gives a company’s values a person to point to. It is harder for an abstract principle to compete with a remembered example.
Give the local business fewer things to juggle
Jones’s commercial argument starts with a disparity. Larger businesses have had access to connected software, data, and customer tools that smaller operators often struggle to assemble. Celero sought to package payments, business management software, and intelligence into something easier to use. The intended customer had a business to run and limited enthusiasm for supervising a committee of vendors.
The early acquisitions help explain the design. RazorSync brought field-service management software. Elmhurst Financial and Tandem Innovative Payment Solutions expanded the payments business. By December 2019, after four transactions, Celero was serving more than 25,000 merchants and processing more than $8 billion in payment volume.
The same thinking shaped Jones’s advice to bankers. He argues that the payments relationship can become central to a business customer’s daily operations, giving banks a way to retain and deepen relationships. A modern payment system can connect with inventory, payroll, rewards, and employee management. Its relevance extends well beyond the instant a card is accepted.
For a community bank, that creates a delicate choice of partner. Jones has urged bankers to consider whether a fintech provider complements their services or competes for their deposits and lending customers. His career has repeatedly returned to this junction: technology supplied through an institution whose customer already knows it.
More transactions. More moving parts.
Thirty-five possibilities. One or two decisions.
Celero grew through both new business and acquisitions. The numbers accumulated: after the TransNational Payments acquisition in October 2020, approximately 40,000 merchants and more than $14 billion in annual card volume; after OMEGA Technology in January 2022, more than 50,000 merchants and approximately $20 billion. Finical became its tenth acquisition in October 2023.
Jones and chief of staff Abigail Anderson Berard later described a selective process that could examine roughly 35 potential acquisitions in a year and pursue only one or two. Their framework asks about strategy, culture, risk, financial potential, operations, and the plan after closing. Enthusiasm still has to pass through a fairly crowded doorway.
The questions are revealingly practical. How do leaders handle an employee who is struggling? What changes will systems require? Can people work together? Their approach calls for integration planning during diligence, including milestones at 30, 60, 90, and 365 days. A purchase agreement is followed by a calendar.
Celero’s early finance arrangements show the same attention to execution. Jones brought in an interim CFO through Armanino rather than rushing a permanent appointment. The work included accounting changes, projections, and working-capital adjustments. A company built around simplifying its customers’ operations had plenty of its own complexity to manage.
Strategy · Culture · Risk · Financial potential · Operations · Integration
A microphone, and a larger audience
Jones has made a habit of discussing the thinking behind the business. In April 2020 he launched the podcast Because We Had To with Brian Castle, a longtime friend and business collaborator. Its announced subjects included entrepreneurship, leadership, developing people, and company culture. The conversation continued beyond the executive meeting room.
He also served as president and board chair of the Electronic Transactions Association, with an emphasis on government relations and industry advocacy. His career had widened from helping community banks offer payments to representing the industry in which those banks operated.
Recognition followed different parts of that work. Jones won an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Southeast award in 2022. In 2025 he was named to Nashville’s Titan 100. He credited the Celero team in accepting that recognition. Outside the company, he serves on the board of Operation Song, which helps veterans, active-duty service members, and their families tell their stories through songwriting.
His technology interests have continued to move. In 2024 he wrote about exploring AI for sales training, product recommendations, retention, and routine support. Those were proposed applications and areas of investigation. The recurring question was how a tool could help staff and customers make better decisions, rather than merely give the technology stack something fashionable to wear.
The next set of relationships
Deluxe announced an agreement to buy Celero for approximately $625 million in cash, plus specified expenses and adjustments, in June 2026. The acquisition closed on July 31. Jones’s appointment to lead Merchant Services followed on August 17. By then Celero had reached more than $28 billion in annual processing volume, 175 banking partners, and 55,000 small-business customers.
The new role brings an earlier chapter back into view. Deluxe acquired First American Payment Systems in 2021; that business became the backbone of its Merchant Services division. Jones now leads a division containing an organization where he had previously developed partnerships. Careers sometimes arrange their own reunion.
The closing announcement projected that the expanded platform would process more than $70 billion in annual gross transaction volume. That figure describes an expectation for the combined business, rather than Celero’s standalone results. The ambition is to join Deluxe’s processing capabilities and resources with Celero’s technology, service, and distribution relationships.
“An effective CEO should focus on facilitating great decisions rather than always making them,” Jones has said. His larger assignment will give that principle plenty of work. The founder who once wanted the title now has a long record of describing the people behind it. And the skier’s old question still applies: how much progress can a team make if everyone is determined never to fall?