In 2000, Michael J. Brown put about $4 million of his own marketable securities behind Euronet’s Hungarian ATM operation. A bank held $4.8 million in cash collateral. His pledge helped release it to the company. The securities were his, and they were separate from his Euronet shares. The company paid him no fee for providing that security.
It is an unusually concrete way to express confidence in a business. The familiar founder story involves a discovery, a launch and a satisfying upward curve. Brown’s includes the less decorative business of making sure money is available for the machines. An ATM can have a handsome screen and excellent software; without cash, it is expensive street furniture.
By then, Euronet had already gone public. Brown had already built and sold a software business. Neither achievement removed the operational demands of the next venture. His financial commitment remained in place until a company letter of credit replaced the pledge in March 2002. In between the big milestones lay the practical work of keeping a network running.
Backing for Euronet’s Hungarian ATM arrangements. Replaced by a company letter of credit in March 2002.
Before the cash machines, there were PCs
Brown’s entrepreneurial career began in 1979, the year he earned an electrical engineering degree at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He co-founded Innovative Software, developing integrated business software for personal computers. This was an early encounter with a recurring problem in his career: new technology creates possibilities before the supporting services become familiar or convenient.
Innovative Software merged with Informix in 1988. Brown served as Informix’s president and chief operating officer, then led its workstation products division before leaving in 1990. His next software connection was as a founding investor in Visual Tools in 1993. That business, which made components for software developers, was acquired by Sybase in 1996.
These are useful details to keep in view when looking at the later ATM business. Brown arrived with experience in software products, corporate integration and the developer market. He had worked on the instructions inside the computer before going into a business whose most visible feature was a metal cabinet. The cabinet was only one part of what he would have to build.
His education also took an unexpected turn. In 1997, he earned a master’s degree in molecular and cellular biology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His academic record contains two distinct technical disciplines, separated by nearly two decades. The year of the second degree would also be the year Euronet entered the public markets.
Budapest supplied the missing piece
After the Berlin Wall fell, Central Europe opened to new businesses. In Brown’s account of Euronet’s origins, he was in Budapest, needed cash and had trouble finding an ATM. That small frustration supplied a business question: could an independent operator put cash access where customers needed it?
Brown and Daniel Henry co-founded Euronet’s predecessor in Budapest in 1994. The first ATM was installed in Hungary in June 1995. By the end of that year, the network had 53 machines. The distinction between founding the company and starting the machines matters. There was work to do between recognizing the opportunity and making the first withdrawal possible.
Henry established the first European office and carried the day-to-day responsibility for the early European expansion. By the time he returned to the Kansas office in 1999, the European business reached eight countries. Brown’s story has a co-founder with an operating role, rather than a conveniently solitary inventor taking all the decisions.
Euronet listed on Nasdaq in 1997. A company founded around a gap in Hungarian cash access now had public shareholders and a wider set of obligations. The later securities pledge belongs in that sequence. Going public had expanded the financing options; it had hardly abolished the need to finance a working business.
- 1994Brown and Henry co-found the business in Budapest.
- Jun 1995The first Hungarian ATM begins operating.
- Dec 1995The network reaches 53 machines.
- 1997Euronet lists on Nasdaq.
The machine needed more jobs
The early years also tested Brown’s assumptions about software. Euronet acquired Arkansas Systems in 1998, bringing payment software into the group. But customers increasingly wanted someone to run their transactions rather than sell them a software package. By late 2000, the software operation had missed its revenue target and was being restructured.
Brown discussed the difficulty directly: the shift toward outsourcing hurt software sales while helping the network services business. The company could still benefit from owning the technology, even if customers preferred to buy its operation as a service. That distinction demanded a change in how the business was organized and what it expected to earn.
The cash machine itself was taking on extra duties. In November 1999, Euronet announced prepaid mobile phone voucher purchases through more than 300 Hungarian ATMs, alongside a similar service in Poland. A machine installed for withdrawals could become another place to buy phone credit. Its connection to a processing center could carry another kind of transaction.
The underlying question was becoming broader than where to put the next ATM. What else could the same network do? Brown was learning to sell access, processing and distribution in different combinations. A customer could need the service without needing to own the equipment, and a machine could earn its keep in more than one way.
“The real value of our company is in our transaction processing.”
Michael J. Brown · 2000
Phone credit, then money sent home
In 2003, Euronet bought the UK-based e-pay business. Prepaid mobile airtime brought a different purchasing habit into the group: customers buying a little value when they needed it. Further acquisitions expanded the prepaid distribution business internationally. Over time, epay’s offering spread into gift cards and other digital products.
The next major change came in 2007, when Euronet acquired Los Angeles-based Ria and established its money transfer segment. This brought the company into the everyday business of sending money between people across borders. The transaction might begin far from an ATM, but it still needed a reliable way to reach its destination.
The purchases changed what Brown was managing. His original company had been built around cash access in Central Europe. The expanded group had to connect retailers, senders, recipients and financial institutions across different markets. Buying the businesses supplied capabilities and relationships that would have taken time to assemble individually.
Today, Ren makes Euronet’s processing technology available to other institutions, while Dandelion opens access to its cross-border payment network. These offerings return Brown to a familiar position: selling the underlying ability to make something work. The list of products has lengthened considerably since his personal-computer days. Software and distribution still meet in the middle.
Milestones show additions to the business, not replacements for earlier services.
Back home, a different kind of access
Brown’s connection to Kansas City has run alongside the international business. After leaving Informix in 1990, he devoted time to bringing Science City to Union Station. He became chairman of Science City’s board of trustees. The educational work began before Euronet, which complicates the neat idea that civic interests arrive only after a founder has finished making money.
In December 2019, Mike and his wife, Millie, committed $250,000 over multiple years to Science City’s Early Learning Initiative. The expansion was designed for younger children. Their return to the project linked the original effort to a new audience, with another practical question about access: how early could a child be invited into science?
The Browns founded the Brown Family Charitable Foundation - Kansas City in 2020. Its focus is K-12 education, including programs intended to produce measurable academic growth. Millie and the foundation’s executive director, Jo Weller, have central roles in its education work. Brown’s civic story is another shared undertaking, with partners doing substantial work of their own.
In 2025, Mike and Millie shared Ingram’s Philanthropist of the Year honors. Reflecting on his early experience of giving, he put it simply: “So it starts with service.” It is a useful sentence alongside the corporate milestones. The science center needed organizing, advocacy and leadership as well as donations. Time was part of the contribution.
“Integrity does not just mean telling the truth.”
Michael J. Brown
A promise with an operating cost
Brown remains Euronet’s co-founder, chairman, CEO and president. In May 2026, he presented the company’s strategy at its Investor Day. The agenda covered payments infrastructure, epay and cross-border payments: three substantial areas of responsibility for a founder whose initial problem was finding cash in Budapest.
His stated ambition remains access to payments for people who have lacked it. The next stage involves newer forms of infrastructure, including the CoreCard credit-processing capabilities acquired in 2025 and the integration of stablecoin technology through Fireblocks. In his 2025 shareholder letter, Brown set a concrete objective for the following year: turning the available technology and capital into measurable revenue growth.
The breadth creates its own demands. Maintaining existing services while developing new ones requires spending, coordination and choices about where to place the next investment. A network can expand the number of things it does; each addition also becomes something the organization must deliver. Brown has been in that position long enough to have seen a promising software acquisition require restructuring.
Kansas City still has a place on his calendar. On October 21, 2026, UMKC announced him among the participants for an upcoming discussion on the future of entrepreneurship in the city. The planned panel brings him back to founders and students, after decades of operating across borders.
The detail worth carrying from his story is the old securities pledge. It gives the idea of commitment a dollar amount, a purpose and an eventual release date. Brown saw a missing service, helped build it, and later supplied personal backing when its operation required it. The machine had to work after the opportunity had been spotted. Much of his career has happened in that interval.