Priority Commerce Bought a Bankrupt Payments Darling - Then Turned It Into a Cash-Flow Machine

At first glance, Priority Commerce looks like a familiar payments company: terminals, transaction fees, a ticker symbol and an office park address outside Atlanta. Look again and the ambition gets stranger. Priority does not merely want to process the moment a customer taps a card. It wants to be present before that money arrives, while it sits, when a business borrows against it and when the cash leaves to pay a supplier.

The company calls this sequence collect, store, lend and send. That phrasing is tidy enough for a conference booth, but it describes a serious expansion of surface area. Merchant acquiring brings Priority into a business through the front door. Accounts-payable automation moves into the back office. Passport, its treasury platform, provides account ledgering and cash visibility. Plastiq adds buyer-funded bill pay. Payroll, property technology and working-capital products create still more reasons to stay.

By the end of 2025, Priority reported roughly 1.8 million customer accounts, about $150 billion in annual transaction activity and $1.7 billion in account balances. It had become the fifth-largest non-bank merchant acquirer in the United States by volume, using the industry ranking cited in its annual report. This was not built by winning a consumer popularity contest. Priority grew through a less photogenic combination of software, resellers, sponsor banks, compliance licenses and acquisitions.

The checkout was a wedge, not the destination

Priority began in Georgia in 2005 as Priority Payment Systems. John Priore brought deep payment-industry experience, while his brother Tom Priore came from structured finance. Sean Kiewiet built the technology organization and later became chief strategy officer. The early product was merchant processing, distributed heavily through independent sales organizations, or ISOs. Today, Priority says it works with roughly 1,100 distribution partners across ISOs, banks, independent software vendors and value-added resellers.

That channel matters because payment processing is brutally competitive and often chosen on price. A reseller can bring merchants to one acquirer and, depending on the contract, move them elsewhere. Priority's answer was to surround the commodity transaction with useful software. MX Connect gives resellers onboarding, underwriting, risk, servicing and commission tools. MX Merchant gives businesses payments, invoicing, reporting, storefront and management applications. Every extra workflow makes departure a little more inconvenient and the relationship a little more valuable.

“Payment processing is just one part of a connected commerce engine.”Priority Commerce, describing its merchant-services model

Commercial payments arrived in 2008. CPX reads a buyer's payment file and routes supplier payments through virtual cards, purchase cards, ACH, discounting or checks. The incentives are wonderfully unromantic: suppliers get paid sooner, buyers may earn rebates and Priority earns processing revenue. It is financial plumbing with a scoreboard.

Then a fintech darling ran out of road

Plastiq had raised venture money around a memorable proposition: let a business pay almost any bill by credit card, even when the supplier does not accept cards. The feature was useful. The standalone economics were less forgiving. On May 24, 2023, Plastiq filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Priority had signed a stalking-horse agreement the day before and completed the purchase of substantially all the assets that July.

The consideration was approximately $37 million, including $28.5 million in cash plus contingent consideration and equity in the acquiring entity. Priority later accelerated $19 million of deferred consideration and bought the remaining noncontrolling interest for $6 million in 2025. The important point is not that bankruptcy assets are cheap. They can be spectacularly expensive when customer trust, compliance or unit economics are broken.

Priority believed it had something Plastiq lacked: a broader distribution network, existing payment infrastructure and adjacent products over which to spread operations. In a 2025 investor presentation, it said Plastiq became adjusted-EBITDA positive within two quarters through operating and go-to-market efficiencies. The buyer-funded Plastiq Pay product now sits beside CPX, Priority's supplier-funded payables platform. One lets a business use a card for a bill; the other automates how large buyers pay suppliers. Together, they cover both sides of a stubborn B2B transaction.

This was the first visible failure in the story, but it belonged to the acquired company: a venture-backed point solution could not carry its own cost structure. Priority's change of mind had happened earlier and more gradually. It stopped defining itself as a processor. The 2021 purchase of Finxera for $407 million net of cash supplied ledgering technology and banking-as-a-service infrastructure. In 2024, customer interviews sharpened the message. Businesses said they were tired of juggling vendors and disconnected systems, so Priority retired its three-part house-of-brands presentation and put one Commerce Engine above it all.

A near-billion-dollar company with processor margins

Priority generated $953 million of revenue in 2025, up 8.3 percent. Merchant card fees contributed $710.9 million, money-transmission services $159.2 million, outsourced and other services $70.7 million, and equipment $12.2 million. The mix explains both the scale and the constraint. Cost of services was $578.3 million, or 60.7 percent of revenue. Card networks, processors, banks and resellers all take part in moving the money, and many must be paid.

Treasury is the especially interesting layer. Priority earns from money movement and from permissible investments on customer funds, so higher balances and interest rates can help. Treasury Solutions revenue rose 19.6 percent to $215.8 million in 2025. Yet this is not a bank hiding in fintech clothing. Priority relies on sponsor banks and third-party processors, carries nationwide money-transmission compliance obligations and must keep customer funds and operational systems safe.

There is also a large balance-sheet footnote. Priority ended 2025 with about $1.06 billion of debt obligations and recorded $90.7 million of interest expense for the year. Acquisitions widen the platform, but debt narrows the room for error. In the second quarter of 2026, revenue rose 9.4 percent to $262.3 million while operating income fell 11.8 percent and net income slipped 9.3 percent. Growth arrived; every profit line did not obediently follow.

Sports is the neatest live demonstration

A stadium makes Priority's pitch unusually easy to see. Ticket money pours in, interchange costs must be monitored, cash needs to be reconciled and vendors eventually need paying. In 2026 the company announced ticket-payment and treasury relationships with the Pittsburgh Steelers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a payables partnership with the Texas Rangers, and a production integration with SeatGeek.

The fan never needs to know Priority exists. The finance office does. Passport can provide one view of ticket inflows and treasury operations; the acquiring stack handles acceptance; payables can manage outflows. The same architecture travels to apartment portfolios, healthcare, education and government. In August 2026, Priority agreed to pay $11.5 million plus up to $3.5 million in earnouts for longtime partner IntelliPay, creating Priority Commerce Government. Buying a partner it already knew is a recurring move, not a coincidence.

What operators can borrow - and what they cannot

The copyable lesson is sequencing. Start with one unavoidable workflow. Use it to earn distribution and data. Add the adjacent task customers already perform badly. Only then make the platform claim. Priority processed cards for years before it could credibly promise a complete cash cycle.

The conditions matter. This approach is poorly suited to founders without patient capital, regulatory expertise or reliable distribution. It weakens when integrations remain cosmetic, when partners can cheaply move customers, when a downturn closes merchants, or when card-network fees rise faster than pricing. It can also fail under its own weight: too many acquisitions, too much debt or one security incident can turn a connected platform into a connected set of liabilities.

Priority's edge is therefore not simply breadth. Plenty of large processors own broad menus. Its wager is that native software, a large reseller network and hands-on service can make the menu behave like one system. The competition includes Fiserv, Global Payments and Worldpay, FIS, Shift4, PayPal, Adyen, banks, BaaS providers and a swarm of vertical software companies. Some have more capital. Some have cleaner developer brands. Priority has twenty-one years of merchant relationships and a growing set of reasons for those merchants to remain.

The company's best proof is still the Plastiq deal. A fashionable point solution hit bankruptcy. Priority bought the useful machinery, attached it to existing rails and distribution, and made it contribute. That does not guarantee the next acquisition will work. It does explain exactly what Priority Commerce does: find a fragmented movement of money, connect it to the engine and look for one more way to earn.