Tom Priore and the business of waiting less

Tom Priore’s grandfather had a modest-sounding prescription for success: work half a day. He was a landscaper, and he meant twelve hours. The joke survives because of the arithmetic. What first sounds like permission to go home early turns out to require a rather different relationship with the clock.

Priore has spent much of his business career thinking about time, although usually somebody else’s. A business receives a payment. How soon can it use the money? Where does the balance sit? What has to happen before a supplier gets paid? These questions rarely appear in the celebratory announcement of a sale. They do, however, occupy the people trying to run the business after the announcement is over.

Now the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Priority Commerce has a consequential timetable of his own. On September 21, 2026, Priority announced an agreement with an investor group he leads to take the company private. The transaction carries an enterprise value of approximately $1.6 billion. Completion is expected in the first half of 2027, subject to approvals and other closing conditions.

For a founder who helped start Priority in 2005, it is another change in the machinery surrounding the business. The underlying preoccupation remains recognizable: making money useful sooner, with fewer disconnected steps between earning it and putting it to work.

Two brothers, two views of the same transaction

Priority began with a useful division of experience. Tom brought investment banking and structured finance. His brother John brought payments. Their starting point included a lesson from residential mortgage lending: a process accustomed to paper could become digital. They saw room to apply that lesson to the payment experience of business owners.

Tom’s route had passed through Harvard University and an MBA at Columbia University. He spent eight years in PaineWebber’s fixed-income sales and trading department, rising to vice president. From 1999 to 2003, he worked at Guggenheim Securities, establishing its structured-finance trading and origination business and managing fixed-income sales and trading. He later founded ICP Capital.

Those jobs supplied a view of finance from the institutional end of the table. Priority offered a different vantage point: the merchant trying to accept a payment and get on with the day. A transaction could look complete to the customer while leaving a considerable amount of work for the business. Connecting the software to the payment was an attempt to shorten that second story.

Priore has said Priority reached positive cash flow within 22 months. That detail matters to the origin: the venture had to develop a working business alongside its idea about where payments were going. The founders were selling into existing operations, with existing customers, rather than waiting for an entirely new commercial world to arrive.

The part of the career that cannot be skipped

ICP is also where Priore’s career acquired a serious regulatory chapter. In 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission brought a civil case against him and ICP-related entities concerning their management of collateralized debt obligations. The allegations included transactions that caused the investment vehicles to overpay for securities and the improper receipt of fees and undisclosed profits.

The case was settled in 2012 without Priore or the ICP companies admitting or denying the allegations. The judgment ordered more than $23 million in aggregate payments by the defendants. Priore’s individual amounts were $797,337 in disgorgement, $215,045 in prejudgment interest and a $487,618 penalty.

In March 2015, he consented to an administrative order barring association with specified securities businesses and participation in penny-stock offerings, with a right to apply for reentry after five years. The order did not make reinstatement automatic. Priority has disclosed that the order did not prohibit his involvement with the company or his service as chairman or CEO.

These events belong in the same chronology as the founding and the later expansion. Priority already existed when the case began. The payments business and the ICP proceedings overlapped; arranging them as a simple sequence of departure, redemption and arrival would make a tidier story than the dates permit.

What happens after the card is accepted?

In November 2018, Priority announced a leadership transition following its entry into the public markets. John would move from CEO to vice-chairman, and Tom would take the chief executive role. The changes also included a new finance chief. A business that had started with its founders was assembling the management structure for its next stage as a public company.

The shift toward banking capabilities became more concrete in September 2021, when Priority completed its acquisition of Finxera. Finxera supplied technology for account management and money transmission, including account opening, reconciliation and the ledger work needed to keep track of balances. These are the backstage jobs of finance. Their glamour is limited; their capacity to complicate a working day is considerable.

Finxera’s founders, Sanj Goyle and Praveer Kumar, took roles in the combined organization. Kumar subsequently became Priority’s chief technology officer, while Goyle was assigned leadership of its consumer finance division. The acquisition added people as well as capabilities, extending the team responsible for turning a collection of payment functions into a connected service.

“my move to CEO was a logical decision”

Tom Priore · November 2018

The distinction is practical. Accepting a customer’s money answers one question. Knowing where it sits, being able to reconcile it and arranging the next payment answer several more. Priore’s product argument puts those questions together. For an owner, the attraction is a shorter administrative journey between a successful sale and a paid bill.

That is also why his preferred examples can sound less like a technology presentation and more like a visit to the accounts department. In a Fintech South conversation in 2025, he described construction payments moving through contractors and subcontractors. He also identified paper checks as a competitor. A checkbook has neither a product launch nor a charismatic founder, but it can be surprisingly difficult to persuade a company to retire one.

From the accounts office to the stadium

By 2026, the same payment-and-treasury proposition was appearing in more conspicuous settings. In August, Priority announced a multiyear partnership with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The arrangement covers a new ticketing payment process and deployment of Passport, its treasury orchestration solution.

The promised work includes monitoring ticket transactions and interchange activity, improving payment costs and simplifying daily operations. Priority also receives marketing rights, including stadium branding and hospitality. The public face of the arrangement is professional football. The operational work concerns the movement and visibility of money behind the ticket.

A day later, Priority announced an agreement to acquire IntelliPay, a longstanding partner serving public-sector payment needs. The planned acquisition would establish Priority Commerce Government. Municipal billing has a different audience from a stadium, but it poses familiar questions about accepting payments and fitting them into an organization’s existing financial systems.

On October 13, the company announced another sports agreement, this time with Rally, which serves Notre Dame student-athletes in name, image and likeness arrangements. Rally will use Priority’s GameTime platform to administer NIL payments. Its functions combine contracts, payment administration, treasury tools and reporting.

For participating athletes, the platform includes a Passport account, a linked Visa debit card and an automated reserve for estimated taxes on NIL income. Here the connected-commerce idea becomes particularly easy to picture: an agreement creates an obligation, a payment moves, and the recipient needs a usable account and a record. The jersey changes; the administrative chain remains.

A founder on both sides of the table

The September take-private agreement gives Priore a different kind of connection to manage. He is the company’s chief executive and the leader of its prospective buyer group. Priority’s independent, disinterested directors formed a special committee to evaluate the proposal and negotiate with him and his affiliates.

The final agreement provides $8.05 in cash for each share the investor group does not already own. The committee’s negotiations produced a price increase of more than 30% from the initial proposal. The transaction was unanimously recommended by the committee and approved by the board. Equity commitments from funds advised by Searchlight Capital Partners provide part of the financing.

Approval by holders of a majority of shares unaffiliated with the investor group remains a condition, alongside regulatory approvals. That matters because a founder’s commitment and other shareholders’ interests do not become identical merely because they concern the same company. The committee’s role is part of the transaction’s substance.

The agreement also leaves a period of waiting. A signed deal, a shareholder decision and a completed transaction are separate events. As of October 20, 2026, the announced plan still points toward a future closing. Priore’s next chapter therefore has a price and a proposed calendar, while the conclusion remains ahead.

There is a revealing small admission among his reflections on entrepreneurship: he wishes he had pursued his own venture sooner. Coming from someone whose finance career preceded a company founded more than twenty years ago, it gives the ambition a human scale. Even a founder can look backward and think he stayed in the previous room too long.

His grandfather’s half-day turns out to be an apt opening for this career. It begins with a deceptively simple unit of time and ends with the discovery of how much can be fitted inside it. For Priore, the corresponding business question is what a company can do with the money it has already earned, once the waiting is shortened.