Nineteen days is an awkward unit of business success. It is longer than a sales team wants to wait, shorter than a quarterly report, and almost invisible on a slide celebrating new customers. Yet in TSG’s analysis of a representative U.S. merchant sample, roughly nineteen days separated opening an account from beginning to process payments. The measurement covered the trailing three months to November 2025. A signature had arrived. The transactions were taking their time.
- TSG sells an outside view: payments data, research, advice, and technology support.
- AIM measures the business. GEM examines the gateway experience.
- The lesson travels: compare similar customers, then fix the delay before the first transaction.
This is the sort of interval that interests TSG, short for The Strawhecker Group. A payments company can count the merchants it signs and the money it processes. Understanding whether those numbers are good requires another view: what comparable businesses are experiencing. TSG sells that perspective, along with help deciding what to do about it.
The sale that hasn’t started
Consider the arithmetic in TSG’s February 2026 activation article. A merchant processing $4 million annually waits thirty days to get going. That defers approximately $329,000 in processing volume. Volume is the merchant’s payments flowing through the system; the provider earns only a fraction of it. Confusing the two produces an exciting, incorrect revenue claim.
The more interesting finding is the spread. Merchants processing $100,000 to $1 million annually activated in about sixteen days. Those above $50 million took fifty-nine. A portfolio full of large enterprises can look sluggish beside one full of smaller businesses without either operator doing anything wrong.
The first thing to inspect, then, is the comparison itself. TSG identifies terminal shipping, gateway configuration, internal IT approvals, and seasonal trading schedules among the reasons activation takes time. Some are fixable by the provider. Others belong to the customer’s calendar. An average becomes useful only after those distinctions survive the spreadsheet.
A former client, a new company
Kurt Strawhecker founded TSG with Jamie Savant in 2006. Savant had been his client. Both knew merchant payments from the inside; Strawhecker had joined First Data in 1985 after working in advertising and marketing. His son Mike joined TSG at its founding and is now President & CEO.
Kurt Strawhecker / Co-founder
Mike Strawhecker / President & CEOThe company’s development has a revealing sequence. Consulting came first. In 2010, Mike led the launch of Acquiring Industry Metrics, or AIM. GEM followed in 2016. Knowledge that might otherwise live in a consultant’s head became something clients could query, compare, and return to.
TSG says it has served more than 1,000 clients. Its homepage lists work with Bank of America, Elavon, JPMorgan Chase, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe, Visa, and Worldpay. Its audience also includes software companies and investors. These buyers share a need to understand payments economics, even when their next decisions differ.
Two lenses. Different problems.
AIM standardizes data so a payments provider can anonymously compare revenue, costs, growth, and attrition with peers. TSG describes a dataset covering nearly four million merchants across more than 250 industries. Users can narrow comparisons by merchant size, geography, pricing method, and other characteristics. The useful feature is the ability to choose a relevant comparison.
GEM, now Global Experience Monitoring, examines gateways from merchant, developer, and technical perspectives. It includes real-transaction performance checks from global locations and assessments of APIs, documentation, and integration tools. A gateway can respond quickly while still being difficult for a developer to adopt. Those are separate problems, and measuring only one leaves the other intact.
“We don’t dabble in payments; we live in it.”Mike Strawhecker / June 2026
That specialization distinguishes the proposition from a general consulting engagement. TSG combines its payments datasets with people who understand pricing, operations, compliance, and acquisitions. Internal analytics teams remain an alternative, as do specialist advisers and monitoring tools. The reason to buy TSG is access to comparisons and expertise that are difficult to assemble inside one company.
What the outside view costs
The business mixes recurring subscriptions with advisory work. AIM’s public Basic tier lists at $999 monthly. The eReports Essentials research subscription lists at $9,850 annually, including company-wide internal access. These buy different things. Broader analytics tiers, consulting, and implementation have their own scope and commercial terms.
PaySights packages AIM access, research, and a retainer of consulting hours. Separately, TSG offers valuations, due diligence, market research, contract renegotiation, and payments strategy. The model lets a customer purchase an ongoing information service, a specific intervention, or both. It also lets TSG reuse research while reserving human attention for decisions that need it.
Advice meets the integration queue
In December 2025, TSG announced a partnership with Payforge, adding payments-focused engineering to its strategy and analytics proposition. The stated problem was fragmentation: one firm defines the plan, another builds it, and accountability gets fuzzy between them. The partnership connects assessment and architecture with development and deployment.
The demand for that connection appears in research TSG conducted with Adyen. Among 76 software companies surveyed in February 2026, 98% said they would consider switching payments providers, while roughly one in four had switched in the previous two years. Integration complexity, compliance, and disruption stood in the way. The sample covered larger software businesses serving financial services and fintech; its findings need that boundary attached.
A July 2026 Stripe partnership extended the focus on monetization, onboarding, and activation. That month TSG also introduced an AI assistant inside its Portal to retrieve and summarize its research. Access to AIM and GEM platform data was described as a future addition at launch. The distinction matters when evaluating what the assistant can actually answer.
The practical move to copy is modest. Measure the time from an approved merchant account to its first transaction. Compare merchants of similar size and industry. Investigate the slow stages. U.S. card-acceptance benchmarks need care when applied elsewhere, and seasonal starts require context. But for a payments operator, the question is wonderfully concrete: after winning the customer, how soon does the business begin?