You can’t let an Olympic year pass without celebrating the fiercest competitors on the planet.
How many of the televised Olympians bankrupted hundreds of thousands of small buisnesses?
Fleeced “customers” so hard that they became billionaires?
Are circling the globe on rocketships?
The Olympics you watch on TV are pedestrian.
If you want to gaze at the best humanity has to offer, you must attend the Payment Bro Olympics.
The measure for Gold is a bit different, however.
It’s not how fast you can swim.
How much weight you can lift.
The precision of your arrow.
It’s all about screwing over as much of your fellow humans as possible.
The math is actually quite complex, but one can boil it down to stoichiometry:
Humans Screwed x Duration Screwed x Magnitude of Screwing
The also-rans are automatically payment bros who don’t have enough scale to bankrupt entire generations of townspeople.
For example, fringe ISO in Bethesda, Maryland with a book of 1,000 merchants?
Sure, you’ll cause some families to put off vacations, suspend college tuitions, maybe even delay starting a family.
But that’s small time.
That’s like burgling without following through with the sex crime.
If you’re going to do it, do it right. You’re already there. Nobody’s going to stop you. It’s your obligation to do it. Make them remember who you are. Forever.
Previous Payment Bro Podium Finishers
In 2024, the event came down to a handful of players.
Since spinning off and going private, Worldpay is a shell of itself. Its private equity owner is still working to learn up from down. Until then, Worldpay merchants aren’t going bankrupt nearly fast enough.
Fiserv has been busy endeavoring to grow Clover, its only growth vector. Software is literally infinitely harder than payments, because payments has no product, so Fiserv’s software efforts jettison them from the competition.
Global Payments has things to prove. Losing the absolute legend that was the King of Fake Fees in Jeff Sloan’s been tough, with the company down over 20% since his departure. Jeff knew that the end was in sight, so out he went.
Jeff’s replacement, Cameron, has been making up lost ground, even doing something so comical we have to wonder if it’s not outright accounting fraud (more on this in a future article).
Jeff may be gone, but Global is very much vying for a top spot.
Then you have to admire someone who made so much money in processing that they single-handedly acquired the world’s largest fleet of private military aircraft. As if that wasn’t enough balls-in-your-face-payments-margin, there’s now endless space travel that their merchants can be excited about paying for.
You don’t get to space without out-payment-bro’ing a lot of of the competition.
It’s even more impressive when you’ve payment bro’d so hard that you’ve convinced some contingent of the market that you are a “software company” so you can increase your valuation to pour resources into buying ever more software companies, firing most of those employees, then running the payments bro playbook and cranking rates on those newly-acquired customers.
This is the double-dip that earns you medal consideration: eliminate the livelihood of those working at the companies you acquire AND squeeze your “customers” so hard that you’re flying to space as if it’s as casual as picking your nose.
After enough of your customers become homeless and sex traffic family members to pay grocery bills, you then take handfuls of their money and throw it at charity organizations to give yourself a protective shield from questioning members of the public (and maybe to assuage your own guilt of criminality).
Entire generations of family livelihoods eradicated from a relatively modest $150B of payments volume?
Check.
Shaft4 is fierce.
Lastly we need to consider a relatively new entrant.
Imagine spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on legitimately good software, lifting an entire industry from a technological backwater (well, as much as you can, any way).
Then imagine having 8 billion (probably not hyperbole) IQ points on your average customer and using that to entirely change what it means to be a payments bro. Tactics so clever, so original, so aggressive that the entire Payment Bro Olympic Committee doesn’t even know how to judge you.
Shifting costs directly to the merchant’s own customers?
Redefining common industry terms to quietly double margins?
Pure genius.
Toast is playing in a 3D world while everyone else is enjoying their 2D game.
But Toast is stuck with a software yoke around its neck.
It can’t really inflict maximal damage because it’s held back by having to actually provide some vestiges of value to their customers.
Sorry, Toast.
The clear gold medaler in 2024 is…
It’s okay, payment bros:
If you pillage real hard, in four years maybe you can be responsible for inflicting the most damage on humanity.
A girl can dream, right?
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