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The infrastructure behind every yes: how Maverick helps ISOs, ISVs and FIs scale without complexity

Ben Griefer

President and COO

Insights from Ben's recent appearance on the Leaders in Payments podcast

The right infrastructure is easy to overlook. The wrong one is impossible to ignore.

Unified payment infrastructure gives ISOs, ISVs and FIs access to payment processing, underwriting, risk management, sponsor bank relationships, technology and support through one provider. This reduces operational complexity while giving partners the flexibility to support more merchants, payment types and growth opportunities.

Ben Griefer, President and COO of Maverick Payments, has spent over 15 years watching how quickly growth can create complexity. The more opportunities a sales organization takes on, the more moving parts tend to show up alongside them: another processor, another system, another relationship to manage. It's easy to assume that's just the cost of doing business. It isn't.

The real question isn't how many opportunities an ISO, ISV or FI can take on. It's whether the infrastructure behind them can keep up without adding more vendors, more operational burden and more risk every time they say yes to something new.

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From sales org to full-service payment provider

Maverick didn't start as an infrastructure provider. It started as an ISO, an independent sales organization.

Back then, the systems and providers available weren't built to flex. Technology evolved slowly, and traditional processors struggled to support new payment experiences, delivery models and emerging merchant needs. One processor could support a certain merchant risk level, but not another, and many providers worked with only one or two sponsor banks, limiting the higher-risk merchants they could approve.

Terminal support created another challenge. A provider connected only to Global Payments would need a separate Fiserv relationship to support Clover. Expanding merchant coverage often meant adding another provider, another gateway or another platform, alongside separate solutions for ACH, chargeback management and fraud prevention. A sales organization that wanted to support every merchant type could easily find itself juggling five to ten vendor relationships. None of it was designed to work together. Reporting, residuals and portfolio management became a monthly exercise in reconciling data across disconnected systems.

"There needed to be a better way to do this, and it just blew my mind that there wasn't," Ben says. "So, we decided to build what we wished we had."

That decision is what eventually turned Maverick Payments into a full-service payment provider (FSP): one company covering multiple sponsor banks and back-ends (Fiserv and Global Payments), a proprietary gateway and in-house ACH processing, all delivered through a single, white-labeled platform instead of a collection of disparate vendors. What would normally require upwards of 10 processing partners and third-party tools is now consolidated into one.

Maverick's experience wasn't unique. It's a pattern that's played out across the industry for years. Legacy providers built for a narrower set of merchant types left partners stitching together their own patchwork of processors, gateways, devices and reporting tools just to serve the full range of customers coming through the door. Partners ended up spending more time managing that infrastructure than actually serving their merchants.

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How rising merchant expectations are changing what ISOs, ISVs and FIs need

The bar partners are expected to clear has moved. Merchants no longer tolerate a clunky signup process, and the partners selling to them are expected to deliver more than processing alone.

Onboarding needs to be frictionless, not a multi-step process spread across different systems. Reporting should live in one place, not scattered across separate portals for separate providers. Embedded payments have raised the expectation that payments feel like a natural part of a platform's experience, not a bolted-on afterthought. And white labeling isn't a nice-to-have anymore. Partners want branding to stay theirs from start to finish.

Underneath all of it is a growing expectation for API-first access: the ability to build directly on top of a payments infrastructure rather than working around its limitations. Maverick was built for that shift, future-proofing ISOs with the technology and infrastructure needed to support payment monetization at every level of their channel. This gives ISOs a scalable way to help smaller ISVs and downstream partners generate new revenue streams without introducing additional operational complexity.

None of this is about adding more features for the sake of it. It's about flexibility. Partners need room to support a wider range of merchants and use cases without sacrificing the simplicity that made the business easy to run in the first place.
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Why infrastructure is the differentiator

Flexibility doesn't come from a feature list. It comes from what's running underneath it.

Infrastructure determines what a partner can actually say yes to. Supporting a low-risk merchant and a high-risk merchant under the same roof requires sponsor bank relationships built to cover both, not a workaround bolted on after the fact. Supporting different payment types requires multiple rails working together instead of separate systems patched together after a deal is signed. And none of it works without compliance and operational support running quietly behind every transaction.

"We're just continuing to position ourselves as that infrastructure enabler," Ben says. "You can't vibe code compliance, infrastructure and sponsor bank relationships."

That same infrastructure that powers flexibility extends throughout the entire merchant lifecycle. As a full-service payment provider, Maverick manages onboarding, underwriting, risk management, compliance and support in-house, giving partners direct access to the teams behind every decision. For ISOs, ISVs and financial institutions, that means the ability to pursue growth opportunities with responsive support and operational expertise behind every step. That's the gap Maverick was built to close.

Multiple sponsor banks cover a broad range of risk profiles under one roof, helping sales organizations pursue more opportunities while maintaining a consistent operating framework. As an FSP working with both Global Payments (TSYS) and Fiserv, Maverick offers compatibility with thousands of terminals, point-of-sale systems and other third-party processing systems, while managing the complexity directly. Our proprietary gateway with connectivity to Visa Platform Connect (VPC), and our in-house ACH processing engine further reduce reliance on third-party vendors. All of this is unified within a single, white-labeled dashboard, giving partners one onboarding experience, one reporting system and one place to manage their portfolio, regardless of the capabilities running behind it.

Ready to stop managing infrastructure and start using it? Let’s talk!

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What the future requires: flexibility at scale

Embedded payments aren't slowing down, and the demand for flexible, API-driven infrastructure is only going to grow alongside them. More ISVs are looking to control and monetize payments directly rather than treating them as someone else's problem to solve. More platforms expect to embed payments into current workflows rather than bolt something on helping to add value and stickiness with customers.

That shift doesn't mean ISOs are being pushed out. If anything, it's pulling ISOs and ISVs closer together.

"A lot of people think ISOs aren't going to be able to compete with ISVs," Ben says, "but we actually think that there's a very collaborative synergy for them to work together."

Partners need infrastructure that can scale as quickly as their ambitions, and increasingly, that means infrastructure built to support collaboration between ISOs and ISVs rather than treating them as two separate audiences with two separate sets of needs. Just as important, sales organizations need the tools to manage growth efficiently. Through Maverick’s integrated CRM capabilities, partners can manage residuals, downline agent hierarchies and portfolio performance within the same platform they use to run their business. The result is less operational noise, greater visibility and a foundation that scales alongside growth.

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