About prof Payments
The Early Days
Founders Eddie Davis & Doug Mulkey have a long history of building businesses and the tools to support them. Eddie built real estate, property management, and a real-estate-oriented marketplace in his early career while Doug was developing accounting, fintech and HR tech.
Working together as COO and CTO at a startup looking to disrupt the small business back office space, learned firsthand how many challenges there were in the market for businesses who really wanted to “get back to business” but were constantly interrupted by payment challenges even though they were overpaying for card receipt services.
While integrating many “leading” technologies, a couple of things were striking:
- “Payment Tech Leaders” were using idiosyncratic, low-quality tech that looked and felt like Prodigy/AOL era technology decades later.
- Businesses, typically referred to as “merchants,” found receiving card payments to be a nightmare across compliance, maintenance, usability and transaction cost.
Almost every business was making trade-offs that didn’t make sense.
Their lingering thought was payment technology was overdue for disruption with a combination of great price and experience.
If you deliver a great product or service, you should get paid quickly and simply, right? That’s a concept that has been around since the days of trading seashells for hay bales.
Great Tech For Hire
Post startup, Doug & Eddie found themselves constantly being approached for help with various challenges. Eddie founded a consultancy centered around sales funnels while Doug was recruited into various leadership roles at large tech companies.
Around this time, another startup friend had joined Celero and reached out to share what they were doing. Stripe had built great APIs but had been charging exorbitant fees and providing a service model where talking to a human was nearly impossible. Now great APIs were available with great rates and service.
But the layer on top was missing.
Having suspected this day would come for many years, the possibility to build “have your cake and eat it too” payment solutions seemed like it had finally come.
prof Payments Launches
Via partnership with Celero and their integration with FiServ as the core processor and provider of merchant processing accounts, Prof Payments was founded with a simple mission:
Make payments both simple and cost-effective for low-risk businesses in the United States.
And now the waitlist is ready for their first tool: a drag-and-drop e-invoices tool.
Business can use whatever they want to create invoices and drop that into Prof Payments’ invoicing tool, send it via email, and their client can pay via card at a rate that actually makes sense.
