About the CEO/Founder

Judson Smith

Judson Smith began his career in the payments industry in 1999. By 2010 he had assembled one of America's largest eCommerce portfolios.

His career began in the Technical Department at First Merchants Bancard (FMBS), where he enjoyed his first success by finding a way to streamline simple to complex merchant account setups and installations in the Deployment area. This resulted in independent agents and affiliates significantly increasing the number of applications due to the short turnaround and setup time that most processing companies could not match.

Judson was then promoted to the Underwriting, Risk and Operations side of the company and was assigned the task of streamlining those departments as well, which began to have a significant impact on the organization as a whole. In 2002 iPayment (Nasdaq: IPMT) acquired FMBS. At that time, Judson was responsible for the Risk Management of accounts worth more than $1.1BB per year while incurring less than $100,000 in losses.

Judson was again promoted in 2003 to the position of Vice President in charge of Affiliate Relations for PowerPay, now a subsidiary of EVO Payments International. From 2003 to 2010 he blended years of Risk/Underwriting experience to construct one of the largest, low-risk eCommerce portfolios in the country, building a platform that eventually became home for many Internet and digital marketers. His unique ability to see behind the curtains of thousands of merchants and business models allowed him to develop relationships with some of the most brilliant online marketers in the world. In turn, these relationships provided Judson with a platform to inquire about digital marketing, while at the same time allowing the marketers to query information related to risk and business models in the processing world.

With regard to risk and underwriting, Judson became fascinated with merchants that had erratic processing volume and then disappeared entirely:

• Why did one merchant fail where another succeeded?
• Why were marketers decisions preventing them from processing higher volumes?
• Why did an entrepreneur shut down an account running $20K per month?
• Why did the marketer not care?

There were more questions than answers. Judson wanted to build a technology company that would have the ability to develop tools and services to answer these questions and eliminate problems for a payment company and their merchants and affiliates. Such a company would be a magnet for marketers intent on having better business intelligence and insight. That company is PayGrip.

In 2010, Jud launched Viral Technologies, Inc. with the mission of developing software that empowers digital merchants to make better business decisions, ultimately leading to increased volume in payments.

In 2013, PayGrip began boarding processing merchants through its relationship with EVO Payments International.