Today we’d like to introduce you to Daniel R. Nadeau and David R. Fabrizio.
The company began in 1984 as Edgil Associates and was the result of a partnership between two High Tech innovators. Founding partner Ed Hopey was an MIT graduate who held a degree in Electrical Engineering and hailed from Bell Labs. His Partner, Gil Wolsky held a degree in Physics from MIT and came from Honeywell. Ed and Gil began with the development of “Select News” a statistical data mining tool that provided customized news feeds to many large media organizations, including the Associated Press.
Edgil was a pioneer of the web, starting in the mid-early 90s when they developed a self-service web tool to assist media companies with classified ads.
Dan joined the company in 1991 as a software engineer and David in 1997 as customer support manager. In 2003, they decided to retire and sold the company to a public company. This is the period they refer to as the “dark days.” Although this term is meant to make people chuckle, it is still somewhat serious. The company experienced a period of instability and was run by people that did not share the same vision of providing software solutions at a fair rate.
In 2011, they seized the opportunity to purchase the company back. Since that time, they have worked with their customers to become a trusted payment solution provider.
In June of 2017, the company was rebranded as Payway Complete, to better communicate that the company’s payment processing services are a comprehensive, integrated solution. The brand was launched via a new website at www.paywaycomplete.com on June 16.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
With the evolution of the web, our product evolved as well. Prior to the web, our software was a proprietary turnkey system. Customers were typically locked in because the cost and time needed to replace a system was too significant. Now that our product is an open architecture, web-based system, it is easier for customers to move from provider to provider, making the competition for customers all-the-more challenging.
As mentioned previously, the company also experienced a period we refer to as the “dark days” when we it was owned and managed by a public company based in California. During this time, the company and its products stagnated and lost competitive advantage and focus.
Once we purchased the company, we faced several challenges. Most importantly, to catch up with the competition, we had to move quickly and efficiently. Our primary focus was to implement the software web services and develop all the features that we had fallen behind on under the previous ownership.
We have sufficiently recovered from that challenge, and are fortunate enough to have a payment processing solution that serves the needs of our customers, as well as a development team that is continually working on the next great feature.
Currently we are tackling a new challenge, which is the fact that many of our major customers are in the media space. Keeping up with the needs of these companies remains our primary focus. However, we feel that our growth can be fueled by entering new markets.
Seeing as our expertise lies in card-not-present, recurring transactions, we are concentrating our efforts in markets that process payments in this environment, such as nonprofits.
Payway® Complete – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
In laymen’s terms, Payway Complete provides soup to nuts payment processing services. In technical terms, we are an integrated, Level 1 payment processing provider whose primary products include a payment gateway and merchant account services.
We are honored to call Danvers, Massachusetts our home base. We always have and always will be local to the New England region. We feel it is important to support our local economy, which is why we seek out local providers whenever we need to enlist the help of a service provider for the purpose of improving our service offering. Of course, our love of New England goes hand in hand with our love of the Red Sox. We cannot deny that we are big fans.
We have overcome many hurdles over the years, but we are most proud of resurrecting the company from the “dark days” and creating a product that helps businesses streamline their payment processing. In fact, we still have customers who began working with us in 1989.
We both personally support various charities. We dove into the nonprofit space when Dan began supporting Christmas in the City, a Boston based charity that brings holiday joy to homeless children and their families. Payway began processing donations for this group in the fall of 2016. Since that time, we have discovered that charities and other nonprofits are frequently being taken advantage of and being vastly overcharged for their payment processing. Quite frankly, we feel that is wrong, and we are hoping to do something about it. That is why we provide a free cost analysis of any potential customer’s current merchant statements. Nothing makes us happier than helping customers save on their processing, so they can keep more of their hard-earned dollars to do good.
Payway is a corporate sponsor of the Jimmy Fund and supports Boston-based charity, Christmas in the City.
What role has luck (good luck or bad luck) played in your life and business?
It all depends on how you look at it. Was it bad luck that we chose to sell the company to a public company that mismanaged its resources? Or was it good luck that we had the resources to purchase it back and put it back on track?
It was mostly hard work and determination that got us to where we are today.
Contact Info:
- Address: 222 Rosewood Drive
Danvers, Massachusetts 01923 - Website: www.paywaycomplete.com
- Phone: 800.457.9932
- Email: info@paywaycomplete.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paywaycomplete/
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/paywaycomplete
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/paywaycomplete
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/11169475/
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