Jason Kafer did not enter the payments industry as a consultant looking to advise companies from the sidelines. He came in as an entrepreneur and operator who had spent years building technology businesses, managing teams, solving complex problems, and seeing firsthand what separates a promising idea from a valuable company.
That distinction is central to the story behind Payments Therapist, the firm Kafer founded after more than 25 years in technology and business. His career has included multiple companies, two entrepreneurial exits and the 2022 sale of a payments business for $24 million. Along the way, he developed an understanding of payments that extends well beyond processing transactions.
For Kafer, payments sits at the intersection of technology, economics, banking, compliance, risk, operations and customer experience. Understanding how those pieces affect one another became the foundation for his career in the industry and, ultimately, for Payments Therapist.
“I have been an entrepreneur for as long as I can remember,” Kafer says. “I was already drawn to the same basic challenge that still drives me today: find a problem, understand it better than most people do, and build something that solves it.”
An Entrepreneur Before Payments
Kafer’s entrepreneurial education started unusually early. At 14, he was repairing computers out of his parents’ basement, solving technology problems for customers before he was old enough to think of what he was doing as building a business.
Computer repair eventually led to web design, broader technology ventures and software development. As the businesses became more sophisticated, so did the decisions Kafer was responsible for making. Technology was only part of the equation. There were customers to win, products to deliver, teams to manage, pricing decisions to make, and commercial commitments to honor.
Eventually, Kafer built a software development company that was acquired, marking his first significant entrepreneurial exit. The experience changed how he thought about building businesses. Growth and revenue were important, but an acquisition forced him to consider a company from the buyer’s perspective: the quality of its customers, technology, intellectual property, people, processes, relationships and ability to continue creating value beyond its founder.
“My identity as an entrepreneur came long before my identity as a payments person,” Kafer says.
That background would become particularly valuable when his career moved into an industry where technology and business strategy are almost impossible to separate.
Learning Payments From the Inside
Payments brought together many of the disciplines Kafer had encountered throughout his career. A transaction that appears instantaneous to a customer can involve processors, financial institutions, software platforms, network rules, risk decisions, security requirements, pricing arrangements and contractual relationships operating behind the scenes.
Kafer began learning that ecosystem from inside it. His experience expanded across processing relationships, integrations, merchant economics, pricing, risk, compliance, security, operations and software.
He quickly recognized that the most consequential payments decisions rarely belonged to a single department. A technology decision could change the economics of a product. A commercial agreement could limit future flexibility. A risk policy could affect customer conversion. A compliance requirement could alter technology architecture or delay a launch.
“The real answer usually lived between the departments rather than inside one of them,” Kafer says.
Eventually, he went from working within the industry to building a payments company himself. That changed the stakes.
When Kafer was responsible for the business, payments decisions were no longer theoretical recommendations. Pricing affected his margins. Technology affected his customers. Risk assumptions affected financial performance. Partner agreements determined how much flexibility the company had when circumstances changed.
It was an education that could only come from operating the business.
Building and Selling a Payments Company
Kafer’s payments company grew into a business valuable enough to attract an acquirer. In 2022, it was sold for $24 million, marking his second major entrepreneurial exit.
The transaction reinforced an idea that had been developing throughout his career: enterprise value is created by far more than revenue alone.
An acquirer evaluates the durability of customer relationships, quality of revenue, technology, processes, intellectual property, people, operating model and risks embedded throughout the organization. In payments, where businesses can depend on complex combinations of technology providers, processors, banks and contractual relationships, those factors can be particularly consequential.
“An exit compresses years of decisions into a single moment of judgment,” Kafer says.
Every decision that once appeared small can suddenly become important. Strong infrastructure can become an asset. A poorly structured relationship can become a liability. Operational discipline, technology decisions and customer concentration can all influence how a potential buyer evaluates the company.
For Kafer, selling the business also provided something that would later become important to his work with clients: experience sitting on both sides of the table.
He understood what it meant to build and operate a payments company. Now he also understood how one was evaluated when millions of dollars were at stake.
From an Exit to Payments Therapist
As part of the acquisition, Kafer remained with the organization for a one-year post-acquisition employment period. It gave him exposure to another side of the financial ecosystem: the differences between entrepreneurial organizations and larger institutions.
When that commitment ended, Kafer made a deliberate decision to leave corporate life.
He had already built companies, sold companies and spent years solving technology and payments problems where the consequences of those decisions appeared directly in his own businesses. What interested him next was applying that experience to companies confronting similarly complicated situations.
Payments Therapist emerged from that idea.
“It was not a sudden pivot into consulting,” Kafer says. “It was the logical continuation of the work I had been doing my entire career: diagnose the problem, understand the system around it, challenge the assumptions, and help build a better outcome.”
The name itself reflects the approach.
“The name Payments Therapist is intentional,” he says. “The work often begins the way good diagnosis begins: before prescribing a solution, understand what is actually happening.”
An Operator’s Approach to Consulting
Payments Therapist operates across areas including payments infrastructure, technology, PCI compliance, security, risk and financial strategy. But Kafer believes the value of the firm lies less in addressing each discipline independently than in understanding how they interact.
A company may believe it has a processor problem when the underlying issue is contractual. What appears to be a pricing problem can actually originate with incomplete data. A company considering building new infrastructure may discover that restructuring an existing commercial relationship produces a better result.
That approach also shapes how Kafer thinks about consulting itself.
“I came to consulting after operating businesses, not before,” he says.
It means considering what happens after a recommendation leaves the conference room.
Who is responsible for implementing it? What will it cost? What happens when transaction volume increases? What dependencies does the decision create? What happens if a financial institution changes its requirements or a processor alters the economics? How will the decision affect the company two or three years later?
Those questions reflect the experience of someone who has had to live with the answers.
“We have built. We have operated. We have negotiated. We have scaled. We have sold,” Kafer says. “Those experiences shape the way we approach every engagement.”
Building a Broader Team
Kafer is now applying that same philosophy to the growth of Payments Therapist itself.
Rather than building a traditional consulting organization around generalized expertise, the firm is assembling professionals who have spent significant portions of their careers operating within the industries they now advise.
That includes the expansion of Payments Therapist’s PCI and compliance capabilities as the company broadens its ability to address problems that cross technology, payments, security and risk. The objective is to bring experienced practitioners into the same room when a client’s problem extends beyond any one specialty.
For Kafer, that multidisciplinary approach reflects a reality he encountered repeatedly as an operator: businesses may organize themselves into departments, but their most expensive problems rarely respect those boundaries.
Taking the Entrepreneurial Story to Television
As Payments Therapist enters its next stage of growth, Kafer’s story is also reaching an audience outside the payments industry. He is set to appear on the upcoming reality television series Inside Success TV, putting a more public spotlight on an entrepreneurial career largely spent building companies and solving complex problems behind the scenes.
The appearance gives viewers a chance to see another side of the executive behind Payments Therapist. Kafer’s story stretches from repairing computers as a teenager to building technology companies, completing multiple exits, operating within the payments industry and ultimately creating a firm around the expertise accumulated through those experiences.
The timing is fitting. After decades spent building businesses himself, Kafer is increasingly focused on applying those lessons to help other executives make high-stakes decisions where technology, money and risk intersect.
The Company Kafer Would Have Wanted to Hire
Today, Kafer says he is building Payments Therapist into the organization he would have wanted available when he was running payments businesses himself.
The firm may help a company prepare for a PCI assessment, evaluate payments infrastructure, examine security, assess the economics of a processing relationship, support an acquisition or determine whether payments can become a meaningful source of revenue. The specific assignment changes, but Kafer says the methodology remains consistent.
“We start with the business, follow the money, understand the technology, identify the risk, challenge the assumptions, and work toward an answer that can actually be implemented,” he says.
More than 25 years after he began solving technology problems, Kafer has built a career around increasingly complicated versions of the same challenge. The teenager repairing computers became a technology entrepreneur. The technology entrepreneur became a payments operator. The operator built and sold a payments company. The experience from those ventures now informs the work of Payments Therapist.
“I have spent my career building businesses, learning from the things that worked, learning even more from the things that did not, and looking for the next problem worth solving,” Kafer says.
For Kafer, Payments Therapist is not a reinvention. It is the result of everything that came before.
Written in partnership with Tom White
