Omni Integration
Omni had spent more than a decade in payment certification, with deep technical credibility and roughly 30,000 terminals in production. Its newest product, PayFlex, was a white-label certified payment application with no commercial motion behind it. Strong engineering, no route to market. I was engaged initially as a fractional advisor to build that route, and the role formalized into VP of Business Operations with full commercial authority, including signature rights.
PayFlex is now a revenue-generating product line with enterprise deployments structured across pharmacy, retail, restaurant, and healthcare, alongside a productized certification service that compresses an eighteen-month industry timeline to roughly 120 days.
The mandate spans deal sourcing and execution, contract analysis and negotiation, partner strategy, pricing and unit economics, internal team coaching, and strategic framing for the founder. In practice that means sitting between engineering capability and commercial reality, translating what the team can build into terms a counterparty will sign.
I came to payments as a merchant rather than an industry insider. That turns out to be the useful vantage point. I have been on the other side of the terminal, the integration, and the invoice.
- Strategic OEM partnershipNegotiated a hardware and software partnership with a global payment terminal manufacturer, securing six-figure non-recurring engineering funding, per-unit channel credits across a multi-thousand-unit deployment ramp, and wholesale marketplace pricing. All confirmed in writing before commitment of engineering resources.
- Enterprise deployment structureStructured a multi-year application and hardware rollout across four verticals, resolving source code escrow, credit line mechanics, hardware exclusivity, OEM credit pass-through, and master agreement governance. The unit volumes are meaningful, but the durable win was a repeatable deal structure the next deployment can reuse.
- Phased platform migrationDesigned a three-phase engagement with an enterprise point-of-sale provider: certification outsourcing as the commercial wedge, a sustaining engineering retainer through transition, and full migration to the client's own gateway on refreshed hardware. Each phase de-risks the next and funds it.
- Enterprise certification programBuilt and delivered the business case for a concurrent three-certification program with a Fortune 500 retail technology provider, spanning multiple terminal manufacturers and point-of-sale platforms.
- Cost curve as a moatDrove per-certification cost down roughly 55% as the process matured, with each completed certification making the next faster and cheaper. Reframed this internally from an efficiency metric to a compounding competitive asset.
- Commercial infrastructureBuilt the pricing architecture from scratch across perpetual license, per-terminal subscription, and velocity-tiered hybrid models, with unit economics carried down to net contribution per deployed terminal. Introduced a risk certainty matrix separating what is banked, what is on us, what is on them, and what is genuinely uncertain.
- Contract disciplineFull clause-level analysis and redlining of master service agreements, statements of work, and platform services agreements, with outside counsel engaged on defined escalation triggers rather than reflexively.
- Channel and referral structureFormalized independent referral partner arrangements with written attribution rules established before pipeline is shared, protecting existing deal flow from downstream claims.
- Team developmentMentored business development staff, reviewing external communications for the gap between what has been promised in writing and what has actually been confirmed internally. The discipline has caught service-level commitments, capacity claims, and certification availability assertions before they reached a client.
What we are scaling next
The next phase moves from proving the model to building the machine. A second go-to-market track through independent sales organizations, software vendors, and gateways, which is a right-sized segment with an unmet need and a shorter path from first conversation to signature. Certification repositioned from project work to recurring pipeline, since every processor integration a platform adds requires certification behind it. Distribution expanded through the device marketplace layer, moving from direct deployment to a channel motion that scales without linear headcount. Vertical expansion into unattended and semi-unattended scope, a modest engineering lift that opens materially larger markets. And program management capacity, because parallel work is currently bounded by attention rather than engineering skill.
