Two decades of payments focus, 1,000+ clients served, and the expertise, analytics, and technology trusted by the world’s leading payments players.
TSG (The Strawhecker Group), a globally recognized analytics, intelligence, and solutions firm serving the payments ecosystem, marks its 20th anniversary. Since 2006, TSG has grown into a global team supporting more than 1,000 clients, from fintech startups and SaaS platforms to Fortune 500 leaders and dozens of the world’s most valuable brands, all while remaining laser-focused on payments acceptance.
Read More on Fintech : Global Fintech Interview with Rob Young, Managing Director – UK at InDebted
Every milestone has been built on the collective effort of our teammates, advisors, partners, and clients, and we’re more energized than ever about what comes next,” said Kurt Strawhecker, TSG Founder and Board Chairman.
“In 2006, payments represented a simple swipe. Today, it means AI, embedded experiences, real-time commerce, and global digital platforms. TSG has grown and evolved right alongside it. Every milestone has been built on the collective effort of our teammates, advisors, partners, and clients, and we’re more energized than ever about what comes next,” said Kurt Strawhecker, TSG Founder and Board Chairman.
That evolution has shaped two decades of category-defining products, proprietary datasets, research, and partnerships, along with a perspective on payments that’s hard to replicate. “We don’t dabble in payments; we live in it. Our clients come to us because we’ve spent two decades in the data, in the technology, and at the table with the leaders shaping where payments go next. That’s a very different starting point than what most firms can offer, and it’s why the most demanding companies in the ecosystem keep choosing us,” said Mike Strawhecker, TSG President & CEO.
Built for Payments. Built to Execute.
- Work has been trusted by the top 50 merchant acquirers, all major payment networks, and countless of the industry’s leading banks, fintechs, and private equity firms
- Associates average 22+ years of real-world payments experience, spanning pricing, product, M&A, technology, operations, and more
- Strategic Advisor bench of former CEOs, founders, and senior leaders from the most influential payments companies in the world
- ~50% of the U.S. card-accepting market resides in TSG’s benchmarking dataset, spanning 250+ industries with near-perfect correlation to the broader U.S. payments market
- ~60% of U.S. gateway traffic is monitored for performance optimizations across 35+ global locations
- Reach of 40,000+ payments professionals weekly through NewsFilter and its broader content footprint
That foundation has fueled an accelerated expansion of TSG’s product and solution footprint, transforming a respected advisory firm into the payments industry’s most complete intelligence and enablement partner. Below highlights some recent developments on that journey:
- Strategic Partnerships: Collaborating with the platforms shaping the future of payments, including Adyen, Stripe, and Payforge, to extend TSG’s reach across the merchant, SaaS, and engineering layers of the payments stack
- TSG Portal: The payments industry’s intelligence command center, unifying products into one always-on environment where executives, analysts, and everyone in between can access critical benchmarking data, insights, and reporting
- Technology Enablement: Focused on the industry’s “last mile” challenge of seamlessly embedding payments into the user experience, helping clients accelerate time-to-revenue, reduce risk, and bring new payment experiences to market faster
- Executive Dashboard: A refined experience that provides payments organizations with an immediate and intuitive view of merchant portfolio performance, surfacing the trends and shifts that move revenue
- AI Built for Payments: A proprietary payments-native AI assistant designed to remove friction between data and decisions, so leaders spend less time searching for insight and more time acting on it
That journey, from advisor to intelligence partner to end-to-end enabler, is what 20 years of focus on a single industry makes possible.
The Work Ahead
The next twenty years of payments won’t look like the last. Agentic commerce, embedded finance, stablecoins, real-time rails, and AI-driven decisioning are reshaping how value moves, and the firms positioned to help leaders navigate that shift are the ones already living at the intersection of data, technology, and strategy.
TSG enters its third decade investing deeper in the data, technology, partnerships, and people that turn payments complexity into measurable client outcomes. The next twenty years start now.
Catch more Fintech Insights : The AI Shift in Fraud: Why Banks Need a New Playbook
[To share your insights with us, please write to psen@itechseries.com ]
