The average small business maintains less than 60 days of working capital, according to Tom Priore, CEO of Priority. This thin margin creates vulnerability to cash flow disruptions that larger enterprises absorb easily. But when payment settlement is delayed three days or reconciliation errors create uncertainty about available funds, small businesses face immediate operational constraints.
Traditional banking relationships no longer address these challenges effectively. “You’re seeing even larger banks start to diminish their branch profile,” Priore observes. The local banker who understood merchant cash flow needs has largely disappeared. “That experience does not exist anymore.” Priority has built infrastructure to fill this gap by combining payments processing with banking capabilities on one platform. The company now processes $130 billion in annual payment volume while serving more than 1.2 million customer accounts, reflecting market demand for solutions that accelerate cash flow through technical integration rather than incremental improvements.
The Velocity of Money Principle
Tom Priore frequently references “cash acceleration” or “the velocity of money”—metrics that measure how quickly money moves through a business. For individual businesses, velocity reflects financial transaction efficiency, enabling better cash flow management.
“Leaders at every type and size of business want to see money pick up velocity in relation to how they receive, store, and send cash,” Priore explains. The concept extends beyond receiving customer payments quickly—it includes how businesses deploy funds once received.
“That ‘sending’ could be paying employees efficiently—which in turn affects their experience working for you—or your key suppliers or anyone else in that ecosystem,” Priore notes. Faster vendor payments unlock early payment discounts. Timely employee compensation builds loyalty in high-turnover industries like restaurants, where turnover approaches 80%.
The infrastructure enabling this velocity requires technical integration that traditional banking relationships and standalone payment processors cannot provide independently.
Same-Day Funding Architecture
Priority’s approach to cash flow acceleration begins with fund availability timing. When businesses use Priority’s banking-as-a-service product alongside MX Merchant, funds become available within minutes of batch closure—including weekends and holidays.
This contrasts sharply with standard settlement, where funds remain unavailable for two to three business days. A restaurant closing Saturday night batches at 11 p.m. traditionally waits until Tuesday morning for fund access. With Priority’s infrastructure, those funds become available Saturday night or Sunday morning.
Restaurant owners can use Sunday revenue for Monday vendor orders, capturing supplier discounts for prompt payment. Retail businesses deploy weekend sales revenue toward immediate inventory replenishment rather than waiting for midweek settlement.
The technical architecture enabling same-day funding includes:
Nationwide money transmission licensing: Priority maintains licensed money transmitter status in all 50 states, providing the regulatory foundation for rapid fund movement without jurisdictional constraints.
Direct banking partnerships: Relationships with major processing networks, including Priority’s Wells Fargo partnership, enable real-time settlement capabilities that intermediated relationships cannot match.
Cloud-native platform: Priority’s technology stack processes transactions and updates balances in real-time rather than batch processing overnight. “When building your product, you need to have made tech decisions early on to have a native stack that’s in the cloud, that’s very agile,” Priore emphasizes.
Priority’s Banking & Treasury segment generated $45.6 million in adjusted gross profit during Q4 2024, indicating financial viability of this infrastructure approach.
Reconciliation as Infrastructure
Manual reconciliation creates a hidden cash flow drag beyond the hours finance teams spend matching deposits to invoices. The more significant impact comes from delayed fund deployment due to uncertainty about cleared transactions.
When finance teams lack real-time visibility into which payments are cleared and which remain pending, they adopt conservative cash management that leaves funds idle rather than risk overdrafts. This conservatism has an opportunity cost that compounds across thousands of monthly transactions.
Priority’s automated reconciliation matches deposits with invoice numbers and remittance details in real-time, providing immediate confirmation of cleared funds and enabling confident deployment without manual verification.
Consider a B2B platform processing 1,000 vendor payments monthly. Before automation, a two-person finance team might spend 40 hours monthly on manual reconciliation. Direct labor cost appears in payroll. Indirect costs appear in delayed fund deployment while reconciliation completes.
Automated reconciliation eliminates both costs. Finance team capacity redirects to strategic work. Funds deploy two to three days faster due to real-time cleared transaction visibility.
Tom Priore describes the friction Priority addresses: Businesses “are frustrated with the way they pay bills and the way cash moves through their business.” The frustration stems not from payment execution but from administrative burden and timing uncertainty.
Treasury Optimization Infrastructure
Same-day funding and automated reconciliation accelerate fund availability. Treasury optimization addresses what happens to funds once they’re available—particularly reserves held for future obligations like quarterly taxes or seasonal inventory.
Traditional business checking accounts offer minimal or zero interest on deposits. On the other hand, a mid-sized manufacturer holding $500,000 in reserves for Q4 tax payments could earn $18,000 annually at 5% yield if those funds were invested from January through November.
Priority’s treasury management tools enable this optimization through automated cash positioning and investment options. Passport Cash Builder allows businesses to invest surplus cash in money markets, Treasury Bills, or bond funds with varying liquidity profiles.
Priority’s infrastructure automates this positioning. Organizations configure rules defining minimum operating balances, reserve requirements, and investment allocation. The platform automatically moves funds between operating accounts and investment vehicles while ensuring sufficient liquidity for scheduled payments.
Tom Priore describes the strategic advantage: “I could utilize that buying power on that same day… pay my vendors early, which generates early pay discounts,” he says. Businesses optimize across multiple dimensions—earning returns on reserves, capturing vendor discounts, and maintaining operational liquidity.
Priority Capital, developed through a partnership with Pipe, adds flexible capital access. Businesses receive loans based on transaction data with repayments structured as a percentage of sales. “It’s dynamic… It’s a bank-like product,” Priore explains. The flexibility resembles a credit line that businesses can pay down and access repeatedly.
Infrastructure Integration Value
The unified platform approach delivers value that individual best-of-breed vendors cannot match. When payments processing, banking services, accounts payable automation, and treasury management operate on single technical infrastructure, several advantages emerge:
Single source of financial truth: All transaction data resides in one platform, eliminating cross-system reconciliation and providing accurate real-time cash positions.
Reduced implementation complexity: Pre-integrated components deploy faster than custom connections. SlipStream Financial became operational with Priority in just weeks after abandoning a previous vendor, where implementation proved insurmountable.
Simplified vendor management: Organizations maintain one relationship for multiple financial services rather than coordinating across separate providers.
Consolidated pricing: Volume discounts and bundled service pricing typically offer better economics than purchasing each capability separately.
SlipStream CEO Miles Busby described the difference: “Priority was by far the easiest to work with because they already have the banking infrastructure in their system.” The ready-to-deploy infrastructure eliminated months of sponsor bank procurement and due diligence cycles. SlipStream experienced 2x growth in six months after implementation.
Regulatory Foundation for Reliability
Cash flow reliability requires a regulatory infrastructure preventing disruptions. Priority’s compliance framework includes licensed money transmitter status in all 50 states with transaction reporting to regulatory authorities, SOC compliance and PCI DSS certification, and regular third-party security audits.
“Getting and maintaining those licenses requires significant resources of money and time,” Priore acknowledges. The investment creates competitive advantage because regulatory delays can freeze funds for weeks, destroying the cash flow acceleration that drives platform value.
Priority’s relationship with Wells Fargo enforces institutional-grade standards: “We’re exceedingly rigorous around our security and our audit process,” Priore says. “The way I would describe it is ‘money center bank quality.'”
When fintech infrastructure provider Sila evaluated banking partners, regulatory maturity became a primary selection criterion. Priority’s compliance infrastructure exceeded previous partner capabilities.
Bank Collaboration Strategy
Tom Priore advocates collaboration with traditional banks rather than displacement: “There’s been so much talk in fintech of disintermediating banks. And I think that’s a mistake. Banks are still the largest pool of assets globally.”
This collaborative approach shapes how Priority delivers services. The company works with diversified financial institutions to provide FDIC insurance, lending capital, and processing capacity that fintech-only infrastructure cannot match.
“In the last five or so years, banks have recognized payments as a source of fee-based revenue and deposits,” Priore observes. Priority’s positioning capitalizes on this shift: “We’ve positioned ourselves to lean into that because we think it makes a ton of sense. And that’s not a disintermediating strategy; it’s a collaborating one.”
Market Validation
Priority’s 2024 financial performance demonstrates market acceptance of the unified commerce model. The company reported $879.7 million in revenue (16% year-over-year growth) and $204.3 million in adjusted EBITDA (21% growth). The platform serves more than 1.2 million customer accounts and processes $130 billion in annual payment volume.
Forbes ranked Priority #45 on its Most Successful Small-Cap Companies 2025 list, and TIME included the company on its list of America’s Growth Leaders. Priority’s 2025 guidance projects $965 million to $1 billion in revenue with $220 million to $230 million in adjusted EBITDA.
“The adoption of our thesis that payments and banking should happen in one place is resonating,” Priore notes. The thesis extends beyond current capabilities. Priore anticipates artificial intelligence adding “predictive insights that can help drive efficiency,” including AI optimizing cash positioning decisions and predicting optimal payment timing.
For businesses seeking cash flow reliability, integrated platforms combining these capabilities on unified technical architecture deliver velocity advantages that fragmented systems cannot match. Priority’s approach demonstrates how purpose-built infrastructure addresses working capital timing challenges that have constrained small and medium-sized businesses.
For more information, visit Priority.
