Businesses today face a significant challenge: distinguishing between technology that delivers genuine value and technology that merely chases the latest trends. In an increasingly digital landscape, many organizations find themselves investing in solutions that look impressive but fail to address real business needs.
This disconnect between technological capability and practical application creates inefficiencies, wasted resources, and missed opportunities for growth.
Thomas Priore, CEO of Priority, has built his approach to financial technology on a foundation of purposeful innovation that directly addresses this challenge. Under his leadership, Priority has evolved from a payments processor to a comprehensive unified commerce platform serving nearly one million customers across small business, B2B, and enterprise segments.
“That’s how technology has to work. It has to actually enable those things that make the lives of business owners better,” Thomas Priore explains in PYMNTS. “Not what you think or the theory behind it — we can all do the math — but is it practical, can it actually be employed to a high degree of utility? If the answer is ‘no,’ then you’ve failed in the architecture. Whatever the tech is, it needs to be simple, it needs to be agile so it’s not just for this business, but needs to scale across business types and be flexible.”
Building a Platform with Intention
The financial technology landscape is crowded with solutions seeking problems. Priority has taken the opposite approach, focusing first on the real challenges businesses face with cash flow and working capital.
“Priority has been built with foresight and planning,” Thomas Priore notes in CEOWORLD magazine. “If you were to encapsulate it in one word, it would be ‘intention.’ We relentlessly pursue knowledge that can help us see around corners and operate with a singular focus on creating reliable, consistent, long-term value for stakeholders.”
This intentional approach extends to the fundamental architecture of the company’s technology stack. Priority’s unified commerce platform integrates payments, banking, and business operations in a single ecosystem, allowing businesses to accelerate the velocity of money through their operations.
“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, that is efficient (insofar as time and cost) to make improvements on,” Priore says. “We’ve built with intention to do that, to provide stability and scale.”
Practical Solutions for Real Business Challenges
Small and medium-sized businesses particularly benefit from technology that solves tangible problems rather than adding complexity. Priority’s suite of solutions, including MX Merchant, CPX, and Passport, focuses on addressing specific pain points in the payment and banking ecosystem.
“We are now a payments and banking fintech that has a very elegant set of financial tools that we are able to bring to businesses of all sizes,” Thomas Priore explains in Tech Times. He adds that these include treasury and banking solutions, vendor management, and large enterprise software that allows businesses to manage their “ecosystem of commerce.”
“Our core focus across that financial tool set is a single platform,” he says. “We excel at collecting, storing, lending, and sending money.”
This practical focus has driven Priority’s growth to become the sixth-largest non-bank payments processor in the United States, processing approximately $120 billion in annual transaction volume. The company continues to expand its services across industries including retail, restaurants, healthcare, and construction.
The Human Element in Digital Transformation
Despite the focus on technological innovation, Thomas Priore maintains that human relationships remain central to effective business solutions. This perspective shapes how Priority approaches customer service and product development.
“One saying I like a lot and try to instill is that people don’t care how much you have to say until they know how much you care,” Priore says. “If they think you care, they’ll listen to you and hear you out. That’s been an important trait to instill in our employees at Priority: Care about the people you work with, the customers you serve, and success will follow.”
This human-centered philosophy extends to how Priority works with clients, particularly small business owners who need more than self-service technology. Thomas Priore notes that these owners “don’t have time to chase down self-service for technology. I want a consultant, an expert to help me.”
Beyond Features: Enabling Business Outcomes
Priority’s approach to technology development focuses on business outcomes rather than technical specifications. The company’s unified commerce platform is designed to accelerate cash flow and optimize working capital, delivering tangible results that directly impact business success.
Thomas Priore explains that cash acceleration opens the door to many benefits for businesses. “As a business owner, the faster I get my money, the better decisions I can make in managing my business,” he says.
This outcome-focused perspective ensures that Priority’s technology remains connected to measurable business value. By integrating payments processing with banking solutions and accounts payable automation, Priority helps businesses create a more efficient financial ecosystem.
Practical Applications of Emerging Technologies
When it comes to emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, Thomas Priore maintains his characteristic focus on practical applications rather than hype.
“The thing I’m most excited about as it relates to AI is its predictive insights, and that can help drive efficiency in a business,” he says. “Accelerate underwriting, get customers set up fast, that’s an awesome experience. [With AI,] I can see patterns and get smarter on risk management to protect not just Priority’s business, but our customers’ businesses.”
Thomas Priore also sees potential for AI to improve “cash flow optimization in a company’s supply chain and vendor management.” These applications demonstrate his commitment to technology that delivers measurable business value.
The Future of Unified Commerce
Looking ahead, the financial technology landscape will continue to evolve toward more integrated, purpose-driven solutions. Thomas Priore positions Priority at the forefront of this evolution, focusing on the convergence of payments and banking functions in unified commerce platforms.
“We’ve put our chips on the table that traditional acquiring is a dinosaur,” Thomas Priore explains. “The conversation needs to pick up on commerce solutions, which are a blend of acquiring, banking, and payables delivered by a single experience.”
This vision represents the future of business financial operations: streamlined, integrated, and purposeful technology that accelerates cash flow and optimizes working capital. By maintaining a human-centered approach to innovation, Thomas Priore and Priority are helping to shape a financial ecosystem that works better for businesses of all sizes.
As traditional financial models become increasingly outdated, Priority’s unified commerce approach offers a blueprint for technology that truly serves human and business needs. In an industry often characterized by chasing the next trend, Thomas Priore’s purposeful approach to innovation stands as a model for sustainable, valuable business transformation.
