PYMNTS Turns Ten

Ten years ago yesterday, on October 20, 2009, in a meeting room at the Ritz Carlton Battery Park in New York, PYMNTS.com was launched.

In that room that day was a small, but eclectic, mix of payments enthusiasts – new to the world companies out to disrupt the status quo and incumbents that sensed the seismic shift in payments that mobile, data and the cloud would force. 

The vision for PYMNTS that I shared that day was to be the platform that would document that transformation - in real time, every day and in new and interesting ways. We sensed an opportunity to take a ringside seat alongside of innovators like Stripe and Venmo and Square and Uber and many other “Class of 2009 innovators” with their sights set on changing how payments were done but who as yet were largely unknown and whose impact was largely invisible. Those were the stories of innovation we wanted to tell and knew that the payments ecosystem could learn from, if told.  

Our tag line – “what’s next in payments” (and later, what’s next in payments and commerce) spoke to that mission and remains our North Star. The intellectual framework and strategy for how we consider and curate what we track, cover and produce every day, we believe, makes the content we produce and publish rich, insightful and valuable to the payments, and now the much broader, commerce ecosystems.

PYMNTS reinvented how businesses share information about what they are doing and offer a balanced view of how their innovations are solving payments frictions. Over the years we have added a portfolio of content products for how that is done – our trademarked Trackers, bespoke research studies and Index reports, actionable Playbooks, and podcasts and video series, to name just a few, have become go-to inputs into the strategies of players in this space.

Like many innovators, ten years ago we found a corner of the world that was ripe for change and set out to disrupt it. Now ten years later, I am proud to say that we have gone from 50 people in a room staring at a brand new website with, quite literally, zero traffic to being the number one content and media platform in the world for traffic and search authority on payments, retail and commerce, as validated by independent third parties.

It was not an easy journey – and as any innovator will tell you, disrupting the status quo never really is. It’s also a journey that wouldn’t have been possible without you.

We are humbled by your readership and support and the sense of community that you bring to our platform. It’s what inspires the entire PYMNTS team to dig even deeper to find new ways to deliver value to you each and every day. I personally have had thousands of conversations with innovators over the last decade who’ve changed the world and trusted us to tell the authentic stories of their journeys. What a privilege that is.

Ten years is a milestone, for sure, and we are so proud of our achievement. In many ways, it is also just the beginning, as we all eagerly await a decade that will see innovation accelerate and flourish.

We are so excited to see “what’s next.”

We’ll be there. We hope you will be too.   

With gratitude,

Karen