Young Entrepreneurs - Jared Isaacman at Catch a Gideon

January 25th, 2007 by digerati

From Business Week.

United Bank Card

www.unitedbankcard.com
Hampton, N.J.
Age: 23

Jared Isaacman put together the plan for United Bank Card, a nationwide transaction processing company, alone in his parents’ basement. The idea, he says, was not really unique. He simply noticed—he was working in IT for a credit-card company at the time—that the big financial institutions ignored the processing end of the credit-card business and focused more on issuing the cards to consumers. The industry was using outdated hardware, and transaction processing and setup times for new business customers were slow. Once he realized he was onto something big, Isaacman recruited close friends and family, who worked 100-hour weeks to build the framework for the company. Instead of thinking about locating venture capital, Isaacman says he took the $10,000 in stocks his grandfather had given as far as he possibly could.

That was in 1999. In 2005, the company did $56 million in business and Isaacman says he expects 2006 to be similar. This year, United Bank Card processed more than $5.5 billion in credit-card volume for over 60,000 unique businesses across the country. The company enables a variety of businesses, from restaurants to multilocation retailers, to accept credit-card and other noncash-based payments from their customers. Isaacman says that most people don’t realize that it’s not the banks that do the heavy lifting in the credit-card industry, it’s the processing companies like United Bank Card that kick into gear when a card is swiped at a business. Isaacman’s plans for the future include “selective acquisitions” with the goal of further increasing the company’s market share.