Darrin Ginsberg brings an uncanny eye for business, a proven track record of success and good old-fashioned hard work to his position as Chief Executive Officer for Merchant Transact. Ginsberg’s nearly 20-years of in-depth merchant services experience, combines with Merchant Transact’s focus on streamlining and innovating workflow and processes, to deliver a winning combination.

A veteran of the merchant services industry, Ginsberg’s success dates back to his teenager years. It was 1987, about the time Macintosh computers were becoming popular for the first time and the California housing market was in one of its booms, when Ginsberg helped sell and market a first of its kind software program for real estate investors. The software helped locate and analyze potential properties, helped manage properties once they were acquired, and helped prepare contracts. It also had one of the first Online Bulletin Boards dedicated to foreclosures and bank owned properties. This idea would set a course for Ginsberg, landing him on the cover of Investor Hotline magazine at the age of 17.

Years later, while running a small mail order business, Ginsberg would again embark on a successful journey. After visiting eight banks and trying unsuccessfully to establish a credit card merchant account to accept payments via phone and mail order for his new startup home-based business, Ginsberg realized that he was probably not the only small company with this problem. So at age 23, he switched gears and started running his own merchant services business from his garage.

He began his business by gathering new fictitious names filed with the county and mailing out flyers every day —125 flyers a day to be exact. With this consistency and with the credit card industry beginning to expand and switch from Paper Based Processing Systems (manual imprinters) to Electronic Draft Capture (terminals), the calls were soon rolling in and Ginsberg’s new business took off.

By 1992, Ginsberg’s merchant account business had expanded from Orange County, California to San Diego, Riverside and Los Angeles. Soon things got really busy and Ginsberg found an organization called CardService International (now First Data) and received an offer he couldn’t refuse: to bring all his business to CardService. Ginsberg established his 2nd ISO, which he named CardService Laguna, based in Laguna Hills, CA. Ginsberg’s entrepreneurial ideas and desire to assist small, home-based and storefront startup businesses were appreciated. Within two years of joining CardService, Ginsberg emerged as the #1 sales office in the United States and set sales record after sales record, as he broke new territory in the Merchant Services Industry.

By 1998, CardService Laguna was still the #1 sales office by almost 10 fold and had achieved a level of success unprecedented in the merchant account industry. After trying unsuccessfully to get CardService to see the future of the Internet, Ginsberg decided to once again, go out on his own. So, after a six-year run, Ginsberg and about 100 of his followers shook hands with CardService left almost 17,000 customers behind, and started up again from scratch. This time the focus was totally on the Internet.

Ginsberg’s new business, E-Commerce Exchange (ECX) went live on the Web in June of 1998. In the first month they signed 600 clients, and within six short months, Ginsberg was back up to averaging 2,000 new clients a month. The company quickly grew to 145 employees and moved to a 20,000 square foot office in Irvine. With additional offices in New York, Chicago, Utah and a few other states, ECX got quite a bit of attention from customers and the media. Ginsberg was even featured on national television on CNNfn as an expert on payment processing via the Internet.

Within a year, ECX’s business had skyrocketed. And in October 1999, Ginsberg secured a $30 million equity investment from Summit Partners, L.P., a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm. Feeling that he had taken the company as far as he could privately, Ginsberg decided it was time to take some time off and stepped down as Chief Executive Officer in March 2000. The company was eventually sold and then merged into what became, Ipayment, Inc. and was taken public on the NASDAQ.

For the next two years, Ginsberg traveled the world, played a lot of golf, investigated new opportunities, and assisted several start-ups in getting their companies off the ground, including LocalLaunch, an Internet local search company, which was later sold to RH Donnelly. In 2004 Ginsberg also took an equity ownership in several payment processing companies including Applied Merchant Systems and payQuake, as well as a payment gateway processing company called PayMeNow. In 2007, Ginsberg joined Merchant Transact to take merchant solutions to the next level by enabling software companies to generate new revenue while improving their product offering.

When Ginsberg isn’t brainstorming on how to improve processes and make companies more financially successful, you’ll find him keeping himself in the “game” on the golf course. Ginsberg believes golf has helped his business ventures, in that it’s allowed him to spend time with clients in a relaxed environment. For those more daring clients, you might find him taking them for a scenic flight over Southern California in his Cirrus SR22 airplane.