Thomas Priore on the Industries Priority Commerce Is Betting On: Ones That Cannot Afford to Stop Moving Money

While much of the fintech industry’s attention is fixed on AI disruption and platform consolidation, Thomas Priore, CEO of Priority Commerce, has been building quietly into a set of industries that rarely make fintech headlines. Apartment rent collection. Payroll and benefits administration. Construction supply payments. College sports team NIL payments. The industries look unrelated until you apply the filter Priore uses: in every one of them, money movement functions as the core business rather than a feature layered on top of it. Withhold payment processing from a property manager and rent collection stops. Remove payroll infrastructure from an employer and employees go unpaid. These categories don’t get cut when budgets tighten; they sit in the financial operating layer of industries that run regardless of economic conditions. Priority Commerce’s vehicle for building into them is Priority Tech Ventures, and in Q4 2025, the division grew revenue more than 200% year over year.

A Broad Funnel, a Very Narrow Filter

The investment thesis behind Priority Tech Ventures did not emerge from trend-watching. It came from a specific observation about the venture landscape and what it was overlooking. “More than a year ago, we noted that the venture space generally was struggling for capital,” Priore told investors. “There were some well-built technology platforms out there for which collecting, storing, lending, and sending money was a core part of the value chain.” Those platforms, Priore noted, were often running on legacy infrastructure and carrying operating costs that made them less efficient than they should have been. The combination of underinvestment, proven customer bases, and embedded money movement made them attractive at valuations that reflected the difficulty of the moment rather than the quality of the underlying business. Priority Commerce’s approach was to acquire them at that price point, bring them onto Priority’s payments and banking infrastructure, and let the distribution network do the rest.

The filter that governs every investment decision is the same question applied to every candidate: is money movement structurally embedded in what this platform does? If the answer is yes, the switching cost for customers is high, the revenue is recurring by nature, and the platform becomes harder to displace over time. If the answer is no, it does not pass the filter regardless of the growth story attached to it. On the Q4 2025 earnings call, Priore described the approach directly: “We have a broad funnel but a very narrow filter for what comes through and we think is additive and accretive.” The result is a portfolio weighted toward industries that are structurally resilient rather than merely fast-growing. According to Adyen and BCG’s embedded finance research, the total addressable market for embedded finance across payments, capital, accounts, and card issuance stands at approximately $185 billion, with current penetration of only around $32 billion. The gap sits precisely in the fragmented, legacy-software verticals that Thomas Priore, whose background in structured finance and platform investing is profiled on Crunchbase, is targeting.

What Has Been Built and What Is Now Deploying

The clearest measure of whether a strategy is working is the deployments. Across 2025 and into 2026, Priority Tech Ventures has moved from a portfolio of early-stage positions to a set of platforms with named enterprise clients, competitive RFP wins, and measurable commercial results. Priore has described the transition as moving from construction mode to execution mode, and the evidence across two verticals makes the point.

In property management, Priority Commerce’s Prisma platform deployed across the portfolio of Apartment Management Consultants (AMC) in April 2026: 923 apartment communities across 26 states, managed by one of the country’s leading multifamily operators. Prisma converts all payment types to digital, embeds banking, bill pay, and rewards programs directly into the resident experience, and delivers measurable net operating income improvement at the property level. AMC’s CFO described the rollout’s impact in plain operational terms: measurable value for residents, efficiency gains for property managers, and an accretive lift to net operating income across the managed portfolio. The AMC deployment spans AMC’s full portfolio rather than a single pilot property, giving Prisma a reference account of the kind that accelerates enterprise sales cycles.

In payroll and benefits, Priority Rollfi was selected by Axos Bank in February 2026 following a competitive RFP process. Axos, one of the country’s most technology-forward financial institutions, will embed Rollfi’s modular, API-based payroll and benefits infrastructure directly into its commercial banking platform, enabling business clients to manage payroll, tax compliance, and employee benefits without leaving their banking relationship. The competitive RFP process is the critical detail: Rollfi was evaluated against alternatives and chosen on merit in a market that includes established payroll vendors with far greater name recognition. For Thomas Priore, that outcome validates the core thesis of Priority Tech Ventures. The platform being built on Priority Commerce’s infrastructure earned the win on competitive merit.

Why the Best Verticals Get Stronger When the Economy Gets Harder

The conventional fintech growth playbook chases consumer spending volume and enterprise software expansion cycles. Both are procyclical: they perform well when the economy is growing and contract when it is not. Thomas Priore’s vertical selection logic runs in the opposite direction. The industries Priority Tech Ventures targets are ones where economic pressure increases the addressable market rather than shrinking it. “We have very intentionally built countercyclical business lines that do well in economically challenging environments,” Priore told investors.

That logic runs across the portfolio. Payroll is non-discretionary in every environment: businesses meet it whether the broader economy is expanding or contracting. Rent collection does not pause regardless of housing market conditions, since property managers still need to process resident payments every month. Construction supply payments shift in composition as building activity moves between commercial and residential work, but the underlying transaction volume does not disappear. College sports NIL payments have grown into a recurring, compliance-heavy transaction category as conferences and athletic departments formalize payment infrastructure for student-athletes, a trend that holds regardless of broader economic conditions. Each of these industries carries its own demand cycle, but in each one, money has to move no matter what the wider economy is doing.

The Market Shift Validating the Thesis

Priority Commerce’s approach to vertical software is consistent with a well-documented shift in how embedded finance is being deployed across industries. The Adyen/BCG research identifies a structural transition underway: vertical SaaS platforms are evolving from software providers into financial operating systems for their industries, embedding payments, banking, and capital access directly into the workflows their clients depend on. The platforms that establish themselves as the financial infrastructure layer in any vertical become difficult to displace. That switching cost runs far deeper than a software migration: unwinding an entire financial operating model. Priore recognised this dynamic before it became a consensus view, describing Priority Commerce’s strategy as one built on finding platforms where “collecting, storing, lending, sending money was a core part of the value chain” and reinforcing that infrastructure with Priority’s payments and banking capabilities. The result is a portfolio where each vertical asset becomes stickier over time, rather than more replaceable.

The Scaling Phase Is Underway

Priority Tech Ventures is not yet a large contributor to Priority Commerce’s overall profit picture. CFO Timothy O’Leary acknowledged on the Q4 2025 earnings call that many of the division’s investments are still in an early, unprofitable stage of scaling. That is consistent with what Priore has said about the timeline from the start: the value of these verticals accumulates over years, not quarters, as platforms are integrated into Priority’s infrastructure, distribution is activated through Priority’s reseller network, and enterprise client relationships compound. The 200%-plus revenue growth in Q4 2025 and the Axos and AMC deployments in early 2026 suggest the activation phase is now in motion. Priore’s outlook for the division extends beyond the verticals already proven: Priority Tech Ventures continues expanding into construction, payroll and benefits, asset management, and sports and entertainment, including the NIL marketplace, with each addition applying the same filter that has governed every investment decision from the start. That same filter now extends across a widening set of industries, each one different on the surface, all connected by one constant: money movement is not optional, and the platform that owns the financial operating layer in any industry owns something that does not get cut.

Photo by Blake Wisz on Unsplash