In this episode of The Sonny Ray Show, host Sunny Ray interviews Rohan, founder of Paygistix POS, a payments platform and point of sale solution that began in the restaurant vertical and has since expanded into retail. Rohan spent 20 years in technology, starting as a solutions architect at Microsoft before moving into fintech roughly a decade ago at Elavon in Manchester, England. He later worked with companies including North American Bancard, MacTech, Pax, Dejavoo, Visa Direct, Fiserv, Global Payments, and Grubhub, and built solutions for enterprises like Walmart, Disney, and Ashley Furniture. Rohan has built and sold two service based companies before launching Paygistix during the pandemic. The conversation covers why Paygistix stays processor agnostic rather than locking merchants into proprietary processing, how dual pricing and surcharge programs let merchants offer zero percent processing by passing the fee to card paying customers, and the two years of development it took to build a competitive POS platform. Rohan also discusses CEO Life, a networking platform for C-level executives inspired by Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, which reached 1,000 sign-ups within thirty days of launch.
A Microsoft-trained architect turned fintech founder on how processor agnostic, AI-driven POS tech gives merchants zero percent processing.
What is Paygistix POS and what are you building?
Paygistix is a payments platform, and what we're building is a point of sale solution. We started the journey as a restaurant solution, and after accomplishing the solution in the restaurant vertical we are now focusing on the retail vertical as well. At our core we are a payments company.
What unique problem are you solving, and why should people care?
The biggest challenge we're trying to solve right now is making the solution affordable for merchants, since processing fees have been the biggest pain point. We are an AI first company, and with artificial intelligence we try to do right by the merchant and mitigate whatever problem statements exist from the merchant's perspective.
What did 20 years in tech, starting as a solutions architect at Microsoft, teach you about running a business?
The biggest teaching from the inception has been understanding the problem statement. Once you're clear about what the problem is, you can strategically build a scalable solution around it. It's always about scalability, then operations and execution. Everything starts with the problem statement, and if you're not clear about it, building any solution becomes very difficult.
What surprised you most about how payments actually work once you got inside the industry, starting at Elavon?
My journey started about ten years back at Elavon, working with a level one payment gateway and solving core challenges from infrastructure to security to compliance. It was a huge learning curve. After Elavon I moved from Manchester to the United States and worked with North American Bancard, MacTech, Pax, Dejavoo, Visa Direct, and processors like Fiserv and Global Payments, plus Grubhub.
You built and sold two companies before this one. What did the first exit teach you that the second confirmed?
Both companies were service based. The first exit taught me how to move from a service journey to a product journey, how to scale enterprises, build a niche solution, and go for global distribution. The second exit was more about handing a finished solution off to another company and moving on to the next project as the market shifts.
Working at scale with companies like Walmart, Disney, and Ashley Furniture, what does that teach you that no startup can?
With big companies you can't just look at the challenge, you have to take a holistic, scalable approach because they never build for the short term. Your perspective changes. You have to understand the core problem and stay ahead of the technology because you're dealing with billions of data points, and mistakes can put you in a very challenging spot.
Toast and Clover tie merchants to their own processing. Why was staying processor agnostic the hill you chose to die on?
We were clear from day one that we wanted a processor agnostic solution so we could work with all channel partners, including more than five thousand ISOs. Those ISOs are veteran, established companies with people on the ground who understand the merchant and customer service. What they're missing is a great processor agnostic product, and that's exactly what we offer them.
Zero processing fees sounds impossible. Can you walk me through what dual pricing really does for the merchant?
Zero percent processing doesn't mean everything is free, someone has to take on the cost. We put merchants on a surcharge or dual pricing program, both fully compliant with state regulations, so the credit card processing fee passes to the customer who pays by card. Cash customers pay the listed price, which effectively makes it zero percent for the merchant.
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