Proficient was built on a simple belief: that businesses operating in complex markets deserve a payment partner who understands the full picture — the technology, the banking relationships, and the capital structures that make a business actually work.
The payment industry is full of specialists — processors who handle volume but not complexity, ISOs who sell accounts but don’t own the infrastructure, lenders who provide capital but don’t understand the processing relationship underneath it.
Businesses that operate outside the standard model — high-risk categories, complex revenue structures, merchants that have been declined or terminated — end up stitching together relationships that don’t talk to each other. The processor doesn’t know the lender. The ISO doesn’t control the underwriting. The technology doesn’t connect to any of it.
Proficient was built to close that gap. One relationship that covers payments, technology, and capital — engineered around how a business actually operates, not how it fits into a risk matrix someone else designed.
Custom gateways, direct banking lines, merchant account placement, and chargeback management — across every category, including the ones most processors decline.
Payment software, platform integrations, gateway architecture, and the infrastructure built around the processing relationship — not bolted on after the fact.
Commercial financing brokered through a relationship that already knows the processing history — working capital, equipment financing, revenue-based lending, and more.
Founder & Principal Consultant
Phillip Trusela founded Proficient in 2019 after spending nearly two decades working across financial services, enterprise technology, and payment processing. He started his career as a Registered Representative at The Vanguard Group, where he learned how institutional money moves and how investment relationships are built. From there, he spent nearly four years as an Account Manager at UpCurve Cloud — a Google Premier Partner — consulting businesses on cloud infrastructure and building the technology advisory practice that would inform how Proficient approaches its clients today.
His entry into payments came through direct sales and consulting work with merchants across low and high-risk categories. What he found consistently was a market full of solutions that were either technically capable or relationally trustworthy — rarely both. Processors who could approve the account but had no interest in understanding the business. ISOs who built relationships but had no control over what happened upstream. Capital providers who underwrote based on financials, with no visibility into the processing infrastructure underneath.
Proficient was his answer to that gap. A company built at the intersection of financial services, technology strategy, and payment infrastructure — with a relationship-first approach that treats trust as the foundation, not a byproduct.
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