Founded in 2014 by former co-founder of First Annapolis Consulting Bill Westervelt, Scott Reaser and Jeff Tassey and other leading paymenty industry advisors, McGovern Smith Advisors LLC is a leading payments industry advisory firm whose goal is to develop and implement strategies and related tactics for transitioning our clients’ businesses in the face of emerging technologies, increasing regulation, changing demographics and ever intensifying competition. The McGovern Smith team is comprised of veteran payments industry operators and consultants who have worked together for many years. We are committed to delivering exceptional value to our many and varied clients.
McGovern Smith offers strategic and tactical insights and advice to clients with respect to all forms of financial services and payment cards (debit, credit, commercial and prepaid) as well as merchant acquiring. Our clients include large and small financial institutions, payment card issuers, emerging fintech companies and many others.
Our principal specialty is advising financial institutions and new industry entrants on identifying, selecting, and negotiating payments industry relationships with industry processors, including fintech providers, card brand networks, merchant acquirers and others. We are intimately familiar with all legacy and fintech processors and delivery providers and bring valuable and unique perspective and advice to assist our clients in implementing relationships with partners based on strategic, risk, capability/functionality, contractual term, cost/pricing, and other critical factors.
Key Services
We approach all our engagements by embracing the core principles of:
We approach every engagement with an open and curious mind. We do not presume to know the answer to a client’s issues before we learn all we can about the topics at hand. We don’t simply wait for our turn to talk and then offer a “boilerplate” solution to a client’s issue. We listen, we think, and then we interact with our clients to ensure that the best possible result is achieved
While our firm is only a few years old, our partners all have 20 or more years of experience in their respective fields of expertise. We bring this experience, and the related insights it provides, to every engagement we support
Every partner at McGovern Smith Advisors provides the benefit of their experience and insights in a straight-forward, open, confidential and honest manner. We understand our role is to help our clients achieve their goals and that this can only be accomplished when clients are comfortable that their shared information will remain protected and confidential, thus enabling them to both share and receive valuable information and insights in an open and honest exchange of ideas
McGovern Smith works closely with its clients to ensure that all information needed to develop the best solution possible is gathered, understood and incorporated as appropriate. We view ourselves as part of the client team, not apart from the very people who engaged us.
We endeavor to ensure that anything we recommend to a client is something they can implement with, to the extent possible, a minimum of disruption to current operations and strategies.
McGovern Smith Advisors strives to “think outside the box” when approaching engagements to provide clients with creative, unique and actionable solutions. As General George S. Patton once said, “If everyone is thinking alike then someone isn’t thinking”. We think on behalf of our clients.