om Wimsett is a man with his eyes on the prize: building a world-class payments company. The former President and Chief Executive Officer of National Processing Inc. (which runs NPC, one of the nation's largest acquirers of MasterCard and Visa transactions) has re-emerged after a six-month hiatus that included some time on the golf course but a lot more time with venture capitalists bullish about the payment space.

"I realized I was never going to make it to the PGA Tour," he joked during an interview.

That's OK, though, because Wimsett has partnered with GTCR Golder Rauner, LLC, the private equity investment firm that already owns about a half-dozen companies in the payment space, including card terminal manufacturer VeriFone, Inc.; card acquirer TransFirst Holdings, Inc.; Genpass, Inc., which specializes in EFT transaction processing; and Transaction Network Services, Inc., which supports data communications services for card processing networks.

GTCR has agreed to provide up to $200 million of equity capital to help fund the partnership venture, dubbed Iron Triangle Payment Systems, LLC and operating from offices in Louisville, Ky. Wimsett's plan: to leverage the $200 million from GTCR with debt and other investments to buy and combine smaller companies, building "a world-class payment processing company." He expects to eventually be working with $400-600 million in capital.

Wimsett, who left NPC (also based in Louisville) last fall, has an agreement with his former employer that he won't enter the merchant acquiring business until at least the fall of 2004, but that hasn't stopped him from looking for opportunities elsewhere in the payment space.

We caught up with Wimsett and Mark Schatz, another former NPC executive who has joined Iron Triangle as Executive Vice President, while they were scoping out potential acquisition partners at Payments 2003, the NACHA-The Electronic Payments Association conference in late April in Orlando, Fla. They're clearly bullish on ACH companies.

"We see stronger growth in this segment than we do in the traditional credit card acquiring business," Wimsett said.

The ACH, perhaps best known as the electronic network for direct deposit of pay, has been slowly creeping into the retail payment mainstream with applications such as electronic check conversion. Last year, the network increased transaction volume by 13.6%, which translates to almost a billion transactions.

According to NACHA's data, 8.05 billion ACH transactions valued at $21.7 trillion were sent by banks via the ACH last year. (Government-initiated payments, such as Social Security, bumped those numbers to 8.94 billion and $24.4 trillion, respectively.) Nearly a half-billion of those ACH transactions (490 million) were electronic check conversions, NACHA said.

Wismsett and Schatz are enthusiastic about prepaid card products, too. "There's no one in a clear leadership position in this space," especially as it relates to small to midsize merchants, Wimsett said.

Wimsett has a keen sense for that piece of the merchant market. While at NPC, he engineered a strategy to diversify its merchant portfolio, cutting loose its strong ties to national retail chains and focusing more keenly on small to midsize merchants. Before he left the company last September, NPC was adding 9,000 new merchants a month to its portfolio, Wimsett said, from mom-and-pop shops to regional chains.

Wimsett spent 19 years at National Processing, working his way up from data entry clerk to President and CEO, a position he held from 1999 to 2002.

During his time as CEO, National Processing sold and/or closed five business lines and 20 operating centers around the world while simultaneously increasing core revenues by more than 60% as core profits nearly doubled.

That Wimsett was able to secure the kind of funding he has for Iron Triangle is no small feat. After pumping a record $28 billion into the market in Q1 2000, venture capitalists have been closing the spigot on funding for start-up companies.

Data released by industry researchers suggests investments during Q1 2003 totaled a mere $3.8 billion. Just 131 companies received venture capital for the first time in Q1 2003, down from 180 in Q4 2002, according to the MoneyTree Survey, a research project of the National Venture Capital Association and other groups.

"We are thrilled to partner with Tom Wimsett to build a new company in the payment processing arena," said Collin Roche, a GTCR principal, in a statement announcing the deal. "We believe that there are numerous attractive, high-growth segments within the payments universe, and we are working aggressively with Tom to identify and pursue the best opportunities."