Published by Wanda Rich
Posted on July 2, 2025
Priority, the payments and banking fintech, announced impressive first quarter 2025 financial results, with strong growth across its unified commerce platform and continued diversification of revenue streams.
Priority reported $224.6 million in revenue for Q1 2025, representing a 9.2% increase from $205.7 million in the same period last year. The company's adjusted gross profit rose significantly, climbing 14.2% to $87.3 million, with adjusted gross profit margin expanding by 170 basis points to 38.9%. Operating income also saw substantial growth, increasing 16.4% to $32.6 million, while adjusted EBITDA grew 10.7% to $51.3 million.
Thomas Priore, Chairman and CEO of Priority, attributes this success to the company's strategic vision of unified commerce – an integrated approach combining payments, banking, and operational tools on a single platform.
"Strong first quarter growth in revenue and profits continues to demonstrate the value of our Priority Commerce Engine, purpose-built to help our customers accelerate cash flow and optimize working capital," said Priore. "We delivered consistent results across each of our SMB Acquiring, B2B Payables and Enterprise Payments segments."
The company's performance demonstrates the effectiveness of its unified commerce strategy across all business segments. The SMB Payments segment generated $151.7 million in revenue, processing over $15.3 billion in merchant bankcard volume. B2B Payments saw revenue of $23.9 million, while Enterprise Payments produced $50.1 million in revenue with particularly strong growth in its CFTPay service, which now averages over 940,000 billed clients – a nearly 34% increase from Q1 2024.
"The blend of the diverse and counter-cyclical aspects of our platform combined with relentless execution to gain market share in traditional payment segments reinforces that Priority's technology, operations and vision have positioned us to excel through the remainder of 2025 and beyond despite an uncertain macro-economic environment," Priore noted.
Priority continues to expand its customer base, now serving over 1.3 million active customers across its SMB, B2B, and Enterprise channels. The company processes approximately $135 billion in annual transaction volume and administers over $1.3 billion in account balances.
Looking ahead, Priority maintained its full-year 2025 guidance, projecting revenue between $965 million and $1 billion (representing 10-14% growth), adjusted gross profit between $360 million and $385 million (10-17% growth), and adjusted EBITDA between $220 million and $230 million (8-13% growth).
This performance builds on the momentum established in 2024, when the company achieved 16% revenue growth to $879.7 million and 21% adjusted EBITDA growth to $204.3 million. Priority's unified commerce platform encompasses the Priority Commerce Engine at its core, which serves as the technology foundation for its suite of integrated financial solutions.
Priore's focus on unified commerce represents a significant evolution in how businesses manage their financial operations. "Our unified commerce vision—which has delivered five-year compound annual adjusted EBITDA growth of 19.8% through the end of 2024—will convince our current and future stakeholders that Priority routinely stays ahead of the market trends and its technology, operations, and decision-making are geared for the future of payments and banking," Priore said during the company's earnings call.
This approach addresses the growing fragmentation of financial services that businesses have historically faced. From processing customer payments to paying vendors and handling banking relationships, these essential services have traditionally created inefficiencies and operational challenges. Priority's integrated platform aims to streamline these processes through a cohesive system.
The business benefits of this unified approach include operational efficiency through eliminating redundancies across previously separate systems, enhanced cash flow via automated payables and expedited payment processing, improved financial transparency through real-time insights, and scalability that allows businesses to adapt to growth without overhauling existing systems.
"The Priority Commerce engine is purpose-built to streamline collecting, storing, lending, and sending money, and delivers a flexible financial tool set for merchant services, payables, and banking and treasury solutions to accelerate cash flow and optimize working capital for businesses," Priore stated.
Unlike some fintech companies positioning themselves as disruptors seeking to replace traditional banks, Priore's approach emphasizes collaboration with existing financial institutions. "Our tightly coupled platform creates an important benefit for Priority's long-term prospects. It allows our partners to choose your adventure, as we like to say, and evolve their offering to respond to opportunities as we add features in collaboration with their goals. Both parties have a clear line of sight to quantify and access revenue growth opportunities," Priore elaborated.
Priority has instead positioned itself as a technology partner that helps banks enhance their offerings through modern financial tools. This collaborative strategy acknowledges that banks increasingly view payments as a source of fee-based revenue and deposits, creating opportunities for partnerships that benefit all parties.
The company's vision extends to emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, which Priore sees playing an important role in areas such as predictive insights, risk management, and optimization of cash flow in supply chains and vendor management.
"Our customers and current market conditions reinforce our belief that systems facilitating payments and banking solutions to accept and distribute funds in multi-party environments will be critical as businesses put greater demands on software and payment solution providers to unlock value in existing and developing channels," he explained.
To illustrate the practical application of Priority's unified commerce approach, Priore highlighted a recent implementation with the Minnesota Wild hockey team: "Not only did we step in and execute the team’s ticketing more efficiently, they’re also benefiting from our banking transparency and acceleration of cash flow. Because we've combined payments and banking on a single platform, think about it this way: every single area of revenue that flows through at the stadium level or anything attached to the enterprise, instead of all that going into a single settlement bucket, we can parse it out like a clearing account."
With its continued strong performance in Q1 2025, Priority demonstrates that its unified commerce approach is resonating with businesses seeking more efficient, integrated financial solutions. As the transformation of payment processing into comprehensive financial platforms continues, Priority is well-positioned to capitalize on the fundamental shift in how businesses manage their money.
