Innovating and securing payments requires far more than a few well-placed tools. It takes systems, people and processes working in concert to authenticate identities, route transactions, evaluate risk and protect data at scale.
At Maverick Payments, that orchestration forms the foundation of the company’s innovation strategy, said Vice President of Product Justin Downey, who joined PYMNTS for the WNIP “Unsung Heroes” series.
Downey said Maverick’s mission for its platform begins with a simple commitment: reduce friction for legitimate customers and catch bad actors early. “We’re trying to let good customers flow through and, the fraudsters — we want to stop them,” he said.
Real-time identity checks and adaptive risk rules deliver that balance. Users with low-risk profiles move ahead without delay, while higher-risk cases are quickly routed to human specialists who can review them without slowing onboarding. The result, he said, is a system that moves fast while getting smarter over time.
Those enhancements have lifted performance meaningfully. Maverick now reduces onboarding time by 40% and increases approval rates by 15%, supported by automation and dynamic scoring tools designed to refine outcomes continuously.
The People Behind the Stack
Downey attributes much of that progress to the often unseen teams who build and maintain the company’s infrastructure. “You have these technology systems that are innovating constantly, and we have personnel that are behind that,” he said. “People that are extremely detail oriented, almost obsessive, but also working without friction as a team.”
Developers, product teams, supportive teams, creatives and engineers work together to streamline onboarding, tune risk models and strengthen routing logic. But Downey says the most critical contributors often sit outside Maverick itself, acting as unsung heroes.
“For me, I think it’s really the partner, the client who’s your customer,” he said. “They’re part of kind of the secret sauce of how a great technology company’s made.”
Client feedback informs everything from user experience improvements to fraud-detection refinements, giving Maverick real-time insight into how systems behave under real commercial conditions.
One of Maverick’s biggest behind-the-scenes upgrades is its routing intelligence. Downey describes an architecture in which the platform selects the optimal rail for each transaction based on reach, speed and redundancy.
“We’ve implemented smart routing logic … with dynamic selection for the optimal rail or path,” he said. Maverick effectively acts as a central hub connecting multiple processors and sponsor banks, which ensures “no downtime, minimal latency and a lot of overlap or redundancy.”
That redundancy helps the company maintain predictable outcomes even when a specific rail underperforms. It also supports faster onboarding and higher success rates by ensuring that traffic follows the most efficient available path.
Data Architecture as a Competitive Advantage
Data volume and architecture underpin Maverick’s scalability. The company tracks engagement patterns across onboarding and transaction flows, adjusts risk rules based on emerging behavior and separates critical functions into different operational tracks to reduce bottlenecks.
Downey says the goal is to help its partners grow without slowing down transaction, approvals or innovation. Running transactions and onboarding separately, supporting multiple processors and building flexible partner layers all create customization and guardrails that meet the unique needs of each institution.
Protecting Sensitive Data While Using It to Fight Fraud
Downey stresses that compliance and privacy engineering drive product design rather than exist as afterthoughts. “Compliance isn’t a checkbox, it’s embedded into our design,” he said. Maverick Payments shields sensitive card and bank account data while still generating insights that help risk teams detect fraud earlier.
He described it as a balance: protecting customer information while ensuring teams have enough visibility to act quickly and accurately without exposing private data.
Downey expects 2026 to accelerate progress in artificial intelligence, user design and system optimization. Those developments will enhance identity verification, routing precision and onboarding flows.
Maverick’s ecosystem is tied to, ultimately, a shared effort. Technology enables scale, Downey said, but it is people — inside the company and across its client base — who power innovation at scale.
