Optix Merchant Group Named 2026 CardConnect Circle of Excellence Winner

This year, CardConnect, a Fiserv company, named Optix Merchant Group a 2026 CardConnect Circle of Excellence winner, recognizing us with its Emerging Partners Breakthrough Award. The award honors the most improved year-over-year growth among CardConnect's emerging partners.

We're proud of it — not because of what it says about us, but because of what it says about how we treat merchants. Here's why it matters to you, whether you're already one of the 1,100+ businesses we advise or you're just now hearing our name.

CardConnect is one of the largest payment processing platforms in the country and part of the Fiserv family. Through its partner network, CardConnect works with independent organizations like Optix to bring payment solutions to businesses of every size.

The Circle of Excellence program recognizes the best of those partners. Within it, the Emerging Partners Breakthrough Award goes to the emerging partner with the most improved year-over-year growth. In plain terms: of all the newer partners in CardConnect's network, our growth outpaced them all.

We want to be careful about how we talk about this, because growth numbers can be spun in a lot of directions. What we can say honestly is this: merchants keep choosing Optix, they keep referring us to other business owners, and the businesses we place with CardConnect stay and grow. That's what "most improved year-over-year growth" looks like from the inside — word of mouth doing its work.

It's also worth saying what the award is not. It's not a paid placement, and it's not a marketing badge we bought. It was awarded by CardConnect based on performance among its partners. That's it.

This isn't the first time a processor has recognized Optix's growth. In 2024, Aurora Payments named us Rookie Partner of the Year at the Aurora Partnership Summit — an honor given to the strongest-performing new partner in their network. We wrote about that award separately here.

Two different processors, two years apart, each looking at our results from the outside and reaching the same conclusion. Aurora and CardConnect don't share ownership, incentives, or any reason to praise us together. What they're both responding to is the same thing: merchants placed with them through Optix stay, grow, and refer other business owners. Recognition like this is a lagging indicator of merchant outcomes — which is exactly the kind we'd rather have than any marketing claim we could write ourselves.

The payments industry has a trust problem. Merchants get cold-called by strangers who claim to be "your processor," receive compliance notices that turn out to be sales pitches, and sign agreements whose fees only become clear months later. We've built our entire business around being the opposite of that.

That's why our Verify a Call guide exists. It's why we'll never ask for your Social Security number, date of birth, or banking credentials on a first call. It's why we publish our phone number and tell you to call us back at the number on our website rather than trusting an inbound caller.

External recognition is meaningful in this context for one reason: it's third parties checking our work. CardConnect measured our growth against every other emerging partner in its network — and, separately, the BBB now holds us to published accreditation standards as a BBB Accredited Business (we wrote about what that means and what it doesn't in its own post). Neither of them takes our word for anything — and that's exactly the kind of accountability we ask merchants to demand from everyone in this industry, including us.

Here's the part that matters most. This award doesn't change what we are.

Optix Merchant Group is not a processor. We don't process your payments, we don't mark up interchange, and we don't work for any single provider. We're an independent broker with relationships across the top processors in the nation — CardConnect, Aurora Payments, Payroc, and others — and our job is to match your business to the right fit.

That independence is precisely why the CardConnect award is notable. CardConnect is one of several processors we work with, not the only one. When they recognized our growth, it happened because we place merchants there when CardConnect genuinely is the right fit — and merchants stay because the fit works. The recommendation comes first; the recognition follows.

We're not planning to change anything except the amount of work we do for merchants. The award is a mile marker, not a finish line.

If you've been putting off a review of your processing costs, there's no better time. A free statement review takes less than 30 minutes, and there's no obligation — just an honest read of what you're paying, what you should be paying, and whether your current setup still fits your business.

Call us at (855) 999-4757 to schedule your free statement review, or reach out through our website any time.

Thank you to every merchant who referred us, stayed with us, or gave us the chance to earn your trust. Recognition like this is built on your word of mouth, and we don't take that lightly.