Although Thomas Rouse founded Dallas-based TransFirst as ACS Merchant Services in 1995—and acted
as its chairman and CEO until 2007—for the first five years it “was just a few people working out of a garage and then a small office,” says Andrew Rueff, who joined the company in 2000 and now is senior vice president of corporate development.

During those first few years, growth was limited to “adding agent banks wherever we could and outsourcing almost 100 percent of what we were doing,” adds the former vice president of mergers and acquisitions for Atlanta-based processor Nova Corp. (now Elavon).

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