At the helm of Deluxe Corp. since 2018, Barry McCarthy is seeing a payoff from the company’s shift from paper-based to electronic payments.
Minneapolis-based Deluxe, which posted $2.1 billion in 2024 revenue, has seen its percentage of overall revenue attributed to its payments services, which includes merchant services and business-to-business payments endeavors, increase from 16.8% in 2020 to 31.7% in 2024. In 2020, its payments revenue came from treasury management and similar corporate payment services, like payroll and disbursements.
McCarthy is president and chief executive of the venerable payments company, once best known for printing checks. Checks have declined among some users, though they remain particularly popular in the B2B payments segment. Still, the portion of Deluxe’s overall revenue coming from check printing has decreased from 39.4% in 2020 to 33.1% in 2024. The Federal Reserve, in its most recent Payments Study with data from 2021, says the total number of checks paid was 11.1 billion, down from 13.6 billion in 2018.