Operating Group

Powering the future of financial technology.

Arrowhead Advisory Group is an operating group across payments, fintech, and education. We do not spread capital across passive bets. We build the brands ourselves: Echelon Institute, Penumbra (with Penumbra for Platforms), and 0030 Payments.

See the Portfolio
Arrowhead
Advisory
0030
Payments
Echelon
Training
Penumbra for Platforms
Platform
Penumbra
Orchestration
4
Operating brands
under one parent
15
Patents filed
across the portfolio
2026
Founded
Pensacola, Florida
Long-term
Generational lens
on every brand we run
Networks we work with or plan to integrate: Worldpay Adyen Fiserv Stripe TSYS FedNow RTP Visa Mastercard American Express Discover NMI Chase Paymentech Elavon Heartland Global Payments NACHA
What We Do

Three places where modern merchant services break.

Modern software platforms increasingly run payment processing inside their own product. Building and operating that infrastructure is hard, and the cracks show up in predictable places. Our portfolio brands sit at each of these intersections.

Margin Drag

Fees that nobody can fully explain.

Interchange misclassification, stale processor agreements, suboptimal routing. Most platforms are overpaying and do not know by how much. Penumbra's orchestration layer was built specifically to surface and route around this drag.

PayFac Build

Building merchant services from zero.

Bank-sponsored acquiring, BIN/ICA sponsorship, sub-merchant underwriting, risk, compliance, and go-live. 0030 Payments is our merchant services brand, built to do exactly this work end to end.

Operator Bench

People who actually understand the stack.

Echelon Institute is our white-label education platform. Organizations deploy a fully branded training and credentialing program under their own name. We use it to train our payments operators and license it across 30+ industries, from bar exam prep to insurance licensing to vertical SaaS customer education.

Our Portfolio

Four brands. One operating spine.

Each brand stands on its own. Each one compounds the others. We build, hold, and operate them all from a single operating group.

0030 Payments Merchant Services · Processing

0030 Payments

Our merchant services and processing brand. Bank-sponsored payment processing for ISOs, SaaS platforms, and merchants. Targeting direct BIN/ICA sponsorship, interchange-plus pricing, multi-processor routing, and broad vertical coverage. Pre-launch.

0030.io
Penumbra Payment Orchestration & Infrastructure

Penumbra

Our payment orchestration and infrastructure brand. Production API live. Multi-provider failover. 15 provisional patents filed across orchestration, AI compliance, and payment intelligence. Built gateway-agnostic so the customer is never locked in.

penumbrahq.com
Certification & Training

Echelon Institute

Our white-label education and certification platform. Thirty-plus industry lanes mapped, payments and legal shipped, the rest in content production. Organizations deploy a credentialing program under their own brand. Learners never see Echelon. Live at echelon.institute.

echelon.institute
Penumbra for Platforms Operations & ISO Platform

Penumbra for Platforms

The portfolio surface of Penumbra for ISOs and embedded-payments teams. Merchant boarding, residuals reconciliation, hierarchy, chargebacks, and equipment management on the Penumbra orchestration core. Live at penumbrahq.com/for-platforms.

penumbrahq.com/for-platforms
Our Domain

The three layers we operate in.

Payments is not one industry. It is at least three: the infrastructure, the intelligence layer that runs on top of it, and the vertical software that consumes it. We have a brand operating in each.

Payments Infrastructure

Bank-Sponsored Acquiring

BIN/ICA sponsorship, PayFac architecture, multi-processor routing, interchange optimization, and compliance across the US and Canada. Our 0030 Payments brand is building this stack from the ground up.

Orchestration & Intelligence

The Layer Above the Rails

Purpose-built decision components for underwriting, routing, fraud detection, and compliance automation, coordinated by an AI orchestrator. Deployed through Penumbra. 15 provisional patents filed. Multi-provider failover live in production.

Operators & Education

Who Actually Runs Payments

Operator talent is hard to find, harder to train, and rarely portable across verticals. Echelon Institute is our white-label education and credentialing platform. Customers train staff, partners, or members under their own brand across thirty-plus industry lanes. Payments and legal are shipped today; healthcare, real estate, securities, faith and nonprofit, and more in content production.

What We Believe

Build, hold, and operate. No passive bets.

Most groups buy companies and let them run on autopilot. We do the opposite. Every brand inside Arrowhead Advisory Group is built in-house, operated by our team, and held with a generational lens. We are not in the business of selling them off as soon as the multiples look right.

Operate, do not just invest

We run what we own.

Every operating brand has direct leadership accountability inside AAG. No portfolio company drifts.

Build defensible IP

15 patents and counting.

Provisionals filed across payment orchestration, AI compliance, and payment intelligence. The defensible layer underneath every brand we run.

Long-term, generational

Compound, do not flip.

We bring a multi-decade lens to every brand. Operational execution today, compounding value across years.

Get in touch.

Tell us about your platform and what you're trying to build, fix, or operate. One conversation, no obligation.

Contact Arrowhead