Harlow Payments, a payment processing company founded in 2024 by former leaders of EVO Payments, today announced a personal pledge aimed at addressing the growing tension between rapid growth and operational stability in the payments and fintech industries. The pledge, titled "Seven Commitments We Choose to Practise," emphasizes discipline-first decision-making to mitigate risks such as rising chargebacks and operational losses.
The company's founders, who previously helped scale EVO Payments through its $4 billion acquisition by Global Payments, stated that the goal was "to build the one we wish existed when we were on the other side of the table." The pledge comes as industry research indicates that chargebacks are expected to exceed $40 billion globally by the end of the decade, and a small percentage of poorly vetted accounts drive the majority of operational losses. Additionally, over 60 percent of merchants rank reliability and support above price, and fixing operational issues after launch can cost several times more than addressing them upfront.
Harlow Payments noted that "speed without structure creates drag" and that "APIs don't fix broken operations; they just expose them faster." The pledge includes commitments such as pausing decisions when alignment is unclear, asking deeper operational questions before launch, prioritizing long-term stability over short-term momentum, and owning mistakes quickly to adjust systems rather than people.
Alongside the pledge, Harlow Payments released a Do-It-Yourself Toolkit with ten actions individuals can take to practice discipline, including writing down one rushed decision and identifying a skipped guardrail, reviewing a process that creates future problems, and tracking where temporary fixes became permanent. A simple 30-day progress tracker is also provided, with weekly steps to build consistency.
The company emphasized that the pledge is not limited to payments companies but can be applied by anyone building products, teams, or systems. Harlow Payments invites founders, operators, and professionals to take the pledge personally, use the toolkit, and share it with others, reinforcing that building durable systems starts with individual discipline and deliberate choices.
