Heartland Payment Systems made its money on the card swipe at the corner diner. Every time a customer paid with plastic, a processor took a small cut, and many small merchants had no idea how much. Robert Carr built Heartland around a sales force that knocked on restaurant doors and offered simpler deals. By its 2005 offering, the Princeton company handled card payments for tens of thousands of small businesses across the country.

Selling Door to Door

Robert Carr founded Heartland in 1997 after years in the payments business. He saw a market of small and midsize merchants that big banks treated as an afterthought. Heartland paid its salespeople well, kept them for the long run, and focused on restaurants, a business that runs on cards. It later published a Merchant Bill of Rights, a pledge to show merchants every fee they paid. The company grew quickly in an industry known for hidden charges.

A Breach, Then a Buyer

Heartland priced its offering at $18 a share in August 2005 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as HPY. In early 2009 it disclosed that hackers had broken into its systems and stolen card data, one of the largest breaches in history. The hacker Albert Gonzalez later went to prison for it. Heartland paid heavy settlements and pushed the industry toward end-to-end encryption. In 2016 Global Payments bought Heartland for about $4.3 billion.

Cover: The Harvesters, Léon Augustin Lhermitte. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for harvesters in a wheat field (the heartland).