He was 24 when he started the company, and according to one profile he had already lost his father at 16.
Philip Fayer's early life, as that profile tells it, was unsettled: born in Montreal, raised partly in Belgium and Israel, then sent to a military school in the United States. It is a secondary account and should be treated with care. But it fits a pattern the later record supports. Fayer was a young man in a hurry.
What almost nobody knew until the share price began to climb was how personal that choice was.
He started Pivotal Payments in 2003 while taking time away from Concordia University. He never went back. Payments is a brutal trade to enter: margins are thin, banks decide who gets processed, and merchants leave the moment a competitor undercuts them. He had to build trust in an industry that had little reason to give it.
Goldman Sachs invested in 2006, a vote of confidence for a business still small by Wall Street standards. Years later came the decision that defined him. A rival wanted to buy the company, and Fayer turned the sale down. He took money from Novacap and CDPQ in 2017 instead and kept control.
What almost nobody knew until the share price began to climb was how personal that choice was. A sale would have made him wealthy at once. Staying meant years more risk. Pivotal became Nuvei in 2018, bought SafeCharge in 2019, listed in Toronto in 2020 and Nasdaq in 2021.
The fall-out arrived on the same schedule as the success. Short seller Spruce Point attacked management and accounting in December 2021 and again in April 2023. Nuvei rejected the claims, and a related class action was discontinued in February 2023. In September 2026 the FTC filed a complaint over merchant screening.
In November 2024 Advent International took the company private for about US$6.3bn, or US$34 a share. Fayer kept a stake of about 24% and stayed as chair and CEO. Revenue was roughly US$1.19bn in 2023.
For a first-time founder, the lesson sits in that turned-down offer. Fayer left a university without a degree, but he understood early that the real prize was owning the outcome, not cashing out of it.