Allentown’s Shift4 Payments has IPO, rings bell at NYSE

A big day for an Allentown company today.

Not only did Shift4 Payments Inc. have an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange this morning, it became the first company to get to ring the bell opening the NYSE since the COVID-19 crisis shut down the trading floor.

“This was a great symbol for our company, and also I think for our country… Our country is healing,” said Jared Isaacman, founder and CEO of Shift4.

Isaacman launched the company 21 years ago out of his parents’ basement at the age of 16. He said his first investor was his grandfather who gave him $10,000 to help start up the business.

It was his grandfather, Seymour Isaacman that told him that being on the NYSE was the pinnacle for any business and made the IPO Jared’s top goal since he started.

The company made the IPO of 15 million shares of the stock, which was listed as “NYSE:FOUR” on the NYSE, at $23 per share.

Isaacman purchased $100 million of the stock keeping him as the largest single shareholder in the business.

By midday the stock was selling for $34 per share, a slightly more than 48% increase.

Isaacman said the company, which makes point-of-sale ordering and payment processing solutions, primarily for restaurants, originally had a target date of mid-March for the IPO, but stopped the process when the COVID-19 crisis hit.

He started seeing improvements in the nation’s economy and decided now was the time to make the IPO.

Isaacman said he’s excited to have “a lot more shareholders” to answer to and to use their investment to strengthen the company’s balance sheet so that they can take advantage of any growth opportunities that may present themselves in the future.

His largest private equity investor to date was Searchlight Capital, which invested in the company in June 2016 and helped it to expand to its current size.

The company’s most recent product launch was in direct response to the shutdown of restaurants during the COVID-19 crisis.

With restaurants only being able to offer takeout and delivery – something many of them had never done before – his team adapted Shift4’s SkyTab point-of-sale ordering and payment system so that it could be quickly adapted for restaurants using the technology for the first time for delivery and takeout and launched the product SkyTab Takeout.

Now that the IPO is complete, Isaacman said it’s back to business.

“Putting the IPO together was fun, but it was also a big distraction,” he said. “We’re going to keep this big growth engine going.”