Mark Stark.
Operator. Founder.
Founder and President of Epitychia Consulting. Over a decade in the rails — built the firm to do payments the way it should be done: transparently priced, technically rigorous, and operated end to end by the people who recommend the work.
Mark built Epitychia from the ground up to consolidate the cross-border payment stack under one operator. The processing rails are his — direct acquirer relationships, in-house banking partners, the FX corridor that settles to operators' home banks. No third-party specialist takes a spread between the customer and the settlement. The firm is structured as an ISO, a consultancy, and a payments processor running on its own rails — every layer of it operating under Mark's direction.
Background
Over a decade in the rails. Direct acquirer and bank relationships spanning merchant services, high-risk verticals, and cross-border corridors. Hands-on experience structuring deals on every layer of the stack — interchange, scheme posture, MOR positioning, multi-acquirer routing, FX strategy, embedded finance, foreign-owner underwriting.
The thesis behind Epitychia: most foreign-owned operators selling to US customers are stranded between aggregator-driven platforms that terminate on the first chargeback wave and generic incorporation services that leave the merchant processing problem unsolved. The firm closes that gap by holding the banks, operating the processing, and running the cross-border corridor in-house — so one operator is accountable from accept to settle.
What Epitychia does today
- US merchant processing — placed on the firm's own rails for operators in supplements, beauty, peptides, electronics, apparel, B2B exports, and adjacent high-touch consumer categories.
- Cross-border settlement — accepts USD on the front end, converts on the back end, settles to the operator's home bank in CNY, MXN, AED, VND, KRW, NGN, or USD-held. No intermediary FX specialist takes a spread.
- Wyoming LLC + US banking + EIN packages — operated end to end through in-house banking partners with non-resident-owner onboarding flows.
- Six cross-border corridors — China, Mexico, UAE, Vietnam, Korea, and Nigeria. Each with its own banking, FX, and compliance posture tuned to the operator's home market.
How I work
Strategy calls run 45 minutes. The conversation is your operation, your numbers, your timeline — followed by a clear engagement letter with scope and fees within a week. I take every new-client strategy call myself before handing the engagement to the team for execution. The firm is sized to keep that pattern sustainable.
How I write
Most pieces in Insights are written from inside the engagements — not from theory. The strategic and corridor-level pieces are mine; the technical implementation pieces are from Timmy; the client-facing operational pieces are from Kimberly Daskap. New pieces from the three of us roughly weekly.
How to reach me
The fastest path is a strategy call. Direct email: Mark@EpitychiaConsulting.com.
Tell us where you are.
A short pre-screening — your business model, volume, and what you're trying to do. We respond within one business day with a clear next step.