More than 15 years ago, the CEO of Smokers Choice — a small smoke and tobacco shop based in New York with six employees to its name — made a decision that was risky, even for a high-risk business. He bought the software company that he was using for his point of sale (POS) system.

And he changed the game.

When Doug Nolan and his team founded FasTrax in the early 2000s, he was on a mission to create POS software that would actually fulfill the needs of those retail stores that support the sale of age-restricted products such as tobacco and liquor (and later, hookah, vape, CBD, and kratom). Stores like this have historically had a hard time finding POS systems and payment processors to help them run efficiently — or at all.

The idea was that operating a software company while also running merchant locations would mean he and his team could test out payment solutions in real time, in real-world scenarios, filling in the crucial gaps as they went along. Now, in 2025, Nolan’s company has 50 merchant locations throughout New York and Pennsylvania, with more than 100 employees, and FasTrax (with FTxPOS) has an executive team with more than 60 years of combined experience in retail, wholesale, and technology industries.

When asked how he got to this place of success, Nolan pointed to two things: safety and support, both from their payment processing partners, and the high-risk merchants they serve.

To support its merchants, FasTrax works in as much automation and identification as possible. A crowning jewel of FTxPOS is its real-time inventory tracking, which can get tricky when items are often sold both individually and in bulk.

Make a sale in the middle of an inventory count? No problem. The FTxPOS system will take a snapshot and account for everything so that detailed, specific reports are as accurate as possible. This system, along with the mobility of the PAX A80 and PAX A35, fixes a problem that used to close stores down to customers during inventory time.

In addition to keeping track of the amount of SKUs and merchandise that a smoke shop or other high-risk retail store can have, security is also of the utmost importance — not just for the payment processor and the merchant, but for the customer as well.

It’s one thing to check identification in person, but it’s another hurdle entirely to verify someone’s age and identity online in a card-not-present transaction.

“We have our identity program, which really works well to make sure that customers are of age online because the manufacturers need to make sure that they're 100% certified,” Nolan said. He added that the software includes features such as pulling potential addresses where a customer has lived to create an identity-verifying quiz question, as well as asking the customer to take a picture of themselves in motion “so that way we know that you're real and you're not spoofing with just the picture.”

This type of security and software development is what led to the partnership with North Developer.

As FasTrax’s software and security measures evolved, so did the specialty merchant businesses that they service, requiring a little extra support from their payment processing partners.

In its semi-integrated PAX setup, the first merchant that FasTrax brought to North in early 2023 was a specialty business that was selling CBD and had been cut off from its previous processor. Because North has over 30 years of experience supporting specialty businesses, the merchant was back up and running in a matter of days — from completely shut off to fully operational.

Nolan said that merchants in those businesses have historically struggled to forge equitable (and trusted) relationships with payment providers because of their business status as “high-risk” or specialty.

However, as a seasoned CEO, Nolan has taken a very upfront approach to boarding these businesses in addition to the holistic security measures that have been built into the software. Measures that are so tightly locked, North began evolving its underwriting and compliance processes to make sure it could not only support FasTrax to the fullest, but get all of its merchants onboarded as quickly as possible. This happens no matter how fast or how many (as most of FasTrax’s merchants operate in an enterprise volume) were being brought in to integrate.

Now, even though FasTrax is partnered with multiple payment processors, Nolan says that he values the relationship carved with North, and likens the partnership to a family — just like with his merchants — built on that security and support.

“My customers become my family because I know the pains that they're going through,” Nolan said. “With any partner there’s always new stuff to learn, but we have worked with a lot of payment partners in the past and I can’t say that I could find a better partner than North.”