Financial Information Technologies, the Tampa, Florida company that trades as Fintech and sells payments and business software to the beverage alcohol industry, announced on October 13, 2026 that it had acquired Ground Signal, a New York provider of market intelligence and analytics on bars, restaurants and other on-premise venues. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Ground Signal's team, including founder Melki Ko and Dan Adams, will join Fintech and help lead the combined company's data and insights business.
Fintech said the deal is a step towards building the industry's most comprehensive platform for technology, data, payments and insights across the three tiers of the US alcohol market: suppliers, distributors and retailers.
What Ground Signal built
Ground Signal was founded in 2015 and is based on West 25th Street in New York, according to CB Insights. It built a market intelligence platform on proprietary consumer, menu, sales and location data sets that it has developed over more than a decade.
Drinks companies use the platform to see where consumers are spending their time, how their brands are doing on menus by market and channel, which products are gaining momentum and where shifts in the market create openings. In October 2024 it launched a product aimed at chain and national restaurant accounts, a part of the on-premise market where brands have had limited data on independent and chain venues.
Ground Signal says it works with many of the industry's leading suppliers and distributors, and describes its tools as AI-powered, combining its data with industry-specific AI models. Its stated aim is to give each tier of the business data-driven recommendations that help build brands and raise sales in bars and restaurants.
“Ground Signal was built on the belief that the best decisions come from connecting data that traditionally exists in silos,”
Why Fintech is buying
Fintech has spent more than 35 years handling invoices and payments between alcohol suppliers, distributors and retailers. It says it serves 320,000 businesses and more than 1.3 million business-to-business trading relationships in retail, hospitality and alcohol, and is backed by the investment firms TA Associates and General Atlantic.
That position gives Fintech large volumes of transaction and product data. Combining it with Ground Signal's view of what consumers order and where, the company plans to build a new generation of analytics and decision-support tools for the drinks trade.
Chief executive Tad Phelps said Ground Signal speeds up Fintech's ability to deliver what customers increasingly want, which he described as actionable intelligence. He said pairing Fintech's scale and reach with Ground Signal's market visibility would help suppliers, distributors and retailers understand trends and make better decisions.
The founder and the AI angle
Ko said Ground Signal was built on the belief that the best decisions come from connecting data that has traditionally sat in silos, and that joining Fintech greatly expands what is possible. He said the combined company could connect insights across all three tiers to help the industry understand consumers and anticipate shifts in the market.
Fintech also tied the purchase to its long-term artificial intelligence strategy. As the industry produces more data, it said, the biggest opportunity is turning that information into insights that improve commercial performance, spot emerging trends and help customers act faster. Ground Signal's proprietary data and models are meant to play a central part in that.
Neither company disclosed Ground Signal's funding history, revenue or headcount.
What happens to customers
Fintech said the combination will speed up the development of new products and services for planning and execution across the alcohol supply chain. It did not say whether Ground Signal's products would keep their name or be folded into Fintech's existing data services.
The practical result is that Ground Signal's view of menus, venues and consumer behaviour will sit alongside the invoice, payment, point-of-sale and price data that Fintech already handles for suppliers, distributors and retailers. Fintech says that pairing is what will let it offer analytics no single tier of the industry could build on its own.
