Pandemic Darlings The pandemic economy, in original documents
Home Profiles Melissa Townsley-Solis

Profiles · Principals

ProfilePerson

Melissa Townsley-Solis

Executive

PPP
Type
Person
Role
Executive
Programs
PPP
Updated

The profile

Co-founder and CEO of GIACT Systems, the Allen, Texas account- and payment-verification company whose checks Blueacorn used in its PPP process; GIACT was later sold and is now part of the London Stock Exchange Group.

Identity and role

Melissa Townsley-Solis co-founded GIACT Systems, LLC and ran it as chief executive from its founding in November 2004 through its sale to Refinitiv at the end of 2020. GIACT, based in Allen, Texas, sold account and payment verification: confirming that a bank account is real, open, and owned by the person presenting it, and scoring the payment for risk before money moves. The technical co-founder was her brother, Merlin Bise, who served as chief technology officer.

She is hard to find in the record under one name because she has used three. GIACT's own 2015 funding announcement calls her Melissa Brown; the 2020 Refinitiv materials call her Melissa Townsley or Melissa Townsley-Solis; she now goes by Melissa Solis.

Biography

By her own account in an Inbenta article, Townsley-Solis grew up in Fort Scott, Kansas in a family that relied at times on public assistance and has spoken about being dyslexic. Her formal education is not documented in the sources we have.

Her career before GIACT was roughly seventeen years in the insurance industry (Leaders in Payments podcast); a Crunchbase-listed iPromotion role is cited, but we do not have a copy of the listing.

She conceived a business around verifying checks and ACH payments, and Bise's team built the product (podcast); she dates the first customer to November 2004, describes the name as an acronym for "God Inspired Acts of Cooperative Thinking" and says the company pledged to give away a tenth of its earnings.

The company and its PPP role

Through its EPIC platform and services marketed under names like gVerify and gIDENTIFY, GIACT answers the questions a lender or merchant needs answered before trusting a bank account: is this account real and open, does this person own it, is the routing and account information valid, and does the payment look risky. By the time of its sale the company said it had more than a thousand customers, over a hundred employees, and had processed billions of transactions.

The House Select Subcommittee's December 2022 staff report lists GIACT among the verification tools Blueacorn used, alongside Plaid, Onfido, and IDology. GIACT did not make credit decisions, set eligibility rules, market loans, or collect a percentage-of-loan agent fee. It validated bank accounts.

GIACT sits in the same KYC category as Plaid.

Their own relief

We found no PPP or COVID-EIDL loan to GIACT in a search of SBA records under the company's name. The company had a private-equity majority owner from 2015.

No SEC, FTC, CFPB, or SBA inspector-general enforcement action against GIACT or Townsley-Solis appears in the public record, and neither is named in the House PPP-fraud report's roster of targets. A docket search surfaces no litigation naming her personally under any of her surnames.

The company has been a civil defendant in consumer-credit (Fair Credit Reporting Act-type) suits, such as Harmon v. GIACT Systems, LLC and Samuel v. GIACT Systems, LLC in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (CourtListener dockets); none located is a government enforcement action or an adjudicated finding against the company.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

GIACT changed hands twice. In 2015 Tritium Partners made what GIACT's release called "a majority investment" (GIACT release, the release names Bobby Mehta as an advisor). Refinitiv agreed to buy GIACT in November 2020 and completed the deal in December 2020 (Simpson Thacher notice and LSEG release); the announcements did not disclose a price, and the $610 million figure appears only in a later Inbenta article. Refinitiv was folded into the London Stock Exchange Group.

Townsley-Solis is now chief executive of Inbenta, a conversational-AI company backed by Tritium Partners, which moved its headquarters to Allen, Texas (Allen EDC); Inbenta appointed Merlin Bise chief technology officer effective January 2024 (Inbenta release).

Sources held in this archive

Original source documents and archived captures

Sources

Back to top