Applause Please! 2014 Payments Hall of Fame® Inductees and Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Announced

What do Bob Selander, Arthur Hahn and George Wallner all have in common? Well, two things, actually.

The first is that they changed the course of payments in a very material way – in fact so material that what they did has stood the test of time and has defined the way payments and commerce is conducted to this very day.

Second is that they will be recognized for their contributions for their path-breaking contributions to payments and commerce by being inducted into the Payments Hall of Fame® on March 20, 2014.

This ceremony will be held as part of the 2014 PYMNTS Innovators Awards Dinner, which will be held in Annenberg Hall on the campus of Harvard University beginning at 6 p.m. And all will be on hand to receive their awards.

These extraordinary individuals saw the future before many, no most of us could have even dreamed of it.

 Arthur Hahn | Inventor of the Magnetic Stripe
Thanks to Arthur Hahn, we’re all pretty spoiled when we go shopping at physical retailers. The card swipe that today takes literally nanoseconds is made possible because of something that Arthur and his small team of engineers at IBM did to incorporate a coded mag stripe on the back of a plastic (or paper) card. Until then, credit cards were plastic but they had nothing with which to encode data that could be used to authenticate a user or a transaction and to streamline the check-out process.

That meant that going to a store and presenting a card was sort of like writing a check. When a card was presented, cashiers had to check a book, well actually three or four different books depending upon which card was presented, to see if the card was lost or stolen. Books were updated and sent to stores weekly. Depending on the amount of the transaction, a phone call was made to the bank to provide an authorization. It took forever, and then some.

Hahn, working with a small group of engineers at IBM, found a way to incorporate a coded mag stripe on these cards that not only streamlined the shopping experience but made it possible to get money out of an ATM or present a ticket to ride the subway. As significant was Hahn’s power of persuasion in convincing the National Retail Federation to accept it as a standard that all merchants would accept, greasing the skids for issuers to upgrade their plastic cards and improved the transaction process. When used in conjunction with the electronic terminals invented by our third hall of fame inductee, the point of sale experience that has defined payments for more than three decades in the US was ignited.
 Robert W. Selander | President and CEO of MasterCard Bob Selander took the reins as president and CEO of MasterCard in 1997 after a 20-year career with Citibank where he was credited with developing its global branch network and managing its Diners Club International credit card business. But the mark that he made on payments goes well beyond his accomplishments in running the world’s second largest payments network.

Selander was visionary who decided that life as a publicly traded company was the best way to unlock value for its issuers, merchants and customers as payments would continue to evolve. So, in May of 2006, during MasterCard’s 40th anniversary year celebration, his goal was accomplished – MasterCard pioneered the transition of a bankcard association to a public corporation, beating Visa by two years. Might sound easy, but it was incredibly complicated and fraught with peril. The $2.4 billion raised during that IPO was one of the largest public company offers in 2006 and changed its governance structure from one that was owned by banks and financial institutions to one owned by and accountable to shareholders.

But that wasn’t the only thing that changed. MasterCard, with its new structure, was able to move faster. MasterCard now had the ability to create an innovation roadmap that has seen MasterCard break new ground on a variety of fronts as the digital payments age has taken hold. The stock market has rewarded it handsomely, too, with a cumulative 500% return on the value of its shares since it debuted now some 8 years ago.

 George Wallner | Inventor of the Modern POS Terminal
George Wallner’s plan to transform payments as we know it was hatched in his kitchen. The year was 1978, and he and his brother Paul, both engineers, had been tinkering with a few ideas focused on developing large telephone systems and data-collection networks. The problem they admit to developing by just “playing with technology” was a system to deliver credit card authorizations to merchant terminals at high speed. The Wallners recognized that merchants needed a way to expedite consumer payments at the point of sale using the mag stripe cards that they now preferred. And the company that they formed, Hypercom, to solve this problem was the first ever to enable the electronic payments that are the bedrock of the modern payments industry.

Hypercom grew into a global provider of POS terminals and support networks. Wallner served in various roles there, including CEO, chairman and chief technologist, taking the company public in 1997 and retiring 7 years later. One might assume that he had nothing really left to prove in payments, but one might be wrong.

In 2006, Wallner went on to invest in ROAM Data, a leading vendor of mobile card-acceptance equipment and software that was later acquired by Ingenico in early 2013. His latest venture, LoopPay, really comes full circle. It has developed a practical mobile-payment solution that enables smartphones to be used for card present payments at the point of sale without requiring merchants to install any new hardware or software – leveraging the technology standard that powered the point of sale terminals he invented some two decades before.

The Payments Lifetime Achievement Award is an award presented to someone who has truly left a mark on the payments world over a long period of time. This year, that award will be presented to the family of  Frank McNamara, the founder of Diner’s Club.

Lucky for us that in 1949, this businessman both forgot his wallet and the much needed and used checkbook back then, when he went out to dine at a New York City’s Major’s Cabin Grill restaurant and was embarrassed enough to actually want to fix the problem for all of us, forever. In 1949, McNamara’s wife rescued him by bringing his checkbook and paying the tab.

A year later, he and his partner went back to the same restaurant. But at the end of meal, instead of pulling out cash or a checkbook, McNamara presented a small cardboard card, the Diners Club card, to the waiter that would allow him to eat that day but pay later. At that time, only a handful of people had a card and a handful of restaurants would accept it. But it wasn’t long before Diners Club ignited as did the concept that paved the way for the general all-purpose credit card that drives trillions of dollars in spending around the world.

Bob, Arthur, George and the McNamara family will all be on hand to receive their awards. It promises to be a special part of our 2014 Innovators’ Award dinner.

We hope you’ll join us to help us celebrate their accomplishments. After all, how often do you have the chance to meet and shake the hands of payments industry legends?

For tickets to the dinner, please contact pbitner@pymnts.com . And for information on how you can meet future hall of famers and lifetime achievement award winners at The Innovation Project 2014, please click here to get on the list!