And The Winner Is …Tonight’s 2014 Pymnts Innovator Awards

Think for a moment of the ease with which we swipe cards for everything from checking out of a store to getting cash from an ATM, how we’re even using smartphones to pay instead, and not to mention the exponential growth and innovation at the world’s second-biggest payments network during the digital age in which we live.

These paradigmatic shifts form the basis for this year’s selections for inductees into the Payments Hall of Fame and the Lifetime Achievements Award, both part of the Innovation Project event at Annenberg Hall on the Harvard University campus. Additionally, Innovator Awards in more than a dozen categories, including for the first time Women Driving Innovation in Payments, will be made this evening.

Hall of Fame inductees are Arthur Hahn, inventor of the magnetic stripe; Robert W. Selander, president and CEO of MasterCard; and George Wallner, inventor of the modern POS terminal. The Payments Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Frank McNamara, the founder of Diner’s Club.

Hahn, working with a small group of engineers at IBM in the late 1960s, found a way to incorporate a coded mag stripe on cards that not only streamlined the shopping experience but also made it possible to get money from a hole in the wall or ride the subway without paying in cash.

He also persuaded the National Retail Federation to accept the mag stripe as a standard that all merchants would adopt, clearing the way for issuers to upgrade their plastic cards and improve the transaction process.

Selander, former president and CEO of MasterCard, was the visionary who took the world’s second-largest payments network public during its 40^th anniversary in 2006. The move meant decisions at the company would no longer be based solely on what was good for the banks and financial institutions that previously owned the company, but for its shareholders overall. It freed MasterCard to innovate as the digital-payments age took hold, and the stock market has duly rewarded the company with a cumulative 500 percent return on the value of its shares since their debut.

Wallner, who together with his brother founded Hypercom, developed a system to deliver credit card authorizations to merchants’ terminals at high speed, meeting their need to expedite consumer payments at the point of sale using the mag-stripe cards they now preferred. That was last century. Now Wallner has a venture, LoopPay, which enables smartphones to be used for card-present payments.

And McNamara forgot his wallet at a New York City restaurant one day in 1949, and the rest is credit history. His wife paid the tab, and he returned a year later to pay for his meal with a cardboard charge card and his signature, a new idea at the time, and founded Diners Club International.

Innovators awards to be presented this evening include Women Driving Innovation in Payments, to be made by the Women’s Network in Electronic Transactions. W.net’s vision is to drive parity for women in payments.

The finalists for this new award are:
Diane Offereins, Discover Financial Services

Diane Scott, Western Union

Melissa D. Smith, WEX Inc.

Lisa Stanton, Monitise

Melissa Stevens, Citi.