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The Story of ETA and the Future of Payments

By Jason Oxman, CEO, Electronic Transactions Association

The Electronic Transactions Association’s journey began on July 16, 1990 in Denver, Colorado.  Inside the Stapleton Plaza Hotel downtown, outside the Arapahoe A conference room, a sign read, “The Future of the Merchant Processing Business and Bankcard Services Association Chartering Meeting.”

Attending a related industry conference, this small group of men and women — true leaders of the payments industry, many of whom represented companies that have since been acquired or changed names — came together with a modest $14,000 budget and a clear goal.  They voted that day to form a group dedicated to representing the interests of the payments business. With that inaugural meeting, the Bankcard Services Association was born, made up of a small group of processors and ISOs that recognized the acquiring side of the payments industry needed its own trade association.

 

What the founders could not have known is that the acquiring association born that day would come to represent the world’s most innovative industry.  After all, the Electronic Transactions Association — the name BSA would adopt in 1996 — was born into a much different world. The payments industry was a straightforward one, focused on enabling magnetic stripe plastic card acceptance at the retail point of sale on behalf of financial institutions. Back in 1990, the Internet was still limited to universities and researchers, and the World Wide Web had not yet been invented.  The smartphone was still two decades away.  It was the age of analog.

At the dawn of electronic payments, there were no APIs, no smart terminals, no instant payments, no mobile wallets, no chip card readers (at least in the U.S.). There was one principal sales channel – the ISO. Visa and Mastercard, now mainstay brands that are among the largest publicly traded companies in the world, were themselves associations owned by their issuing banks. The Discover Card was owned by Sears, the nation’s largest retailer at the time. First Data was a new name — most of BSA’s charter members would have known it as American Express Information Services Corporation.

The analog days are over. The payments industry is now the payments technology industry as software and tech firms collaborate with financial institutions to bring merchants and consumers the seamless and secure payments experience they demand.  And as ETA innovates and changes after three decades as the  voice of the payments industry, it makes sense that ETA should look different too.

Today, I’m proud and excited to officially introduce ETA’s new logo.

As your voice and your community, ETA advocates, educates and brings together a diverse coalition of companies from across the globe. From the world’s biggest financial institutions, to Silicon Valley’s blue-chip firms, to over 500 software vendors, value-added resellers, payment facilitators, FinTech startups and developers, ISOs and processors, every corner of this robust and dynamic ecosystem is part of ETA. ETA has invested tens of millions of dollars into developing events, educational content, political advocacy and industry research that advances the payments technology ecosystem. Our logo needs to convey the novel, forward-thinking, fast-moving, innovative industry that we proudly represent.

Our new logo is a natural evolution but deliberate departure from ETA’s previous look and feel. It focuses forward, invoking the interconnectivity and diversity of our members on a worldwide scale. The tech-inspired geometric lowercase lettering is built from circuit-like forward-moving elements, representing and invoking the global flow of trillions of electronic transactions that our members enable.

Our global, interconnected economy is approaching a cashless future, built on payments enabled by our members through innovative POS solutions, quick and ultra-secure e-commerce, the Internet of Things, blockchain, mobile and smart platforms, smart collaboration and partnerships.  Our new logo projects what has been true of our organization since its founding day — that ETA is the pulse of the payments industry.