Young Payments Professional Scholar Spotlight — Louis LaMarca, Electronic Merchant Systems

Louis LaMarca has built his career in payments technology at Electronic Merchant Systems (EMS). And in many ways, his now decade-long career at EMS has helped build his interests, too.

A double major in Professional Sales and Marketing at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio, LaMarca was unsure of which path to take and in what industry to take it in when he graduated.

“Before I started at EMS, all I knew about the payments industry was when I swiped my card to buy something, it came out of my account. Simple enough.” LaMarca, now a member of ETA’s 2018 Young Payment Professional Scholars class, said in an interview with Transaction Trends.

In an industry as esoteric as payments, even an expert can get lost; for a short time at the start of career at EMS, LaMarca said, he felt overwhelmed and underinformed. It was not long after starting that he found a community of payments industry professionals at EMS committed to helping him grow in the industry, he said.

“Thankfully EMS has some incredibly intelligent people in their executive management team willing to help, and I was lucky to have one take me under his wing,” LaMarca said. With a top sales executive as his mentor and plenty of learning opportunities along the way, he says, LaMarca excelled and advanced through numerous positions at EMS. He now works as Assistant Director – Agent Channel, where he helps train new sales agents, advises experienced teams, conducts research into new verticals of business, and helps manage partnerships and relationships with vendors and other stakeholders.

The dynamic, innovative and sometimes abstruse nature of the payments industry, which once intimidated him, is now what keeps him engaged in the industry, LaMarca said. “The one thing that always keeps me on my toes is that the industry never stops,” LaMarca said. “My mentor Matt Shepard once told me ‘the day you think you know everything about this industry is likely the day you need to leave it.’ That is the motto I’ve developed my career around, to never stop learning.”

And his position, it’s a critical motto to take to heart. “From sales and marketing, to accounting and residual questions, and even risk and chargebacks side of the industry, I need to be up to speed on all of them in order to help agents build successful and thriving portfolios at EMS,” he said.

LaMarca says the huge array of new payments tech products, particularly online products like payments gateways, have empowered ISOs with the opportunity to help merchants boost sales through new online channels and connected mobile devices. And the rise of so-called “microtransactions” — in-app purchases in mobile games, for example — and other online payments will continue to not only shape the industry, but the way consumers interact with money in their personal lives, LaMarca says.

As for the payments technology that most excites him, the capabilities of biometrics to authenticate a transaction fascinate him. “What’s next?” he asks, “Chip implants with our payments stored with our car keys, house keys and other types of badges we need in our lives? Sounds futuristic, but then again, 10 years ago so did paying for lunch with a quick glance at my phone.”

YPP Spotlight Features is an editorial feature that highlights ETA’s Young Payments Professionals (YPP) Scholars to emphasize thought-leadership, storytelling and payments news. The 2018 ETA YPP Scholars represent the finest young minds across the payments technology ecosystem. You can read more about the program, which is sponsored by Discover Global Network, here.