Recently, The Motley Fool's Matt Koppenheffer interviewed Jason Oxman, the CEO of Electronic Transactions Association at the ETA Transact 2014 conference.
Oxman has decades of experience as he's worked as the senior vice president of industry affairs at the Consumer Electronics Association, as well as general counsel for the Association for Local Telecommunications Services and vice president at Covad Communications Company. His past and current experiences give him great ability to analyze the climate of the payments technology industry and gauge its evolutionary movements into alternative payments.
In the following video, Matt and Jason explore the possibilities of the industry. Matt asks Jason where he sees the industry moving over the next five years and the question has Jason diving into many of the complexities of the changing landscape.
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Matt Koppenheffer: Closing out, let's finish off with, what's one thing that you're the most excited about in the industry over the next five years, and maybe one of the biggest challenges for the industry over the next five years -- and let's flip it, just so we end on an optimistic note!
Jason Oxman: OK. I think one of the biggest challenges for the industry in the next five years is ensuring that consumers remain confident in the use of electronic payments.
There's been a lot of noise lately about data breaches and protection of information at retailers. There have been a number of high-profile retailer breaches in recent months, and of course there's always the fear that there will be more, because there are sophisticated global criminals who are constantly seeking out fraudulent benefits of their labor.
The concern, I think, for the industry is not that the payments networks are insecure; payment systems are very secure, and the breaches of the retailers have been breaches of the retailers' own systems.
The question is, can we all work together across industries to deploy the type of technical solutions we need to deploy, like end-to-end encryption, to make sure that retailer systems are encrypted, as well as the payment networks.
Tokenization, to protect payment data online and with mobile devices, so that consumers remain confident in using electronic payments when they shop at retail -- that will be good for everybody. That's the challenge.
The biggest opportunity I see for the next five years is the migration to mobile. No question about it for our industry, this is the most significant technological change in our industry in 40 years, since the mag stripe was first deployed.
That migration to mobile really opens up huge new opportunities for our industry to move beyond payments viewed as a commodity, and more as payments viewed as the most vital component of a commercial transaction that takes pace online, in brick and mortar, on the phone, on the tablet -- wherever it is.
That, I think, is a huge opportunity for our industry.
Koppenheffer: Great. Jason, thank you so much for joining me. I've got to say, that is a fantastic bow tie.
Oxman: I would say exactly the same to you! This is definitely the most sartorially impressive interview that's taken place on the show, thus far.
Koppenheffer: Thank you very much.
Oxman: Thanks for being here at Transact.
Koppenheffer: Take care.
