Credit card industry veteran Alex W. "Pete" Hart, who has fashioned a second career out of championing high-tech financial services companies, has joined the board of directors of Actrade Financial Technologies Ltd., a New York company that sells electronic payment technology for commercial trade.
It is the sixth board seat Mr. Hart has taken on since 1997, when he left the top post at Advanta Corp. and began working as a full-time consultant. He had been chief executive officer at Advanta for three years and before that had been CEO at MasterCard International, which he joined after a decade at First Interstate Bancorp, now part of Wells Fargo & Co.
Mr. Hart said that since leaving Advanta he has enjoyed the freedom of working for himself and having a say in the affairs of many different payments and financial services companies.
He is on the boards of Global Payments Inc., HNC Software, Sanchez Computer Associates, Silicon Valley Bancshares, and Corillian Corp. The president of Corillian, an e-commerce software vendor in Hillsboro, Ore., is Mr. Hart's son Alex. (An evenhanded parent, the elder Mr. Hart pointed out that another son also works in the financial services industry.)
Mr. Hart is also an adviser to two start-ups: Orbiscom Inc., which sells surrogate credit card technology, and Quest Products Corp., which markets a multi-application smart card product. He says his membership on the Actrade board will have him seeking out ways to use the company's commercial products in the credit card industry. Fourteen-year-old Actrade's leading product is the Electronic Trade Acceptance Draft Program, an irrevocable payment obligation negotiated between a buyer and seller for a specific sum to be paid on a set date through automatic debiting of a buyer's designated bank account.
"The Actrade customer typically exercises a transaction that is higher in value than in the credit card world, but I think a number of things could be done with credit card players," Mr. Hart said. He said it would be premature to discuss specific products.
"I think they have developed an approach to value exchange that serves the B-to-B market in a unique way," Mr. Hart said. "The leveraging of new technologies into new capabilities fascinates me.
I enjoy being actively engaged in companies that operate around that."
