The Smart Card Forum has elected its third president.
William J. Barr, 49, was elected at the forum's fifth annual meeting last week in Washington to succeed Jean McKenna.
Mr. Barr, vice president during Ms. McKenna's two-year term, is executive director, information networking, for Bellcore, the Morristown, N.J., research organization owned by the Baby Bell companies.
Bellcore has agreed to be acquired by Science Applications International Corp. of La Jolla, Calif., which was closely involved in the development of the credit card industry's Secure Electronic Transactions standard.
Ms. McKenna, 50, a Visa International senior vice president, will remain on the Smart Card Forum board. She has led the group since Catherine Allen, a former Citibank officer and now chief executive officer of the Banking Industry Technology Secretariat, stepped down.
Ms. Allen and Mr. Barr have been credited with doing the early organizational groundwork for the Smart Card Forum, a unique educational alliance with representation from many industries.
Whereas Ms. McKenna was said to have brought technical and organizational expertise that the forum needed as it gained maturity, Mr. Barr has a reputation for both general and specialist skills as well as a knack for futuristic vision.
"I particularly appreciate Bill's ability to see the forest and the trees," said Michael H. Smith, general manager of Schlumberger Danyl, Moorestown, N.J., the smart card forum's secretary. "He has a good grasp of the details of issues, but he can also see sweeping trends affecting industries and technologies."
"The forum, like the rest of the industry, has to change," Mr. Barr said, "because the world around us is changing as well. Today there are additional organizations that can deliver certain kinds of things better than we can."
In its two days of Washington meetings, the group stressed its current themes of multi-application cards, system interoperability, and partnerships.
Mr. Barr said the focus will turn to industry education and public policy initiatives.
He inherits a fast-growing organization that over five years has doubled in size and diversified from an initial core membership of about 100 financial services and telecommunications companies. The travel and entertainment industry, for one, is represented in force.
"The forum has gone through a couple of years of transition from a young organization to a more mature organization," Ms. McKenna said. "We had members five years ago who knew nothing of chip-card technology. What has happened over the last five years is we have a lot of companies who are implementing that technology."
Ms. McKenna, a native of Glasgow, Scotland, presided over the move of administrative headquarters from Tampa to McLean, Va., to be close to the capital. She is also credited with setting up a work group to draft consumer privacy principles relevant to smart cards.
"There is a growing recognition," Ms. McKenna said, that although the group's members compete with each other, "if we want to make the technology successful, we have to cooperate to build the infrastructure." u
