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On this episode of the Listen Up Show, we are diving deep into the foundations of global payment systems, banking leadership, and corporate governance with industry titan Alex “Pete” Hart.
Pete’s extraordinary career spans over 50 years of leadership at the highest levels of financial services and fintech. He is the former President and Chief Executive Officer of MasterCard International, where he drove massive global scaling from 1994 to 1998, and the former Chief Executive Officer of public diversified financial services company Advanta Corporation.
A master of corporate governance, Pete has served as the Chairman of the Board for major industry pillars, including Verifone Systems (a global leader in credit card terminal and payment technologies) and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) Financial Group. He has also lent his strategic expertise as an independent consultant and board member to legendary public and private tech companies, including LendingClub, FICO (Fair Isaac Corporation), Global Payments Inc., Mitek Systems, eHarmony, and HNC Software.
A Masterclass in Fintech Longevity
My connection to Pete dates back to 1995. Right after graduating from law school and passing the bar, I set my sights on becoming counsel to Advanta, where Pete was serving as Executive Vice Chairman. Beyond his corporate brilliance, Pete’s leadership roots run deep—he was also the captain of the 1961 Harvard football team. We are talking to a true, battle-tested leader.
“When it comes to success, it is a matter of being able to do the things I like to do with the people I like doing them with, and feeling as if I am being paid acceptably. Beyond that, there is not a whole lot to it.” — Pete Hart
Every startup founder, builder, and fintech entrepreneur can extract timeless strategy from Pete’s career longevity and leadership frameworks.
Connect with Pete’s legacy and explore modern payment solutions via www.verifone.com.
Happy listening!
Historical Note: Verifone Systems was originally founded in 1981 by William ‘Bill’ Melton. The foundational Verifone story remains a powerful, highly inspirational case study for early-stage tech builders navigating the execution phase.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Speaker: Alex Pete Hart, former chairman of Verifone Systems, Silicon Valley Bank and CEO and president of Mastercard international. With over five decades of credit card payments experience, he has been on the board of directors for Lending Club, Fico Fair, Isaac Corporation, eHarmony Global Payments Incorporated, and currently he’s on the board of Mitek systems.
I first got to meet Pete back in nineteen ninety four upon my graduation from law school and passing the bar. Pete at that time was the president of Advanta, a regional credit card company headquartered in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and a leading credit card company in the region. I wanted to start my legal career as in-house counsel after following the DOJ’s antitrust case against Visa and Mastercard in the early nineties, while on Law Review and going to law school and following all the payment issues raised by Discover an American Express.
Pete called me at my parents home as I had sent in. My resume had just passed the bar, but I was still living at my parents home in Philadelphia. Getting that call from Pete was thrilling, especially after reading so much about him and all his accomplishments. Listen up to my interview with Pete as he provides so much business wisdom and great stories. Listen up, trusted friends. Start up, trust smarter. Execute your plan. Take action. I’m Mitchell Chadrow. This is the Listen Up show. So if you are ready to listen up, here is today’s show. Get the show notes at Listen Up Show zero zero two now. Enjoy the show. Pete, are you ready to tell us your story?
Mitchell: Hello, Pete. We are so excited to have you on the Listen Up show today.
Pete: Mitchell, I thank you for that generous introduction, which may be overstated, but in every term except my longevity, I gave a detailed description about you. But tell everyone in our listen up audience in a one minute elevator bio. Who is Alex Pete Hart?
I have spent about fifty years in the financial services industry and increasingly focused around the payment side of the business, and it continues to be very stimulating. And I am adversely every day.
Mitchell: Great. Let’s jump right in. Success means so many different things to so many people. How does Pete define success?
Pete: Well, I think that’s a very personal subject. And everybody has their own definition. For me, it’s always been being able to do the things I like to do with people, like doing them with and feeling as if I’m being paid acceptably. Beyond that, there’s not a lot more to it.
Mitchell: So humble. Pete, you are a finance, banking and payments rock star. Startups, business owners, entrepreneurs will learn a lot from your success stories today. But tell our trusted friends and the Listen Up show audience a lesson you learned from a business failure.
Pete: Well, I suppose that one of my earliest lessons was in the first days of Automated Teller Machines. I was working for Bank Ohio back in the late sixties, and Diebold provided me with a look at their first cash dispensers, the precursor to ATMs, and I was completely taken with it and convinced that these were going to revolutionize the business overnight.
I convinced my bank to be among the first to install an ATM in every branch, and we were underwhelmed by the speed at which the customers converted. And I have been very cautious about predicting that there will be a rapid take up on any new technology going forward. So that was a lesson I learned almost fifty years ago, and it remains true today.
Mitchell: What is the best business advice you ever received?
Pete: Well, Mitchell, I think the most important thing of all is to find a business that really excites you and stimulates you. I finished college, married with one child and having a need to make income, and I spent seven years as a commission lumber broker. And while it was a relatively lucrative business for someone at my age, and it certainly took care of my family needs. When you’ve sold one car a half inch plywood, you’ve sold them all.
Mitchell and I found that there was very little stimulation in that business. Banking was something that stimulated me and increasingly, the consumer side of the business and the advent of technology and the ever increasing application of emerging technologies is something that has kept me fascinated and excited about the business ever since I started. Start off saying find something that excites you just from an application standpoint. After that, make sure you find people that you enjoy being around and that the enterprise that you’re engaged with has the values that you’re comfortable with.
Mitchell: Excellent point advice from a true business leader. People in our audience want to know how you got started with Mastercard international and ultimately headed up the Association of twenty seven thousand member banks. And how did you determine when it was time to change positions or companies?
Pete: Well, I was involved in the industry for a long time from a bank issuer and acquirer standpoint, Mitchell. And over time got to know the Mastercard people better and better. Ultimately was invited to join the board and ultimately then to become CEO.
You’re right. I think that at the time, Mastercard was a collection owned by twenty seven thousand banks around the world. And so you had too many masters. And I found that Disenchanting. And that was probably the biggest reason that I left Mastercard. But having said that, you know, every business has good and bad things about it, and you sort of have to sit down from time to time and take a look at the balance sheet and determine whether this makes sense for you or not.
I’m one of those people who’s changed jobs many times and have had the benefit of a lot of different corporate environments, and each one has some positives and negatives. And as long as the positives are dramatically stronger than the negatives, I’ve stuck with them. When I found something that was more stimulating and more appropriate for me. I’ve moved on.
Mitchell: You’ve been involved with so many different companies and roles. How do you view candidates today that have switched positions or companies numerous times?
Pete: You know, I think that we’ve crossed the Rubicon in that regard. I will say that there are those for whom a twenty year experience with the same company is a good thing. But I think increasingly we’re looking for people who have multiple experiences because in almost every situation, there is a learning curve that begins to nose over at a certain point in terms of years of service. Now, if you’re in a big company, you may be able to get multiple experiences and continue to grow. But I think most of us would say that the reporting process, so to speak, is typically a real growth opportunity.
Mitchell: Our listeners want to bank smarter. They’re interested in emerging financial technology, better known as fintech, and constantly on the lookout for good alternatives to credit unions or traditional banks. So how did you get involved with Lending Club?
Pete: Well, I was invited to meet the people who were organizing the Lending Club back in two thousand and seven. We found that the chemistry was good and I became an advisor to them. I don’t want to overstate my relationship with them because they did all the work and I simply offered input time to time. But I think that, you know, increasingly there are non-traditional players who are taking a fresh approach and applying these emerging technologies to almost every aspect of financial services, and we see the companies out there by the hundreds. We see dozens of successes. And we see many of them either going public, in the case of the Lending Club or square or PayPal or people of that sort, or many, far, many more who are acquired at very attractive valuation.
Mitchell: You mentioned nontraditional mobile payments using mobile wallet and banking apps like Moven, Braintree, Capital One, prosper. Is that how you got involved with Mitek systems?
Pete: Well, I live part time in San Diego and I got to know Jim Cappello, the CEO of Mitek. And Jim invited me to get involved there as he was changing their business model substantially. And so I came on board about six years ago. And we have certainly come to dominate the mobile check capture business, and we’re doing some very exciting things now in the identification space that are taking us out of the financial services vertical and expanding us into a variety of other business lines that we’re very excited about. Now, it’s very exciting.
Mitchell: Our start up round sponsored by Bank smarter. Check out all the companies you can bank smarter with at bank smarter dot com. That’s B a n k s m a r t e r dot com. Bank smarter, a virtual cash incorporated company. Now back to the Listen Up show. Let’s talk fintech. We started with the credit card, the Magstripe. Then we went to smart cards. Now emerging technologies like mobile applications. We mentioned a few. So you now have even bigger players like Apple’s iPad, Google’s Google Pay, Amazon’s Amazon Pay, and also there’s authorize dot net and Pay simple Coinbase. How long will it take for them to really penetrate the market?
Pete: Well, I think it’s hard to change consumer behavior, Mitchell. Particularly when the existing system works rather well. And I think that the credit card has been around for fifty years, and it does most of what consumers want it to. And I think that the transition to the mobile device for the displaced credit cards is going to take some time. But I think that we see every day evidence that more people are using it. And I think it will take a bit of time, but it will sort of inevitably happen. You probably saw that both eBay and Wells Fargo are now moving to use NFC in conjunction with their ATM devices, and that’s just one more positive step along the way.
Mitchell: I agree. Silicon Valley Bank has a who’s who lineup of clients throughout Silicon Valley and the world. I mentioned your bio Pete early in the interview, but people in our Listen Up audience want to know how you became the CEO of one of the most prominent banks.
Pete: Well, I was actually chairman and non-executive chairman at that of Silicon Valley Bank. So I wasn’t involved in the day to day operations of the bank. I was brought on board by virtue of my background in banking and the fact that I had a reasonably comfortable feel for technology and had been involved in some other technology companies.
I spent two years on the board before I was elected chairman and then spent, oh gosh, I guess eleven years as chairman of the bank. And it was a great experience in that you had an opportunity to meet many of the entrepreneurs that we read about today. I think that Silicon Valley Bank has about half of all the venture backed companies in the United States. And we have a unique understanding of early stage businesses and how those businesses evolve and what their credit needs might be throughout that evolution. And so it was a really a unique experience. And I really treasure my time there. The bank’s been extraordinarily successful, certainly.
Mitchell: Pete, how does a finance payment guy get involved with a dating site like eHarmony?
Pete: Well, I frankly was involved in starting eHarmony and it was really driven by my personal experience with my own relationship and my belief in predictive analytics. And eHarmony to a probably greater extent than anyone in that field goes through a very elaborate process of factor analysis and predictive science to match people for relationship purposes. And in some ways, it’s no different than a lot of the work we did in credit scoring at Fico and other predictive businesses. I have a particular affection for that business, and while I’m not on the board any longer, I still am very close to the founder and to other directors.
Mitchell: You mentioned predictive analytics and your involvement with Fico Fair Isaac Corporation. What financial advice do you have for startups, business owners and entrepreneurs related to building good credit and Fico scores?
Pete: Well, you know, I think that particularly for those entrepreneurs who are part of your audience, we know that credit is a very important part of starting most businesses, and most businesses have a shortage of cash for much of their early years. A good credit reputation, meaning a good credit score, is very important personally and from a corporate standpoint and increasingly as a factor in most of the things we do.
I mean, now insurance underwriters take a look at your credit scores just to determine your lifestyle and how much risk is likely to come from the relationship with you. And so for anyone just starting out, I’d say work hard to maintain a good credit score. For those who have run into a brick wall and have had some difficulty, I would say do everything you can to rebuild your credit score because it’s something that will be with you the rest of your life.
Mitchell: Our fast Pitch round sponsored by Trust Smarter for all your trust estates. Check out all the trust companies at trust smarter dot com. That’s T r u s t S m a r t e r dot com. Trust smarter. A virtual cash incorporated company. Now let’s get back to it. Pete, a fun fact I read about you is that in nineteen sixty one, your Harvard College football team elected you as their captain. Is that how you developed your leadership style and likeable personality?
Pete: Well, I think that, you know, it’s pretty hard to set out to become captain of a sports team. By and large, your teammates decide whether or not they’re going to look to you for some element of leadership or not. And I don’t take much credit for that. But I was privileged to play on a good team that won the league championship that year, and it certainly was an excellent leadership experience.
I think more importantly, the benefit of playing football taught me that there is a position for almost everyone and that the best of tackles will probably never make it as a quarterback and vice versa. You look at organizations and determine where people are likely to be most effective. And so if I learned any lesson from that experience, that’s probably it.
Mitchell: Our wrap up round is sponsored by Chadrow.net Legal Solutions for life—from do it yourself legal guides, videos, checklists to finding a law firm for more complex legal matters. Go to Chadrow.net. That’s C h a d r o w dot net, a virtual cash incorporated company. Chadrow.net is not a law firm. Now let’s get back to the Listen Up show. I know that a tremendous amount of transformation at Verifone is taking place from a terminal sales company to a leading provider of payments and commerce solutions. So what’s next?
Pete: Well, Mitchell, I think that Verifone is a business in transition. We’re spending all our time on it. I can’t talk a great deal about what we’re doing, obviously, because it’s a public company. And I can’t share with you very much inside information. But publicly we can just say that we believe that the point of sale is changing dramatically and that the traditional point of sale device that wasn’t very smart, frankly, has to become smarter, has to become interconnected, has to do a variety of other things for the customer.
Mitchell: Pete, Verifone’s payments technology is critical to the operation of merchants around the world, so keep up the great work. What message can you leave our audience?
Pete: Always welcome hearing from people with ideas, particularly as it relates to the payments industry.
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This has been Alex Hart. His friends call him Pete. We want to thank you for all your time. We really enjoyed the conversation and wish you all the best in the future. We are excited to hear about the next steps in your journey, so I hope you come back and let our listen up audience know how you were doing. Wish you all the very best. You take care now, Pete. It’s nice to reconnect with you after all these years, and I wish you the very best. Thank you so much, Pete. We will be in contact real soon. You take care now. Thank you. Bye bye now.
I have a true passion for helping all of my listeners in the Trusted Friends community. With free resources at Mitchell.com, click on start here. Our podcast guests provide practical tips, advice, guidance, help, and amazing stories of business and personal success stories that you can apply in your own business and family life. Share on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. We are growing by word of mouth, by one trusted friend telling another listener. As our audience continues to grow each and every day, the trusted friends community here help each other, making it a great place to learn, grow, and trust.
Learn from each other and why you are all my trusted friends. Okay, we will be back soon with more business content, entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurial stories. I am Mitchell Chadrow. Both the MitchellChadrow.com website and the ListenUpShow.com website are Virtual Cash Incorporated productions. Copyright twenty sixteen through twenty nineteen. Check out the ListenUpShow.com website. Tune in next time for The Mitchell Show with more stories of amazing business people, entrepreneurs, and startups whose stories provide practical value, guidance, help, and entertainment for our next show. Tune in to show zero zero three when we interview podcast host Steven Worley, who talks to us about the life skills that matter. I’m Mitchell Chadrow. Until next time, my trusted friends.
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