Page 16 - Pay Magazine s2014

companies & people
6 Payments Visionaries
doug yeager
Co-Founder and CEO, SimplyTapp
Growing up in Knoxville, Tenn., Doug Yeager’s favorite hobbies were the typical pursuits of an adventurous young boy: riding bikes, skate-
boarding, playing with model cars—and using an RF modulator to convert his parents’ Zenith TV into a monitor for the TI-99 personal computer he received as a Christmas gift at the age of 10.
Okay, maybe they weren’t all exactly typical.
In the years since, Yeager has applied a combination of adventurous spirit and technical know-how to the payments space, eventually helping develop one of the most buzzed-about technologies in the industry today —Host Card Emulation, or HCE.
Yeager made his first splash into payments in the mid-2000s, when TradeWind Technologies, a company he founded to make RFID attachments for handheld devices, was acquired by SIRIT Inc. and tasked with producing POS readers. One of TradeWind’s first projects under its new ownership was to cobble together a primitive NFC-equipped handset for a demonstration of the technology.
“We took a Palm Treo and literally removed the circuit board from the casing, retrofitted it with an NFC radio and secure element and closed it back up,” Yeager recalls. “I think it was the first NFC-enabled smart- phone. That’s when my eyes really opened up to FinTech, because it was clear that cards and banking were migrating to the phone, especially when you could see it in your own hands.”
It would be years, however, before there was sufficient infrastructure to support contactless payments on a larger scale. And while that infra- structure remains a work in progress, Yeager was instrumental in developing the technology many
in the industry are hailing as the killer app to finally take contactless mainstream.
In 2011, Yeager joined with partner Ted Fifelski to found SimplyTapp, a mobile payments infrastructure provider that developed the code for HCE. By storing payment
information in the cloud, HCE eliminates the need for a Mobile Network Operator-provided secure element on a handset, enabling developers—including banks and retailers—to create their own NFC applications and take them directly to consumers.
The game-changing potential of HCE has earned the backing of the payments industry’s biggest names, including Google, which incor- porated HCE into its latest Android mobile operating system. MasterCard and Visa also have given their stamp of approval, with both networks developing standards for HCE app develop-
ment. “HCE has started a shift toward cloud-based payments, and that’s one of the most disruptive things to happen to mobile payments yet,” says Yeager.
HCE’s status as the next big thing in payments means Yeager is a busy man these days. But whether he’s on the road securing new financing for SimplyTapp or explaining the finer points of HCE to a client, Yeager makes sure to fit in time for exercise and cooking with his wife and two children. And when it comes time to unwind, Yeager taps into the inquisitive nature he’s had since childhood. “What I really like to do is design and code,” he says. “When I get a break from travel and meetings, I love to get in a room with our devel- opers who are working on really cool stuff. Thinking of new ideas is where I feel at home, and that’s the world I like best.”
For more on SimplyTapp, see our Innovators’ Spotlight section on page 27.
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