After 18 years heading the U.S. Payments Forum and Secure Technology Alliance, Randy Vanderhoof will retire at the end of the year.
Jason Bohrer, a payments industry executive with 27 years of experience in payment card technology, manufacturing, security and identity, will replace Vanderhoof as executive director of both organizations.
Most recently Bohrer served as senior vice president and general manager of secure card solutions at card manufacturer CPI Card Group and previously spent nearly 15 years in various executive roles at identity technology firm HID Global.
Bohrer plans to drive ongoing industry collaboration for secure and accessible solutions as the payments industry faces rapid changes in various spheres including security, mobile ID services, IoT and transit fare technologies. “These two organizations will be at the forefront of the transformation and implementation of these [payments] businesses. There is much to do and I’m excited to kick off 2021 in this new role,” Bohrer said in a release.
Vanderhoof began his work with the organizations in 2002 as executive director of the Smart Card Alliance just as card technology was evolving to more secure, chip-based processes.
Over the last two decades Vanderhoof led the Princeton Junction, N.J.-based alliance as it drove cross-industry collaboration to advance new payments industry initiatives and secure practices with identity and chip technology, culminating in the U.S. migration to EMV cards beginning in 2011.
Reflecting on that effort, Vanderhoof said the challenge was in bringing banks, processors, merchants, hardware and software makers together for the first time in working groups to find a path forward under a tight deadline, given the October 2015 EMV liability shift the card networks established.
“There had never been a lot of communication before with these groups and when they gathered they heard what each other had to say and found solutions,” Vanderhoof said.
The U.S. was the first major market to implement EMV without requiring a PIN on credit cards, which was a major subject of debate between industry participants, and the two-debit-network-choice requirement of the Durbin Amendment posed another significant challenge unique to the U.S.
The legacy of the effort was ongoing relationships across the industry and working groups that continue to work on developing solutions to mitigate card-not-present fraud, contactless payments, mobile wallets and tokenization, according to Vanderhoof.
“We are coming out of a year of rapid change in consumer shopping and payment preferences, and the Forum is looking forward to continuing to provide guidance and best practices to the industry for 2021,” said Kristy Cook, director of payment acceptance technology at Target, who is chair of the U.S. Payments Forum Steering Committee.
