By Jason Cunningham
Vance Academic Center Room 105 had no more than 40 people settle in as the audience to former CEO of First Data and Charles Fote for his interactive conversation on his business and success since his days at Central Connecticut State University.
Fote founded and is currently CEO of Fotec and was CCSU President Jack Miller’s executive guest throughout homecoming.
“Well I haven’t been here for I guess 42 years,” said Fote.
Fote was at CCSU back when the university was Central Connecticut State College.
“When I was here it was a lot smaller, but, I enjoyed coming to school,” said Fote.
Fote briefly talked to the mostly business and communications students about being a student and how much smaller the university was, shifting to going over his children’s education and careers, mainly his son’s experience as a farmer, for the first quarter of the more than an hour long speech. He was in a dry condition that possibly echoed his Wednesday night arrival from Denver. Fote seemed drained of energy, playing with the cap of his Dasani water bottle during most of the time he talked.
Slowly going over his time at First Data, a Fortune 250 electronic payments company, Fote detailed his 30 years there. Fote began climbing First Data’s corporate ladder in 1975, helping the company grow from an $11 million U.S. division to a $12 billion global player. He retired as chairman and CEO in 2005.
Fote’s current enterprise, Fotec, was founded in 2009. According to FotecGroup.com, the company was created by a group of payments experts to develop technologically advanced payment capabilities for the world’s evolving marketplace.
“You guys at your age will do everything on the phone, you’ll start your car on the phone here pretty soon…I’m not kidding about that, your credit cards, you won’t carry a card in your wallet,” said Fote.
FotecGroup.com includes that the company is focused on facilitating merchants’ ability to authorize and accept all types of payments by providing money transfer services to consumers and businesses electronically. Through new technologies, the acceptance of consumer transactions at the point of sale can be made at the actual merchants’ locations. This offers new payment methods through devices, like smartphones, that Fote believes will make sales more convenient.
“The fraud will be very low, because most fraud today is merchant fraud…the fraud goes away because the consumer is not going to steal from themselves,” said Fote.
When the audience members were asked how many of them paid their bills electronically, nearly everyone raised their hand.
“Technology is just changing the world faster than we can we can ride it out,” said Fote.
Fote advised to the students to jump on new technology and to remain ahead of the curve if you haven’t’ already leaped ahead.
“I’ve never sent an e-mail in my whole life,” said Fote.
In fact, Fote’s wife still pays their bills on paper, mailing out their checks in traditional envelopes. While Fote and his family haven’t adapted every aspect (some of them major) of the Technological Age into their lifestyle, Fote still manages to have his fingers on the pulse of technological advancement, especially in the payment industry.
“Every consumer is also going to be a merchant….Which means you’ll be able to buy and sell from your phone,” said Fote.
Fote thinks plastic debit and credit cards will be mostly gone within five to 10 years and predicted that business owners will be able to run their companies straight from their smartphones soon. While Fote suffered a few walkouts while he talked, he maintained an interactive period of questions and answers rounding out the later half of his time into the end.
Fote’s main advice to students was to do what makes them happy for their careers, to keep clients of any kind regardless of industry as long as you can, to always give people quality and to work hard at paying close attention to what’s happening around them. In addition to acting as CEO of Fotec, Fote is currently Chairman of the Board of Accretive Technologies Inc. and serves on the Payfone board. He also acts as head of the Fote family foundation and serves on the board of a nonprofit, humanitarian relief organization called Project C.U.R.E.