Both the CEO of First Data, Ric Duques, and TransPoint’s CEO Lewis Levin would join the new board, setting up a strong management team.
CONCLUSION
On November 29, 2000, Kight was the keynote speaker at the Bank Administration Institute’s Retail Delivery Conference in New Orleans. Speaking to an audience of five thousand banking industry executives and vendors, Kight said:
The ultimate promise of the Internet involves information, choice, immediacy, and access to global markets... How would your customers feel about you if you enabled them to buy and pay for anything, anywhere on the globe, with a single transaction from your site? You are going to be able to offer that frictionless global transactions from your DDA systems.
Kight went on to explain that the Internet requires businesses to change. Before the Internet, he said, companies could choose to be customer-focused, whereas today, they must be. In fact, Kight told the bankers, today customers decide what being customer-focused means, and they expect companies to deliver on that. Specifically, Kight said, capturing and keeping mainstream online customers means providing them: