Mobile Success

By Robert Green Atlanta Trend

• Apr 01, 2012

Some people are bad at following advice. Others, like Keith Smith, know how to take a mentor’s advice and put it to the best possible use. Perhaps it comes from his days as a football player. Growing up in Atlanta, Keith played for Roswell High School and then went on to Georgia Southern where he suited up for the legendary Erk Russell as a punter. “Erk Russell was a player’s coach,” Keith says. “He was a master at helping people achieve their potential. He was never short of time for his players.” In a career that has been as successful as it has been in mobile, it is no surprise that Keith Smith anticipates success as president and COO of CorFire, the Atlanta based company for mobile payments owned by South Korean giant SK.
After two years at Georgia Southern family reasons forced Keith to drop out of college and go to work. He started at the mailroom of Lanier Worldwide. After solving a problem at work that saved the company millions of dollars the president came down to thank him and asked him why he was in a mailroom job. “I just wanted to get my foot in the door at a big company and work my way up. I want to be in sales,” Keith responded, “but I don’t have a 4 year degree.” The president said that he would look into making an exception for Keith and shortly thereafter he moved into sales. Within a year, he was making so much money that Lanier wanted to place him in a management position with a fixed salary. Rather than accept, Keith decided to start his own company, Independent Business Supplies. It sold specialty receipt tape for cash registers. After a year and a half he sold the company to a group of private investors for a hefty sum. He was 25 years old.
It was in his next position at Checkmate Electronics, which sold point-of-sale devices to retailers, that Keith met another important mentor. Checkmate’s CEO, Jerry Malec, made Keith the head of sales and brought him in on every call with Wall Street analysts. Checkmate was a public company and it was here that Keith learned about how companies are financed and valued as well as the true value proposition of the payment industry to merchants. “It was a true education,” Keith says.
In 1995, Keith started NexTran, a check verification company and also became a consultant to a friend’s terminal company, Gibbs Management. NexTran was starting at zero revenue and, Gibbs, a turnaround effort, was only doing $3 million in annual revenues. Putting the two companies together, Keith and the Gibbs family grew their revenues to $12 million and then sold the company to First Data for over $13 million in 1999. “The process of merging a hardware maintenance company with an alternative payment processor proved to be very valuable for our clients and investors,” says Keith.
Vital Processing then recruited Keith in as an EVP in 1999. Vital was a 50/50 joint venture between Visa and Columbus based Total Systems. With $180 million in revenue, Vital provided “white label” merchant processing to major financial institutions like Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Fifth Third Bank. It was in this role that Keith developed a great relationship with Total Systems Board Chairman Phil Tomlinson. “He taught me a lot,” Keith says. “I found what the complications of running a 50/50 joint venture were, of course, but I also learned three valuable lessons: 1) the importance of scale; 2) the importance of running the company from the customer back; and 3) the importance of great people – employees must be kept happy.” Vital then asked Keith to become the CEO of a sister company – Vital Merchant Services – to provide terminal management, maintenance and support to Vital’s customer base. He took VMS revenue from $1 million to $36 million in two years. He also set up a terminal financing program for his customers – the financial institutions – to resell.
From 2002 to 2004, Keith worked as an employee of Concord, a company much like Vital Processing. Concord was sold to First Data for $7.3 billion on 2004.
At this point in his life, Keith Smith had every reason to love the payments industry - he had put a lot of him self into the industry and had gotten a lot back. Other people might consider slowing down or taking a break, but not Keith. He immediately joined Pre Holdings, the prepaid card company started by Cam Lanier. Pre’s goal was to create a destination for the prepaid market in retail establishments, provide prepaid cards to the under-banked and to convert then paper gift certificates into gift cards. They had customers like Dollar General, Pilot and Family Dollar but ultimately merged with market leader InComm in 2006.
Keith was then asked to join a startup company called Firethorn as SVP of Sales. He was employee number three. As a company, Firethorn’s goal was to drive Internet banking to mobile devices. Interestingly, the company also wanted to move payments to mobile devices but recognized that it was still probably too early. Keith set up two important strategic partnerships for the company. One was with AT&T so that the telecom carrier would allow them to preload their software on mobile devices and the other was with CheckFree to get to all the financial institutions on board. “Because of Firethorn,” Keith says, “via CheckFree, people were able to do banking and make bill payments with mobile devices for the first time in the US.” With only 50 employees, Firethorn was sold to Qualcomm for more than $200 million in 2007. Finally, Keith Smith was ready to take a break. From 2007 to 2009 Keith put his very mobile career on hold, studied the payment marketplace and made private investments. It was in this period of rest that he first became associated with the South Korean technology giant, SK C&C, as an advisor.
Keith became president of SK’s worldwide mobile payments company, SK C&C USA, in 2009. The company was rebranded as CorFire in 2011. Based in Atlanta, Keith views the company’s choice of location as a great endorsement for the city. Atlanta is SK’s worldwide headquarters for mobile payments. The company’s goal is to bring mobile payments to the US and then the rest of the world. Even more, it wants to bring “the mobile lifestyle” to North America and the rest of the globe. A worthy ambition.
“Being a startup inside a $100 billion company can be a challenge,” says Keith, “but it also comes with some tremendous advantages.” The major one is experience. SK first deployed mobile payments in Seoul, South Korea 10 years ago, for transit. Today they provide everything – smartpay at point of sale, wave and pay, gift cards, public parking – as well as transit. 30 million consumers are doing more than 32 million mobile transactions per day. In keeping with the company’s aim to “stand in the middle,” Keith first entered into a partnership with First Data in order to get credit cards to the phone in the US. In six months this partnership signed its first customer – Google. CorFire is the trusted service manager for Google Wallet. 2012 promises to be even more successful for CorFire. They were just selected to build a proprietary mobile wallet for a major wireless carrier in Europe and last week they just signed a deal with a famous worldwide quick service restaurant. Everything seems to be running smoothly and Keith is pleased. “We’ve been able to extract technology from Asia, import it to the US, and localize it,” he says. “Now we are sending it from Atlanta to Europe and the rest of the world. Having done this, the rest of our job will be replication and scale.”
Asked if he believes his present venture will be as successful as his previous ones, Keith smiles. “The last twenty years of my life have been great. I expect the next twenty years to be even better.”
 
Secrets to Success:
 
In life, Keith follows the 3Rs: be Respectful, Responsible, and Reasonable.  In business, Keith focuses on the 3 Ps: Passion, Perseverance, and People.
  
“In order for mobile commerce to meet wide scale adoption, we must not only provide the technology to get the credentials to the handset, we must give the consumer a reason to transact – without the demand, the supply is irrelevant.”