A little ETA recap

I was at the ETA conference for a few days this year. Two days seems to be more than enough for any social event in Las Vegas. Red Bull became my best friend after a painful two hours of sleep the first night.

It amazes me how much money goes through Las Vegas, and through the ETA in general. It has to be billions of dollars a day. The Mandalay Bay hotel is amazing, not only in how nice it is, but also by the sheer size of the place. I think that it is about a mile to the conference area, once you are in the hotel.

If you are an ISO or someone looking to see some of the meat of the processing industry, I recommend attending an ETA conference at some point. Even if you get very little out of the seminars, the social aspect of the conference is definitely worth it. Just about every major ISO, equipment manufacturer, and anyone involved in credit card processing will be there. It is a great place to make new relationships, and learn about new products and services.

Anyway, I was able to make it to the EVO dinner at Aureole, the FDR lunch at the Mix lounge (horrible elevator ride to and from the 64th floor), spent some time at the Rumjungle Paybytouch cocktail party, and the rest of the time I was with the whole crew from Way systems. I missed out on Nova’s dinner, but did spend a good hour at the Nova booth catching up on some new information especially related to their Canadian ISO program. I was able to attend a few seminars making a special point to get to the “running a successful free terminal program” seminar with Jared Isaacman (United Bankcard), and Ed Freeman (Total Merchant Services) as the main speakers.

It seems like the FDR acquisition was one of the biggest topics of the event, especially from FDR’s perspective. FDR has some major changes coming up in the near future that will greatly improve the back-end structure for any company that is using FDR platforms. Way systems was also a major topic, as they are showing some amazing growth and potential. So far they have established themselves as the largest wireless terminal provider other than Verifone/Lipman, and the future looks extremely bright for them.

As for the rest of the news, I will be incorporating into the website over the next few months. Thanks for the patience on the lack of posting over the past few weeks.