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Mitch Cobrin, who has run AnywhereCommerce Inc. as chief executive for the last four-and-a-half years, has stepped aside for a new chief executive but will continue at the company in the role of founder, board member, and “chief catalyst,” he tells Digital Transactions News.
The management change comes as the privately held Montreal-based mobile point-of-sale company is gearing up a cloud-based international gateway service, with a development center in Dublin, Ireland, says Cobrin, who also remains the company’s second-largest shareholder. “This has been a project of mine over the last six to eight months,” Cobrin says. “It is market-ready, with live connections to processing platforms in various countries. We can connect to any processing platform in 30 days if we have a business case.”
Succeeding Cobrin as chief executive is William Nichols, a former executive with First Data Corp. and VeriFone Systems Inc. “Bill is a proven executive, [focusing on] building international markets and really strong products,” says Cobrin, who recruited Nichols. “This was the time to give him the reins and for me to do what I do best.”
Nichols, who has been with AnywhereCommerce since February of last year, has been promoted from executive vice president for international markets.
As chief catalyst, Cobrin will concentrate on business development and “strategic partners,” he says. But a top priority will be the new cloud capability for the gateway, which is available to clients independently of the company’s hardware products. “I’ve been championing our cloud-based international gateway infrastructure,” he says. “It’s an exciting next step for AnywhereCommerce.”
The gateway as a business unit “stands on its own two feet,” Cobrin says, and helps broaden the company’s line of products and services. “It gets our customers to understand we’re a whole lot deeper than hardware,” he says. Indeed, the gateway processes e-commerce as well as physical-world transactions.
AnywhereCommerce is perhaps best known as a provider of mobile card readers that can handle chip cards on the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) standard as well as conventional mag-stripe cards. That capability has positioned the company for an expected shift next year in the U.S. to EMV.
It counts several large acquirers among its clients, including Bank of America Merchant Services.
The company also holds important patents, including one that covers the linkage of mobile readers to mobile devices via the audio jack in the device.
Before it repositioned itself in the mobile POS market, AnywhereCommerce, then known as Home ATM, had marketed a service that allowed consumers to use a peripheral card reader attached to a personal computer to make e-commerce transactions.
