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John Barrett, a 16-year veteran of MCI Corp., has joined First Data Corp. to run the processor's merchant-sales operations through independent sales organizations and sales agents. In his position as senior vice president for FDC's third-party sales channel, Barrett will have responsibility for all merchant-sales efforts through third parties at First Data Merchant Services and at FDC's Moorpark, Calif.-based Cardservice International unit, as well as credit card-related third party sales for Concord EFS, which FDC acquired earlier this year. Barrett's key roles, he says, will be to recruit new ISOs and to increase sales for existing ones. He says he has no numerical goals for new ISOs, preferring to focus on finding ones that can bring in enough large concentrations of merchants. “We're looking more at where we can get a bigger impact on the merchant base,” he says. He oversees FDC's relationships with approximately 85 ISOs through Concord and FDMS, as well as the company's ties to another 300 agents selling for Cardservice and an almost equal number representing Concord. At MCI, Barrett managed the carrier's sales operations, including direct sales, third-party sales, and wholesale marketing of MCI's telecommunications services to other carriers. He likens the acquiring business for electronic transactions to the state of telecommunications some five to 10 years ago. “The telecom business opened up in '83 with deregulation, then it matured and we had to sell value and new technology,” he says, adding that this point of maturation is what the business he finds himself in now has reached. “We need to find new applications and technologies,” he says. The top opportunities he says he'll pursue in his new job include the markets for wireless transactions, gift cards, and transactions over Internet protocol (IP) terminals, which includes the quick-service market, one of the hottest in electronic transactions currently. Barrett succeeds John Burtzloff, who has left FDC.
