Mr. Polhemus has over 30 years of experience in domestic and international banking networks, procurement and distribution systems, the construction industries, and large-scale systems integration projects.  During his career he has been involved in the startup of three successful technology businesses, each of them subsequently acquired by publicly traded corporations.  His involvement in high-performance transaction processing for the financial industries began in 1980 when he joined Tandem Computers, an innovator and leader in the design, manufacture and deployment of fault tolerant computers.  There he was actively involved in implementing large multi-institution financial networking systems throughout the western United States.  In 1986 he moved to Singapore to support and manage the international financial software systems group for the Asia/Pacific rim operations of CAP (Sema) Group UK, one of the largest European consulting services firms.

 

In 1991 Mr. Polhemus returned home to begin the design and development of specialized leading-edge transaction processing systems for core "mission critical" applications in the financial industry and government "citizen's services" sector.  As founder and technology leader of Transaction Strategies, Inc. (TSI) Mr. Polhemus directed the design and implementation of several highly innovative medium and high-performance transaction switching and delivery systems for high availability financial networking applications. In 1994, TSI and its proprietary transaction switching technology was acquired by GTech Corporation, the leading worldwide supplier of lottery systems and one of the largest transaction processors in the world.  These technologies formed the core platform for development and deployment of several "first of kind" systems for delivery of statewide government services, such as Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) and Electronic Fish & Game permits.

 

Since 1997 Mr. Polhemus has been very involved in the development of switched-transaction and middleware-based data integration software strategies to leverage high-availability mission-critical systems for large insurance companies, major specialty wholesale distributors, an Internet startup, and issuers of proprietary card-based transaction authorization systems.  Nearly two years ago he embarked on a project to develop a "next generation" high-availability transaction switch with dramatically reduced long-term ownership costs.  This new software is targeted at serving several key markets of "value added" transactions such as those for the non-banked, stored value and gift cards, international money transfer, loyalty and reward, and other emerging high-volume specialty business transactions.

 

This new transaction switch will form the core of the Global Loyalty's GeN "X-2" Platform as we move to take control of our technology solutions future, assuring that we have the flexibility to drive our markets in the shortest time frames, while at the same time preserving the ability to retain a proprietary offering of product features and benefits.