Volume 1, Issue 8
Innovating Cash 
We're so excited to tell you that we've added Larry Summers, Former Treasury Secretary, Square Board Member, and Special Advisor to Andreessen Horowitz, to The Innovation Project 2013 lineup.

He and Hikmet Ersek, CEO of Western Union, and five CEOs are going to take you to a place in the payments ecosystem that is huge, untapped, largely ignored and ripe for innovation: Cash.

Yep. You heard it. Cash. The cold, hard stuff that has stuck around for 3,000 years but that people have been trying to kill ever since plastic cards with mag stripes hit the scene sixty-plus years ago. Like Cinderella and her ugly stepsisters, not a lot of people really want to take cash to today's payments innovation ball. But, as it turns out, there are a lot of Prince Charming's waiting in the wings to transform it since consumers and merchants the world over still really like it, in spite of how hard innovators are working to displace it.

Summers comes at all of this as a bit of a cash-skeptic. Ersek's business is built on moving lots of it somewhere in the world every second. Both agree that part of innovating cash involves making it work better with electronic payments. The two of them and 5 CEOs will tell you what they are doing to innovate the oldest and biggest payment network on the planet. They are Lars Bleko, CEO of Loomis, Aryln Davich, CEO of PayPerks, Jim DiBellow, CEO Mitek Systems, John Moore, COO of The San Francisco Federal Reserve, and Steve Rathgaber, CEO of Cardtronics.

Want more scoop? Click here. Want to skip that part and just get on the list? Then, better hurry and click here.
Every single payments innovator is trying really, really, really hard to get consumers to do something really, really, really hard - try some new form of payments and commerce application when they don't think that much, if anything, is broken today. But, as we've seen with lots of innovation, simply giving consumers an amazing new experience - even when things work well - is enough to get them to make the switch, e.g. the iPhone. 
 
But how do we really know where to look to figure out how to deliver the "aha" moment that will ignite that adoption?

Steve Levitt, economist and well known author of Freakonomics, and Don Kingsborough, King of PayPal's POS efforts and retail veteran, will help us figure out where to look for those hidden consumer clues about shopping and buying and paying. 
 
In a "behavioral economics meets payments reality" session, Levitt, Kingsborough and 4 CEOs will shed new light on what we know about consumers and payments, what we think we know and, more important, what we don't know, we don't know and how to plug those gaps. These C-suite execs are on the front lines of figuring this all out in real-time and will leave you thinking very differently about how to motivate consumers to adopt your payments innovation.

Be part of that conversation today!
Deep Dive: The Interactive CEO Keynotes

We've been giving you the scoop on our 90-minute Interactive CEO Panels over the last couple of weeks but thought you might want to see the whole lineup in one big list. These panels are definitely going to kick up the discussion of payments innovation a couple of thousand levels, don't you think?

Check out our first four panel deep dives here!

Panels include:

*The Future | How the Global Mind Will Transform Global Commerce And Earth, Inc.