Newsmaker: JP Morgan's David Cramer To Head Visa's Commercial Sales

JP Morgan Chase's director of sales and marketing for commercial card solutions, David Cramer, on April 1 will join the Visa U.S.A. payment network as senior vice president of commercial sales.

Cramer said his role at Visa will be to "work with commercial card issuers as well as increase their usage of Visa commercial products in their customer base and help them be as efficient and effective as possible. I'll work with corporates, as well as the federal and state governments to make Visa their brand of choice." Visa added that Cramer will oversee the development and maintenance of sales training materials, manage funding incentives for commercial deals and build "executive relationships with commercial accounts."

A 12-year veteran in the corporate payment market, Cramer began his career in 1991 working on national accounts for Diners Club. He moved to GE Capital in 1994 and helped bulk up the card issuer's presence in the corporate card market by bringing its internal commercial card to the public. Two-and-a-half years later, Cramer and others created a corporate application for Paymentech, an electronic payment solutions provider and, at the time, a subsidiary of First U.S.A. The Internet-based electronic payment technology that Cramer and his team developed for Paymentech eventually caught the acquiring eye of Chase Manhattan.

"Rather than spend millions of dollars to develop their own solution they decided if you can't beat them, buy them," Cramer said. "So they bought the commercial card part of Paymentech." The acquisition, now two years old, moved Paymentech's corporate card business and Cramer to JP Morgan Chase, an issuer of Visa consumer and commercial charge cards.

Cramer quipped, "I've had the same job basically for six-and-a-half years, just with different owners."