Steve Elefant is currently the Chief Strategy Officer at GoPago, which provides a cloud based Android tablet solution for Point of Sale to merchants around the country. Prior to GoPago, Steve was a Sr. Strategic Consultant at Google, focused on commerce, wallet and Point of Sale.
Steve joined Heartland Payment Systems in November 2008, Steve was a ‘non traditional’ CIO also providing strategic focus for delivering the company's solutions, M&A, Business Development, Strategy and Mobile. Steve led Heartlands Software as a Service (SaaS) applications to its merchant base. In January 2009, he ran and developed Heartlands new end-to-end encryption team focusing on developing point-of-sale products and executing Heartland's E3™ security platform that encrypts cardholder data from the point of swipe/entry at a merchant location through the Heartland processing networks and to the card brands, after Heartland’s massive security breach exposing 100M cards.
Steve was the founder of several successful Silicon Valley startup and venture capital firms. He is co-founder and former chief executive officer of ICVerify, Inc., a leader in payments processing integration of PC-based POS software. The company merged with CyberCash, Inc. where he was Vice- Chairman in 1998 to form an Internet and physical service provider for electronic payments software (which was ultimately sold to FirstData and is still in production today). After leaving CyberCash, Steve was involved in several other startups including a company called Price Radar in the online auction space (technology sold to eBay), a digital content management and micro payments company called Yaga (ultimately sold to Digital River) and then venture capital with Claremont Creek Ventures and Soaring Ventures for the five years before joining Heartland.
Steve has been an active member of the US Secret Service Electronic Crimes Task Force for more than six years, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Infragard Electronic Crimes Task Force for the past five years.
In his 'spare time' Steve is a passionate Multi Engine Instrument rated pilot, is a Special Deputy doing search and rescue flying for the San Francisco Sherriff's Department and is on the board of the USS Hornet, space, science and discovery museum. Steve holds a Bachelor of Arts, Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).