Pamela Joseph, head of payment services, U.S. Bancorp

« We'll fi­nal­ly start to see the move­ment around mo­bile pay­ments. We've been wait­ing for this magi­cal mo­ment to take place. » Pam­e­la Joseph, head of pay­ment ser­vices di­vi­sion at U.S. Ban­corp

About Joseph: Pam­e­la Joseph leads one of U.S. Bank's most dy­nam­ic di­vi­sions. Pay­ments is a key growth en­gine for the bank, cov­er­ing cred­it, debit and pre­paid cards; card pro­cess­ing for mer­chants, and the Minneapolis-based bank's in­vest­ment in mo­bile pay­ments. Joseph has pre­sided over ma­jor ac­qui­si­tions and in­ter­na­tion­al ex­pan­sion of its card pro­cess­ing op­er­ations since 2004.

Per­son­al file: A na­tive of Chi­ca­go, Joseph lives in the At­lan­ta sub­urb of Roswell with her hus­band, Hank, and three sons. She heads the nonprofit Women Lead­ers in Ac­tion, which sup­ports women's ed­u­ca­tion in Af­ri­ca, and trav­els there fre­quent­ly.

What's big in 2014: Joseph sees the long-await­ed break­through in mo­bile pay­ments, although she's not sure what ex­act­ly it will look like. "We've worked on pil­ots with just about every kind of hand­set, every piece of soft­ware." The bank is fo­cused on point-of-sale tech­nol­o­gy to help mer­chants ac­cept smartphones as pay­ment. Mi­cro lo­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy al­lows re­tail­ers to tell what aisle of the store you're in, for in­stance, and zap you a cou­pon on the spot. The bank is doing a beta launch of a me­di­a app called "Peri" that al­lows com­panies to en­code me­di­a so peo­ple can quick­ly scan an item, click and buy it from their mo­bile de­vice.

Final word: "It's total im­pulse buy­ing. Now you can turn ad­ver­tis­ing into ac­tion."