Management Team

The management team of WAY Systems is a deeply experienced one with veterans from the POS terminal, payment processing, smart card, wireless, and security industries.

Fred Gumbel, Chief Executive Officer

Fred Gumbel assumed the role of CEO of WAY Systems in October, 2006.  Gumbel has over thirty years of experience in the financial services industry, including having served as President of the EDS Electronic Commerce Strategic Business Unit and the founding Chairman, President and CEO of Vital Processing Services.  Prior to holding these positions, Gumbel held senior executive positions with First Bank System and Citicorp.  Since leaving Vital in 1998, he has served as CEO of Payment Insight, a leading consulting firm to the finnacial services industry with clients including financial institutions, payment processors and a number of airlines and other organizations.  Gumbel also served in the United States Army and received a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Western Kentucky University prior to beginning his successful career in business.

Eric Lecesne, President and Chief Operating Officer

Prior to joining Way Systems, Mr. Lecesne was principal at ECL International a consulting company he founded. From 2002 to 2005, Mr. Lecesne was General Manager, Executive Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer in charge of Marketing, R&D and Manufacturing for Ingenico, a leader in secure transaction equipment. From 1999 to 2002, Mr. Lecesne was General Manager at VeriFone in charge of Marketing and R&D. He also worked at Cosine Communications and Hewlett-Packard where he held various positions in engineering and general management for telecommunication equipments and high end servers. Mr. Lecesne is a graduate of the Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble (France) where he earned an engineering degree in Electrical Engineering.

Randall R. Wheeler, Chief Marketing Officer, Worldwide Sales 

Mr. Wheeler is another longtime industry veteran. Prior to joining WAY Systems, Mr. Wheeler was Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Lipman, the POS terminal vendor with the third largest market share. He also served as Senior Vice President of Global Product Development at MasterCard International, Director of Marketing at Diebold, Inc., was an Assistant Vice President for Bank of America, and was a pioneer in the ATM and POS markets with BankAmericard.

Mr. Wheeler earned his Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration at Malone College and his Executive MBA at Kent State University, both in Ohio.

Jon Schau, Senior Vice President - Engineering

Mr. Schau has held Vice President of Engineering positions at Polycom and PictureTel, and has a record of delivering technology products on time and within budget. Prior to PictureTel, Mr. Schau held a number of development and management positions at CNR, an RF communications startup, and at GTE Strategic Systems, a supplier of command and control systems.

Gary Long, Vice President of Finance

Mr. Long is another seasoned executive having served as CFO at Ennovate Networks, Quarry Networks and REALink.

His 30 years of experience include working for M/A-Com, a publicly traded company, Eastern Technologies and Horizon House Publications. In addition, Mr. Long has consulted to a number of start-up and early stage companies.

Mr. Long received his B.S. in Accounting and his MBA from Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts.

John Mannix III, Chief Information Officer

Harry Hargens, Vice President - Product Management

Harry Hargens has over 23 years of experience in the payment industry leading product management and development, sales and marketing. Mr. Hargens worked for POS vendors such as VeriFone, Omron, as well as payment processing companies like TransNet (now Paymentech), HONOR Network (now STAR), National Data (now Global Payments), to enable credit/debit card transactions at the point of sale and in eCommerce. Mr. Hargens has worked for large enterprise as well as start up companies, having founded and led his own debit processing company (Kryptosima) as CEO for nearly five years. Mr. Hargens graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology with a BSEE, and received his MBA from University of Chicago with honors.