Kurt Cavano is taking a break and resigning his executive leadership role at Infor.
Before there was “fintech” or “cloud,” there was TradeCard, an idea brought to life by Kurt Cavano to digitize global trade.
This month marks the end of Cavano’s 20-year “experiment” that started with the World Trade Centers Association, a few sharp colleagues from American Management Systems and a few senior bankers from Bank of America, as he steps down from his executive leadership role at Infor.
Their original idea was simple: Deliver safe and secure B2B international trade transactions over the internet. Following a merger with GT Nexus, Cavano’s cloud-based fintech creation sold to Infor for $675 million in 2015 and became the Infor GT Nexus Commerce Network.
Cavano led the founding of one of the earliest fintech companies that went on to revolutionize how companies execute the financial supply chain. TradeCard started out focusing on eliminating letters of credit on a cloud platform that enabled brands, retailers, suppliers and finance providers to connect and collaborate within a single network.
From 1999 to 2013, the company grew to more than 1,000 employees and tens of thousands of customers in over 70 countries before merging with GT Nexus. The merged company took the GT Nexus name and grew to be the largest pure-play software-as-a-service supply chain company in the world. Today, there are more than 60,000 companies on the network, managing over $1 trillion in shipments and facilitating $50 billion in payments annually.
“There are so many opportunities out there today,” Cavano said. “But after 20 years of hard work, I need a break. Once I rest and recharge, I can think about the next big thing. I figure I will have the energy for one more run. Technology is changing so fast and creating so much disruption, I’m sure I won’t be able to resist diving in again.”
Cavano, who has been recognized by World Trade Magazine as one of the top 50 most influential people in global trade, serves as an adviser to XRC Labs, an innovation accelerator based at New York’s Parsons School of Design, that is creating the next generation of disruptors in the retail and consumer goods sectors
Supply chain software pioneer stepping down
