An authority on e-Commerce and data security, the Industry Standard named Mr. Caulfield, the “Grandfather of e-Commerce.” He has testified as an expert witness in front of the U.S. Senate.

With over 25 years of Information Technology, Security, e-commerce, and payments experience, Mr. Caulfield has provided Internet-based solutions for hundreds of Fortune 500 organizations. Mr. Caulfield’s efforts focused on secure payment processing, back-end database development and management, operations, Internet and data security, website development management, and more. Mr. Caulfield designed and implemented the first city in the United States e-commerce platform for the City of Los Angeles.

Mr. Caulfield is viewed as an industry expert on data security and has served as a key presenter at many conferences. Mr. Caulfield created and introduced multiple innovations to the payments arena (tokenization of payment data, dynamic mapping, encryption of magstriped swiped data) and continues to strive for future success and challenges.

TrustCommerce has been referred to as the best product and security provider in the payment industry. During Mr. Caulfield’s tenure, human capital was a core value. As founder and Chief Executive Officer of TrustCommerce for over 20 years, Rob Caulfield was responsible for the strategic vision, expansion, and business operations.

Mr. Caulfield created and introduced multiple innovations to the payments arena (tokenization of payment data, dynamic mapping, encryption of magstriped swiped data) and continues to strive for future success and challenges.

In 2001, TrustCommerce created the concept of Tokenization to protect sensitive payment data for a client, Classmates.com. It engaged Rob Caulfield, founder of TrustCommerce because the risk of storing cardholder data was too great if the systems were ever hacked. TrustCommerce developed TC Citadel®, with which customers could reference a token in place of cardholder data and TrustCommerce would process a payment on the merchant's behalf. This billing application allowed clients to process recurring payments without storing cardholder payment information. Tokenization replaces the Primary Account Number (PAN) with randomly generated tokens. If intercepted, the data contains no cardholder information, rendering it useless to hackers. The PAN cannot be retrieved, even if the token and the systems it resides on are compromised, nor can the token be reverse-engineered to arrive at the PAN.

Read more about tokenization and data security.

Throughout his time with TrustCommerce, Mr. Caulfied’s firm belief in creating a positive corporate culture was pivotal in retaining 34 key employees for over 15 years, a feat not easily achieved in today's climate of engineers and coders. He is actively involved with various charities and has donated large sums to these philanthropic endeavors over the years. When he sold TrustCommerce he contributed an undisclosed amount of the sale proceeds said to be in the tens of millions to the employees as they were key to the company’s success.