Doug Lockyer

From 1997 through 2000 Doug was active as Visa USA's Internet Strategies Consultant Of Record, and his firm, Riptide Communications, was one of three Interactive Communications Agencies accepted as vendors.

In its strategic consulting communications, Riptide used the tree frog as a report mascot to epitomize the concept of "thinking by leaping", referring to Doug's trademark, discontinuous but visionary approach. The approach demands a high level of initial due diligence, part of which consists of a disciplined and robust needs analyses.

The process can be compared to the composition of jazz music, whereby a musician must know and be intimate with classical music first, before leaping to abstraction. In just this manner, Riptide espoused a responsible but sometimes dramatic divorce from the path the client was on, which would have lead inexorably to what was always going to happen anyway. Often this path got re-acquired, but one has to be equally willing to abandon preconceptions, or return to them, in order to be open to extraordinary results

The first strategic direction project was to recommend or design a solution that would enable VISA to save money from call center operations by automating as much of the support relationship between VISA and its (then) 17 Million merchants, using online communications.

Simultaneously VISA wanted to explore the potential for a co-branded e-commerce initiative between VISA and key global partners.