Banc One Financial Card Services Corp., Columbus, Ohio, has named Marvin W. Adams president.
Mr. Adams, 38, will report to chief executive Richard D. Headley. He replaces Kevin Kessinger, who resigned last May.
Mr. Adams, who stressed that "I'm already responsible for financial card services," described his new role as more "a change of titles" than anything. He did expect "to become much more involved with overall strategy."
Mr. Adams joined the unit of Banc One Corp. in April 1994 as vice president and group manager for systems development. He was elevated last May to senior vice president and managing officer.
His responsibilities have included managing all financial card services activities, including the ongoing conversion of affiliate bank and third- party clients to the Triumph card processing system.
He listed his goals as "certainly to help our clients leverage Triumph, and secondly, since we're now in really good shape with Triumph, we'll be putting more energy into going back into the marketplace and selling more licenses."
Banc One and its partner, Andersen Consulting, which Mr. Adams called "the marketing arm," began developing Triumph in 1988. After many delays, it went live in 1993 and was licensed to Barclays Bank of London.
Criticized by some as inferior to other software and outsourcing choices, Triumph received a big boost a year ago, when American Express Co. licensed the system as part of its overhaul of worldwide card operations.
Triumph, said Mr. Adams, "is doing very well, and becoming an accepted core platform for card processing. We've really hit the stability and efficiency plane. We invested an awful lot into the infrastructure to make sure the performance is sound. It's really running nicely."
Prior to joining Banc One, Mr. Adams was vice president of engineering systems and services at Xerox Corp. from 1991 to 1994. At Xerox, he developed and implemented several worldwide engineering systems.
Mr. Adams got his start at IBM Corp. in 1981, spending the next 10 years in a variety of engineering, systems engineering, technology. and marketing management roles.
Both Xerox and IBM gave him experience in "very large-scale system development and deployment," Mr. Adams said.
Mr. Adams received a degree from Michigan State University in electrical engineering and systems science.
