Marvin W. Adams, who once headed Banc One Corp.'s card processing unit, has returned to the Ohio-based banking company as its first chief technology officer.
Mr. Adams, who had been technology manager at International Business Machines Corp. for 10 years, served from 1994 until last June as president of Banc One's Financial Card Services Corp.
He left the bank to work in Detroit as chief information officer of Frontier Corp., a long-distance telecommunications company. He assumed his new position at Columbus-based Banc One in February.
Mr. Adams, 39, said his job is to pull together disparate systems on to a coherent technology platform.
"The bank is focused on creating a national business, coming from a legacy of a lot of different distributed organizations," he said.
"We had a traditional information services department and that organization is still in place, but we created the chief technology officer position to try to split up the day-to-day operational focus from the development and planning for the future. I've got (the latter) side of the world."
Banc One has been investing heavily in technology. It is a member of Integrion Financial Network, an IBM-spearheaded consortium dedicated to remote banking, processing, and standardization, and has been experimenting with Internet commerce applications using software from Open Market Inc. of Cambridge, Mass.
"The thing I'm impressed with is how many different initiatives the bank has gotten involved with to stay on the cutting edge of this technology," said Mr. Adams, who earned a degree in electrical engineering and systems science from Michigan State University.
At IBM, Mr. Adams was a supervisor of the Ford Motor Co. account, with responsibility for large-scale system integration projects. He also worked for Xerox Corp. as a vice president of worldwide engineering systems.
At Banc One, Mr. Adams said, further technology innovations are on the horizon. He will work on "the development of emerging technologies and preparing the bank for rolling those kinds of technologies out."
"It's all about ensuring that we have a balanced risk management infrastructure, so we can roll technologies out in synchronization with the right kind of process capacity, the right skills capability, and the right kind of security," Mr. Adams said.
This month, Banc One plans to introduce a Web-based remote banking program as part of an Integrion pilot, said Bruce Luecke, the banking company's general manager of interactive delivery services.
For the last five years, Banc One has offered a limited computer-based banking program through the Prodigy on-line network. "We're about to throw that away and we're in the process of introducing new transaction capabilities using Integrion," Mr. Luecke said.
