When the president of Money Access Service Inc. left the country's largest automated teller machine network to become chief information officer for Comerica Inc., the network's parent company, Electronic Payment Services Inc., sped up the management realignment it was planning for the past year.
The MAC network executives who had been reporting to MAC president John Beran, who became Comerica's executive vice president and CIO on May 1, will now report to Beran's old boss, John Beahn, who is EPS' chief marketing officer. Beran said he had initiated the realigment, and it was prompted by a desire of EPS' management to differentiate the MAC network brand name as a product distinct from the several processing services EPS supplies to member and non-member banks.
Beran said he was approached by Comerica's management to fill the CIO slot, which had been vacant since Robert Condon's retirement in June 1994.
EPS's objective was to drive more management responsibility down the chain of command and into the hands of the individual managers of its business units.
"We thought the way we were organized was too hierarchical," Beahn said.
In addition, EPS is creating a new unit called "Gateway Services." Beahn said this group will negotiate fee-sharing and transaction processing arrangements with other regional ATM networks so that fewer transactions will be routed through the national networks--Plus, owned by Visa, and Cirrus, owned by MasterCard. This will help EPS and other regional networks around the country lower the fees they pay one another for transactions they send and receive from other networks.
