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Who's who: Marilyn Kilcrease

Creative Card Solutions founder Marilyn Kilcrease puts the work in 'workaholic,' but she thrives on the challenge of serving customers.

May 2, 2006

Marilyn Kilcrease puts the work in "workaholic."

The California resident and president of Creative Card Solutions is generally up and working by 4 a.m. - and is frequently still working 15 or 16 hours later.

"She always answers her phone, and when I send her an e-mail I get a response right away," said John Steely, president of Automated Systems America Inc., a San Diego, Calif-based ISO and Data Stream, a newly created transaction processing company.

"She never stops," said Michael Epps, executive vice president of American State Bank, another Creative Card Solutions client. "She gets done more than 10 other people could."

Epps remembered a recent business trip to Washington, D.C., in which he and Kilcrease had three hours before a flight. In that time, they managed to see every monument on the Mall and part of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum - during a heavy rainstorm.

"You couldn't do something like that with a normal person, only with someone with as much energy as Marilyn," Epps said.

Kilcrease founded Creative Card Solutions, a consulting firm that assists both ISOs and the financial

Marilyn Kilcrease

institutions that sponsor them into EFT networks, in 1998. Her clients sponsor more than 100 ISOs with some 60,000 merchant locations, accounting for 20 million annual transactions.

Kilcrease began her career as a teller at a small bank in the late 1960s. Finding that she had a knack for finance, she accepted a position with Mutual Savings and Loan, a small bank that nonetheless provided card issuing and merchant services.

The job appealed to Kilcrease because it was "a world in its own," separate from the rest of the bank. "I'm a controlling person, and it really allowed me to control my own destiny," she said.

After moving to San Diego, she accepted a position with Great American Bank managing one of the largest merchant portfolios in California. Unfortunately, Great American - like many other savings banks in the late '80s - went out of business.

Kilcrease spent a year helping Visa Risk Management sell the bank's card and merchant portfolios. She also helped develop the policies and procedures - still used by Visa today - for when a member is taken over by a regulatory authority.

The Visa experience helped her put a positive spin on Great American's failure. "It wasn't like all my energy, time and experience had gone to waste. I was able to use it for some good," she said.

Though she enjoyed working with Visa, Kilcrease was a little frustrated by her role of visiting banks for a few weeks at a time to help them get their card businesses in order.

"I felt like I could never get my hands around anything. I had to tell people how to do things rather than being out there doing them myself," she said.

After a year with Visa, Kilcrease accepted a job offer from Chase Manhattan Bank to help develop debit and credit card products. When Chase merged with Chemical Bank, the newly combined company closed the San Diego facility where Kilcrease was based. Uninterested in moving to New York, she became president of Cardholder Client Services, the lending arm of a new business called The Credit Store.

After six months with the company, Kilcrease found she missed the banking side of the business. She went to Colorado's Best Bank, where she helped develop "a lot of amazing debit card products," including money transfer and payroll cards, and also managed the bank's ATM and point-of-sale sponsorship programs.

"I wish I'd patented some of those ideas. If you could think about a way of getting money and putting it on a card, we did it," she said, noting that many similar concepts are beginning to experience mainstream success today.

After Best Bank failed, some of Kilcrease's former Visa coworkers came in to manage the sale of assets, an experience she called "very traumatic." She said, "It was strange for me to be answering the questions instead of asking them."

Pueblo Bank and Trust bought the assets, including the ATM sponsorship program. However, it declined the debit card portfolio. When the FDIC gave Kilcrease permission to take all of the bank's debit files and customers -- "three bankers' boxes full of information," she said -- she founded Creative Card Solutions.

Her mentor was husband Bill, whom she calls "a walking book of knowledge on bank regulations." After years of experience as a bank president, he worked as a consultant for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency before recently retiring.

"I've been a banker all my life, but Bill can tell me how bankers think and what they want. He really gives my business an edge," she said.

After placing merchant debit portfolios with a number of banks, Kilcrease saw a similar opportunity with ATMs. An early supporter was Sandra Hartfield, president of Palm Desert National Bank's electronic banking division. After helping PDNB create its ATM sponsorship program, Kilcrease did the same for other clients, including American State Bank, Paragon Federal Credit Union and Fifth Third Bank.

Kilcrease helps her clients navigate the sometimes tangled relationships between sponsor banks, ISOs, their sales agents, networks and transaction processors, an environment she calls "not difficult, but confusing."

"It's tough what she does," said ASAI's Steely. "She has to represent the interests of both the ISO and the financial institution, and that's not always easy."

Corralling those entities isn't such a big challenge for a woman who helped herd a group of stampeding cattle

Marilyn KilcreasePresident,Creative Card Solutions* Birthdate:Nov. 18, 1945 * Birthplace:Memphis, Tenn. * Residence: Temecula, Calif. * Resume: 30 years in the banking industry, including positions with ChaseManhattan Bank, Best Bank and Great American Bank, and stints with Visa and with The Credit Store, before founding Creative Card Solutions in 1998 * Family: Husband Bill and sons Brandon and Matthew * Hobbies: Water and snow skiing, weight training, reading * Phrase:"Something good comes out of every bad thing that happens."

while on a dude ranch vacation in Idaho. A trail ride with her sister and mother was "sedate" until the cattle took off, Kilcrease recalled, "Then the two wranglers obviously needed help. I said, 'I think I can do that' and I did -- for about three hours. It was really exciting."

Kilcrease helped create the ATM Industry Association's Committee for Sponsoring Financial Institutions, a group that includes nearly all of the FIs that currently sponsor ATM ISOs. She co-chairs the committee, along with PDNB's Liz Nutting.

"All of them take risk mitigation very seriously," Kilcrease said. "We're establishing some best practices to bring more consistency into the industry."

Kilcrease would like to see EFT networks take a more active role with the committee.

"(The networks) want the members to take more control, which is exactly what they are trying to do. We invite the networks to our meetings, send letters, ask questions and give our combined opinions of actions they are contemplating - yet we are largely ignored," she said. "It would be so much easier for them to talk to the committee as a group instead of talking to each bank individually."

The introduction of the Patriot Act gave Kilcrease an idea for a new business called Merchant Underwriting that will help ISOs and sponsor banks perform due diligence on merchant ATM owners.

Visa's Plus network is expected to introduce a new operating rule that will increase even beyond the Patriot Act the requirements to "know the customer," said Kilcrease, who has enlisted the aid of a professional investigator to perform background checks on merchant locations.

"It wouldn't be a good situation to have the ISOs doing this themselves, and most sponsor banks are not going to want to deal with a thousand applications coming in every month," she said. "With our help, the financial institutions will finally know something about every ATM location."