The McCue Interview: Steve Adams, COO, Barclaycard International

Steve Adams is leading the trend of IT directors who are moving on up to take on COO roles - not bad for someone who admits he got "sucked kicking and screaming" into IT in the first place…

IT and business executives aren't usually noted for their pin-up status but Barclaycard COO Steve Adams is different. He recently caused a bit of a stir when he appeared as one of a series of IT 'poster boys' in a major Hewlett-Packard advertising campaign across the likes of the Financial Times and other mainstream business publications.

On one of his regular business trips to Spain he went to the toilet on the plane only to come back and find his companions waving the full page pictures from the magazines above their heads.

"I've had the mickey taken out of me. I assumed when we were doing it, originally it would be something low key or trade press," he said.

But far from the almost austere and intimidating pose he strikes in those ads, Adams is much more engaging and relaxed in the flesh

The other thing about Adams - which is unusual for this interview series at least, where past subjects have been CIOs and IT directors - is that he is actually a COO. At the time the interview was arranged he was IT director in Barclaycard's UK operations but he is now a few months into his new role as COO of Barclaycard International.

Adams acknowledges the prophetic words of former Safeway CIO Ric Francis in an earlier McCue Interview where he said more and more CIOs will take on broader business roles such as COO. So what exactly is COO?

"It actually means lots of different things to lots of different people but in the context of how we've chosen to interpret it it's all the traditional IT stuff, both in terms of project development and the run side, and it also includes the business change management programmes as well, which sit above the IT," he explains.

Adams was one of several Barclays high-flyers hand-picked by new Barclaycard International CEO Peter Herbert to form an executive team to carry out Barclay's CEO Matthew Barrett's publicly stated aim of expanding the international business.

"On most measures currently the UK card issuing business would represent in the order of 80 per cent of the business overall. The task we've got in International is to create an international business the same size as the UK business within the next six or seven years, which is quite a big ask," he says.

Technology will obviously be a key component of that but Adams stresses that everything is driven by a business need, with the technology purely there to support that.

"One of the things we've learnt here in the past three or four years is that the quality of spend on business change is far more important than just having an almost bottomless pit of money you can chuck at IT because actually you might just as well be throwing bundles of fivers on the fire," he explains. "Of our strategic investment money the vast majority of it is spent on business change, not the IT components that support it, and that is exactly the right thing to do."

In fact IT costs at the organisation have been kept on a tight leash for the past few years. Most companies have an IT budget that is a fairly constant percentage of revenues, which means investment depends on the performance of the business. Not so with Barclaycard, says Adams.

"The percentage of IT spend to revenues has been falling by virtue of the fact we have got pretty good control of our IT costs and we have kept them pretty flat over the last three years," he explains. "Our revenues, however, have been growing substantially so the gap between fixed IT costs - particularly on the run side - and revenues has been growing. IT investment has tended to remain fairly flat over the period as well."

Adams' focus at the moment in terms of technology is re-engineering the in-house built account management system for Barclaycard's merchant acquiring side to a CSC platform, and harmonising disparate International systems that have sprung up through tactical growth by acquisition.

Chip and PIN has also been a major programme for the organisation and one that Adams believes Barclaycard has taken a lead on amongst other card providers and retailers.

"Liability shift occurs in 2005 and we intend to be finished in terms of card reissue, PIN reissue and terminal replacement programmes before the liability shift occurs."

Using technology to combat fraud and evolving security threats such as phishing is obviously important for Barclaycard but Adams again states that the technology merely supports good business and management decisions.

"It's not what you've got but how you use it," he says. "It is about within those neural systems the decision rules that you create to not embarrass your genuine customer any more than you absolutely have to but also turn the wick up sufficiently so you really do start picking up unusual spending patterns and behaviours from customers as quickly as possible."

The reasons for Adams' continual emphasis on business decisions - more so than the usual lines trotted out by some IT directors - becomes apparent when you delve into his career background.

Having started out running a sales and marketing team for the Joint Credit Card company (that's Access your 'flexible friend' to anyone who remembers the 1970s and 1980s) he was headhunted by NatWest when the banks decided to run their own credit cards. In 1994 he says he was "sucked kicking and screaming" into IT as part of the re-centralisation of the bank's IT operations. With hindsight he says it was actually the best thing that happened to him.

After mentoring and an accelerated development programme Adams became IT director of NatWest Cards when the IT operations were decentralised again, where he spent two years before joining Barclaycard as IT director for the merchant business.

Now as COO for the International business Adams is clocking up the air miles between operations in the UK, Dublin and Madrid, as well as preparing to up gears in Nairobi where the African operations are based.

"The geography and logistics are the biggest constraint. I'm in Madrid at least once a week and then buzzing between these centres in Dublin and Hamburg."

But that does give him chance to indulge in one of his passions - running. A marathon veteran, Adams says it is a great way to actually see the places he visits and the one essential item he always packs is a pair of running shoes.

Expect Adams to continue setting the pace in the cards business, which isn't bad for someone who is happy to admit they got into IT "by accident".