Mary Ann Francis is, by her own description, an adventure seeker. She jumped off a mountain in the Alps with a parachute, and leapt off of a waterfall in Africa without a parachute. And that's on top of the great white shark diving in Australia.
"When you're a risk taker, it gets you to a point where you wind up jumping off a cliff," said Francis, an associate partner at IBM and one of 2023's
Francis' affinity for the cutting edge extends to innovation, where she is quick to champion new, unproven ideas in financial services, often tasked with pushing adoption for concepts before there's a clear path.
"I first got involved in blockchain about ten years ago, and earlier than that had the task of trying to explain the internet to the corner office in 1996," said Francis, who has worked at IBM for three years and also serves on the advisory board of the Emerging Payments Association. "I am an early adopter of new technologies, whether that's ACH, wire, card, blockchain, real-time payments and now — quantum."
An early start
Francis' experience in payments and financial technology dates to 1976, when she got her start as a branch manager. Before IBM, Francis' career includes seven years at Wipro, where she was global head of the payments practice, among other executive positions and as a payments-oriented executive at several other technology firms. She also worked for 31 years at National City (now PNC), including 18 years during which she planned, designed and developed treasury management products and other offerings.
In one of her roles, she was assigned to convince eight states to shut down lockbox services, consolidating them into two common sites.
"This was a daunting task as each state had its own pride, territorial interests, and power stances," Francis said. "It took months of hard work and perseverance to get each state on board, but we were ultimately successful."
In another instance, an $8 billion global technology firm had payments trapped firmly within its banking vertical. Francis had to present, convince, and justify turning the payments business into a horizontal one so that experts could serve manufacturing, petroleum, airlines, health care, agriculture, banking and insurance.
"Payments is a vast arena, involving much more than a debit and a credit transaction. Payments encompass not only money movement, data and remittance movement, but processing, posting, reporting, translation, validation and operations," Francis said. "Surrounding all of that is posting to the general ledger, reconciliation, infrastructure, regulations, risk, FX, data management, monitoring, tracking, audit and compliance. Each are further surrounded by geo-specific requirements."
In her current post at IBM, Francis is responsible for developing and implementing IBM's global payments strategy, working with clients that are trying to navigate the complex and rapidly changing world of transaction acceptance and processing.
"Quantum is a new hot topic," Francis said. "It has been around for a while but it's not well understood."
'Evolution and revolution'
Financial institutions are challenged to keep up with the rapid pace of payments innovation, facing tough decisions on how to deliver multi-channel shopping and transactions to merchants, how to manage security and economic risk for e-commerce, charting a path to real-time payments and developing a strategy to accommodate the growth of blockchains and other forms of distributed finance.
"Payments are never boring. It's evolution and revolution," said Francis, who has been in her current role for three years and in the
The big topics these days include the cloud, quantum and real-time payments. IBM is in the thick of the race to supply cloud hosting that enables financial institutions to easily add new digital payments and other automated financial services in an economically challenged time.
"A lot of customers want to manage costs," Francis said, adding that AI and the cloud both can play a role in streamlining automation while managing expenses.
IBM has recently stepped up
"IBM is in an interesting position in cloud computing for payments," said Richad Crone, a payments consultant.
"Watson has a long track record, so that gives IBM a fighting chance against Azure and AWS," Crone said.
IBM is additionally working on helping banks gauge and understand preparations for real-time payments. The Federal Reserve's FedNow faster payment service will soon go live, joining The Clearing House's RTP network as an option for bringing real-time settlement to hundreds of new financial institutions. Banks have been relatively slow to adopt real-time settlement, but that's expected to change in the coming years.
Real-time payments will bring faster, more efficient and more secure transactions, as well as new opportunities for innovation in the financial services industry, according to Francis.
"Real-time payments will be a game changer and will bring the entire world together in a new way," she said. "It will be the true measure of success when all systems are working in real-time and the smoke and mirrors are gone. This is when we will be able to say that real-time payments are the norm."
The people who will help IBM and Francis achieve these goals often come from outside of the payments industry.
"Payments can be learned but combined with the understanding of the line of business in parallel with vertical expertise is priceless," said Francis. "I hired the treasurers of two Fortune 100 corporations. Neither were bankers, but they each helped me navigate how treasurers want to work with banks. It's an art."
