Peggy Bekavac Olson - Founder & Principal

Peggy Bekavac Olson is an industry veteran with over 15 years experience in financial services and electronic payments.  She founded Strategic Marketing to help companies build their brands, enhance communications, and improve promotion and lead generation capabilities, with the goal of growing revenues.

Prior to founding Strategic Marketing, Olson served as vice president of marketing and communications for TSYS. During her five year tenure, Olson was responsible for directing brand, public relations, investor relations, communications, advertising, events, product marketing, market intelligence and creative activities for the merchant acquirer processing business, TSYS Acquiring Solutions.  She was instrumental in guiding her team in launching several new payment solutions, including gift card, petroleum, multi-currency, dynamic currency conversion (DCC), virtual terminal, PC-based point-of-sale (POS), shopping cart, terminal-based POS, data breach compliance and insurance programs and back-office support solutions.  She developed innovative acquirer toolkits to jump start the merchant sales process, spearheaded the company’s re-branding efforts from Vital Processing Services to TSYS Acquiring Solutions, and effectively managed communications for more than 200 bank acquiring clients and their one million plus merchants.

Before joining TSYS, Olson operated a marketing consultancy serving clients in both the financial services and technology industries, including Aurum Technology (now part of Fidelity National Information Services (FNIS)) and Vital Processing Services. Throughout her career, Olson has gained broad experience developing marketing campaigns, programs and materials for core, teller, ATM, item processing, remittance, lockbox and point-of-sale technology platforms as well as for credit, debit, check, ACH, gift, prepaid and alternative payment forms. She has additionally held marketing, sales and product management positions with software providers developing for IBM, NCR, Unisys and BancTec hardware platforms.   

Olson currently serves on program planning committee for the Electronic Transactions Association (ETA) and the mentoring and program planning committees for Women Networking in Electronic Transactions (W.Net). Additionally, Olson is a monthly guest columnist for the popular payments industry magazine, The Green Sheet.

Olson has significant philanthropic experience. As a founding board member of a private, not-for-profit independent school and as corporate United Way executive, Olson has led fundraising campaigns to record levels of giving, generating in excess of $10M in charitable contributions. 

Olson holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Administration from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.  In addition, she provides consulting services for Align Financial Service Consultants, Inc. (Align fsc) based in Atlanta, Georgia.