ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times

DATE: Sunday, March 2, 1997                  TAG: 9702280043
SECTION: BUSINESS                 PAGE: 1    EDITION: METRO 
DATELINE: FREDERICK, MD.
SOURCE: DAVID DISHNEAU ASSOCIATED PRESS 

BANK-CARD WATCHDOG JUST CALLS IT LIKE IT IS

So to whom does McKinley pledge allegiance? That's easy.

``To me!'' the robust founder of RAM Research Group said with a booming laugh. ``To us!''

RAM, the company McKinley founded 10 years ago in his basement, is indeed the prime beneficiary of his balancing act. From a converted red-brick house on the edge of downtown Frederick, RAM gathers and dispenses reams of credit-card information to consumers and bankers alike.

The booming business has made its engaging founder a widely quoted authority on credit-card deals and misdeeds, as well as a consultant to banks pondering new twists to their plastic products.

``It serves our purposes to keep him advised of what we're doing. He's fun to talk to about what he thinks the consumer is going to do,'' said Beverly Wells, president of bank card services for North Carolina-based Wachovia Corp.

RAM's chief asset is its credibility, which McKinley and his 20 employees preserve by reporting exhaustively on their monthly surveys of 500 banks, highlighting good deals and calling foul on deceptive practices.

For example, RAM's CardTrak newsletter, which is sent to 1,500 media outlets, blew the whistle in 1990 on two-cycle billing, a way of computing interest that lets card issuers make more money on people who don't pay their balances in full.

McKinley also recently criticized Capital One, a Falls Church, Va., bank spun off from Richmond-based Signet Banking Corp., for offering its customers a $20 ``enhanced'' option of lowering their minimum monthly payments.

``Anyone who knows anything about the card business knows that if you make the minimum payment, the 2 percent per month that they ask for, you will never get out of debt. It takes 30 years to clear a $2,000 debt,'' McKinley said.

Sometimes banks cancel their $1,000 subscriptions to RAM's quarterly Bankcard Update report, but most come back, he said.

``We just call it like it is, and we take the hits,'' McKinley said in an interview during a rare break in his 60-to 80-hour work week. ``We just try to provide the best information we can for consumers and stick up for consumers if we see something we really think is out of line.''

He traced his upright attitude to a strict Jehovah's Witnesses upbringing in a Hagerstown home headed by an electrical engineer father and homemaker mother. An early interest in electronics led to a series of technical jobs with area radio and television stations, which gave him a grasp of the news business.

In high school, McKinley began reading The Wall Street Journal - now a RAM subscriber - which sparked his interest in financial matters. By age 19 he had built and sold his first business, a Muzak-style background music enterprise.

McKinley was 30 and working at a Washington television station when he decided to publish a consumer newsletter on his home computer. He was considering the already crowded field of mutual-fund publications when he stumbled across an ad for an 8 percent credit card from a bank in Arkansas.

``I thought this was great,'' he said. ``All the credit cards I had were 18 percent, and all my friends' were at that level. I contacted the bank, got the application, it was approved and sent back.''

He found no one publishing extensive lists of credit-card rates, so he started contacting banks and compiling data.

``My first interest was to serve consumers. I didn't even realize there was a larger void on the industry side,'' McKinley said.

His initial mailing to newspapers got a mention in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. That yielded at least 40 orders for McKinley's 50-cent publication, which he now sells to consumers for $5.

RAM - the initials are those of McKinley and his wife, Anita - also caught bankers' attention. Suddenly, there was a single source of information about their competitors - and a new way of reaching vast numbers of potential customers.

LENGTH: Medium:   79 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  AP. Robert McKinley, president of RAM Research holds 
          credit cards at one of his company's work stations with a computer 
          displaying RAM's Web page in Frederick, Md. Ram provides information
          on credit cards to both consumers and banks, keeping a keen eye on 
          deceptive practices. color.