Earlier this week, Mike Bernard and I had the pleasure of attending Fiserv Forum, Fiserv’s flagship client event in Las Vegas. The event brought together over 4,000 Fiserv employees, clients, and partners. With 100+ sessions and the exhibit hall with 74 product displays on offer, there were plenty of opportunities to learn and network.

There has been a change at the very top at Fiserv recently: the new CEO, Mike Lyons, joined the company from PNC in January this year, while the COO, Takis Georgakopoulos, previously Global Head of JP Morgan Payments, has been at the firm for just over a year. Kicking off the event at the General Session, the leadership team were keen to emphasize several points:

• Commitment to Core Banking and One Fiserv. The executives reiterated their “deep commitment to core banking” and spoke of “one Fiserv”, acknowledging perhaps the need to dispel any lingering market perceptions of Fiserv as two distinct businesses, while stressing equally strong commitment to both merchants and financial institutions. The company is investing to modernize and consolidate various platforms, for example, moving from 16 cores to five. On the issuing side, while Optis transformation programme continues, Fiserv is also bringing to the US Vision Next, a cloud-native card management platform developed in Europe from scratch leveraging the experience and knowledge accumulated over many years of running VisionPLUS.
• Client-first mindset manifesting in multiple ways, from increased engagement and firm commitment to meet SLAs to the promise to support clients in their M&A activity and help them migrate away from legacy platforms on their timelines. To strengthen their ability to support client modernization efforts, Fiserv announced the acquisition of Smith Consulting Group, “an operational consulting service utilized by community banks and credit unions across the United States”. The CEO even put the photos with emails and phone numbers of the entire management team up on screen at one stage, inviting clients to communicate directly.
• Strategic multi-year quality plan to minimise incidents and reduce their impact, accelerating the recovery time, especially for client-facing applications.
• Ongoing investment into innovation and value-added services, from Clover, Fiserv’s merchant platform, to AI, embedded finance, and stablecoins. While stablecoins have the potential to become “revolutionary global utility”, they can also represent the risk to financial institutions eroding deposits. To support clients, Fiserv is building out its digital asset platform that includes FIUSD, a new stablecoin issued on Solana blockchain. The company also announced the acquisition of StoneCastle Cash Management, which "enables its network of depository institutions, primarily community banks and credit unions, to easily access stable, cost-efficient deposit funding from thousands of businesses and enterprise customers holding cash balances". The combined offering should allow Fiserv's financial institution clients to custody cash supporting FIUSD stablecoins and help protect their deposit base.
• Long-term outlook. Public companies face relentless pressure to deliver quarterly results, sometimes leading to short-term decisions to influence the stock market. The management team reiterated their belief that “not all great stocks turn out to be good companies, but all great companies become great stocks” and expressed commitment to be guided by longer-term priorities aimed at “building a great company”.

I can’t finish this wrap up without mentioning that we also got to experience the Shark Tank, one of my favourite TV programmes! First, Mark Cuban was one of several brilliant guest speakers. Then, at the end of Day 2, some other “sharks”, including Kevin “Mr Wonderful” O’Leary and Daymond John, came on stage to judge live pitches from three small businesses that took part in the Clover x Shark Tank Summit, which ran in parallel with the Forum.

The last thing that remains is to thank Fiserv for inviting us to experience these two memorable days - we really appreciate it. I am already looking forward to next year!