Fiserv CEO Takis Georgakopoulos is attempting to transform the company by better monetizing its core businesses while streamlining and divesting other parts.
In presenting last week at an investor conference, Georgakopoulos emphasized that the company hadn’t previously been organized in a way that allowed it to sell its key services and cross-fertilize its offerings for clients. Now, he’s positioning the company to pitch its Finxact core offering to two-sided, e-commerce marketplaces that need a modern ledger, in addition to its historical sale of those services to bank and fintech clients.
“You can sell it as a banking core, but there are low-hanging fruit, and there is a very large [opportunity] out there for a core ledger for enterprise clients,” especially when you connect it to Fiserv’s gateway, Georgakopoulos said Thursday at the Goldman Communicopia and Technology conference.
“It's just very important to monetize those things, which historically again we have not done, and the way we had set up the business, we were not set up for success around those.”
Part of the new CEO’s plan is to keep reviewing standalone businesses within the company that can be divested, including those that were purchased in years past and were never fully integrated, he said. Georgakopoulos was elevated to CEO from a co-president post to lead the Milwaukee-based company in June after Mike Lyons exited to lead Truist Financial.
Earlier this year, the company sold an ATM business as well as an education financing software unit.
Georgakopoulos told analysts earlier this month that the company is considering selling one of its debit networks. The CEO didn’t specify which network, Star or Accel, but some analysts said they suspected the company would keep Star and shed Accel.
“We will continue to look for standalone businesses that don't have either the growth profile or margin profile that we like, that are standalone, and we will try to find strategic solutions for those,” Georgakopoulos told the Goldman audience. “There are a number of such products that we have that we are looking at.”
Georgakopoulos sees duplication of services within the Fiserv business that shouldn’t exist, and also some Fiserv services in need of streamlining.
Much of the plan to revamp the company entails “simplifying the infrastructure that we have and reducing the number of platforms and the number of backends that we have,” the CEO said. The company has come “a long way on that” in its merchant services side of the business, and it will do the same for financial services, he said.
Fiserv is seeking $500 million in savings, with a plan to invest $100 million in its technology infrastructure.
Advances in artificial technology have made it all the more important that the company speed up the plans to accomplish those goals, Georgakopoulos said.
Still, the company’s chief financial officer, Paul Todd, noted at the same conference that some of the profit benefits of the new plan, called Project Elevate, won’t land for a few years. Todd was appointed CFO last October before Lyons departed.
“On Project Elevate, we do expect that to be more back-loaded as we expect 2029 benefit on the operating leverage on the margin side to be almost 2x the benefit that we see in 2027,” Todd said.
