A South Florida police pension fund and a European-based investment firm want to serve as lead plaintiff in a class-action shareholder lawsuit against Fiserv over the payment behemoth’s Clover unit.
The motions last month were filed by the pension fund for police officers in Hollywood, Florida, along with a competing motion from Ethenea Independent Investors SA of Luxembourg.
The officers’ pension fund said it lost $1.67 million on a decline in Fiserv shares, while Ethenea’s flagship fund, Ethna-AKTIV, lost $5.95 million on its Fiserv investment, according to the investment firm’s Sept. 22 brief.
A federal court’s designation of a lead shareholder plaintiff is heavily influenced by the size of an investor’s purported loss and their attorneys’ ability to oversee the litigation on behalf of other plaintiffs, as outlined in the 1995 Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, according to court filings.
The lawsuit, filed in July in federal court, alleges the payment processor misled investors by failing to disclose it had “forcibly migrated” merchants to its Clover point-of-sale product in late 2023 through the first half of 2024. Fiserv executives made misleading statements about Clover’s growth, leading to major share price declines earlier this year after the company revealed shortfalls in Clover payment volumes and overall company revenue growth, the lawsuit alleges.
The complaint names Fiserv and four current and former executives as defendants, including Chief Executive Michael Lyons and former CEO Frank Bisignano, who now oversees the Social Security Administration and was named chief executive of the Internal Revenue Service this week.
The litigation covers investors who bought or owned Fiserv stock between July 24, 2024 and July 22, 2025.
Fiserv had no comment on the lead plaintiff process, a company spokesperson said Monday in an email, adding that “Fiserv disagrees with the claims and will vigorously defend itself.”
Shares of Milwaukee-based Fiserv have declined 38% this year. Lyons became CEO in May when the Senate confirmed Bisignano for the Social Security role.
The complaint was filed in the Southern District of New York by the pension fund for 733 active and retired Hollywood, Florida, police officers, which manages about $460 million, according to court documents.
Ethenea Independent Investors SA manages 2.4 billion euros ($2.8 billion) in assets, describing itself as “a sophisticated institutional investor” based in Luxembourg, according to its Sept. 22 brief supporting its lead-plaintiff motion.
Two other plaintiffs — Dr. Danish Qureshi, a Pittsburgh physician, and Yoko Momoyama, a physician with “more than 30 years investing experience,” according to her filing — withdrew their motions on Sept. 25 and Friday, respectively. Qureshi said he lost $490,620 on his Fiserv investment, while Momoyama lost $228,222 on hers, according to their prior motions seeking to lead the case.
“The withdrawal is just a function of our client not having a larger loss than the competing movant — the size of loss is determinative of who will be appointed lead plaintiff,” Momoyama’s attorney, Phillip Kim, said Monday in an email.
Qureshi’s attorney at the law firm Levi & Korsinsky in New York did not respond to an email Monday seeking comment about his withdrawn motion.
In a filing Monday, lawyers for the pension fund argued that Ethenea made its only “class period purchase” of Fiserv shares on June 25, after “the company’s fraud was largely disclosed.” As a result, the investment firm’s “superior financial interest rests entirely on a fatal trading quirk which renders it atypical and threatens to overwhelm the focus of the litigation.”
Selecting Ethenea as the lead plaintiff would “severely undermine the prosecution of the Class’s claims because such a blatantly atypical lead plaintiff may be disqualified or rejected at later stages of litigation,” the pension fund said, arguing that Fiserv would target Ethenea’s trading in its defense.
Attorneys from the law firm Motley Rice representing Ethenea did not respond to an email Tuesday seeking comment about the pension fund’s brief.
Ethenea said in its own filing Monday that it has the largest financial interest among the class of plaintiffs, “having a loss that is not only substantially larger than any other movant, but one that exceeds the losses of all other movants combined.”
Courts also assess the experience and resources of the plaintiffs’ legal counsel as part of their process in selecting a plaintiff to lead a class action suit.
The police officers’ pension fund is represented by the law firm Labaton Keller Sucharow, which focuses on securities, corporate governance and shareholder rights litigation. Motley Rice specializes in complex civil litigation.
