It is safe to say that Metavante Technologies Inc., a stalwart of the FinTech 100 since the list's inception in 2004, will not be making a return appearance in 2010.
The Milwaukee vendor, No. 10 on the list for the past two years, sold itself Oct. 1 to Fidelity National Information Services Inc. in Jacksonville, Fla., for $2.94 billion of Fidelity stock.
For Frank Martire, who was the chairman and chief executive of Metavante and is now the president and CEO of the combined company, the work is beginning anew.
"To say we have no challenges would be ridiculous," Martire said.
Chief among them is to meld the two organizations and to combine their hardware, software and service offerings without suffering too much customer attrition.
Martire is bringing along a cadre of trusted lieutenants to help manage the transition — a number of Metavante alumni have taken prominent roles in the post-merger Fidelity. Among them are Mike Hayford, who was Metavante's president and chief operating officer and is now a corporate executive vice president at Fidelity and its chief financial officer; Frank D'Angelo, formerly the president and chief operating officer of Metavante's payments group and now executive vice president of payment solutions; and Brian Hurdis, the former president of the Metavante image solutions unit and now executive vice president of technology services.
Up and down the new organization chart, the combined company presents a blend of talent from both its predecessor organizations, Martire said. "A lot of us know each other," he said. "We put the best people in the right jobs."
Metavante actually had a pretty short life as an independent company. It was long a unit of the Milwaukee banking company Marshall & Ilsley Corp., which spun it off as a publicly traded company in November 2007; its sale to Fidelity closed 23 months later.
Some observers worry about the consequences of concentrating so much competitive firepower in a single company, but Robert Hunt, the senior research director of retail banking at TowerGroup, a Needham, Mass., independent research firm owned by MasterCard Inc., said the combination could actually enhance the ability of smaller vendors to compete for banks' business.
"It really helps the tertiary players," Hunt said. "When you get to the short list, there's more room."
