First Data

Incoming chief Frank Bisignano downplays any pressure to find $1.2 billion in cost cuts promised to shareholders from the acquisition of First Data. Instead he emphasized his track record of producing revenue growth and pledged to keep funding innovation projects.

When Fiserv purchased First Data in 2019, it was part of an industrywide push to combine bank and merchant technology under one roof. A year later, a key piece of First Data’s technology — and its top executive — have become Fiserv’s path through the coronavirus crisis.

Bisignano, who engineered a technology-driven recovery at First Data before it was acquired by Fiserv last year, will take Fiserv's top job as the company forges its coronavirus strategy.

Fiserv completed a PIN on Mobile transaction using only an app on a consumer grade handset, and plans to pilot the technology in Europe and Asia.

2019 kicked off with a series of large, multibillion-dollar acquisitions that promised to forever change the landscape of the payments industry. And while those big deals were clustered at the start of the year, many other pivotal deals took place over the course of the year.

Over the past several years, well-established companies in the space like Klarna and FIS have become big enough to buy competitors, fueling the majority of the M&A we’ve seen of late, says AvidXchange's Michael Praeger.

Now that the big, multi-billion dollar payment deals of the past year have closed, the companies must figure out how their new scale can address tasks such as software migrations or data sharing compliance in specific markets.

The big payment processor/bank technology mergers that were announced early this year are officially closing, setting the stage for complicated conversions and a fierce battle for customer share.

The large payment processor mergers were meant to give bigger companies a better way to compete against the nimble startups that were luring their customers away for digital services such as mobile point of sale. And post-merger, Fiserv and First Data have fired their first salvo.

Two of the three multibillion-dollar payment mergers announced in 2019 closed this week, and these global giants must now fend off the invigorated fintechs eager to nab unhappy merchant and bank clients.