Fiserv's Early Halloween, Western Union's Stablecoin

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Fiserv’s very scary Halloween

Fiserv had the worst week for a payments company in decades. M&A had driven earnings growth and impressive stock performance, but suddenly the music stopped. The skeletons in the closet are out in time for Halloween. This once behemoth company now faces an existential crisis.

Can it be an issuer, acquirer, core processor and innovate to grow? Or is the business model simply rotten to the core? 

Fiserv Q3’25 Earnings Horrow show

• Revenue: $4.92B (Est. $5.33B) 

• Adj EPS: $2.04 (Est. $2.63)

• Organic Revenue Growth: +1% (Est. +9.29%) 

• Merchant Solutions: UP +5% YoY

• Financial Solutions: DOWN -3% YoY

Fiserv has cut its 2025 guidance on organic Revenue Growth to 3.5%–4%. This is wildly different from over a decade of steady, predictable, solid growth. What happened?

History of Fiserv

Fiserv's core products in banking and issuer processing were core processing (deposit accounts, checking, savings). Online banking, branch automation, card management (think Marqeta-like issuer processing), and ATM driving. It claims to serve 10,000 financial institutions globally, with 2,500 in the USA.

Then it entered its M&A era. CheckFree gave it electronic billing, CashEdge gave it digital bank transfer services, and Monetise gave it a mobile app it could white label. But the big moment was the acquisition of First Data in 2019.

For payments nerds,this was massive. Like all the major houses of Westeros suddenly merging. First Data itself was a behemoth, having grown through decades of acquiring various companies. Its core businesses included:

• Merchant Acquiring: Providing point-of-sale systems, payment processing, and related services to businesses (merchants) to accept card payments. This included their well-known Clover platform for small and medium-sized businesses.

• Card Issuing Solutions: Supporting financial institutions in issuing and managing credit, debit, and prepaid cards, including transaction processing and fraud prevention.

• Check Processing: Handling the clearing and settlement of paper checks.

By revenue, the former Fiserv business (Grey) and the former First Data business (Orange) were about equal by early 2025. 

This all seemed to be going well.

Jev from Popular Fintech neatly describes the Fiserv business here (emphasis mine):

Nice, steady, 8% YoY revenue growth. Net income growth at 13%, and earnings per share at 16%. Steady, boring, predictable. 

Until it wasn’t.

What went wrong?

The Q3 earnings call was a "critical and necessary reset" (CEO Mike Lyons' words) that confirmed what analysts suspected: the two-engine growth story had failed.

1. Engine 1: The Merchant Engine (Clover). This engine is still running but is decelerating. The Merchant Solutions segment grew 5%, but that wasn't nearly enough to cover the rot elsewhere, leading to the massive guidance cut (from ~10% organic growth down to 3.5-4%). My WhatsApp groups noted that buying smaller independent sales organizations (ISOs) to make growth look good was a short-term solution that couldn’t last.

2. Engine 2: The Banking Engine (Financial Solutions). This engine stalled and is now in reverse. The segment shrank by 3%. This is the "smoking gun." This core business, which was supposed to be the stable, cash-flow-positive foundation, is eroding.

The company explicitly admitted it had prioritized short-term profitability over long-term investment.

• In the earnings call, Lyons said, "decisions to defer certain investments and cut certain costs improve margins in the short term, but are now limiting our ability to serve clients in a world-class way."

• Running around acquiring ISOs and rolling up companies is a sugar high. It boosts the top-line numbers, but it just creates a Frankenstein's monster of disconnected tech stacks, sales teams, and data centers.

The problem is integration. Or lack thereof.

The "One Fiserv" strategy isn't a new idea; it's a public admission of failure. It’s the "oh shit" moment where they finally have to do the hard work of the First Data merger that they put off for years.

Can they do it this time?

The Bull Case for the Reset and “One Fiserv.”

Fiserv announced its “One Fiserv” strategy to double down on the integration and make it stick. So the big question is can they do it? Here’s the movie version.

“One [Insert Company Name] strategy has been successful in the past.

• Ford in 2006, was near bankruptcy, and had competing brands (Jaguar, Volvo, Mazda) that didn’t share parts, supply chains or strategies. By unifying behind a single platform (chassis), Ford became so successful that it was the only US car maker to refuse a government bailout in the financial crisis.

• Microsoft in 2014 was famous for its knife fights and fiefdoms. Office vs Windows. Satya Nadella stopped protecting Windows, went all in on Azure, and became services-first (Office 365). 

This strategy works when there’s a clear danger. And your stock dropping 43% in 24 hours is about as dangerous as it gets.

Can it work in payments?

On paper, it sounds great. 

Fiserv's "One Fiserv" plan is a bet that the future isn't about being an "issuer" or an "acquirer"; it's about owning the small business operating system.

The strategy is to use its massive footprint with banks (the "issuer" side) as a sales channel to sell Clover POS systems (the "acquirer" side) to all of their small business clients. f they succeed, they create a powerful, "closed-loop" ecosystem that FIS/Worldpay cannot compete with.

Imagine: A small business gets its bank account from a Fiserv-powered community bank. That bank sells them a Clover terminal. Because Fiserv controls the bank core and the merchant terminal, it can offer unique products like instant settlements (instead of waiting two days for a batch) or embedded lending (like Clover Capital).

The problem with a strategy on paper is that it can fail in practice. This has also been the stated strategy for the past six years. The market is rightly concerned about the credibility of doubling down on something that hasn’t worked.

Contrast this with FIS, which went in the precise opposite direction.

Two competing strategies.

FIS spent $43 billion to buy Worldpay (its merchant acquiring business) in 2019. In 2023, it spun it off, admitting the merger had failed. FIS leadership, particularly CEO Stephanie Ferris (who came from Worldpay), concluded that the two businesses are too different and the "synergies" were an illusion.

Their thesis.

• Merchant Acquiring (Worldpay): A fast-paced, tech-driven, sales-focused business. It needs constant investment in e-commerce and new products to compete with agile players like Stripe and Adyen.

• Issuer Processing (FIS Core): A slow-paced, high-margin, sticky "enterprise software" business. It's built on long-term contracts and deep relationships with banks.

Trying to run both businesses under one roof created a "clunky conglomerate." The fast-moving merchant business was stifled by the slow-moving banking business, and neither side could invest or move at the speed it needed to.

They are two valid, but high-risk, bets on the future.

• FIS is betting that the industry will reward focused specialists and that the "synergies" are not worth the bureaucratic drag.

• Fiserv is betting that the future belongs to the company that can build the most valuable integrated network and that the "synergies" are the key to winning the entire small business market.

The "One Fiserv" strategy, and the new leadership team, is a direct admission that their integration had failed up to this point (just as it did at FIS). The recent earnings miss and strategic "reset" are the proof.

Fiserv is now making a high-stakes gamble that a new, purpose-built leadership team can succeed where FIS failed: to finally make the integrated model actually work.

Can new Leaders Deliver?

Here’s what the new team has to do.

• Client-First Mindset: Translation “do sales” and listen more.

• Clover Dominance: Translation “err, try get Clover sales up?”

• Innovating in Finance: They say they’ll deliver platforms in “embedded finance and stablecoin.” (note the lack of “s” on stablecoins? Says a lot.)

• Operational Excellence: Translation. Fire people because AI. (I’m being glib, there’s value here when done right)

• Disciplined Capital Allocation: Translation. Cut costs and stop buying ISOs.

While every fibre of me despises the management-speak of it all, none of it is wrong. The real question is, can they execute? They have one heck of an All-Star team on paper.

CEO, Michael Lyons: Fiserv brought Mike Lyon’s from PNC to be CEO in Februrary after former CEO Frank Bisignano joined the Trump administration to oversee social security disbursements (which is seeming less like a good idea today).. Mike was the customer at PNC, if you’re gonna have a customer mindset, have a former giant customer be your CEO.

Co-President: Dhivya Suryadevara: Was CFO of Stripe and CEO of Optum Financial gives her elite-level expertise in modern, tech-forward financial platforms. Her mandate is to fix the operational gaps in the banking solutions segment. 

Co-President: Takis Georgakopoulos: As the Global Head of Payments at J.P. Morgan, he ran one of the world's largest and most successful payments and merchant-acquiring businesses. Does that mean he can make Clover dominant and get First Data moving?

Like sports teams, you can have the best players, but they need a system and a playbook to win. The strategy is written down and communicated, but is the market going to give them patience, and is it fundamentally flawed?

The "One Fiserv" plan is a bet-the-company-level gamble that the synergy is real and just needed the right leadership to unlock. But is it the right strategy?

Sometimes it Its Hard to Escape Gravity

Sometimes it’s worthwhile

The market has whiplash from predictability to actually, there were skeletons in the closet, and ghosts, and demons, and oh god, what else might be there.

What they’ve done here is try to turn on the lights and buy time to sort the place out, but there’s a surprising amount of strategic optionality they face.

1. Having Co-presidents leading the separate business units sure does set you up nicely to separate those companies. This buys them time and optionality to see if the strategy can work. But should they go all the way and just start divesting? Maybe they have.

2. Issuing and acquiring are very different businesses. Those co-presidents could run them differently, but what’s the system that drives the “One Fiserv” flywheel? How do you make Clover win without investing in it?

3. “Core banking” is an eroding business model that is being slowly chipped away at by AI, modernization, and cloud migration. I’m not convinced a new leader can take various old mainframes and make them modern again, without a major investment.

4. Not all emerging markets are equal. While Brazil and Mexico have been incredible Fintech markets, Argentina has not. Chasing hyper-growth in unstable markets (Argentina) while neglecting your core market (US banks) is a classic short-term play that just blew up in their face. 

Escaping gravity is hard.

A Spooky Reset for Fiserv.

Fiserv’s earnings miss and reset is a direct admission that this strategy has not worked. In a way, their statements to the market are that they’re doubling down, but going harder at actually integrating for real this time. 

Worldline is a cautionary tale. It has lost more than 90% of its value since its peak in mid-2021. As of late October 2025, the stock was trading around €2 to €3, a steep drop from its peak of over €85 in July 2021

The parallels between Fiserv and Worldline are striking. Worldline, another payments giant built through M&A, has also faced significant challenges in integrating its acquisitions and delivering consistent growth, leading to a recent strategic review and a sharp decline in its stock price. 

Will Fiserv be a business school case study of a corporate turnaround like Microsoft, or another cautionary tale like Worldline?

The answer depends the leadership, the wider team, and their ability to work together.

Was this a jump scare or the nightmare that won’t end?

If the stock keeps plummeting, they’ll need to run for the hills pretty quickly.

ST.

4 Fintech Companies 💸

Natural - Payments for AI Agents

Natural aims to build infrastructure to make AI Agent payments useful. This includes potentially wallets, identity, dispute arbitration, authorization tools, and controls for owners. They don’t say how (nothing on the git repo either).

🧠 Everyone sees this opportunity, and they’re all searching for that wedge. One area that comes up often is AP/AR because it's manual, paper-based, and full of rules. I wonder where these guys will start?

2. Cybrid - The stablecoin/tradfi infrastructure 

Cybrid creates a single programmable stack for banking and stablecoin wallets. It provides one set of APIs for KYC, compliance, account creation, wallet creation, liquidity routing, and ledgering. 

🧠The quiet part-out-loud about the stablecoin market is there’s the top 3 or 4 infrastructure companies, and then there’s everyone else with far less revenue and volume. But if this is a growing market, and the big names all get acquired, then you have to think there’s still a big opportunity here.

3. Acoru - Block Authorized Push Payment Fraud

Acoru ingests any data source to give pre-fraud predictions and signals, or a holistic fraud prevention picture to risk teams. They’re aiming to help banks and non banks ensure compliance with European Banking Authority (EBA) and Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) rules for preventing push payment fraud.

🧠 Is this a use case or a business? Sometimes a wedge is all you need. In Europe “authorized push payment” fraud is a major topic because regulators are pushing it and setting up re-imbursement rules. PSD3 will push this much further pushing everyone to look for solutions.

4. Bridge (not that one) - A private market Operating System

Bridge syncs a firm's proprietary data into a single platform to capture capital calls, distributions, and tax documents. It aims to become the centralized system of record for all documents and can create client / LP-ready summaries in minutes from the data.

🧠Cool platform but maybe get a new name? There’s 100s of these, which always makes me wonder, how do you pick just one?

Things to know 👀

1. Visa now supports 4x stablecoins, 4x blockchains, and stable-linked-card transactions up 4x QoQ.

Visa reported quarterly net revenue rose 12% to $10.72 billion, surpassing analysts' estimates of $10.61 billion. Transaction volume, cross-border, and services growth continued to be key drivers. Visa also said it now supports USDC, EURC, PYUSD, USDG on Ethereum, Solana, Stellar, and Avalanche. They convert to 25+ fiat currencies and are running at $2.5bn annualized volume.

🧠 $2.5B annualized monthly volume is 0.02% of total Visa volume. But if that keeps growing 4x QoQ (or anywhere near that), it becomes statistically significant quickly. And that’s before you add in the real effect of the GENIUS Act / domestic volume.

🧠 Stablecoin volume is nice but the real real prize is instant settlement. Visa is building the rails for banks to clear international payments in stablecoins, then instantly convert to local currency with Visa direct. If merchants can get paid instantly, across borders, we get into some very interesting commerce places.

2. Western Union Announces a Stablecoin. Right in the middle of earnings season hmmmm 🤔 

Western Union is launching a US dollar stablecoin, USDPT, issued by Anchorage Digital on the Solana Blockchain. The company also noted they’re using stablecoins for internal treasury management and will partner with 3rd party wallets to enable cash-based on/off ramps in their 500,000+ agent locations across 200 countries.

🧠The distribution partnership with wallets is 1000x more interesting than the stablecoin. Stablecoins solve the dollar to the last mile, but not the fiat conversion. Agent networks are a superpower for the true last mile.

🧠Using stables for corporate treasury in exotic markets is now a no-brainer too. dLocal and Thunes are major cross-border payments companies already getting value from this use case. In exotic <> exotic flows, being dollar-based, instant, and 247 is just better.

🧠Notice how prominently Solana features in the announcement? Word is there's an 8-figure payment behind that exclusivity. Which raises questions: How long is the lock-in? Is this sustainable for L1s to pay for usage? Does it create artificial demand signals?

🧠I imagine this got WU the short-term press cycle it wanted. And it bootstraps its way into stablecoins. But this is a competitive market. Now it's game on. Stablecoins, like AI announcements, are just what the market wants to hear. Although I get the sense that WU sees the bigger picture.

3. NuBank makes ChatGPT Go available to 107m customers for up to one year.

ChatGPT Go is a tier between Free and the Plus tier, with higher message limits and more access to image generation. Nubank customers get one year of free access. All Nubank customers will get 1 month free, Nubank+ get 3 months, and Ultravioleta customers get 12 months.

🧠 This is smart on all sides. ChatGPT as the new “subscription account benefit” makes so much sense. Expect others to copy. For Open AI its new distribution.

🧠 OpenAI is pushing hard with the banks. They’ve hired all of the people, and they’re building a partnerships muscle. This is a nice starting point, but the bigger projects will come out in the wash in 12 to 18 months’ time.

Good Reads 📚

1. A16z‘s State of Crypto 2025 Report

Key highlights. Onchain activity is growing fastest in developing markets. Around 40 to 70m MAU crypto users. ETFs now hold $175bn onchain assets. Stablecoins have gone mainstream and broken their correlation with trading. “Real World Assets” are growing exponentially fast and are the next major mainstream area. The infrastructure is almost ready for prime time with TPS improving and txn fees falling. Privacy is the next big barrier to adoption. AI and Crypto are converging with wallets and protocols for payments like x402. The GENIUS Act happened, and CLARITY is likely to follow. 

🧠 a16z is still pushing the “stablecoins are cheaper” narrative. Which is true but only if the recipient is willing to accept stables (or can instantly transfer) There’s still a lot of risk, compliance and FX cost that stablecoins avoid. 

🧠 Stablecoins are a B2B, not consumer phenomenon. It’s the fastest growing segment of stablecoins (per Artemis), up 300% YoY, and has massive interest from global corporates.

Tweets of the week 🕊

That's all, folks. 👋

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