Hi, Frank. Thank you for being here. Just.
My pleasure.
For those of you that don't know me, I'm Mizuho's Payments and IT Services Analyst, mostly payments. Don't worry. It's my pleasure today to host my friend Frank Bisignano, Chairman of the Board, President, CEO of Fiserv. Frank has joined Fiserv in 2019 through the acquisition of First Data, where he was the Chairman and the CEO. At Fiserv, he initially led the company's day-to-day operations as President and COO before assuming the role of CEO in July 2020. It's been nothing but a huge success. He became Chairman of the Board in 2022. It's been our consistent topic on our side, literally the one so-called deal stock that actually thrived. It's all credit to you. So thank you again, Frank, for joining us this morning.
Thanks for having me.
So yeah, maybe let's just start with some questions for you. We're here in mid-June. What do you think the consumer looks like today? What's your view of the macro environment and the health of the U.S. consumer versus, say, a couple of months ago?
Yeah. You know, we're fortunate to produce the Fiserv Small Business Index. You've watched that monthly as we produce it, fundamentally two business days after the end of the month. You saw where April was. You saw during the middle of May, I answered a question like this, and I said the consumer's a hair slower. People thought I was trying to tell them something. What I was telling them is they're still robust, but April was very strong. May was a hair slower. Then you saw the numbers we produced from a 5-something, 4-something. Still good. One of the things I like to remind people is spending categories change. Spending categories change. So if restaurants are feeling a downtick, grocers are feeling an uptick, and we're big in both of them.
If travel's a hair off, generally petro's a hair up, and we're well indexed on all of that. So I think the diversity of our portfolio allows us to fundamentally get the desired outcome because of our client base. And that's why you frequently hear me say, you know, I think we got the best client franchise around. And that's what we work on a heck of a lot, acquisition in all the verticals that we operate.
Thank you. So good news, I guess. Let's maybe shift gears quickly to Clover. I mean, this has been a masterstroke on your end. Nobody really believed it. I've been covering First Data for a long time. I remember in 2016, people were kind of making fun of it. Today, it's kind of considered its main considered literally the best-in-class share gainer, U.S. point of sale. You see it everywhere. I saw it in Europe, by the way. I was in Europe a couple of weeks ago. I saw it everywhere in Germany, et c. What gives you the confidence that Clover's growth is sustainable? It's been amazing, and particularly in the context of achieving your medium-term target of north of $4.5 billion of Clover revenue by 2026.
Yeah. You know, I thought about your introduction a little bit, Dan. And when you first, I'm about to say anything here?
Yeah.
Yeah. I won't curse, I swear.
It's the best part.
I hope. I hope. Sometimes it happens. You know, I remember you first covering us. And I think there was a little bit. I can't remember where it was. But yeah, yeah. And I teased Dan because when he introduced himself today as a senior analyst, U.S. technology, payments, and technology, when he was at Nomura, Nomura had a different system, I guess. I'm sure I'm going to get in trouble now. But they put their analysts in alphabetical order. And Dan had payments and pesticides.
Correct.
Is that correct? I was like, he sometimes got me confused, right? I'd be like, Dan, you're always saying how bad we are. We're just not a pesticide company. It's the truth. So people follow mine and Dan's relationship today sometimes and think like, oh, well, Dan was one of the hardest critics of our company. He actually, you know, in my opinion, made us better. He made us better. One day, you know, I got tired of what Dan would write. I'm like, well, you get him up here, get a bunch of investors here, and let's go do it. Now, at that point in time, probably early on, I'd have this saying, like, Clover's going to be in a heavyweight bout. You know, I have love of sports, and I have an uncle who is a middleweight champ of the world.
So I'd talk about boxing, and then I could cover a bunch of other sports and people in my family, but let's stay on boxing. I'd be like, it's going to be in a heavyweight bout. You know, and everybody knew who I meant. We were going to be in a heavyweight bout, a guy and a company I have tremendous respect for. But you know, I did get laughed at at stadiums, right? Like, how is that going to happen? And in the beginning, it really happened through great distribution, right? Good product, great distribution.
That great distribution still exists. We still have great, we build a lot more distribution. We have way more distribution than we had back then. And we have much better product. And then, you know, I think, you know, remember, you know, Clover, when we bought it, was, you know, seven engineers and three patents.
So you know, we got it wrong a whole bunch early on. And you know, I kind of like saying that. You know, I learned to like saying it. I didn't like it when it was going on, right? Clearly, I didn't like it because we were struggling in what it was. I thought it was going to be an iPhone for small businesses. And I found out pretty early on, like, small businesses are uninterested while they're making a pizza to try to figure out how to flip through what to look at. And then we started changing our mentality. And then we built great horizontal. We brought in more software. We realized employee management mattered a lot. So we'd have tools for it. We'd be a great distributor. So when I get asked this question, right, like this famous question, what makes you so confident?
Well, I was confident when we were broke and homeless, and I had three patents and seven people. So you know, thousands of engineers working on it, a company with 13,000 software engineers alone, obviously not all dedicated to it, and increased distribution capability through the Fiserv merger. And you know, I love saying, you know, banks are great distribution partners, and this is a great product for banks. It actually helped banks compete in multiple levels. And so you know, if you look at what we said, first when we did Merchant Day, and you know, we talked about $3.5 billion, and then we came back and upped it to where we are today. And then you look at you know the growth of it, you know, $29 billion, $30 billion, $28.5 billion. You know, so definitely in the range with way more distribution.
I love telling people, you know, if you can relate to this, it's super early innings. It's super early innings. We're geographically not everywhere we want to be. We're not where we want to be in every vertical. And we're not where we want to be in the amount of distribution we have and the amount of penetration of the distribution. But the product is proven. So you know, I had blind confidence early on. I have full visibility to my confidence today, our confidence, the whole team's confidence.
I remember that breakfast very vividly. Basically, every hedge fund sent a delegate to your office. I think the stock was up 5%.
Wow.
I was so confident out of that breakfast in terms of that. We were, you know, this literally changed my perception of Fiserv. It was a good move.
Yeah, well, you know.
I do miss covering pest control a little bit. You know, the bugs don't care about multiples. They don't read the Journal, and you don't have to.
There's definitely a high-volume business, though, right? It's a high-volume business. I was like, you know.
At the end of days.
I couldn't help that joke, though, when I looked at him. So he covers payments and pesticides. I'm like, oh, Nomura does it by the alphabet. Tech and taxis.
Tech. It's like, it's.
Oh, they're out of business.
We did everything. Yeah, this is the, yeah, we did everything at Nomura. But in uniform rental and whatever, right? So this was, it's definitely much more focused now, and we made our choice to stick with payments. So yeah, maybe just to talk about.
How many of the people sitting here knew he covered pesticides, too? That's my job. To give you information you probably don't care that much about.
Well, Sean does, because Sean and I work together. So does Ryan.
Yeah, two people.
Two people. Pest control and day school. What else did we cover?
I may be creating a huge problem for you.
No, it's all good.
Because when people now have a problem at home, they're going to call you to ask who they should call.
Yeah. No, we've had some fun covering those names and Aramark. And you know, we covered like every dysfunctional company.
I'm a little scared being here.
Back then. No, no, no. Now we cover, you know, this is, it's, you know, you have it good when you worked at a different Japanese bank, and now we're working at a very good one.
Yeah.
You know you have it very good now. Maybe just really quick, you mentioned distribution, Frank. This is obviously one of the biggest strengths of Fiserv. I mean, you've got epic distribution capabilities. Maybe, I don't think the audience appreciates what makes the distribution so effective and how big of an advantage it is when you're competing with good quality products like Toast, but just they lack the distribution that you have.
Yeah, I think, I think first of all, I think distribution isn't always completely understood. And you know, I mean, you'll love having manufacturing and distribution. You know, somebody would taught me really, really, really long time ago, like, distribution's king. You know, ultimately, it's the endpoint. Where are you going to get your clients from? And then having distribution partners. And you know, I think banks are fabulous distribution partners, and specifically on this product, because we're bringing them revenue, right? That's how it works. We're bringing them revenue with 100% margin. And that's an unusual position for a provider, so to speak. We actually have another product coming to market that will do the same thing, CashFlow Central, which we can talk about later. But so I think, you know, that's one set of distribution partners.
We always had this tremendous individual entrepreneur sales force that, you know, would be writing, serving, writing contracts, serving clients who ultimately were doing it in our name. That agent sales for us are entrepreneurs that are out there. When we bought CardConnect, we bought the best set of tools that would serve that network and also brought a whole bunch of tools that allowed us to begin getting in the ISV. If you remember, back in the day, we did not have an ISV business. We were significantly disadvantaged. We made a choice to not decide who was going to be the winners and losers in the ISV space, but to say we would power them all. You know, we'd rather serve every liquor store or, you know, other type of veterinarian as opposed to pick which one is the right one.
And so we just kept increasing distribution. We also have a very strong retail ISO business, which are distributors. They're fundamentally all exclusive partners. You know, and obviously, we have this processing business, which you've seen us break it out. You know, like I like to say, hopefully, we finally got this right, you know, that, you know, instead of me just talking about it and explaining to you, well, we have an ISO business and we have processing. So when you want to know about volume versus revenue, you got to look at us differently. I think I'll break out on this in the segment now in a new way we did it, hopefully depicts where growth is occurring. But that processing business many times is able to distribute other products of ours, too.
And you know, when you got all of that and then you want to lay software on top of it, you know, I think it's why I feel so confident. If I look at the promise of the merger, it really, really, really did work. I like to say all the time, none of, you know, people, I think people like Dan would call them deal stocks. And I always thought they were, you know.
That's a nice way of.
Yeah, well, my only point is they weren't, there was nothing similar about them, right? I think the construction of this company is unparalleled. And that's what you really got to step back, you know, because we'll sit here and talk about the component parts, Clover or, you know, Brazil or, you know, STAR and Accel. But when you got to say the integration of this company is what makes it, to me, the unique asset. You got Clover way on the front. You have a debit network that's very powerful, right? You have an issuing business that, you know, in the retail private label space and the general is really a powerhouse. And you've seen us win a lot of that business over time. Yesterday, I addressed like our top 25 clients who are all in that space. And there's future growth there. You got an international franchise.
And then you have this set of banking systems that we're innovating in and actually believe we're fighting better than the company ever did. And they all hang together. They're not disparate, you know? And so I really like the construction of the company. I want you to like it and understand it. That is not a bunch of disparate assets that happen to sit under one roof. It's an integrated firm. We go to market integrated, whether it's to a merchant or to a financial institution. And so the amount that we can still penetrate, the amount of time we can penetrate within our own four walls allows us to continue to have the growth algo that we have on the top line.
Yeah, and it works. It's a big part.
So far. Our job to keep it working.
And no, it's been amazing. Maybe just the last one on this topic, quickly on, you've mentioned recently that you want to get into new verticals. Like, what are the most interesting verticals outside of restaurants that you can think of for Clover?
Yeah. I mean, you know, it's an interesting thing because if you walk into our office and you know, the first thing you'll see is a screen that shows how America is spending money on our rails, right? And that'll be 40% of the U.S. volume. And the number one category is restaurants. The number two category is gasoline. The number three category is grocery. You know, and so, you know, we already have a dominant restaurant business. We want to go further north on that restaurant stack, right? That's really where the passion is. How do we bring more? And when I say north, you know, you know, whoever the best restaurant you can think of, you know, we want to have all the tools and capabilities to serve them.
Dropping down underneath that, I feel like we win head to head and can beat anybody any day in that space. Then you say, look, retail has a lot of elements to it. You can bring a lot more software to retail. Retail is pretty big, pretty dominant. We already have, you know, a lot of value-added services that we do bring to grocery and petro. It's kind of where one part of the company grew up. So you say, hey, you know, we should continue to invest in that retail. And then you'd say services. Services probably was underserved by us. And of course, it's a word. So we should give a better definition of what we mean by it.
You know, everywhere from lawn care to your local plumber to all people who traverse your house and would like to get paid and haven't always had the capability. And so, you know, I think of those three. And when we look, part of that decision-making is off of our book of business, where we can see the traffic, where we know we can bring software, and we know we can grow that TAM with our current client base and then have better skills to acquire more clients.
Yeah. So more to come from a vertical. Maybe one more question, and we'll open to Q&A, because I think we started, the clock was still standing, so.
It's okay. I wouldn't worry about it.
Thank you. So one.
I'm trying to sing at this cabaret well enough that I get invited back to a main event, you know? I'm not always the undercard.
For me, you're number one.
Oh, yeah.
But don't worry.
Right this minute.
Always.
Tell the next guy or girl.
Always, always. You know, like the, if I think about, it's like the main, one of the main pushbacks have been Argentina. It's about 6% of merchants, I think. And there has been some, I would say, there's, if investors are picking on something, they're picking on Argentina inflation. Maybe we can, you can shed some light on like where we are in terms of that, you know, what is, how important that business is for Fiserv and how does, you know, how does inflation play into the growth there? Because that's what we're.
You know, anytime I get asked a question, I give a way longer answer than the question, because I think framing and understanding as opposed just to transacting allows people to have a forward vision towards outcomes. Argentina was a single acquirer market at the time we were doing the merger. We had a point of view about Argentina. We had a point of view about Brazil. We had countries that we believe we're either in and can do more. Brazil was. I think the Brazil story like really, really matters. It's almost like the Clover story, already penetrated market with a high payment volume market that we were not in. And actually, no U.S. company had ever succeeded in Brazil.
And we went down there and, you know, when we raised the $3.5 billion, when I like to say we're poor, homeless, and destitute, you know, we talked about Clover, we talked about Brazil, things we would build out and succeed at. And in that same way, we already had this Argentine business, but we were a single acquirer of Mastercard and Visa was the dominant acquirer. If you look really deep and really hard, you'd find out that we went to Argentina and we got the payment rules changed, right? We run this global franchise with three regions, with three region heads who all report directly into me. And we think about countries from capital allocation to human resource allocation to where we're putting technology. And we said, if we could get the payment rules changed, we would bring Clover into that market.
You can follow. I don't think too many people here who get up in the morning and read the Argentinian newspapers. But if you looked at the Argentinian newspapers and go back to the merger, and I remember saying to Jeff Yabuki one day, he's like, what are you doing? Where are you going? I said, I'm going to Argentina. He's like, you're going to Argentina, you know? What are you going to do there? I said, well, we're going to try to become a dual acquiring market and then we're going to deploy Clover. By the way, the people in Sunnyvale were like, what are we doing? Why are we going to Argentina? Why are we going to Argentina? I'm like, well, there's a lot of payment volume. We actually have the lower market share capability.
But if we can get this change and come in with Clover, we can win. And that happened. That happened. And then, you know, whether right or wrong, my career took me through Citigroup and JP Morgan in the greatest eras of both companies. One of them still having its greatest era. But you know, if you go check the league tables during my days from Salomon Smith Barney to Citigroup, we were like number one in every category and we had big global businesses. So there's nothing odd to me about inflation, about, you know, currency. Now, can you manage it? Do you understand it? Right? And when you call it all back, and if you went through everything we've said through this journey, we've actually performed exactly as we've forecasted. And if you rip it all out and you say, what's the merchant business?
It's an 11%-14% grower if you take out all of the extra stuff going on in Argentina. I just think we have good local management. We have good regional management. We understand the markets we operate in. And this is going to happen. Now the question is, what's your underlying business doing? And I think our underlying business is doing exactly what we told you to do.
Yeah. So the presence and the share gains in Argentina are more important than transitory.
Yeah, we're at the back. You know, I kind of feel like we've been talking about this for a while. I think we have. And you know, I think we've said what was going to happen. We've managed it. We can't, we can't, you know, I can't forecast what the finance minister is going to do. And I can't forecast, you know, we lived through a governmental change there. And which in these countries are pretty dramatic, you know? It's probably dramatic in the U.S. too, but you know, that's a whole nother problem we're not going to talk about today. Oh my God. You know, but like, you know, I mean, when I do, we won't go there.
Let's go there. Let's go there. It's interesting.
Well, no, it's what people ask me about when I'm outside the U.S., what they ask me about the U.S. So we don't really want to talk about that. I just think the fact of the matter is, you know, call it all back, look at it, slice and dice it any way you want. We're 11%-14% grower. We're performing at that level. And by the way, on the EPS line, it, because of, you know, on the other side of it is FX. It's fundamentally been neutral, if not down a tick in a quarter or two.
Yeah. Obviously, a hedge fund darling that, you know, that Argentina inflation, I would say like our conversations with local investors.
Yeah.
They see through that.
Yeah.
So you kind of know what people are playing for. Maybe just really quickly, a question for Frank from the audience, if anyone has anything.
How about them Yankees? I should be saying, how about them Mets? Because they, you know, have a bunch of Clover in their stadium, but you know.
Where is the, maybe question, maybe last question on my end, if there's nothing for Frank? Just on capital allocation, like where is, you know, you've made the partnership with Melio from Israel, B2B corporate payments is a big focus. Like where does, where's the, where do you see Fiserv in, you know, two to three y ears in terms of the big focus now that you've basically won retail and merchant? So it's very clear.
Yeah, I mean, first of all, first of all, you know, I never get up thinking I want anything. You know, we're competing every day and, you know, I'm generally, you know, difficult on my team and about all we could do better. I see so much opportunity. So I just want to clear that up. And I think, you know, I've lived on a platform of complimenting my competitors as opposed to saying anything, anything other than that. And I think technology is a great equalizer. I mean, you saw it happen in companies all the time. So, you know, I think our strength is 13,000 software engineers and half the company being technologists. But you know, relative to capital allocation, you know, because of distribution and because of our geographic presence, we've liked the things we've done that then we can run through our distribution networks.
Melio would equal that, you know, why are we the, you know, exclusive partner and it'll run on Clover and it'll run through the FIs because they understand our distribution capability. You look at what we did with Ondot, which is one of the things I'm super proud of, but nobody really pays attention to, and that's kind of fine. But you know, we bought a card control capability, digital card control capability, put it on top of all of our cards, but then integrated it for our banking platforms into mobile banking to actually be able to give a best in class experience, which ultimately gets to like what's our purpose. Our purpose is to help our clients grow their business and serve their clients. The output is what we get paid, right? Our purpose isn't to collect fees. It's to drive our clients' revenue.
And that could be in the largest retailers in America or the best banks around or all the banks around, you know? And so that's how I'd think about it, right? You know, I feel like we got all the assets we need inside the company. But you know, I would say, you know, last year, I like to say the following. And last year is a long time ago right now. I think we bought back $4.7 billion of stock. And I would probably say, you know, that wasn't my plan. I would have thought we acquired a few assets along the way. Having said that, there was nothing that got sold last year that I wished we had done.
So although I'm upset that we didn't deploy more to growthier assets that can give us more growth inside the place, on the other hand, I say to myself, you know, I'm not kicking the dog. Don't report me to the ASPCA. I didn't play with my dog this morning. I'm not kicking the dog because we didn't, you know, buy something we should have. So I expect us to be paying attention to anything and everything in all the spaces we operate and our adjacencies.
Good. Well, Frank, thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, of course.
Thanks.
And.
Back to the, where's the music? Back to the music.
Where's the music?