All right, I think we're going to get started here. Next, I would like to welcome Fiserv CEO Mike Lyons and CFO Paul Todd. Mike stepped into the CEO role in May, bringing a strong track record from PNC, where he served as president and previously led the corporate institutional banking business. Paul is Fiserv's newly appointed CFO, joining just a few weeks ago, and many of you may know him from his CFO roles at Global Payments and TSYS, so thank you both for joining us today, so Mike, I know a lot has happened in the past few months. I know the market's very focused on the guidance reset and the change in strategic direction that you've laid out.
So maybe can you just walk us through the discovery process that led you to conclude that the prior guidance was probably built on overly optimistic assumptions and unsustainable short-term initiatives?
Yeah, and thank you, obviously, for having us here. We've got a great long-term relationship with KBW on the banking side and then with Stifel as we serve as the core for Stifel Bank. So it's great to be here and great to be part of your conference, and we appreciate it. I obviously went through a lot of the details on the changes, the basis for our changes to guidance as part of the call, so I'll keep it at a relatively high level today. But in Q3 and into Q4, we did a thorough, extensive, and rigorous analysis of the company: operations, technology, financials, business, competitive landscape. We used inside and outside resources to do that, and we did it in conjunction.
It started in conjunction with our annual strategic planning and budgeting processes, but it was an analysis that went much more expansive and extensive than that would normally go. And ultimately, as we got through the conclusion of that, there were four things we pointed out that were drivers for the adjustments to guidance: Argentina, which had gone through a very strong cyclical growth period that had added, obviously, to our organic growth revenue numbers. The second big one was the performance of our businesses relative to expectations, both in the third quarter and then over the course of the rest of the year. The third we talked about was some necessary and we thought really compelling high ROI capital and OpEx investments into the business to run the business in a way that we think maximizes long-term value and creates net promoters for our customers.
And then the final one was the adjustment, just striking a greater balance between pursuing short-term initiatives and long-term initiatives, which every company over the course faces that challenge. So in the end, we felt like the, obviously, the result was the result, which we're not happy with, but we felt like it was a thorough, complete, rigorous analysis, gave us a great understanding of our gaps, our opportunities, strengths of the companies, and obviously, that's gone directly into where we've set our strategic priorities and where we will allocate our capital going forward. And we feel like that we've given investors and the sell-side community our best view today of the structural growth capabilities and margin capabilities for the company and the path forward for growth from there.
Last thing I'd add, I just, you know, I think one of the most important observations as we went through the analysis is if you lift up some of the cyclical factors over the last four or five years where we've had double-digit organic growth, you take out some of the COVID, post-COVID rebound in inflation and spending, which then sort of flowed into very strong cyclical growth in Argentina, and then you take out some of the non-recurring items and you lift that up, the Fiserv of today looks a lot like the Fiserv and First Data predecessor companies, 5, 10, 15, you know, over the past years, and within that is you have great platforms, great software, mission-critical, we're delivering mission-critical services and solutions and software to two massive groups of customers who are incredibly important to the U.S.
economy, and we're capable of mid-single-digit growth, mid-30% margin, and it's an incredible company to go through and run that, and so we set, we put out that structural growth rate, and that's what we're working from.
Great. I've gotten this question a few times, and I'm sure you have as well, so I want to get this out of the way first. Just given the changes in CFO and audit committee roles, along with your comments around the short-term initiatives, is there any reason to be concerned about potential accounting irregularities coming to light?
No, no, nothing, nothing at all. We did a rigorous analysis of the company and had the four observations that I talked about, but nothing had anything to do with accounting. The change in the CFO and the change in the board members, obviously happening at different times, we announced at the same time. That's all about getting a fresh perspective on the company. We've got new leadership, and the board was going through its own exercise of making sure they were best positioned in their governance position, and we announced it all at once because we had a lot to say, and we didn't want to drip it out over a long period of time. I think we've gotten the questions on short-term initiatives, and I want to be clear on this.
Every company has the ability, you have the option to go after short-term initiatives and long-term initiatives, and striking the right balance between those is critically important to long-term success of the company, both how you treat your customers and how you treat and reward your shareholders. And it's not a choice of one thing or the other. If you do all in one, that's not sustainable. If you do all in the other, that's not sustainable. But there's nothing fundamentally wrong with either one of those. It's just you're making business decisions, and business decisions may be really great for one period of time, and they may have ramifications that you have to deal with in another period of time, but it's got nothing to do with accounting. It's just how do you make business decisions.
Got it. So I know you highlighted the three or four different factors that are driving the growth reset. Maybe if you could just give us a bridge on, you know, we were running at approximately 8% organic growth in the first half, rough numbers, and now we're sort of looking towards maybe flattish growth over the next four quarters. So if you could just give us a bridge to, you know, what are the different factors that are driving that?
Yeah, we said, you know, organic growth for the years now is going to be 3.5%-4%, originally 10%-12%. You know, the bridge from second, we haven't done the bridge, you know, interquarter bridges and the like. I think the clearest way to talk about it or think about it is the biggest factor in changing from organic growth of double-digit the last couple of years back to, you know, more traditional areas of organic growth for Fiserv was Argentina. We showed in the materials that it was about half the growth, double-digit growth two years ago. It was 10 percentage points of the 16 percentage points of growth last year, and that's obviously down to, or not obviously, but we said it's down to two percentage points of the growth this year, and it'll be less in the pieces there.
Nothing is bad in Argentina. I think it's, you know, some people have written articles about something happening in Argentina. Everything's good in Argentina. All that really changed. We have a business that's core to our customers there, our merchant customers there, where for various reasons that's long been the case in how banks interact with merchants in Argentina. There's a long settlement date between spend and cash settlement with the banks. We anticipate that in an Anticipation business and provide the merchant the cash today. It's a great piece of software we do it in. We have a great market position. It's a core part of the use of Clover in our payment devices in Argentina, and our merchants really want it. So it checks all the boxes. It creates value for shareholders. It creates value for our merchants.
It's simply in how that business got reported in organic growth versus adjusted growth, and adjusted growth took a lot of that noise out. Organic growth, which the guidance was off of, obviously brought in the full influence of that, so all that really fundamentally happened in Argentina is there's a structural move down in rates because they've taken a different approach to managing the deficit and the budget, so we are going to continue our business in Argentina. It's a great business. We're super proud of it. Our team does a great job of running it, but obviously had the biggest influence. The other, the rest of the bridge is completed by the things I talked about. It's hard to quantify each one of them, and I won't go into it, but we made the necessary capital expenditures and operating expenditures to set up a client relationship model.
If you take away small business from our platform, right, we have institutional clients, banks, and merchants, and our business is built on effectively penetrating them. This is this ARPC concept, average revenue per client with value-added products and services. And to do that, you need to be, you need to provide great coverage, great, you know, coverage when things don't go as they're supposed to go. You're supposed to deliver great value-added ideas, be on top of their business. And if you do that, there's an ability to sell more and more products into them and deepen and embed those relationships. So we made the investments needed both in the quarter and into next year to put ourselves in a position to execute on that part of the business model, which we think is a great, again, a great long-term trade on that front.
Obviously, we made the decision to deprioritize some of the things that could have driven growth higher around short-term versus long-term initiatives we talked about, and then we recalibrated, you know, the performance against business expectations in the back half of the year, so you bridge those four, but by far the biggest, I mean, you go 16 minus the Argentina, you're at six, and you're at three and a half to four, and then you're, it's a much smaller exercise to solve.
Right. May I ask just on the Argentina business? I know Anticipation revenues was probably the biggest piece. Were there any other big revenue drivers in Argentina outside of that?
We have great businesses on both the FS side and the merchant side. We're heavily merchant, and we gave you all the stats in our disclosure on Argentina. We're heavily merchant, and a chunk of merchant, the biggest chunk of merchant is Anticipation. So by far the biggest factor, especially related to the translational organic growth, because it was based off of interest rates.
Got it. And I think I knew, I know you alluded to this a little bit before, Mike, but just maybe to double-click on that a little bit, I think one of the things you said on the call was that nothing is fundamentally broken at Fiserv, right? So can you just recap for investors what's giving you the confidence that most of these issues are transitory and fixable, and there is no evidence of anything more deeply challenging at the company?
Yeah, and I mean, just take Argentina off the top to start with. It's just, it's a reporting number, and if you look at adjusted, most of that gets cleaned up. When we did our analysis, both on the financial service side and on the merchant side, we heard feedback from clients that was around the experience, not around the products. They love our products. They actually want them to get to market faster. It's CashFlow Central, which is, you know, we think one of the more exciting projects around receivables and payables in a long time. They want Experience Digital, which is our digital surround and a consolidation of all the prior surrounds to one. They want the modernization of the cores. They want Commerce Hub and a single global integration.
We didn't hear anything in our review from customers and feedback from customers that said, "Your product's just not as good as the next person's product," or, "You're getting beat by this," or, "You're getting beat by that." They said, "We want more coverage. We want more value-added ideas. We want stuff to market faster. We want great resilience, great reliability," and those are things. So when you go through, same thing Paul and I go through, there's nothing out there on the acquisition side where we need that. We have everything we need.
We just have to execute it around it, and if we execute it around it well, we're on the low side today of what Fiserv and First Data have historically grown, and we want to get to the high side of what, and if we execute on what's in front of us, there's a clear path to doing this. Most of the other stuff we talked about, there was a lot of noise around, you know, we talked about Argentina, we talked about short-term initiatives. Our issue isn't quality of products, quality of technology, and quality of platforms. It's getting the service right and getting products to market in a timely way and delivering them to our customers.
I think one thing, you know, and we talked about this on the call, actually to your question on the call around. We had good volume growth. We've got good sustainable volume growth in these businesses, and that's the fundamental kind of underlying of when we say the fundamental strength is we had good growth on the merchant side. We had, you know, good account on file growth on the issuing side. We had good debit transaction volume growth. So when we talk about fundamental strength, when you see that kind of good volume growth, that's the underlying fundamental strength that we're referencing.
That's definitely helpful. So maybe then we just go into each of the two segments and starting with merchant. On Clover, you lowered the expectation to $3.3 billion. Is that purely tied to reversing the short-term pricing initiatives, or are you also seeing any change in the competitive backdrop that's causing some of the difference in the growth outlook?
Yeah, again, Clover, as we just said, what we found in the market is people really like Clover. They want more on the Clover platform, and they want more Clovers, and they want, and we want to price Clover fairly for value in the market. The adjustment, so we're excited about Clover. I'll go more into the investment side, but it's a super important product for us going forward and one that is well received by our clients.
The adjustment from 3.5 original target to 3.3 had a number of different factors in it, including the fee adjustment, but also just the effect of, again, the effect of Argentina and our view around certain OpEx and CapEx and our view around some certain short-term initiatives that we didn't think was the right ones that we could have gotten through in the end of the year to make it 3.5, but it wasn't the right decision long-term for the product. So we made the adjustment on it, and we identified a structural growth story on GPV and a structural growth story on revenues. It's got a logical algorithm between the two, a SaaS package, Clover Capital hardware being the difference in making up the VAS plus hardware. The Clover story, at least from all of our review and analysis, remains really, really good.
We're making a significant investment, and we'll continue to make a significant investment in it. And that comes around a couple of different areas. One is continuing to build out the vertical expertise there. We were very strong in restaurant and retail, obviously built out Clover Hospitality to compete on the higher end of restaurant where we weren't as historically as strong. We formed the partnership with Rectangle Health, which is on the healthcare provider side, especially through our bank partners. That was one of the biggest demands for vertical help on that. Continue to look at professional services areas and other associated verticals.
On the horizontal, that's obviously in the verticals on the horizontal side. We're hearing from our customers and the ISOs, our partners, is that small businesses increasingly want a single platform to do their major initiatives, whether that's bill pay, paying workers, managing employees, obviously processing payments. So whether that's ADP or Homebase on the employee management side, we continue to build out a horizontal stack. Third big area is the international expansion, and we're happy to go into that in any more detail, but good traction there. The fourth is we are pursuing a full experience redo on Clover because we think we can deliver our clients a better end-to-end experience, especially in the early stages of receiving Clover where we get very, very high NPS scores.
And then the experience out of the box and setup initiation and first billing, there's room that we think we can drive further growth there by creating a better post-launch client experience. So we're working on that, putting Clover capabilities through other of our product delivery vehicles, whether that's Commerce Hub or expanding Clover Capital and other VAS into non-Clover, into non-Clover SMB products. And then the final is backbook conversion, which sort of depends, especially on the vertical expertises. We have a backbook today that's slightly bigger than the one on the SMB side, slightly bigger than the Clover SMB base. Clover is clearly the platform to go forward with an effective conversion of the backbook to the frontbook. That needs, if you're going to convert someone into Clover, there needs to be a value proposition to do it. Otherwise, you're just going through a conversion.
So as you build out more and more vertical expertise or horizontal expertise, it makes it easier to bring those clients in. So there's other areas, but those are the highlights on where we're going with Clover, and we're excited about it. Again, there's significant TAM out there, low penetration here in the U.S., even in our main verticals, and very low penetration outside the U.S.
So maybe just double-clicking on that U.S. versus international, I think you talked about once we're through this sort of transitory headwind, you see it as a mid- to high-teens revenue growth opportunity within Clover. How should we think about the U.S. versus the international driving that?
Yep. So the majority of our business today is U.S., but all the foreign markets off a lower base, obviously growing very quickly, and I can touch on each of those. But we disclosed in the U.S. this year, 7.5% GPV growth year- over- year in the Q3, which is the first time we've shown that, which ended up falling right between Visa and Mastercard. So we feel good about that, and that was an acceleration, slight acceleration from the first half of the year. So we continue to feel good about our position in the U.S., and all of the elements other than grow internationally, which I think was the third or fourth concept I raised to you, will drive further and support further growth in the U.S. On the international side, again, obviously growing faster.
Canada and Brazil have been real highlight markets for us. Canada, we've been at it for several years through direct and ISO channels, and we're super excited to do the partnership and backbook transaction, partial backbook transaction with TD, which again plays into our strength of bank partnerships to complement an already well-growing market. We did the launch earlier this year in Brazil with great partners, Sicredi and Caixa, and announced incremental new partnerships this quarter and massive TAM, obviously massive SMB base growing very, very nicely there. We did UniCredit in Austria. We did the CCV acquisition. We got JVs in the UK with NatWest and Lloyds. We got Deutsche through Vert in Germany. We did the transaction on the AIB side in Ireland with AIB. And then we've got. We launched in Australia, and the growth has been a little bit slower there.
We're going direct initially and we'll continue to build partnerships as we go, and then obviously, although we didn't go into the specifics of it, we will in the coming weeks, next couple of months, as we announce the decision to go into Japan with a major partner and a major association. Japan to us is super interesting, obviously a significant market and still cash dominated, and there hasn't been a major point of sale digital platform to go in there with, so we're excited to bring Clover there.
Great. And then maybe just double-clicking on the backbook conversion as well, you sort of called out the non-Clover SME book is slightly larger than the Clover book. Should we think of all of that as TAM that's achievable to convert to Clover? And typically, what kind of revenue lift do you see when a merchant moves from non-Clover to Clover?
Yeah, I think what I said was Clover is the platform for the future. We've got other great platforms today in the non-Clover side. We're going to be super thoughtful about how we move backbook to Clover, and it's not. The backbook concept is not really a fair concept. It's Clover, non-Clover. But if you're going to move non-Clover to Clover, it has to be done in a thoughtful way that creates a positive outcome for our client. And whether that's in incremental software that they can use, incremental capabilities, incremental TAM, or whatever it may be, you know, we're excited on StoneCastle brings us a liquidity network that we can bring to our small business merchants. Maybe that's an app, it becomes an app on Clover. So it has to be a value proposition to do it.
You can't just do it, feel good about it, and then those customers, we may feel better about the growth we drive over to Clover, but this is Fiserv, and the customers are all in Fiserv today. So we want to get them onto the platform that's going to best serve them well, and part of that is building out the right verticals and the like, but we've been testing around this. We feel good about it, and we're going to start a process this year to go through that based on what we've done, but we're going to be super careful and thoughtful and protect the long-term outcome for our client and for our shareholders.
Maybe outside of Clover, what are the strategic areas of focus as you think about closing the competitive gap in the merchant segment?
Yeah, I think, you know, we're the dominant card present player, obviously here in the U.S. and a significant footprint abroad. We built out a nice e-commerce platform. What we hear from major significant merchants is they want an omnichannel global merchant platform, and for us, that's Commerce Hub. You can be all e-com, you can be all card present. The future is having a gateway that you can have access to everything that you want. So we've had a significant investment. Our biggest investment in merchant away from Clover is to build out a Commerce Hub. We have today, there's instances, a single instance for the Americas on Commerce Hub, but separate instances for the other regions. This will be our gateway, global gateway.
We're building a very sophisticated orchestration layer that's got access to all of our VAS, and eventually even Clover can run through the Commerce Hub gateway and get to omnichannel merchants who are running, you know, e-commerce and point of sale platforms across the world. And we have obviously been onboarding customers onto Commerce Hub over the last year, year and a half, and we'll be done with the build-out in early 2027 of the full capabilities. But we think that's going to be a very, very, it's already a competitive platform. We think it'd be super important to the future of our business and very, very excited about it. We built it with the developer community in mind, so the KPIs and the SDKs are state of the art. The fraud solution and auth optimization tools in there are significant.
The ability to go buy now, pay later, whatever structure you want to do, it's true. A merchant can enter a single gateway and have everything they need to run their payments platform.
Maybe switching to Financial Solutions. I know there were a number of drivers that were weighing on the growth near-term in that segment as well. And some of the things you guys called out, tougher licensing commissions, I think was one, pricing changes in the debit business. Maybe can you just elaborate on some specific items that drove the weakness?
Yeah. I'll start, just give a quick overview of what our analysis showed and some of the things we're facing and/or benefiting from in the various segments of FS, and then Paul can go through and give some specifics on the numbers. You know, we have issuing banking and digital payments in issuing. We've got a great platform. We like it a lot. There's two major players out there for major card issuing. Shares about roughly equal to them. Paul knows about more than one of them, more than I do. And we do really well on the private label side. They do well in international. You know, it's great. So we have got a great market position.
We've got a number of key investments going on there, which is the modernization of Optis, which is our core U.S. platform, and then the rollout of Vision Next, which is the modern card issuing platform that you should think of as the sister to Finxact on the bank, the modern bank core Vision Next . And that will be our platform to compete better internationally, also be an important platform in our embedded finance offering along with Payfare and Finxact. So great investments there. We've had great momentum in the business, some significant wins over the last couple of years. We announced two important wins this quarter with Dex, and then we announced our largest healthcare win ever for a customer who's been an issuing customer is now going to do incremental surrounds with us.
As far as the numbers go, we had, we were very clear, Q2 at +13%. It's not a 13% year-over-year issuing. It's not a 13% annual growth business. We called out some noise in that, and there was called out some noise in the year that you referenced in the year-ago comps. We think this is a mid-single-digit growth business as it is today, and then we think we've got great options on the embedded. This is where embedded finance would really manifest itself within our company. Obviously, a merchant would come in, but the tools that our big embedded finance customers are using today is a card issuing platform, Finxact, and some form of the prepaid network, and then an orchestration layer like Payfare.
So we feel great about issuing, some lumpiness in the noise, but it's going to be a great business for us for a long period of time. On the banking side, this is cores and then really the digital around it. We're going from 17 original digital platforms to one in Experience Digital. People are super excited about it. The rollout started to happen. It's one of the areas that we got real feedback that this needs to get to market faster, and we're working on that. We have the right OpEx, CapEx around it. We made some specific commitments on getting that to market in the right way. On the banking core side, this is not new. The 16 to 5 is not new. It's been out there for a while. We've made great progress on that.
Most of those numbers are on the credit union side going from 11 to two, which is very far along, and a bunch of those cores next year will come offline. Then Finxact is obviously in the surviving five, and then we're rolling three cores into a new product called Core Advanced, and maybe this is where the most amount of noise in the market's been. For most of those customers going into Core Advanced, they're coming from Premier. Core Advanced is a Premier upgrade. It's not a full conversion. The other customers would go through a conversion. Core Advanced, a great platform. It'll be great for our customers to get there in terms of going forward. We've built, you know, all five platforms are modernized, cloud-based, API-driven. Core Advanced is especially a great platform we need to get there.
When we announced that over time, it was the narrative in the market or however it got played out in the market, it seemed like everyone had to go through a major conversion. Our competitors rightly jumped on that and said, "If you're going through a conversion, you should come to us or run a process to see, you know, what could be better." And we've now course-corrected to manage that migration and customer journey in a much better way. Most importantly, explaining to the Premier customers, it's an upgrade, it's not a conversion, and then taking the customers who have to go through a conversion and hand-holding them through the process and allowing them to do that on their time, which is the commitments we made at Forum.
You set the time when you want to do it, and you can go do it, and it's going to be a great destination when you get there, but we're not forcing anything upon you or anything like that, and then we spent a lot of time with both the consultants and the customers, new customers and existing customers, highlighting the merits of Core Advanced, that it's a great core to go on, so back to your question about what's not fundamentally broken. We didn't hear anything in the market that your cores aren't great cores. They're great cores. We heard about client experience and managing the expectations and getting us to where we need to get to in terms of going through that experience, so we've been on this for a while. Feel really good about where we are today in terms of managing that journey.
We had a great day in Alpharetta last week where Core Advanced is being built with all the consultants showing it off, but that's created noise, and the effect of that noise around our customers played through in the banking numbers that we're weaker. If you take out some of the noise, we're still weaker than we wanted them to be at this time, and we need to run that business. We talked about it at Forum. Core is, no pun intended, but it is very, very core to the company, and we have to run that business really well because that drives a lot of the surrounds and multiplies revenues off of it, and then finally, on digital payments, we called out some decisions we made around pricing. We called out some of the growth, a still rapidly accelerating, but moderating growth on the Zelle platform.
We talked about a secular growth downward story in the banking traditional bank bill pay, which didn't start this quarter. It's been going on for some time as billing goes more direct to customer. We have a biller business on the merchant side that picks up a lot of the direct to customer business. So whether it's your phone company coming to you directly now rather than you're doing it. So overall to Fiserv, a lot of that just flips around to the other side. And then we've seen some pressure. We have an ATM managed services business. The business has had some slower growth.
You take all that out and a lot of the noise out, you know, and Paul talked about it and talked about it some more, is the key, the underlying key metrics around volumes and like are still strong in digital payments, and we see that as an attractive business going forward. But everything in banking in that mid-single digit growth business, not higher than that.
Yeah. And so, just real quick on the banking side, obviously we called out about the license fees. So that was the biggest single driver on an issuer. From a year-over-year basis, we did have some output services that on a comparative basis was a headwind for us. And then on the digital side, Mike hit on it. Obviously, we talked about it on the call with the debit piece, but the ATM piece and also the slowdown on the bill pay side were the key drivers.
Got it. So maybe if I can just double-click on the core conversion, Mike, because that's one that is generating a lot of questions and people aren't sure where you are. You've said that it's been going on for a while. I think a lot of people think it's still on the cusp. So can you clarify where we are in that journey, especially the Core Advanced, the three products getting converted to core? Like, where are we in that journey?
Yeah, two products getting converted to core, one getting upgraded. So 16 cores today, 11 of those serve credit unions, and that will go to two in the future, Portico and DNA, and the majority of that work will be completed this year and then into 2026. I think five or six of those will come offline. Finxact's one of the other five. There's another core that's in the five Signature that will just, there's no conversions or anything happening to that. We've already, to the 11 to 2 on the credit union side, there's already hundreds of conversions have already happened. And then the rest of it comes down to the three products around Core Advanced, an upgrade for Premier customers, which are the bulk of the customers that have to go to Core Advanced. And then if Cleartouch and Precision customers choose to convert, it's on their timeline.
We've said we can continue to support the products, but this is a really good product to go to, and it's our job to sell that to them and show them the benefits of it. It's on their timeline. The timeline Core Advanced just came online. This is, we're not behind on Core Advanced. It's right on schedule. We have one customer has gone on to Core Advanced and completed it, and that original migration timeline was supposed to happen over the next several years, several being longer than two. And what we told customers at Forum is we'll do the conversions for those two sets of customers who have to do the conversions. We'll do that on whatever timeline they want. So the long tail of that could be what it is.
For us, we believe for the customers, ultimately when they're done, they'll be on a great core that serves them well. And obviously for us, the ability to more effectively manage OpEx and CapEx when you're not maintaining 16 cores and you've got really just the technical advances you can put in and then rolling out surrounds when you don't have to make them interoperable on 16 different fronts. So it's a good outcome for both sets of customers, and we need to carefully manage that narrative. And I think that start for us, that starts with creating, we talked about it earlier, creating a great client experience for our customers where service is great. When things go wrong, the MTTR is super fast, and we're bringing them value-added ideas, and that's what we're trying to deliver.
Again, helping them, the big pivot we're trying to make is don't just be a processor for banks or a processor for merchants. Help both sets grow their customer bases. So CashFlow Central, every bank and credit union in the country wants to grow their small business customer base. That's what CashFlow Central built to do. Got to get it to market and deliver it to them. StoneCastle, when we complete the transaction, we'll be able to bring a liquidity to our bank customers and a liquidity investment alternative to our merchant customers, including the small businesses. These are all areas that help them grow. We'll bring Agentic commerce in through the Clover app so that small businesses who don't have a way that the major merchants have to deploy it can deploy it.
But that starts with great customer service, bringing value-added ideas and like, and same thing around the core conversions.
So in the last few minutes, I have a few more topics to touch. Maybe just first on just bank M&As on the rise. What does that mean for Fiserv's core banking business?
Yep. Bank M&As more active in the last year relative to the past administration. If you go back over a long period of time, we did the exercise. It doesn't make a real big difference to us. We look over four, five, six years. You win some, you lose some, and no net difference. This year, the way that it's developed this year, a little bit of a larger bank M&A type move. We're netting out positive this year if all the deals close as anticipated and convert as anticipated, and other years it goes the other way. I think there's a core. Everybody focuses on the core. There's a huge opportunity on the surrounds in every one of these transactions. So someone may be on Optis, but a different core, and we get a consolidation win on that front.
I don't think, I wouldn't think of it as a big driver to our business one way or the other.
Got it.
Hasn't shown that way over a long period of time.
I think one of the things you mentioned on the call as part of the One Fiserv action plan was monetization of certain smaller businesses. Can you provide any color on the potential scale of what these divestitures might be and how you would plan to redeploy that capital?
Yeah. We had $1 billion. We're doing $1 billion. We had $1.5 billion in the plan for CapEx this year. We said we're taking up to $300 million to $1.8 billion for CapEx this year. We're super clear and laser-focused on the products that we want to get to market with and that our customers want to get to market. A lot of discipline that Paul is bringing is every single dollar of the $1.8 billion being spent in the most optimal way for our customer to return value for our customers and shareholders. As we go through, just in the initial review, there are certain businesses that aren't that important to our customers and aren't generating outsized margins, growth, or returns for our shareholders and not critical to what our strategic vision and value is going forward.
We'll peel those off, and there are people who want to be in those businesses, and we'll do it. It's not a huge $200 million in revenue, but we're going to go through, as we go through the process, we're going to make sure that every dollar of CapEx and OpEx is optimally invested for the right return. And if we see something, we'll move it. There isn't any, there's no wedded to any of those things as part of the system.
Anything on what assets you might be thinking to divest as you're rethinking your portfolio of assets?
Say the question again.
Just any color on what type of assets you might be looking to divest?
Oh, no, we're going to go through the process and see them. But again, it's on $20 billion in revenue, it's a couple hundred million, yeah.
I guess the last one in the one minute we have left, you've put a new high-caliber leadership team into place, to lead both the businesses. How are you sort of re-energizing the talent in the company, making sure you're retaining the right talent as you go through this transition?
Yeah, it's obviously we complemented a great leadership team. We have a lot of the prior leadership team is still there and a lot of, and the majority of the positions brought in two co-presidents. One built one of the largest payments businesses in the world, and I would argue is one of the either the most foremost expert in payments and then an incredible executive with a long track record of execution, understands financial services and payments businesses, and a great execution track record. The staff is obviously there was noise, the noise in the market, and you have to communicate with your people and explain to them what's going on. But they obviously want to take care of customers. They want to build great products, and we're doubling down our investment in creating a great client experience and creating world-class products and services.
So people want to do that, and a lot of communication on our part and certain types of retention tools that we're going to have to go through with our people. But it's been internally, it's been, you know, we want to go do this and show us how to do it and incentivize us to do the right thing to do. So I think we've gotten, it's resonated really well on the inside, and we've complemented a fresh look from the outside, combined with talent that's been around Fiserv and First Data for many years. We're in a new business pitch on Monday with eight or 10 Fiserv people with the entire executive team of the prospect. And on average, they take me out of the table, the average tenure of our people on the table is 24 years.
So, you know, there's a ton of great people in our company who love Fiserv, love First Data, and love the combined entity of what we can do with our clients. And what we're saying is we're going to enable them to do the right things for clients, and we're going to execute crisply on that to deliver for you all.
Great. With that, we're out of time. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.