Fidelity National Information Services has historically targeted a big bank clientele, but under a prior management team it wandered from that focus.

Now, CEO Stephanie Ferris and her top leaders have returned to that sweet spot, seeking to double down on cross-selling to the largest banks in the U.S., mainly those with more than $10 billion in assets. 

That was the message last week from the chief financial officer of the core technology and payments company when he spoke at an investor conference.

“We're focused on maximizing our growth, which means the number of products we sell to the biggest banks – we’re not going down market to sub-$10 billion-dollar banks,” FIS CFO James Kehoe said at the Wells Fargo payments and fintech symposium last Wednesday. 

“Will we still compete in that area, yes. Is it strategic? It's not as a strategic” focus, he said, acknowledging later that serving mid-sized banks is still part of FIS’s mission too.

Under former FIS CEO Gary Norcross, who exited in late 2022, the Jacksonville, Florida-based company drifted from its focus on large financial institutions, as it attempted to swallow a purchase of the merchant services business Worldpay, and began to compete for smaller bank clients. 

Ferris, who succeeded Norcross, spent the past three years unwinding that mega $35-billion Worldpay deal done in 2019, and doubling down on banking and payments by buying a card issuer business. Both happened as part of a multi-billion-dollar transaction with Global Payments, furthering the FIS big bank campaign.

“We are only focused on financial institutions, and this is what banks like,” Kehoe contended. “We're not focused on merchant-acquiring. We're focused on making banks successful.”

Recovering from distractions

While there’s overlap between the larger client set serviced by FIS and the smaller financial institutions courted by rivals Fiserv and Jack Henry & Associates, FIS has long catered to the biggest banks, said Wolfe Research analyst Darrin Peller. 

FIS became distracted by other initiatives under Norcross, Peller said in an interview Tuesday. “I think they lost track of what they really were, of who they were,” he explained, saying the company’s “differentiated angle” wasn’t as clear at that time.

With a renewed focus on the “large bank category,” the company has “re-accelerated again,” Peller said, citing an increased growth rate for the banking segment.

Last year, FIS’s banking segment revenue grew 6% over 2024 to $7.3 billion, according to its annual filing last month. Revenue for its smaller capital markets segment increased 7% to $3.2 billion.

FIS will keep plugging that big bank angle, with new cross-selling opportunities, thanks to its larger payments business, Kehoe said. Its payments play expanded with the $13.5 billion acquisition of the card issuer business formerly known as TSYS. 

That payments business, which sits within its banking segment, allows FIS to couple credit and debit card processing pitches with its core tech offering to banks.

Payments unit becomes biggest unit

With the completion of the card issuer acquisition in January, the payments business, which also includes network and fraud management services, has become the biggest revenue-generator for the company, Kehoe noted. 

He pointed to pro forma financial statements the company released last month showing the payments business would have produced about $5.5 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2025, if it had been part of the company then, while the banking business would have yielded about $4 billion and capital markets $3.3 billion.

The company is turning its sales force’s attention to that payments area. “More and more on payments, we're displacing competition even when we don't have the core,” Kehoe said. “We're going in and targeting specifically our competition on the payments business.”

Kehoe acknowledged competitor Fiserv probably serves more banks, but contends FIS is No. 1 among large bank clients with more than $10 billion in assets, allowing it to better service commercial banks as opposed to retail banks.

“Everything we do, we can do at scale,” Kehoe said. “There's many people who can process a core ledger for a small bank. The more you go [upstream], and the complexities increase, the more you get into commercial banking.”

AI enters the equation

Artificial intelligence should be an “accelerant” for the business, Kehoe said, noting that FIS has some 17,000 tech employees, with many using AI and exploring innovations. 

AI has also presented threats to the payment industry with its ability to take on significant data processing mandates. Still, with FIS possessing the data itself, the company has a pivotal advantage over would-be rivals, Kehoe argued.

With big banks already having in-house AI tools, this is one area where FIS may find a niche servicing mid-sized financial institutions.

Mid-sized banks, and maybe regionals, will happily hand that work to FIS if it can help them reduce their back-office operations, he predicted.

“The next step is, build AI and agents into your software to make banks more efficient,” the CFO said.