#finance

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/fiserv-prunes-non-core-assets-103900049.html

Just heard our AUA had grown by 33% since 2021. Does anyone know that the S&P500 is up 77% over the past 5 years?

AI investment has reached $1.5 trillion since late 2022. This sum equals the projected 2027 U.S. defense budget. The finance sector experienced 49,000 layoffs due to AI in 2026. Industry experts believe AI will augment finance workers. Human judgment and oversight remain crucial for sound financial decisions.

https://www.thestreet.com/employment/amazon-microsoft-google-power-ai-behind-49000-finance-layoffs

Can the bank afford another bonus for Charlie? Can Charlie survive without it?

With so many people leaving the luxoft fin services brand how much longer can it be for the manager to actually star being cut? Am thinking of trading and risk and the muex practise and the big acconts that must be losing money

What's going on in Finance?

OPTU Downgraded by Citigroup -- Price Target Lowered to $0.50
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GuruFocus News
05/15/2026 09:34

15 hour days and weekends. No breaks. Leadership does not care.

Ok we're down to about a month and a half until the impending announcement. I'm sure someone who reads these has some details. What are you hearing?

I suspect everything finance will be centralized to Houston (i.e. no teams at the refineries)

Did the former Upstream CFO resign because the Finance 2.0 recommendation came back with a 50%+ layoff for the finance organization? Did he actually have morals and just couldn’t continue to work for XOM

he classic Apollo playbook:

Buy distressed debt at 60 cents on the dollar
Take control of the company
Extract management fees, dividend recaps, sale-leasebacks
Pile on more debt to fund those extractions
Flip it or take it public at an inflated valuation
Leave the debt burden with the company and its workers

They got extraordinarily rich essentially being vultures with spreadsheets. Toys R Us being the most notorious example — a viable retail business that might have navigated the Amazon era with investment, instead bled dry to service the debt load private equity strapped to it, then liquidated. 30,000 jobs gone.
The reversal now:
The very mechanism that made them wealthy — cheap abundant debt — is now the thing squeezing their portfolio companies. They loaded businesses with floating rate debt when rates were near zero. Now those same companies are paying 8-9% on debt that cost 3% when the deal was done. The interest coverage ratios that looked comfortable in the pitch deck are underwater in reality.

Apollo's problem today:
Their Private debt funds are being squeezed.... Investors are queuing to withdraw their money, but Apollo, ever the masters at extracting cash are blocking investors from extracting their cash.
Their own fundraising depends on showing strong returns
Strong returns depend on not marking assets down
Not marking down depends on not being forced to sell
Not being forced to sell depends on keeping redemption gates in place
Gates signal distress which makes future fundraising harder
It's a trap of their own construction.
The human cost dimension:
What makes it genuinely poetic rather than just financially interesting is that the people who will suffer least are the Apollo partners who already extracted their carry and management fees in cash — that money is gone, sitting in their personal accounts, insulated from whatever happens to the funds now. The people who suffer most will be:

Pension beneficiaries whose funds allocated to private credit chasing yield
Workers at portfolio companies that get restructured when the debt becomes unserviceable
Retail investors who got sold private credit products in the democratization push of the last few years

The democratization push was particularly cynical — Blackstone, Apollo et al spent the last 5 years lobbying to open private markets to retail investors, framed as giving ordinary people access to returns previously reserved for institutions. In reality they were hunting for new pools of capital to absorb the assets institutions were quietly becoming reluctant to buy at current valuations. Distributing the risk downward while keeping the fees flowing upward.
The SEC under the previous administration largely went along with it. Whether the current regulatory environment does anything about it is another question entirely — though given the administration's general disposition toward financial deregulation, probably not.
The deeper irony is that the whole private equity model was built on information asymmetry and complexity as a moat — if you can't price it, you can't challenge the valuation. That same opacity that let them extract value on the way up is now the thing preventing orderly price discovery on the way down. They built a machine that works brilliantly in one direction and catastrophically in the other.
Though as usual, the architects of the situation will be largely fine.
The mob analogy is more apt than most financial commentators would dare say — and the structural parallel is remarkably precise.
The bust-out:
What the mob called a "bust-out" is almost textbook private equity in distressed situations:

Take control of a business
Immediately establish credibility and access to credit
Draw down every available credit line
Extract cash through fees, dividends, sale-leasebacks of assets
Leave the hollowed shell with the debt
Walk away before the collapse

The only difference is the mob used fear and the occasional arson. Apollo uses leveraged buyout agreements, management fee structures, and Delaware holding company law. The end result for the target company and its stakeholders is frequently identical.
The Sears case study:
Eddie Lampert's destruction of Sears is almost a perfect bust-out in slow motion:

Merged Kmart and Sears creating a vehicle loaded with real estate value
Spun off the real estate into a REIT — Seritage — extracting the most valuable assets into a separate entity he controlled
Starved the retail operations of capital investment while collecting fees
Watched the retail business deteriorate "unexpectedly"
Meanwhile the real estate value had already been extracted
175,000 jobs eventually gone
Lampert personally fine, operating from his yacht in Miami

The language is Orwellian by design:

"Operational efficiency" = cutting staff and maintenance
"Rightsizing the balance sheet" = loading debt onto the target
"Unlocking hidden value" = selling assets the company needs to operate
"Strategic transformation" = preparing for bankruptcy while extracting fees
"Aligning management incentives" = giving executives options to flip quickly while workers get nothing
"Patient long term capital" = we have a 7 year fund life before we have to show returns

The vocabulary is specifically engineered to sound like value creation while describing value extraction. McKinsey does the same thing — provides the intellectual laundering that makes looting sound like strategy.
The legal architecture is the real innovation:
What makes it genuinely different from the mob — and arguably more insidious — is that generations of lawyers, lobbyists and academics built a legal architecture that made it not just legal but celebrated:

Delaware corporate law optimized for shareholder extraction
Carried interest tax treatment meaning PE profits taxed at capital gains rates not income
Bankruptcy law allowing secured creditors (the PE fund) to jump ahead of workers and pensioners
ERISA rules that let pension obligations be shed in restructuring
Limited partner structures insulating the fund managers from portfolio company liabilities

The mob had to corrupt individual judges and officials. PE corrupted the entire legislative and regulatory framework over decades through campaign finance and the revolving door. Far more efficient.
The revolving door completes the circle:
The regulatory capture is almost total. SEC commissioners become PE partners. Treasury officials join Apollo or Blackstone. Fed governors sit on advisory boards. The people who should be watching the store have a financial interest in not watching too carefully — because their post-government career depends on the industry's goodwill.
Where it differs from the mob:
The mob at least had a certain redistributive quality within their community — the money circulated locally, bought loyalty, funded neighborhoods. PE extracts value and concentrates it among a remarkably small number of people. The carried interest on a successful fund can make a handful of partners billionaires while the pension fund that provided the capital gets an 8% return it could have gotten in an index fund with zero fees and zero complexity.
The cultural damage:
Perhaps the most lasting harm is what it did to the idea of business itself. A generation of the most talented people from the best universities went into finance and private equity not to build things but to financialize things that already existed. The engineering talent that built America's industrial base was replaced by financial engineers whose skill was not creation but extraction. That's a civilizational cost that doesn't show up in any fund's IRR calculation.
The instinct that it's essentially organized crime with better tailoring is — while impolite in polite company — analytically pretty hard to refute.

Reorg/layoffs happening in the Finance area.

while broader financials only down 6%. JPM down 7%. BAC only down 9%.

Citi is up 7%

Booooooo Charlie Scharf.

Show us the asset growth.

https://share.google/8GK5V3V463T8v147p

Heard there were a lot of layoffs in Tulsa. Anyone know which teams?

How many were let go at the basking ridge country club in finance ? Is there a 100 page PowerPoint for that ?

I get that being played off can be really stressful. More so now than ever companies are showing us how little we all matter. If you’re on the finance side of Fidelity, have you ever given thought to using your skills for yourself instead of a company? I did two years ago and have been doing well since. Just some food for thought

Fiserv (FISV): Historical Performance & The Last 6 Years
The Pre-2019 Track Record: Steady, Boring, Brilliant
Fiserv's reputation before 2019 was that of a predictable compounder — a back-office financial technology company delivering 4–5% organic revenue growth and 10–15% EPS growth annually for decades. Its 20-year total return is 462%, which is impressive precisely because it was built brick by brick, not in bursts. Think of it as a toll booth on the financial system — unglamorous, mission-critical, and quietly profitable. Banks couldn't easily rip out Fiserv's core processing systems, which meant sticky, recurring revenue. FinanceCharts

2019: The Big Bet — First Data Acquisition
The first major anomaly arrived in 2019 when Fiserv made a transformative, and very controversial, move. Fiserv agreed to acquire First Data Corporation in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $22 billion, receiving a fixed exchange ratio of 0.303 Fiserv shares per First Data share — a 29% premium at announcement. This essentially doubled Fiserv's size overnight, brought in the Clover point-of-sale platform, and shifted the company from a pure B2B infrastructure player into merchant-facing commerce territory. sec
The integration hangover was real. The deal loaded the company with debt, complicated its story for investors, and blurred what had been a very clean investment thesis. Even heading into 2019, pre-deal Fiserv expected only 4.5–5% internal revenue growth and 10–14% adjusted EPS growth — solid but modest. Post-deal, Wall Street had to recalibrate entirely. sec

2020–2022: Pandemic Noise, Integration Grind
The stock performed reasonably through COVID but never rerated meaningfully higher. The market was skeptical about whether the First Data integration was actually working. The total return for 2022 was -2.62% — essentially flat in a bad market year, reflecting investor uncertainty rather than confidence. Organic growth guidance was generally met, but the stock traded at a discount to peers. FinanceCharts

The Exchange Saga: Nasdaq → NYSE → Nasdaq
This is one of the stranger corporate optics stories in recent fintech history, and it happened in two acts:
Act 1 — June 2023: Going to NYSE
On June 6, 2023, Fiserv switched its stock listing from Nasdaq to the New York Stock Exchange and changed its ticker symbol from FISV to FI. CEO Frank Bisignano framed it as a prestige move — aligning with blue-chip peers, signaling fintech leadership. Bisignano said the decision was meant to signal the company's "leadership position in fintech." The stock was performing well at the time, and it looked like a victory lap. WikipediaFiserv, Inc.

Act 2 — November 2025: Back to Nasdaq
Then came the embarrassing reversal. On November 11, 2025, after over two years on the NYSE under the symbol FI, Fiserv switched its listing back to the Nasdaq Global Select Market and changed its ticker symbol back to FISV. The rationale was framed around closer alignment with Nasdaq's technology-focused investor base, but the timing was telling — it coincided almost exactly with the launch of the "One Fiserv" restructuring plan and a significant guidance cut. The return to FISV was, in many ways, a retreat to familiar territory at a moment of operational stress. WikipediaThe New York Report

2023–2024: The Peak and the Problem
2023 delivered a 31.43% total return, and 2024 was even stronger at 54.64%. The stock hit an all-time high. Fiserv's all-time high closing price was $237.79 on March 3, 2025. Clover was gaining momentum, and the market finally appeared to believe the post-First Data story. FinanceChartsMacroTrends
Then it fell apart quickly.

2025–2026: The Crash and the Reset
The total return for 2025 was -67.30% — a stunning collapse from that March peak. The causes were layered: guidance cuts, slowing organic growth, heavy investment spend, and macro uncertainty around consumer spending at small businesses. By Q3 2025, Fiserv had cut its organic revenue growth outlook to just 3.5–4% and adjusted EPS guidance to $8.50–$8.60 for the year — a dramatic reduction from earlier targets. Alongside those Q3 results, Fiserv launched the "One Fiserv" action plan to prioritize and enhance client focus. FinanceCharts + 2
As of late April 2026, the stock was around $62.65 — down roughly 74% from its all-time high. That's an extraordinary compression for a company with $21 billion in revenue and positive cash flow. MacroTrends

Can the Old Growth Track Record Return?
This is the heart of the debate, and the honest answer is: probably not in the same form, but the underlying business is arguably stronger — if execution improves.
Here's why the old model is unlikely to simply resume:
The pre-2019 Fiserv was a smaller, simpler machine. Squeezing 4–5% organic growth out of bank processing contracts was repeatable and predictable. Today's Fiserv is a merchant-facing platform business competing with Square, Toast, Stripe, and global acquirers — a fundamentally more volatile, competitive environment.
Here's the bull case for why growth could re-accelerate:
Clover's value-added services reached 27% of revenue in Q4 2025, up 5 points year-over-year, and management targets Clover GPV growth of 10–15% in 2026. The thesis is that Clover becomes what Square/Block tried to be — a full small business operating system, not just a payment terminal. Analysts point to Clover's 25% value-added services penetration with a path to 35–40%+ as a high-margin compounding engine the market may be underweighting. TIKRSimply Wall St
Financial Solutions core banking and debit processing carry near-irreplaceable switching costs, meaning client defection risk is structurally low. Simply Wall St
And the valuation math has shifted sharply. At roughly 10–11x 2026 adjusted EPS, the stock appears to price in essentially no recovery from the guided trough — any normalization toward higher adjusted margins in 2027–28 could create meaningful upside. The average analyst rating remains "Buy," with a 12-month price target around $127.53. Simply Wall StStockAnalysis

Bottom Line
The historical slow-and-steady compounder version of Fiserv is effectively gone — that company no longer exists in its original form after the First Data merger. What remains is a larger, messier, higher-potential but higher-risk entity trying to prove it can be both a reliable financial infrastructure provider and a growth platform business. The exchange round-trip (Nasdaq → NYSE → Nasdaq) is a reasonable metaphor for that identity confusion: it was a company that briefly thought it had arrived, then had to acknowledge it still had significant work to do.
Whether it can rerate from here depends heavily on Clover's execution, the success of "One Fiserv," and whether the payments sector recovers investor confidence. The fundamentals — cash flow, sticky clients, market position — are intact. The credibility with investors, after two years of guidance misses, is not.

I'm salary and normally my check clears in my bank by today but now it's magically not there after ODW went live for HR tools. Where the fu-k is my money?

i am 100% sure they want to phase out the rest of IT. i dont have insider info, it's just logical based on everything they've done so far... those folks are basically making themselves redundant at this point. i am also sure that finance, project teams are targets. mgmt too.

Obviously, I am not asking for binding financial advice, just curious, do you guys think there will be any stock market movement on this big Investor Day and if so, do we think it'll be up or down? Earnings calls are already regularly terrible and I'm not sure what an "investor day" would do differently since people already see through the smoke and mirrors of those.

https://www.cheapism.com/americas-worst-banks-according-to-customers/

#9

So what does this mean?

Anyone have any intel on when Houston Financial Crimes Investigations will be done? There are only a few of us here, and all of our managers are in a different location.

WARNING: this post is longer -and possibly more useful- than you may expect.

So, for those who still have meetings to attend, dashboards to ignore, or layoffs to survive, here is the TL;DR:

Xerox tolerated years of weak performance, endless restructuring, and a stock chart that looked like it fell down the stairs.

Then, in February, the company raised $450M through an IP-backed JV with TPG Credit, basically borrowing against part of the Xerox crown jewels.

A few weeks later, creditors were reportedly paying attention, and suddenly Steve B was out “effective immediately”.

Maybe it is all coincidence.

Or maybe poor performance made Steve vulnerable, but the IP deal made him disposable.

Now the full blown post to see if we’ve got this right.

For years, Xerox performance looked like death by a thousand paper cuts - not one clean fatal blow, just endless small wounds: shrinking revenue, restructuring fatigue, disappearing morale, executive-level delusion... until the patient was technically alive but nobody wanted to check the pulse too closely.

The stock was crushed. The core business kept shrinking. “Reinvention” became the corporate version of putting a fresh tie on a skeleton. Employees were asked to run, rush, sacrifice, and also restructure, realign, resize, reskill, re-something every quarter.

Meanwhile, the top of the house kept pumping out “Reinvention” slides like PowerPoint decks could pay down debt, grow revenue, and make the stock chart stop looking like a cliff.

And through all of that, Steve B stayed.

The board tolerated him. The company tolerated him. The market tolerated him less enthusiastically. Employees tolerated him because, well, employees are not usually invited to vote on the circus.

Then suddenly — bo-m.

March 30, 2026: Steve “steps down”.

Louie Pastor becomes CEO effective immediately. No long transition. No elegant handover. No “after a distinguished tenure, Steve will remain through year-end”. Just corporate-speak for: “Please exit through the back door”. Xerox also reaffirmed 2026 guidance in the same announcement, which makes the timing even more interesting.

If nothing was wrong, why the trapdoor?

Here is the part employees should pay attention to.

Six weeks earlier, on February 17, Xerox announced a $450 million IP joint venture with TPG Credit.

Translation for normal humans: Xerox took valuable intellectual property (the sort of assets that make Xerox, Xerox) and put them into a special financing structure to raise cash. Xerox said the deal was designed to strengthen the balance sheet and support liquidity, Reinvention, Lexmark integration, and possibly debt repayment.

In plain English: when a company starts pawning the crown jewels to keep the lights on, people are allowed to ask whether this is a clever financing move or the corporate equivalent of playing your last card.

Now, is that illegal?

Not necessarily. Smart lawyers get paid obscene amounts of money to make aggressive things look technically permissible. Xerox disclosed the deal. Serious advisers were involved. The paperwork was almost certainly blessed by lawyers billing at rates normally reserved for organ transplants and ransom negotiations.

But let’s not pretend this was a normal “strategic partnership”. This was not two companies joining hands to invent the future.

This was Xerox raising money against the crown jewels because liquidity matters when the "balance sheet" drops "balance" and starts looking like "sh*t".

And creditors noticed.

Octus reported that Xerox lenders were preparing a cooperation agreement following the “deal-away” transaction. Debtwire/Ion Analytics later reported that a lender group had signed a cooperation agreement after the $450 million TPG-led deal-away transaction.

That is finance-world language for: “The people who lent money are not calmly sipping herbal tea”.

Why would lenders care? Because if valuable assets are moved into a new structure where new money gets priority, existing creditors may worry that value has been shifted away from them.

Again: maybe legal. Maybe documented. Maybe clever. But definitely suspicious.

So now look at the sequence:

• February 17: Xerox announces $450 million IP-backed JV with TPG Credit.
• Late February: lenders reportedly start organizing after the transaction.
• March 30: Steve B is suddenly out, Louie Pastor is in, effective immediately.
• April 2: Xerox files Steve’s separation terms, including non-disparagement, non-compete, non-solicitation, cooperation obligations, continued vesting, and severance mechanics.

Nothing to see here, folks. Just your average corporate spring cleaning: monetize IP in February, creditors start circling, CEO disappears in March, and everyone smiles for the press release.

Maybe it is all coincidence.

Maybe Steve suddenly discovered a passion for gardening.

Maybe the board, after years of tolerating him as the corporate equivalent of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus Chief Clown, finally woke up one Monday and said, “You know what? Leadership quality matters”.

Or maybe the IP deal changed the risk.

That is the real theory.

Poor performance made Steve vulnerable. But poor performance alone does not explain the suddenness. Xerox had been under pressure for years. The stock did not collapse overnight. The business did not become difficult in March. Employees did not suddenly notice the “Reinvention” machine was mostly powered by layoffs and vocabulary.

The more plausible question is this:

Did the board get scared?

Scared that the IP-backed financing was too aggressive?
Scared creditors might challenge it?
Scared the company had moved from “bad strategy” into “legal exposure”?
Scared that if this thing went sideways, directors might be asked what they knew, when they knew it, and why they approved it?

Boards can tolerate weak CEOs for a long time. They can tolerate bad morale. They can tolerate stock charts that look like ski slopes. They can tolerate employees screaming and leaving.

But creditor lawyers? That is different.

Once lenders start organizing, the room gets colder.

This does not prove Steve did anything illegal. It does not prove the board did anything illegal. It does not prove the TPG deal was invalid. But it does suggest Steve’s sudden exit may have had less to do with “fresh leadership” and more to do with risk containment.

In corporate terms, Louie Pastor may not just be the new CEO. He may be the adult brought in to stand next to the smoking g-n and say, “Everything is under control”.

The official story is simple: Steve stepped down, Louie stepped up, guidance was reaffirmed, please continue working harder with fewer people.

The unofficial employee version is more interesting:

Xerox may have borrowed against the crown jewels in February, creditors started paying attention, and by March the CEO was gone.

Maybe that is coincidence.

But at Xerox, there are no coincidences.

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/gm-expects-500-million-trump-195909092.html

Alphabet (GOOG) (5-Year Total Return): Approximately 194% to 199%. A $1,000 investment five years ago would be worth roughly $2,900–$3,000 today.
Wells Fargo (WFC) (5-Year Total Return): Approximately 121% to 236% based on recent, conflicting data reports. While WFC has seen a recent 40% rally in the past year, its total 5-year return has generally trailed the rapid growth of Alphabet.

As of April 2026, Oracle finalized a $16.3 billion financing deal for its massive data center campus in Saline Township, Michigan. This transaction is widely recognized as the largest single-facility technology debt package in history.

It's not a secret the OT is bleeding and drying out the divisions and there going to be another major layoff soon.

I'm hearing a lot of rumors about OT going to sell ADM bu heard SAP and others but is there any credibility to those rumors? is anyone going to buy ADM?
I guess the sale will be happening at the end of the faineance year (this June - start of July)

In a meeting about AI, (I am working on two Claude AI models now) it was slipped to myself and another by a market VP that they are looking deep into AI driven models to replaced human bodies. May is the month they will be collecting names of those that have not done all the AI training, looking to flat out replace them with AI driven models. The bottom line is this, on June 4th those that have just rejected AI and have not embraced AI will be removed from Verizon. Those that have embraced AI and have done all the training will still be employed on June 5th. That is the plan as it was told to me. On a side note our Claude code will replace many bodies in finance.

https://www.marketsgroup.org/news/verizon-to-move-pension-asset-management-to-goldman-sachs-ocio?fbclid=IwY2xjawRZliFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA80MDk5NjI2MjMwODU2MDkAAR6tW1eHusgv8sz-a_EIVp4-3Gr4_fpKJS5WnDXYY_YCVgII9d67nLy1BfY0TQ_aem_SCp5oOD-4eH3Wc8UasPgGw

When is finance team going to cleaned up with official span of controls in place. AVP reporting to AVPs, directors with 1 person team. Company wants to save money, but they cant save themselves.

Anyone hear anything about cuts in AML?

Why did WF pay?

Marvel was affected by Disney's latest round of company-wide layoffs. Staff reductions impacted both Marvel Entertainment and Marvel Studios. Approximately 8% of Marvel's workforce was reportedly let go. Cuts reached multiple departments including film, comics, and finance. Disney plans to cut up to 1,000 employees across the broader company.

Burbank, California

https://tribune.com.pk/story/2602916/marvel-hit-by-layoffs-as-disney-cuts-continue-across-company

Affecting ATS, Business, Ops

New Center of Excellence being created under Sabrina Sanders’ Org to standardize data collection

Up almost $10 from lows in less than a month. Is there a reason or just random?