Trading Post June 15, 2026

Talk about a dog of a stock, now under $48 from $226 early last year.

During one of the greatest stock market bull runs of all time.

The current price is a 10-year low, and over the last 18 months, the stock has gapped down more than 3% eight times and more than 10% three times.

Today, the stock gapped down about 8%.

I covered this one fairly extensively in The Payments Giants: FEE FI FOUR Umm….

In that article, I provided a bingo sheet.

And I concluded thus:

In something like this, buying very cheap is important. This will not soon romance the growth crowd, and the payments space is, as I said at the top, changing enough for a wise investor to be patient with the incumbents.

Fiserv is also lacking the catalysts I like to see. Perhaps the best one is a hint of better results from new management that might restore credibility to Fiserv on Wall Street. Probably at least 1-2 years away.

The CEO left unexpectedly, which is a thesis violation if there ever was one. Thesis violation does not mean sell. It means re-evaluate.

Ex-CEO Mike Lyons joined Fiserv 13 months ago, and the stock has fallen 71% during his tenure. It is a bad look, but the prior CEO before Lyons had set the company up with aggressive accounting and short-term sales tricks that had to be unwound.

When Lyons told the story, the stock crashed, and kept crashing.

Note, volume has been elevated for many months now, potentially signaling a bottoming process.

So, Lyons gets a clean start now as CEO of Truist Bank – which is no slouch and a top ten banking institution (the old SunTrust, merged with BB&T). It is always possible Lyons found Fiserv impossible to turn after he got a deep look at it. That is not, however, a foregone conclusion. Lyons is a long-time investment banker, so Truist may be a more natural fit.

The new CEO seems to have technology expertise in payments that the old one did not.

CEO Takis Georgakopoulos comes from the fast-growing Clover side of the business. Clover competes globally in payments by being preferentially bolted onto and into Fiserv’s extensive roster of current clients.

Takis spent 17 years at JP Morgan, last running JPM’s global payments business before joining Fiserv in late 2024. Takis is an inside hire but not part of the old guard.

To be clear, the business itself runs just fine no matter who is CEO.

Fiserv holds the #1 spot in the 2025 IDC FinTech 100 for the third straight year. It processes 10,000 transaction per second, with 1.8 billion issuer accounts, 339 million deposit and loan accounts, and reaches 95% of U.S. households.

I’ll keep going. 3.9 million small businesses, 900,000 Clover merchants, 7,000 enterprise-level clients across almost 1 million locations.

One man at the top is not pulling switches to make that happen.

The CEO is there to grow the business with high-ROIC moves and to ensure existing moats are fortified if not expanded. A sudden CEO change after 13 month hits at that part of the thesis.

Read more