Fiserv's stock plunges 40% on worst day ever. Outlook reset is deemed 'difficult to comprehend'

By Emily Bary

The company, which sells payment processing, mobile banking and billing solutions to banks and merchants, dramatically lowered its guidance for the year

Fiserv sells banks and merchants services including payment processing, mobile banking and billing.

Fiserv Inc. slashed its outlook on Wednesday to a degree that one analyst said was "difficult to comprehend."

That was Jefferies's Trevor Williams, who said the financial-services company just delivered a "complete reset" - with a new outlook calling for 3.5% to 4.5% in organic revenue growth this year, versus a prior view looking for about 10% growth. By pure math, that indicates dramatically changing growth trends within the business, seeing as the prior outlook was discussed in July with half the year already in the books.

On adjusted earnings per share, the company now anticipates $8.50 to $8.60, whereas it was previously looking for $10.15 to $10.30 in 2025.

The stock (FI) was down 43% in late-afternoon action Wednesday. Any regular-session decline in excess of 19.5% would make for its worst day on record.

Shares of Fiserv - which sells offerings for things like payment processing, mobile banking and billing to merchants and financial institutions - could also become the S&P 500's SPX worst year-to-date performer if current losses hold.

Chief Executive Mike Lyons blamed the lowered guidance on several factors, including overly upbeat prior expectations for growth in Argentina and a previous focus on cost cutting that hurt the company's ability to deliver products to customers in the right way.

He acknowledged that past moves to reduce costs and delay investments "placed too much emphasis" on meeting quarterly targets while hurting the company's ability to execute product launches.

William Blair analyst Andrew Jeffrey thought it could be "difficult to recover" from those missteps.

"In a competitive market like merchant processing, innovation is king, and we think Fiserv's ability to take economic share is impaired as the company had been focused on short-term performance, trading that for long-term competitive advantage," he wrote in a note to clients after the company's earnings call.

Fiserv had also been a leader in "card-present" technology - payment processing done through terminals for purchases made in stores - but Fiserv has since reversed earlier pricing changes that Lyons said weren't "appropriate for our business model."

Jeffrey noted as well that Fiserv saw a 3% drop in financial-services revenue. Some of the pressure could relate to timing matters around sales cycles, but he also wondered if Fiserv was facing "structural demand challenges as banks grapple with digital finance competition."

Meanwhile, Argentina had become a major contributor to the company's overall growth rate in recent years, but "the excess Argentina growth is now coming down," according to Baird analyst David Koning. To put Argentina's impact into perspective, the company would have seen 5% to 6% organic growth in 2023 and 2024 without the Argentina business; when including Argentina, the growth rates were 12% and 16%, respectively.

Overall, Fiserv's earlier outlook implied expectations for "outsize business volume, growth, record sales activity and broad-based productivity improvements" that all "would have been objectively difficult to achieve even with the right investment and strong execution," Lyons said on the earnings call.

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Fiserv has a new CEO in Lyons, who started in May, and is in the midst of reshuffling its leadership team. Takis Georgakopoulos, the current chief operating officer for technology and merchant solutions, and Dhivya Suryadevara, formerly the CEO of UnitedHealth's Optum Financial Services, are set to become co-presidents at the start of December. And Paul Todd, previously Global Payments Inc.'s chief financial officer, has been appointed to the CFO role at Fiserv effective Oct. 31.

In Lyons' view, though, "nothing at Fiserv is fundamentally broken."

"Our businesses are well positioned," he said. "The markets we serve are growing," and customers "have a near-insatiable appetite for innovative technology and payment solutions." Lyons said Fiserv's current tough spot is "self-inflicted" and "not the result of a material change in our positioning."

Nonetheless, one analyst saw better opportunities elsewhere in the financial-technology sector.

"We can no longer recommend Fiserv given what we consider a shocking third-quarter revenue and EPS miss and abrupt management transition," Jeffrey wrote. "It is our view that relatively new CEO Mike Lyons is now in a difficult position as he and his team try to figure out what went wrong."

Shares of Global Payments (GPN) and Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS), two Fiserv rivals, were down 6% and 9%, respectively, in midday trading.

But Jeffrey thinks "Fiserv's challenges are company specific."

"In fact, Clover's apparent lack of real innovation, evidenced by reversal of some fees, is probably a positive for truly innovative companies like Block (XYZ)," he wrote.

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-Emily Bary

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10-29-25 1530ET