Dive Brief:
- Fiserv falsely portrayed customer demand and revenue growth to investors until an October 2025 organizational reset exposed the payment processor’s true financial state, shareholders suing the payments giant said in a Tuesday court filing.
- Fiserv’s efforts to boost growth of its Clover point-of-sale system resulted in “an undisclosed battery of temporary cash grabs” from 2023 to 2025 designed “to create the façade of skyrocketing organic growth tied to Clover,” the plaintiffs wrote in their opposition to Fiserv’s August motion to dismiss the lawsuit. In reality, “hyperinflation in Argentina was Fiserv’s most important growth driver” during this period, the plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote.
- “Defendants lied about Fiserv’s organic revenue growth in a ploy to artificially inflate the Company’s stock price for their own benefit,” according to the plaintiffs. “Defendants were strongly incentivized to commit fraud to enrich themselves” through their executive compensation plan, they added.
Dive Insight:
The shareholder lawsuit in U.S. District Court in New York City dates to July 2025. Besides Fiserv, the lawsuit names as defendants former CEOs Frank Bisignano and Mike Lyons, along with Bob Hau, the former chief financial officer, and John Gibbons, the former head of Fiserv’s financial institutions group.
Bisignano left Fiserv before the lawsuit landed, in May 2025, when he was confirmed by the Senate to lead the Social Security Administration after being nominated to the post by President Donald Trump in late 2024.
A few months after Bisignano’s exit in October last year, Lyons overhauled the company’s management team and pursued what he called “a critical and necessary reset” for the payments processor. But then this year, Lyons also resigned, in June, to lead Truist Financial.
About 90% of the individual defendants’ income was tied to meeting specific targets, according to the plaintiffs. Bisignano made about $700 million in July 2025 from “illicit stock sales at inflated prices,” according to the plaintiffs’ filing on Tuesday.
In the motion to dismiss, Milwaukee-based Fiserv defended Bisignano by saying he sold his Fiserv stock as part of an ethics agreement following his nomination to serve in the Trump administration.
The lawsuit aims to represent Fiserv shareholders as a class of litigants, from Feb. 6, 2024 to Oct. 28, 2025, according to an amended complaint filed in June. Fiserv stock declined 73% during that period, erasing about $92 billion in market capitalization, according to the lawsuit.
“Defendants misleadingly portrayed Fiserv as a customer centric financial services provider with stable and predictable double-digit organic revenue growth that reflected genuine product strength and customer demand — artificially inflating” the stock price during the 20-month period ending last October, according to the plaintiffs’ filing Tuesday.
Fiserv argued in its August motion that plaintiffs were displeased by the stock’s steep fall, but could not prove any alleged securities fraud because none had occurred.
Nonetheless, the defendants created “the appearance of growth” using “a fraudulent scheme” that involved “unsustainable hyperinflation” in Argentina, which boosted prices and resulting revenue from the local currency’s decline, the plaintiffs wrote.
The plaintiffs also contend that Fiserv forced merchants to convert to the Clover point-of-sale system from its older Payeezy system, and classified them as new customers, according to the filing.
On Tuesday, Fiserv said in a press release that this year its Clover POS system had topped 5 million device shipments globally, including 2 million over the past three years. Fiserv acquired Clover in 2019 as part of its $22 billion acquisition of First Data, where Bisignano was chief executive.
The company also diverted resources from its core banking business “to maintain the false appearance of meteoric growth” in its merchant solutions segment. That effort caused banking customers “to flee in droves,” according to the plaintiffs.
Most of Fiserv’s share decline occurred in October 2025 after Lyons announced the reset for the company, to rebuild customer relationships and improve operations. The management shift came as the company reported disappointing third-quarter results last year and reduced its earnings and revenue growth forecast.
As a result of that news, Wall Street analysts who cover the company sharply revised downward their views of the company’s growth prospects and stock price.
The lawsuit is led by Ethenea Independent Investors SA of Luxembourg, an investment firm, and the City of Hollywood Police Officers’ Retirement System. A pension plan for retired employees of Pontiac, Michigan is also a plaintiff. The lawsuit includes a separate complaint filed in Wisconsin that a federal judge incorporated into the Manhattan case earlier this year.
Fiserv has until Nov. 12 to reply to the plaintiffs’ comments about the dismissal motion.