Accelerating the Pace of Innovation

Creating a Smarter Future for Banking and Commerce

 

From tapping a card to buy a cup of coffee to funding a loan for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, people rely on financial services and payments for what matters in their life and work. As a technology company at the intersection of banking, commerce and the consumer experience, Fiserv understands that helping clients improve their experiences and grow their business makes a difference for millions of consumers and businesses around the world as well.

Speaking before more than 3,700 leaders from banking, commerce and fintech at the recent Forum client conference, Guy Chiarello, Chief Operating Officer and Head of Technology Innovation at Fiserv, highlighted the privileged seat Fiserv holds in each client’s office – providing technology that is not only critical to operations, but pivotal to how consumers manage their financial lives. 

To that end, Chiarello highlighted key areas of continued focus and investment to accelerate the pace of innovation, including:

• Deliver open, scalable platforms that make it easier and faster for clients to connect and embed new capabilities
• Provide broader, deeper data and AI-driven insights across industries and technologies

 

Connecting new capabilities

Omnichannel experiences are essential to serving the diverse needs of today’s consumers. By carefully analyzing each touchpoint in the customer journey, financial intuitions and merchants can create curated digital experiences that differentiate their brand from the competition.

Chiarello explained how Fiserv is bringing digital innovation to market that helps clients offer these next-generation experiences, fueled by internal innovation, strategic acquisitions and partnerships. The company will continue to build solutions on open platforms that provide banks, credit unions, merchants and businesses of all sizes with the solutions they need to digitize the user journey.

“Our experience and birds-eye view of financial services allow us to help our clients in many ways, including seeing around corners faster, and with less risk,” Chiarello said.

Frank Sanchez, Vice Chairman of Fiserv and Head of Finxact, and Whitney Russell, Head of Digital and Integrated FI Solutions, spoke to the investments Fiserv is making in open digital platforms to give credit unions and community banks a competitive edge. 

A prime example is Finxact, a next-generation financial services platform for the business of banking, fintech and embedded finance. As a cloud-native, real-time and API-first system of record, Finxact enables financial institutions to future-proof their technology and innovate rapidly. It’s scalable enough for the largest of banks and agile enough for the nimblest of fintechs. Innovative platforms like Finxact also help credit unions and community banks remain competitive with large financial institutions, continue growing, and easily embed new digital experiences within their offerings.

Experience Digital, a connected digital ecosystem, and CardHub, a next-gen digital card platform, are two more examples.

“Next gen has become now gen for our clients,” said Sanchez.

Using data and AI to accelerate innovation

The explosion of interest in AI, fueled by the recent introduction of ChatGPT from OpenAI, has executives across industries rethinking what generative AI means to their business and how and where to begin adoption.

Chiarello made it clear that Fiserv has been, and will continue, investing in AI across the portfolio. Central to that effort is data, which underpins the ability to build a stronger, smarter future through AI.

“Data is the DNA of technology,” said Prasanna Dhore, Chief Data Officer at Fiserv, “It is the genome that will future-proof innovation for our clients.”

Speaking alongside Tom Eck, Chief Technology Officer at Fiserv, and Bob Breynaert of Microsoft, Dhore discussed the unique data advantage Fiserv offers – access to proprietary data sets across banking, payments and purchasing that, paired with data from partners like Equifax and Microsoft, create an unparalleled insight for clients.

“While no single entity has a full view of the customer, we are linking industry-wide data through AI to create connected intelligence that will solve problems in real-time,” said Dhore.

Existing use cases for AI-powered Connected Intelligence span simple yet robust customer self-service, lead generation, improved fraud prevention, modifying loyalty and rewards programs to better serve customers, and even gaining better insights into macroeconomic trends.

While the promise of AI is great, we are still in the early phases of this revolution. As Eck noted, AI best serves as a co-pilot for innovation. Trust, accuracy, consistency – these are the attributes that need to be perfected before we truly experience all that AI can do. In the future, every company will be an AI company, he added.   

 

A smarter future

Of course, it all comes back to the clients – banks, credit unions, large enterprises, small businesses and fintechs who are working hard on behalf of their customers. Together with clients, Fiserv is building a smarter future.