The ex-JPMorgan banker facing Wall Street’s toughest turnaround job

One Sunday in June, Takis Georgakopoulos got a call from Gordon Nixon, the board chair of troubled US fintech Fiserv, asking him to be the company’s next chief executive. Georgakopoulos said he needed to mull it over.

“When Gordon called me that Sunday morning, I asked for a couple of hours to think about it,” Georgakopoulos, who was then the co-president, told the FT.

Georgakopoulos, 56, would be walking into arguably the toughest turnaround job in financial services.

The company’s most recent CEO, Mike Lyons, was leaving after barely a year to join US regional bank Truist. Months earlier, Lyons sparked worries that his predecessor, Frank Bisignano, had given unrealistic growth targets, deferred investments and cut costs to the bone before leaving to join the Trump White House.

Fiserv, which runs back-end technology for banks and payment networks, had gone from being a high-flying, fast-growing company to one with major cultural and structural challenges. In particular, its recent financial results appeared to have been bolstered by high inflation in Argentina more than investors realised.

Its market value plunged below $30bn from almost $90bn when Georgakopoulos joined the company two years earlier. Ultimately, Georgakopoulos said, “there was not much to think about” with the CEO offer, and his appointment was announced the next day.

“I felt responsible not just to the people I had just hired into the company, but also to the hundreds of great people I had worked with over the past year and a half,” Georgakopoulos said in his first interview since taking the role. “More importantly, I felt that the company had an incredible foundation on which to build and innovate for its clients.”

Georgakopoulos moved to Wisconsin-based Fiserv in 2024 from JPMorgan Chase, where he was seen as a long-shot candidate to succeed Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief executive.

At Fiserv, his assignment is to restore investor confidence in a company that has repeatedly fallen short of its own targets and unify a fragmented business that is the result of several mergers, all while fending off competition from nimbler rivals such as Stripe and Adyen. He has plenty of sceptics to prove wrong.

“I actually believe in the turnaround story,” he said. “We have an opportunity to show our clients, analysts and the market that established companies can evolve and innovate.”

His plan involves using AI to modernise its payments platform, expanding beyond physical payment devices for restaurants and retailers, and improving customer service. If investors do not see sufficient signs of progress, he may face questions about Fiserv’s viability in its current structure.

“We should know nine to 12 months from now whether Fiserv needs to really do something more dramatic, like sell more assets or break up the company,” said Darrin Peller, a managing director at Wolfe Research.

A former McKinsey partner from Athens with a PhD in mathematical economics, Georgakopoulos joined JPMorgan in 2007 and spent almost two decades there. He worked as head of corporate strategy before Dimon tapped him to run the bank’s payments business in 2017.

Under Georgakopoulos, JPMorgan’s revenue from wholesale payments grew almost 60 per cent from 2019 to 2023, to more than $9bn. However, he failed to win a promotion in a 2024 management reshuffle and moved to Fiserv a few months later, as a senior adviser with a spot on the company’s management committee. He was later promoted to co-president and ran the technology and merchant solutions division.

When Georgakopoulos joined, Fiserv was run by Bisignano, another former top JPMorgan executive. At that time, Fiserv was a high-flying fintech, with one division providing software to banks to help run their business and a fast-growing merchant division facilitating payments for retailers and restaurants. Fiserv merged with First Data in 2019, where Bisignano was the chief executive.

Bisignano ran the company from 2020 until 2025 when he left to run the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration. As part of his move into government, Bisignano sold his Fiserv shares, worth more than $500mn at the time of his Senate confirmation.

Lyons, a former senior leader at PNC Bank, replaced Bisignano as Fiserv’s chief in May last year. Months after starting the role, Lyons shocked investors at third-quarter results by missing analysts’ estimates and slashing its revenue growth outlook.

Lyons also revealed that the high interest rates and hyperinflation in Argentina had been a bigger driver of growth than investors previously believed at its payments business. In Argentina, rapid price increases drove up payment volumes while higher interest rates in the country meant the company could charge merchants a higher fee for early settlement transactions.

Lyons disclosed that more than half of the company’s organic revenue growth had come from Argentina, a shock for investors. He talked about long-haul changes to the company’s culture to prioritise integrity and fairness.

The stock dropped more than 40 per cent on the day and has fallen further since. Less than seven months later, Lyons left to join Truist and was replaced by Georgakopoulos.

“The strategy of the company is pretty straightforward: listen to your customers, keep stability and resiliency, continue to modernise and continue to do a lot of the basic things,” Georgakopoulos said. “The keyword is continue, because these things don’t happen overnight. And therefore, execution is probably the most important thing for the company right now.”

Georgakopoulos’s first earnings call in early August was a clearing of the decks. He cut the company’s guidance for 2026 and said he would expand a strategic review of Fiserv’s business, which could result in divestitures. Investors remain sceptical the company will hit its targets for the year.

“Any stock has a hard time working if the market is sceptical about their guidance being achievable,” said Peller. “There’s a bit of a see-it-to-believe-it dynamic right now.”

The challenge for Georgakopoulos is twofold: show he can modernise Fiserv’s payments infrastructure division and turn around its core bank systems business, which investors fear has atrophied from years of under-investment.

In payments, Georgakopoulos is trying to shift its Clover business payments with physical payment processors to a model based on software for electronic transactions. Here Fiserv faces stiff competition from Adyen and Stripe, which do not have the same legacy technology that can be extremely costly to modernise. Georgakopoulos is hoping Fiserv can use AI tools to revamp its infrastructure more cheaply.

Fiserv is deeply embedded in many banks’ businesses as critical infrastructure. This business has come up against unsatisfied clients who complain it is not quick enough to address issues.

“It’s not rocket science,” he said. “It’s about picking up the phone when clients call and answering their questions and feeling the ownership to deliver the answer.”