FIS has spent years shrinking after two big strategic bets that have not paid off as promised. The shares are about thirty-eight dollars, down more than forty per cent in a year. Headline profits look strong only because of a one-off gain on the last of Worldpay. Debt is still around twenty-one billion dollars after the firm bought Global Payments’ issuing business.
Staff numbers have fallen from about sixty-nine thousand in 2022 to forty-four thousand. There have been repeated job cuts, and many American roles have been moved to Cognizant or offshore. Chief executive Stephanie Ferris is paid around twenty million dollars a year while the share price has slumped.
Worldpay was a strategic failure of management. FIS paid tens of billions in 2019 for a merchant business that did not fit, destroyed a great deal of shareholder value, and has since been sold off in pieces at a much lower valuation. The Modern Banking Platform looks like a second failure of the same kind. It was built from scratch as the cloud-native core that would replace the old IBS and Horizon systems. Years on, the platforms banks are still buying, and the ones Gartner still ranks, are mainly Horizon and IBS. FIS has stopped actively selling MBP as that replacement. The marketing site remains, but the commercial centre of gravity has not shifted. Building a new core from the ground up is costly, slow and risky. Money and people went into MBP while the installed bases that actually earn fees were neglected, then the firm cut staff and moved work offshore.
The current cuts are the aftermath: tidy the portfolio, lift margins and cash, get debt down, and perhaps sell the weaker capital-markets bits. Selling the whole company is possible later if the shares stay cheap, but it is not the official plan. Customers feel it where a promised next-generation core never became the main product and experienced people leave. Worldpay and MBP were not bad luck. They were management choices, and the leaner company now is what those choices cost.