Financial Solutions interim leadership (Andrew Gelb and Srini Krish) are confirming what the Street has been whispering since Jana Partners’ letter hit: the $500 million Project Elevate savings target is dead. The activist is pushing hard for $1.25 billion by 2029 and wants Palantir brought in to accelerate the tech cleanup. New CEO Takis Georgakopoulos (the ex-JPMorgan payments guy who took over after Mike Lyons bolted for Truist) is already reviewing every cost center.
Expect the real bloodletting after the November 3 earnings. They’re looking hard at residual legacy ops, certain debit network remnants (Star/Accel chatter never really died), non-core Clover support layers, and parts of the old Financial Solutions stack that Dhivya Suryadevara left behind when she exited. Adam Rosman’s departure from the legal/admin side was just the first visible crack. Insiders say the next round won’t be another quiet 98-person New Jersey WARN notice—it’ll be bigger, faster, and uglier. Georgakopoulos is monetizing what he can, divesting what he can’t, and the margin pressure is real.
But here’s the part that doesn’t make the analyst notes.
In the closed-door strategy sessions last week, someone apparently brought shrimp. A lot of shrimp. One of the interim co-heads looked over and said something about the ocean running out. Nobody laughed. Then the conversation somehow drifted to whether Finxact could be pitched as a core ledger for two-sided marketplaces and also whether anyone had ever actually been to Akron. Someone mentioned flying there just to settle an old score. Another person started talking about life-support machines and coma wives. The whiteboard somehow ended up with “je-k store” written on it in three different colors.
By the time the meeting broke, the official action item was still “accelerate cost reductions and evaluate Palantir,” but the unofficial one—the one people keep repeating in the elevators—was simpler:
“Well, the je-k store called… and they’re running out of you.”
That’s the real Project Elevate status update. You’re welcome.