Eye on Processors: EMV Card Orders Boost FIS; Fiserv’s Debit Business Grows

Orders for Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) smart cards rolled in for bank and payment processor Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) in the fourth quarter while rival Fiserv Inc. saw increases in its multi-faceted payments business.

Jacksonville, Fla.-based FIS on Thursday reported $647.2 million in fourth-quarter revenues from its Payment Solutions Group (PSG), up 5% from $618.3 million a year earlier. PSG, which brings in about 38% of FIS’s revenues, includes the NYCE electronic funds transfer network and provides card-issuer services for more than 4,000 financial institutions, EFT processing, bill payments and related services.

PSG’s organic growth came in at 3%. Higher transaction, processing volumes and card-production business drove the growth, according to FIS. PSG’s full-year revenues grew 2% to $2.5 billion.

Chief executive Gary Norcross said at the company’s earnings call with analysts that issuers converting their payment card files to the EMV chip card standard boosted FIS’s card-production business. “EMV is going to be a tailwind for us in 2015 … we are continuing to see more and more activity on that,” Norcross said, according to the Seeking Alpha transcript service.

On Tuesday, Brookfield, Wis.-based Fiserv reported that its Payments and Industry Products unit generated $630 million in adjusted revenues for the fourth quarter, up 6% from $596 million a year earlier. For all of 2014, the payments unit posted adjusted revenues of $2.42 billion, up 7% from $2.26 billion in 2013.

Fiserv, which owns the Accel PIN-debit network, signed 356 electronic bill-payment clients and 134 debit-processing clients in 2014. Debit transactions grew 12% in the fourth quarter and 11% for the year, chief financial officer Thomas Hirsch told analysts, according to Seeking Alpha.

Fiserv also signed 305 clients for its Popmoney person-to-person payments service last year. The Popmoney network now includes nearly 2,400 financial institutions. In addition, Fiserv added 395 financial-institution customers for its Mobiliti mobile-banking service in 2014, bringing Mobiliti’s client base to 2,100.