Fiserv Looks to Units Like Clover And Carat to Help Bend Its Growth Trajectory Upward

Like many of its rivals, Fiserv Inc. is looking for ways to prosper as hope begins to rise for a recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic that has ravaged much of the world. Tuesday afternoon, the Brookfield, Wis.-based payments provider revealed a promising report card for its fourth-quarter performance, with high-flying products like the Clover point-of-sale platform growing fast and healthy gains in its independent software vendor (ISV) business.

“We’ve entered 2021 with tremendous momentum,” Frank Bisignano, Fiserv’s chief executive, said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call.

Much of the integration work to stitch together the operations of Fiserv and of Bisignano’s former company, First Data Corp., which Fiserv bought in 2019, is now done. And acquisitions announced or executed in 2020, such as that of Ondot Systems Inc., a developer of software that lets consumers turn their payment cards on or off, show promise.

Despite that momentum, the pandemic’s effects linger, and Bisignano conceded 2021’s first quarter will offer a hard year-over-year comparison. The coronavirus started to take a toll on financial results only in the spring last year. “We expect [the first quarter of 2021] to be our toughest comparison,” he conceded.

Results in the company’s merchant-acquiring business were strong, thanks to Clover. That business racked up $34 billion in volume for the quarter, up 25% year-over-year. The related Clover Connect service signed 44 ISVs, bringing the year’s total to 176. Order-ahead, pick-up-in-store volume meanwhile grew fully 125%. And yet another merchant service came on line this month with Citizen’s Bank’s launch of Citizens Pay, a buy now, pay later service Fiserv is supporting.

The company is also expecting much business to come from Carat, a unit it launched in November to sell coordinated digital payments and related commerce services to large companies looking to serve Covid-wary consumers.

All told, Fiserv’s Acceptance unit, which accounts for about 40% of the company’s revenue, recorded $1.44 billion in revenue for the quarter before accounting for currency impact and divestiture adjustments, down slightly from $1.464 billion in 2019’s fourth quarter.

The other big gun, Payments, racked up $1.42 billion, again down only slightly from $1.45 billion. This unit includes Fiserv’s Zelle peer-to-peer payments business as well as its retail private-label card and bill-pay services. Rounding out the company is its Fintech unit, which supports mobile banking and other services. This division recorded revenue of  $742 million, down from $751 millon.

For the company as a whole, revenue totaled $3.62 billion, down slightly from $3.71 in the fourth quarter of 2019. Revenue for the year came to $13.91 billion, down 3.7%.