That’s a wrap for Fiserv Forum 2024! 

That’s a wrap for Fiserv Forum 2024! And Finxact was there in force, making power moves alongside our clients, partners and associates.

Forum really has a way of distilling for all in attendance just how much impact Fiserv has on the entire financial services industry. As Frank Bisignano pointed out in his opening remarks, the synergy created by our market-leading businesses across merchant acquiring, payments, issuer processing, and banking technology differentiates Fiserv even among the most highly regarded financial services companies on the globe. In 2024, Fiserv was recognized by Fortune as a World’s Most Admired Company for the second straight year.

We had tremendous momentum going into the event and have even more coming out of it. A quick recap of the Finxact moments to remember below:

Batting leadoff for Finxact was Sathish Mohan who moderated a super-engaging and edgy discussion (with leaders from Live Oak Bank, PwC, and ONE). The panel explored how the adoption of game-changing technology like Finxact informs the kind of talent you hire and retain. This turned out to be a lively and provocative discussion summed up by Renato Derraik, CIO of Live Oak Bank, who declared that team members need to get with the next-gen mindset or get going. Nameet Pai, Head of Core Banking for ONE, implored those in attendance to seek engineers that are outcome oriented and to remove intermediaries where self-service functions can and should suffice.  Employees should be empowered and expected to ask first-order questions like “How does what I’m doing support our business objective and serve our customers.” Rounding out the panel was James Farhat, Principal at PwC.

A standing-room-only crowd attended the Finxact Strategy Update, where Finxact COO Tom Lowry led off with stats that demonstrate Finxact’s market success, followed by John Gomes, Head of Solution Architecture, Nick Handorf, Alliance Partnerships Director, and Mike O’Toole, Head of Software Architecture.   Detailed updates were dished on progress to date integrating Fiserv Surround solutions (26 out of 32 targets completed to date!) and the astounding success of Finxact’s performance benchmarking.  Yes, we are blowing by historical watermarks set by mainframes on-prem systems.

On Monday afternoon, Amy Ratliff, Director of Channel Partnerships, and Jonathan Weston, Director of ISV Partnerships, co-moderated a panel consisting of Finxact partners Zafin, JIFFY.ai, and PortX. The group explored de-risking core transformation, decreasing time to market and dependency on resources, and integration as a service.

Tom Lowry, who managed to be everything everywhere all at once for Forum, is up for his own Oscar for deftly leading one of the most engaging insight sessions of the three days with industry aces Chris Nichols of SouthState Bank and Justin O’Connor of PwC. Some of the most consequential questions and challenges facing institutions as they embark on transformation surface in the form of co-existence of real-time payments and real-time core platforms and the ways that genAI is coming into the lives of bank system operators in extraordinarily beneficial ways.

On Tuesday morning Theatre 1 of the Experience Center Professor Nick Handorf gave a crystalline explanation and guided tour of how Finxact.io is empowering Finxact clients and partners to accelerate time to mastery and time to market.

Finxact is indeed Transforming the Business of Banking, but don’t ask us, you heard it straight from our production clients (Forbright Bank and ONE) and partner Accenture if you were lucky enough to catch this session moderated by Ryan Matthews, VP of Client Services at Finxact. I personally loved Emily Heffelman’s advice to bankers beginning their transformation journey to “think big and start small” and to understand your “why” and align that to meaningful outcomes.  Sitting in the audience I reflected upon our years working alongside Emily and the Accenture team and understood deeply that hers were more than catchy phrases. These are hard-won learnings, and they should serve as guideposts to those following the early adopters.  This is the kind of thing you get at Forum, very good guidance from a community that wants to see you succeed.

Over the course of this year’s Forum, you saw many of our power moves on stage, but as many power moves were contributed by the hundreds of Finxact and Fiserv associates who worked tirelessly in the months leading up to Forum to ensure that this was an event to remember. My personal thanks to all of you on phenomenal preparedness and execution.

And that’s a wrap for this recap. For all who attended, we appreciate so much your participation and can’t wait to see you next year!