Fiserv, the financial services firm, announced on Wednesday (Jan. 16) that it would buy First Data, the payments processor, in a deal valued at $22 billion, marking a landmark deal in the FinTech sector.
The all-stock deal is roughly a 30 percent premium to First Data’s closing price Tuesday of $17.54.
The deal is slated to close in the second half of 2019. As the companies said in the announcement Wednesday, upon consummation, Fiserv shareholders will own 57.5 percent of the combined entity, while First Data holders will have 42.5 percent.
Fiserv CEO Jeffery Yabuki will be CEO of the merged firms, and First Data CEO Frank Bisignano will be president and COO.
The firms said in a statement that end users would benefit from a “highly complementary combination” that offers a range of payments and financial services, spanning account processing and digital banking, integrated payments and the Clover POS system, among other products and services.
Fiserv and First Data said they will link their respective merchant and cash management capabilities, further developing new offerings and providing First Data’s Clover cloud-based platforms for small and medium-sized businesses. For example, First Data’s digital merchant account enrollment capabilities can be integrated into Fiserv’s digital banking solutions that serve thousands of financial institutions. The companies also said the payments platform will span issuance to acceptance.
Incremental investments will focus on technology – as much as $500 million over five years, said Fiserv and First Data, with revenue synergies of $500 million over a five-year period, too. Revenue growth will come from a focus on bank merchant services and Clover, credit processing, additional biller services and network initiatives.
Through the same five-year period, $900 million in cost savings should be realized, with streamlining of technology infrastructure and the reduction of duplicative corporate structures.
Wayfair has reduced the time needed to curate product listings by 67%, saved hundreds of thousands of dollars and improved some conversion rates by 2% by deploying Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
The online retailer shared these results in a Sunday (Jan. 10) press release emailed to PYMNTS announcing that it is using Google’s Gemini models on Vertex AI to enhance its product catalog and unlock “the next generation of retail experiences.”
“With Google Cloud, we’ve been able to efficiently scale and enrich our product catalogs, enabling us to support a more seamless and engaging shopping experience for our customers,” Wayfair Chief Technology Officer Fiona Tan said in the release.
Gemini on Google Cloud improved Wayfair’s time-to-market by automatically categorizing products across its 30 million product portfolio, delivered cost savings by eliminating the need to manually tag attributes like color and style, and improved conversion rates by increasing the accuracy of product attributes and improving the coverage of attribute tags in the retailer’s catalog, according to the release.
The technology also automatically catches errors in product dimensions and flags inappropriate materials, per the release.
Wayfair is also using Gemini for Google Workspace to boost employees’ productivity, according to the release.
The retailer is using AI features in this suite of productivity apps to draft and respond to emails, summarize and proofread documents, build presentation templates and gain expertise in new areas, per the release.
“By harnessing the power of Gemini and Google Workspace, Wayfair is not only automating complex tasks and boosting employee collaboration, but also creating more personalized and engaging experiences for every shopper,” Matt Renner, president, global revenue at Google Cloud, said in the release.
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has thrust generative AI into the driver’s seat of retail technologies, prompting brands to reassess their strategies, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence and AI-ID collaboration, “What Generative AI Has in Store for the Retail Industry.”
The report found that 92% of companies are using AI-driven personalization to drive growth and that 77% of business leaders rank generative AI as the most impactful emerging technology.
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