For most people, Frank Bisignano is known for two things: being the president and CEO of Fiserv, and now President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Social Security Administration (SSA). Within Fiserv he’s known for something else: overseeing a pitiless program of rolling layoffs in the name of cutting costs.
Maybe no part of the Trump administration’s program of dismantling federal government agencies has generated as much concern as its drastic cuts to the SSA, the agency responsible for trillions of dollars’ worth of payments to retirees, people with disabilities, and millions of other Americans, and which is already seeing its workers laid off en masse, its offices shuttered, and some of its core services ended.
If Bisignano is confirmed, the White House may soon have an ideal ally in this effort: as chief executive of both Fiserv and First Data before that, he has been responsible for cuts to worker benefits, branch closings, and thousands of layoffs.
Since Bisignano took over as CEO of the payment processing firm in July 2020, Fiserv has been steadily shedding jobs in the face of rising costs, though it has been cagey about revealing exactly how many. As reported by trade publication Payments Dive, the company claimed for years in public filings and statements that it still has “about 44,000” employees worldwide, while also disclosing that its number of foreign employees had increased — suggesting that jobs had been offshored from the United States — and that its termination costs had jumped from $32 million in 2019 to $131 million in 2020, the year Bisignano took over.
Layoffs at the company kept at a steady tick over the years, whether the one hundred positions cut in Dublin, Ohio, in 2020, the three thousand workers (or roughly 7 percent of its workforce) it disclosed cutting in 2023, or the staff reduction it admitted to on December 5 last year (the same day Bisignano was officially tapped to lead the SSA), which…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
