Innovative Fintech Leadership: Powering the Future of Money

Welcome to Leadership Reimagined, where game changing conversations are reshaping the world of work. I'm Janis LG CEO and founder of l A Group, Executive Search advisors and pioneers in redefining executive search through our unwavering commitment to helping organizations hire outstanding executives to build inclusive environments. Today on Leadership Reimagined, our topic is innovative fintech leadership powering the future of money, and I'm delighted to welcome Stephanie Farriss, CEO and President of the Fidelity National Information Service or FIS, a Fortune five hundred fintech leader whose technology gives financial institutions and other businesses the ability to move money around the world.

Stephanie joined FIS in twenty nineteen as Chief Operating Officer before being promoted to Chief Administrative Officer in twenty twenty one. During that time, she led global strategy, technology transformation, key acquisitions, and the global integration of FIS and World Pay. She was named president and CEO in twenty twenty two, the first woman to assume that role, where she has continued to redefine how FIS technology enables seamless movement of money. Under her visionary leadership, FIS has delivered some of the most modern technology in the financial services industry, introducing AI driven insights and embedded finance offerings into its solution stack, and rolled out next generation payment capabilities that help businesses, banks, and developers unlock efficiencies and revenue opportunities.

This year, Stephanie was named to CNBC's annual change Makers List that highlights women leading and disrupting the business world from within the largest companies, startups, in philanthropic organizations, and she was recently honored by the Committee for Economic Development of the Conference Board with the twenty twenty five Distinguished Leadership Award. And I was there to see her and hear her and it was wonderful. So Stephanie, welcome. I'm so happy you could join us today.

Well, Janis, thank you, and what a kind introduction. Very excited to be here. You during when you got your award from CED. I've heard also you describe yourself as a very private Midwesterner.

So tell us about that Midwest background and who or what inspired you to pursue your career in financial services. Yeah'e you're right, Janas, So I grew up in the Midwest, born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. I was the only daughter with three brothers, so that'll come back. In financial services, I'm very comfortable in what's historically been a very male dominated field.

I started my career there at Cooper's in Libran, which ultimately became PwC. And it was a great launchpad for me out of the Midwest, which really gave me an opportunity to work across many many industries outside the outside the Midwest and around the world. But at my core, and you've heard me talk a little bit about this, being from the Midwest, I tout a lot of the Midwestern values, which is about hard work, focus, discipline, putting people first, putting clients first, and so that is really how I was raised there in the Midwest, and it's proven to be really successful for me no matter what I've attempted to do in life.

You know, I'm a New Yorker who went out to the University of Iowa and Iowa City. So I totally agree with you in terms of there is a different way of thinking, feeling, behaving, and I think those Midwest values really do help us very much in the workforce today. Well, Jannis, I might say one thing on that I did. I am an aspiring East Coaster.

So when I was leaving college, I actually had a job offer to go to New York, but I was so broke, quite frankly, that I just couldn't afford to make it happen. So I have always been in my heart of hearts, you know, wanting to be a New Yorker who's never had been. So we are aligned there. So in your career, you know, you started an accounting auditing sort of helped shape your career.

You've made a lot of big moves and bowl moves, including selling world Pay, the very company that purchased FIS back in twenty nineteen. So how did that background help you in terms of making these major steps and you're growth strategy. It's a great question, and it's interesting I keep getting asked it, which forces you to reflect a little bit. I guess I would say it was a great.

Platform to launch a career from because what you get in public accounting is it's lots of exposure, exposure to different clients, exposure to different industries, exposure to different regions, and I I just loved learning about all of those and different business models, and you saw so much success and failure through that. You know, I started my career in nineteen ninety five when computers were just starting, and I'm sure you're going to ask about AI, so I just flagged that we'll come back to that.

But you know, I just had this unique opportunity to really look at and study and be a part of teams that we're working on these fascinating companies. And I really liked large sec public companies. I really liked companies that did a lot of m and a like a lot of action, maybe just rooting it back to like I lived with a bunch of brothers who were always in action, so it was a great place to start my career. And then I went from there and I joined Fifth Third Bank, and that was also I joined it at the time that it had merged with Old Kent, so you know, it was interesting.

I started my career working with a bunch of companies who were buying and selling assets, and then I went to Fifth Third at the time that they had a merger of equals and that was fascinating to be on the acquiring side of that transaction. And then when the financial crisis happened. I was part of the payments division that got spun out and sold to private equity, and then, as you mentioned, ultimately ten years later bought a company called world Pay and then sold that to FIS.

So I really love the opportunity to be constantly transforming businesses, not that everybody needs to be transformed. So it's not like, you know, it's a little bit of an addiction, it's not. It's really making sure that you are strategically looking forward, always placing the company you're with at the best strategic advantage for them. At that time.

And so it's been an absolute honor and privilege to be a part of all these companies. And it's certainly an adrenaline rush to do all these transactions. But what I might say, janis is at the core of it all, it is about the customer and making sure that we have the right products and services for the customer so that we can help them grow, and that includes having the right team members. So that was a long winded answer to your I think midwestern question.

Now that this is really important because you've worked in many organizations, many platforms, a lot of moving parts, m and a acquisitions divestitures, and so all of that has helped you in terms of your decision making in your role today. And I understand that you've been quoticing. You do a ton of analysis market, customer, financial, and investor. Again, what you want to know how the customer doing.

So describe a little bit how you go about that decision making with so many levers to pull. Well, I'm a voracious reader, so I start every day reading what's happening in every market. I also read a lot of different perspectives on the same thing, so whether it's talking about the industry or the geopolitical, I never just read a one sided piece. And then I will move into my day and I spend What I love to do is spend a bunch of time with clients because at the root of what we're always trying to accomplish is are we serving our clients in ways that can help them grow.

So it's really important I spend a lot of time listening to clients very specifically on what their challenges are and what their opportunities are. I find that to be really helpful in terms of making decisions. I then do a lot. Of work with my teams in terms of analysis.

I'm a CFO by background, financial by background. That part is obviously really important to focus on where value gets created And then probably frustrating for my team is I ask a lot of people the same question for their perspective. So with all of that input, you know kind of internally process all of that to come down to you know a set of options in terms of what could be and what things could happen, what things could look like. And I do think it's always important to have a plan B.

So you might have a plan A on what could happen and what you'd like to do, but if that doesn't work, do you have a plan B. Absolutely? And you have said that financial services are no longer just transactional, they are experiential. So what's an example of that?

So janis I talk. A lot about fundamentally financial services has not changed. Fundamentally, banks take deposits, they move money in the capital market side, they put money to work trading and processing. That at its core has not changed.

What's changing is the ability to do those capabilities at the point of transaction. So you and I, for example, might be taking a micro loan through buy now, Pay later, that loan in itself is not fundamentally different. It's the vehicle for which it is delivered to us at the point of transaction. So, if you think about banking at its core, originally everybody went in the branch, and then you went to the ATM, and then you were on your mobile app, and who knows, maybe you're going to be doing it soon with an agent.

So the fundamental product isn't necessarily different, but the way it gets delivered is different, and so we in the technology space have to be very focused on what does that mean in order for our financial services clients to be able to deliver those products at the point of transaction. It means that the technology itself has to be componentized and consumable and delivered in an as a service way so that you, as the consumer of that financial services, experience it like you experience Amazon.

The consumers today, you and I, whether we're commercial banking customers, trading and processing customers, we're all consumers of digital environments. And so the expectations for how you consume financial services is now the same as the expectations and the experience of how you consume from big technology companies. That is bringing a lot of innovation that's required inside what's a traditional financial services legacy kind of technology industry. And that's what we at FIS are really focused on, which is taking our historical legacy software, componentizing it and making it consumable and pieces to help the modernize the bank and digitize the bank.

And so all of our capabilities have to be componentized like that so that our financial services can consume them, not in one big piece of software, but in consumable pieces so that they can then deliver out to you and I the products and services in the experiential way we wanted them. And so that experience is going to continue to change and escalate in the speed to change. So what are some of the most compelling technology solutions and innovations fis IS introduced for the financial services industry?

Can you talk about those a little bit. I think the thing that has been really interesting with the advent of AI that I think is really compelling is we have a set of treasury management solutions that we sell to CFOs of corporations and banks. So think about CFOs managing their treasury operations and then they use our products and services to do cash flow forecasting. They also use our products and services to do risk management, you know where they think or they could possibly have geo know climate type issues.

We have treasury management solutions that we have enabled with AI to make the cash flow forecasting to be much more proactive. Don't have to go in as a CFO and do all of the work yourself. It has become very predictive, and so that's very exciting as we think about taking AI and jen Ai into our capabilities in terms of compelling solutions. The other place that we think we've been really really that's been really important to our end client is our digital suite of solutions.

So when you think about interacting with a financial institution, you're going to do it digitally, but also the people that work for the financial institution also need to be able to experience the back end operating systems digitally. And you as the. Consumer and I as the person working for the financial institution, that digital experience is important both to you as an employee and you have to be able to see the same thing as the consumer seedes. And so while that sounds very easy, it's actually been a big transition for the financial services industry as we bring our digital capabilities online.

Now when you start to open up accounts digitally, remember you used to have to go into a branch. There is a lot of fraud that comes with online account opening, and so we've had to lean in and provide some really unique fraud capabilities into our digital services. We just bought a company called Amount, which we're really excited about, that provides digital account opening capabilities. Whether you're opening a credit card or you're opening a deposit account.

No matter what kind of account you're opening, you want to be able to open that digitally. That's been a historical, very big challenge for the financial services industry. We bought a company called Dragonfly that allows that same type of capability. Got on the commercial side of the business.

So I would say from a very innovative standpoint, we're broadly taking all of our software and modernizing it across the stack. But I think the digital capabilities, the payments capabilities that we have. We most recently announced a partnership with Circle. Our money Movement Hub, which is our new product allows financial institutions to move money and provide the capabilities for all their clients, whether it's a card ach, real time payments, digital payments, et cetera.

So we really are focused on making sure we can provide the products and services in the places that are innovating for our customers. You have been very busy putting in place a lot, and I know through some of my clients who use your services, you're also training people, and so I know when I'm placing them they have to also have this not a digital native, but they have to come up to speed because the products and services that you offer require that as well. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the trillions of transactions that you process annually, in fact, eight trillion asset services, sixteen trillion financial assets on platforms serving nearly six thousand clients across one hundred and fifty countries.

This is a really volatile environment. You're processing a lot. How do cybersecurity, how do you have that in place for financial stability, and how do you continue to protect those transactions, trillions of transactions while being faster and more efficient. Well, tell us superhuman.

As you mentioned, I talk a lot about the competitive advantages of FIS. So at FIS, as you said, we have massive scale, but alongside that scale, we have scale in making sure that we have compliance and regulatory and cyber wrapped around the level of scale, and I'll come back to that. We also have best in class products and services. As you mentioned, it's quite complex the amount of products and solutions we have, and we have a marquee set of clients and global distribution.

So these are really important competitive assets of FIS. But as you say, the biggest risk to any technology company is always about cyber security and resiliency, and they go hand in hand. So from a cyber standpoint, I think everyone around the world will tell you that the investment in cyber and protection and resiliency for anyone, but in particular the size and scale of the technology company we have today is significant. And so I have a great team, I have a great CISO, I have a great chief risk officer, and we're constantly constantly evaluating our investments, evaluating the priorities.

We're doing a b testing ourselves on can you get in? So there's just a significant amount of buying the right software and putting it at the right place to protect ourselves, but then also understanding and making sure that if and when something happens, you know we have the ability to cut off that risk and know how to deal with it. I will tell you it continues to escalate. It's never gotten flatter the entire time I've been at fis.

The cyber risk environment continues to s late, especially given the geopolitical environment that we're in, and the industry is always always focused on it, and clearly the thing that underpins all of it is the data and the algorithms we're using to protect ourselves. So we are always on twenty four to seven. It is the thing that I lose the most sleep on because you never know if your investment is enough. But we do make significant investments in this space.

You know, when you receive the CED Committee for Economic Development of the Conference Forward twenty twenty five Distinguished Leadership Award, you mentioned your team, and you mentioned it several times here, and I hear you say what keeps you up at night is a lot of those risks that are out there in cyber and bad actors doing things. So it sounds like you've got a team that's really has a sense of urgency and a sense of ensuring the customer is protected. How do you build a culture like that, Stephanie.

Yeah, that's a great point, and thank you for asking. Janis so a couple of things. One is when I came into the CEO role, I have three pillars that I'm maniacally focused on, and my team is moniagly focused on. The first is client centricity and putting the clients at the center of everything that we do.

And what I would say for FIS is the people that have worked for us for you know, there are people that have been here over thirty years, amazing focus on client that is inside the culture. I think the other thing. Two things we've been focused on is innovation, which we just spent a bunch of time talking about innovative products and solutions and really making sure we as a company are being on our front foot there. And then simplicity being easier to do business with.

But with respect to our culture and our team, the folks that work here, they love that agenda. You have to be client centric, you have to be focused on innovative products, you have to be wanting to be part of a transformative journey and wanting to be part of technology and technology change the exciting things around that. What I would say about myself and one of the things that's drawn me to FIS and why it's an honor and a privilege to work here and lead teams here is that I love to work on teams that do extraordinary things and have my hats off to Fis and the team members, the folks that have been here before and the folks that will be here in the future.

I think that's what we do. If you look at even the things that we've done in the short time period I've been here, it takes a team to do it. I only want to do it on a team. And it's the thing that I would say without a team, we wouldn't be here for sure.

So hats off to the team, and you know, still a lot more work to do, but we wouldn't be here without each other. Now that is true. It's people that make the difference. I can attest to that, and people who want to go to companies that have great leaders who recognize what a team can do and the impact they make.

With all of this going on, Stephanie, you've said there's a way of balancing the orchestration of pleading a twenty four billion dollar deal with also being there for your daughter's spring break. Now, I don't believe anybody in your role has really work life balance. It's almost an integration you have to do. But how do you manage that, how do you maintain, you know, driving innovation in this rapidly changing fintech landscape and still be able to be a member of the family, be there for your daughter's spring break.

Yeah, yes, that was crazy. So it's not insane, right, No, it's not. And there is no such thing as balance. I think that a couple of things.

One, you have to love what you do and then love your family. And you don't have to love them equally at every moment the same because they come in and out of who need you the most. I used to think when I was younger that, you know, I needed to go home and check out and do this with family and do this with work, and I could componentize it. I recently figured out, probably over the last five years, I'm not a good componentizer.

I can't turn off my family and I can't turn off my work. And so most recently what I've kind of come to realize is for me, it's about integration of them together. So, like I was saying, I was on senior high school spring break. I was there with my daughter.

We were in the middle of a transaction. I told her I was going to have to leave her in Mexico, which is not making me Mom of the Year, which is the story you were referencing. But at the same time, I also used the advantage of being able to be in amazing places when I'm with my team, and I try to bring my family along so that they can experience things like that. I'll give you an example.

A couple of years ago, I was going to London for work and I brought my daughter along, who is who at that time I think was in college or a senior, I can't remember. And she hooked up with another colleagues of my daughter and they while we were working, they toured London. So there's definitely some unique opportunities, and I'm figuring out that for me. I used to think it was I needed this separation, but what works better for me is just integrating it all together.

The other thing I would say is my husband is amazing. So we were both working for years and years and having two kids. We were just reflecting on this because we just put both our kids in college and so we're back to being kind of it feels a little bit like we're in our twenties. When we were traveling and working together.

I would absolutely not be here without him and without my family. I lived in my parents' neighborhood for the first ten years of my kids. So just you know, fully integrating life and every you know, every day is a different challenge, and you kind of got to let. The guilt go.

I did have a lot of mom guilt for a long time, but you got to let that go to the extent possible. But you're right, it is not easy. No, but that's great advice. It is integration, and it is taking advantage of opportunities when everybody can be together, and turning off one to turn on another doesn't work, you know, particularly in roles.

You know that CEOs have you really have to have both working at the same time. So, given the industry that you're in, looking ahead, what do you think the boldest bet payment processors and fintech companies in general will need to make in the next five years If you can look ahead. I mean, I think, just put simply, it's about how we as technology companies are going to embrace and harness the benefits of Genai, not just in our back office, which I think everybody I'll be able to take advantage of but how do we use it to lean into our products?

And then most importantly, are there things we could be doing for our clients that they need us to do on behalf of them so that they can take advantage of Jenai. So I just to me, I'm now remember I'm an eternal optimist and I'm also the CEO of a tech company, So I couldn't be more excited about the genai technology coming into the space. It reminds me a little bit of of when I was graduating from college in nineteen ninety five and when personal computers were just kind of the norm.

I think everyone graduating from college right now. You know, my daughter is a senior in college. I think they won't know any different. So I do think, you know, leaning in and adopting it and going with it.

And I run that agenda for I am the head of AI for the FIS business, and so it's really important to me. I also think that digital currencies, tokenized deposits, tokenized ledgers, agentic commerce very very exciting capabilities. They've been around for a while, by the way, but they're now at scale and adoption is coming. So I think for those of us that sit here in fintech trying to figure out how to take advantage of all those for our own products and solutions, but also making sure or keeping an eye on where those are strategically moving to make sure that we don't get left behind those would be the big ones.

Well, it's exciting times for all of us. Whatever stage we're in, it does mean keeping up. So for those maybe who are looking for a career in fintech in your business, what would be your advice or advice to all of us out there as we are approaching really the nascent stages, but it's going to be very fast in terms of coming at us. Is this age of AI any parting words for us?

Yeah? I think it's always about, you know, being as curious and leaning in and making yourself as uncomfortable as possible in terms of adopting technologies or being willing to put yourself in places where you feel over your head or uncomfortable. I think the more that we all do that at all stages of our career, that's really where learning comes from and advancement comes from. Easier said than done.

I try to on a daily basis really push myself on the AI front to learn something new, do something new. It frustrates me because sometimes it takes me longer than I would have expected if I would have done something the traditional way, and then once I really get good at it, it becomes so much faster. So I would lean it from my perspective, Lean into risk, lean into learning, Lean into doing things that make you uncomfortable. I think that's really where advancement comes.

Well. I'm using chat ept every day and it makes my life a lot easier and I'm learning more and more. So, Stephanie Farris, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your incredible story as the global leader of FIS, which is facilitating ten percent of the world's economy FIS and you are playing a vital role in moving money securely in such safety and that's all paramount to all of your clients. And I know you're very focused on being clients centric, So thank you for talking with us today and sharing your story.

It was really incredible. Thank you, Janis appreciate the time. And to our audience, thank you for tuning in to another game changing conversation on leadership or reimagined. You can find me on LinkedIn, Instagram or visit our website at elggroup dot com.

Thank you for joining us today.