Building a $150M Banking Intelligence Portfolio

Fiserv is one of the largest financial technology companies in the world, serving thousands of banks, credit unions, and financial institutions across the United States. After the First Data acquisition, the company operated five separate banking cores, each with its own data, product, and engineering stack.

I joined as Senior Director of Product Management and General Manager of Bank Insights, a portfolio of data and analytics products serving ~4,000 banks and credit unions. The portfolio generated ~$150M in annual revenue. My scope covered operational analytics across all five banking cores, payment API commercialization, and new product incubation.

The portfolio was declining. NPS sat at 30. Annual churn was 7%. Revenue was dropping 10% year over year. 150 basic client requests sat unaddressed.

The root cause was structural. The First Data acquisition restructuring eliminated 6 of 9 developers, a 70% reduction in engineering capacity. Previous resource requests had been denied because leadership saw them as product specific asks, not enablers of broader Fiserv growth. There was no prioritization process, no roadmap communication, and the largest clients dictated the backlog ad hoc.

The mandate was clear: stabilize the base, rebuild the team, and find new growth. All at the same time.

Abiliti: 0 to 1 SaaS Platform

In my first two weeks, I listened to ~30 customers. No pitching, no solutions. Three pain points kept surfacing: no 360 degree customer view, no technical resources for reporting, and data siloed across warehouses. I assigned a summer intern to review 500+ backlog items. 70% fell into those three buckets.

I identified three personas, mapped pain points per persona, and worked with UX to build clickable prototypes. Tested with 20 clients over three weeks. Feedback was strong. Built a product led growth strategy: released BankView FREE to all 3,500 banks to drive engagement. 57% of banks expressed interest in paid features. Created a $160M pipeline target and a $23M business case for scaling.

Branded the suite Abiliti with three tiers: Bronze (free), Silver ($6,500/month), and Gold ($10,000/month). The critical design decision was the success metric. MAU was the obvious choice but wrong for PLG. A user who logs in once and bounces counts the same as a power user. I designed a behavioral KPI: stickiness (DAU/WAU), defined as logging in 2+ days out of 5 per week and running 1+ report per session. Target threshold: 50%.

That metric reshaped the entire business. Clients at 70 to 80% stickiness converted to paid in 3 to 4 weeks almost automatically. Clients below the threshold had long, unpredictable sales cycles. We restructured the upsell motion around this insight, focusing sales effort exclusively on clients above 50% stickiness.

Results: Free tier hit 73% engagement (target was 50%), NPS 60. Paid tier: 22 to 28% conversion, NPS 50, churn ~2%, stickiness 85%. ARR reached $11.2M by end of 2020 and $24.9M by end of 2021. Projected $100M+ over three years.

SBA PPP Crisis Response

Covid hit. The U.S. government announced the Paycheck Protection Program, ~$600B in emergency loans for 30M+ small businesses. SBA announced around March 15, 2020, with loans to be disbursed by end of April. Traditional loans take 45 to 60 days.

As GM of Bank Insights, I worked across all five banking cores and knew every product and dev leader. I went directly to my EVP and proposed leading the cross company coordination. Before the first meeting of the ~23 person task force, I reviewed the 90 page SBA guidance document and created a high level four stage flow. I took personal ownership of the Application Process UI and project management for the full effort.

Built the application UI from scratch: reviewed SBA guidance, sketched the journey, mocked up the UI, ran UX wireframes, tested with 3 customers, got a dev MVP in 2 days, stress tested, beta tested, and rolled out to production by April 6. Less than three weeks from start to launch. SBA changed rules almost daily. 16 hour days for ~2 months including weekends.

Results: ~600 lenders sourced ~130K loans worth ~$5B. Fiserv earned ~$84M in one time revenue. Near 100% renewal rate for the 600 banks over the following 12 months.

Apple Pay and API Monetization

Led GTM for payment API commercialization through Developer Studio, Fiserv's open banking platform. Built the business case for bank issued card transaction processing, including Apple Pay integration. The work involved positioning the product, securing early adopters, and projecting revenue.

Results: 500+ banks onboarded. ~$10.5M annual processing revenue at ~150 bps on $700M volume. $10M in projected three year revenue.

The FDIC launched a competition to replace quarterly bank Call Reports with more frequent submissions for supervising 6,000+ community banks. The contract was worth ~$250M over five years. Fiserv assembled a 12 person task force. I was the product lead and de facto team lead. 35 initial entrants, including AWS, FIS, S&P, and Palantir.

We advanced to the semifinal (top 9 of 35). Before building a working prototype for the next round, I insisted on testing the concept with actual end users. Showed clickable prototypes to 12 banks. The feedback was devastating: banks were not hearing about this from FDIC directly, did not want to add monthly reporting on top of quarterly, saw no clear benefit, and had invested millions in existing processes.

I laid out the case to the team: without customer willingness, adoption would fail even if we won. Only 3 weeks remained for a working prototype. If we reached finals, the 6 month proof of concept would cost ~$500K. Sales disagreed and wanted to proceed. UX, dev, and professional services agreed with me.

I recommended we withdraw. We did.

FDIC selected 4 finalists, Palantir among them. Then FDIC cancelled the entire program in early 2022 after the banking industry confirmed near 100% unwillingness to participate. That was exactly the signal we had already captured. Fiserv saved ~$500K and 6 months of wasted effort. Palantir, the finalist, later sought Fiserv's help for core banking data.

Over two years, the portfolio reversed its decline and grew 10%.

The team was rebuilt from 3 remaining developers back to strength. Resource requests that had been denied for years were approved after framing them as enterprise wide enablers: $20M in retained revenue at risk, $100M in Abiliti revenue dependent on fixes, $300M in core banking deals at risk.

Stabilizing a declining portfolio and building new products at the same time requires the same discipline: listen to customers first, measure behavior not vanity, and have the courage to walk away from revenue that will not materialize.