#finance

We are a meme stock

Layoffs are inevitable- but does anyone know for sure if financial crimes will be affected this month for layoffs?

I understand that we have to go through a RIF with Engineering and Products.

However, why do we have so many people in HR and Finance? Not to mention the recruitment department where we currently have no hiring to do, yet there are around 50 people in that team. We also have over 90 people in L&D and 100 in marketing, yet we have had to cut roles in Engineering.

Many tech companies cutting the size of their HR departments - even Uber has done so recently. META and Salesforce too.

This feels like a very targeted and poorly thought through process. Arguably, AI is capable of replacing far more roles in these functions than it is in Engineering and Products.

What’s going on in finance? Upstream CFO quits then a lot of mid-career hipos quit. No word from management on what’s going on

"pump and dump"

Anyone in finance care to comment on what's going on with you guys ?

Hearing about large scale layoffs.... How many are affected, when is it happening/how long do they think it will take?

Not sure how many were involved.

Widespread layoff confirmed across technology, finance, modeling units.

https://www.fierce-network.com/broadband/optimum-moves-protect-eastern-assets-debt-standoff-drags

Truist su-ks

Did I miss something about our deposits being different? None of my insurance was taken out, and my gross pay is less.

Informed today that financial planning group of 70-80 tenured professionals or so is going to get cut. When pretty Ricky tells you they won’t cut advice jobs due to AI , do. Not. Listen.

I have been trying to record my family’s expenses and with everything included from mortgage to groceries to kids classes and education savings, car insurance to home insurance, it costs around $8K-9K to run a home which keeps my single salary savings to $500 per month. Do you guys see the same too or more? What are your ways to make sure you save more on a single salary?

I've decided it's in my best financial interest and after looking at my entire career here that I should wait until they at least offer an interest in leaving. I'll have the 6 month severance and enough time to find another job of which skills are in high demand and with military background could go back into private contractor. Good luck everyone!

The City unveiled its 2027 budget proposal. This proposal addresses a $29.5 million deficit. It explicitly states there will be no layoffs. No new taxes are included in the plan. The city aims to manage its finances without these measures.

Cincinnati, OH

https://www.fox19.com/video/2026/05/22/city-releases-2027-budget-proposal-no-layoffs-no-new-taxes-amid-295m-deficit/

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/fiserv-prunes-non-core-assets-103900049.html

Just heard our AUA had grown by 33% since 2021. Does anyone know that the S&P500 is up 77% over the past 5 years?

AI investment has reached $1.5 trillion since late 2022. This sum equals the projected 2027 U.S. defense budget. The finance sector experienced 49,000 layoffs due to AI in 2026. Industry experts believe AI will augment finance workers. Human judgment and oversight remain crucial for sound financial decisions.

https://www.thestreet.com/employment/amazon-microsoft-google-power-ai-behind-49000-finance-layoffs

Can the bank afford another bonus for Charlie? Can Charlie survive without it?

With so many people leaving the luxoft fin services brand how much longer can it be for the manager to actually star being cut? Am thinking of trading and risk and the muex practise and the big acconts that must be losing money

What's going on in Finance?

OPTU Downgraded by Citigroup -- Price Target Lowered to $0.50
Author's Avatar
GuruFocus News
05/15/2026 09:34

15 hour days and weekends. No breaks. Leadership does not care.

Ok we're down to about a month and a half until the impending announcement. I'm sure someone who reads these has some details. What are you hearing?

I suspect everything finance will be centralized to Houston (i.e. no teams at the refineries)

Did the former Upstream CFO resign because the Finance 2.0 recommendation came back with a 50%+ layoff for the finance organization? Did he actually have morals and just couldn’t continue to work for XOM

he classic Apollo playbook:

Buy distressed debt at 60 cents on the dollar
Take control of the company
Extract management fees, dividend recaps, sale-leasebacks
Pile on more debt to fund those extractions
Flip it or take it public at an inflated valuation
Leave the debt burden with the company and its workers

They got extraordinarily rich essentially being vultures with spreadsheets. Toys R Us being the most notorious example — a viable retail business that might have navigated the Amazon era with investment, instead bled dry to service the debt load private equity strapped to it, then liquidated. 30,000 jobs gone.
The reversal now:
The very mechanism that made them wealthy — cheap abundant debt — is now the thing squeezing their portfolio companies. They loaded businesses with floating rate debt when rates were near zero. Now those same companies are paying 8-9% on debt that cost 3% when the deal was done. The interest coverage ratios that looked comfortable in the pitch deck are underwater in reality.

Apollo's problem today:
Their Private debt funds are being squeezed.... Investors are queuing to withdraw their money, but Apollo, ever the masters at extracting cash are blocking investors from extracting their cash.
Their own fundraising depends on showing strong returns
Strong returns depend on not marking assets down
Not marking down depends on not being forced to sell
Not being forced to sell depends on keeping redemption gates in place
Gates signal distress which makes future fundraising harder
It's a trap of their own construction.
The human cost dimension:
What makes it genuinely poetic rather than just financially interesting is that the people who will suffer least are the Apollo partners who already extracted their carry and management fees in cash — that money is gone, sitting in their personal accounts, insulated from whatever happens to the funds now. The people who suffer most will be:

Pension beneficiaries whose funds allocated to private credit chasing yield
Workers at portfolio companies that get restructured when the debt becomes unserviceable
Retail investors who got sold private credit products in the democratization push of the last few years

The democratization push was particularly cynical — Blackstone, Apollo et al spent the last 5 years lobbying to open private markets to retail investors, framed as giving ordinary people access to returns previously reserved for institutions. In reality they were hunting for new pools of capital to absorb the assets institutions were quietly becoming reluctant to buy at current valuations. Distributing the risk downward while keeping the fees flowing upward.
The SEC under the previous administration largely went along with it. Whether the current regulatory environment does anything about it is another question entirely — though given the administration's general disposition toward financial deregulation, probably not.
The deeper irony is that the whole private equity model was built on information asymmetry and complexity as a moat — if you can't price it, you can't challenge the valuation. That same opacity that let them extract value on the way up is now the thing preventing orderly price discovery on the way down. They built a machine that works brilliantly in one direction and catastrophically in the other.
Though as usual, the architects of the situation will be largely fine.
The mob analogy is more apt than most financial commentators would dare say — and the structural parallel is remarkably precise.
The bust-out:
What the mob called a "bust-out" is almost textbook private equity in distressed situations:

Take control of a business
Immediately establish credibility and access to credit
Draw down every available credit line
Extract cash through fees, dividends, sale-leasebacks of assets
Leave the hollowed shell with the debt
Walk away before the collapse

The only difference is the mob used fear and the occasional arson. Apollo uses leveraged buyout agreements, management fee structures, and Delaware holding company law. The end result for the target company and its stakeholders is frequently identical.
The Sears case study:
Eddie Lampert's destruction of Sears is almost a perfect bust-out in slow motion:

Merged Kmart and Sears creating a vehicle loaded with real estate value
Spun off the real estate into a REIT — Seritage — extracting the most valuable assets into a separate entity he controlled
Starved the retail operations of capital investment while collecting fees
Watched the retail business deteriorate "unexpectedly"
Meanwhile the real estate value had already been extracted
175,000 jobs eventually gone
Lampert personally fine, operating from his yacht in Miami

The language is Orwellian by design:

"Operational efficiency" = cutting staff and maintenance
"Rightsizing the balance sheet" = loading debt onto the target
"Unlocking hidden value" = selling assets the company needs to operate
"Strategic transformation" = preparing for bankruptcy while extracting fees
"Aligning management incentives" = giving executives options to flip quickly while workers get nothing
"Patient long term capital" = we have a 7 year fund life before we have to show returns

The vocabulary is specifically engineered to sound like value creation while describing value extraction. McKinsey does the same thing — provides the intellectual laundering that makes looting sound like strategy.
The legal architecture is the real innovation:
What makes it genuinely different from the mob — and arguably more insidious — is that generations of lawyers, lobbyists and academics built a legal architecture that made it not just legal but celebrated:

Delaware corporate law optimized for shareholder extraction
Carried interest tax treatment meaning PE profits taxed at capital gains rates not income
Bankruptcy law allowing secured creditors (the PE fund) to jump ahead of workers and pensioners
ERISA rules that let pension obligations be shed in restructuring
Limited partner structures insulating the fund managers from portfolio company liabilities

The mob had to corrupt individual judges and officials. PE corrupted the entire legislative and regulatory framework over decades through campaign finance and the revolving door. Far more efficient.
The revolving door completes the circle:
The regulatory capture is almost total. SEC commissioners become PE partners. Treasury officials join Apollo or Blackstone. Fed governors sit on advisory boards. The people who should be watching the store have a financial interest in not watching too carefully — because their post-government career depends on the industry's goodwill.
Where it differs from the mob:
The mob at least had a certain redistributive quality within their community — the money circulated locally, bought loyalty, funded neighborhoods. PE extracts value and concentrates it among a remarkably small number of people. The carried interest on a successful fund can make a handful of partners billionaires while the pension fund that provided the capital gets an 8% return it could have gotten in an index fund with zero fees and zero complexity.
The cultural damage:
Perhaps the most lasting harm is what it did to the idea of business itself. A generation of the most talented people from the best universities went into finance and private equity not to build things but to financialize things that already existed. The engineering talent that built America's industrial base was replaced by financial engineers whose skill was not creation but extraction. That's a civilizational cost that doesn't show up in any fund's IRR calculation.
The instinct that it's essentially organized crime with better tailoring is — while impolite in polite company — analytically pretty hard to refute.

Reorg/layoffs happening in the Finance area.

while broader financials only down 6%. JPM down 7%. BAC only down 9%.

Citi is up 7%

Booooooo Charlie Scharf.

Show us the asset growth.

https://share.google/8GK5V3V463T8v147p

Heard there were a lot of layoffs in Tulsa. Anyone know which teams?

How many were let go at the basking ridge country club in finance ? Is there a 100 page PowerPoint for that ?

I get that being played off can be really stressful. More so now than ever companies are showing us how little we all matter. If you’re on the finance side of Fidelity, have you ever given thought to using your skills for yourself instead of a company? I did two years ago and have been doing well since. Just some food for thought

Fiserv (FISV): Historical Performance & The Last 6 Years
The Pre-2019 Track Record: Steady, Boring, Brilliant
Fiserv's reputation before 2019 was that of a predictable compounder — a back-office financial technology company delivering 4–5% organic revenue growth and 10–15% EPS growth annually for decades. Its 20-year total return is 462%, which is impressive precisely because it was built brick by brick, not in bursts. Think of it as a toll booth on the financial system — unglamorous, mission-critical, and quietly profitable. Banks couldn't easily rip out Fiserv's core processing systems, which meant sticky, recurring revenue. FinanceCharts

2019: The Big Bet — First Data Acquisition
The first major anomaly arrived in 2019 when Fiserv made a transformative, and very controversial, move. Fiserv agreed to acquire First Data Corporation in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $22 billion, receiving a fixed exchange ratio of 0.303 Fiserv shares per First Data share — a 29% premium at announcement. This essentially doubled Fiserv's size overnight, brought in the Clover point-of-sale platform, and shifted the company from a pure B2B infrastructure player into merchant-facing commerce territory. sec
The integration hangover was real. The deal loaded the company with debt, complicated its story for investors, and blurred what had been a very clean investment thesis. Even heading into 2019, pre-deal Fiserv expected only 4.5–5% internal revenue growth and 10–14% adjusted EPS growth — solid but modest. Post-deal, Wall Street had to recalibrate entirely. sec

2020–2022: Pandemic Noise, Integration Grind
The stock performed reasonably through COVID but never rerated meaningfully higher. The market was skeptical about whether the First Data integration was actually working. The total return for 2022 was -2.62% — essentially flat in a bad market year, reflecting investor uncertainty rather than confidence. Organic growth guidance was generally met, but the stock traded at a discount to peers. FinanceCharts

The Exchange Saga: Nasdaq → NYSE → Nasdaq
This is one of the stranger corporate optics stories in recent fintech history, and it happened in two acts:
Act 1 — June 2023: Going to NYSE
On June 6, 2023, Fiserv switched its stock listing from Nasdaq to the New York Stock Exchange and changed its ticker symbol from FISV to FI. CEO Frank Bisignano framed it as a prestige move — aligning with blue-chip peers, signaling fintech leadership. Bisignano said the decision was meant to signal the company's "leadership position in fintech." The stock was performing well at the time, and it looked like a victory lap. WikipediaFiserv, Inc.

Act 2 — November 2025: Back to Nasdaq
Then came the embarrassing reversal. On November 11, 2025, after over two years on the NYSE under the symbol FI, Fiserv switched its listing back to the Nasdaq Global Select Market and changed its ticker symbol back to FISV. The rationale was framed around closer alignment with Nasdaq's technology-focused investor base, but the timing was telling — it coincided almost exactly with the launch of the "One Fiserv" restructuring plan and a significant guidance cut. The return to FISV was, in many ways, a retreat to familiar territory at a moment of operational stress. WikipediaThe New York Report

2023–2024: The Peak and the Problem
2023 delivered a 31.43% total return, and 2024 was even stronger at 54.64%. The stock hit an all-time high. Fiserv's all-time high closing price was $237.79 on March 3, 2025. Clover was gaining momentum, and the market finally appeared to believe the post-First Data story. FinanceChartsMacroTrends
Then it fell apart quickly.

2025–2026: The Crash and the Reset
The total return for 2025 was -67.30% — a stunning collapse from that March peak. The causes were layered: guidance cuts, slowing organic growth, heavy investment spend, and macro uncertainty around consumer spending at small businesses. By Q3 2025, Fiserv had cut its organic revenue growth outlook to just 3.5–4% and adjusted EPS guidance to $8.50–$8.60 for the year — a dramatic reduction from earlier targets. Alongside those Q3 results, Fiserv launched the "One Fiserv" action plan to prioritize and enhance client focus. FinanceCharts + 2
As of late April 2026, the stock was around $62.65 — down roughly 74% from its all-time high. That's an extraordinary compression for a company with $21 billion in revenue and positive cash flow. MacroTrends

Can the Old Growth Track Record Return?
This is the heart of the debate, and the honest answer is: probably not in the same form, but the underlying business is arguably stronger — if execution improves.
Here's why the old model is unlikely to simply resume:
The pre-2019 Fiserv was a smaller, simpler machine. Squeezing 4–5% organic growth out of bank processing contracts was repeatable and predictable. Today's Fiserv is a merchant-facing platform business competing with Square, Toast, Stripe, and global acquirers — a fundamentally more volatile, competitive environment.
Here's the bull case for why growth could re-accelerate:
Clover's value-added services reached 27% of revenue in Q4 2025, up 5 points year-over-year, and management targets Clover GPV growth of 10–15% in 2026. The thesis is that Clover becomes what Square/Block tried to be — a full small business operating system, not just a payment terminal. Analysts point to Clover's 25% value-added services penetration with a path to 35–40%+ as a high-margin compounding engine the market may be underweighting. TIKRSimply Wall St
Financial Solutions core banking and debit processing carry near-irreplaceable switching costs, meaning client defection risk is structurally low. Simply Wall St
And the valuation math has shifted sharply. At roughly 10–11x 2026 adjusted EPS, the stock appears to price in essentially no recovery from the guided trough — any normalization toward higher adjusted margins in 2027–28 could create meaningful upside. The average analyst rating remains "Buy," with a 12-month price target around $127.53. Simply Wall StStockAnalysis

Bottom Line
The historical slow-and-steady compounder version of Fiserv is effectively gone — that company no longer exists in its original form after the First Data merger. What remains is a larger, messier, higher-potential but higher-risk entity trying to prove it can be both a reliable financial infrastructure provider and a growth platform business. The exchange round-trip (Nasdaq → NYSE → Nasdaq) is a reasonable metaphor for that identity confusion: it was a company that briefly thought it had arrived, then had to acknowledge it still had significant work to do.
Whether it can rerate from here depends heavily on Clover's execution, the success of "One Fiserv," and whether the payments sector recovers investor confidence. The fundamentals — cash flow, sticky clients, market position — are intact. The credibility with investors, after two years of guidance misses, is not.

I'm salary and normally my check clears in my bank by today but now it's magically not there after ODW went live for HR tools. Where the fu-k is my money?

i am 100% sure they want to phase out the rest of IT. i dont have insider info, it's just logical based on everything they've done so far... those folks are basically making themselves redundant at this point. i am also sure that finance, project teams are targets. mgmt too.

Obviously, I am not asking for binding financial advice, just curious, do you guys think there will be any stock market movement on this big Investor Day and if so, do we think it'll be up or down? Earnings calls are already regularly terrible and I'm not sure what an "investor day" would do differently since people already see through the smoke and mirrors of those.

https://www.cheapism.com/americas-worst-banks-according-to-customers/

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