What The Hell America!

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 one analyst estimated meant the laying off of anywhere between another 2.4 and 3.7 percent of its workforce.

“The changes that were made were basically hostile toward workers,” one longtime Fiserv employee who requested anonymity to avoid reprisal told Jacobin. “Layoffs were a regular occurrence.”

“Ever since I started, Frank’s style started to take over: more cutthroat, profit at all costs,” says another current employee.

Though the firm has played down the size of workforce reductions and avoided disclosing specific figures, current and former employees have regularly complained over the years about major job cuts on websites like Glass Door, where employees rate their current and former workplaces. Multiple Glass Door reviews put “constant layoffs” on their list of cons of working there, with employees over the years describing the layoffs as “many,” “quite high,” “common,” and “happening monthly at this point.”

“Bad leadership; non-visionary; Layoff is in the policy,” one former manager, who had worked for the firm for five years, wrote in May 2021. Fiserv has, at the time of writing, a dismal rating of 2.8 out of five stars from nearly ten thousand reviews on the website, with Bisignano himself holding an approval rating of only 33 percent.

Even ostensibly positive reviews, meaning those giving three stars or more, alluded to the same issues. “Always short staffed, systems always having issues. Queues never end,” states a September 2024 review. “Regular redundancies always hanging over you can be unsettling,” reads one of the cons from a review earlier that year. “There are too many departments and factions that are busy defending their headcount and budget from the constant staffing cuts to focus on improving client service,” a portfolio manager and five-year-veteran of the company wrote in 2023.

Fiserv employees describe seeing long-serving, valuable workers with deep institutional knowledge (“really high-caliber players”) serially laid off, with one team being reduced from around twenty to only two people, even as the size of the workload stayed more or less the same. In one round of layoffs this past year, despite an abundance of more private spaces, workers were simply called into a room in full view of the other employees to be given the bad news, before leaving the rooms visibly upset.

“They kind of put on a little show,” the longtime employee recalls. “I’m not saying that was intentional. But there wasn’t much thought to spare anyone’s privacy or respect. It’s almost sadistic, cruel.”

That employee’s grievances are echoed by the firm’s workers online: raises becoming minimal, remote work eliminated, workplace surveillance software installed, workers required to clock in and out and spend a minimum number of hours in office, and benefits like the employee stock discount reduced while health insurance deductibles grew.

In the quest for a tax break, the company in 2022 built an office in New Jersey’s Berkeley Heights, for which it reported closing roughly one hundred offices around the United States, and about which employees complained they were given an ultimatum: relocate from wherever they were in the country, or lose their jobs. The employees Jacobin spoke to confirmed workers had been offered such an ultimatum, regarding both the New Jersey hub and others.

“Fiserv under its current management cares about nothing more than tax cuts and tax incentives,” one September 2024 review from an employee of more than ten years charged. “They have been obsessed with moving positions (not people — they don’t seem to care that they are losing droves of knowledgeable people) to certain locations where they get tax incentives.”

Other objections likewise pop up again and again in employee reviews: no flexibility, zero work-life balance, a toxic work culture, a lack of parking and bathrooms, and management that treats its workers like robots instead of people.

“A lot of the best people end up leaving because they don’t want to work at a place that offers zero flexibility when they could work somewhere else,” an employee told Jacobin.

For disgruntled workers, there is a clear explanation for this. “Many complain that the CEO puts the stock before the employees,” one four-star review states, echoing a frequent charge. In his January 2025 ethics disclosure, Bisignano reported holding between $5 and 25 million in Fiserv stock, after selling more than $25 million of stock in September 2024. In public filings, the company has disclosed carrying out more than $17 billion in stock buybacks since the 2019 merger, including $5.5 billion in 2024 alone.

Many reviews date the deterioration in working conditions and company culture to its 2019 merger with FirstData and Bisignano’s subsequent ascendance to chief executive. One charged that all the pros of working for Fiserv were “until First Data took over,” at which point it became “a slow demise into hell for the common employee.” “The downward spiral of morale can be pointed to post merger with FirstData and the change of CEOs,” states another. “Was great until FirstData came along,” reads one from 2021. “New CEO is ravaging the company from inside out.”

In fact, Fiserv’s Glass Door reviews are riddled with bitter personal animus to Bisignano specifically: “The decision making in this company has been extremely erratic since Frank Bisignano took over as CEO”; “Once Frank took over, it became a horrible place to work for”; “Frank and his squad, not the greatest tbh”; “The CEO is a micromanager and only cares about the stock price”; “Replace Frank with a leader who listens.”

“CEO could care less about employees. They are all a widget and an expense to him. Mr Scrooge at his finest,” concluded one. “Frank, please go buy an island and move there, never to return.”

“It’s almost entirely negative. There’s a lot of distrust for Frank,” a Fiserv employee told Jacobin about employee attitudes toward Bisignano. “When the announcement came out about him leaving and he had a town hall, people were in a really good mood about that, about the prospect of him being gone.”

What happened at Fiserv could have been predicted from Bisignano’s tenure at First Data, another payment processor that saw a similar cycle of layoffs, downsizing, and stock pumping over the six years he was CEO.

When Bisignano came aboard in 2013, the credit card processor was laden with more than $22 billion in debt owing to a familiar phenomenon: a leveraged buyout by a private equity firm six years earlier. Despite talking up his reputation as a “builder” who liked “to improve things” by “investing in our people” and who would avoid cuts, cuts are exactly what happened.

Almost immediately, First Data started laying off workers — one hundred employees at their founding office in Omaha in July, hundreds more in Denver that November — and began offering workers the choice of either joining a three-month performance improvement plan with the potential for no severance pay if they failed or leaving their jobs. By 2015, it announced a cost-reduction plan that would involve “a few thousand” more layoffs and offshoring of jobs, tipped to save the indebted company $200 million a year by the middle of 2016, as well as the closure of smaller facilities nationwide and around the world.

“In many cases, we’ve eliminated a lot of jobs,” Bisignano said on a call with analysts, adding that they had “also moved a lot offshore. . . . Expect more of that going forward.”

Those who kept their jobs saw benefits reduced. Before his first year as CEO was over, Bisignano barred employee spouses from qualifying for the company health care benefit plans, ended the company’s matching contributions to employee retirement accounts, and reduced managers’ cash bonuses.

All of it was meant to help pay down debt in advance of the company’s October 2015 initial public offering (IPO), in which employees were given a stake in the form of hundreds of shares each as a way to make up for cuts to retirement and other benefits. The idea was that it would all be worth it once Bisignano eventually took the company public.

It didn’t work out that way. Tipped to be one of the biggest IPOs of 2015, First Data badly underperformed when the time came, with shares selling for substantially lower than officially predicted by the company, netting it a little more than half of the $5 billion it had expected to make. When adjusted for the 10 million shares held by executives, workers were left holding an average of just $42,000 worth of stock each. Unable to sell the shares until 180 days after the IPO, they watched the stock price further fall, at one point tumbling below $10, and ending up more or less where it started by the time they were able to sell.

But the move was very good for the twenty-three First Data executives and directors who held roughly one-seventh of the company shares — and one in particular: Bisignano, who alone held more than half of that number, or close to 5.5. million. The IPO left his stock holdings valued at more than $86 million. That was on top of his status as the highest paid CEO in Georgia, earning as much as $51 million in 2016 and $102 million in 2018 — even as the company had posted consistent losses totaling in the billions.