< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge
25
Frank Bisignano
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
First Data Corp.
PNR
As a youngster in Brooklyn, New York, Frank Bisignano worked at a cheese store in the Kings Plaza shopping mall. “It’s where I learned everything I know about business,” he quips. Over more than two decades in and around Wall Street, Bisignano made his reputation as a hard-nosed operations and turnaround specialist. At Citigroup, where he had worked since 1994, he became CEO of the Global Transaction Services business in 2002 and by 2005 had turned a $400 million loss into a profit exceeding $1 billion. While Bisignano was CEO of mortgage banking at JPMorgan Chase & Co., where he was also co-COO, the business earned $3.3 billion in 2012 after losing $2.1 billion the year before. “I’ve always looked at adversity as opportunity,” says the 55-year-old as he repeats the pattern most impressively at payment processor First Data Corp., where he was named CEO in April 2013 and chairman the following March. Since being taken private by KKR & Co. in a 2007 leveraged buyout, Atlanta-based First Data didn’t record a profit until what Bisignano terms “our historic fourth quarter” of 2014: $12 million on $2.9 billion in revenue. “Two years ago First Data was a no-growth company that could barely pay its debt load. We were fundamentally a processor of payments, essentially a utility,” Bisignano says. “Today we’re a broad technology and solutions company and a software enabler — and we’ve hit profitability.” Bisignano has filled out his senior team with JPMorgan alumni including ex-CIO Guy Chiarello, whose remit as First Data president includes innovation and product development. Bisignano has reached out to Silicon Valley, forming partnerships with the likes of Apple and Palantir Technologies and acquiring mobile gift-card platform Gyft. “We had to be prepared to cannibalize our existing base and bring in new products,” he says. “I was prepared to take the risk of cannibalization to be more relevant.”
See the full story, “The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge.”
The 2015 Tech 50
1. Jeffrey Sprecher 2. Catherine Bessant 3. Phupinder Gill 4. Lance Uggla 5. Robert Goldstein |
6. Shawn Edwards & 7. R. Martin Chavez 8. Deborah Hopkins 9. Stephen Neff 10. Adena Friedman |
11. David Craig 12. Daniel Coleman 13. Michael Spencer 14. Michael Bodson 15. Charles Li |
16. Chris Concannon 17. Christopher Perretta 18. Antoine Shagoury 19. Kevin Rhein 20. Neil Katz |
21. Lee Olesky 22. Richard McVey 23. Seth Merrin 24. Robert Alexander 25. Frank Bisignano |
26. John Marcante 27. Joseph Squeri 28. Lou Eccleston 29. Claude Honegger 30. Chris Corrado |
31. David Gledhill 32. John Bates 33. Michael Cooper 34. Gary Scholten 35. Sunil Hirani |
36. Hauke Stars 37. Brian Conlon 38. Jim Minnick 39. Lars Seier Christensen & Kim Fournais 40. Tyler Kim |
41. Jim McGuire 42. Steven O’Hanlon 43. Sebastián Ceria 44. Yasuki Okai 45. Stephane Dubois |
46. Mazy Dar 47. Brian Sentance 48. Mas Nakachi 49. John Lehner 50. Jock Percy |
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