The 2015 Tech 50: Frank Bisignano

< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

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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

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1. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange 2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. 3. Phupinder Gill CME Group 4. Lance Uggla Markit 5. Robert Goldstein BlackRock

6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg 7. R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group 8. Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures 9. Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments 10. Adena Friedman Nasdaq OMX Group

11. David Craig Thomson Reuters 12. Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings 13. Michael Spencer ICAP 14. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. 15. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing

16. Chris Concannon BATS Global Markets 17. Christopher Perretta State Street Corp. 18. Antoine Shagoury London Stock Exchange Group 19. Kevin Rhein Wells Fargo & Co. 20. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw & Co.

21. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets 22. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings 23. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings 24. Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. 25. Frank Bisignano First Data Corp.

26. John Marcante Vanguard Group 27. Joseph Squeri Citadel 28. Lou Eccleston TMX Group 29. Claude Honegger Credit Suisse 30. Chris Corrado MSCI

31. David Gledhill DBS Bank 32. John Bates Software AG 33. Michael Cooper BT Radianz 34. Gary Scholten Principal Financial Group 35. Sunil Hirani trueEX Group

36. Hauke Stars Deutsche BÖrse 37. Brian Conlon First Derivatives 38. Jim Minnick eVestment 39. Lars Seier Christensen & Kim Fournais 40. Tyler Kim MaplesFS

41. Jim McGuire Charles Schwab Corp. 42. Steven O’Hanlon Numerix 43. Sebastián Ceria Axioma 44. Yasuki Okai NRI Holdings America 45. Stephane Dubois Xignite

46. Mazy Dar OpenFin 47. Brian Sentance Xenomorph Software 48. Mas Nakachi OpenGamma 49. John Lehner BNY Mellon Technology Solutions Group 50. Jock Percy Perseus