Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via AP Images
Frank Bisignano, nominee to be commissioner of the Social Security Administration, speaking at a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee, March 25, 2025, at the Capitol in Washington
Social Security is in danger. As my colleague Bob Kuttner has written, the system has endured a series of body blows, including alleged security measures that force beneficiaries to go into Social Security field offices rather than problem solving over the phone, even as those offices are seeing cuts to an already threadbare workforce and prolonged waits for recipients. The Washington Post has documented the repeated website crashes, floods of unanswered calls, and long waits for service that represent a “destruction of the agency from the inside out,” according to Sen. Angus King (I-ME).
Such barriers to access deny benefits, plain and simple. Other recipients are seeing their benefits terminated improperly, as part of a fruitless hunt for largely nonexistent benefits fraud.
Currently, Leland Dudek, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA) who has admitted to being a front for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency wrecking crew, is planning to fire at least 7,000 employees (and potentially up to half the workforce), consolidating offices and programs, slashing phone services, canceling the agency’s modernization efforts, and threatening to shut down the agency if the DOGE boys were barred from sensitive payment databases. But Donald Trump’s handpicked leader for his official SSA administrator is Frank Bisignano, who went before the Senate Finance Committee at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday.
There’s reason to believe that Bisignano is being brought in to finish DOGE’s job, based on his past experience as the CEO of the oligopolist data processing firm Fiserv, the nation’s largest provider of back-office banking services. Crippling Social Security’s ability to serve customers is seen by many as a stalking horse for privatizing parts, if not all, of the system, and companies like Fiserv are waiting in the wings. “Wall Street wants part of the $1.6 trillion that flows through the agency,” said Nancy Altman, a member of Social Security’s advisory board and president of the advocacy group Social Security Works. “There’s money to be made.”
In the hearing, Republicans treated Bisignano like a savior who could use his skills as “a leader in payments and financial technology,” as Finance Committee chair Mike Crapo (R-ID) introduced him, to rescue a mismanaged agency. But Fiserv’s role in the banking system is worth studying as its CEO migrates into the government. Simply put, SSA could be yet another one of Bisignano’s company’s many conquests.
FISERV HAS A STORY LIKE ONES WE’VE SEEN in practically every corner of the U.S. economy. Founded in 1984 through a merger between First Data Processing and Sunshine State Systems, Fiserv grew by acquiring at least 40 companies in the data processing space (see chart), including subsidiaries of Citicorp, BBVA Compass Bank, Hewlett-Packard, and U.S. Bancorp.
Among Fiserv’s biggest mergers were the 1995 purchase of Information Technology, Inc., which had devised the Premier bank platform that was the biggest account processing system in the U.S. at that time; the 2007 acquisition of CheckFree, which had itself just swallowed up four tech service companies and was the leading online banking, online and electronic bill payment, and check-clearance processor in the country; and the $22 billion deal in 2019 for First Data, which netted Fiserv its current CEO. Bisignano, who had previously worked at Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, was at First Data during the acquisition, and he became CEO of Fiserv a year after the deal.
Fiserv, along with Fidelity National Information Services (known as FIS), and Jack Henry & Associates, are “core providers” that control the back-end technology for the majority of U.S. depository institutions. If you want to keep track of customer deposits, offer bank mobile apps, and virtually everything else a bank needs to function and attract customers, you need the services of these companies.
Last year, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City reported that the “Big Three” core providers served 72 percent of all banks and nearly half of all credit unions, with Fiserv alone serving 42 percent of all banks and 31 percent of all credit unions. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Big Three’s percentage of the market for smaller banks, which cannot develop their own technology and must rely on outside help, is closer to 90 percent.
Fiserv is vertically integrated as well, having bought payment systems, card networks, and “banking as a service” (BaaS) providers in recent years. The Kansas City Fed described Fiserv and its two counterparts as “one-stop shops” that have “market power over depository institutions of all sizes,” though Fiserv in particular specializes in smaller banks.
In 2022, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Rohit Chopra made remarks to community bankers in which he cited figures showing that core providers had only a 5 percent net satisfaction rating from community banks. “In a market where small financial institutions need to compete head-to-head with big players, I am concerned that the core services providers that small players rely on have too much power in the system,” Chopra said.
Smaller lenders, who depend on core providers for their livelihoods, have complained about complex, expensive long-term contracts (some totaling large shares of a bank’s annual profits) and substandard services that Fiserv and its competitors offer. Fees are apparently charged for implementation and upgrades, as well as for early termination of contracts. And multiple lawsuits allege that renewals for core provider services were coerced. “Executives at some small banks say they feel like they are becoming franchises of the core providers because they are so reliant on their technology,” the Journal reported in 2019.
The satisfaction of employees at Fiserv is apparently no better than that of the banks that use its services. According to Branko Marcetic, at Fiserv, Bisignano has engaged in multiple rounds of layoffs and outsourcing of jobs, benefit cuts to employees, and office closures. “If he is confirmed, the now toxic work environment at SSA will likely get worse,” said Altman.
The American Bankers Association even invested in their own startup, Finxact, to relieve the stranglehold that Fiserv and the other two big core providers had on the industry. But in 2022, Fiserv bought Finxact, in which it had also been an early investor.
THE REAL QUESTION IS HOW FISERV could insinuate itself into Social Security. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), in a letter to Bisignano sent on Sunday, raised the possibility that Fiserv could “theoretically benefit from a privatization of Social Security.” At the least, SSA could steer agency contracts to Fiserv to provide the agency back-office support, even if Bisignano personally recused himself from the decision.
As smaller banks have testified, Fiserv’s contracts are often onerous and expensive, and get more so over time. SSA could find itself in a similar position to those community lenders, outgunned and without leverage, locked into contracts that are more lucrative deals for Fiserv than good deals for the people who depend on Social Security.
But even if Bisignano and Fiserv want to upgrade SSA’s back-end technology, the payments themselves aren’t really the problem. Bisignano talked repeatedly in the hearing about Social Security’s error rate (which is less than 1 percent) and how he could improve it, but this betrayed a lack of understanding about what that error rate comprises. “The overpayments result from the complexity of the law,” Altman said. “When you get paid Social Security you get paid for the month before. If you die on a Tuesday that is the last day of a month, and the money gets deposited on Wednesday, that’s an overpayment. No payments system in the world will solve that. And the money is clawed back.”
SSA doesn’t actually send out the payments, either; they compile lists of where the money goes for the Treasury Department’s payment system, which sends the money out. While Republicans treated Bisignano as a kind of oracle who could use his private-sector experience to fix Social Security’s problems, his experience is not where the agency’s problems—which are primarily budgetary—actually lie.
“The problem is Congress made the law too complicated and didn’t give it enough resources, and now Musk and Trump are demolishing it all,” Altman explained. Bisignano, she added, “knows nothing about Social Security, he knows nothing about the government. He knows about payment systems, which is not a big deal at SSA.”
This wouldn’t be the first time that a Trump appointee was mismatched for the job they received. But as the commissioner, Bisignano would have the authority to revamp IT or other services at the agency, which could lead to contracts for his old company. And the contracts are a source of complaints from some banks that work with Fiserv.
More broadly, Bisignano has worked at some of the largest banks on Wall Street, from Morgan Stanley to Citigroup to JPMorgan Chase. Those banks could definitely benefit from a privatized Social Security system that looked more like a 401(k) retirement account. The SSA commissioner wouldn’t be able to do that on their own, but if Congress added a private account setup, the commissioner would pick the private-sector partners to manage it.
In Tuesday’s hearing, Bisignano referred to Fiserv as a “tech company,” and touted his ability to problem-solve. But when asked repeatedly about privatization, he maintained that nobody had talked to him about privatizing Social Security and that he hadn’t thought about it. Asked about Bisignano’s Fiserv empire after the hearing, Sen. Wyden said, “I’m especially troubled by the prospect that he just seems mesmerized by AI, and won’t respond to any constructive suggestions to get phone service up for the seniors because that’s what they need right now.”
In previous remarks, Bisignano has called himself a “DOGE person.” Altman sees him as a loyal foot soldier for the gang that is hobbling the landmark social insurance program upon which millions rely. “They want to convince everybody it’s full of fraud, and that they’ll get rid of the fraud,” she said. “What they want to do is destroy the program.”
