Bundling digital wealth with Fiserv

Fiserv is a Wisconsin-based fintech services provider. Founded in 1984, Fiserv is publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and has more than 40,000 employees worldwide.

Fiserv has recently launched product features that enable consumers and SMBs to bundle the points and other stores of value offered by businesses they frequent. Through a digital wallet experience, customers can combine the value that is dispersed across accounts, unlocking value without having to open new lines of credit or take on more debt.

To Sunil Sachdev, Head of Embedded Finance at Fiserv, the new product is a timely response to current macroeconomic conditions.

“We're living in a world where inflation is an outlier compared to the last decade or so, and with that, it's impacting people's purchasing power,” Sachdev commented. “[Our goal is] to enable any brand, any software platform, to embed a wide array of financial products and services that they feel will help their customers—whether their businesses or retail—increase purchasing power in a time where prices are going up, and savings are going down, without having to rely on just exclusively on a line of credit.”

By bundling consumers’ points, this product undoes some of the unbundling tendencies of digitization, which have siloized rewards into different buckets. This may help unify stores of wealth, and make them more useful, in the medium term.

Fiserv has seen inbound interest in this product, especially from vertical software companies. For health and wellness-focused solutions for example, Fiserv’s solutions can help account for consumers’ different insurance plans and the programs they’ve signed up for, such as EBT programs. Fiserv’s solutions can help consumers maximize the benefit of these programs while also remaining compliant, such as by ensuring that the cards and wallets used are purchasing SKUs that are in the right bucket.

Fiserv’s work is fueled in large part by Finxact, a gen3 cloud-based ledger, which Fiserv acquired in 2022. This technology helps Fiserv work for enterprise merchants and brands, as well as vertical SaaS companies, as these entities can leverage their high-frequency contact with consumers into financial products as well as increased purchasing power for themselves.

“By offering these financial products, they’re not only using it in my shopping experience, whether that’s online or my physical store, but they’re also using it outside and I’m learning a lot about them,” Sachdev said.

This work may fuel a growing shift in payments that Sachdev has observed. Where the payments landscape has traditionally centered around a four-party model—an acquirer, acquirer processor, issuer processor, and issuer—the lines are more blurred between acquirer and issuer now because of APIs and integrations. In turn, this may encourage even greater change in how payments solutions are built—as well as the talent sustaining these efforts.