Fidelity National Information Services and Metavante: Creating the Big Three

I love to talk about my inability to call the shots, or pick the pros, or look into the future. I prefer the enjoyment of surprise, and at 6:00 AM today, I was indeed surprised.• I expected there would be merger activity within the Top Eight core vendors (stated on page 7, paragraph 22, of Automation in Banking - 2008), but I never would have picked Fidelity and Metavante. • I expected the two would be players but not with each other. For example, I could see IBM and Accenture as acquirers of Metavante. My reasons were weird. Every time I saw a Metavante employee, I saw an IBMer or Accenturian in the shadows. Similar cultures, probably because the original M&I Data Services management team were former IBMers. And Accenture was always lurking in the workrooms at Brown Deer and now in their Board Room. • Curiously, Fiserv just announced a clearing of the air with new branding to make Fiserv look like one. Now Fidvante will create their own style of confusion with hundreds of overlapping solutions. For example, Metavante has spent mucho dinero on adapting the TEMENOS core system as a modern high end core system. Fidelity has been working on their own system (Profile) to do the same thing. Do they need two? Which one will win? The integration project will give new meaning to the word "headache." • I'm not concerned about "too big to manage," because bigger tech companies do it. And at $5.2 billion in combined revenue, that's only half of what each of the top three U.S. banks spend on IT. • I'm sorry for the loss of jobs that are inevitable. Our economy doesn't need that stat right now, and moving from Brown Deer to warmer places may be pleasant, but the connection between Metavante customers and Metavante employees was something sociologists could write volumes about. I wonder if bloggers will. • I'm not making bets, but I believe the integration of these two companies will take at least five years. By that time, the banking crunch will have ended and Fidvante should begin reaping substantial benefits.

We now have a Big Three in the bank tech industry. I hope they don't go the way of the Big Three in the auto industry.