The 2015 Tech 50: Frank Bisignano

As a youngster in Brooklyn, New York,Frank Bisignanoworked 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.”