Sunil Sachdev | FinTech Magazine
When Fiserv Head of Fintech and Growth, Sunil Sachdev, and President of Digital Payments, Matt Wilcox, join me to explain the nature of their roles at the company, the two are united by a clear common cause. Simply put: leveraging the expertise and innovation of Fiserv to help clients continue to bring new financial innovations to market, deepening relationships by adding more value to the consumers and businesses they serve.
“Fiserv is in a very privileged position,” says Sachdev. “We are the largest core banking provider in the United States, the largest digital banking provider and the largest provider of bill payments and person-to-person payments in the country. And that’s not to mention the enviable footprint we have as a leading provider of merchant services in markets all over the world.”
A long-suffering New York Knicks fan, Sachdev knows a thing or two about an underdog story. His background is in banking and payments, including overseas stints in the UK, South Asia and India – where he gained an understanding of the challenges and struggles that people in emerging markets endure to access financial services. He says it definitely has implications for his work today, especially when he thinks about opening up financial services to the unbanked and underbanked through the power of open finance.
“Fiserv is about taking something off the board and bringing it to life,” he explains. “For me, that’s the best part of it – it’s about having an idea or identifying a problem, having a conversation with our customers and other market players, being able to bring different subject matter experts together. Then we combine the technical parts, the commercial parts and the go-to-market parts to build a successful product or service to meet the opportunity. That’s why I enjoy it. I don’t really see it as work at all.”
For Matt Wilcox, open finance begins with solid data. Other markets such as Europe have accelerated ahead of North America, but he believes there is slowly growing parity in the US. “We’re starting to see the area of open finance really open up,” he explains. “We’ve seen a faster clip of innovation. And that’s starting to open the doors for industry collaboration. We’re working with countless companies where that opportunity exists now, and it’s a faster path to more open finance.”
Ultimately, he believes that this will bring more benefits to the consumer, and that the open economy will shift away from being primarily about personal financial management and start to become more focused on the important task of compliance and ID verification.
When asked about his leadership style and who inspires him on a daily basis, Wilcox says, “I’m very much a leader on the ground with the team. We have a very flat organization, inspired by some of the key leaders in financial services. We also have some amazing leaders here at Fiserv who have given me guidance over the years. I’ve been very fortunate to have really good mentors throughout my career.”
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