Stephanie Ferris on banking industry strength
From How AI Is Reshaping Banking: A Conversation with FIS CEO Stephanie Ferris | Ep1 · · Reuters Plus
“We truly are. Um there's three things that are happening in financial services that have never happened before. The first is banks in the banking industry have incredible strength. They don't have any capital issues, they don't have any liquidity issues. They're extraordinarily strong. The second is with the rollback of the regulatory environment, and this is true around the world. Um they have the handcuffs off of them that are going to allow them to grow, whether they want to grow organically or they want to grow through M&A. We saw the largest amount of bank consolidation that we've seen in 10 years happen in 2025 and we we see more of that coming in 2026.”
On , Stephanie Ferris, CEO, President & Director at Fidelity National Information Servcs Inc, spoke about banking industry strength during How AI Is Reshaping Banking: A Conversation with FIS CEO Stephanie Ferris | Ep1 on Reuters Plus.
About Stephanie Ferris
Stephanie Ferris, CEO and President of FIS, has described the current period as a "generational moment" in financial services, citing strong bank balance sheets, regulatory rollbacks, and the rise of artificial intelligence. In a May 2026 podcast, she stated that banks have "incredible strength" and that a looser regulatory environment has "the handcuffs off of them." Ferris emphasized that FIS's competitive advantage lies not just in its data but in providing "trusted data" that is compliant and auditable. She highlighted a partnership with Anthropic to develop agentic fraud protection, noting that FIS "owns the agent and the regulated infrastructure" while Anthropic provides the underlying LLM model. Ferris also discussed a partnership with Circle Internet Group to enable banks to transact in USDC for payments, and reiterated that FIS is "not receding from" the community bank market, calling it "a very key market." On earnings calls in 2025 and 2026, Ferris reported strong financial performance, including 5% revenue growth in the second quarter of 2025 and a raised full-year outlook. She noted that FIS processes 73 billion annual payment transactions across approximately 1.1 billion accounts. Ferris described the company's strategy as centered on "client centricity, operational simplification and innovation," and said FIS is "executing on our future forward strategy." She also addressed the acquisition of a global payments issuer business and the sale of a minority Worldpay stake, stating these moves align with the company's operational simplification goals and have improved free cash flow generation.