Elon Musk, Frank Bisignano bring different style and experience to the government | PaymentsSource

One of Elon Musk’s first business opportunities was an offer for his X.com startup to become a full-fledged bank. 

He said no.  

Rather than exercising an option to acquire First Western National Bank in Colorado, the then 29-year-old Musk told American Banker in 2000 that he preferred X.com to focus on the nascent and unproven digital payments market, relying on the banking industry as a distribution network. 

When Fiserv CEO Frank Bisignano was in his early 30s, he was working at First Fidelity Bank as an executive vice president overseeing technology and operations, according to S&P Capital IQ. From there, he went to Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, and by 2020 Bisignano was leading Fiserv.

It’s an example of how Musk’s approach to the financial industry differs from Bisignano’s. President Donald Trump has recruited both executives with ties to the payments business to streamline government — Musk as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency and Bisignano as the potential commissioner of the Social Security Administration. 

Both have had success, but Musk has charted a course outside of traditional banking while Bisignano has thrived within mainstream financial services. 

“Frank Bisignano has a steady, understated public presence, while Elon Musk is flamboyant and often reckless,” said Aaron McPherson, principal at AFM Consulting. DOGE and Fiserv did not respond to requests for comment.

Taking risks

For Musk, staying outside banking at the original X.com was a risky move, one that included giving up regulatory cover and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. protection. But it paid off. X.com evolved into PayPal, which would become one of the world’s largest and most famous payment companies and set Musk on a high-profile career as a technology entrepreneur who is currently the world’s wealthiest person. Musk is taking the same kind of risk now as he did in 2000.

One of Musk’s first moves as head of DOGE has been accessing Department of Treasury payments technology, a controversial step that has dominated media coverage for the past week.

DOGE’s access has included unorthodox methods, such as employing young programmers and making frequent social media claims about agencies such as USAID, that almost no other private-sector executive would use in a presidential administration.

That has partly led to legal action that contends Musk is threatening privacy, political accusations of a conflict of interest and concerns over security. Musk suffered an early setback, as the Trump administration on Thursday limited DOGE’s access to Treasury payment technology to two DOGE representatives for “read only” access while the lawsuits are considered. And one of those staffers, Marko Elez, resigned Thursday evening after he was tied to a social media account that endorsed racism and eugenics, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

A different style

Bisignano’s assignment is in some ways similar to Musk’s. The SSA is plagued by inefficiencies, and Bisignano’s job will be to streamline the agency, add automation and lower costs. 

But that’s where the similarities end. 

While Musk has maintained his roles at new X (the former Twitter) and other companies such as SpaceX and Tesla, Bisignano will leave Fiserv if confirmed by the Senate. Fiserv recently hired former PNC executive Michael P. Lyons to assume Bisignano’s job, reporting to Bisignano until June 30 or upon Bisignano’s confirmation. “Mike and I have been working tirelessly to ensure a smooth transition,” Bisignano said during this week’s Fiserv earnings call. (For the fourth quarter, Fiserv reported profits of $938 million and adjusted earnings per share of $2.51, beating analysts’ estimates of $2.48.)

Bisignano comes from a background in large mainstream financial services organizations where regulation, bureaucracy and chains of command are a day-to-day reality. He built a career operating within such a framework, said Aaron Press, research director of worldwide payment strategies at IDC. 

“Elon Musk has operated in a very different world. His success has come when he built organizations from scratch,” Press said. “He has a strict bias toward action and appears to have little patience for structure or structural limits. And his track record around taking over and managing existing operations is limited.”

Bisignano became chief executive of Fiserv when it acquired payment processor First Data, where Bisignano was CEO, in 2019. Bisignano joined First Data as CEO in 2013 following more than a decade at JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup. At JPMorgan, he was head of mortgages and chief administrative office. He had the same job at Citigroup and also led Citi’s global transactions group and was deputy head of technology and operations. 

In a 2013 interview with American Banker, Bisignano said his days as JPMorgan’s mortgages chief helped prepare him for his new role: “The mortgage company … really is a processing company in a lot of ways,” he said. First Data “just feels like a great opportunity for myself, doing something that I love to do, with a fabulous, fabulous board.”

Bisignano oversaw a technology-driven recovery at First Data, which suffered from an earnings slump in the early 2010s. A key part of that strategy was Clover, First Data’s point of sale system that enabled the company to compete with emerging fintechs such as Block, PayPal and Stripe. Clover also helped First Data push into international markets and larger merchant categories.

Following the First Data/Fiserv deal, Bisignano oversaw a $1.2 billion cost-cutting strategy. In a 2020 American Banker interview, Bisignano downplayed layoffs, saying “we use attrition as our friend” and mentioned Fiserv had worked hard on reducing expenses in a way that did not affect people. He did say “We’ve reduced headcount in some sites where we shut down sites.”

When Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, he fired more than half of the company’s staff, eliminated content moderating teams and pivoted to a subscription-based model. The company, since rebranded as X, was valued at about $9 billion at the end of 2024, according to Fidelity, which is 20% of what Musk paid for the social media site. Fiserv’s stock price in the past five years has grown from about $119 in 2020 to about $231. 

Bisignano’s experience running the huge Fiserv enterprise gives him knowledge about how to deal with complex IT environments and bureaucracies that is better suited to government than Elon’s entrepreneurial “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley mindset, McPherson said. “I don’t see Bisignano attempting to do things that jeopardize the stability of the Social Security Administration, although I hope he will have more success at upgrading its IT systems than past commissioners have had,” McPherson said. That said, Musk’s access to the Treasury payment systems could place him in conflict with Bisignano, according to McPherson. 

“Musk has no experience running a large payments operation, having participated in PayPal when it was a startup, and now trying to relaunch a similar capability at X,” McPherson said. “For that reason, I doubt he has much to contribute to Bisignano’s SSA.  He may try, though, leading to more conflict.”

Accounting for differences

The men have different histories, which likely shaped their approaches. Bisignano was born in New York City and remained connected to the financial district for his entire career. Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and came to the U.S. as a student in 1992.

There’s also a 12-year age gap between the men, with Bisignano as a baby boomer and Musk as part of Generation X. It’s likely that Bisignano and Musk have different regulatory experiences given Bisignano’s time with large publicly traded companies, which impacts the speed of change in an organization.

“There are night-and-day differences between these two leaders when it comes to tackling payments modernization, especially given the regulatory and security concerns surrounding Treasury’s payment systems,” said Richard Crone, a payments consultant.

Musk tends to operate at breakneck speed with minimal hierarchy, according to Crone, noting Musk’s push to build “X Money,” a financial and payments superapp built off of a social network, highlights a willingness to disrupt traditional processes.

Bisignano, on the other hand, is steeped in a culture of strict internal controls, third-party audits and layered regulatory compliance, Crone said. “In a politically charged environment, this lack of formalized risk management raises serious compliance questions, as evidenced by the controversy over DOGE’s access to sensitive Treasury systems,” Crone said.

For example, Crone said Bisignano likely understands the importance of meeting SSAE 18 standards, maintaining transparency, and proceeding under close government and industry scrutiny. SSAE 18 standards, which are part of Fiserv’s product mix for its own clients, guide audits for items such as a schedule of investment returns, the effectiveness of an organization’s control over security and disclosures of impacts on economic issues such as greenhouse gas emissions.

SSAE 18 is particularly designed to ensure organizations can handle sensitive financial information and private data; have effective internal controls and identify risks that an organization can use to demonstrate its safety to external stakeholders. DOGE did not respond to a request for comment on its auditing policy or if it had submitted to an SSAE 18 audit. 

“Had someone with Bisignano’s background led a government cost-cutting review, you’d likely see a clearly published roadmap with the blessing of a Big 4 accounting firm performing external audits,” Crone said. 

Bisignano will additionally face challenges in dealing with Trump’s and Musk’s personalities. “I hope he is able to navigate those treacherous waters,” McPherson said. “Otherwise, he risks sharing the fate of other CEOs like Rex Tillerson, who joined the first Trump administration and was not successful.”