Fiserv Names Michael Lyons CEO as Ex-Chief Heads Social Security

With its previous CEO headed to Washington, Fiserv has picked a new chief executive.

Michael Lyons, a longtime banking executive, has been chosen to lead the payments FinTech, Fiserv announced Tuesday (May 6), the same day outgoing CEO Frank Bisignano’s nomination to lead the Social Security Administration was approved by the U.S. Senate.

“For more than 40 years, Fiserv has been a transformative force in financial technology driven by innovation and deep commitment to delivering best-in-class technology, value-added advice and service to our clients,” Lyons said in a news release.

“I am proud to lead an organization that provides exceptional solutions to financial institutions, merchants and communities of all sizes while driving growth and long-term value for our shareholders.”

Lyons joins Fiserv from the PNC Financial Services Group, where he served as president. Before that, he headed PNC’s corporate and institutional banking division and held leadership roles at Bank of America.

Bisignano was confirmed with senators voting along party lines. As CNBC reported, Republicans had expressed their support for Trump’s pick, with Democrats flagging Bisignano’s alleged ties to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Before the confirmation vote, the report added, Democrats had held a rally outside the Senate building to protest Bisignano’s Social Security Administration nomination.

“We want Donald Trump to stand with working families and seniors and stop the attack on Social Security once and for all,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said at the event.

At a hearing in March, Wyden entered into the record a statement from a whistleblower raising concerns about Bisignano working closely with DOGE. The Senator asked the nominee if he would “lock DOGE out of Social Security databases.”

“I’ve spent my career protecting PII (personally identifiable information) in the largest institutions. I think it’s of the utmost importance for PII to be protected. … There’s lots of databases, but PII will not be exposed,” Bisignano replied.

He had also pledged to improve the agency’s efficiency, saying that 20-minute wait times for beneficiaries seeking answers would become a thing of the past.

“The ability to receive payments on time and accurately is job one. The ability to process any type of claim we receive is job one,” Bisignano said.

He has also spoken of using technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) to ferret out fraud at the Social Security Administration (SSA).

“The objective is not to touch benefits,” Bisignano said in a TV interview in March. “The objective is to figure out, there could be fraud, waste and abuse in there. And we build AI to find fraud, waste and abuse for a living. It’s going to be a tech story.”

Bisignano has served as Fiserv’s CEO since 2020. He previously served as chief executive of First Data, which was acquired by Fiserv in 2019. He initially oversaw the combined company’s day-to-day functions as chief operating officer (COO) before becoming CEO. Trump nominated him to the SSA job in December.