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Trade operations, derivatives trading, portfolio management, order execution, market data, risk management, middleware…
Now FIS is looking at which parts of Capital Markets it wants to sell, or can sell.
Not all of Capital Markets.
CEO Stephanie Ferris: "It is not a Capital Markets segment sale. It is looking at products within the segment that don't fit the overall company's strategic profile."
FIS Capital Markets is so tangled, it could cost more to tease apart than it would selling the original pieces.
CFO James Kehoe: “The businesses are all highly integrated in the core infrastructure. Every time you take it out, you don't see a proportionate reduction in the fixed cost…”
Management won’t commit to divesting parts of Capital Markets because not even they know what could go tomorrow. Carving out any one product would be a Herculean task.
The former SunGard is the core of today’s FIS Capital Markets: FIS bought it for $5.1B before debt from a seven-firm private equity group just ahead of a planned $7B IPO.
To break up Capital Markets cleanly, FIS would need to drop SunGard like a ton of 30-year-old similar-ish bricks: SunGard owned over a dozen related capital markets products under a trading systems umbrella, covering large-FI trade operations from front to back.
A slide from a SunGard 2004 investor deck. Availability Services and Higher Ed & Public Sector were later sold, leaving behind Investment Support.
SunGard at its zenith rolled up a computer disaster recovery business with higher education, public sector and K-12, and financial software.
By the time FIS bought SunGard in 2015, the company had sold disaster recovery, its original business, and assembled a capital markets suite that only a neurosurgeon could excise.
FIS sold the remaining SunGard public-sector and K-12 software business in 2017. Higher education had already been sold before FIS arrived.
An exhibit from 1997: A 300-word WSJ dispatch was a deal announcement for Infinity Financial Technology; it listed five more companies that SunGard had bought in the preceding 18 months.
A 1997 Wall Street Journal clipping announcing SunGard’s acquisition of Infinity Financial Technology, one of a handful of named acquisitions in 1996 and 1997 (Source: WSJ)
Those are just a few of many deals composing what later became part of FIS Capital Markets. After nearly countless acquisitions from the SunGard era and others that never made the news, FIS has a tightly wound capital markets business.
FIS has a tightly wound inherited capital markets business.
Clients overlap between asset managers, private equity firms, brokerage and trading firms, and insurers; software and operations commingled over more than 20 years.
Some of today’s headline FIS capital markets products derive from Adaptiv, a SunGard product; and GL Trade and Front Arena, SunGard acquisitions.
FIS started 2026 with one notable capital markets acquisition on its own, Virtus Partners, a managed services company, which it bought in two parts starting in 2019 (as it digested, then tried to spit out, Worldpay).
It makes sense as a surrounding service; Ferris said that FIS will not sell entire businesses. So if FIS makes a sale in Capital Markets, what is it? Ferris: “…several products that…may not serve that set of large financial institutions.”
Products for community banking customers sit in FIS’s banking business unit, which isn’t a target. President of Capital Markets Andrés Choussy:
“As financial institutions expand into private assets, credit markets, and more complex client structures, the need for comprehensive compliance…is becoming a defining factor.”
The unbundling of fintech conglomerates is in fashion. But the signals are weak. FIS faces a nearly impossible task.
FIS faces a nearly impossible task.
Selected Resources
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