The Wall Street Journal reported on July 6 that Fiserv has held preliminary discussions with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and PNC Financial Services to sell its STAR Network, the debit card routing infrastructure that processes transactions for more than 115 million cardholders across 2,800 financial institutions. Fiserv stock rose 7 percent on the news. No deal has been reached.
STAR routes debit, ATM, and e-commerce transactions between banks, merchants, and consumers. It is one of several PIN debit networks that compete with Visa and Mastercard for transaction routing, handling roughly 20 percent of the US PIN debit market. Fiserv acquired it in 2019 as part of the $22 billion purchase of First Data, one of the largest fintech acquisitions in history.
Five years later, Fiserv is worth less than the deal that brought STAR in. The stock has fallen 78 percent from its March 2025 all-time high of $237.79 to approximately $52 per share, a market capitalization of roughly $28 billion. CEO Michael Lyons departed after 18 months to run Truist Financial. His replacement, Takis Georgakopoulos, came from JPMorgan, where he ran payments for the Corporate and Investment Bank. Revenue fell 2 percent in the first quarter of 2026 to $5.03 billion. Management has called 2026 a transitional year.
The four banks circling STAR are not buying distressed infrastructure. They are buying a way around the regulation that has cost them more than $100 billion.
The Durbin Amendment, Section 1075 of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, capped the debit card interchange fees that banks with more than $10 billion in assets can collect from merchants. Before Durbin, the average regulated debit interchange fee was approximately 44 cents per transaction. After the rule took effect in October 2011, it fell to roughly 24 cents. Estimates of the immediate annual revenue loss ranged from $6 billion to $8 billion for covered issuers. Over fifteen years, the cumulative transfer from banks to merchants has exceeded $100 billion.
Durbin also required that merchants have a choice of at least two unaffiliated networks for routing each debit transaction. This provision was designed to break the dominance of Visa and Mastercard by forcing competition. It worked. Networks like STAR, which had existed since 1984 as a regional PIN debit processor, gained transaction volume they would never have received in a single-network world.
The regulation that took $8 billion a year from the banks created the network the banks now want to buy.
If JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and PNC acquire STAR jointly, they would own the routing infrastructure for a significant share of US debit transactions. The same institutions that the Durbin Amendment was designed to constrain would control one of the networks the amendment was designed to empower. The tool Congress built to limit bank pricing power would become a bank-owned asset.
Banks have responded to Durbin by raising monthly fees, adding balance minimums, and eliminating free checking. Those adjustments recovered some lost revenue from retail customers. Owning the network is a different strategy. It addresses the routing itself.
Fiserv's decline makes the timing possible. At its peak, First Data's STAR Network was embedded inside a company valued at over $130 billion. Now the entire company trades at $28 billion, barely above the price Fiserv paid for First Data alone. The CEO who ran JPMorgan's payments business now runs the company that JPMorgan wants to buy a piece of.
The Durbin Amendment was written to move pricing power from banks to merchants by forcing debit transactions onto competing networks. The networks grew. The banks shrank. Now the banks want to buy the networks.
The amendment created the asset. The decline created the price. The same four banks that lost the most revenue are the four banks at the table.
The routing comes home.