In his years at companies like Fiserv, Frank Bisignano has cultivated a reputation as a fixer.
Now, the CEO says he aims to provide the same approach as the head of the Social Security Administration (SSA), the New York Times reported ahead of Bisignano’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday (March 25).
“The objective is not to touch benefits,” Bisignano said in a recent TV interview. “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.”
The report notes that employees at the SSA hope Bisignano can bring back a level of certainty to their agency, charged with disbursing around $1.6 trillion in retirement and disability benefits per year. These employees say recent changes by President Donald Trump’s administration in the name of ferreting out fraud has worsened customer service at the agency.
If the SSA does — as Bisignano suggests — employ artificial intelligence (AI) to search for fraud and waste, it would put the agency in the company of parts of the business community using the technology to bolster defensive capabilities, as PYMNTS wrote last week.
“Trust is the very foundation of commerce,” Rajat Taneja, president of technology at Visa, said in an interview with PYMNTS.
“When two unknown parties are transacting, they have to trust that the transaction will occur correctly, the money will be transferred properly, any dispute will be managed, and there’s someone handling fraud and scams.”
Taneja added that the first use case for AI in financial services was actually in risk management, and it remains a “critical tool to combat fraud, scams and enumeration attacks.” (These attacks are those that test different credentials like passwords and usernames to gain unauthorized access.)
Meanwhile, research by PYMNTS Intelligence from late last year found that 71% of financial institutions were using AI and machine learning to combat fraud, up from 66% in 2023.
Bisignano, 65, has served as Fiserv’s CEO since 2020. He had been chief executive of First Data, which was acquired by Fiserv in 2019 and initially oversaw the combined company’s day-to-day runnings as chief operating officer (COO) before taking on the CEO job.
Before his time with First Data, Bisignano served as co-COO and CEO of mortgage banking for J.P. Morgan Chase, and held a number of leadership positions for Citigroup.
Trump nominated him to lead the SSA in December, praising Bisignano’s “tremendous track record of transforming large corporations.”
