FIS just completed a $13.5B bet on what Jacksonville does best
America's largest city by land area hosts two Fortune 500s that used to be one company, a Fortune 500 railroad, and the back-office operations of five major banks — all mid-reshuffle at the exact same time.
Benchmarks in this market
- Qualified fintech & bank-vendor inquiries
- +149%Qualified fintech & bank-vendor inquiries
- Financial-services recruitment applicant quality
- +36%Financial-services recruitment applicant quality
- CAC on compliance-reviewed banking funnels
- -27%CAC on compliance-reviewed banking funnels
Illustrative ranges for engagements of this type, not verified Jacksonville-specific client data. Orientation, not a guarantee — your starting point changes the range.
How we work here: Remotely from our San Francisco office, with ET coverage for calls and travel for kickoffs. We don't claim a Jacksonville office we don't have.
Clients across every market
What's actually different about the Jacksonville metro
Jacksonville is the largest city by land area in the contiguous United States and Florida's largest city by population at just over one million people, and its financial-services identity runs unusually deep for a metro that size. Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) and Fidelity National Financial (FNF) — both Fortune 500s, both headquartered blocks apart on Riverside Avenue, and both descended from the same company before a 2006 split — anchor the metro alongside CSX Corporation, the Fortune 500 railroad that has run its headquarters from downtown Jacksonville since 2003 with roughly 23,000 employees. FIS just completed the largest transaction in its recent history: in January 2026 it finished selling its remaining Worldpay stake to Global Payments for $6.6 billion while simultaneously acquiring Global Payments' card-issuing business for $13.5 billion in enterprise value, completing a multi-year exit from merchant acquiring to refocus entirely on bank-issuer technology — a combined operation now processing more than 40 billion transactions a year across 75 countries. Beyond the two homegrown giants, Jacksonville hosts genuine back-office operations for five major banks: Bank of America (~8,000 employees), Citigroup (~4,000, at a dedicated card-operations campus running since 1997), Deutsche Bank (over 2,000, its second-largest U.S. office), JPMorgan Chase (~1,700, anchored by a large mortgage-servicing operation), and Wells Fargo (~1,180).
The metro's banks are simultaneously selling real estate and reinvesting in what's left
Bank of America sold its 52-acre Deerwood Park North campus for $42 million in January 2025, then filed a permit for a further $2.8 million investment in its remaining Southside operations center in January 2026. Citigroup sold part of its Flagler Center campus for $24 million in January 2025, leased back the space it actually needed, then announced a $19 million modernization of that same space in July 2025. Neither bank is leaving — both are consolidating footprint while reinvesting in the space they're keeping, which is a genuinely different story than either 'Jacksonville is losing bank jobs' or 'Jacksonville is booming,' and most content about the market picks one of those two wrong framings.
FIS's $13.5B pivot is the single biggest thing happening in Jacksonville fintech right now
Completing the exit from merchant acquiring to focus purely on bank-issuer technology is a fundamental strategic repositioning, not routine M&A news — vendors, talent, and partners in this ecosystem need to understand what FIS is now rather than referencing what it used to be before the Worldpay era.
Wells Fargo's layoffs were unit closures, not a Jacksonville retreat — the distinction matters
WARN filings in 2024 and 2025 cut specific business units (global operations, then global payments and liquidity) rather than signaling a broader pullback from the metro. Content that treats every bank layoff headline as equivalent misses which changes are structural and which are one team's reorganization.
Be precise about employee counts — this market has real, checkable numbers
Multiple secondary sources circulate specific-sounding but uncorroborated statistics about Jacksonville fintech job losses that don't trace back to any primary source. A vendor or marketer citing fabricated statistics in a market this well-documented by local business press gets caught fast by buyers who actually track this ecosystem.
What usually moves first in Jacksonville.
Based on what tends to be the binding constraint for companies in this market. Your audit may point somewhere else — we go where the numbers say.
Industry playbooks relevant in Jacksonville
The part clients actually remember.
Not the reports. The uncomfortable conversation that changed the trajectory.
We were about to increase paid budget to fix what we thought was a top-of-funnel problem. The cohort chart took ten minutes to build and showed we'd have been pouring money into a bucket with a hole in it. That meeting probably saved us a year.
We had two spreadsheets that had never met: what it costs to fill a unit, and what it costs to keep one. Putting them on the same page changed where our money goes. The uncomfortable part was learning our renewal problem was really a maintenance problem.
We were three weeks from cutting the channel that was actually feeding us, and we would have had a defensible-looking dashboard justifying it the whole way. What I found hardest was accepting that our reporting had been wrong for two years, not that it needed fixing.
Jacksonville questions, answered straight.
Often the better fit. Procurement and vendor-management teams inside a $13.5 billion post-merger integration or a bank's operations-center consolidation are actively evaluating suppliers right now — visibility in that specific, qualified search is usually an easier win than competing for the institution's own consumer-facing attention.
Other markets we work in
Let's look at your numbers.
A free 30-minute teardown of your funnel, ads, and site — run against what actually works in the Jacksonville metro. You keep the findings either way.