FIS just completed a $13.5B bet on what Jacksonville does best
The largest U.S. city by land area is home to two Fortune 500s that used to be one company, a Fortune 500 railroad and back-office teams for five major banks. All of them are reshuffling at the 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 Lahore 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 lower 48 states, and Florida's biggest city by population at just over one million people. Its financial-services roots run unusually deep for a city that size.
Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) and Fidelity National Financial (FNF) are both Fortune 500 companies. Both are headquartered a few blocks apart on Riverside Avenue, and both came from the same company before a 2006 split. CSX, the Fortune 500 railroad, has run its headquarters from downtown since 2003 and employs about 23,000 people.
FIS just finished the biggest deal in its recent history. In January 2026 it sold its remaining Worldpay stake to Global Payments for $6.6 billion and bought Global Payments' card-issuing business for $13.5 billion. That completed its exit from merchant payments to focus fully on technology for card-issuing banks. The combined business now handles more than 40 billion transactions a year in 75 countries.
Five major banks also run big back-office operations here: Bank of America (about 8,000 employees), Citigroup (about 4,000, at a card-operations campus open since 1997), Deutsche Bank (over 2,000, its second-largest U.S. office), JPMorgan Chase (about 1,700, built around a large mortgage-servicing operation) and Wells Fargo (about 1,180).
Banks are selling buildings and reinvesting in the rest
Bank of America sold its 52-acre Deerwood Park North campus for $42 million in January 2025, then filed for a $2.8 million upgrade to 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 needed, then announced a $19 million modernization of that space in July 2025. Neither bank is leaving. Both are shrinking their footprint and investing in what they keep. Most content about this market gets it wrong by saying either 'Jacksonville is losing bank jobs' or 'Jacksonville is booming'.
FIS's $13.5B pivot is the biggest fintech story in town
Leaving merchant payments to focus only on technology for card-issuing banks is a fundamental change of direction, not routine deal news. Vendors, job seekers and partners need to understand what FIS is now, not what it was in the Worldpay era.
Wells Fargo cut teams, not its presence
Layoff notices in 2024 and 2025 closed specific units (global operations, then global payments and liquidity). They didn't signal a wider pullback from the city. Treating every bank layoff headline the same misses which changes are structural and which are one team's reorganization.
Get the numbers right
Several secondary sources repeat specific-sounding Jacksonville fintech job-loss figures that don't trace back to any original source. In a market this well covered by local business press, buyers who follow the industry catch made-up statistics quickly.
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
Specific playbooks for Jacksonville businesses
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 more so. Purchasing and vendor-management teams working through a $13.5 billion merger or a bank's consolidation are choosing suppliers right now. Showing up in that specific, qualified search is usually an easier win than competing for the institution's consumer attention.
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.