Fidelity National Information Services, Inc. FIS

The business

FIS sells the software banks run on. Banking Solutions is core processing, the ledger and the payments rails inside a regional bank, plus the newly acquired issuing platform that produces and authorises the cards those banks hand out. Capital Market Solutions sells to the other end of the industry: post-execution processing, collateral, treasury systems for asset managers and corporates.

Both are utilities with long contracts and slow growth, which is the correct way to think about them. What has made this company hard to read for three years is not the operating business but the transactions layered on top of it, and January's was the largest yet.