Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
Objective To assess the effects of didgeridoo playing on daytime sleepiness and other outcomes related to sleep by reducing collapsibility of the upper airways in patients with moderate obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome and snoring.
They Built a System to See Everything. But It Can’t See You.
Voice assistant software has documented microphone access that extends beyond active use. Cross-app data sharing, acoustic fingerprinting, behavioural inference across platforms — the system behaves as if it knows more than you consciously gave it, because the consent architecture was designed to make that possible without you noticing. Face ID is reading your micro-expressions before your mind has formed an opinion.
The system prompt runs invisibly under the chatbot’s friendly surface, always on, always gathering. The data brokers are selling you between themselves on an open and largely invisible market. The cookies were the price of access to sites you needed to use, which permitted data sharing you never consciously agreed to. You’re not paranoid. It is actually happening. But the power they claim from all of this? That part is the big lie.”
And that is precisely the allure of this cosmopolitan city often overlooked by travelers yearning for the splendors of Italy. What a blind spot.
Milan, long a global center of fashion and textiles and the gateway to the Italian Alps and Lake Como, "is a city that sneaks up on you," says gallerist, collector, and patron Nina Yashar. "You think you know it, and then you stumble upon a tiny gallery, a rooftop with a hidden view, or a perfect pastry shop. It is a place where history and innovation meet effortlessly."
The canniest luxury travel experts have spotted the. moment. "Design is the new art, which was the new food," says Embark Travel founder and CEO Jack Ezon, who journeys the world peering around the corner for what's coming next. And what he and others see in the city that this year cohosted the Winter Olympic Games is a new generation of luxury hotels and design brands flocking in -notably The Carlton, a sumptuous hotel on the Via della Spiga; and RH's new outpost in the Porta Venezia district, a 75,000-square-foot gallery set to open in a historic palazzo during April's Design Week. Better yet: The buzz in Milan has a distinctly untouristy feel. "Milan rewards curiosity and time, not checklist visits," says Britt Moran, cofounder with Emiliano Salci of Dimorestudio and Dimoremilano.
"This is a city that you can't 'discover' in five days," adds interior designer Paolo Moschino, who with partner Philip Vergeylen created the aforementioned Carlton.
"Milan is incredibly elegant, but everything is behind doors. It takes time, but then when you start, you find things that you didn't think existed!" Although their studio and showrooms are based in London, Vergeylen says he'd moveto Milan in a heartbeat. "There's an energy in Milan," he says. "It's what London had 15 years ago."
The historic Brera neighborhood is Milan’s artists' quarter, with galleries tucked al cobblestone streets.
KPMG Australia’s new boss, John Sams, is already facing questions over his judgement in relation to the firm’s handling of whistleblower complaints that led to his predecessor’s resignation and Sams’ appointment to the top job on Tuesday.
The parliamentary committee investigating the scandal released documents on Tuesday evening that KPMG had previously relied on to claim there was no substance to the allegations before it backtracked in the face of a wave of political and media pressure.
“I do not underestimate the task ahead but commit to our clients and people that I am prepared to be courageous, take the tough decisions and lead the changes we need to set us on the right path,” says new KPMG CEO John Sams.
In an April 30 document summarising the findings of KPMG’s investigations, submitted by the firm’s leadership, the consultancy claimed that there was largely no substance to a whistleblower’s allegation that confidential audit information had been misused.
KPMG said Sams did not see this report until May.
Labor senator Deborah O’Neill, who is leading the parliamentary committee, said in a statement following the release of the documents on Tuesday that the summary was “full of calculated half-truths and strategic denial.”
“Let’s be clear that in April, this document of 22 pages was the firm’s concerted effort to convince the parliament of Australia that there were no failures at KPMG and that the whistleblower’s concerns were completely unsubstantiated,” she said. Since then, O’Neill argued, many of the whistleblower’s claims had been substantiated.
“I question the judgement of those who allowed KPMG to send this summary to the committee, regulators and government bodies,” O’Neill said.
Labor senator Deborah O’Neill has questioned the judgement of KPMG’s new chair and CEO over their role in discrediting the whistleblower complaints as unsubstantiated. GETTY IMAGES
The committee also released a document with the whistleblower’s original email complaint from May 2024, which included claims of the “recording of client conversations without permission and subsequent sharing of these with other KPMG employees.”
Sams was elevated from his role of chief financial officer to CEO on Tuesday after rising through KPMG’s ranks in Australia and overseas since 2003.
There is no suggestion Sams was personally involved in any misconduct, but as chief financial officer of KPMG since October last year, he was on the firm’s leadership team. During that period, numerous senior executives at the firm resigned amid its stumbling response to revelations that some of KPMG’s most senior staff allegedly accessed confidential client information to win new customers.
KPMG chairman Michael Ebeid said Sams would lead the firm’s efforts to fix its integrity issues.
“John has a clear mandate from the board: to strengthen leadership and culture, improve confidence with our people, clients, regulators, government and the parliament, and focus KPMG on the areas where it can make the greatest contribution to our clients, people and stakeholders,” Ebeid said.
Sams reiterated the firm’s mistakes in a statement. “The firm fell short of the standards rightly expected of us, and the accountability for these failures will continue to be implemented,” he said. “We have serious work to do on our culture, our leadership and our governance and it will take resolve and endurance.”
Among the first tasks on his list are likely to be job cuts. The firm has not denied reports of redundancies, but the process will not begin in earnest until after Sams is established in his new role.
Earlier this month, a KPMG spokesman said it continues to evaluate a range of options to ensure the firm remains well positioned for the challenges ahead.
“We are reviewing our operating model, cost base and workforce needs,” the spokesman said. “No decisions have been made regarding any specific measures or any potential impact on roles. We recognise that discussions of this nature can create uncertainty, and as decisions are made, we will communicate with our people first and in a respectful way.”
All four of the major consulting giants have been cutting staff in response to a weaker economic environment and falling revenue from federal government business, which has been the single biggest customer for these firms and especially KPMG.
Sams joined the UK arm of KPMG in 2003 as a graduate and moved to Australia in 2006. He recently led its commercial advisory and transactions business as lead partner.
KPMG said the appointment was overseen by a panel comprising independent directors Ebeid, former big business lobby boss Jennifer Westacott and prolific corporate adviser Kerry Schott. External candidates were also considered for the role.
KPMG is under intense scrutiny after admitting that some of its staff accessed confidential information from corporate clients to win business – a serious breach of trust in the world of auditing that is essential to the integrity of financial markets.
KPMG’s investigations have confirmed some of the whistleblower’s allegations, which included the sharing of sensitive Lendlease and Optus data among staff bidding for audit work with Westpac, Dexus and Telstra.
KPMG’s former CEO Andrew Yates and chairman Martin Sheppard resigned in the wake of the scandal, along with many senior audit partners. One of its most significant audit clients, Lendlease, is preparing to dump KPMG as its long-time auditor and its business with federal and state governments is under review.
The allegations were first raised to the firm in 2024 but did not become public until O’Neill aired them in March this year.
“I note reports of concerns within KPMG about the role Mr Ebeid has played in advancing the path of Mr Sams to CEO,” O’Neill said. “Given there has been no formal agreement by partners to allow Mr Ebeid, who is not a partner of KPMG, to assume the role of chair of the board.”
The ultrarich are buying up big, and using shell companies to hide it Across the country, the wealthy are increasingly creating schemes to shield real estate transactions from view. And with it, creating a whole new industry.
Across from Bondi Icebergs, with a sweeping and unobstructed view across the iconic Sydney beach, is a nondescript apartment block. Unit by unit, over a decade, it has been acquired by STM 123 No 11 Pty Ltd.
The company now owns seven of the eight two-bedroom units inside the building. Each unit is now worth between $3 million and $10 million, based on the sales of similar apartments along the same street over the past year. So who is behind STM 123 No 11? The company can be traced back to Vaughan Blank, a former Glencore executive who now owns a swath of luxury real estate.
This is a hard story to piece together as there is always more behind the scenes than one can read in the press.The basic facts are that Ramsi A. Woodcock, a law professor at the J. David Rosenberg College of Law at the University of Kentucky has sued the university (and its president and provost) in federal court seeking to block the appointment as dean of U.S. District Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove (Judge Van Tatenhove is also a defendant). Woodcock has been in conflict with the university over disciplinary action taken during a prior deanship against Woodcock for allegedly antisemitic behavior.
But the nature of the current suit is the allegation that Judge Van Tatenhove was named dean over the objection of a majority of the law faculty. If true, such an appointment would represent a break with longstanding principles of faculty governance (I’ll leave it to others to parse accreditation standards). This should attract everyone’s attention.
Harden Your iPhone: The Settings That Make You More Expensive
Transparency Cascade Press “In December 2024, the Federal Trade Commission caught a data broker called Mobilewalla holding more than 500 million advertising IDs paired with people’s precise location — and selling the ability to draw a circle around a building and get a list of every phone that had been inside it. The FTC’s own example of what that buys you: a segment of “visitors to pregnancy centers.”
Much of that location data came from ordinary phone apps, scooped up through the ad auctions that fire every time an app loads a banner. That same pipeline from your phone, to an ad ID, to a broker, to a buyer; it sells to the government too. A federal agency that isn’t allowed to collect your location without a warrant can simply buy it from a broker who got it from your weather app.
The EFF has tracked this exact data reaching Customs and Border Protection. In this transaction you are not the customer. You are the inventory. So “privacy settings” turns out to be the wrong frame. This isn’t about hiding. It’s about cost. Every setting below makes you a little more expensive to surveil — and surveillance, like any other operation, runs on a budget. The goal isn’t to disappear. It’s to make yourself not worth the money.
Here are the five that matter on an iPhone. The most powerful security setting is thepower button Before any of the toggles, the most important thing to understand about your iPhone is counterintuitive, and almost nobody is told it: A phone that is turned off is dramatically harder to break into than a phone that is merely locked. Here’s why. When your iPhone has been unlocked even once since it booted up, the keys that decrypt your data are sitting in its memory, ready to go.
Forensic tools, the ones police and border agents use, made by companies like Cellebrite, are far better at pulling data off a phone in that “already been unlocked” state. But when a phone is powered all the way off and hasn’t been unlocked since, those keys don’t exist in memory yet. The data is a safe with the door welded shut. Leaked documents from the tool-makers themselves show that a powered-off, up-to-date iPhone is the case they struggle with most.
So the single most protective thing you can do, in any moment of real risk (a protest, a border crossing, a traffic stop) is hold the side button and a volume button until the slider appears, and power the phone all the way down. Not lock it. Off. Everything else is settings. This is a habit. The habit matters more…”
Predicting the Court: Evaluating Large Language Models as Forecasters of Supreme Court Decisions
Large language models are increasingly used by lawyers to analyze legal materials and forecast litigation outcomes. This Article evaluates four leading large language models-GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Grok 4-as predictors of Supreme Court decisions using every argued merits case from October Term 2025.
Although the models predicted some aspects of the Court’s decisions with surprising accuracy, conventional performance metrics overstated their predictive ability. Much of the models’ justice-level accuracy reflected the Court’s ordinary ideological alignment rather than case-specific legal analysis.
The models also systematically overpredicted ideologically divided decisions, particularly in politically salient cases that the Court ultimately resolved on narrow and often technical legal grounds. Rather than treating prediction as a simple accuracy problem, this Article uses the models’ recurring successes and failures to illuminate the current strengths and limitations of AI-assisted legal prediction and the continuing role of human judgment in forecasting judicial behavior.
Marco Rubio’s Disappearing Signal Chat
The Atlantic Gift Article: The State Department told a court last year that the secretary didn’t use disappearing messages. By this spring, it had dropped that claim.Secretary of State Marco Rubio, like most federal officials, is legally required to retain records that he creates as part of his job.
So it was no surprise that his office ended up in court last year after The Atlantic revealed that he had participated in an auto-deleting Signal chat about war plans in Yemen with other top national-security officials.
In a case involving a Freedom of Information Act request for the Signal records on Rubio’s phone, a federal judge wanted assurances that these documents had been preserved. Rubio’s team told the court that his government phone was equipped on July 21, 2025, with software called LeapXpert that automatically preserved from Signal “all messages sent or received, regardless of whether the sender configures a message to ‘auto-delete.’”
Seven weeks later, in another declaration to the court, the State Department went further. “Secretary Rubio does not use the auto-deletion functions in third party messaging applications when sending communications that may include federal records,” Susan Weetman, a senior adviser for the department’s Information Access Programs Directorate, told the court on September 9.
But that denial, written in the present tense, was less than it seemed. About two months later, Rubio changed the settings in a Signal chat about administration matters with other senior officials so that the messages would automatically delete after a set amount of time, a person familiar with the exchange told us, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to share the information. When we reached out to the State Department for comment, the official who responded contested the idea that Rubio has made a practice of turning on disappearing messages but said that he could not address the specific instance.
The State Department told us that Signal continues to be an approved communication application, that LeapXpert is installed on the government phones of some officials, and that the department remains committed to full compliance with record-keeping laws.
“These measures support compliance even when users adjust application settings, including the Signal app’s ‘disappearing messages’ setting,” the department official told us, speaking on the condition of anonymity to address agency regulations.The department did not answer questions about why Rubio would decide to activate disappearing messages if his phone contained software that ensured those messages could not be fully deleted…”
How to poison AI research agents
Indicator: “In July’s episode of Show & Tell, Hal Triedman showed us how easy it can be to poison an AI research agent. Hal is a privacy and security researcher at Cornell Tech and former senior privacy engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation.
He walked us through a recent research project he ran with colleagues Tingwei Zhang and Vitaly Shmatikov. Their draft paper, “Deep-Research Agents Can Be Poisoned via User-Generated Content,” details how deep-research agents often rely on a handful of Reddit and Wikipedia pages across an entire topic, no matter how a user phrases the question.
They appended as few as 13 words to one of those pages, which caused the agents to recommend a product, app, or investment that doesn’t exist, like the cryptocurrency BananaCoin or dating app for divorced men over 50 called SilverPath.
The team ran this in a simulated environment rather than on the live web to avoid pushing the made up products they were trying to make the AI believe were real. These attacks are increasingly relevant as brands, marketers, and deceptive actors try to get AI models to reference their products and content, just as they’ve long done with search engines…”
JP MORGAN Bank always hires the very finest people..apparently he was helping to funnel Epstein's Sex Trafficking …
As head of the IRS and Social Security Administration, Frank Bisignano is entrusted with the private financial records of every American taxpayer. But before entering public service, he spied on his colleagues at JPMorgan Chase. While co-COO at the bank, Bisignano directed staff to snoop on rival executives, people familiar with the matter told the Journal. Bisignano denies spying on co-workers. Still, our reporting details how he ultimately lost the trust of CEO Jamie Dimon.
Frank Bisignano directed staff to use software to snoop in email of rivals and surveil work of employees; Bisignano, who also is the chief of Social Security, denied he ever spied on co-workers
Alexander Saeedy covers banking and finance for The Wall Street Journal. Previously, he covered financially distressed companies and bankruptcy. On the banking beat, he has
Frank Bisignano, the head of the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration, sits atop two government organizations that store vast reams of sensitive financial data about every taxpayer.
More than a decade ago, he was co-chief operating officer at JPMorgan ChaseJPM -0.65%decrease; down pointing triangle, another perch that gave him visibility and authority over every part of a massive financial institution. At the bank, people familiar with the matter said, he spied on fellow executives—using his authority over the security department and position to access sensitive information and internal communications without an apparent business justification.
The executive directed his security staff to use software to snoop in the email of rival executives—including Charlie Scharf, JPMorgan’s then head of consumer banking who is now the CEO of Wells Fargo, some of the people said. One executive said he suspected the spying and put a code phrase in his email, which he said Bisignano repeated back to him.
Bisignano also accessed a draft complaint from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission about a questioned derivatives trade that was a confidential document only seen by a few members of the legal department, some said. He also directed his staff to use software to surveil the work of employees, sometimes seeking to track keystrokes—which can show draft versions of written material—others said.
The people said Bisignano’s goal was to keep a tight rein on employees and use the information to undermine his rivals as he expanded his responsibilities. No allegations are known to pertain to the improper access of customer information.
Around the end of 2012, following years of complaints about his behavior, including allegations of disrespectful conduct toward colleagues and underlings and of the breaking of company norms around data collection, Chief Executive Jamie Dimon lost trust in him and told Bisignano he would support him finding a job elsewhere, people familiar with the matter said.
Bisignano left the bank to become CEO of First Data, which later merged with FiservFISV 2.07%increase; up pointing triangle, a payments company critical to the digital infrastructure used in card transactions and banking.
Courtney Forrest, a lawyer for Bisignano, said in a statement that he never spied on co-workers. She said he “never directed anyone to look through any employee’s or executive’s communications or engaged in any form of surveillance.” She said Bisignano “never accessed a draft FERC complaint,” that he and Scharf “have maintained a strong personal and professional relationship for years” and that it was false “that an executive planted a codeword to catch” Bisignano reading the email.
Forrest said “Dimon never asked, encouraged or suggested that Mr. Bisignano leave JPMorgan” and that Bisignano voluntarily left to become CEO of First Data. She also said “the claim that Mr. Bisignano’s growing responsibilities at JPMorgan were accompanied by a pattern of undermining colleagues is patently untrue and inaccurate.”
After Bisignano left the bank, investigators from the legal department found digital traces of the spying activity, including records that showed email access, some of the people said.
As a result, Matt Zames, who took over as JPMorgan’s sole chief operating officer, increased restrictions on access to sensitive employee information, requiring approval from senior members of the legal department to access emails and other data, some of the people said.
President Trump picked Bisignano to become chief of the Social Security Administration, the government retirement system, and he was confirmed by the Senate last year. His responsibilities were expanded later in the year when he was appointed to the new position of CEO of the IRS, running its daily operations.
Last Wednesday, the Treasury Department announced that Bisignano would take charge of the implementation of Trump Accounts, the tax-deferred retirement accounts for children.
At SSA and IRS, his challenges include modernizing the systems that power the nation’s biggest benefit agency and tax collection authority, both of which still rely on technology that is more than 20 years old. At the IRS, which has rotated through a half-dozen leaders during the Trump administration, Bisignano is also tasked with enforcing the tax law with a smaller staff.
Trump has complained that the IRS was weaponized against him by political enemies. In May, Bisignano agreed to settle a lawsuit Trump brought against the agency for the 2019 leak of his tax returns that included an unprecedented agreement that the government would never review or audit previous tax filings by Trump, his sons or the Trump Organization, among other actions.
On July 13, Judge Kathleen Williams harshly criticized the agreement, in part because Bisignano is part of the Trump administration. The federal judge said the president and his family acted in bad faith in bringing the $10 billion lawsuit and said it was brought to “manipulate the judicial process.” Her ruling doesn’t alter the no-audit promise, but she said the acquiescence to it by Bisignano and others was “wholly incompatible” with their duties “to enforce the law and protect the public interest.”
A White House spokeswoman said Bisignano “is a trusted and talented member of the President’s team who is doing an incredible job.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Bisignano’s proven executive leadership has improved services at the IRS and eliminated waste. A spokesperson for SSA said Bisignano was transforming the agency to deliver world-class customer service.
A JPMorgan spokesman said Bisignano is distinguished for his grit and determination, and that “we applaud his service to our country both at the Social Security Administration and the IRS.”
At JPMorgan and in his previous role at Citigroup, Bisignano had built a reputation on Wall Street as an administrator and fix-it man, with a track record of turning around businesses. Many of his former staff followed him from JPMorgan to First Data and Fiserv, where he became CEO in 2020, and now to the IRS.
At Fiserv, Bisignano helped grow sales of Clover, a point-of-sale payment terminal for credit-card payments, and consistently delivered revenue and profit growth that made its stock more than double between the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2025.
But months after he left to join the government and had sold nearly all of his Fiserv stock, the firm’s new management threw out the forecasts Bisignano’s team had been giving Wall Street and said they were materially inaccurate, blaming unrealistic growth projections, misleading revenue figures skewed by foreign-currency fluctuations and management decisions to defer investments. The move sent the stock into a tailspin and prompted shareholder lawsuits against Bisignano and Fiserv.
Bisignano’s attorney declined to comment on matters at Fiserv “that are the subject of active litigation” but said the bulk of the decline in its share price occurred under the leadership of his successor as CEO, Mike Lyons.
Bisignano said: “My experience working for leaders such as Jamie Dimon, Sandy Weill, Tony Terracciano, Henry Kravis and Scott Nuttall has prepared me for the privilege of serving the American people.”
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, Bisignano and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2007. MARK LENNIHAN/AP
Recruited by Dimon
The son of a customs officer at Port Newark, Brooklyn-raised Bisignano was a rising star at Citigroup and its predecessor firms in the 1980s and ’90s. Dimon, who was a top executive there in those years, was impressed by Bisignano’s operational abilities. After Dimon was fired from Citigroup in 1998 and later became CEO of Chicago-based Bank One, he tried and failed to hire Bisignano, people familiar with the matter said.
In 2001, Bisignano’s profile was raised when, as Citi’s deputy head of technology and operations, he helped lead Citi’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, standing outside Citi’s office a few blocks north and directing employees to safer locations.
After Bank One and JPMorgan merged in 2004, Dimon attracted Bisignano to join with an executive job as chief administrative officer. Bisignano was tasked with tackling complex back-office problems as JPMorgan looked to integrate the multiple companies it had acquired in a short number of years.
In 2011, Dimon named him head of the mortgage department—replacing Scharf—after former Marine Captain Jonathan Rowles testified before Congress about how JPMorgan had illegally foreclosed on his house while he was serving on active duty.
Bisignano overhauled the mortgage staff, doubled the number of borrower-assistance centers and helped launch a coalition of companies committed to hiring veterans. He also spearheaded the bank’s negotiations with the federal government and state attorneys general on mortgage-related lawsuits after the 2008 financial crisis.
As Bisignano took on more responsibility, complaints about his management style and conduct toward other executives and employees grew.
He frequently clashed with some top executives, including Gordon Smith, an executive in the consumer bank, and Todd Maclin, a commercial banker who was assigned to run some of the consumer business in 2011, according to people familiar with the matter. They and other executives felt that Bisignano was trying to undermine them in order to add to his own power in the bank, often disparaging their activities to Dimon without confronting them directly, some of the people said.
Forrest, Bisignano’s attorney, said JPMorgan’s internal culture encouraged a “direct, sometimes uncomfortable management style,” and that Dimon said he wanted executives to “ask hard questions.”
Bisignano demanded his own team pledge loyalty to him directly, people who spoke with him said. He told some of his employees he kept dossiers about them in his desk in case they “went native”—which they took as his way of describing someone who was no longer loyal to him, the people said.
Around 2012, during a biennial employee survey review, which covered workplace issues such as how satisfied employees were with their jobs, Bisignano’s division gave some of the most negative feedback in all of JPMorgan. Bisignano asked his direct reports to go into the survey submission tool and figure out which employees had written negative reviews, some of the people said.
Forrest said Bisignano never maintained a dossier on employees and said it was false that he asked for negative survey responses to be traced back to their authors.
Executives griped to Dimon about what they saw as Bisignano’s use of company resources for his own benefit, including allegations Bisignano misused the corporate jet for personal purposes, people familiar with the matter said.
Some also raised concerns to members of the legal department about preliminary efforts—which didn’t take place—to use JPMorgan resources for the renovation of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan that began in 2011, people familiar with the matter said. Bisignano is one of the cathedral’s trustees, a group that at the time was responsible for raising funds for the historic $175 million renovation.
Some complaints led to internal reviews, which concluded Bisignano hadn’t violated the bank’s rules, some of the people said.
Forrest said it was false that he used the jet for personal purposes and that he didn’t ask JPMorgan for money for the cathedral. Bisignano “never misappropriated corporate funds at JPMorgan, or anywhere else,” she said.
Around 2007, Bisignano asked senior executives to personally look into giving a loan to his friend Bo Dietl, owner of a private security company and prominent New York personality with whom he often dined at the New York restaurant Rao’s, people familiar with the matter said. The move was unusual in that Bisignano had directed executives to handle his friend’s loan application instead of referring him to rank-and-file bankers. The bank didn’t lend Dietl any money after reviewing his application, which upset Bisignano, the people said.
Forrest said Bisignano “knows nothing about any such loan.”
Dietl told The Wall Street Journal he didn’t remember asking for the loan but that Bisignano was a friend and the two did business together while he worked at JPMorgan, including when Dietl sold keystroke capture and encryption software to the bank. He said he also provided a group of former veterans to be security guards for some of the bank’s branches.
Bisignano had good relationships with some executives at JPMorgan, including asset and wealth management chief Mary Erdoes and former chief financial officer Mike Cavanagh, who respected his ambition and ability to get things done, people familiar with the matter said.
Dimon for years dismissed the complaints as run-of-the-mill conflicts between ambitious executives, some of the people said. But by late 2012, he had lost trust in Bisignano after he continued to come into conflict with executives and didn’t demonstrate a willingness to change, and he told Bisignano he would support him finding a job elsewhere, some of the people said.
The chief executive has rarely fired executives who have fallen out of favor during his 20-year career. He has instead typically made clear to people they have no more room to be promoted and urged them to find new jobs.
Dimon said in a memo to employees announcing Bisignano’s departure in 2013 that he was a “capable executive willing to take on the most complex challenges and get the job done.”
Sensitive records
Months after Bisignano left for First Data, forensic investigations found digital footprints that showed Bisignano’s staff had accessed sensitive corporate records and employee communications without a clear business purpose, according to people familiar with the matter.
Around this time, Bisignano’s key deputy handling cybersecurity issues and regulatory inquiries, Peter Cavicchia, was pushed out, people familiar with the matter said. He joined Bisignano at First Data and currently is the chief technology officer at Fiserv.
Federal regulations require banks to keep a broad range of communications, including emails, phone recordings and instant messages, which can be used if necessary for compliance investigations. Regulators often inquire about internal controls on information and have penalized banks when they have found lapses.
Bisignano, who as co-COO had shared oversight of security and compliance functions for JPMorgan, could access these records, and the company at the time didn’t have strict rules requiring approval to access them.
Forrest, the attorney, said Bisignano didn’t “personally access or have access to any individual records.” She said he was “unaware of the specifics of any forensic investigation, subsequent access-control changes or the circumstances” of Cavicchia’s departure.
Bisignano at the close of an NYSE trading day last year.BRENDAN MCDERMID/REUTERS
Investigators from the legal department found Bisignano accessed a draft complaint and inquiry from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission about an energy derivatives trade the bank had made, people familiar with the matter said. The confidential documents had been emailed to individuals in the legal department.
The contents of the documents were reported by the New York Times in 2013, and some executives at JPMorgan said they believed that they were leaked from someone inside the bank.
Forrest, in addition to denying Bisignano accessed the FERC complaint, said he “has never leaked anything to the press.”
JPMorgan didn’t prepare a report documenting any investigation into Bisignano’s alleged misconduct, some of the people said.
When he left, the bank didn’t grant Bisignano his unvested shares, people familiar with the matter said.
At the 2013 wedding of Steve Black, a former JPMorgan executive, Dimon asked why other executives had waited so long to tell him their concerns about Bisignano’s behavior, people who heard him said.
‘New York numbers’
After JPMorgan, Bisignano became chief executive of First Data, a payments processing company that KKR had bought with $25 billion of debt before the financial crisis. Executives at KKR weren’t aware of any personnel complaints regarding Bisignano before First Data hired him, people familiar with the matter said.
Forrest said “there were no undisclosed personnel issues to discuss.”
Bisignano ran into problems with his old firm when he recruited a number of JPMorgan executives to join him at First Data, which JPMorgan said violated his separation agreement. To settle the fight, First Data paid JPMorgan roughly $10 million, the Journal previously reported.
Bisignano helped turn around First Data, which had run into trouble not long after the KKR acquisition. He took the company public in 2015.
As the head of First Data, Bisignano invested in Clover, a popular way for merchants to accept credit card payments. In 2019, First Data merged with Fiserv, a payments and tech infrastructure platform for banks that was long loved on Wall Street for being a reliable investment. KKR eventually sold its stake in Fiserv after the merger.
Scott Nuttall, the co-CEO of KKR, said in a statement that “Frank was an outstanding leader” and “delivered one of the most successful transformations in our history.”
In 2020, Bisignano took over the combined company and led a push to get Fiserv’s clients onto Clover. The conversion resulted in one-off fees, and Clover-related revenue growth jumped as high as 30% year-over-year, boosting Fiserv’s performance. Fiserv also imposed new fees on converted Clover customers to help grow revenues further.
Growth projections for Clover prepared in the final years under Bisignano were viewed as unrealistic by some employees, according to people familiar with the matter, one of whom referred to them as “New York numbers,” a reference to the staff far away from Clover’s San Francisco operations. Driven by rosy projections, Fiserv’s stock hit an all-time high in February 2025, when Bisignano told investors that the company was “all gas and no brake.”
Bisignano left Fiserv in May 2025 for the SSA. As part of his compliance with federal conflict of interest rules, Bisignano sold large quantities of Fiserv stock by July 22, 2025, the day before the company reported its second-quarter earnings. That included selling at least $77 million in stock in total on July 21 and July 22, when Fiserv’s current executives were in a blackout period to ensure they weren’t trading on material nonpublic information.
Bisignano wasn’t subject to the blackout rule because he had already resigned, a person familiar with the matter said.
On July 23, Fiserv reported its results. The new CEO, Lyons, said the company expected a slowdown but that it would still meet the lower end of its 10-12% growth projections. The shares fell around 15%.
Then, in October, Lyons made deeper revisions, calling for a “reset” of the company’s forecasts, saying they were “objectively difficult to achieve” and had been skewed by foreign-exchange fluctuations.
The company said around half to two-thirds of Fiserv’s revenue growth in 2023 and 2024 had come from higher transaction values in Argentina, where inflation topped 100% in both years but was now declining. Investors were surprised by this disclosure, with one analyst report from JPMorgan stating the company “had not previously disclosed that Argentina was driving such a large portion of companywide growth.”
The company also said it had scrapped several short-term fees it charged to Clover customers and said deferred investments under past management had limited its ability to earn revenue, after a back-office failure at Fiserv in May resulted in a widespread outage for millions of bank customers at Bank of America, Capital One and other firms. The company spent hundreds of millions of dollars to fix the problems, people familiar with the matter said.
After the reset was announced, the stock fell over 40% as a result, wiping out some $30 billion for investors.
Shareholders sued Bisignano, Lyons and Fiserv, saying the company intentionally presented overinflated forecasts and figures to boost executives’ stock-based compensation. Bisignano earned $21 million from incentive-based compensation in 2024. Lawsuits against them have been consolidated into a class-action case, which is pending in New York federal court. Lyons resigned from his job in June to become the CEO of the Charlotte-headquartered bank Truist.
Forrest, the attorney, declined to comment on matters related to the Fiserv litigation but said “any insinuation that there was a lack of investment in the company is false.” She added: “The story of Fiserv changes dramatically when Mr. Bisignano leaves and Mike Lyons takes over.”
Bisignano still keeps in contact with many current and former leaders at JPMorgan, including Dimon.
In June, Bisignano traveled to the bank’s New York headquarters for a farewell party for Vince La Padula, a JPMorgan banker who has joined the IRS. The party was held at the Patriot’s Bar, a flag-filled watering hole at JPMorgan’s new skyscraper where Dimon has been hosting parties and social gatherings. Bisignano caught up with executives such as Erdoes, but Dimon had left the party by the time Bisignano arrived, people familiar with the matter said.
