Unpacking FIS and Global Payments’ Worldpay-led deal: Impacts, benefits and potential
FIS, Global Payments and GTCR have announced a multi-party deal that sees Global Payments acquire the recently spun-out Worldpay while FIS acquires Global Payments’ Issuer Solutions segment. We dig into the details to find out how the deal could change the payments landscape.
Last week, Global Payments, FIS, Worldpay and GTCR announced a multi-party deal that will see the currently standalone Worldpay become part of Global Payments, while FIS will acquire Global Payments’ Issuer Solutions segment.
The deal is set to transform both companies, while providing significant gains for private equity player GTCR, and comes just a year after the completion of Worldpay’s spin out as a standalone business after several years as FIS’ Merchant Services division. FIS’ share price rose following the deal announcement, however Global Payments saw a share price drop of more than -13% from the news.
Involving three major names in the payments processing space, the deal has the potential to be significant for the sector. With this in mind, we dig into the details to unpack how it will change the respective companies and what the implications are.
Topics covered:
- Overview of the deal for FIS, Global Payments, Worldpay and GTCR
- Worldpay’s year as a standalone company
- The impact of Global Payments’ acquisition of Worldpay
- The impact of FIS’ acquisition of Global Payments’ Issuer solutions
- Implications for the wider industry
Overview of the deal for FIS, Global Payments, Worldpay and GTCR
Set to close in the first half of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and the usual closing conditions, this is one of the more complicated M&A announcements to be made in the payments space in recent years.
Although it involves four brands, it is a three-way deal due to the ownership structure of Worldpay, which has been co-owned by FIS and GTCR since being spun out, with the former holding a 45% share and the latter a 55% share.
Under the deal, Global Payments will acquire Worldpay from the two companies for $24.25bn in cash and stock, including $1.55bn in anticipated tax assets for a net purchase price of $22.7bn. As part of the deal, GTCR will receive 59% cash and 41% stock, with its shares in Global Payments issued at $97 a share, meaning once the deal is closed it will own around 15% of Global Payments’ outstanding shares.
Meanwhile, FIS will acquire Global Payments’ Issuer Solutions business for $13.5bn.
The deal will also see Global Payments and FIS establish a strategic commercial partnership to provide a suite of capabilities to financial institutions, including core banking, treasury management, issuer processing, merchant solutions and risk management.
Worldpay’s year as a standalone company
The deal announcement comes just over a year after Worldpay completed its spin out as a standalone company, and is the latest in a long line of acquisitions and divestments for the payments processing giant.
Having been founded in 1997, Worldpay has been through five previous major acquisitions, including the GTCR deal that saw its recent spin out, and one IPO. During this time, it has spent around 46% of its time as a standalone company with various ownership structures, and around 54% as a business segment of a wider organisation, primarily the Royal Bank of Scotland in the 2000s and FIS in the 2020s.As we explored in our report when Worldpay span off from FIS, the company has also made a considerable number of its own acquisitions during this time. This is a practice it has continued as a standalone company, most recently with the acquisition of enterprise fraud prevention platform Ravelin, announced in February.
Worldpay’s valuation at the time of its spin-out represented a considerable drop from the price FIS paid for it when it made the acquisition in 2022. However, this most recent deal has seen the company’s value climb significantly since 2023.
Although in 2019 FIS’ purchase saw Worldpay valued at $35bn, the 2023-announced deal that saw 55% of it sold to GTCR valued the overall company at half that: $17.5bn. This latest $24.25bn valuation therefore represents a significant increase.
FIS has reported that, adjusted for its control premium payment to GTCR, this valuation represents around a 10.5x multiple on Worldpay’s expected adjusted EBITDA for 2025. It also reports that the pre-tax value of its minority stake in the company is $6.6bn, compared to its book value of $3.9bn.
Meanwhile, Global Payments has said that the $22.7bn net purchase price represents around 8.5 times Worldpay’s expected adjusted EBITDA for 2025.
FIS has published limited numbers for Worldpay Holdco, the joint venture company co-owned by FIS and GTCR, since February 2024 when the spin-out deal was finalised. This indicates that revenue has climbed by around 6% YoY to $5.1bn in FY 2024, although adjusted EBITDA margin has dropped by around 10 percentage points since FY 2022, when the last data for this metric was available.
However, this is skewed by particularly weak adjusted EBITDA in Q1 2024, with the remaining quarters of the year delivering a combined EBITDA margin of 42%, far closer to 2022’s 47%.
Worldpay has also seen gains in both the number of transactions it is processing and the volume of these transactions, having processed a total of 55bn in 2024 with a volume of $2.5tn.
This means that its average transaction value has also increased, having reached $45.45 in 2024, up from $45.20 in 2022.
Under the guidance of GTCR, Worldpay has continued to build out its product set, with recent advances including faster refunds and one-click checkout solutions in the UK as well as the launch of Tap to Pay on iPhone. It has also continued to forge major partnerships, including the October 2024-announced global deal with Klarna.
“The progress over the past two years was made possible thanks to the invaluable partnership with GTCR,” said Charles Drucker, CEO of Worldpay, in a GTCR release announcing the new deal.
“Their deep domain expertise in payments, experience in executing carveouts, and unwavering support of management growth initiatives is world-class, and I look forward to a continued partnership as we work towards a successful integration.
“Through this next phase of growth, we will continue to invest in our product and technology and further strengthen our ecommerce offering.”
The impact of Global Payments’ acquisition of Worldpay
For Global Payments, the sale of its Issuer Solutions division and acquisition of Worldpay represents a fairly radical transformation for the company. Having previously divested its Consumer Solutions segment and gaming business through 2023 sales totalling around $1.4bn, as well as its medical SaaS product AdvancedMD for $1bn in late 2024, the company is now streamlining to become solely focused on its Merchant Solutions division.
This will be significantly bolstered by the inclusion of Worldpay. The sale of AdvancedMD would have contributed to an expected -1.5% contraction in Merchant Solutions’ adjusted net revenue between 2024 and 2025 to a projected $7bn. However, Global Payments now anticipates the combined company to see 2025 adjusted net revenue of around $12.5bn – a 76% increase on pre-acquisition 2024.
This comes as Merchant Solutions has seen relatively sluggish growth since the start of 2024, although Q4 2024 and Q1 2025 has been impacted by headwinds from the disposition of AdvancedMD.
The division saw 9% YoY growth in adjusted net revenue in FY 2024, compared to 16% YoY in FY 2023, with its core payments offering seeing the slowest growth in Merchant Solutions. However, while Q4 2024 dipped into negative growth YoY, with Q1 2025 seeing only a slight improvement, without the AdvancedMD sale Q4 saw 6% YoY growth.
In Worldpay, Global Payments is acquiring a company that has a strong global presence across a range of customer sizes. Around half of its customers are ecommerce and enterprise, with the remaining half split equally between SMB and integrated payments.
Global Payments has in particular highlighted the benefits of Worldpay’s enterprise offerings for its business, as well as its ecommerce strength.
“The company is a leading merchant acquirer with a best-in-class digital platform powering global ecommerce solutions for some of the most sophisticated enterprise companies with complex multinational needs,” said Cameron Bready, CEO of Global Payments, in an investor call announcing the deal.
“Worldpay also offers modern managed PayFac and PayFac-as-a-Service capabilities to software, platform and marketplace partners that complement Global Payments’ existing portfolio of integrated and embedded payment solutions.”
He also highlighted the company’s marquee customers, including leading digital media, retail and fintech players, as well as a “fast-growing” presence in emerging markets and its network of financial institutions. He added that Worldpay has a presence in several “attractive” markets that Global Payments does not currently serve, including France and the Nordics, the Middle East and Africa and Japan.
The company expects the combined business to initially see around 78% of its business in the Americas, with 18% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and 4% in Asia-Pacific.
Describing the two companies’ payments software and commerce enablement solutions as “highly complementary”, Bready said that Global Payments would marry its SMB-focused commerce and vertical market software with Worldpay’s ecommerce and enterprise capabilities.
“This will pave the way for significant revenue enhancement opportunities and will catalyse growth as the demand for software and digital solutions accelerates around the world,” he said, adding that the company would amplify its global distribution channels and go-to-market with a sales force topping 4,000, as well as direct-to-enterprise specialised software sales.
“Together, Global Payments and Worldpay’s significant scale will enable us to accelerate innovation, which will deliver to merchants seamlessly with vertical market fluency regardless of customer size or location,” said Bready.
“Our global capabilities will span more than 175 countries and include some of the most attractive and fastest-growing markets across EMEA, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.”
Global Payments believes that the combined business, which is set to be a significant merchant-focused player in a space where Worldpay already has the highest transaction volume of any company of its type, will provide significant gains across a variety of metrics.
In addition to gains on adjusted net revenue in FY 2025, the company also expects to see adjusted EBITDA reach $6.5bn, compared to a projected $4bn without the acquisition, although adjusted EBITDA margin is set to be slightly lower with Worldpay onboard, at 51% compared to 52%.
Meanwhile transaction volume is expected to reach $4tn, up from the projected $1tn without Worldpay. This would make Global Payments by far the largest payments processor in terms of transaction volume processed globally. By contrast, Stripe processed $1.4tn in 2024, while PayPal processed $1.7tn and Adyen around $1.4tn.
The impact of FIS’ acquisition of Global Payments’ Issuer solutions
FIS, meanwhile, is acquiring Global Payments’ Issuer Solutions at a time when the company is seeing solid ongoing performance, having consistently seen low single-digit revenue growth since it spun Worldpay out of the business.
While for Global Payments the deal represents an opportunity to streamline its business, for FIS it is a chance to broaden its offering. In adding Issuer Solutions, FIS is gaining a significant new business unit, while allowing it to cash out its Worldpay stake.
Speaking to investors during a call announcing the deal, FIS CEO Stephanie Ferris said that it “dramatically simplifies and enhances” the company’s operating portfolio “at attractive multiples”.
“It accelerates the monetisation of our non-cash-generating minority stake in Worldpay and replaces it with a predictable flow of high-margin recurring revenue and positive cash flow, strengthening our overall financial profile,” she added.
In Issuer Solutions, FIS is acquiring a global credit processing unit that saw $2.5bn revenue in 2024, a 3% increase on 2023, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 45.1%. This means the combined company will have revenue topping $12bn.
The division has over 885m accounts on file and in 2024 saw 40bn annual transactions in more than 75 countries, making it a significant addition for FIS.
“The acquisition immediately improves our financial profile and increases our scale in one of our key growth vectors: payments,” said Ferris.
“The business provides FIS with best-in-class credit processing to complement our existing payment capabilities.”
Financed by a combination of debt and FIS’ Worldpay stake, the $13.5bn enterprise value-transaction represents a 10x multiple of the synergised 2025 adjusted EBITDA, or 9 times the $12bn value, adjusted for a $1.5bn tax benefit.
FIS also expects to see significant synergies in both revenue and operational expenditure within three years from the acquisition, projecting $45m from the former and $125m from the latter. In the longer term, it forecasts revenue synergies to pass $125m.
FIS in particular anticipates significant complementary benefits between Issuer Solutions and its existing Banking Solutions division due to both an expanded addressable market and significant potential for cross-selling.
Among the top 150 large banks, FIS currently has an existing client relationship with 50%, while Issuer Solutions has with 25%, but together this share reaches 60%. The company also sees a significant gain in market opportunity among this group, which together reaches around $2.4bn.
By bringing the two together, FIS now anticipates significant increased cross-selling across banks, financial institutions and corporates, and in particular sees greater international opportunities.
“With this acquisition, FIS is now well positioned to grow its wallet share and improve its portfolio of offerings with financial institutions by bringing together leading core and digital solutions, scaled processing capabilities across credit, debit and network, award-winning treasury and risk management tools and next-generation lending and asset management offerings, all under the FIS brand,” said Ferris.
“We can now offer the most comprehensive product suite for financial institutions in the market.”
Implications for the wider industry
Once completed in 2026, the deal has the potential to cement Global Payments and FIS as two very significant players in the payments processing arena. While FIS is evolving to become a broad-range provider of payments solutions and related services, Global Payments has streamlined to become a pure merchant-focused player, with unparalleled transaction volume.
For the rest of the industry, this inevitably has the potential to increase competition, particularly if the synergies from either deal create additional competitive advantages. However, the extent to which the deal will impact the wider market ultimately depends on how successful both players are at both integrating their respective acquisitions and effectively capitalising on their increased capabilities to further grow the businesses.
Worldpay in particular is one to watch here. The purchase and eventual spin out of the company by FIS for a lower price suggests that this deal did not fully set out to achieve what had been hoped of it, and with a long history of sales and purchases, there are clear challenges when it comes to effectively capitalising on the strength of the company as a leader in the space.
However, GTCR retaining a significant stake in Global Payments may be key to this. With the company having already played an active role in Worldpay’s evolution, its continued presence may prove to be a valuable asset. GTCR co-CEO and Managing Director Collin Roche has said that the company intends to remain “closely involved as a long-term strategic partner”, suggesting that it could be very active in keeping the Worldpay-enriched Global Payments on course.
