Global Payments doubles down on merchant services with $24.25 billion Worldpay deal (2025)

Global Payments has agreed to buy rival Worldpay from FIS and private equity firm GTCR for $24.25 billion in a three-way deal, sharpening its focus on merchant services in its race for big-business clients in a crowded payments market.

As part of the deal announced on Thursday, Global Payments will sell its slower-growing issuer solutions unit, which offers card processing and account services, to FIS for $13.5 billion.

The deal will allow Global Payments to combine Worldpay's strength in online and enterprise transactions with its expertise in serving small and mid-sized companies.

The merger creates a global payment processing company that will serve more than six million customers, process about 94 billion transactions and generate $3.7 trillion in volume across more than 175 countries.

The transaction also allows Global Payments to become a pureplay merchants business, with a customer base that includes large corporations, as well as small and medium-sized businesses.

Key competitors in this space include Fiserv, PayPal, Dutch fintech company Adyen, Stripe and Block.

The deal will help FIS become a standalone banking business, while also allowing it to offload its remaining stake in Worldpay, which it acquired for $43 billion in 2019. Since then, FIS shares have lost more than half their value, leaving it with a market capitalization of $39 billion, as the company fights to stay competitive with old and new financial technology players promising better and cheaper services.

The talks for a deal for Worldpay kicked off several months ago when the CEOs of Global Payments, FIS, and Worldpay - Cameron Bready, Stephanie Ferris and Charles Drucker - started discussing how a potential transaction might be structured to benefit each other, according to people familiar with the matter.

The deal effectively values Global Payments' issuer unit at a multiple of 12.3 times its core profits, while Global Payments effectively paid about 8.5 times earnings for Worldpay including cost savings of about $600 million.

The transaction is expected to generate about $1 billion of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization for Global Payments, one of the sources said.

"After several years of uninspiring merchant organic revenue growth and what we consider a lack of strategic cohesiveness, this transaction is a bold step for Global management — and long overdue," William Blair analyst Andrew Jeffrey said in a note.

Shares of Global Payments, which has a market value of about $17 billion, were down more than 17 per cent on Thursday, while FIS, also known as Fidelity National Information Services, jumped nearly 7 per cent.

While the shares of both companies have trailed the S&P 500 index, Global Payments' stock has significantly underperformed rival FIS over the past year.

"This transaction provides us with one of the world's most feature-rich platforms to support e-commerce and enterprise customers," Global Payments CEO Bready said.

The announcement for the deal was complicated by the wider market volatility, which delayed the signing of an agreement by a few days, according to the sources.

BIG EXIT FOR FIS

The deal marks FIS' complete exit from merchant services, after the company sold its 55 per cent stake to GTCR in 2023 at a valuation of $18.5 billion as the payments processor lost ground to traditional financial services players and fintech startups.

For its stake in Worldpay, GTCR will get shares of Global Payments valued at $97 each, giving it a nearly 15 per cent ownership interest in the combined company, valued at about $21 billion. The value of GTCR's stake represents a premium of about 15 per cent to Global Payments' closing price on Wednesday.

The deals are expected to close in the first half of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals.

Global Payments plans to finance the acquisition through proceeds from the Issuer Solutions sale, cash on hand and new debt, including a $7.7 billion debt issuance.

The combined entity is expected to generate about $12.5 billion in adjusted net revenue and $6.5 billion in adjusted core earnings.

Goldman Sachs advised FIS, Wells Fargo advised Worldpay, and Morgan Stanley served as financial advisor to GTCR.

(Additional reporting by Niket Nishant in Bengaluru; Editing by Anirban Sen, Krishna Chandra Eluri, Arun Koyyur and Ed Osmond)