Global Payments set the FinTech sector abuzz early Thursday (April 17) with a pair of sweeping transactions.
It sold its issuer solutions business to FIS for $13.5 billion and simultaneously bought Worldpay for a net price of $22.7 billion, according to a Thursday press release. Worldpay is currently co-owned by FIS and private equity firm GTCR.
Global Payments will fully exit the issuer processing field, turning that operation over to FIS as it doubles down on merchant solutions, the release said.
FIS also announced in a separate Thursday press release that it would divest its remaining stake in Worldpay to Global Payments for $6.6 billion, speeding up the monetization of its minority holding.
The moves aim to clarify each company’s strategic focus. Global Payments becomes a pure-play merchant solutions provider, while FIS strengthens its banking and payments suite by bolstering its credit processing scale. Both deals are slated to close in the first half of 2026, pending regulatory approvals.
Under the new structure, Global Payments consolidates its merchant-focused platform with Worldpay’s capabilities in eCommerce and enterprise transactions. This combined enterprise is expected to serve 6 million customers, enabling around 94 billion transactions and $3.7 trillion in payment volumes across more than 175 countries, per the first release.
FIS, meanwhile, intends to use Issuer Solutions’ comprehensive credit processing technology, which spans more than 40 billion transactions annually, to deepen relationships with global financial institutions, according to the second release.
“The acquisition of Issuer Solutions is a strategic and accretive transaction that will expand FIS’ payment product suite,” FIS CEO and President Stephanie Ferris said in the second release, adding that it replaces a “non-cash generating” minority stake with growing recurring revenues and cash flow.
Global Payments CEO Cameron Bready described these agreements as transformative, sharpening the company’s focus on merchant solutions at scale and boosting its offerings for everything from point-of-sale systems to integrated and embedded payments.
“We could not be more excited about the future,” Bready said in the first release.
Worldpay CEO Charles Drucker also underscored in the first release how the deal knits together “two strong teams with similar histories, a shared culture of innovation and deep payments expertise.”
FIS stands to integrate Issuer Solutions’ credit processing suite into its established debit, loyalty and network services, expecting to drive more than $150 million in net EBITDA synergies within three years, according to the first release. The company also projects $45 million in incremental revenue synergies in that period, expanding to at least $125 million in the longer term. In financial terms, Issuer Solutions is expected to give FIS over $500 million in additional adjusted free cash flow within the first 12 months post-closing. While taking on $8 billion in new debt and transferring the value from its Worldpay stake to fund the acquisition, FIS anticipates its pro forma gross leverage to be about 3.4 times and plans to reduce that to 2.8 times within 18 months.
Looking ahead, both Global Payments and FIS reaffirmed their 2025 outlooks. Global Payments cited first-quarter adjusted net revenue growth of over 5%, excluding dispositions, while FIS reported about 4% adjusted revenue growth for the period, per their respective releases. Each company plans to report more detailed quarterly results May 6. In the near term, FIS intends to maintain its dividend strategy and execute M&A and share repurchases, although it expects to pause buybacks briefly after closing to accelerate deleveraging.
If regulators and shareholders give their blessing, the transactions will likely reshape the competitive landscape in digital payments and processing, creating a more specialized ecosystem in which Global Payments focuses entirely on merchant solutions and FIS assumes a more active role in issuer processing for financial institutions worldwide.
Global Payments, FIS Upend FinTech With Dual $13.5 Billion, $6.6 Billion Deals
