Worldpay and FIS Deals Shake up Merchant Services in Echo of 2019’s Payments Megamergers

In the FinTech space, 2025 is shaping up to feel a bit like 2019.

This time around, all eyes are on embedded payments, in a nod to the new ways in which transactions are being woven into the fabric of eCommerce and enterprise business models.

On Thursday (April 17), a pair of announcements — in which Global Payments said it was acquiring Worldpay from GTCR and FIS, and is also divesting its issuer solutions unit to FIS — pointed to strategies driven by Global Payments’ intention to become a pure-play commerce solutions firm. By keeping its issuers business (and taking on GPN’s issuers operations), FIS is embedding payments even more fully into its business. 

The price tags of the deals are staggering, as the net purchase price for Worldpay will stand at $22.7 billion, and the sale of the issuing business comes in at $13.5 billion.

The tens of billions of dollars changing hands — and the roster of familiar names — recall the megamergers of 2019, when Global Payments acquired Total System Services for about $22 billion, Fiserv and First Data merged for roughly the same price and FIS took Worldpay that same year for $43 billion.

By the Numbers

In terms of valuation, and according to the materials presented alongside the announcements and a Thursday morning conference call, the purchase prices equate to 8.5x the EBITDA for Worldpay and 12.3x for the issuer solutions segment. EBITDA is a rough measure of cash flow; the multiples can vary widely across the tech sector, depending on the segment. 

As Statista has noted here, the average multiple is around 18.9x, so against that backdrop, the deal-related multiples discussed above indicate relatively slower growth (revenue growth in issuing solutions, for example, might be in the mid single digit percentage range) than might be seen in other areas of technology. 

But the merchant solutions and the issuing businesses throw off a lot of cash, where the EBITDA margins are roughly half of revenues, per the presentation materials.

Beyond the financials, by taking on Worldpay’ eCommerce solutions, there’s also the potential for Global Payments to boost its own integrated, embedded payments offerings. FIS gains the ability to expand the presence of Payrix, its embedded payment service.

FIS said in an X post on Thursday that the sale of Worldpay stake and acquisition of Global Payments’ Issuer Solutions Business would wind up “further enhancing credit processing capabilities and strengthening its payments offering for financial institutions and corporates. Separate company materials posted by FIS said that deal will accelerate its Issuer Solutions growth, and help extend credit processing into its client base.

Global Payments has pointed to scale that would be realized once the deal closes, which is scheduled to do so in the first half of next year. The combined entity would serve more than 6 million customers, underpinning 94 billion transactions and $3.7 trillion in volume across more than 175 countries, per company materials. 

The announcement also noted that FIS and Global Payments have established long-term collaboration and commercial agreements.

During a conference call to discuss the deals, Global Payments CEO Cameron Bready said that with Worldpay, “we significantly increase our exposure to the fastest growing digital trends, geographies and vertical markets in payments.” 

He said later in the call that “bringing together Global Payments’ differentiated merchant solutions focused on SMB customers with Worldpay’s world class capability for eCommerce and enterprise clients positions the combined business to deliver end to end payment solutions … and meaningfully enhances integrated and embedded capabilities for partners, adding Worldpay’s Payrix solution to complement our existing offerings.” 

Worldpay, he continued, processes more than 55 billion transactions annually and serves 1.4 million merchant customers. Worldpay, he said, “has significant technology and product depth across alternative payment mechanisms and FX solutions, payouts, marketplaces, authorization optimization, analytics, and fraud and risk management and provides a highly configurable solution to all delivered by a flexible modern and modular architecture.”

In further detail on the FIS and Global Payments joint commercial efforts, Bready said that the firms will focus on core banking, treasury management, embedded finance and issuer processing.

Asked later in the call about the strategic intent of the deal, Bready said that “as we thought about exiting issuer and becoming pure play, merchant solutions oriented, we thought it was important to diversify away from SMB and be able to play across the entirety of the merchant spectrum.

“Worldpay’s capabilities across eCommerce and enterprise are completely additive to what we have at Global Payments today and position us to benefit from some of the stronger digital end and faster growth areas we see in payments globally — tied to the growth of eComm and in digital payment solutions. So that’s a clearly compelling aspect of the pro forma business in an area where we expect to be able to grow at above market rates,” he added.

He told analysts: “The addition of Payrix and our ability to plug that into our suite of offerings [allows us] to really serve any software platform partner in any way that they need to be served with a variety of different operating models.”

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