Worldpay: The story of a 54 year-old $24B deal (TWIF 4/20)

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This week, Global Payments – a publicly-listed 25 year-old payments provider focused mostly on merchants and issuers – announced that it will acquire Worldpay for $24.25 billion from GTCR, simultaneously selling its Issuer Solutions business to FIS. Worldpay provides payment services to merchants and financial institutions globally generating 40 billion transactions across 146 countries and 135 currencies.

The move marks a pivot for Global Payments away from its own issuer-focused business to a more merchant-focused financial services orientation, with Worldpay theoretically picking up the slack. Worldpay provides payment strategies to 1,400+ financial institutions, including more than 700 credit unions throughout the U.S., supporting over 33 million debit cards and processing more than 15.7 billion transactions each year.

If these names look familiar, it's because FIS previously bought Worldpay for about $35 billion in 2019 and sold most of its stake last year to GTCR (the sale completed in Feb '24).

The market was not enthused about Global Payments' new merchant focus or ingestion of the payments business, sending shares down 17%.

Worldpay itself has had a circuitous path, starting life as Midwest Payment Systems in 1971, a division of Fifth Third Bank built to provide electronic funds transfers to financial institutions. In 2009, MPS – renamed Fifth Third Processing Solutions – spun off from Fifth Third Bancorp and was launched as a joint venture with Advent International.

The company adopted the name Vantiv in June 2011 as a step towards becoming a public company and developed a new focus on e-commerce payment processing solutions to cater to the growth of the consumer internet (around the same time as a little-known payment provider Stripe was beginning to take off).

Vantiv grew through a series of e-comm and in-person payment acquisitions, the largest of which was an acquisition of the UK's Worldpay for $10.4 billion in 2017.

But instead of going public, the renamed Worldpay was acquired by FIS in 2019 for $43 billion – at the time the largest international payments deal in history – before then being spun out and sold to GTCR, who purchased a 55% stake at an $18.5 billion valuation in 2023.

The Global Payments acquisition marks the latest chapter in the firm's history, but it remains to be seen whether it will be the last.

Please find another week of fintech exits and deep reads below.

(👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know. Find me at @nikmilanovic, @twifintech, and @ndm)

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📖 Reads of the Week

☯️ Exits

💻 IPOs & SPACs

Webull, a digital investment platform, saw a significant surge in its stock price, climbing up to 500% to reach $79.56 on its second trading day after going public via a SPAC merger with SK Growth Opportunities. It has a current market cap of $16 billion.
- The merger, completed in February 2024, marked the culmination of Webull's plans to go public, which were initially considered during the 2021 market boom but postponed due to the 2022 downturn.
- Founded in 2016 by Wang Anquan and headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida, Webull reported 4.3 million funded accounts managing $8.2 billion in assets by the end of 2023 and now boasts approximately 20 million users globally.
- The deal gives Anquan an on-paper net worth of over $5 billion.

🤝 M&A - Fintech

Global Payments agreed to acquire Worldpay from GTCR for $24 billion.
KKR agreed to acquired OSTTRA, a derivatives trade processing platform, from IHS Markit and CME Group for $3.1 billion.
Pipe acquired Glean AI* to expand its embedded finance platform with spend management solutions.
Banked acquired VibePay to strengthen its open banking and account-to-account payment offerings.
Checkr acquired Truework to enhance its income and employment verification services.
Securitize acquired the fund services business of MG Stover, boosting assets under administration to $3.8 billion.
Marcum sold its remaining stake in its Asia business, following the earlier CBIZ deal.
Inveniam acquired Hedgehog to build intelligent data infrastructure and enable scalable agentic AI for private markets.
Intuit announced it would integrate Deserve’s co-branded card technology platform and team to accelerate innovation in money movement products.
IQ-EQ acquired AMAL Group to strengthen its private markets and fund administration capabilities.
Forge revealed plans to acquire Accuidity to drive growth in private market liquidity solutions.
Banknote printer De La Rue accepted a $347 million takeover bid from private equity firm Atlas Holdings.
Recharge moved into the B2B digital rewards market with its acquisition of UK digital gift company Giftcloud from Groupon.
Barclays is reportedly nearing a deal to sell a stake in its payments unit to Brookfield.
NorthRow, a U.K. regtech firm, is exploring a potential sale amid rising interest in the compliance sector.

🏦 M&A - Bank and FinServ

KKR will buy a joint venture of S&P Global and CME Group in a $3.1 billion deal. London-based OSTTRA — which provides post-trade services across interest rate, foreign exchange, equity and credit asset classes — will be divided evenly between financial data provider S&P Global and derivatives marketplace CME.
StoneX, which trades 18,000 over-the-counter products and 140 currencies across 40 exchanges, will buy broker R.J. O’Brien for $900 million.

GENIUS bill > STABLE bill

a. doesn't outright ban yieldbearing stables
b. allows tokenized reserves
c. issuance on decentralized network can't be grounds for rejection
d. state-level oversight vs STABLE (must meet/exceed federal reqs)
e. lighter-touch regs for smaller stables
— Bridget (@bridge__harris) April 16, 2025

Every time SPY -5% Dalio comes out of his hovel to talk about 1,000 year cycles and currencies under Attila the Hun
— Hiroo Onoda (@OnodaCapital) April 14, 2025

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Sponsored Content

With 100+ years of banking experience and over 20 years of working with VC and PE-backed tech companies, Wolf & Company is the advisor of choice for growth-focused fintechs navigating regulatory scrutiny and preparing to access capital markets. As your trusted advisor, we’ll work to address challenges and achieve success – together.