Global Payments → Worldpay

A three-way exchange that unwound the 2019 payments wave: Global Payments bought Worldpay from GTCR and FIS for a net $22.7bn, and in the same transaction sold its issuer-processing business — the former TSYS — to FIS.

Bought from GTCR and FIS for a net $22.7bn, alongside the simultaneous sale of Global Payments' Issuer Solutions unit to FIS.

Value

$24.3B

Announced

April 2025

Completed

January 2026

Sector

Payments

Deal type

acquisition

Acquirer

Global Payments (United States)

Target

Worldpay (United States)

Why it mattered

Six years after FIS paid $43bn for Worldpay and Global Payments paid $21.5bn for TSYS to combine issuing and acquiring, both companies concluded the combination had been a mistake and used each other to undo it. Global Payments became a pure merchant acquirer with Worldpay's scale in e-commerce and enterprise; FIS returned to bank technology with the issuer-processing business it lacked and without the acquirer it had impaired; GTCR, which had bought its 55% of Worldpay in 2024 at an $18.5bn valuation, sold two years later at $24.25bn and kept a stake in the enlarged Global Payments.

The structure is the interesting part: rather than a sale for cash, each company paid the other partly in the business it no longer wanted, so that the net cash moving was far smaller than the headline values and the tax on the disposals was reduced. The deal closed in January 2026 after competition clearance.

What it left behind

A payments industry organised the way it was before 2019 — specialists in issuing and specialists in acquiring — with the difference that the acquirers are now global and the growth still belongs to the platform companies. For anyone pricing a "combine both sides of the transaction" thesis, the round trip from 2019 to 2026 is the reference case.