---
title: "GTCR → Worldpay (55% stake)"
url: "https://mahouse.world/ma-deals/gtcr-buy-worldpay-55-stake-2023"
type: "M&A deal"
year: "2023"
author: "Ihor Vlasov"
reviewed: "2026-09-20"
---

# GTCR → Worldpay (55% stake)

A private equity firm paid $11.7bn for 55% of Worldpay at an $18.5bn valuation, four years after FIS had bought the whole company for $43bn and written $17.6bn of it off — among the largest write-downs of any acquisition on record.

GTCR paid $11.7bn for 55% at an $18.5bn valuation, unwinding the FIS deal of four years earlier at under half the original price.

- **Acquirer:** GTCR (United States)
- **Target:** Worldpay (55% stake) (United States)
- **Value:** $18.5B
- **Announced:** July 2023
- **Completed:** February 2024
- **Sector:** Payments
- **Deal type:** asset purchase

## Why it mattered

FIS had impaired Worldpay by $17.6bn in early 2023 and announced a spin-off; GTCR's offer replaced the spin with a sale that gave FIS cash, a 45% stake in whatever GTCR could make of the business, and an exit from a strategy that had not worked. For GTCR it was the largest private equity payments deal since KKR's purchase of First Data in 2007, and the thesis was the opposite of FIS's: Worldpay would do better as a standalone acquirer, free to invest in its platform and to compete with Adyen and Stripe for enterprise merchants, than as a division of a bank-software company.

The deal was structured as a carve-out under time pressure — separating Worldpay's systems, contracts and people from FIS took most of a year and closed in February 2024 — and it priced the business at roughly 8 times EBITDA, half the multiple FIS had paid.

## What it left behind

GTCR held the stake for less than two years. In April 2025 Global Payments agreed to buy Worldpay for $24.25bn, giving GTCR a gain of about 30% on the valuation and a continuing interest in the buyer. The episode became the standard illustration of two things in payments M&A: a strategic buyer's multiple built on cross-selling that does not arrive, and a private equity buyer's return built on buying at the bottom of that disappointment.

— Ihor Vlasov, M&A FinTech Expert. Last reviewed 2026-09-20. https://mahouse.world/authors/ihor-vlasov