---
title: "Worldline → Ingenico"
url: "https://mahouse.world/ma-deals/worldline-buy-ingenico-2020"
type: "M&A deal"
year: "2020"
author: "Ihor Vlasov"
reviewed: "2026-09-20"
---

# Worldline → Ingenico

A cash-and-shares offer implying €7.8bn of equity value for the world's largest maker of payment terminals and a major European acquirer, creating the largest merchant acquirer in Europe at the time and the fourth-largest payment services company in the world.

A cash-and-shares offer implying €7.8bn of equity value, creating the largest merchant acquirer in Europe at the time.

- **Acquirer:** Worldline (France)
- **Target:** Ingenico (France)
- **Value:** $8.6B
- **Announced:** February 2020
- **Completed:** October 2020
- **Sector:** Payments
- **Deal type:** acquisition

## Why it mattered

Worldline, spun out of Atos, processed payments for banks and merchants across the Benelux, Germany and France; Ingenico made the terminals on those merchants' counters and had built an acquiring business around them. The deal put the hardware and the processing in one company at the moment consolidation was reshaping the sector on both sides of the Atlantic, and it was struck weeks before the pandemic closed the shops those terminals sat in — completion in October 2020 came after the worst of the lockdowns.

The strategy was to sell the terminal business, keep the acquiring, and use Ingenico's merchant relationships to build a European champion in the mould of Worldpay. The terminals went to Apollo in 2022 for €2.3bn; the acquiring stayed.

## What it left behind

A larger Worldline with the problems of scale: a 2023 profit warning, driven in part by the termination of high-risk merchant relationships that regulators and banks had pressed it to end, took more than half off the share price in a day. The deal is cited on both sides of the argument about European payments consolidation — proof that scale can be assembled, and proof that assembling it is not the same as running it.

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