FIS and Worldpay have arranged to merge to bolster their combined financial services portfolio
Upon closing, the combined company is expected to be better positioned to offer enterprise banking, payments, capital markets, and global eCommerce capabilities empowering financial institutions and businesses worldwide.
The combination is expected to expand FIS’ capabilities by enhancing its acquiring and payment offerings while increasing Worldpay’s distribution footprint by accelerating its entry into new geographies.
FIS and Worldpay solutions and services encompass financial institution issuer services, network and merchant services including global leadership in eCommerce, as well as loyalty and fraud solutions benefiting consumers and businesses. Clients are expected to benefit from the combined omnichannel payment and multi-currency capabilities, robust risk, and fraud solutions and advanced data analytics.
“Scale matters in our rapidly changing industry,” stated FIS chairman, president and CEO Gary Norcross said.
“Upon closing later this year, our two powerhouse organizations will combine forces to offer a customer-driven combination of scale, global presence and the industry’s broadest range of global financial solutions. As a combined organization, we will bring the most modern solutions targeted at the highest growth markets.”
“Combining with FIS helps us accelerate the achievement of that, now benefiting from new scale and capabilities that will truly differentiate the company globally,” Worldpay CEO And executive chairman Charles Drucker said.
The merger has drawn mixed reactions from commentators. Barron’s Robert Teitelman questions what Worldpay is number one at: “How do you judge solutions sets, global communities and client focus? Define personalization. And then there’s the accelerating future! Either Norcross is trying to obscure how these two companies fit together in a complicated jigsaw puzzle, or this is just how payment-processing folks talk.”
In a PaymentsSource article by John Adams that comments on the pressure to build a global powerhouse to counter large-scale Fintech mergers, he pulls in a quote from Zil Bareisis, a senior analyst at Celent who said: “As open banking and faster payments grow, the ability to offer end-to-end solutions from merchants to account funding irrespective of payment rails will be increasingly important.”