FIS

A trio of big deals in the payments and financial tech area and continued bank and venture capital interest in fintech investments are creating expectations for a banner year.

The stocks of a wide swath of publicly traded payments companies are rising faster than the overall S&P 500 index, potentially fueled by several mega mergers in the first half of 2019.

The London firm lags the three largest U.S. vendors but bets its new open banking platform can win it more business.

Following the FIS-Worldpay and Fiserv-First Data deals, the payments and bank technology industries are in the midst of major consolidation, and TSYS is looking for a merger partner to stay competitive.

Much like Visa's CEO, Mastercard's top executive is viewing the recent mergers in the payments industry as a chance to build partnerships rather than a competitive threat.

The lumbering pace of product development is one of the typical drags on large bank technology firms, while nimble startups can seemingly launch new offerings overnight.

Less than a day after saying it would work with large core processors in a consolidating industry, Visa has struck a deal to link its B2B platform to FIS' bank clients.

In the month since FIS announced its $43 billion Worldpay deal, the company has disclosed little about its timeline for integrating the two large organizations.

As major payments M&A deals mount, some free agents are awaiting deals of their own — and one area where that’s most apparent is in debit and ATM networks.

FIS’s $43 billion agreement to acquire Worldpay and Fiserv’s $22 billion deal to buy First Data are largely closing the gaps between financial technology and merchant acquiring. But these mergers are only the first of many steps.

What the FIS-Worldpay deal means for banks; behind the OCC's public rebuke of Wells Fargo; ripple effect feared as Fed mulls lifetime bans for two bankers; and more from this week's most-read stories.

Reports of improper charges by perpetrators who know the victim soared last year. Issuers and card networks are failing to tighten security, clearly label transactions and police chargebacks, critics say.

Dumping passwords in favor of interoperable, flexible identity is an evolution as bumpy as it is necessary. FIS and Worldpay’s combination stands to create tools that can smooth this road.

The FIS-Worldpay merger is the largest international payments deal to date, significantly topping the recent Fiserv-First Data merger that turned heads at the beginning of the year. But the FIS deal’s strategic implications could be more interesting than the raw numbers.

The companies could bring something new, such as merchant acquiring to community banks, but their merger could also cause anxiety about giant vendors.

Bank technology giants FIS and Fiserv are spending nearly $66 billion between them in just the past few weeks to add a broad swath of payments technology — including a few key nuggets that will help them go toe to toe with fintechs.

Given the size of the deal — which includes about $9 billion of Worldpay’s debt on top of a $34 billion bid — the pressure’s on to build a global powerhouse that can counter other major fintech mergers announced in the past weeks. FIS must also emerge as a nimble rival to the startups that threaten the old order.

The $35 billion deal could create "a global payments giant"; with the number of community banks dropping as low as 5,477, it may be time for new ones.

The financial services technology company FIS has agreed to buy Worldpay. The deal is valued at $43 billion and will allow FIS to counter the transaction processing scale Fiserv received when it acquired First Data this year. The merger price is based on a $34 billion bid plus $9 billion of Worldpay's debt.

Gateway Mortgage Group says its launch of a digital-only bank is scheduled for this summer.