What FIS has planned after the Global Payment deals

• Key insights: FIS has completed its purchase of Global Payments' card-issuing tech unit, while selling its merchant tech division to Global Payments. 
• What's at stake: FIS is narrowing its focus on bank clients as fintechs threaten its market share.
• Forward look: FIS will release a suite of bank-focused agentic AI tools in the coming months. 

FIS just closed on what amounts to a baseball trade with Global Payments, picking up more credit card technology from Global Payments, which will take on FIS' merchant technology. One of FIS's first challenges with the deals out of the way will be to get banks on the artificial intelligence bandwagon.

"We have a large number of clients that have concerns about agentic commerce," Chris Como, head of cards and money movement at FIS, told American Banker, noting bank clients are concerned about security and other risks.  

At around the same time that FIS wrapped the Global Payments deal, it launched an agentic AI project through which it will develop and sell services to banks. FIS is making its move as payment companies, software companies and banks pursue the technology, and merchants kick the tires.Agentic AI, which performs functions such as payments with little or no human supervision, has generated a lot of buzz and predictions of growth. By 2030, the agentic commerce market could reach $1 trillion in revenue in the U.S., according to McKinsey. 

Who's that agent?

FIS has partnered with Visa and Mastercard to vet agentic commerce for card-issuing banks — this fits with FIS's goal of focusing more on banks as part of the Global Payments deals. The new products will verify agentic AI transactions and related compliance.

"It made sense to partner with the banks. We want to make sure banks get ahead of the curve before transactions start to ramp up, so they don't wind up with a lot of chargeoffs and disputes," Como said. 

Validating AI agents, or bots, is a key task, since there's little human interaction. That is sparking card and technology companies to develop protocols to make it easier for AI agents to communicate with and recognize each other. 

"The agents often aren't easily identifiable," Como said.

FIS's agentic AI portfolio will be available by the end of the first quarter. Visa's Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard's agentic commerce technology will enable AI agents to initiate and  conduct transactions across their networks via FIS' bank client cards. FIS in the coming months will test authorization, fraud, loyalty and customer servicing, and will develop products that use bank data to support agentic AI..FIS also aims to work with and compete with fintechs. "Fintechs want to do a lot with agentic commerce, but a lot of the data is with the banks," Como said. 

"Traditional" merchant acquirers may struggle with agentic commerce, according to Aaron McPherson, principal at AFM Consulting. The new protocols that have been announced are designed to work best with ecommerce, which plays to the strengths of companies like Block, PayPal and Stripe, McPherson told American Banker. 

"As more consumers use AI to do their shopping, traditional players will be challenged to keep up," McPherson said. "An unfortunate product of FIS's divestment of Worldpay is that they no longer have  a robust acquiring capability, which is going to be important as card issuers seek to provide value in an agentic commerce environment."

Pressure on tech vendors

As payment fintechs such as Block, Stripe and PayPal have become threats to traditional payment processors and bank technology sellers, the traditional players have been merging and deploying other strategies to reorganize their businesses and update models to accommodate e-commerce.

The Global Payments/FIS deals, which were announced in April 2025, unwound earlier deals designed to sell technology to both banks and merchants. In 2019, more than $100 billion changed hands as Fiserv acquired First Data, FIS bought Worldpay and Global Payments merged with TSYS.FIS and Worldpay's partnership did not last long, as FIS in 2023 said it would spin off Worldpay as part of a strategy to enable Worldpay to make acquisitions in a depressed environment for fintechs.

That plan changed five months later, when FIS decided to sell a majority stake in Worldpay to GTCR. For FIS, the purchase of the credit card technology opens up $1.4 billion in cross-sell opportunities according to a research note from William Blair, which adds FIS has about 60% market share of the world's largest 150 banks following the Global Payments deal. FIS would be able to sell card adjacent services such as servicing to Global Payments, as well as broaden the range of card products. 

In an earlier interview, FIS CEO Stephanie Ferris told American Banker that the company had "lost our focus on serving our banking clients...We had just taken our eye off the ball."

FIS, which is scheduled to report earnings on February 10, has seen its stock decline 23% over the past 12 months and 53% in the past five years. 

 "Small to medium sized business payment processing is the last of a dying breed of services that is still sold, in many cases, in-person and door-to-door," Aaron Press, research director at IDC, told American Banker. "Legacy players and ISOs still command a large share of that business, and it's the legacy processors that provide the foundation regardless. But that is a shrinking share of the overall payment market."

 "Traditional" processors tend to be very sales driven, leading with price or customer service rather than technology or consumer experience, according to Press.

"The traditional processors have had an advantage at point of sale, with decades of experience and strong relationships. But those relationships are being tested in the age of embedded payment acceptance and omni-channel commerce, even in some of the most established markets, like grocery or home improvement."