Global Payments expands its checkout revamp

• Key Insights: Global Payments is expanding its point-of-sale platform. 
• What's at Stake: Rivals like PayPal and Block are also expanding tech. 
• Forward Look: Analyst commentary on Global Payments is getting more positive following earlier criticism. 

With payment companies aggressively adding new tools to shopping and checkout, Global Payments has entered a new phase of its payments technology relaunch.

The payment company has launched its Genius platform for enterprise clients in the U.S., targeting larger quick serve restaurants and large entertainment venues and adding a broader set of merchants to what Global Payments refers to as a "command center"  for merchant-focused technology.

Global Payments has made Genius an important part of its strategy to focus more on payments than its previous mix of payments and services for card issuers. Genius is a mix of hardware and software that can be updated to add new content or merchant services. The platform combines more than a dozen existing payment products along with new products and upgrades designed to accommodate digital payments and multi-channel commerce.

Global Payments hopes to convince merchants that this technology mix is flexible enough for their future needs.

The company is ramping up sales of Genius following Global Payments' April deal to sell its issuer business to FIS for $13.5 billion while acquiring Worldpay from investment firm GTCR and FIS for $22.7 billion. The acquisition and divestiture is expected to close in early 2026 and expands Global Payments' stress on payments and other products for merchants.

Global Payments did not comment on the new Genius rollout. In earlier conference calls with analysts, Global Payments CEO Cameron Bready said, "Genius marks an important milestone in our journey to streamline our solutions, unifying all the Global Payments point-of-sale products into an intuitive and highly configurable new platform, while establishing a stronger and more recognizable brand in the market." 

One place the company is concentrating is sports venues, with a goal of accelerating checkout-free payments, including biometric checkout and other options that reduce the amount of time or navigation a consumer needs to perform to make a purchase. In an earlier interview with American Banker, Chris Siefken, president of Genius Restaurant at Global Payments, said sports facilities are a "proving ground" for new payment technology that can be replicated in other business lines. 

Global Payments is gradually deploying Genius across its merchant categories and countries as it faces competition from Fiserv's Clover and fintech companies such as Block, Stripe and PayPal, which all offer payments and other financial services for businesses, and Toast, which focuses on restaurants. 

PayPal has invested in artificial intelligence to reset its business, while Block reorganized its corporate structure around development tasks rather than lines of business.

PayPal, Google and Mastercard recently boosted investments in agentic AI as a way to enable informed shopping and checkout with little or no human interaction. Payment analysts have criticized Global Payments' strategy amid these trends, though commentary on Global Payments has improved in recent months. 

Global Payments was trading at about $86 on Monday, down from about $112 in September 2024. 

Jefferies analysts noted that Global Payments' merchant growth is expected to accelerate in the coming months, driven by improved salesforce productivity and the rollout of Genius, with Jeffries projecting more than 6% in merchant payments volume growth in the second half compared to 5% the first half. "There is an upbeat tone on the Genius rollout," Jeffries said. 

In the wake of Global Payments' Genius expansion, analysts at TD Cowan raised their price target on the company's stock from $84 to $92.