Global Payments' top executives addressed analysts' misgivings about its plans to acquire Worldpay after the payment technology company's first-quarter earnings came in flat.
"Global Payments and Worldpay will be better-positioned competitively in the market with a durable business structure, increased investment capacity, significant runway for growth and an enhanced ability to deliver sustainable performance," Global Payments CEO Cameron Bready told analysts Tuesday morning. "Unlike new entrants who often build around narrow solutions, the combined company will offer the full spectrum."
Global Payments in April agreed to sell its issuer solutions business to FIS for $13.5 billion while acquiring Worldpay from investment firm GTCR and FIS for $22.7 billion, a deal that's expected to close in early 2026. It's designed to reduce bank technology company FIS' reliance on merchant acquiring while removing card issuing technology from Global Payments menu.
It's also the latest in a series of
That plan changed five months later, when FIS decided to sell a majority stake in
Weighing in on the Global Payments/Worldpay deal, analyst firm Jeffries said, "We struggle to see how Worldpay and Global Pay, which both have long-term challenges, are ultimately additive to each other."
KeyBanc Capital Markets said, "We'd expect Global Payments' ability to integrate Worldpay to come into question considering the ongoing business transition."
What Global Payments said
As a combined company, Global Payments and Worldpay expects to process nearly $4 trillion in annual volume across 100 billion transactions, Bready said, adding there would be significant merchant coverage serving millions of merchants and thousands of platform and software partners with capabilities scanning physical-card-present environments and global e-commerce. The two companies will also reach across 175 countries with a sales force of more than 4,000 professionals.
"We will be capable of providing end-to-end service across the entire merchant journey from onboarding through transaction processing to settlement, reconciliation and business intelligence, and all of this is supported by our global distribution and service infrastructure," Bready said.
Worldpay manages its business across three channels today, e-commerce and enterprise platforms and small to medium-sized businesses, Global Payments President Bob Cortopassi said during the earnings call, adding that Worldpay has enhanced its technology and product depth across alternative payment methods, foreign exchange solutions, payouts, marketplaces, authorization optimization, analytics and fraud and risk management.
"Worldpay has historically lacked a robust product suite, which we complement nicely by bringing our Genius point of sale offering and leading commerce enablement solutions to the portfolio," Cortopassi said.
Genius is Global Payments' new point of sale system, consisting of some new payment technology and a reorganization of more than a dozen existing products. Genius launched this spring in the U.S. and is scheduled to be available internationally later in 2025.
It's part of a broader
Global Payments' position in the SMB market will remain a concern following the Worldpay deal, Jeffries said, adding Worldpay's e-commerce business duplicates the "core" of rivals including Adyen and Stripe. Jeffries also said the combination comes at a time of macroeconomic uncertainty.
In a research note William Blair said "traditional merchant processors require two attributes to take share and deliver above-market organic revenue growth: distribution scale and technology. To the extent Global was lacking scale, Worldpay addresses that shortcoming."
First-quarter earnings
For the three months ended March 31, Global Payments reported net revenue of $2.41 billion, down 0.3% from the year-ago quarter. Net income totaled $305.7 million, down 2.4% from a year ago and below S&P analysts' expectations of $306.9 million.
Adjusted revenue rose 1% from a year ago and adjusted net income gained 4.9%.
Like payment companies such as
