Global Payments celebrates M&A regulatory wins

• Key insights: Global Payments earnings beat Wall Street estimates. 
• What's at stake: The payment company's deal to acquire Worldpay has cleared major regulatory hurdles. 
• Forward look: Global Payments plans to integrate Worldpay in early 2026. 

Buoyed by an earnings beat and a favorable regulatory environment, Global Payments is planning to incorporate its planned acquisition Worldpay into its business. 

"The overlap is very attractive. They have a distribution that is complimentary to what we do today," Global Payments CEO Cameron Bready said during Tuesday's earnings call, adding "scale has become everything in our business." 

For the quarter ending September 30, Global Payments reported net revenue of $2.43 billion, up 6% from the prior year, and earnings per share were up 11% to $3.26. That beat Wall Street analyst expectations of $3.23 EPS and net revenue of $2.41 billion, according to Zacks Investment Research.

Global Payments affirmed net revenue growth in the range of 5-6% for the full year, with EPS growth at the high end of the 10-11% range.

In a note, Jefferies analysts said Global Payments' earnings were "clean enough..as expected, merchant revenue growth accelerated by 50 basis points to +6% year over year and small to medium sized business volume growth was 5.5%." 

Moving forward

The Atlanta-based Global Payments is in the midst of acquiring the Cincinnati-based Worldpay for $22.7 billion. 

Because both companies have operations in the U.K., they needed approval from the Competition and Markets Authority, the country's anti-trust watchdog. The CMA recently approved Global Payments' Worldpay deal, which U.S. regulators approved in July. The CMA is still investigating an adjacent deal in which bank technology firm FIS will buy Worldpay's issuer business, TSYS, for $13.5 billion.

"The CMA approval is a critical milestone," Bready said, adding he anticipates the Worldpay acquisition to be completed in the first quarter of 2026. Global Payments had previously targeted "early 2026" to close the Worldpay deal, so Tuesday's announcement was less of an acceleration than it was affirming a target. 

With U.K. and U.S. regulatory approvals, integration planning is underway, Bready said.  The Global Payments/Worldpay combination will have more than 6 million customers in more than 175 countries and process 94 billion transactions totalling $3.7 trillion yearly. 

In addition to broadening Global Payments' merchant scale, the merger may also help the company support stablecoins through Worldpay's collaboration with cryptocurrency technology firm BVNK, which will enable Worldpay's clients to process USDC payments. Worldpay also recently entered a partnership with buy now/pay later lender Affirm to integrate Affirm's lending options into Worldpay's software clients. Worldpay's embedded payments platform supports transactions for more than 1,000 software-as-a-service companies that have processed more than $400 billion in payments volume and 4.6 billion transactions over the past 12 months. 

Global Payments competes with Stripe, Block and PayPal, along with more traditional payment processors such as Fiserv and Adyen. Analysts asked if Global Payments could benefit from "challenges at a competitor" (without directly referencing Fiserv's recent earnings miss)."It's hard to comment on another company," Bready said. "But I'm pleased with what we're seeing in our business."

Genius' growth

The second major leg of Global Payments strategy is the company's relaunch of its Genius point of sale system, which will integrate with Worldpay's merchants after the acquisition closes. Genius is a combination of more than a dozen existing and new payment systems. It launched in May for restaurants and retailers in June and large enterprise clients in September. 

Global Payments also started selling the Genius POS system to colleges; and launched its handheld point of sale device for Genius, with early adopters including the University of Illinois. Genius recently launched in the U.K. and plans rollouts in Austria, Germany, Ireland, other European nations and Australia in late 2025 or early 2026. Since launching Genius for SMB restaurant and retail verticals, monthly recurring revenue from new sales increased 75% from June to September, and more than 90% of Genius sales are to new customers, Global Payments reported on Tuesday.

To improve Genius' adoption, the firm has added base pay plus commission for sales people, replacing 100% commission. This will encourage sales of new technology, rather than sales people taking a "wait and see" approach for new technology, Bready said. The company plans to hire 500 sales people in North America. Global Payments has additionally partnered with Google to support agentic commerce, including adding Google's agentic AI protocol. The company has also expanded use of AI for internal technology work. 

Global Payments' strategy has drawn criticism from analysts in the past year, starting with JPMorgan in late 2024 saying the company's stock was in "no man's land." In a more recent research note, Jefferies said the continued Genius rollout, with upcoming international debuts in Canada, Mexico in the new term and Europe and Asia Pacific in 2026 make analysts "more upbeat on the potential to take share from [rival Fiserv's] Clover as a lower-cost alternative."