Global Payments to purchase Worldpay in $24bn deal | USAEMALL.com

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Payments provider Global Payments has struck a $24.2bn cash-and-stock deal to buy rival Worldpay from GTCR less than two years after the private equity group bought a majority stake in the company.

As part of a three-way deal announced on Thursday, GTCR will receive 59 per cent of the deal value in cash and the remainder in Global Payments stock.

Fintech group FIS, which owned a 45 per cent stake in Worldpay, will take control of Worldpay’s issuer solutions arm, valued at $13.5bn.

After the deal closes, Chicago-based GTCR will own about a 15 per cent stake in Global Payments. It originally bought a 55 per cent stake in Worldpay from FIS in July 2023 in a transaction that valued the business at $18.5bn including debt.

Worldpay is one of the world’s largest providers of payment services, used by merchants and consumers to process card-based transactions globally both online and in physical stores. The sale of the business will yield a large and speedy windfall for GTCR, a midsized buyout group that beat larger rival Advent International to buy Worldpay in 2023 in one of the largest corporate carve-outs in history. 

GTCR brought back Worldpay’s former chief executive Charles Drucker to lead a revitalisation of the business, which had seen its growth stall under the ownership of FIS. 

GTCR invested more than $5bn of equity to take control of Worldpay and raised more than $8bn in debt to fund the purchase, people told the Financial Times at the time.

At a $24.25bn valuation, GTCR will have more than doubled its initial equity investment and FIS’s minority stake has also surged in value by billions of dollars.

Founded in 1989 as part of UK bank NatWest to process card payments at bricks-and-mortar retailers, Worldpay is a rare example of a British technology group to have achieved global success. It has changed hands multiple times since it first launched under the name Streamline.

Royal Bank of Scotland took over the business as part of its acquisition of British bank NatWest and expanded it through a series of overseas acquisitions. But RBS was forced to spin it off eight years later as a condition of its £46bn bailout by the UK government at the height of the financial crisis.

Private equity groups Advent International and Bain Capital bought Worldpay in 2010, before floating it on the London Stock Exchange in 2015.

It was taken private by US payments group Vantiv two years later and moved its headquarters to Ohio. FIS bought it in 2019 in a $43bn deal as part of a wave of consolidation in the sector before spinning it off in 2023.