UK’s CMA Clears Global Payments’ Planned Acquisition of Worldpay

Global Payments’ planned acquisition of Worldpay was OK’d Monday (Oct. 20) by the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority.

“The CMA has cleared the anticipated acquisition by Global Payments Inc. of Worldpay Holdco LLC,” the regulator said in a Monday update. “The full text of the decision will be published shortly.”

PYMNTS reported April 17 that this was one of two “sweeping transactions” announced that day by Global Payments and by Worldpay’s co-owner FIS.

Global Payments said it bought Worldpay for a net price of $22.7 billion and simultaneously sold its Issuer Solutions business to FIS for $13.5 billion. Worldpay is co-owned by FIS and private equity firm GTCR.

FIS announced the same day that it would divest its remaining stake in Worldpay to Global Payments for $6.6 billion.

With these deals, Global Payments will fully exit the issuer processing field, turning that operation over to FIS as it doubles down on merchant solutions.

Global Payments CEO Cameron Bready described these agreements at the time as transformative, sharpening the company’s focus on merchant solutions at scale and boosting its offerings for everything from point-of-sale systems to integrated and embedded payments.

“We could not be more excited about the future,” Bready said in an April 17 press release.

PYMNTS reported at the time that that the tens of billions of dollars changing hands in the acquisitions, and the roster of familiar names, recalled the megamergers of 2019, when Global Payments acquired Total System Services for about $22 billion, Fiserv and First Data merged for roughly the same price, and FIS took Worldpay that same year for $43 billion.

The CMA is also conducting an inquiry into the anticipated acquisition by FIS of Global Payments’ Issuer Solutions business, TSYS.

The regulator said in an Oct. 10 update that it rejected the parties’ merger notice because it failed to provide “the prescribed information.” The CMA added that it will restart its formal investigation into that planned merger once it has received a complete merger notice.

FIS said the same day that despite its need to refile information with the CMA, its planned acquisition of Global Payments’ Issuer Solutions business remains on track.