Unlock Editor’s Digest Lock for Free
FT editor Roula Khalaf will select your favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Payments Provider Global Payments attacked $24.2 million in cash and stock transactions to buy rival global sustainability from GTCR within two years of Private Equity Group’s acquisition of a majority stake in the company.
As part of the three-party agreement announced Thursday, GTCR will receive 59% of the transaction value in cash and the rest in global settlement stocks.
Fintech Group FIS, which owns a 45% stake in WorldPay, manages WorldPay’s issuer solution arm, worth $13.5 billion.
After the agreement ends, Chicago-based GTCR owns approximately 15% stake in global payments. Originally, in July 2023, we purchased 55% of WorldPay stake from FIS through trading and valued the business at $18.5 billion, including debt.
WorldPay is one of the world’s largest providers of payment services used by merchants and consumers to process card-based transactions worldwide, both online and physical stores. The sale of the business will bring massive, rapid pimples to GTCR, a mid-sized acquisition group that defeated its large rival Advent International to buy world domination in 2023 with one of the biggest corporate carve-outs in history.
GTCR revived WorldPay’s former CEO Charles Drucker to lead the revitalization of a business that had been stalling growth under FIS ownership.
GTCR invested more than $5 billion in stock to control the world, raising more than $8 billion in debt to fund purchases, people told the Financial Times at the time.
At a valuation of $24.25 billion, GTCR has more than doubled its initial equity investments, with FIS’s minority stakes skyrocketing in billions of dollars.
Founded in 1989 as part of the UK bank Natwest, WorldPay is a rare example of the UK technology group’s global success, to process card payments at brick and mortar retailers. It has changed hands several times since it first launched under the name Streamline.
Scotland’s Royal Bank took over the business as part of its acquisition of Natwest and expanded it through a series of overseas acquisitions. However, RBS was forced to spin off it eight years later as a condition for a £46 billion bailout by the UK government at the height of the financial crisis.
Private Equity Groups Advent International and Bain Capital purchased WorldPay in 2010. It came to the London Stock Exchange in 2015.
Two years later it was private by the US payment group Vantiv and moved its headquarters to Ohio. Before its spin-off in 2023, FIS bought it in a $43 billion deal in 2019 as part of a wave of integration in the sector.
