Record-breaking FinTech divorce: FIS mulls $15 billion Worldpay sale 😳; American Express is doubling down on SMEs. And winning 👏

FinTech is Eating the World, 4 July

Hey Everyone,

Happy Tuesday & happy Fourth of July to all my American readers and Friends!🇺🇸 Today’s issue is especially interesting since we’re looking at the biggest-ever FinTech divorce as FIS mulls Worldpay sale (a deeper dive into the ins & outs of the deal), and American Express which is doubling down on SMEs (& how it’s building a B2B FinTech giant). Let’s jump straight into the hot stuff 🌶

Record-breaking FinTech divorce: FIS mulls $15 billion Worldpay sale 😳

The MASSIVE News🔥 Global financial technology giant Fidelity National Information Services aka FIS FIS 0.00%↑ is reportedly considering selling a majority stake in Worldpay to private equity groups.

As reported by the Financial Times, the deal should be worth more than $15 billion and would mark a reversal of FIS’ previously reported plan to spin off Worldpay as a separate entity.

This is probably the biggest-ever corporate divorce in FinTech, so let’s take a closer look at it.

More on this 👉 I initially covered the news back in February, but now we must do this through different lenses.

First, we must remember that FIS created a payments behemoth when it bought Worldpay for a whopping $43 billion back in 2019 (it was the biggest FinTech deal ever - see below).

At the time, Worldpay was the largest global merchant acquirer, focusing on payment processing technology and solutions for merchants. FIS' acquisition of Worldpay effectively gave it access to all of Worldpay's clients - adding to FIS' 20,000 global clients - and transactional data. This has hence enabled the firm to significantly build out its merchant services and tools, as well as strengthen its positioning as a leader in the global payments space. As an effect, FIS' revenues grew 13% to $3.19B in 3Q2020. Not bad at all 👏

So sale then? 🤔 The truth is that corporate mergers fail more often than marriages. It seems that FIS & Worldpay isn’t an exception here too.

Let’s take a deeper dive into this unpacking the underlying causes and problems, and see what might come next (if anything) out of this.