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US: FIS to buy Worldpay in record US$34B

By  |  March 18, 2019

Fidelity National Information Services has agreed to acquire Worldpay for approximately $34 billion in cash and stock, the biggest ever deal in the white-hot payment processing sector, Bloomberg reports.

Florida-based FIS will also take on Worldpay’s net debt of $7.7 billion, bringing the enterprise value of the deal to around $43 billion. FIS shareholders will own about 53% of the combined company, while Ohio-based Worldpay’s investors will get the remainder.

Worldpay, spun off from Royal Bank of Scotland in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, became the UK’s largest payments firm before it was taken over by Vantiv in a $10.4 billion deal that closed in January 2018, the Financial Times reports. The two companies agreed to keep the group headquarters in Cincinnati and run international operations from London while maintaining a secondary stock market listing in the UK.

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