US financial technology group FIS last month announced plans to spin off Worldpay just four years after paying $43bn for the group in a deal now seen as the high watermark for the consolidation then gripping the payments industry. The admission by FIS, which took an almost $18bn writedown on Worldpay, is not just the latest case of buyers’ remorse over a company that was created in a wave of mergers and whose owners over the past two decades have included buyout firm Bain and fintech group Vantiv. It has also forced a reckoning over the industry’s mantra that scale must be prized at all costs.
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Worldpay and FIS: the ‘original sin’ that tore up a $43bn merger
“One of the challenges WorldPay has had is that WorldPay itself has been a collection of acquisitions – how you knit all those together from a tech point of view so you can offer a unified proposition to your customer base. That’s a challenge they’ve been grappling with."
