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.