The Largest Confirmed Deal of the Cycle
Global Payments agreed in April 2025 to acquire Worldpay from GTCR and FIS, a transaction reported at $22 billion to $24.25 billion depending on the final structure and timing cited, which completed in January 2026. The same restructuring ran in the other direction too: Global Payments simultaneously divested its TSYS Issuer Solutions business to FIS for $13.5 billion, also completing in January 2026. Together, the two transactions moved tens of billions of dollars of acquiring and issuer-processing infrastructure between three of the industry’s largest names inside a single restructuring window.
A deal at this scale reshapes which sponsor bank and processing relationships sit behind a given ISO’s book, even when the ISO’s own day-to-day sales motion never changes.
Fiserv’s Bet on Embedded-Payments Distribution
Fiserv completed its acquisition of Payfare, an embedded-finance and program-management company, in March 2025, followed a month later by its acquisition of Pinch Payments, an Australian payment facilitator, and an agreement to acquire Money Money Serviços Financeiros S.A., a Brazil-based fintech. All three moves point the same direction: a large processor buying its way deeper into PayFac and embedded-payments distribution rather than relying solely on a traditional ISO channel to reach merchants.
This list is deliberately not presented as a complete industry-wide M&A tally. It is a small, self-compiled set of named, dated deals gathered from company-history sourcing within this research pass, not a single publisher’s official count, and a stronger version of this page would pull a dedicated M&A-tracking firm’s own published payments-sector deal figure if one surfaces in a future pass.
The Numbers
Global Payments agreed in April 2025 to acquire Worldpay from GTCR and FIS, a deal reported at $22 billion to $24.25 billion depending on final structure, completing in January 2026.
As part of the same restructuring, Global Payments divested its TSYS Issuer Solutions business to FIS for $13.5 billion, also completing January 2026.
Fiserv completed its acquisition of Payfare, an embedded finance and program-management company, in March 2025.
Fiserv completed its acquisition of Pinch Payments, an Australian payment facilitator, in April 2025, and agreed the same month to acquire Money Money Serviços Financeiros S.A., a Brazil-based fintech.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.