Global Payments Scales Up Yet Again

The lucrative and growing payments market is one that increasingly rewards scale, and the leading players are acting accordingly. First Data (FDC) and Fiserv (FISV) are pairing up, as are Fidelity National (FIS) and Worldpay (WP). While not on the same scale, JPMorgan (JPM) is also scaling up, recently announcing the $500 million acquisition of InstaMed to target the fast-growing healthcare payments vertical. Not to be outdone (or left behind), Global Payments (GPN) has announced an acquisition of Total System Services (TSS) that should boost it to around 8% share of the U.S. acquiring market while filling in some gaps in its covered verticals.

Fintech is still hot, and although not every analyst or investor is sold on Global Payments’ strategy of using wholly-owned software offerings to drive customer acquisition and retention for its payments business, the shares seldom trade at much of a discount. Although I don’t think Global Payments is particularly cheap, I believe today’s share price is a relatively fair reflection of the value of the business at this point.

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Global Payments Scales Up Yet Again