In recent weeks, the 51-year-old chief executive officer of Fidelity National Information Services Inc. quietly engineered a trio of deals that will see the Worldpay payments business change hands for a fifth time in 15 years. The move came after Ferris spent nearly a decade helping build Worldpay into the country’s third-largest merchant payment processor.
With the latest transactions, bankers will have reaped tens of millions in fees on the share sales and deals that they’ve arranged for Worldpay since 2010. The most recent transactions also come at a particularly crucial time as dealmakers across Wall Street have seen merger activity stymied and IPOs paused over the uncertainty created by US President Donald Trump’s tariff policies.
That Ferris — along with bankers at firms including Wells Fargo & Co. and Morgan Stanley — could pull off the complex, three-way deal amid that uncertainty was all the wilder.
“When I got into the seat, people were a little skeptical because my background came out of payments — not necessarily the core banking side of the business,” Ferris said in an interview. “What I tell people is if I’m convicted and make a decision, for example, to run FIS, then I’m going to run FIS.”
Ferris’ path to the top seat at FIS — one of the country’s largest financial firms that helps process more than $12 trillion a year — was an unusual one. Raised in Cincinnati alongside three brothers, she earned an accounting degree from Miami University in Ohio. Her father supported their Midwestern household selling leather wallets to drug stores.
After college, she moved back in with her parents while she worked as an audit manager for PwC to pay off her student loans. From there, she took a job at Fifth Third Bancorp.
At Fifth Third, she worked her way up through the lender’s payments processing division, which was spun out in 2009 and was ultimately renamed as Vantiv. Eight years later, Vantiv announced it would acquire Worldpay for $10.4 billion. Ferris was named chief financial officer of the combined entity.
In early 2019, Fiserv Inc. - a top rival to FIS - agreed to acquire the payments processor First Data Corp. for $22 billion. The deal kicked off a wave of consolidation in the industry that led to FIS gobbling up Worldpay for a whopping $43 billion. Another of their rivals — Total System Services Inc. — was bought by Global Payments Inc. for $21.5 billion.
That trio of megadeals married up two disparate sides of the financial ecosystem. While companies like FIS provide infrastructure to financial institutions — including critical systems like core banking platforms that track customer deposits — companies like Worldpay equip merchants with the systems they need to accept payments.
FIS Woes
Within FIS, the growing pains were felt almost immediately.
Ferris was elevated to become chief operating officer of the company after the Worldpay deal. But management struggled to integrate the two businesses and achieve the synergies it had promised. In 2022, after facing pressure from activist shareholders D.E. Shaw & Co. and Jana Partners, FIS promoted her to become chief executive officer.
“When she came in, I think she found a company that had its problems,” FIS Chief Financial Officer James Kehoe told investors at a conference last year. “It had spread its talent and its capital far too thinly across the company. It was incapable of managing the combination of Worldpay plus traditional FIS, and it stretched the management team too much.”
Untangling the Worldpay integration was one of Ferris’ first major tasks when she became CEO. Once in the seat, she led a strategic overhaul — focusing the company on its core offerings, cutting jobs and promising new cost savings.
Within months, she revealed that FIS would book a $17.6 billion writedown on Worldpay and announced plans to exit the business. The company ultimately sold a majority stake in the division to private equity firm GTCR LLC in a deal that valued Worldpay at $18.5 billion at the time.
“That was a very hard decision for me personally because I had brought it in,” Ferris said. “But I stand behind those decisions because they were right for shareholders, colleagues and clients and feel really good about where everything’s landed.”
Three-Way Tieup
All along, Ferris has been looking for ways to offload the rest of the Worldpay business entirely. That’s where Global Payments came in.
In Ferris’ mind, one easy way forward for both companies was to swap assets: Global Payments could take Worldpay and become a behemoth in the so-called business of merchant acquiring, giving it more scale and heft to compete against players like Adyen NV, Stripe Inc. and PayPal Holdings Inc.
In exchange, FIS would get the issuer-solutions business and return to its roots as a major technology provider to the largest banks and capital markets players in the world.
That’s ultimately what the two companies - along with GTCR — announced on April 17: Global Payments acquired the 45% stake in Worldpay that FIS still owned as well as the 55% stake held by GTCR as part of two deals that valued Worldpay at $24.3 billion. Global Payments, meanwhile, agreed to offload the issuer-solutions business to FIS in a $13.5 billion deal.
What Bloomberg Intelligence says:
Fidelity National Information Services’ (FIS) sale of Worldpay to Global Payments — while buying its issuer business — unlocks about $2.7 billion of value and strengthens FIS’ position as a top-three banking-tech provider.
— Diksha Gera, senior industry analyst
So far, stockholders seem to like the idea: Shares of FIS have risen about 6% since the announcement, giving the Jacksonville, Florida-based company a $41 billion valuation.
“Credit issuer-processing is very highly recurring, the clients hardly ever churn,” said David Koning, a senior research analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co. “Whereas merchant acquiring clients churn at a rate around mid-teens per year.”
