Global Payments

Global Payments was spun off from National Data Corporation in 2001 and has grown almost entirely through acquisitions since. In 2016 it bought Heartland Payment Systems, which eight years earlier had suffered one of the largest card data breaches on record. In 2019 came the roughly 21-billion-dollar merger with TSYS, which also brought the issuing side: processing for banks that hand out cards.

In 2025 it reversed course. The issuing business was to go to FIS, and in return Global Payments bought Worldpay from FIS and the private equity firm GTCR. The result is a pure-play acquirer in an industry where the same handful of names have been trading ownership of each other for decades, and where it can be hard to keep track of who owns whom this quarter.