Global Payments Inc. GPN

The business

Global Payments sells the plumbing of card acceptance: authorization, settlement, funding, terminals, fraud tooling, and vertical software for merchants across the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Two linked transactions completed January 2026 remade the company: it bought Worldpay from FIS and GTCR at a $24.3B valuation and simultaneously sold its Issuer Solutions unit to FIS for $13.5B, leaving a near pure-play merchant business. Merchant acceptance carries the franchise now, essentially 100% of continuing revenue, spanning small-business point of sale, enterprise e-commerce via Worldpay, and integrated software verticals such as restaurants, education, and healthcare. The moat, in one sentence, is switching costs on embedded processing relationships plus software-led distribution; whether that holds for twenty years is a separate audit.

What the financials understate is the transition noise. Q1 FY26, the first quarter with Worldpay inside, printed GAAP revenue of $2.97B and a GAAP diluted loss of $6.59 per share on deal and integration charges, while adjusted net revenue was $2.86B, up roughly 5.5% normalized (4.5% constant currency, per the Q1 release), and adjusted EPS grew 10% to $2.96. The leading indicators are not the GAAP line: they are normalized net revenue growth, merchant retention through the Worldpay migration, and the synergy schedule, roughly $600M of expense synergies and at least $200M of revenue synergies within three years per management's deal targets.