FIS Doubles Down on Issuing While Riding an AI Wave

With its sale earlier this month of Worldpay to Global Payments Inc., FIS Inc. is focusing on its longstanding business in card issuing for banks, a business where it sees strong returns, especially as banking mergers unfold—but it’s not seeking just any bank. “Our strategy is partnering with banks growing faster than the market” and can sustain that pace, noted Stephanie Ferris, chief executive and president.

The Jacksonville, Fla.-based processor is looking forward to a new era in technology for issuing, especially in artificial intelligence, its top management said during a conference call early Tuesday held to present fourth-quarter 2025 and full-year results. And merger activity in banking is a headwind, Ferris told equity analysts on the call. “It’s a generational moment in bank M&A. We’ve been on the winning side of most [mergers], and we expect to see more M&A, so stay tuned on that.”

The technology of the moment is agentic commerce —bits of code that can buy from online merchants on behalf of consumers—and Ferris stressed FIS’s rapidly mounting activity in this form of AI as the company has launched its first platform supporting agentic commerce. Accurate recognition, she noted, is critical now as these agents increasingly spill into cyberspace. “Where we’re focused is on ensuring that when we receive an agentic transaction on behalf of a bank we can identify it, so [for example] we don’t decline it because it’s shopping at a weird time of night.”

Ferris did not offer numbers on how fast technology like this is growing, but she hinted that the company’s clients are fast embracing it. “I’ve never seen banks adopt a technology faster than they’re adopting AI,” she noted during the call. But that adoption rate calls for faster development in technology to fight fraud, Ferris said. “There are a lot of bad guys out there, and we run fraud models, so we’re spending a  lot of time on how to update [those] models for agentic commerce so we can make sure we can authorize transactions.”

FIS boosted its business in card issuing when, as part of that Worldpay deal, it acquired Global’s issuing solutions unit for $13.5 billion. The business came to Global in 2019 when it paid $21.5 billion for the processor Total System Services. “We have now added the marquis issuing business globally,” Ferris said. “We’ll be able to leverage our relationship with [financial institutions] worldwide.” Indeed, she noted, “we have by far the biggest credit business in North America.”

With that acquisition in hand, FIS reports processing for more than 1 billion accounts on file generating 73 billion transactions annually. “The banking industry is strong,” said Ferris. “Banks are executing on growth agendas, and emerging technology is becoming mainstream.”

For the year, FIS reported $10.5 billion in revenue, up 5.8% from 2024. The company posted $2.7 billion in fourth-quarter revenue, up 7.4%. Earnings per share grew 20% year-over-year to $1.68.