FIS Welcomes Its Imminent Post-Worldpay Era, With a Stress on Bank Tech

FIS Inc. historically has been known for its banking technology and for its merchant processing. With its sale of the merchant processor Worldpay to Global Payments Inc., the Jacksonville, Fla-based company has been venturing into other new business opportunities, including artificial intelligence and stablecoins, its top management indicated early Wednesday. That $22.7 billion deal is expected to close during the first quarter of next year.

Meanwhile, FIS’s core banking-technology platform has grown as financial institutions look for help with digital technologies for payments, according to chief executive Stephanie Ferris. The company’s money-movement hub, a real-time payments gateway, has signed 40 clients since its launch early in the quarter, she said during the company’s discussion of its third-quarter results. And FIS is making moves to exploit increasing interest among banks and governments in cryptocurrency, particularly stablecoins.

“We’re not going to issue a stablecoin,” Ferris said during a conference call with equity analysts to discuss FIS’s third-quarter results. Instead, the company looks to be an enabler for financial institutions looking to venture into digital money, including asset tokenization. “We’re investing there,” she said. “There’s lots of action in tokenizing assets. We’re hearing a lot of demand there.”

Though FIS earlier this year began working with digital-asset platform Circle Internet Financial, Ferris said her company will not issue a stablecoin. Interest among payments companies in digital currency, particularly stablecoins, has grown over the past year, and particularly since July with the U.S. Congress’s passage of the GENIUS Act, a law governing that digital asset.

Digital-currency ventures aside, “banks are spending money on technology,” Ferris said, a trend that helps companies like FIS, which focuses on financial institutions and capital markets. Digital-payments enablement for financial institutions alone represents a total addressable market of $53 billion, according to FIS. “The banking segment remains the cornerstone of our business,” Ferris said.

And banks are willing to open their wallets for FIS, according to Ferris. “Banks are spending aggressively on digital,” she said, as well as on tech that can support applications for artificial intelligence. As for AI, “we’re in the beginning stages of that,” Ferris said. “We’re feeling really good about that.” That trend, she noted, is part of what FIS views as a major trend. “Overall, across the industry, you’ve seen a bank-modernization movement,” she told the analysts.

For the quarter, FIS posted $2.7 billion in revenue, up 6.3% from the same period last year. Year to date, revenue is up 5.3% to $7.7 billion, driven largely by strength in recurring-revenue growth, the company says. Banking Solutions, the larger of FIS’s two divisions, posted $1.9 billion in revenue for the quarter, with the company’s other unit, Capital Market Solutions, accounting for the remainder.