Global Payments Looks Forward to a Post-Issuing Era

Having divested its card-issuing unit and acquired the massive Worldpay processing platform, Global Payments’ top executives early Wednesday said the company is ready to build its already sizable business with a new “pure-play focus” in the highly competitive acquiring sector, as chief executive Cameron Bready put it.

The two big transactions, both of which closed Jan. 12, saw Global Payments pay FIS Inc. $24.25 billion for Worldpay while selling the issuing unit to the same company for $12 billion.

Adding to Global’s renewed focus on merchant processing is its Genius point-of-sale service, introduced in the market in May last year. This business is “performing exceptionally well,” Bready reported during a morning call with equity analysts to discuss Global’s fourth-quarter and 2025 results. He noted, though, that the service is still in its “early innings.”

Also in the early stages is agentic commerce, where Bready noted Global is “expanding investment.” The company is “already seeing results,” he said, in “helping merchants capture more revenue with less friction.” Here, the Worldpay acquisition will help out, as the company last year issued an open-source standard for developers working on AI-based commerce agents.

The Genius launch, which began in the hotly competitive restaurant market and in June expanded to “Genius for Retail,” has since added a drive-through component as well as a version for service businesses. Meanwhile, Global launched an advertising campaign “to put Genius in front of more prospects,” said Bready. Helping in that regard, he noted, is that Global is making Genius available through Worldpay, with a move to offer the platform in the United Kingdom, one of Worldpay’s strongest markets.

“Worldpay has good distribution in the [small-and-medium-size business] space, they just need a better product. Global Payments brings that,” Bready said, adding that Global is working to make Genius adoption simple and quick. “It should be easier to move to Genius than with any other product in the market,” he noted. It might soon be easier to sell the service, as well, as Global plans to hire 300 more salespeople for it, Bready noted.

The company did not release specific numbers for Genius’s uptake, though it released numbers indicating the company as a whole is serving 6 million merchant locations across 175 countries and generating more than $3.7 trillion in payments volume.

For the quarter, Global recorded $2.32 billion in adjusted net revenue, up 1% year-over-year. Revenue for the year came to $9.32 billion, up 2%. The results are reported as prior to the sale of Issuer Solutions and the acquisition of Worldpay.