In a continuing consolidation of the payments space, FIS has agreed to acquire Worldpay for $43 billion, while Worldpay at the same time has become the first payments acquirer to fully enable Amazon Pay for its ecommerce seller customers.
FIS’s main competitor Fiserv was acquired First Data, a payment rival to Worldpay, in January in a $22 billion deal.
With the combined company, FIS will expand its acquiring and payment offerings, gain significant entre into ecommerce and greatly increase Worldpay’s distribution footprint by adding new markets. It will offer enterprise banking, payments, capital markets and global ecommerce capabilities.
And through the partnership with Amazon Pay, it can be used by Worldpay merchants accepting payments in the U.S. Through Worldpay’s API, they can use it as both their gateway provider and acquirer. Shoppers can also use Amazon Pay as both a payment and shipping option at checkout.
TechCrunch noted that the Worldpay-Amazon partnership could conceivably have Amazon eventually offering value-added services for Worldpay merchants, including Prime with its free shipping for members.
“It’s a good question, but we’d prefer not to speak about our future plans,” Patrick Gauthier, VP of Amazon Pay, told TechCrunch when asked about Prime. “Today the announcement is about the extension of our footprint. It will lead us into more opportunities to grow the value proposition for buyers and merchants, but I will reserve discussion about that for the future.”
Using Amazon Pay gives the millions of consumers who have already bought on Amazon the opportunity to pick from addresses and payment options on file, reducing checkout friction by auto-filling fields and thus cart abandonment.
Worldpay processes 40 billion transactions annually worth about $1.7 trillion, through more than 300 payment options in 120 different currencies.