Last week, Fidelity National Services (FIS) agreed to sell a majority stake in its Worldpay business to private equity funds managed by GTCR in a deal that values the merchant payments at $18.5 billion. However, just 4 years ago, FIS acquired Worldpay for more than $30 billion with the intention to revolutionize the industry, but […]
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In a significant development for the payment card industry, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has granted its final approval to a consent order mandating that Mastercard discontinue its practice of obstructing the use of competing debit payment networks. The FTC’s investigation into Mastercard stemmed from allegations that the company employed unlawful business tactics to coerce […]
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On March 10, Visa announced that it completed its acquisition of Tink, an open banking platform that enables financial institutions, fintech and merchants to build financial products and services and move money. This is Visa´s largest acquisition in Europe since it acquired Visa Europe in 2016 and it will expand the company´s capabilities in the […]
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Visa lags behind its main rivals in the European market for direct payments, with open-banking platform Tink potentially unlocking access to a significant market opportunity. However, the deal will undergo significant antitrust scrutiny in the EU and the U.K.
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Nexi, Worldline and other European PayTech companies may be in a better position than Visa, Mastercard and Paypal to reap the benefits of the $139 trillion market for account-to-account (A2A) payments that run outside the card networks.
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The failed attempt by Visa to buy Plaid may indicate a bigger problem for card networks and a few fintech companies, they are growing too large to be ignored by regulators and areas such account-to-account payments and merchant acquiring servicies may enter in antitrust scrutiny territory. In this article we tell you which PayTech companies may be in a better position to continue growing through M&A.
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Mastercard can’t shake off a $19 billion consumer class action in the U.K. which may become the first opt-out collective proceeding (as known in the U.K.) to be certified by the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT). In this article we explain how much Mastercard may need to pay if it loses this case.
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Visa’s $5 billion acquisition of Plaid was unconditionally cleared by the U.K.’s CMA on August 24. It contrasts with the EU conditional approval obtained by Mastercard in its acquisition of Nets on August 17. The analysis conducted by the U.K. regulator left a door wide open for companies like American Express, PayPal and TrueLayer to continue the consolidation in the customer-to-business (C2B) payment sector.
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MasterCard is defending at least 20 damage claims totalling about $2 billion filed by more than 2,000 retailers in the U.K. Five claims were filed in the Competition Appeal Tribunal (“CAT”). The rest were filed in the U.K. High Court. The company’s swipe fees were found anticompetitive by the European Court of Justice in 2014 and recently by the U.K. Court of Appeal. Yet, the counterfactual played an important role to determine whether MasterCard’s fees could be justified under article 101.3 of the Treaty of Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).
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