Global Payments (GPN) FY2025 results: revenue $7.7 billion, down 0.4% on the year

Global Payments is a payments technology company. It lets businesses accept card, cheque and digital payments, and it sells the software those businesses run on top of the payment. Its reach spans North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America. It is headquartered in Georgia, its common stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol GPN, and at the end of 2025 it had approximately 26,000 team members living and working in 37 countries, approximately 50% of them in the Americas, 22% in Europe and 28% in Asia Pacific.

The shape of the company changed in January 2026

In January 2026 Global Payments acquired all of Worldpay Holdco from Fidelity National Information Services and affiliates of GTCR, and at the same moment divested its own Issuer Solutions business to FIS. It paid GTCR approximately $6.2 billion in cash and 43.3 million of its own shares for GTCR's interest in Worldpay, and received approximately $7.7 billion in cash plus FIS's interest in Worldpay for Issuer Solutions. Both are subject to customary working capital and other adjustments, and each side is providing transition services to the other. Issuer Solutions has been reported as discontinued operations since the second quarter of 2025, so the segment information in this filing covers Merchant Solutions before Worldpay arrived. Two smaller businesses went earlier: AdvancedMD, software for small and medium ambulatory physician practices in the United States, sold in December 2024 for approximately $1.1 billion plus up to $125 million of contingent consideration; and Heartland Payroll Solutions, sold to Acrisure in September 2025 for approximately $1.1 billion including up to $75 million of contingent consideration, alongside a mutual referral agreement and a long-term commercial partnership.

What the merchant business does

The payments side covers authorisation, settlement and funding, customer support, chargeback resolution, reconciliation and dispute management, terminal rental, sales and deployment, payment security, and consolidated billing and reporting. Around it sits business management software, including specialty point-of-sale software, for customers in a range of vertical markets, and commerce enablement services: data analytics and customer engagement, human capital management and payroll, accounts receivable automation, inventory management and reporting.

Three ways it reaches a merchant

Point-of-Sale and Software Solutions is payments technology built into point-of-sale systems and business management software the company itself owns, with cloud-based point of sale for restaurants and retail and software in education, covering colleges, universities and schools, real estate, mainly property management, and communities, largely event organisers in health and fitness. Those point-of-sale businesses are being brought under one brand, Genius. Integrated and Embedded Solutions puts the same payments capability inside software owned by technology partners, and inside shopping carts, ordering platforms and marketplaces. Core Payments Solutions is the direct route: direct sales forces worldwide and referral partnerships, selling to merchants across many verticals, alongside merchants referred by independent sales organisations and financial institutions.

How the money is made

Most of it is priced as a percentage of the value of a transaction, or as a set fee per transaction, depending on the payment type and the market. The rest is software subscription and licensing fees, plus fees for particular value-added services that may have nothing to do with the number or value of transactions.

Settling the money

In a typical card payment the merchant and the card issuer never deal with each other directly; they rely on a company like this one to handle authorisation, electronic draft capture, the file transfers that settle the funds and back-office work such as chargeback resolution. It processes the major international card brands, among them American Express, Discover, JCB, Mastercard, UnionPay International and Visa, and domestic debit networks such as Interac in Canada. Settlement runs on two models. Under the sponsorship model a member clearing financial institution sponsors the company, which routes transactions under that member's control and identification numbers, and the card network rules bar Global Payments from touching the settlement funds until the merchant has been paid. Under the direct membership model it is itself a member of the network, routes and clears transactions directly, and is not restricted from performing funds settlement.

From Global Payments' annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2025. The filing

Written from the 10-K filed 20 February 2026: read the full 10-K.