Payments M&A spools up | Payments Dive
Payments deal-making has spooled up this month as the industry heads into what is often more merger and acquisition activity in the latter half of the year.
Digital startup Stripe’s reported $53 billion bid for digital payments pioneer PayPal Holdings, and processor Fiserv’s possible sale of a debit network are inklings of busy boardroom discussions with investment bankers.
With some stocks in the industry badly beat up – witness Fiserv’s 70% drop over the past year – there are increased incentives to buy and sell.
Low stock prices are often a good indicator that deal-making is poised to increase, said Pitchbook analyst Rudy Yang, who follows the fintech and payments industry merger and acquisition activity. “I think that there will be a pickup,” Yang said in an interview last week.
Companies are especially interested in assets that will bolster their new strategies in artificial intelligence and stablecoins, two nascent areas of growth that have quickly fed into global trends.
While card networks, including Mastercard and American Express, are fueling some of the M&A activity too, smaller players are also joining in. For smaller players, consolidation is persisting in some of the more fragmented corners of the industry.
For the first half of the year, Pitchbook’s figures for the broader fintech sector showed merger and acquisition volumes and values to be about the same as 2025.
The Strawhecker Group, a payments industry firm which tracks the payments niche closely, also noted that 36 deals announced through June 24 was about the same count as for the period last year.
That said, the value of payments deals for the first half of this year was higher than last year, as bigger, public companies increased buying, said Sam Wares, a director at TSG who tracks industry deal-making.
The reported deal value through that June date was about $20 billion, but that’s only for the 11 transactions that reported financial details (most didn’t). So, with the volume of deals climbing this year, the year-end transaction value may eclipse the $48.4 billion in activity last year.
A second half increase in activity is to be expected, based on past patterns, including the past three years, and there’s no reason to believe that would change this year, Wares said in an interview this month.
Card networks drive deal-making activity
The card networks are behind much of the increased activity, perhaps partly in reaction to Discover Financial Services being scooped up last year by the big bank Capital One Financial, which is leveraging that network for interchange fee gains.
“The networks are driving a lot of the activity,” Wares said, adding that “the pace is not slowing.”
So far this year, Mastercard agreed to purchase London-based stablecoin infrastructure startup BVNK for up to $1.8 billion. The Purchase, New York-based network is also reportedly considering selling a majority stake in its United Kingdom payment system subsidiary Vocalink, according to a report from Reuters this month.
Meanwhile, Amex agreed to pay $700 million to continue its restaurant foray by buying the European restaurant booking outfit TheFork last month, after investing $400 million in the purchase of Tock in 2024.
Also, this year, Amex bought into artificial intelligence in a bigger way by saying it had agreed to purchase Hypercard Network, a New York startup that uses artificial intelligence to provide automated expense management services.
Capital One changes payments landscape
Following its purchase of Discover, Capital One kicked off this year by scooping up another company active in the payments arena. In January, Capital One agreed to buy the fintech Brex for $5.15 billion, adding a unit that integrates cards, payments and banking in a single offering.
Capital One’s purchase of Discover, which included the latter’s debit network Pulse, may yet set off another wave of potential deal-making with respect to networks.
Fiserv’s possible sale of a debit network could be a follow-on move to shed an asset that may suddenly be more valuable to banks seeking to compete with Capital One.
Fidelity National Information Services has also been talking to banks about its debit networks, now that they may offer more value in the hands of financial institutions, whether as a defensive play or an offensive one.
“Everyone is trying to think through what’s that going to mean to us,” Wares said of Capital One’s Pulse acquisition. “Folks looking into a debit network that might be on the market, is what’s driving that.”
Stablecoin, agentic commerce force change
Payments players are also taking defensive and offensive postures to adapt to the emerging twin trends of stablecoin use and agentic commerce.
Capital One’s purchase of Brex was arguably a bid to benefit from the younger company’s expanding use of artificial intelligence agents. Brex is exploring expanded use of AI agents across its operations, including how to control their use.
Stripe’s interest in PayPal may also further its agentic and stablecoin endeavors, not because PayPal had made more headway than Stripe on those fronts, but because PayPal’s digital wallet capabilities, including its Venmo unit, could bolster strategies in those two areas.
Stripe’s acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge last year made its intentions clear with respect to interest in the stablecoin space.
Stripe’s “biggest priorities, in terms of emerging technologies right now are going to be on the stablecoins piece and the agentic payments,” Yang said. “I do think the consumer side [of PayPal] helps them kind of bridge that gap and push it forward more than [Stripe could] do with just the merchant side alone.”
For Stripe, which has built its business providing payments services to merchants, a purchase of PayPal would be an avenue into owning consumer accounts. PayPal and Venmo connect to hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide, and they could fill a hole for Stripe in advancing its stablecoin and agentic ambitions.
“Agents need to be handed a wallet at the end of the day,” Yang explained. “The wallet is super important because it gives agents controls [over] the ability to spend, and you can set permissions and prove your intent.”
The data associated with those PayPal consumer customers is also very valuable, Yang noted. That’s not only true in offering merchants’ opportunities to personalize services for consumers, but also in marrying the data with AI uses, such as fraud prevention, he said.
Data is “more valuable than ever,” Yang said.
Growing globally matters in payments
For big and small players alike, the technology plays dovetail with becoming more globally relevant to merchant, corporate and consumer customers.
“The technology plays are about moving money globally, whether that’s making sure there’s stablecoin infrastructure [or] cross border type of movement,” Wares said.
For the business-to-business payments player TreviPay, that kind of expansion has become more important this year as corporate customers demand more coverage internationally. Some of the company’s big clients include Best Buy and Walmart.
The Overland Park, Kansas-based company, which provides payments and invoicing software, is in the early stages of talking with investment bankers to evaluate targets, CEO Brandon Spear said in an interview this month.
“In the private equity world, there’s a lot of people that are looking to sell assets, and so we’re just trying to be proactive and ready that if and when these assets come to market,” Spear said.
As a result, TreviPay is hunting for acquisitions not only in the U.S., but also other regions of the world, Spear said. In Europe, he’s eying possibilities in the U.K., France and Germany and in Asia, he’s focused on China and South Korea and Vietnam or Japan, he said.
Plans in 2021 to make acquisitions in Latin America and Asia fell by the wayside for TreviPay, which is owned by private equity firm Corsair Capital, as it digested smaller purchases of Apruve and Baton.
“Increasingly, the customers we serve – these enterprise merchants, very large customers – they want us to have more and more geographic coverage,” Spear said.
While there are some companies for sale in the market at lower prices, given lower valuations for parts of the industry, oftentimes those are older businesses, without the AI-native capabilities that younger peers might offer, he noted.
Another private equity-owned payments player, Montreal-based Nuvei, agreed to pay $2.75 billion last month to buy the cross-border payments company Payoneer, which enables customers to send, receive, hold and convert stablecoins to fiat currencies through its platform.
Consolidation continues in the point-of-sale arena
For the thousands of companies in the U.S. point-of-sale, independent sales organization and independent software vendor realm, the fragmented nature of the market continues to spur merger and acquisitions
Chris Sidhom, President of Harlow Payments, knows the dynamic well. His father, Ray Sidhom, was a co-founder of Evo Payments, and the two of them helped build up the business until it was sold to the giant processor Global Payments for $4 billion in 2022.
Now, the younger Sidhom is eager to round up more small players in the industry, not buying them outright, but buying a significant stake that keeps managers of the ISOs, ISVs or POS providers on board for more growth.
Melville, New York-based Harlow, which has about 200 employees, is dedicating about $150 million in capital to such purchases over the next three or so years, Sidhom said in an interview last week. The company embarked on the growth plan this year by buying a majority stake in the payments facilitator Payfactory, based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Closing of deals remains to be seen
Deals won’t necessarily get done, said Wares, pointing specifically to Fiserv’s potential sale of one of its debit networks, NYCE and Star.
The company has a new CEO, Takis Georgakopoulos, as of last month and may be moving in new directions.
Stripe’s purported interest in PayPal may fade too if the two sides can’t agree on price, with Reuters reporting last week that latter’s management considered the offer too low.
“It seems like a fairly low bid for now,” Yang said. “It’s also the first offer,” based on the media reports.
For the second quarter, deal-making in the broader fintech arena was actually down, Yang noted, saying that might have been partly due to investments being directed to AI.
Still, this early glimpse of the third quarter suggests that may be changing for at least the payments subset. As upstarts get stronger and legacy players weaken, investment bankers are trolling for potential sales.
“The commentary from bank earners have suggested that the pipeline for deal activity is pretty robust, and so that does signal that there could be a bigger pickup in this activity in the second half of this year,” Yang predicted.
