Fintech giant Fidelity National Information Services has completed its $13.5 billion acquisition of Global Payments’ Issuer Solutions business, formerly known as TSYS, ahead of the original schedule. The fintech deal, announced Monday, simultaneously closed with FIS selling its remaining minority stake in Worldpay to Global Payments. Additionally, FIS launched a new agentic commerce platform designed to help banks maintain control over AI-initiated transactions across major card networks.
The acquisition consolidates what FIS describes as the world’s largest issuing business under its Total Issuing Solutions portfolio. According to the company, the combined entity now serves clients in more than 75 countries and processes over 40 billion transactions annually.
Why the Fintech Deal Matters Now
FIS President and CEO Stephanie Ferris told Forbes that the timing reflects two converging trends creating what she called a generational moment in financial services. The first is a regulatory environment increasingly favorable to bank growth, with less friction around mergers and innovation like digital currencies moving inside the traditional financial system. The second is the rapid acceleration of AI adoption across the banking sector.
Ferris indicated that banks are adopting AI, particularly agentic AI, faster than any previous technology wave. According to the CEO, this allows financial institutions to address operational challenges such as fraud and compliance while simultaneously improving customer experiences and reinvesting savings into their businesses.
The strategic logic of the fintech acquisition becomes clearer against this backdrop. FIS announced the three-way deal with Global Payments and private equity firm GTCR last April, when Global Payments agreed to acquire Worldpay from FIS and GTCR while selling its Issuer Solutions unit to FIS for $13.5 billion.
Financial Impact and Market Expansion
The acquisition expands FIS’s banking segment addressable market opportunity to $28 billion, according to company statements. FIS projects the deal will strengthen its free cash flow profile, generating an expected $500 million in incremental adjusted free cash flow in 2026 and $700 million by 2028.
However, the more significant strategic signal came with what FIS announced alongside the closing. The company launched an agentic commerce offering for banks, built in partnership with Visa and Mastercard, designed to enable AI agents to initiate and safely conduct transactions across card networks.
Ferris explained that FIS now controls the largest collection of consumer and commercial accounts on file, spanning core banking, debit, and credit transactions. This data foundation, she noted, is essential for banks wanting to implement agentic AI capabilities within their operations while maintaining control over customer relationships.
Understanding Agentic Commerce in Fintech
The concept of agentic commerce represents a significant shift in how transactions occur. Ferris outlined two phases: AI-assisted shopping, where consumers remain in control and authorize purchases, and autonomous purchasing, where AI agents complete transactions independently based on predefined budgets and constraints.
The autonomous phase creates new challenges for existing fraud detection systems. Banks’ current fraud models are trained on individual customer behaviors, including typical devices, purchasing habits, timing, and preferred merchants. Meanwhile, autonomous agents break these patterns by design, potentially triggering false declines on legitimate transactions.
FIS’s new agentic commerce platform addresses this challenge by enabling banks to identify and authorize AI-initiated transactions while operating within existing authorization, authentication, and dispute frameworks. The offering is expected to be available to FIS issuing bank clients by the end of the first quarter of 2026, according to the company.
Data Infrastructure as Competitive Advantage
Ferris emphasized that the real asset in modern fintech is comprehensive, real-time data. With Issuer Solutions integrated, FIS now manages one of the broadest consumer and commercial card data sets in the industry, layered with core banking and debit data flows.
The CEO noted that FIS keeps bank data private and secure, emphasizing that the data belongs to the banks themselves. However, centralizing, securing, and making this data consumable in real time enables banks to build and deploy models that function effectively in production environments, particularly for high-stakes decisions involving fraud detection and transaction authorization.
This data advantage becomes increasingly important as agentic commerce grows. McKinsey forecasts that agentic commerce could generate as much as $1 trillion in orchestrated U.S. retail revenue by 2030, with global potential reaching $3 trillion to $5 trillion, according to industry reports.
Strategic Partnerships and Scale Requirements
Ferris outlined her partnership philosophy for the agentic commerce ecosystem. Any partnership must benefit banks, FIS, and the partner organization equally. Additionally, partnerships must demonstrate resiliency and scale, given that FIS serves 95 percent of the world’s banks and could direct a billion transactions to partner platforms through its distribution channels.
The CEO also introduced the concept of “know your agent” data, a compliance framework designed to help issuers distinguish legitimate consumer agents from fraudulent ones. This represents an evolution of existing know-your-customer protocols adapted for an AI-driven transaction environment.
Ferris described her leadership approach as anchored in three pillars: client centricity measured by impact rather than activity, innovation through building, buying, or partnering based on bank needs, and simplicity in operations. She acknowledged that simplicity remains the most challenging principle, particularly for large enterprises that can be difficult to work with both internally and as vendors.
FIS expects to use AI to reimagine workflows throughout 2026, reducing handoffs and increasing automation to improve both internal operations and client experiences. The company has not announced specific timelines for broader platform integration beyond the Q1 2026 launch of its agentic commerce offering for issuing bank clients.
