What do the mega mergers & acquisitions of the last few years tell you about the direction of the payments market today?

Mega M&As and capital raises can buy time to pivot to where the market is heading. The question is whether the current wave of deals is being used to fund that pivot, or to defend mature and fading market models for as long as possible.

During the last month, I decided to take a closer look at what lessons can be drawn from the varied fortunes of some of the larger publicly listed payments consolidators over the last few years, and where that leaves the next wave of dealmaking.

The thesis up front

Big payments deals can make excellent strategic sense. The financial logic is often sound. The cost-saving targets are usually credible. Scale genuinely matters in a sector where unit economics improve with volume and pricing pressure is relentless. My argument is not that mega M&As are wrong. It is that the price-protection window these deals create, is all too often spent shoring up the existing book of business, rather than funding the build of what comes next. That is the difference between deals that age well and deals that don't.

Worldpay passed the parcel

When FIS bought Worldpay in March 2019 for around $43 billion, the theory looked compelling: combine merchant acquiring, banking tech and payments infrastructure at scale to create a stronger, more modern fintech platform. FIS' share price sat in the $108-110 range after the deal closed.

Four years later, FIS took a $24.4 billion goodwill impairment and sold its controlling stake in Worldpay to GTCR. The shares trade around $46 today. Global Payments has had a similarly tough run, with its share price down roughly 67 per cent from its April 2021 high of $209.41, to about $68.29 today.

It is fair to point out that some of that decline is sector wide. April 2021 was close to the peak of the fintech bubble. Almost every name in the space including software-led ones like Adyen have come down meaningfully since. However, consolidators have not simply been punished for being consolidators. The relative picture still tells a story: Fiserv, which made a comparable mega-acquisition with First Data, has held up materially better than FIS or Global Payments.

The market has not turned against scale itself. It has turned against the particular combination of a heavy legacy estate, a complex multi-deal integration agenda, and a growth narrative that depends on the old model holding up. In broad terms, the market stopped valuing Global Payments as a premium growth consolidator and started valuing it as a slower-growth, integration-heavy payments processor.

In my experience, the majority of fintech acquisitions deliver less than the integration plans promise, and they deliver it later. Worldpay proved harder to integrate than predicted for both FIS and its next owner. It got harder still when both companies had several acquisitions, disposals and integrations running in parallel.

Use acquisitions to build for the future, not just to protect the status quo

Tech platform integrations consume an enormous amount of senior management time. Yet most M&A pitches sell the benefits in terms of stack consolidation, promising results in months when the work usually takes years, or never finishes at all.

The better play is often to use the price-protection window created by taking out a major competitor, plus the additional resources and scale, to fund a genuinely new platform. One built on a thorough analysis of where the market is heading rather than where it has been. That longer-term thinking avoids burning energy and capital defending an ailing market model.

The prevailing payments megalith model is to bundle services around the POS hardware 'brick'. Our January 2026 published white paper on 'Mapping the Journey into Mainstream Market Adoption of SoftPOS' sets out why we think the market is reorientating around a payments software ecosystem instead.

What the data does and doesn't say

It is worth being precise here because the headline numbers can mislead. Capgemini's 2026 World Payments Report estimates that card-based payments are around 52 per cent of worldwide non-cash transactions this year, down from about 67 per cent in 2016. That is a real shift, but it is not the same as cards being in retreat. The non-cash payments pie has grown several times over in that period, so the absolute volume of card payments is still rising. And many of the wallet transactions that have taken market share — Apple Pay, Google Pay and similar — actually run on card rails, with the card tokenised behind the scenes.

The genuine account-to-account (A2A) substitution story is mostly geographic. UPI has restructured the domestic payments landscape in India. PIX has done the same in Brazil. FedNow is starting to do so in the United States. In each case, real-time A2A payments have taken share that would otherwise have gone to cards. The implication for acquirers is not that cards are dying, but that the mix of acceptance methods a merchant needs to support is broadening — which puts a premium on flexibility and software, not on a single proprietary endpoint.

The new breed of PSPs

Square arguably did more than most providers to show small merchants that payments could be one feature inside a broader business operating system. SumUp expanded well beyond simple card acceptance into invoicing, business accounts, online selling and other merchant tools. Zettle helped familiarise the market with app-led acceptance and flexible hardware choices. Dojo showed that, even where dedicated hardware remained important, the proposition had shifted towards faster payouts, better service, smoother integrations and more merchant-friendly tooling.

None of these businesses won simply by putting a card reader on the counter. They won market share by being more useful in the day-to-day running of a merchant's business. Most of them operate with one foot in hardware and one in software — a hybrid model rather than a pure pivot.

Once merchants begin to expect faster onboarding, cleaner software integration, more flexible acceptance and the freedom to choose the right device for each role. The standalone acquiring relationship starts to look less defensible. Once payments are embedded inside software platforms, the acquirer risks becoming a utility layer beneath the real point of commercial control.

That does not mean hardware is disappearing. The merchant device world is becoming richer and more varied. What is changing is the role hardware plays. It is no longer the undisputed centre of the proposition; it has to serve a wider software and workflow strategy. That may mean a SoftPOS-only device. It may mean an Android handheld or a smart scanner used for scan-as-you-shop. It may still mean a traditional PCI PTS terminal in some checkout lanes. Merchants want flexibility, not dependence on the proprietary brick.

So, the move of the last few years is not really a migration from hardware to software. It is a migration from terminal-centric control to software-centric control. Hardware still matters. However, the strategic value increasingly sits higher up the stack.

Who controls that stack?

This is where the harder question for everyone in payments, including us, comes in. If commerce is moving from terminal-centric to software-centric control, the natural control point is the merchant operating system: vertical SaaS POS providers like Toast in hospitality; Shopify in commerce; Lightspeed across retail and hospitality; and Square's own software stack. These are the platforms merchants spend their day inside. In that world, payment acceptance, including SoftPOS, risks becoming a feature inside someone else's product rather than a standalone proposition.

The traditional acquirers are not blind to this. Some are responding by buying or building software. In turn, the vertical SaaS players are pulling more of the payments value chain in-house. That tug-of-war is the real strategic contest of the next few years, and it is bigger than the SoftPOS-versus-terminal debate.

For specialist acceptance-technology businesses, including Mypinpad, the answer cannot be to pretend the SaaS POS layer doesn't exist. It has to be to make the acceptance layer genuinely valuable inside someone else's stack: device-flexible, certified, secure, and easy to integrate. That way, both the merchants and platforms don't have to compromise on choice.

SoftPOS is one of the clearest symbols of that shift. It weakens the dedicated terminal's monopoly as the acceptance endpoint and gives merchants more freedom over device choice and workflow design. However, it is one piece of a bigger story about software-led merchant commerce.

Where this leaves the deal logic?

Large capital raises and the current M&A boom can still make sense. Scale lets organisations advance across a larger merchant base faster, improves unit economics, generates pricing leverage smaller competitors cannot match, and slows the pace at which pricing erodes.

Consolidation creates breathing space, and in a sector where everyone knows the model is shifting, breathing space matters. The real test is what gets done with it. A deal that uses that breathing space to fund the move to software-centric control has a credible forward story. A deal that uses it to protect and milk the existing terminal-centric book has a much harder one. The relative market reaction to FIS and Global Payments, versus better-positioned peers, reflects that.

SumUp's planned flotation

SumUp is an interesting case in this context. Reports of a potential $15 billion London listing within the next year have sharpened attention on the company, and one can see why. Its story is more aligned with the direction the market has been moving. SumUp has built its growth around merchant simplicity, flexible acceptance, broader software and service tools, and a coherent proposition for small businesses that want more than a card reader. It is not trying to retrofit a large legacy acquiring estate into a new software world. It is growing from the merchant workflow outwards.

It is also worth being honest about where SumUp started as a card-reader business and about how it has funded its expansion with several large debt raises along the way. The valuation has moved around materially with private market sentiment. A public listing will test how far investors are willing to back the broader merchant-services narrative at scale, in a market that is no longer paying 2021 multiples for growth.

If the next phase of SMB payments is defined by merchants wanting payments, software and financial tools delivered in one integrated experience, SumUp looks well placed. If SoftPOS continues to mature alongside app-led acceptance, smarter merchant devices and embedded payments, that position should strengthen further.