Private equity firm GTCR is set to receive a return of about two times its investment in Worldpay after the sale of its 55% stake in the payments’ processor to Global Payments. A windfall like this is exceedingly rare in private equity which has been starved of large exits during the last two years when high interest rates froze up financing markets and slowed down the pace of large leveraged buyouts.
Earlier on Thursday, Global Payments acquired Worldpay for $24 billion. This was followed by the divesting of its user services user services unit for $13.5 billion in a complex three-way deal, marking one of the biggest transactions in the payments industry in recent years.
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“These are the types of deals which show the value of private equity. We took a business that was doing well, recruited a world class management team led by an industry luminary, Charles (Drucker, CEO of Worldpay), invested heavily in new products, technology and a clear strategy, and drove accelerated growth to make it attractive to the point where a large strategic could come in and buy it,” said Aaron Cohen, head of financial services & technology at GTCR, in an interview with Reuters.
The Worldpay deal marks GTCR’s second big exit over the past year. In December 2024, the firm entered a deal to sell insurance brokerage AssuredPartners to Arthur J Gallagher for $13.45 billion. GTCR, which jointly owned AssuredPartners with Apax Partners, earned around 2.5 times its original investment in the company that was made in 2019, according to previous Reuters reports.
The exit was announced less than 15 months after GTCR closed its original Worldpay stake acquisition. This stands out considering that in these times private equity firms have been forced to hold onto their investments for longer periods.