No Worldpay for JPMorgan, but the banking giant may have its toe in the water, or testing the breeze for further inroads into the payments space.
So reports Bloomberg News, which said Wednesday that the company’s merchant acquiring unit might have been a strategic fit with Worldpay, having already become the largest card transaction processing business globally. That’s been buoyed by card issuance on its own, including Sapphire Reserve, and total processing volume stands at more than $1 trillion.
That payments business has also seen growth from the acquisition earlier this year of Merchant Customer Exchange, with a move to digital payments and, of course, continued traction in Chase Pay, the JPMorgan digital wallet application. The company’s genesis in payments harkens back to Chase Paymentech, which in turn processed payments for mail order companies.
As has been reported, JPMorgan had been one of the suitors for Worldpay, and speculation had been running that JPMorgan would make an all-cash offer for the U.K. company. In the end, Vantiv prevailed with a $9.9 billion stock deal for Worldpay.
In an interview with the newswire, Moshe Katri, a Wedbush Securities analyst, stated that “I don’t think JPMorgan is going to stop here; they’re going to find different ways to tackle that market. The fact that they went after Worldpay is another indicator that they are going after the national merchants business. That would have been a direct threat for people like First Data and Vantiv.”