Worldpay

Worldpay

File:World Pay.png
Type	Public limited company
Traded as	LSE: WPG
Industry	Electronic Payment Services
Founded	1989 (as Streamline)
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom
Key people	Sir Michael Rake (Chairman) Philip Jansen (CEO)
Services	Payment Services, Payment gateway
Revenue	£3,963.0 million (2015)
Operating income	£340.5 million (2015)
Profit	£(29.8) million (2015)
Number of employees	4,500 (2015)
Website	www.worldpay.com

Worldpay (formerly RBS WorldPay) is a payment processing company. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.

History

Worldpay started as an electronic payment system called Streamline which was first released by CentreFile in 1989 in the UK but has extended into mail order/telephone order, "unattended" payments and handling secure payments over the Internet through merger and acquisition of several other companies.

Worldpay first provided international multi-currency processing in 1992 and Internet payment services in 1994, making it one of the first providers of such services in the world.

CentreFile was formed in 1965 but had become a wholly owned subsidiary of National Westminster Bank (NWB) before 1985. In 1995 the Streamline system was reabsorbed into the bank when the rest of CentreFile was sold to Ceridian. It was acquired in 2002 by The Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS) which renamed the business RBS WorldPay. RBS expanded the business significantly by acquiring and merging a number of payment solutions companies from different countries. Over the next five years it was combined with seven leading retail payment solutions brands: Streamline, Streamline International, PaymentTrust, Netherlands based Bibit, RiskGuardian and US based Lynk. By 2007, Worldpay was the largest merchant acquirer in Europe and one of the largest globally, operating in more than forty countries, 120 transaction currencies and fourteen settlement currencies. That year Worldpay processed 4.4 billion transactions worldwide.

As a condition in the European Commission's clearance in December 2009 of state aid to RBS, Worldpay was to be sold as part of a plan to divest selected businesses from the group. On 6 August 2010, Advent International and Bain Capital agreed to acquire Worldpay for £2.025bn including a £200m contingent consideration. The RBS Group retained a 20% stake in the newly independent business with Advent International and Bain Capital owning 40% each. The sale completed on 1 December 2010. RBS WorldPay was renamed Worldpay as part of the deal.

On 21 December 2010, almost immediately following on from the sale, Worldpay acquired Cardsave, one of the UK’s leading independent sales organisations distributing credit and debit card processing services to small retailers. In May 2011 Worldpay acquired Envoy Services Limited, a leading provider of alternative payment solutions to eCommerce merchants worldwide, for an undisclosed amount.

In June 2013, Worldpay launched Worldpay Zinc, a mobile card processing terminal which connects to smart phones.

In September 2013 Worldpay revealed it had acquired US payment processing company Century Payments.

In November 2013, Royal Bank of Scotland said it had sold its remaining stake of about 20 percent in Worldpay to the payment processing firm’s majority shareholders, private equity firms Advent International and Bain Capital.

The company listed on the London Stock Exchange through an initial public offering (IPO) in October 2015.

Operations

The company provides payment services for mail order and Internet retailers, as well as point of sale transactions. Customers are a mix of multinational, multichannel retailers, with the majority being small business merchants. It also provides loans to small businesses.