By Chris Jones, Managing Directorat PSE Consulting
The first six months of 2026 have highlighted two very different approaches to mergers and acquisitions in merchant acquiring. In January, Global Payments completed its $24bn acquisition of Worldpay, reinforcing a long-established strategy centred on increasing scale and transaction volume. More recently, Adyen moved away from its historic preference for organic growth by acquiring Talon.One and Orb, adding loyalty and billing capabilities rather than payment volume.
Both strategies have clear strategic merit but neither is without risk. Ultimately, however, the deciding factor is neither size nor synergy – it is customer value.
The case for scale
The traditional acquiring playbook is built on consolidation. Acquiring established competitors delivers immediate access to merchant relationships, regulatory licences, banking connections and processing volume that would otherwise take years to build. In an industry with high fixed costs, greater scale should, in theory, improve economics by spreading compliance, fraud prevention and technology investment across more transactions.
The approach has shaped much of the sector’s evolution, from Nexi and Worldline to Nuvei and Paysafe, with Global Payments’ acquisition of Worldpay representing its largest expression yet.
The challenge is migration. Cost synergies depend on moving merchants onto a common platform, yet payment integrations are often highly customised and business-critical. Merchants rarely welcome disruption for what appears to be a like-for-like proposition, leaving acquirers operating multiple legacy systems long after deals complete. Worse still, forced migrations can trigger customer churn, undermining the very scale the acquisition was designed to create.
Expanding through capability
The alternative strategy is to keep the payments engine intact while acquiring adjacent capabilities that deepen merchant relationships.
Adyen’s purchases of Talon.One and Orb follow this model, extending into loyalty and usage-based billing rather than acquiring transaction volume. Stripe has pursued a similar path through acquisitions in tax, reconciliation and merchant-of-record services.
The appeal is obvious. By broadening their software offering, providers can increase share of wallet, deepen merchant engagement and unlock greater value from payment data without facing the complexity of integrating another acquiring platform.
Yet, this model also introduces challenges. The success of firms such as Adyen and Stripe has been built on focus and engineering excellence around a single core proposition. Expanding into adjacent categories stretches management attention and product development while placing them against specialist competitors whose sole focus is loyalty, billing or tax software. The danger is that the differentiated payments proposition becomes diluted.
So which strategy wins?
We are deliberately not going to call it, because the honest answer is that the evidence does not yet exist, and the determining variable sits outside both deal models. The question that decides both strategies is the same: where is the customer value?
For consolidation-led deals, the test is whether the merchant ends up with something better than they had: a stronger product, broader geographic reach, better economics, a reason to migrate willingly rather than under duress. If the answer is a like-for-like offer on a different platform, history says the volume will not move, and the scale that drove the investment will stay trapped on legacy stacks.
Capability-led acquisitions face a different but equally important test. Do merchants genuinely want services such as loyalty, billing or stablecoin infrastructure from their payments provider? More importantly, does combining these capabilities create something that specialist vendors cannot easily replicate, such as real-time decision-making powered by transaction data, a unified commercial relationship or a single operating model? If the answer is a bundle of adequate adjacent products wrapped around an excellent core, the core will carry the bundle for a while, and then the focus premium will erode.
It is entirely possible both succeed, in different segments: volume consolidation in the cost-driven mainstream of acquiring, scope expansion at the premium end of enterprise commerce. It is equally possible both disappoint, for the reasons their own histories suggest. The first half of 2026 has given the industry a rare natural experiment: the two most consequential players in merchant acquiring have placed large, public and opposite bets on the value created by M&A. The deals were priced on synergies and addressable markets. They will be judged on whether merchants get a better acquiring offer. On that, only time will tell.
