Stephanie Ferris, Chief Executive Officer and President, FIS
FIS GLOBAL
On Monday, fintech giant Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) announced it closed its $13.5 billion acquisition of Global Payments’ Issuer Solutions business (formerly TSYS) ahead of schedule, while simultaneously completing the sale of its remaining minority stake in Worldpay to Global Payments.
Then FIS did what most legacy fintechs don’t do at the moment a transaction closes: it shipped product.
Alongside the closing, FIS announced a new “agentic commerce” offering for banks, built in partnership with Visa and Mastercard, designed to let AI agents initiate and safely conduct transactions across the card networks, according to the company.
The speed was not an accident, FIS President and CEO Stephanie Ferris told me in a follow-up interview. The market moved, the technology moved, and the window to lead moved with it.
“There’s two trends that since that time are coming together and actually creating what I would call a generational moment in financial services,” Ferris said.
She pointed to a policy and regulatory environment that’s finally geared toward helping banks grow again—more M&A, less friction, and innovation like digital currencies and tokenized deposits moving inside the financial system. Layered on top of that is a rapid acceleration in AI adoption across banking.
“I’ve never seen banks lean in and adopt technology faster than they’re adopting AI, particularly generative AI,” Ferris said. “It allows them to tackle some of their biggest operational problems—like fraud and compliance—while creating better experiences and taking those savings to reinvest back into the franchise.”
That backdrop makes the strategic logic of FIS’s deal sharper in hindsight.
Big Fintech Deal to Bigger Point
Last April, FIS announced the blockbuster three-way reshuffling with Global Payments and private equity firm GTCR: Global Payments would acquire Worldpay from FIS and GTCR, while selling its Issuer Solutions unit to FIS for $13.5 billion.
It was a bold move in a cautious market, and Ferris framed it as a decision to “leap” when the strategy was clear, even if the macro environment felt unpredictable.
Now, with the issuer business officially back under the FIS roof, the company is consolidating what it calls “the world’s largest issuing business” under its FIS Total Issuing Solutions portfolio.
The scale is massive. Client presence in more than 75 countries, more than 40 billion transactions processed annually, and commercial partnerships with over 150 financial institutions and corporates, according to the company.
And the financial pitch is straightforward: FIS says the acquisition expands its banking segment’s addressable market opportunity to $28 billion and strengthens its free cash flow profile, including an expected $500 million in incremental adjusted free cash flow in 2026 and $700 million by 2028.
Yes, it’s a major M&A milestone. But the more interesting signal is what FIS chose to announce with it.
“We now have the largest amount of consumer and commercial accounts on file, across core banking, debit, and credit transactions,” Ferris said. “If banks want to do very significant things with generative AI inside their franchises, the underpinning is access to that data—and now we have it on their behalf.”
That foundation, she added, is what allows banks to remain central as AI agents begin sourcing, negotiating, and executing transactions on consumers’ behalf.
“We are solely focused on making sure banks stay at the center of everything around agentic commerce,” Ferris said.
Fintech Moves Toward Agentic Commerce
The phrase “agentic commerce” can sound abstract until you map it to a behavior most of us already do: letting software narrow our choices.
Ferris gave me a simple split.
The first phase is AI-assisted shopping, where you’re still in the loop authorizing the purchase. Ask an assistant for gift ideas for your niece and it returns a shortlist, with links you can click to buy.
The next phase is autonomous purchasing: you tell an agent your budget and constraints, and it books the flight, reserves the hotel, and completes the transactions on your behalf.
That second phase is where the payments system gets stressed in new ways.
Banks’ fraud models are trained on you: your devices, your habits, your timing, your typical merchants. An autonomous agent breaks those patterns by design. It might buy in the middle of the night. It might buy from a merchant you’ve never used. It might route through a new interface entirely.
“What the banks don’t want to do is decline a good transaction,” Ferris said. “So they have to start rebuilding their fraud models” for an agent-driven world.
This is where FIS’s new product announcement fits. The company says its agentic commerce offering enables banks to identify and authorize AI-initiated transactions while operating within existing authorization, authentication, and dispute frameworks. It’s expected to be available to FIS issuing bank clients by the end of Q1 2026.
FIS is also leaning into a new compliance-adjacent concept: “know your agent” (KYA) data, meant to help issuers distinguish a legitimate consumer’s agent from a fraudulent one.
If this sounds like banks fighting disintermediation, that’s because it is.
“What we are announcing is us leaning in with the banks,” she said. “Making sure they stay central to payment flows and they don’t get disintermediated.”
Real Asset In Fintech Is The Data Engine
Ferris has always sounded most energized when she talks about infrastructure. This time, her argument is that infrastructure is becoming intelligent, and intelligence requires data that is both comprehensive and real-time.
With Issuer Solutions folded in, FIS now sits on one of the broadest consumer-and-commercial card data sets in the industry, layered with core banking and debit data flows. In the interview, Ferris pointed to “190 million core accounts on file,” “40 billion credit card transactions,” and “70 billion transactions inside FIS” as the raw material for what comes next.
The point is not that FIS wants to give away bank data to anybody who requests it. Ferris emphasized the opposite.
“We keep banks’ data very private,” she said. “This is the bank’s data.”
But she believes centralizing it, securing it, and making it consumable in real time is what will let banks build and deploy models that actually work in production, especially for high-stakes decisions like fraud and authorization.
And that’s why she described the current moment as generational: a banking environment that is more focused on growth, colliding with a technology shift that banks are adopting faster than previous waves.
Fintech Partnerships And Non-Negotiables
Agentic commerce could generate as much as $1 trillion in orchestrated U.S. retail revenue by 2030, and as much as $3 trillion to $5 trillion globally, according to McKinsey.
Still, agentic commerce is one of those domains where no one wins alone. You need issuers, networks, processors, and increasingly AI platforms to agree on protocols that keep transactions secure and disputes resolvable.
Ferris’s partnership philosophy is consistent with her broader leadership style: it’s pragmatic, and it’s tied to scale.
Her non-negotiables start with alignment. Any partnership has to be good for banks (FIS’s core customers), good for FIS, and good for the partner. Then comes the constraint many fintechs discover too late.
“It has to have resiliency and scale,” she said. “We are serving the largest financial institutions in the world–95% of the world’s banks. We could put a billion transactions on your platform by virtue of our distribution channels.”
Innovation is only valuable if it survives contact with volume and longevity.
Fintech Leadership At Scale
In April, Ferris talked about long walks and trusting her gut. This time, with the deal closed and the integration beginning, her framing shifted toward operating principles.
She told me she anchors her leadership around three pillars:
- Client centricity: not activity, but measurable client impact.
- Innovation: buy, build, partner, but always tied to what banks need to compete.
- Simplicity: the hardest one, and the one she says she grades herself lowest on.
Large companies are “hard to work with,” she admitted, both internally and as a vendor. Her focus for 2026 is using AI to reimagine workflows end-to-end, with fewer handoffs and more automation.
It’s also a subtle tell about where she thinks the next competitive gap will open.
In the intelligent era, speed is table stakes. Trust is the differentiator. Simplicity is how you scale trust.
When FIS announced the Worldpay deal last year, the headline was strategic focus. The close turns that strategy into a platform.
FIS now has:
- A scaled issuing business with global reach
- A stronger cash flow narrative for investors
- A reason to show up credibly in the agentic commerce conversation
- And a clear stance on the stakes: banks must stay central as AI begins to shop, negotiate, and transact on consumers’ behalf
Ferris didn’t pretend she saw every twist coming in April.
“I wish I could have told you I saw [it] coming,” she said. “But I did not.”
The win, she argues, is that the original decision still holds up under a faster, stranger reality than anyone predicted.
Last year, she leapt.
This year, she landed—and immediately began building what comes next for fintech.