The FinTech Consolidation Wave Continues. Incumbents Fear the Mobile Wallet.

The FinTech Consolidation Wave Continues. Incumbents Fear the Mobile Wallet.

FIS to Acquire Worldpay for approximately $43 Billion (enterprise value). This deal comes on the heels of the recently announced Fiserv acquisition of First Data. The FinTech M&A spree is approximately two years old at this juncture. So what gives?

We went through this exercise a couple of weeks ago with a buyside friend. While much of the attention deservedly goes to innovative FinTech companies such as Venmo/Braintree/PayPal, Square and Stripe, the Payments cohort that does not receive air time commensurate to its collective potential impact are the mobile wallet players. Yes, people really use Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay and Samsung Pay (Microsoft Pay is also a wallet offering, we just do not hear about it as frequently). Further, it is still early days for mobile wallets.

A recent survey conducted by TSYS demonstrated consumers’ awareness and interest in mobile wallets is increasing.

One survey question that is indicative of the larger mobile payments trend is the following: “Use your phone instead of a payment card to make purchases when checking out?” 39% answered in the affirmative in 2015, 40% in 2016 and 51% in 2017. We expect TSYS to publish an updated study end of March. See the table below: