Worldpay pushed GAAP revenue up 68.6% to $3.32B while deal amortization, interest and an Issuer-sale tax charge cut GAAP EPS to $0.05; normalized adjusted net revenue grew about 4%, adjusted EPS rose 12% to $3.46, and 2026 guidance was trimmed.
Revenue
$3.3B
+68.6% YoY
Net income
$13M
-94.6% YoY
Diluted EPS
$0.05
-94.9% YoY
Operating margin
10.2%
Overview
Global Payments' second quarter of 2026 (three months to June 30) was its first full quarter after a transformative swap: on January 9, 2026 it bought Worldpay, a large merchant-payments processor, and at the same moment sold its Issuer Solutions business (card-processing services for banks) to FIS. The company now calls itself a "pure-play commerce solutions provider": it earns money by helping merchants accept card and digital payments.
That swap makes almost every headline comparison with last year misleading:
GAAP revenue jumped 68.6% to $3.32 billion, but the 10-Q says Worldpay alone added about $1.4 billion. Without it, revenue would have been roughly flat to slightly below a year ago.
GAAP diluted earnings per share (EPS) fell 94.9% to $0.05, mostly because of the cost of buying Worldpay (amortization, integration spending, more interest) and a $102.0 million loss booked under the sold Issuer business.
On the company's own like-for-like ("normalized") basis, adjusted net revenue grew about 4% and adjusted EPS rose 12% to $3.46.
The underlying business grew slowly, and management cut its full-year outlook slightly, pointing to the conflict in the Middle East and its effect on the travel-related part of the business.
Key figures
Metric
Q2 2026
Q2 2025
YoY Change
Revenue (GAAP)
$3,320.8M
$1,969.3M
+68.6%
Operating income (GAAP)
$337.1M
$393.3M
-14.3%
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Operating margin is the share of revenue left after running the business, before interest and tax. "Adjusted" figures are the company's own non-GAAP measures: they strip out amortization of acquired intangibles, deal and integration costs, and some other items, and "adjusted net revenue" also removes certain pass-through payments that GAAP counts in both revenue and expenses. The 2025 adjusted figures still include the sold Issuer Solutions business, so the "normalized" growth rates are the company's like-for-like comparison.
Why the year-over-year numbers are distorted
Three accounting effects sit on top of each other this year:
Worldpay is in 2026 but not in 2025. Acquired businesses are only counted from the day they are bought, so every 2026 line includes Worldpay and every 2025 line does not. Worldpay contributed $1.4 billion of revenue in the quarter ($2.6 billion in the half-year) and, after acquisition-related charges, an operating loss of about $28.2 million.
Issuer Solutions is a "discontinued operation." Because it was sold, its results are pulled out of the main income statement for all periods, including 2025, and shown as a single line below the rest. That is why reported Q2 2025 revenue is $1.97 billion here, not the $2.36 billion of adjusted net revenue the company reported at the time, which included Issuer.
Smaller 2025 sales of businesses. The 10-Q says the rest of the revenue change came from 2025 sales of businesses that were "not individually significant."
The company offers two ways to see through this:
Pro forma (in the 10-Q, GAAP-based): restated as if the Worldpay deal and the Issuer sale had both happened on January 1, 2025, revenue was $3,320.8 million vs. $3,453.5 million, down 3.8%, and net income from continuing operations was $139.9 million vs. $85.3 million. The company warns this is "not necessarily indicative" of what would have happened.
Combined adjusted figures (Exhibit 99.2): Global Payments' continuing business plus Worldpay produced $3,113.4 million of adjusted net revenue in Q2 2025, against $3,159.1 million this quarter, up about 1.5%. The company's headline "normalized" figure of about 4% goes further and also removes the other businesses it has sold.
However the numbers are cut, the combined business is growing in the low-to-mid single digits, not at 34% or 69%.
Segment performance
After the deal, Global Payments reorganized into three reporting segments. Comparing this quarter's adjusted revenue with the combined Global Payments + Worldpay figures for Q2 2025 (from Exhibit 99.2):
Segment (adjusted net revenue)
Q2 2026
Q2 2025 combined
Change
Enterprise (large and multinational merchants)
$838.1M
$783.7M
+6.9%
Platforms (payments embedded in software partners' products)
$627.5M
$584.1M
+7.4%
SMB (small and medium-sized businesses)
$1,512.6M
$1,514.0M
-0.1%
Other revenues
$180.8M
$231.6M
-22.0%
Total
$3,159.1M
$3,113.4M
+1.5%
The growth is in Enterprise and Platforms, both up about 7%. SMB, the largest segment and nearly half of revenue, was flat. Other revenues fell; the 10-Q blames "attrition on non-core portfolios and relationships." These percentages are our own calculations from the company's figures and are not the company's normalized growth rates, which also remove divested businesses and currency effects.
On a GAAP basis, the 10-Q says every segment's operating margin fell, "due to higher amortization expense related to acquired Worldpay intangible assets." SMB's GAAP operating income fell $40.7 million (-6.1%) even though its revenue rose 23.7% with Worldpay included.
What drove GAAP profit down
Amortization of acquired intangibles was $757.6 million, up from $200.7 million. When a company buys another, part of the price is booked as intangible assets (customer relationships, technology), which are then written down gradually. This is a real accounting cost but not a cash expense, and it is the main reason GAAP margin fell to 10.2% from 20.0%.
Deal and restructuring costs: adjusted results exclude $157.4 million of acquisition, integration and separation expenses, $40.1 million of business transformation charges and $25.3 million of employee termination benefits in the quarter.
Interest expense rose to $277.5 million from $152.5 million, which the 10-Q attributes to higher average borrowings for the Worldpay deal and "higher average interest rates from recent debt refinancing."
Discontinued operations lost $102.0 million, almost entirely $96.8 million of income tax expense recorded against the sold Issuer business. For the half-year, the discontinued line lost $1.69 billion, mostly $1.7 billion of tax that the 10-Q ties to writing off Issuer's goodwill (goodwill whose removal was "not deductible for U.S. federal income tax purposes") when it was sold. That is why the half-year GAAP result is a $1.79 billion loss (-$6.58 per share).
Share count: diluted shares rose to 270.1 million from 243.6 million, mainly because 42.8 million new shares went to GTCR as part of the Worldpay price, partly offset by buybacks. More shares means each dollar of profit is spread thinner.
The quarter's tax rate was also unusual: a small tax benefit ($4.9 million, an effective rate of -4.7%), which the 10-Q attributes to tax credits and foreign earnings applied against a much lower pre-tax income.
Balance sheet and cash
Debt: long-term debt was $21.49 billion plus $925.0 million due within a year, against $1.70 billion of cash the company considers "available for general purposes" (out of $5.41 billion total; the rest is mainly settlement cash owed to merchants, merchant collateral and customer funds). The company says it met its loan terms at quarter-end; its revolving credit facility allows a maximum leverage ratio of 4.50x.
Taxes payable rose to $2.45 billion from $117.5 million at year-end, at the same time as the tax recorded on the Issuer sale. This is a large near-term cash commitment.
Operating cash flow was only $373.8 million for the half-year (vs. $1,372.6 million), which the 10-Q says reflects paying costs of the Worldpay acquisition and Issuer divestiture, plus certain liabilities taken on with Worldpay.
Capital returns: $1.10 billion of buybacks in the half-year (15.2 million shares, including two accelerated repurchase programs at average prices of $75.73 and $69.30), plus $134.7 million of dividends. $1.4 billion of buyback authorization remains. The quarterly dividend is $0.25.
Takeaway: The 69% revenue jump and the 95% EPS collapse both come from the Worldpay/Issuer swap, not from the business itself. The business underneath is growing about 4% (company's normalized basis; about 1.5% on the simplest combined comparison). Enterprise and Platforms are growing about 7%, and SMB, the largest segment, is flat. Management's case now depends on cost savings and margin expansion more than on revenue growth, and its guidance cut this quarter was a cut to growth.
Outlook
Management lowered its 2026 guidance in the earnings release, citing "the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and its impact on our travel portfolio":
2026 guidance
After Q1 (May 6)
After Q2 (Aug 5)
Normalized, constant-currency adjusted net revenue growth
~5%
~4%–5%
Adjusted EPS
$13.80–$14.00
$13.60–$13.80
Normalized adjusted operating margin expansion
~150 bps
~150 bps (unchanged)
Capital returned to shareholders
>$2 billion
>$2 billion (unchanged)
Constant currency means growth measured as if exchange rates had not moved. Management also says it remains on track to return about $7.5 billion over 2025–2027, and the 10-Q guides to roughly $1.0 billion of capital expenditure in 2026 (versus $497.0 million spent in the first half).
Our read: Keeping the 150 bps margin-expansion target while lowering the revenue range means integration savings have to do more of the work. The first half showed 110 bps of normalized margin expansion in Q1 and 70 bps in Q2, so the second half needs to hold or improve on that pace. The things to watch are whether SMB returns to growth, whether travel-related volumes recover, and how quickly cash flow normalizes once the one-off deal costs and the Issuer-related tax bill have been paid. Until then, adjusted EPS will look much better than GAAP EPS because acquisition amortization is running at $757.6 million a quarter.