US card firm Vantiv seals £9.3 billion takeover of Worldpay — but UK jobs could be at risk

Thomson Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) - US card firm Vantiv has made a formal offer to buy Britain's biggest payments processor Worldpay for £8 billion ($10.39 billion), five weeks after the deal was first announced.

Worldpay said on Wednesday that Vantiv has offered 55 pence in cash, 0.0672 of a new Vantiv share, an interim dividend of 0.8 pence per Worldpay share and a special 4.2 pence dividend, valuing the former RBS unit at about £9.3 billion including debt.

The deal will see Cincinnati-based Vantiv creating a global payments group — with the combined company to be called Worldpay —with a pro forma enterprise value of more than £22 billion and global headquarters in the United States. It will be listed in New York but retain a secondary listing in London.

The company's international operations will be run from Britain, but there will be no guarantees that UK jobs and employees will be protected.

The deal, which was first announced on July 5, took several weeks of negotiations with the deadline for a formal offer being extended twice, as the two companies haggled over the location of the combined group and ways to safeguard UK jobs.

The combined company will be a leading global payment firm, processing approximately $1.5 trillion in payments and 40 billion transactions through more than 300 payment methods in 146 countries and 126 currencies, with a combined net revenue of over $3.2 billion.

The group will be led by Vantiv boss Charles Drucker as executive chairman and co-CEO while Worldpay boss Philip Jansen will report to Drucker and act as co-CEO.

(Reporting By Pamela Barbaglia; Editing by Rachel Armstrong)