6 takeaways from the Global Payments-TSYS merger

The deal will also streamle how payments technology is packaged with other merchant services in the sales process, Woods said.

“The other large companies do have components of that but they are also doing mortgage services and many other things that a bank might need,” Woods said. “We are purely a payments technology company.”

Stripe is one of the biggest competitive threats to legacy processors, with its huge valuation and international ambition. Square also offers merchant credit, PayPal is embedding its own Venmo P2P app into merchants payment flows, and Adyen has picked up processing and e-commerce heft in Europe.

In competition with fintechs, TSYS and Global Payments will rely on scale, according to Woods.

“[The fintechs] are formidable competitors that have grown up from typical acquiring and moved into credit and advances and faster access to money, which are things that we have done,” Woods said. “Some of the biggest differences is we’ll have 24,000 team members when a merchant is growing to run down a problem.”

By pairing merchant innovation, delivered as in a cloud, Global Payments and TSYS hope to respond to the fintechs, according to Global Payments CEO Jeff Sloan, who will be CEO of the combined company

“The world is moving more toward tech adoption — those other two transactions validate that thesis,” said Sloan during a Tuesday morning conference call to announce the deal. “This merger accelerates that division between folks that sell commoditized processing and those of us that are migration toward tech enablement.”