For the average consumer, Global Payments is probably one of the biggest payments companies they have never heard of. Shoppers may be familiar with the logos branded on their credit cards, but what happens after they give the plastic to the retailer is often a mystery. It is companies such as Global Payments that sit behind the transactions and enable the processing of billions of consumer payments every year.
The company does as its name suggests – global payments – processing more than 6 billion transactions a year and about $1bn a day in countries all around the world. It has grown in recent years through acquisitions, such as the purchase of HSBC Merchant Services – the merchant acquiring division of HSBC – in 2009.