How many times has there been a “rumor” that someone was interested in acquiring Shift4 only for us to find out… Shift4 was likely entirely behind the rumor?
Dude.
Could you be any more desparate?
In December, Shift4 pumped the media channels with Global Payments acquisition hype.
Then Global published a formal note saying that they were (drumroll…) not interested in buying Shift4.
Things must have been slow over at Shift4 because not even a quarter later the payment wires were blowing up with another acquisition rumor:
Shift4 was in talks with not one, but TWO potential acquirers!
Shift4’s share price shot up, and NASA started fielding unrelenting call volume from Jared Isaacman’s personal cell phone looking to book the Netjet equivalent of space travel.
Times are good, baby!
Then reality came crashing down when one of the “potential acquirers” issued a written note that no, they were not talking with Shift4.
Amadeus needs Shift4 like it needs a kick in the d*ck.
The other “potential acquirer”, Fiserv, has no business buying Shift4.
Why would they?
Where’s the strategic benefit?
Fiserv already owns a much, much better POS asset in Clover.
Why would Fiserv want to buy the underinvested POS that is SkyTab?
Fiserv wouldn’t want to juggle multiple POS systems and own that technical debt; if they acquired Shift4 they would need to move all those Skytab (plus four other, legacy POS system) merchants onto Clover. This would justify a steep discount in Shift4’s acquisition price, which Shift4 can’t really accept since they’re public.
Instead, Fiserv needs to be leaning heavily into Clover, which is literally Fiserv’s only growth vector at this point.
Buy more assets to support Clover and move it upmarket.
Invest in features and product, especially knowing that Toast is ripping 55 bps-on-their-way-to-80 bps in margin on restaurants doing > $1M in GPV (note that with surcharging Toast is making much more than this).
Fiserv was mentioned because, we suspect, Shift4 is baiting Global Payments, the only logical acquirer for the business.
Worldpay may be interested, but they have a ton of debt and need to sort out their own shit. Not to mention they’re hemorrhaging SMB market share, and their enterprise, international gateway segment is their only real bright spot.
Shift4 would just be rubbing salt in Worldpay’s SMB wound, frankly, and we bet Worldpay is eyeing their exit from SMB; acquiring Shift4 would simply overly complicate things for no good reason.
Looks like all the stargazers out there will need to wait a bit longer to see payment bros light up the night sky.
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