Dive Brief:

• Payments processor Fidelity National Information Services, also known as FIS, is in discussions about the possibility of selling a part of its capital markets unit to the private equity firm Symphony Technology Group for approximately $2 billion, the media outlet Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing "people familiar with the matter."
• The assets that Jacksonville, Florida-based FIS is considering selling include its "treasury management, alternative-trading and algorithm-based trading platforms," according to the short Bloomberg report. No final agreement has been reached and the deal could still fall through, the media outlet said.
• The purchase could be announced as soon as this week, according to unnamed person cited by Bloomberg.

Dive Insight:

FIS became a mega payments processor after completing the $35 billion acquisition of WorldPay in 2019. It counts many banks among its clients. The company didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the Bloomberg report, and neither did Symphony.

"We think this could be mildly accretive if FIS uses the potential proceeds for share repurchases," Baird analysts said in commenting on the Bloomberg report last Wednesday. "We also think it's possible these parts of Capital Markets could have slower-than-average revenue growth/lower margins."

For the first nine months of the year, FIS reported revenue of $10.2 billion and gross profit of $3.77 billion, according to its quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

On another front, FIS recently has been pitching its real-time service called RealNet, which it says will help customers find "the fastest, most cost-efficient payments option for a given transaction in real-time."

Among other recently added services at FIS, the electronic processor offered its bank clients the option to provide accounts in which their customers could buy, sell and hold the cryptocurrency Bitcoin earlier this year.