Fidelity buys SunGard Data of Wayne for $9.1 billion

Fidelity National Information Services Inc., a provider of banking and payments technology, said Wednesday it agreed to buy Wayne's SunGard Data Systems Inc. in a deal valued at $9.1 billion, including the assumption of $4 billion of debt.

SunGard's software is used by 14,000 banks, private-equity firms, asset managers, and insurance companies to automate trading, administering portfolios, accounting for assets, and managing risk.

"We believe SunGard is a perfect fit," said Gary A. Norcross, president and chief executive officer of Fidelity, which is known as FIS and is anchored in the traditional banking sector.

Norcross said big financial institutions want to deal with fewer vendors, making it an advantage to package FIS and SunGard software and services.

The combined company will have $9.2 billion in annual revenue, more than 55,000 employees, and thousands of clients in more than 100 countries, according to FIS, of Jacksonville, Fla.

FIS said it expected to trim $200 million in expenses from the combined operations by the end of 2017. It was not immediately clear what the deal will mean for SunGard's Wayne headquarters. The company also has local operations in Voorhees.In addition, it has operations in North Jersey, Minnesota, and New Hampshire.

Officials at SunGard, which had $2.8 billion in revenue last year and employs 13,000, did not respond to a request for details on how many the company employs in the Philadelphia region.

FIS said it expected to squeeze $65 million in savings from finance, human resources, and legal departments, functions likely to have a big presence in Wayne.

The sellers of SunGard are a group of private-equity firms, including Bain Capital Partners, the Blackstone Group, KKR & Co., Silver Lake Partners, and TPG Capital, which took SunGard private for $11.3 billion in 2005.

SunGard was spun out of the former Sunoco Inc. in 1983 and went public three years later.

SunGard didn't thrive under private-equity ownership, but in the last year and a half, it returned to revenue growth.

The private-equity owners have sold or spun out several SunGard businesses. They sold SunGard Higher Education Inc. for $1.8 billion in 2012 and last year spun off its original computer backup business, SunGard Availability Services, into a separate firm.

In June, SunGard's private-equity owners filed for an initial public stock offering, which is a way to test the value of a company before selling it.

The sale to FIS, which requires regulatory approval, is expected to close in the fourth quarter.

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