The companies now have 28 days, or until August 1, to make a formal bid, per rules in the UK’s Takeover Code (it’s the Code that required Worldpay to disclose the names of the two companies, since its stock price was already moving on rumors of their interest, and once you disclose the names, they have to make an offer within 28 days to minimise needless disruption. “Put up or shut up” is how it’s termed (which is actually very British)  hong thai travel.

Worldpay today competes against a lot of the more established financial startups that provide payment services both online and to physical merchants, but the company itself did not come out of that massive wave of new tech companies; rather it was one of the services created by an incumbent bank to help stave off any disruption.

It has been around since 1989, before the first dot-com wave, started out of a subsidiary of NatWest Bank in the UK, and eventually it became a part of RBS (the Royal Bank of Scotland) when those two banks combined. It was then spun off in 2009 as part of a divestment agreement struck with the European Commission to help give RBS a bail-out package during the banking crisis  Next Generation Firewall.

It has been publicly listed since 2015.

of headlines around malicious hacking of its services but it has also been making moves to position itself at what it believes could be some of the newer frontiers in payments, such as developing a prototype for VR payments, and a secure, smartphone-based payment service that works using the camera’s contactless chip reading functionality and an app — no extra hardware required  Fractional co2 Laser.

JPMorgan as a buyer would be an interesting move for the bank: it has up to now mainly focused on acquiring banks rather than payment services. Vantiv, meanwhile, shares a common previous investor with Worldpay, Advent International, and is today the largest merchant acquirer in the U.S. (It’s also had a taste of controversy: last year, the company made the headlines when it pulled payment processing from FanDuel and DraftKings, citing ongoing legal cases against the two over whether or not they are gambling services  .)