Jim Armitage: Vantiv and Worldpay tie-up is an ideal marriage

Apart from baseball and chilli, there’s not much to attract your self-respecting fintech wizard to Cincinnati.

So the city’s payment-processing giant Vantiv, which on Wednesday won its £9.3 billion takeover of Britain’s Worldpay, is right to have conceded to have the international ops based here in London.

Any Ohio-heavy structure would have increased the widely reported fears of Worldpay’s staff that they’d either have to transfer to the dull city or get the chop.

To be honest, employees’ worries were overdone on this score; the deal’s rationale is to combine the number one in the US with the number one in the UK.

Worldpay spent £600 million developing its platform here; why would Vantiv throw that, or the expertise behind it, away?

Still, today’s solutions, including a crop of Worldpay bosses on the board, will provide comfort. Vantiv has also heeded UK investors peeved at missing out on the company’s future. It is offering a secondary listing of shares in this $22 billion player in London.

Huge riches beckon for payment processors providing a one-stop shop of global, online and offline coverage. That makes Vantiv-Worldpay a stock worth holding.