Sources: UK's money transfer company WorldFirst, which is in talks to be acquired by Ant Financial for £700M, will close in the US to avoid US blocking the deal
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second time Alibaba's Ant Financial has reshaped a cross-border payments deal around US national-security review. In January 2018, Washington blocked its $1.2B bid for MoneyGram outright, costing Ant a $30M termination fee and signaling that Chinese-owned money-transfer assets would face a hostile CFIUS path.
Rather than repeat that outcome, WorldFirst is preemptively exiting the US market entirely — removing the jurisdiction where the deal could be blocked — before Ant completed the ~$700M acquisition two weeks later (the deal closed February 14). The move trades a strategic market for regulatory certainty.
First-order effects
- WorldFirst's US customers lose their transfer service immediately, as the company shuts US operations ahead of the £700M Ant Financial takeover rather than risk a repeat of the MoneyGram block.
Second-order effects
- Ant Financial gets the UK/European remittance footprint it wanted without a US fight, but the pattern tells other Chinese acquirers that divesting or abandoning US operations is now the price of admission for payments deals.
Third-order effects
- Cross-border payments M&A is splitting into regional blocs: acquirers from one jurisdiction effectively cannot buy money-movement infrastructure serving another, pushing companies like WorldFirst to choose which market they live in before they can be bought.
The trend: US national-security review of fintech deals is forcing foreign acquirers to pre-emptively shed US operations, turning market access into a bargaining chip in cross-border M&A.