Stephens analyst Brett Huff noted that Bloomberg reports that Global Payments (GPN) and TSYS (TSS) have held talks about a potential merger, joint venture and/or partnerships. While he has previously thought that Global Payments had the luxury of "waiting and seeing" if combining consumer funding account with a merchant POS experience, such as the Fiserv (FISV)-First Data (FDC) and FIS (FIS)-Worldpay (WP) deals will do, would yield enough strategic value, he suspects a sooner deal might be driven by the companies' desire to not just achieve larger scale but also achieve that scale with high-quality assets. Huff said he thinks any deal would likely be highly accretive given overlaps and both companies' track record for realizing cost synergies and he also sees limited antitrust concern. Huff also thinks a Global Payments-TSYS combination would increase the chances that assets such as ACI Worldwide (ACIW), Bottomline Technologies (EPAY), Jack Henry (JKHY), USA Technologies (USAT) and Q2 Holdings (QTWO) would likely be bought.