Bill Foley, chairman of Jacksonville-based Fidelity National Financial Inc., has invested in a wide range of companies since building his fortune on Fidelity’s title insurance business.
His investment in hockey may turn out to be his most successful venture yet, or at least his most prominent.
Foley’s National Hockey League team, the Vegas Golden Knights, has nearly doubled in value from the $500 million expansion fee his group paid for the franchise in 2016 to an estimated $965 million at the end of 2022, according to Forbes magazine.
But more significantly, the Golden Knights made good on Foley’s goal to win the Stanley Cup championship in its sixth year of play.
The team, which began play in the 2017-18 season, won the Cup by beating the Florida Panthers on June 13.
Foley has received a lot of national attention for his prediction coming true that the team would win the championship in its sixth season.
According to a story posted on NHL.com after the final game, Foley told reporters his business career, as well as his education at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, prompted his “silly statement” about winning the Cup.
“Set unrealistic goals, way above everyone’s expectations, and overachieve,” he said.
Foley moved from Jacksonville to Las Vegas after acquiring the expansion franchise, but his imprint on the Jacksonville business landscape remains strong.
Besides Fidelity National Financial, the Fortune 500 company he moved from Santa Barbara, California, in 2003, he is responsible for creating three other major corporate headquarters in Jacksonville.
Fidelity National Financial spun off another Fortune 500 company, Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS), and Fidelity also spun off mortgage technology firm Black Knight Inc. as a separate company.
Foley led an investment group that acquired business data firm Dun & Bradstreet Holdings Inc., which then moved its headquarters to Jacksonville in 2021.
He also led a group that acquired control of London-based payments processing firm Paysafe Ltd., which announced in November 2022 it would establish a North American headquarters in Jacksonville.
Foley, 78, likely isn’t done with his business deals and he told reporters the Golden Knights aren’t finished either.
“Well, I’m not going to make a prediction this time, but we’re not done,” he said.
FIS’ plan to spin off its Worldpay merchant payments technology business remains on schedule, CEO Stephanie Ferris said at a June 12 investor conference sponsored by Morgan Stanley.
“We feel really good about getting that done in the first quarter of 2024,” she said, according to a transcript posted by the company.
FIS bought Worldpay in 2019 but after three years of disappointing results, the company announced in February it would spin off the business and focus on its core business of banking technology.
Ferris said Worldpay is “the largest payment processor in the world,” but it needs to keep adding new services to keep pace with a changing payments landscape. Worldpay will be better able to acquire businesses with new technologies as a separate company, she said.
“We haven’t been able to do that since we bought it in 2019. We’ve only acquired one asset for it,” she said.
Ferris expects the separation of Worldpay from FIS will go smoothly.
“The good news, even though we drove a ton of synergies into the business as we brought it into FIS, it’s still primarily separate. So, we have a lot of overlapping corporate functions but the development teams and the technology teams are still running fairly separate. And so, getting it back out, we think we can absolutely do,” she said.
Mediterranean fast-casual restaurant chain CAVA Group Inc. had an extremely successful initial public offering, with its stock nearly doubling in price on its first day of trading.
After pricing the IPO of 14.44 million shares at $22 each, the stock closed at $43.78 on June 15.
CAVA, which started in 2010, expanded significantly after acquiring Zoës Kitchen in 2018 and now has 263 restaurants in 22 states.
The Washington, D.C.-based company converted the four Zoës restaurants in Jacksonville to CAVA in 2022 and closed down another Zoës in Ponte Vedra Beach.
CAVA had revenue of $564 million in 2022.
Another restaurant company with plans for Jacksonville is also going public.
GEN Restaurant Group Inc.’s IPO of 3 million shares at $10 to $12 each is expected to be priced June 22, according to financial website MarketBeat.
The California-based company operates 34 GEN Korean BBQ restaurants in seven states and according to its IPO filing, it has signed leases to open seven more restaurants, including one in Jacksonville.
The company did not respond to phone messages seeking more details about the Jacksonville restaurant.
CAVA trades under the ticker symbol “CAVA” and GEN expects to trade under the symbol “GENK.”