first data has six million merchants, the largest in the payments industry. the company handles 45% of all us credit and debit transactions, including handling prepaid gift card processing for many us brands such as starbucks. it processes around 2,800 transactions per second and $2.2 trillion in card transactions annually, with an 80% market share in gas and groceries in 2014. first data's spendtrend report is a key shopping metric for national news networks such as "wsj, usa today", "espn", "the new york times", vox media, and "bloomberg".