Global Payments Stock

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to Global Payments Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's conference will be recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to your host, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations, Nate Rozof. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Welcome to Global Payments Second Quarter 2026 Conference Call. Joining us today is our CEO, Cameron Bready; CFO, Josh Whipple, and COO, Bob Cortopassi. Some of the comments made during today's call will contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied and we caution you not to place undue reliance upon them. They speak only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to update them.

In addition, we will be referring to non-GAAP financial measures. For a full reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measure, please see our press release furnished as an exhibit to our Form 8-K filed this morning and the supplemental material available on our Investor Relations website. Finally, the slide presentation that accompanies our prepared remarks is also available on our Investor Relations website. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Cameron Bready. Cameron?

Thanks, Nate, and good morning, everyone. We are pleased with our second quarter performance, which reflects the continued disciplined execution of our team members worldwide. Our integration of Worldpay is progressing rapidly, and we are progressing well against the road map we established to unlock the value creation opportunities from the transaction.

At the same time, we continue to enhance our competitive position through strong commercial execution, ongoing innovation and the accelerated adoption of AI across our products and operations, while also establishing a strong foundation to lead in the emerging era of agentic commerce. Our second quarter results underscore the durability of our business model. Adjusted net revenue grew 4% on a normalized basis, which includes an approximately 100 basis point headwind from the impact of the Middle East conflict on our travel portfolio. Adjusted operating margins expanded 70 basis points on a normalized basis, and adjusted earnings per share increased 12%. The our ability to generate durable mid-single-digit growth in the face of transient, external headwinds demonstrates the benefits of our enhanced scale and the resilience of our diversified revenue streams.

Capital allocation remains a central pillar of our investment thesis. During the quarter, we returned approximately $550 million through our previously announced accelerated share repurchase program as well as additional open market repurchases. Combined with our dividend payments, we are now more than halfway to our over $2 billion capital return commitment for the year.

Turning to the integration of Worldpay. We achieved a number of key milestones this quarter. First, we completed our operating model design and have now established our entire leadership structure, creating a more streamlined organization with clear accountability, greater agility and faster decision-making.

Second, we defined our target architecture model for our combined technology environment, providing the blueprint to consolidate platforms, reduce infrastructure complexity and improve operating leverage over time, while accelerating product innovation.

Third, we finalized the alignment of our commercial organization around three operating segments: SMB, enterprise and platforms, simplifying execution while positioning us to better serve customers across each market segment.

With these foundational elements now in place, we are well positioned to advance integration execution, unlock further synergies and strengthen our competitive position across the markets we serve. In our SMB business, our investments in go-to-market transformation are yielding improvements in sales effectiveness. Since the beginning of the year, we have seen a 30% increase in new merchant locations per quota carrying sales professional. This contributed to a greater than 25% sequential increase in Genius bookings in the second quarter. New customer yields also increased 75% year-over-year, demonstrating that our clients are willing to pay for the value Genius delivers.

Genius adoption is accelerating as we expand across geographies and sales channels. In Canada, our long-standing bank partner, Desjardins, is now selling Genius and experiencing strong momentum. In the U.S., we are on track to enable Worldpay's financial institution partners to begin selling Genius during the fourth quarter, starting with 30 of our largest bank partners.

Further, our pipeline remains strong, and we continue to win new marquee clients. For example, Long John Silver's recently completed its rollout of Genius digital menu solutions across 100 locations, and Pollo Tropical selected Genius for its 135 stores. Jeremiah's Italian Ice chose Genius to replace its legacy point-of-sale solution and to unify its software and payments together with a single provider.

In response to this strong demand, we are further investing in new features and functionality for Genius. We recently introduced our sleek new Genius handheld. It is designed for edge AI, meaning that it eliminates latency by running an AI model locally on the device. Its AI-powered voice ordering technology allows servers to have natural conversations with customers while the point-of-sale system quietly builds a ticket in the background, even in high noise environments. We also introduced our Genius AI reporting tool. This agentic assistant allows users to ask natural language questions across their own operational data and reports. It services trends, patterns and insights from a businesses reporting and operational data set to proactively support decision-making.

These innovations demonstrate the power of Genius as a modern scalable platform that combines ease of use, robust functionality and AI-enabled capability. We recently celebrated the 1-year anniversary of Genius' launch at the National Restaurant Association Conference in May. While its revenue contribution is relatively modest today, our sales momentum, product enhancements and geographic expansion in such a short period of time is impressive and a testament to the strength of our team and the scale of our business.

Genius remains central to our long-term strategy, and we are investing meaningfully in the product to enhance capabilities and open new markets as well as in marketing to build brand awareness and mind share. You may have seen our newest commercial that features Genius in the fast-paced high-pressure environments restaurant operators navigate every day. It helped to drive a nearly 60% uplift in Genius in Google-branded search, which ultimately helps to lower our cost of acquisition over time. Looking ahead, we are making additional targeted investments to accelerate Genius adoption and deeper partner engagement.

Later this month, we will host Genius World in Las Vegas, bringing together clients and partners to showcase our full suite of capabilities and innovation road map. We're also launching a nationwide roadshow to expose Genius directly to partner bank branches, increasing awareness, education and momentum across our expanding financial institution network.

Turning to our Enterprise segment. Our strategy to sell our advanced payments capabilities and value-added services in a modularized, configurable way, continues to pay dividends. Bookings are up 10% year-to-date, including notable new wins with Shangri-La Hotels; online derivatives platform IG Group; Australian crypto trading platform, BINX; and a multinational home furnishing brand. We also expanded our relationship with Domino's Pizza to be their exclusive provider for card-present and card-not-present payments in the U.S., alongside our existing relationship in Canada.

Further, we extended our relationship with a leading global retailer to support their Canadian locations, and we renewed key municipality partners, including the state of Ohio and the cities of Chicago and San Antonio. We also continue to make strong progress integrating and ramping our recently signed clients with approximately 1/3 of these going live during the second quarter, including our recent wins with ALDI, Morrisons and ridesharing and delivery platform, Careem in the UAE.

Within our platform segment, our growth strategy is centered around expanding our leadership position in embedded payments. We are investing to extend our reach with fast-growing PayFac, marketplaces and software platforms while leveraging our global footprint and broad portfolio of value-added services to drive expansion across both new and existing partners.

Within this segment, we signed 48 new partners during the second quarter, with more than half of these wins being international. These partners are well diversified across verticals, including B2B, health care, hospitality, personal and professional services and retail. On the renewal front, we were pleased to extend and expand our relationship with Xplor, a leading provider of software and integrated payment solutions across several verticals. They selected Global Payments for platforms because of our scale, service excellence, reliability, and importantly, for our ability to enable their international expansion.

Several of our other value-added services, including embedded finance, dynamic payouts and terminal modernization, also form a core part of the value proposition we deliver to Xplor and their clients. Platform's VAS revenue grew 25% in the second quarter, driven by fraud side, payouts, prime routing and merchant working capital and we saw continued double-digit volume growth in our embedded payments platform, highlighting the strength of our capabilities.

Across our business, we continue to deploy AI as an accelerator in our products and internal workflows, allowing us to innovate at a faster pace, reduce development cycle times enrich merchant experiences and provide distinctive customer service. Thanks to the scale of our combined company, the volume of data we process gives us a competitive advantage in value-added services like fraud and authorization optimization, and we are magnifying that advantage by deploying AI. Payment performance is not based on guess work. It is based on frameworks and identifying patterns and data.

For example, our AI native optimization services continue to drive payment performance in risk mitigation across multiple products delivering higher approval rates with minimal risk. Our revenue boost solution, which was already generating $2 billion in annual approval uplift, is now delivering an additional 50 basis point increase in approval rates through AI-powered intelligent decisioning. Our patent pending authentication optimization solution is also utilizing agentic capabilities to deliver significant improvements in authorization performance for 3D secure transactions.

Further, agentic commerce is an emerging growth opportunity, and we continue to invest in platform agnostic modular set of capabilities designed to help merchants participate in new commerce models regardless of channel, agent or payment method. We now have multiple agentic commerce pilots in flight with leading AI platforms in some of the world's largest global retailers. We are co-creating new commerce experiences bringing to bear our deep expertise in payments, fraud and authentication to allow management to happen at pace in a secure, reliable and scalable way. Our continued innovation and disciplined execution reinforce our confidence in the durability of our business model, and our ability to consistently generate sustainable top line growth, strong cash flow and attractive long-term shareholder returns.

With that, I'll turn it over to Josh.

Thanks, Cameron. In the second quarter, we generated adjusted net revenue of $3.16 billion, representing normalized growth of 4%, excluding dispositions. Our results reflect resilient consumer spending trends across our business through the quarter, partially offset by an approximately 100 basis point headwind primarily related to reduced volumes in our travel sector business from the conflict in the Middle East. This is in line with what we discussed on our first quarter call.

Adjusted operating margin for the quarter expanded 70 basis points on a normalized basis, excluding dispositions, and the net result was adjusted earnings per share of $3.46, representing an increase of 12%. Turning to our segment results. We are pleased to introduce our three new operating segments, SMB and enterprise and platforms, which reflect our go-forward business. These segments align to the go-to-market structure we implemented at the closing of the Worldpay transaction.

In addition to our operating segments, we also have other revenue that includes noncore portfolios and certain relationships that don't align with our segment's go-to-market strategies. We will report each of our operating segments on a contribution margin basis, and we'll also have a corporate category that contains all overhead costs.

Our largest operating segment is SMB, which provides payment, software and related commerce solutions to help small- and medium-sized businesses with less than $50 million in annualized volume. In the second quarter, SMB generated adjusted net revenue of $1.51 billion, representing normalized growth of 4%, excluding dispositions, underpinned by 4% volume growth. We saw solid growth in North America in the second quarter, and our enlarged and transformed sales force continued to deliver strong results as we accelerated the rollout of Genius, our new flagship point-of-sale technology platform.

New Genius locations grew more than 50% year-over-year and nearly 25% sequentially compared to the first quarter. We delivered $891 million of adjusted operating income in the SMB segment, representing a contribution margin of 59%.

Our enterprise segment serves large enterprises and multinational clients with more than $50 million in annualized volume. It provides card-present and card-not-present payment processing and other value-added software and services offerings to support complex payment environments.

In the second quarter, Enterprise generated adjusted net revenue of $838 million, representing normalized growth of 7% despite an approximately 400 basis point headwind attributable to the Middle East conflict. Enterprise volumes grew 4% highlighting our ability to expand yields based on the strength of our solutions. In addition, card-not-present revenue, which primarily represents global e-commerce grew low double digits. We delivered $653 million of adjusted operating income in the Enterprise segment, representing a contribution margin of 78%.

Our final operating segment is platforms, which offers payment and commerce solutions through software partners, PayFac, marketplaces and other technology-enabled platforms across numerous vertical markets. In the second quarter, platforms generated adjusted net revenue of $628 million, representing normalized growth of 7%, led by strength in embedded payments, which includes our PayFac and managed PayFac offerings.

Platform segment volume grew 10% in the second quarter, reflecting the growing mix of embedded payments within the segment. We delivered $284 million of adjusted operating income in the platform segment, representing a contribution margin of 45%. We generated adjusted free cash flow of $687 million in the second quarter, representing a conversion rate of adjusted net income to adjusted free cash flow of approximately 75%. This represents sequential improvement as expected, and our free cash flow adjustments declined by more than 70% compared to the first quarter.

As a reminder, our free cash flow conversion follows a seasonal pattern and is typically materially higher in the back half of the year relative to the first half. Additionally, we invested $236 million in capital expenditures in the quarter, representing approximately 7% of revenue.

In the second quarter, we repurchased approximately 8 million shares for $550 million through our previously announced accelerated share repurchases as well as open market repurchases. Our balance sheet remains healthy. We ended the second quarter just below 3.5x net leverage and our indebtedness is more than 90% fixed rate with a weighted average cost of approximately 4%.

Turning now to our full year outlook. As we discussed on our first quarter earnings call, our prior outlook assumed a normalization of travel activity by the end of the second quarter. However, we continue to see impacts on our travel portfolio, particularly in the Middle East and the associated revenue headwind has persisted longer than anticipated. Accordingly, we are updating our outlook to reflect the assumption that the impact of the conflict will continue through the remainder of 2026. While the duration and ultimate outcome remain uncertain, this represents the most prudent planning assumption at this time.

As a result, we now expect normalized constant currency adjusted net revenue growth of approximately 4% to 5% for the full year 2026. We continue to expect normalized adjusted operating margin expansion of approximately 150 basis points, and we now anticipate adjusted earnings per share of $13.60 to $13.80, representing 11% to 13% growth for the full year, which reflects the flow-through of the travel portfolio impacts to earnings as well as less FX impact.

Given the recent strengthening in the U.S. dollar, we now expect currency exchange rates to have roughly no impact on reported growth for the full year. We continue to expect to realize benefits from our sales force expansion, ramping of Genius sales and enterprise clients coming live during the second and third quarters and also for adjusted operating margins to expand more meaningfully in the second half of the year as we realize additional integration cost savings.

Regarding cash flow, we continue to expect the conversion rate of adjusted net income to adjusted free cash flow to exceed 90% for the full year 2026. Our capital allocation plans for 2026 and beyond remain unchanged. We continue to expect to return more than $2 billion to shareholders in 2026, while investing approximately $1 billion in the business or 8% of adjusted net revenue. Furthermore, we remain committed to preserving our investment-grade credit ratings and achieving our 3x net leverage target by the end of 2027.

In summary, the underlying trends across the business demonstrate the durability of our model. The team's focus continues to be on commercial excellence in all our go-to-market channels and disciplined execution of our integration with Worldpay. We remain confident in our prospects for sustainable growth, cash flow generation and return of capital to shareholders.

And with that, I'll turn the call back over to Cameron.

Thanks, Josh. As you have heard throughout the call, we are executing well and delivering on the initiatives within our control, exactly as planned. We are continuing to monitor the conflict in the Middle East, but expect its impact to be modest and transitory, underscoring the diversity of our revenue streams and the power of our scale. We continue to differentiate through feature-rich products, distinctive service and support and a reputation for delivering outcomes that exceed client expectations, from industry-leading enterprise payment solutions to innovative platforms like Genius, Global Payments is at the forefront of commerce technology.

And with approximately $1 billion in annual investment, we are among the few companies in our industry with the resources to innovate at this scale, anticipating and delivering solutions ahead of demand. Our global distribution network is another powerful differentiator. The breadth of our reach, combined with deep local expertise positions us uniquely to help customers expand into new markets and capture growth opportunities around the world.

At the same time, we remain focused on disciplined capital deployment and maximizing total shareholder return. We are a proven compounder with durable and diversified revenue streams and substantial free cash flow generation. We're more than halfway to our $2 billion-plus 2026 return of capital commitment and remain on track to return $7.5 billion cumulatively by the end of 2027.

Overall, the integration execution, operational simplification, innovation investments and disciplined capital deployment are strengthening the foundation of the company and position Global Payments to deliver sustainable growth, expanding margins and compelling long-term shareholder value.

Operator, please open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question will come from Dan Dolev with Mizuho.

Really nice results, really -- great to see all the progress on Genius. It looks like you're off to a great start there. Just had a question, Cameron, I think a lot of people are asking, can you maybe help us unpack some of the assumptions underpinning the new guide? I think a lot of investors want to get some more detail into that. But overall, great job here and congrats again.

Yes. Thanks, Dan. Maybe I'll start with a high-level sort of overview and I'll turn it over to Josh to get into a little bit of the detail. So I think the right way to think about the guide is we're trying to derisk the back half for whatever the Middle East conflict may entail in terms of ongoing impact to our travel portfolio. As we said in our Q2 results, we certainly saw a pretty meaningful impact from the conflict. We called out 100 basis points. It was probably a little bit higher than that. We were able to offset some of that impact in Q2, but look, the situation obviously remains volatile and uncertain.

And right now, our assumption is that it will persist through the balance of the year, and will continue to negatively impact the travel portfolio. Look, the environment is slightly better than it was, clearly, in the sort of the middle of Q2, but certainly, capacity and forward bookings within our travel portfolio -- sorry, remain significantly below kind of pre-conflict levels. And the capacity that kind of has come back tends to be more short haul, lower yielding domestic sort of routes versus the higher yielding long haul routes that drive greater levels of revenue for us.

So look, I think our guide for the back -- for the year now is 4% to 5% on a constant currency ex disposition basis. I think that allows for a range of outcomes in the Middle East. I think previously, we said the back half would be slightly above 5%, now it's probably going to be closer to that 4.5% range, not to put too fine a point on it, again, trying to allow for a variety of outcomes as it relates to the conflict.

But look, I think this is the prudent approach to take given the uncertainty that exists and the impacts that we continue to see on the travel portfolio versus taking a kind of a quarter-by-quarter view, but certainly, end of day, we still feel good about kind of how the business is positioned for the balance of the year. And I think most importantly, it doesn't impact our capital return plans for the year because the impact overall, given the size and scale of the business is relatively modest. Josh, I don't know if you'd add any more details around that.

Yes, just a couple of other things that I would add, but a finer point on some of the other pieces of it. We do continue to expect margins to expand 150 basis points for the full year, and that's primarily driven from the realized Worldpay integration synergies and operating leverage from the model. And as Cameron mentioned, we now expect to report EPS growth in that 11% to 13% range, which also takes into consideration updated FX assumptions just given the strength, or the recent strengthening of the dollar.

And then as it relates, Dan, more specifically, the second half, we would expect revenue growth to be in that approximately 4.5% range, and we expect 200 basis points of margin expansion with margins right around that 43% range. And then as it relates to general macro, we've factored in just continuation of the spending trends that we saw in Q2 and a generally stable macro environment.

Congrats on a really, really good quarter.

Our next question comes from Bryan Keane with Citigroup.

Solid results here. I wanted to ask about yields. I noticed that the normalized revenue is running above volume for enterprise and a little bit below for platforms. Just wanted to understand that and maybe what the kind of go-forward outlook looks like for those segments. And then in SMB, we're kind of running volume and revenue are at the same levels I'm just wondering with Genius coming into the mix, does that maybe drive yield higher for that segment.

Yes. Really great questions, Bryan. Why don't I start, and I'll ask Bob maybe to chime in if you had some additional color he'd like to add. But Look, as it relates to the enterprise business, as a reminder, it's a mix of card-present, card-not-present volume. So I think we called out in our script card-not-present volumes are kind of growing in that double-digit range. Card present, given the type of merchants we serve in that space, it's generally going to be more GDP-type levels. So you blend that together, and you get a growth rate that is on a volume basis, fairly consistent with the overall revenue growth of the business.

We do obviously get a little bit of a tailwind from value-added services within the enterprise channel as well. So again, blended all together, probably revenue growth a little bit higher than overall volume growth when you mix the card-present, card-not-present portions of the portfolio together with VAS kind of being a tailwind that drives revenue growth a little bit higher.

I think in the platforms business, it's really a mix question, so where we're seeing volume growth, and this is a secular trend, not just a unique trend to Global Payments, is really around the PayFac and managed PayFac segments of the market, what we characterize as our embedded solution. So volume growth there is strong, around 15%. Volume growth in the more traditional integrated referral channels is going to be less than that. So you get a blended volume growth in the business that's in the roughly 10% level.

Revenue growth being a little bit lower than that, largely because the yield, the revenue yield, that we see in the managed PayFac and PayFac channels is a little bit less than what we see in the more traditional integrated referrals. So that's a little bit of a mix story.

And platforms, and certainly, we're pleased with the strength and volume we're seeing. And obviously, the revenue growth will continue to drift up as we move more and more volume to our managed PayFac solutions over time.

And then lastly, within the SMB channel, you're exactly right. I think the challenge with Genius is just size relative to the size of the channel. So Genius is a relatively modest contributor today. Over time, we would expect Genius to be able to drive better yields, and we actually see that in the data and some of that we called out on the call this morning. It's just a modest contributor given the scale and size of the total SMB business today. So I would continue to expect to see revenue growth in SMB fairly consistent with volume growth in the short term. But over time, obviously, revenue growth will drift up as Genius becomes a more meaningful contributor to revenue over a longer period of time.

Bob, I don't know if there's anything you would add.

Yes. Real quick. One additional item, Bryan. I think Cameron already highlighted that our expectation is for revenue growth and volume to decouple in a favorable way over a period of time. That's not just anchored to Genius, although certainly, we have aspirations for Genius that we think are going to drive material improvements in the growth of the business. But it's really about the value-added service portfolio across all three of the segments.

So over a period of time, accounting for mix shift and some of the trends that Cameron already highlighted, we would expect to be driving higher front book yields and over time, higher back book yields by attaching more products and services to our relationships with clients across the size spectrum, whether they're SMB platforms or enterprise.

Our next question comes from Andrew Schmidt with KeyBanc.

Appreciate all the work on the segment detail here, really helpful. Two related questions. I'll ask them upfront. Just when we think about segment growth rates, we just maybe talk about expectations for intermediate term? I know we just walked through some of the yield dynamics, some of the drivers there. But just intermediate term sort of view on those segments would be helpful. And then specifically within SMB, obviously, Genius, a big driver of value-add services, distribution, maybe if we could just drill into that a little bit in terms of the key components in terms of driving revenue growth improvement there?

Andrew, it's Josh. So good question. As we think about just the segments more generally, if we start with Enterprise, we called out 7% normalized growth in Q2, and that obviously reflects some impact from the Middle East, which was about 400 basis points of growth headwind, so that business on a normalized basis, you can call it like low double digits.

I think as you think about the back half of the year, we would see some modest improvement there as we continue to see some of the strong underlying trends around card-not-present, we called out that the bookings growth of 10% in the first half of the year and we start to see those conversions or those bookings go live in the back half. So we're continuing to see really strong trends there.

Platforms, we called out that normalized growth rate in that 7% range, and we expect to see some slight acceleration there. Embedded payments, which includes our PayFac and managed PayFac business, that's about a little over 20% of the overall composition there, and that's growing kind of in that 20% range. And so we expect to see some acceleration there in the back half. And then SMB, we called out, it was about 4% normalized growth. And again, we've seen really strong trends through Genius, we talked about the bookings on the new locations that we added in our prepared remarks, and we continue to see really, really strong underlying trends with Genius.

It's a modest piece of overall SMB composition. But generally speaking, we're seeing really strong trends with Genius as that we continue to see improved adoption. And we also really only launched this a little over a year ago, so we're still kind of in the early innings here. But again, as I mentioned, seeing really strong contribution from that.

Yes. Maybe I'll just add a couple of points on that. If I take a bigger step back and kind of look at the three segments, sort of specifically, I would say enterprise, we would target to be kind of a high single-digit, low double-digit grower depending on the quarter and some of the underlying trends, particularly around e-com volumes, et cetera, seeing really good front book productivity, 10% sales growth kind of in the quarter as we called out. So that's generally the target that we would have for that business, ex the kind of Middle East headwinds that we're experiencing currently.

Platforms, again, to Josh's point, a high single-digit grower, really led by the embedded solutions, managed PayFac and PayFac capabilities. Obviously, with VAS become an increasingly important component of revenue growth over time. And then SMB, we're still targeting that mid-single-digit range. And that's a little bit of a more secular story than anything else. I think as probably everyone in the audience is aware, more and more SMBs are procuring their payment solutions from their software provider.

So over time, that's why Genius is such a critical component of our growth story for SMB, is getting good penetration with our own software solutions in restaurant and retail and adjacencies where we think Genius can be relevant. Whereas over time, other verticals will continue to shift towards our platforms business, again, as more and more SMBs look to procure their solutions integrated with their software provider.

So that's more of a secular trend broadly in the market. And why we expect to see kind of SMB at those types of growth rates, again, with Genius becoming a more meaningful contributor over time and ultimately able to drive the growth rate higher, but that's going to take some time just given the relative size of Genius today.

Our next question comes from Jason Kupferberg with Wells Fargo.

So I know you said 1.5% growth for the half of the year. Just curious on cadence there between Q3 and Q4. And then just to get a little nerdy on the numbers maybe for a second. I want to talk about the Middle East. Just going back to last quarter, I thought we were talking about like a 70 basis point headwind in Q2 and then another 30 basis points from the IRS contract. It sounds like the airlines alone were a little over 100 bps of headwind in Q2. So I just wanted to make sure we have the facts right there. And then should we assume that the 4.5% outlook for the second half assumes that current run rate of airline headwind stays unchanged?

Yes. Jason, it's Cameron. Maybe I'll start and I'll ask Josh to chime in with some more color as well. So to your first question, I wouldn't parse too specifically Q3 and Q4 at this point in time. Obviously, given the drivers of better growth in the back half of the year, I think it's fair to assume that on the margin, Q4 would be a little better than Q3, but I don't think we're talking huge material differences here relative to the back half outlook in totality. And as a reminder, those drivers are really a few things. One is just the continued ramping of our sales force from a productivity perspective as well as our new sellers.

Two, it's a continued progress that we're seeing with Genius, and obviously, the trends that we've seen in the first half of the year start to contribute more as a revenue matter into the back half of the year on the margin, which is helpful. And then third, it's really the boarding and go live and ramping of the enterprise book of business that is what we call signed but not live. We called out on the call that about 1/3 of those went live in the second quarter, so they will now start to ramp in the back half of the year. Examples are ALDI, Morrisons, Careem, which is a ride-hailing service in the UAE. All those are going to help to drive slightly better kind of outcome in the back half of the year as those revenues ramp for the business.

So hopefully, that gives you a little bit of color around the drivers for the back half.

I think to your second question, first of all, your memory is very good. We did call out 70 basis points and roughly 30. I think the 70 basis points, as we said in our Q1 call, really sort of presuppose that the Middle East conflict kind of ended more quickly than certainly it hasn't ended yet, so it ended up persisting for the entirety of the second quarter and the impact ended up being slightly more than we anticipated. So closer to that 100 basis points versus the 70 that we called out in the first quarter.

We were largely able to absorb the other things, largely because of better volumes. Some of that was driven by the World Cup that we don't necessarily expect to persist in the back half of the year. But we were able to offset some of the impact around that for the second quarter.

For the balance of the year, look, as I said earlier, things are getting slightly better, but we still expect a headwind from the Middle East conflict on the travel portfolio. If things get worse, it could drift up to that kind of 100 basis point impact we saw in the second quarter. If not, it will probably be slightly less than that. And I think that's what our guide largely reflects, but I think we've given room in the guide for a variety of outcomes around the Middle East conflict. And given the uncertainty and again, the current instability in the environment, we think that's the prudent approach to take.

Just want to pivot to free cash flow for a second. I mean, it's good to see some of those adjustments coming down. And I know we've been talking about an adjusted free cash flow number for next year of $4 billion. Just as we think about trying to translate that to more of a GAAP free cash flow number based on your sense of how much more of the adjustments may come down next year? What might be a reasonable range to think about for a clean GAAP free cash flow number in 2027?

Yes. Look, Jason, we talked about when we announced the transaction that we expected $600 million of onetime costs to match our overall synergies. And this year, we're trending, I think in the first half integration, we're right around that $300 million mark. We expect about another $100 million. That does include some separation costs in it, so you back that out we would expect to go ahead and see the integration costs come down slowly over time with them primarily front loaded in the first half of the integration and then tailing off into 2028.

So again, we feel comfortable kind of with our free cash flow we called out in 2028, our capital returns and deleveraging back down to that 3x leverage point. And then as we -- obviously, we get closer to 2027, we'll be able to give a better steer with regards to what the outlook looks like for '27. But I'd say, right now, we feel very good about getting back to that 3x leverage point and returning the capital that we committed to returning when we announced at our Investor Day in September 2024.

And Jason, it's Cameron. Let me just add a couple of comments to that. First of all, we are trying to pull forward some of our integration work, but more importantly, our separation work. We spent a lot of time talking about integration. We haven't spent so much time talking about separation, but we are trying to pull forward as much as we can. Our separation from FIS for Worldpay, in particular, their technology environments. The sooner that we can do that, the sooner we can execute on our own plans without reliance upon coordination through FIS, et cetera.

And that's not a knock on FIS by the way, it's just -- that's what's in the best interest for the business for the long term is trying to move off as quickly as we can. So we are accelerating some of that work into 2026, to Josh's earlier point around separation. So those costs will likely be a little bit higher this year.

The benefit of that also is it helps to offset the tax gain on the issuer sale, so there is some benefit of pulling forward plans onetime expenses associated with integration and separation into this year. As Josh said, over time, naturally, those costs will drift down as we continue to execute on both of those initiatives as we get into '27 and more so in '28.

But I think the most important point is we remain confident in our ability to generate the free cash flow next year that supports the capital return plans that we've articulated and view ourselves very much on track to hit those objectives.

Our next question comes from Darrin Peller with Wolfe Research.

I want to ask first a question on Genius. And then Josh, I will have a quick follow-up on the free cash. So just more in this year versus going forward. But Cameron first, just on the Genius rollout. Obviously, the checks continue to be very strong as the demand is there. So what expectations do you actually have for it, specifically the SMB segment and to see success cross-sell into the Worldpay side over the next 12 months. Just I guess we're looking for a little bit more color on milestones you're looking to achieve that we can watch and see success in.

Yes. I think it's a good question, Darrin. Thanks, and thanks for the commentary as well. We see the same thing in the marketplace, which is why we continue to invest behind the product, the capability, the marketing, the brand the distribution, et cetera, because we have big ambitions for Genius. And certainly, all of the early results at year-end from launch remain very, very positive, particularly as it relates to the sequential growth in new sales and just the receptivity in the market for the product we're able to deliver.

Look, I think as we get through kind of the back half of the year heading into 2027, we owe you more sort of key sort of KPIs around Genius itself, just where have we gotten to in terms of size, what do we expect sort of the Genius specific growth rates to be as we continue to move forward and invest against the product and solution.

It's such a modest contributor today. We haven't really broken out a lot of specificity around Genius in particular. But other than kind of what we're seeing from a front book perspective. But as we continue to scale it for the back half of the year and head into 2027, we'll be able to provide you a little bit more color around size contribution and where we see it going from a growth rate perspective over time that I think will help inform the overall expectations around kind of growth for the SMB channel.

I would just reflect back on the comment I made earlier. I think it's important to recognize, as this business evolves over the course of the next few years, and this is largely a U.S. commentary, but that's the vast majority of our SMB business. Ultimately, the SMB channel is going to be selling Genius largely in restaurant and retail verticals and some adjacencies where, again, Genius can be relevant.

Most everything else we're doing from a vertical perspective will be through our platforms business. Again, as more and more SMBs are procuring their payment solutions through their software provider, so that's a natural kind of secular trend in the industry, but certainly something we expect to continue to play out in our SMB portfolio and our platform portfolio over a period of time as payment and software continue to merge and buying behaviors of SMBs continue to drift towards procuring it through software vendors, ultimately, that's the expectation that you should see in the SMB channel and the platforms business.

Continued strong growth SMB transitioning from having historically sold stand-alone payment solutions to selling Genius, and ultimately, whether it's next year or the following, I think, effectively 100% of front book sales in our SMB channel will be Genius in the U.S. and the rest of the world will evolve towards that same model over a period of time.

Okay. That's really helpful. Josh, just my follow-up, was on free cash again. I mean I know you did about $1.2 billion in adjusted free cash and you need to do about $2 billion in the second half. But in terms of also real free cash, I mean, we calculate you would need a step function of around $1.7 billion in the second half, just to achieve what we think is the conversion.

Just -- I know you said there's seasonality that drives second half higher, but if you could just walk through some of the key specifics to drive that materially higher free cash, both on an adjusted and GAAP basis. I think it'd be really helpful, just given the strong capital return program we're looking for.

Yes. Look, so Darrin, a good question. And what I would do is I would point you actually back to kind of the historical trends that we've seen around free cash flow conversion. And historically, it's lower in the first half relative to the second half. I think if you go back and if you look at our free cash flow conversion, last year, it was over 100% in the second half of the year. And we would expect those trends to go ahead and continue for the second half where we see that acceleration.

And look, we've already returned more than half of the capital that we targeted to return in 2026. So we're well on our way there, and we feel very confident with regard to between dividends and buybacks, that will be over that $2 billion mark for the full year.

Our next question comes from Adam Frisch with Evercore ISI.

I just wanted to do a little bit of housekeeping on revenue. Since FX was neutral, was the delta between nominal and adjusted the $60 million of divestitures. And then along those lines on other revenues was down year-over-year on a normalized basis, which our math takes the growth rate down, obviously, across the three segments. So can you just help us understand what sits in the other revenue bucket and when it stops being attracted?

So Adam, as it relates to the other revenue, we called this out in our prepared remarks. This represents noncore portfolio to certain relationships that don't align to our segments or go-to-market strategies. And what that really is comprised of its portfolio of partners that are no longer referring us front book relationships and that are no longer actively providing us with new merchant referrals, so that's one piece of it.

Another piece of it is there are a couple of noncore processing businesses that we acquired through the Worldpay acquisition, that's included in there. And then there's a portfolio where we provide managed services, where the partner builds on acquiring the platform and they're solely migrating off of us.

If you think about just the other revenue, and that's in our disclosure, about 8% in 2025 of that revenue -- of our total revenue was other, and we expect that to be in the 6% range in 2026. But the reason, Adam, we broke that out is we want to go ahead and get better line of sight of what the core business looks like going forward. So those are some of the components that make up the other revenue.

Adam, and just to your first question, you're right. The difference year-over-year for Q2 is just going to be dispositions. There's really no FX, meaningful FX sort of to call out so the ex dispositions number, I think it's a little north of $60 million, $63 million -- $65 million in the second quarter is the difference.

And then to just put a finer point on Josh's comments, as we think about the aggregate growth rate is the aggregate growth rate. What we're trying to demonstrate, I think, in the disclosures and the way that we've segmented the business is the future of the business really now sits in enterprise platforms and SMB. There are elements of the business that we are winding down and exiting over a period of time. It will be a drag until they're gone, but we did want to at least highlight across the three segments with the ongoing sort of growth rate for the business is, in particular, how we're sort of competing and winning in the market and what the three segments look like excluding kind of the drag from this other portfolio of activities that we're in some cases, purposely sort of looking to exit and wind down over a period of time because they don't align with the go-forward strategy for the business.

So we think the disclosure we provided help to provide a lot more transparency around that. And obviously, the other revenue will continue to decline as that revenue attrites and we exit certain relationships over the coming years.

Our next question comes from Dave Koning with Baird.

I guess I'm kind of wondering how we see the acceleration picture going forward. You're talking about second half, 4.5%. As we look forward, it seems the Middle East 1% dissipates, you get Worldpay revenue synergies, probably incremental kind of going into next year, and then Genius ramps. I mean do you feel pretty good today that 2027 will be an accelerating growth year?

Yes. Absolutely, Dave. I think for the reasons you described, obviously, once we lap the headwinds from the Middle East, as we get into Q2 of next year with the acceleration we're seeing around Genius, the front book kind of bookings numbers that we've been able to generate this year all gives us confidence kind of going into next year that we should see an acceleration off of our current expected 4% to 5% constant currency ex disposition guide for 2026 without a doubt.

It's a big ship, so obviously, moving revenue point on a business of this size is a pretty meaningful increment, kind of year-over-year, but we feel good certainly about the momentum that we'll have kind of exiting the year given everything that we're executing on heading into 2027.

And just a quick follow-up, SMB 4%, was that pretty equal between Worldpay and Global Payments?

Yes. It's really hard now that we've segmented the business and combined the portfolios to really disaggregate between the two portfolios. I would say, and we haven't really talked about it. One of the bright spots in SMBs, one of the less bright spots in SMB is the U.K. The U.K. market, I think, overall, just as a GDP matter is kind of struggling from a macro standpoint. And certainly, we're seeing a little bit of softness in the U.K. market.

That's more coming from Worldpay, just given their presence, particularly in the SMB space there. So if I had to sort of try to pinpoint it, it's probably slightly more weighted to global than Worldpay on the SMB side. But at this stage, given the work we've done to integrate the business, in particular, how we've aligned the segments, which has really been on an account-by-account relationship-by-relationship basis, it's kind of hard now to disaggregate it back to what was kind of premerger heritage Worldpay versus premerger heritage Global Payments.

Our final question comes from Ramsey El-Assal with Cantor Fitzgerald.

I wanted to ask in the context of the higher customer yields you're seeing on Genius. Is there a back book of existing customers on the SMB side that you can convert to Genius? Could that become an important kind of accelerant or growth driver for, I guess, just on the SMB segment growth rate?

Ramsey, thanks for the question. It's Bob. The answer is yes. As we've mentioned a couple of times when this topic has come up, our focus has largely been on converting front book opportunities into Genius, attaching more product, adding more value around each of those engagements with prospects and clients. there is a back book. The back book of point of sale is largely serviced by our dealer network today. And as they're having conversations with their clients, there's opportunistic upgrades that are happening.

I think the attractiveness of the new Genius technology that spans both the sleek hardware profile that we've built around the countertop experience, kiosks, digital menu boards and the new handhelds, that's really attractive. The incremental functionality that Genius brings to bear given where they were coming from is very attractive.

And so we do see a degree of kind of opt-in upgrades as customers are looking for increased functionality and a better experience overall. But there's not a mass campaign around back book conversion, and we haven't put a gun to anybody's head to force them with platform retirements or deprecation sort of expectations.

So we continue to upgrade the back book at a measured pace, really on a voluntary basis as customers want to opt in to those new solutions, but 100%, truly of our focus around Genius adoption is around horizontal vertical expansion, geographies, making it available in more of our distribution channels and increasing our sales footprint and sales effectiveness, both in terms of the digital client journey as well as kind of our traditional sales.

Okay. And a quick follow-up for me. In Enterprise, in the slide presentation, I think you called out 30% growth in cross-sell bookings. I'm just wondering if you could comment a little further on where you're seeing success there, what that means?

Yes. I'll touch on that, Ramsey. Thanks for the question. It's really a around our VAS portfolio. Bob touched on VAS and the importance of VAS to drive our growth across all three segments. It's particularly important in our Enterprise channel. And we've seen really good progress this year, largely through a concerted effort to drive more cross-selling of our value-added services into existing client relationships that we have. So we have teams very much focused on net new payment opportunities, but we also have teams now very dedicated to cross-selling value-added services, whether it's revenue boots, fraud side, authentication optimization solutions, et cetera, across our FX capabilities, across our portfolio of clients, we're seeing very good traction there. It is partially driving obviously the strong bookings growth that we've been able to articulate for the enterprise business on a year-to-date basis.

We have no further questions at this time. This concludes our call. Thank you, and have a good day.

Okay. Well, thank you, everyone, for joining. I am very, very pleased and honored to have my friend, I say, Cameron Bready, CEO of Global Payments here. This is literally the most exciting part of the conference for me for many, many reasons. Happy to have you here. Thank you, Cameron.

Very happy to be here. Thanks for hosting us.

We've been following the story, and it's very exciting. And as you know, we're big fans of you, the story, your team, Nate, everyone is here. So thank you so much. So let me just start. We prepared a few questions, and I think we're happy to take -- Cameron is happy to take questions from the audience as well if we have -- if the time permits. So let's talk about -- you completed the acquisition of Worldpay from FIS in January, and you're simultaneously divesting TSYS, right? So can you talk about the key integration milestones that you achieved and then we'll take it from there.

Okay. Yes, happy to. So once again, delighted to be here. Thanks, Dan, so much for hosting us. Look, obviously, the acquisition of Worldpay and simultaneous divestiture of Issuer Solutions was a big sort of transformative opportunity for Global Payments. Exiting the Issuer Solutions business allows us to be a monoline merchant solution pure-play business, which strategically, I felt was very important in terms of making sure we are well positioned for the future.

The reality is we operate in a very competitive industry. And I think allowing us to be in a place where all of our time, effort, attention, investment and resource was going towards Merchant Solutions was the right thing for us to do to make sure we can continue to compete and win in the market as we move forward in time.

And of course, Worldpay is a significant catalyst to the transformation journey that we began a couple of years ago. And obviously, I think the combination of the 2 businesses better positions the combined company far better for the future to compete and win and either one of us was positioned, I think, on a stand-alone basis. So clearly, a scenario where putting the 2 businesses together really allows for differentiated outcomes in the future relative, again, to what I thought we could do on a stand-alone basis.

So I think as of yesterday, we're 150 days in. It feels like 1,050 in many ways, but I'm enormously proud of the progress we've made. And I would say from a milestone perspective, the things we focused on most specifically in the early days were kind of as follows.

First, we wanted to make sure we built the right foundation for the future. And we really took a good deal of time to think about our mission, our vision, our values and set the foundation for the culture that we want to have for the new Global Payments. And the good news is Worldpay and Global Payments have very similar cultures. And I think bringing those 2 cultures together is going to be a really positive thing for our company. But we wanted to make sure we got off on the right foot in establishing a strong foundation for the future of the business.

The second thing we did was institute our operating model. And that operating model is very consistent with what Global Payments had transformed to over the last probably 18 months. And we had moved from holding company, operating company, highly fragmented business to a single unified operating company structure.

And we moved very quickly to embed that new operating model across the combined business as well as aligning our go-to-market activities across 3 channels: enterprise, integrated and platform and SMB. And that work is largely done as well, and that was a big milestone for us.

The third thing we've been highly focused on is getting the right organizational structure and leadership team in place. We announced the executive leadership team a couple of months before close. Right at close, we announced the next layer of management, and we're in the process of finalizing and will, I think, this month or early next, the last layers of management for the organization and then aligning the rest of our teams against that new organizational and leadership structure.

I think interestingly, as we've done that work, it's been a great opportunity to really uplift talent kind of across the organization. In most situations, we had 2 in a box that we could assess relative to the needs of the business, and we're able to choose the best talent and the best individuals who can help lead and drive the company forward, given the things that we want to accomplish. So that's been a very deliberate process, but one that I think is going to yield long-term benefits in terms of establishing a very strong leadership team and a very strong organizational design that supports the operating model that we want to run.

I think interestingly, we're probably evenly split between heritage Global Payments and heritage Worldpay team members at the executive level, all the way through kind of all the management level. So I'm proud of that. And I think it reflects that there's really good talent in both sides and the opportunity to put that together will allow us to uplift talent kind of more broadly.

And then lastly, we've established very tactical execution plans to go and chase all of the expense synergies that we've targeted around the transaction as well as the revenue synergy opportunities that we expect to bring to life over the next 3 years as we work to integrate the 2 businesses. So really proud of the team. We -- today, it feels like we've been together for years as opposed to 150 days. But we still have a lot of work in front of us from an integration standpoint, and we recognize that challenge, and we face it head on every day.

And touching on the synergies, you have some very ambitious synergy targets, both about $600 million for cost synergies and $200 million for revenue synergies. Can we talk about the progress that you're making there specifically?

Yes. It's a great question and obviously dovetails nicely with my last answer. So we are targeting $200 million of run rate synergy. We expect to get that kind of exiting 2028. As I said before, we have all the tactical plans in place. Most of those really involve cross-selling between the heritage Global Payments business and Worldpay and vice versa.

Some of those synergies also involve taking capabilities that exist within the heritage Worldpay business at the enterprise level and bringing them down market more into the SMB channel. And then, of course, across the 2 businesses, we have enormous amounts of distribution, both breadth and depth and diversity that we can leverage globally, I think, to bring more product and capability to market and really look to lean into that distribution asset in more meaningful ways to bring the best product and make them more ubiquitously available to all of our clients around the globe.

And as we think about driving revenue synergies in the business, that's really the core thesis. How do we unlock all the best product and solutioning we have now within the 4 walls of Global Payments and how do we better leverage the combined distribution footprint and the scale of that to drive better revenue and growth outcomes for the business long term.

Josh always likes to say, and so I'll borrow his words, the expense synergies are table stakes. Like we have a great deal of confidence in our ability to deliver on those. We have a great track record of delivering on expense synergies. Again, we have all the tactical plans identified to deliver on the $600 million of run rate expense synergies. We're well on track for what we expect to deliver in 2026. Still expecting to exit the year around $150 million and building to that $600 million exit rate again by the end of 2028. So very well progressed against those.

And most importantly, we have very clear line of sight to where every dollar of those expense synergies are going to come from in the business as we continue to move forward and execute against those plans.

Great. And then maybe last topic on this medium-term, long-term stuff is the cross-sell opportunities. Can you maybe -- it looks like there's a lot of very exciting cross-sell opportunities. Maybe we can touch on like 1 or 2 specifics and some examples.

Yes. And a lot of it really is borne out of what I described earlier, which is this core thesis around how do you unlock all the product and solutioning across the ecosystem and push it through the distribution that's available to us. Some really nice early wins we've seen. And look, these aren't huge needle movers, but I think they're indicative of better things to come in the future, within, I'd say, a couple of weeks of close, we were able to enable Worldpay direct sellers in the U.S., which they didn't have a ton of, but enable their direct sellers to sell our Genius point-of-sale software solutions. That was a big early win.

One of the things about the Worldpay business, clearly, they had a lot of strengths, and we're delighted to have those strengths now. One of their weaknesses was really SMB product. They've invested heavily on the enterprise side. SMB probably didn't get as much investment. So the ability to bring our SMB product suite into the Heritage Worldpay business is a real opportunity and one that we're particularly excited about.

So being able to enable them, it was a nice early win for our teams. They were very excited about it. And obviously, the selling motion around that has been quite good, even though it's on a fairly small scale today.

The other quick win that we were able to achieve was enabling our heritage Global Payments sellers in the U.K. to sell Worldpay's e-comm solutions. So clearly, Worldpay's strength is in their e-comm capabilities. The ability now for our teams to sell those solutions in the U.K. market, again, within weeks of closing was a nice early win for our teams, and we're seeing really good traction with our team, our heritage Global Payments team ability to sell those e-com solutions in the market.

The other thing that I mentioned earlier that we're working on is bringing some of our SMB-oriented product and capability, Genius, for example, into the enterprise book within Worldpay. Genius serves enterprise customers today. Worldpay has a lot of enterprise businesses that would benefit from the Genius solutioning that we can bring to market, particularly in QSR restaurants.

So looking to unlock those opportunities, as well as bringing Worldpay the very sophisticated value-added services and capabilities they deploy in the enterprise space. Fraudsight is a great example of that, which is their AI-driven fraud solution, bringing that down into the SMB market as well. So lots of opportunity that will take a little more investment, a little more time to bring to life, but certainly tactical plans that are baked into the $200 million of run rate revenue synergies we expect to realize.

Great. And we always focus on the long term, but most of the questions we get is more about the second half, unfortunately, from that's -- my side.

That's the world we live in, right?

Yes. That's the world -- the short term is the long term. So let's talk about the confidence. Let's talk about the second half is like -- what factors give you the confidence for that accelerating growth in the second half of 2026?

Yes. I mean, I think it's largely -- it's confidence in the things that we're doing that are helping to drive better commercial outcomes for the business by and large. I think first and foremost is Genius. We only launched Genius a year ago. It feels, again, much longer than that. And we're very proud of the progress that we've made with Genius, really gratified by the receptivity we've seen in the market around Genius and the early returns are quite good. Obviously, it's still a small part of our business and growing and scaling it is an important part of the long-term future of our business.

But for the first time probably ever, I'm proud of our point-of-sale offerings. I think they're highly competitive with everything in the marketplace today. And I have more conviction today than I ever had around the ability to really make Genius a central part of our growth story and just our story overall over a longer period of time.

So the continued momentum we're building around Genius, obviously, albeit small, is a tailwind as we continue to progress through the year and assuming we produce at the same levels we've seen, certainly for the first part of 2026, we'll obviously have an incremental tailwind for that in the back half of the year as we continue to grow and scale it.

The other area is just around the commercial productivity side of the business. We've been adding new sellers to our ecosystem. We're targeting to add 500 this year. Expect most of that to be done probably by late Q3, Q4 sort of time frame. But the early cohorts of hiring now have been on board for several months. They're ramping from a productivity perspective. So we would expect to see better new sales performance, which also creates a tailwind as we think about first half, second half, just as those early cohorts are now maturing in our environment and their productivity levels are getting to what we would target kind of as run rate sort of productivity achievement for each of those cohorts. And we're obviously adding net new sellers, and so we expect that to contribute to new revenue growth as well.

And then lastly, in the enterprise space, we have a pretty large, what we call kind of signed but not wide portfolio. and have very good visibility around sort of new logos actually starting to process and flow transactions and volume across our ecosystem in the back half of the year. So the enterprise business is a great business.

The one downside to the business is kind of long lead time on the sales cycle and sometimes long lead time on boarding and bringing new volumes into the ecosystem, but we have very good visibility into the back half in terms of new logos who have signed with us last year or maybe early this year starting to flow volumes, which gives us some confidence around the enterprise growth rate, obviously improving as we work through the balance of the year.

Fair enough. And maybe on capital allocation, one of the exciting parts of the story is the capital return to shareholders. I think it's $7.5 billion by the end of '27, and you announced a $500 million accelerated repurchase in Q1. So how should we think about the remainder of the year and the remainder of next year?

Yes. And then maybe to contextualize it a little bit, we targeted it over the '25 to '27 time frame. We did a little over $1 billion last year, I think $1.25 billion, $1.3 billion, something like that. We're targeting north of $2 billion this year. So by the time we get through the second quarter, we'll have done about half of that or a little over half of that will be complete. And then the balance will come in 2028 -- sorry, 2027, all the years run together. Yes, sorry, the balance will come in 2027, getting to that kind of $7.5 billion target over that 3-year period.

So by the end of Q2, we'll be halfway through or more than halfway through what we anticipate doing this year. This year, we've got a couple of things working against us. One is we have a pretty big tax gain on the issuer sales. So we have fairly large tax payments that we have to make in 2026, which is governing a little bit the amount that we can return this year, but we feel confident in our ability to return north of that $2 billion number, which is our target for the full year.

And that's also -- I think it's worth noting that's while investing $1 billion, almost 8% of our revenue back into the business this year. So all that capital return kind of comes after the investments that we're continuing to make in the business to drive growth and to drive returns for the long term.

Great. And I wanted to touch a little bit on Genius because that's a very, very big initiative and the product from what we are hearing is off to a great start. So can we talk about the -- how the AI integration is differentiated for Genius versus some competitors like Stripe, Adyen or Fiserv? And what is the adoption that merchants that you're seeing with merchants with Genius right now?

Yes. Yes. As I mentioned before, Genius is obviously a central part of our story and ultimately, I think, an important driver for us for many years to come. As we step back and think about it, if you look across restaurant and retail today from a payments perspective, the mode of competition is the point of sales.

No one is really making stand-alone payment decisions anymore. They're all procuring their payments through the point-of-sale environment that they're using to run their business. And within restaurant and retail, that's generally through point-of-sale software. So it's really critical for us given that retail and restaurant probably represent 65%, 70% of consumer spending. You have to be competitive from a point-of-sale perspective to win payment business in that channel. And we think it's really important as a result that Genius is successful.

And the early returns, I think, have been quite good. As I mentioned earlier, we're really gratified at the receptivity we've seen in the market. Everybody that's had an opportunity to come and demo it, I think walks away impressed with the full suite of the ecosystem, the UI/UX, the thoughtful design, obviously, the feature functionality. If you haven't had a chance to do that, we'd love to have you into our demo center to do it, and that's on Nate to coordinate.

But I'm really proud of the work that our team has done on that. We still have lots of opportunities to invest in the platform and in its feature functionality and capability to continue to drive differentiation in the market, but we're off to a fantastic start. At NRA, the National Restaurant Association Show last month, we introduced 2 new features within Genius driven by AI.

One is our AI-first kind of handheld solution. I think it's the best handheld offering in the market, particularly for the restaurant vertical market, but it is AI-enabled such that servers can use the handheld and the AI feature within the handheld to automatically take orders. It listens to the orders, it pre-populates within the point-of-sale system. All the server has to do then is just check the order and submit it, real and efficiency driver for a server, but also accuracy is much improved and obviously creates a better guest experience as well, leveraging that handheld capability.

We've also embedded AI support agents within the point-of-sale solution itself that are native language AI agents. So business owners can speak into the point of sale to get analytics, research insights. It's integrated into our analytics and customer engagement platform so they can do reputation management, social management, obviously, drive marketing campaigns all through the AI agent, that is embedded within Genius.

So I think it's indicative of an overarching theme in terms of how we think about AI, which is clearly one of the levers is to utilize AI to drive product differentiation, enrich the feature functionality and solutioning we can bring to market, and to speed up our ability to deploy new products and the velocity of product development within the organization. All that, I think, benefits our ability to drive differentiation in the marketplace around our capabilities and our solutioning and Genius is the epicenter right now for a lot of that investment.

And I think, maybe staying in the same area, but after acquiring Worldpay, you've become a very, very significant e-commerce provider, and you're basically up there with the audience and the stripes of the world. So can we talk a little bit about the differentiation that you have in e-commerce, which we think is very big versus the -- those 2 players specifically?

Yes, I do too. And some of that's borne out of -- we have a different approach and different model by which we do approach the sort of e-com segment. And I think if you take a big step back, markets evolve over time and particularly around technology buying where clients move from, I want an all-in-one box, all-in solution. I'm willing to take all my capabilities from one provider and they oscillate between that and a best-of-breed a la carte sort of environment where I want best-of-breed solutions and I want to be able to plug in different providers, et cetera. We definitely play more towards that latter strategy.

I think our benefit in our approach to the e-comm market more broadly is an ability to deal with complexity, an ability to configure our platforms to meet the underlying needs of our clients and a willingness to work with other partners and integrate them into our ecosystem to allow the client to get the exact experience, the exact solutioning that they want. Hopefully, most of that can come from us, but we recognize in enterprise -- sophisticated enterprise environments, they're going to have other people that they want to work with as well.

And I think our ability and willingness to be flexible around that open architecture and to integrate with other partners is a real competitive advantage for us, and it's how we've positioned ourselves in that ecosystem vis-a-vis other players that have more of a monolithic kind of platform and you basically take everything they have to get anything. And that's not our approach to the marketplace.

So I think clearly, our approach to competition is different. And I think this open architecture idea and how we're willing to work with other partners and integrate with other partners is a point of distinction relative to others in the marketplace.

The second thing is the strength of our value-added services. And our ability to deploy those at scale globally, I think, is a huge advantage for us, whether it's our Fraudsight solution, our revenue boost solution, other AI capabilities we're embedding into the ecosystem. Our FX solutions are best-in-class. We have an amazing array of value-added services that we wrap around that payment experience in the enterprise level where we're seeing great traction on the uptake of those and have a strong pipeline of new product and capability we want to bring to market.

And then third, I think the mode of competition within the enterprise space is often around performance. So it's a rates, it's fraud and the richness of the data and the sheer scale of the data we have in our ecosystem, I think, allows us to drive better performance around pure payments within the enterprise space, which is a point of competitive differentiation as well.

We want to drive the highest levels of authorization rates. We think the 4 trillion of processing volume we have in our ecosystem across 100 billion transactions gives us greater scale, greater richness of data to be able to drive better performance and optimization within the e-comm space. And again, that's the mode of competition to win more share of wallet and often to win net new logos. So continuing to invest against that and using that as a point of differentiation is an important part of how we want to compete in the marketplace more broadly.

It's obviously a huge objectives now advantage versus pre-Worldpay. You're the #1 acquirer and you have both enterprise and SMB and e-commerce that's truly unique out there.

It is. And I think that scale is fantastic if you use that scale well to drive, I think, drive the outcomes that we want to drive for the business. And as we think about leveraging that scale, it's really in a few different ways. One, it's around just the breadth and depth of product that we have in the ecosystem today and our ability to invest at scale behind that. That scale is enormous. And we want to compete in the marketplace on product and differentiation and capability. We don't want to lead with price. Obviously, as a big scale player, we can be price competitive with anybody. But our goal is to differentiate on product and to differentiate on feature functionality, and that's how we want to be able to win in the marketplace.

The other point of differentiation that we really strive to achieve competitively in the market is around the service experience. We have a level of scale that allows us, I think, to create a service experience that's really distinctive to Global Payments. I think we are able to meet clients how and where they want to be met in distinctive ways across our business, whether it's SMB, integrated and platforms or enterprise.

And the ability to do that at scale, to do it in more geographies around the globe than most of our competitors, again, I think, is a unique advantage to us that we want to lean into because that service experience is a real differentiator across all 3 of our go-to-market segments and finding ways to continue to invest behind that is really important.

And then lastly, it's the data and the richness of the data in the ecosystem that I mentioned before. The scale of that allows us to do really unique things as we think about deploying more AI, whether it's agentic commerce or AI against product and capability, just the richness of the data to train models, to develop AI solutioning, I think we can do that at scale and to drive better outcomes, leveraging AI than, frankly, most of our competitors.

And maybe on the data, one use for the data is embedded in the financial solution software. Maybe we can talk a little bit, Cameron, about what you're doing there and how you differentiate in those areas?

It is an important driver across kind of all 3 segments of the business. And people call it different things. In SMB, we call it commerce enablement solutions. In enterprise, we call it value-added services. Within our integrated and platform business, it's the embedded finance engine. But ultimately, end of the day, it's how do we wrap more value and deliver more capability through the payment experience that we have with our underlying clients.

So embedded finance is clearly an important part of that. More and more our clients, particularly within the SMB level, are looking to take more capabilities, more solutions from partners like us. And we also have a lot of partners in the marketplace that want to leverage the scale of our distribution to be able to bring their capabilities to market. And clearly, there are certain things that we want to be able to deliver our clients. We're not going to develop on our own. And it's the ability to work with partners to be able to deliver that through our ecosystem, I think, is an important growth driver for the business for the long term.

So within Genius, we're embedding sort of embedded finance capabilities to be able to deliver those to clients through the Genius point-of-sale ecosystem. Within integrated and platforms, we have an embedded finance engine that we can plug different financial services into to be able to deliver them, not just to the end-use client, but through our software partners.

So our software partners are looking for us to be able to deliver more capability that they can deploy through their software solutions to that joint client base on the back end, and that's certainly an important driver of growth within our integrated and platform business for the long term. And then certainly, within enterprise, most enterprise buyers have the ability to do this on their own, but there's clearly some elements of embedded finance that can be provisioned through our enterprise ecosystem with a lot of our large multinational enterprise clients. FX solutions is a good example of that.

And I got 2 more topics, and then we'll open it up maybe for questions if the time allows -- about 8 minutes. I'll try to finish early as always. So operational transformation, how is your transformation driving the operational efficiency? And how do you see the cultural -- how do you manage the cultural differences between Worldpay and legacy GPN these days?

Yes, a lot embedded in that question. Maybe I'll start with the latter part of the question, and I'll get back to the first part because I think the cultural side is an often overlooked. I mean people talk about it all the time, but people don't really, I think, pay as much attention to it as they should.

I think, and particularly, as you think about the history of our businesses and Worldpay in particular, I think part of the reason we now own the business is it probably wasn't the best cultural fit with the prior owner and that gave rise to some of the challenges that they experienced.

But as I look across Global Payments and Worldpay, our cultures are very, very similar. And I mean it is -- it's eerily similar. And it's largely because we're operating the same businesses. We have a lot of shared experiences. We have a very similar mindset about the industry that we operate in. And that has been very rewarding to see our teams come together.

I tell people all the time, if I threw in a room with 20 heritage -- mix of heritage Global Payments, heritage Worldpay people, I would challenge you to tell me which side of the business they came from. That's how similar they are. So I think the strength of our cultures, the commonality of our cultures and the ability to blend those create a very strong culture for the organization going forward is a very important part of how we thought about putting the 2 businesses together.

I think as part of that, we were operating the businesses in very similar ways. So as you think about transitioning them from culture to operating model and driving operational efficiencies through our transformation, as I mentioned earlier, Global Payments had evolved from holding company, operating company structured to a single unified operating company model. Worldpay was largely already operating in that way.

So as we brought the 2 organizations together, we were very similar in terms of how we were operating the business. And Worldpay had sort of transitioned to that over the last several years as well. So the way we think about product development, the way we think about product ways of working and the PDLC between our product teams, our technology and software development teams, how we think about delivering operating services back to the businesses, how we think about going to market was very similar across the 2 companies.

So putting the 2 businesses together, that made it much easier. I told people when we announced the Worldpay deal, if it was 3 years ago when we were still operating Global Payments the way we were and you had Worldpay, it wouldn't have worked if I'm being blunt. Like our operating model was so different at that time. We had to go through our transformation to get ourselves to a place where I think combining these 2 businesses is much more feasible than it would have been otherwise.

But today, going into the merger, operating models are very similar. The operational transformation that we've been undertaking at Global Payments put us in a position to be able to combine effectively with Worldpay, and I think bring about all the value and the benefits that will come from us being a combined business for the long term.

I think the biggest thing for us is it really allowed us to reenergize and really revamp our sales and go-to-market motion. We've invested heavily in sales tooling, equipping our sales professionals with better capabilities, AI-driven solutioning to help them be more effective and more productive from a selling motion standpoint. We've consolidated CRM platforms. We've made a lot of investments in revamping the commercial, and we're not done, but revamping the commercial engine within Global Payments that we expect to bear fruit over time.

The biggest issue at Global Payments we had historically is just so much fragmentation across the businesses. As you were running as the holding company operating company structure, we had 1 or 2 or 3 or 10 of everything kind of across the business. So unifying our business on common platforms, common tooling, common ways of working, aligning common functions within centralized organizations across technology, operations, et cetera, getting rid of the fiefdoms that kind of existed and aligning everyone to the single unified operating company model has unlocked huge benefits for the business that we've been reinvesting to drive all of the improvements that we want to make largely on the commercial go-to-market activities in the business, investing in Genius, et cetera.

So we'll have unlocked by the time we get through the end of our transformation, about $650 million of benefits in the business through our transformation program that have allowed us to reinvest in more meaningful ways back into the business to drive the commercial transformation that we've really been undertaking and the product advancement, particularly around Genius.

Okay. And then we're almost at about time. My last question, we talked about the second half, which is near term. I get 100% of my questions are on the short term. So maybe let's just -- know there's been a lot of confusion out there we think. And you called out the conflict in the Middle East on your last earnings call. Can you please remind everyone of the guidance and then maybe share any update if there is anything to update on?

Yes. No update -- nothing's changed since our first quarter call. So on the Q1 call, we thought it was important to highlight, obviously, the implications of the Middle East conflict on our business because, unfortunately, it does have some implications. We won probably the largest travel portfolio of any merchant acquirer globally. That's made up of some of the most premier and large kind of airline customers around the globe, and a lot of those happen to be Middle Eastern airlines. So we serve the 12 largest Middle Eastern airlines. So it's every flagship carrier, you can imagine, they're a client of ours.

So given the conflict in the Middle East, that's obviously creating a little bit of headwind for us in the second quarter as they've really scaled back their routes anywhere between probably 30% and 70%, depending on the carrier. And there are some other downstream impacts to other carriers as well because of fuel costs and whatnot. Lufthansa canceled 20,000 flights and another large client for us.

So we are seeing disruptions in the travel portfolio. We expect that to be about 100 basis points headwind in the second quarter. We called that out on the Q1 call. That's not changed. Nothing's changed. That's still our view sitting here today. Unfortunately, as we all saw last night and this morning, the conflict continues. That's bad for lots of reasons. But as it relates to our business, it's unfortunately, results in that 100 basis points likely materializing for the second quarter, but it's exactly what we called out in our Q1 call and nothing's changed on that front.

For the back half, our assumption has been that travel would begin to normalize as we get into the back half of the year. That's still my hope. Obviously, it's hard to know what's going to happen in the Middle East from one day to the next. But my hope is the conflict will come to an end relatively soon, and things will begin to normalize as we get into the back half of the year. But nothing's changed for the second quarter relative to what we've been communicating since our first quarter call.

Okay. I hope so too, because I have plans to go to Israel this summer.

Yes. Well, look, it's hard to talk about these things, obviously, in the business context when there's lots of other humanitarian and concerns to focus on. But yes, the sooner it ends, I think the better for everyone.

Okay. I think we're actually about time. So thank you, Cameron. This has been incredibly educational. And thank you so much for coming to the Mizuho Tech Conference.

Appreciate the opportunity to be here. It's always great to see you. Thanks so much, Dan.

Thank you.

All right, terrific. Let's get going. Thanks, everyone, for joining. My name is Tien-Tsin Huang. I'm the payments and IT services analyst at JPMorgan. I was just telling the team here, I've learned a ton, super grateful for getting all these companies come through, especially Global Payments has supported the conference for many, many years. So I want to thank the Global Payments team.

From Global Payments, we got Bob Cortopassi, the President and COO, Josh Whipple, CFO; as well as here, of course, Nate [ Rozof ] as well from the Investor Relations group. Thank you guys for joining.

Thanks for having us.

Yes. So it should be a good discussion. I've gathered a lot of questions from the investors to ask, they were all pretty consistent. So let's get through it and should be fun and hopefully learn some stuff. But just to ask the standard macro question, if that's okay, just to get it out the way, what are you seeing on the ground from consumers, from small businesses, especially any leading indicators or signals that are interesting that you'd like to share?

Yes, sure. First, Tien-Tsin, it's great to be here at the conference and it's an exciting time to share the Global Payments story. And as we continue to go ahead and advance our transformation, but start with the macro, sitting here today in May, we're seeing a continuation of the same trends that we saw at the end of last year and exiting Q1. Naturally, we're continuing to go ahead and monitor the Middle East and the conflict there and potentially broader implications on the overall macro environment. But so far, the consumer spending has been surprisingly healthy.

As it relates to our Middle East exposure, we talked a little bit about this on our Q1 call. We service the 12 largest airlines in the Middle East. They've been excellent customer relationships for us, long-standing customer relationships. But obviously, given the events in the region, we've been fairly -- we've seen a fairly meaningful reduction in capacity since March, and it's been anywhere between 30% and 70% depending upon who the carrier is.

And as I called out on our Q1 call, we expect up to 100 basis points of revenue headwind in Q2. As a result of the conflict, we've also factored in a potential impact from our Link2Gov tax payment business. We've seen some weaker volumes in that business just due to the overall Big Beautiful Bill. But look, if we take a step back following the Worldpay acquisition, this business is more diversified than it's ever been.

We're more diversified in terms of geographies, consumer spend categories and merchant size. And with the acquisition of Worldpay, we acquired a pretty significant enterprise business. And I've always said, Tien-Tsin, scale matters in this business. And this year, we'll process approximately $4 trillion in volume. And to put that into context, that's equivalent to the seventh largest country in the world from an overall GDP perspective. So it's really staggering. But -- so what I'd say is following the Worldpay acquisition, we're better positioned now to absorb those transient headwinds.

And as a result, our 2026 outlook remains the same. That assumes that travel normalizes at the end of the second quarter and the overall macro remains stable. And if those assumptions hold, then we expect top line growth to be more than 5% in the back half. And then we'll finish the year at 5%. But Tien-Tsin, with the deal behind us, it's -- we're intensely focused on execution.

So just staying with some of the results and of course, the scale, like you said, is tremendous, is sometimes hard to fathom and we take it for granted. You just reported the quarter. Any surprises, any call-outs? I don't need you to go through every single detail, but it would be great to just get a quick takeaway. What did we learn? What was better or worse than expected beyond the macro you just discussed?

Yes. No, absolutely. Look, as I said on the call, our Q1 results were -- exceeded our expectations. We're really proud of all the work that the team has done to close the transactions ahead of schedule. We completed many of our day 100 integration milestones ahead of plan. And I feel like we've built an incredible strong foundation for the combined business going forward. We're also pleased with the rapid adoption of Genius. We -- bookings nearly doubled on a year-over-year basis.

Merchant locations increased 25% year-over-year and payment attach rates were more than 20%. And those metrics were better than really anything that we've ever seen pre-Genius. And I think it's not only because of the modern technology, but it's also because of the feature-rich product and it's also because we've enlarged the SMB direct sales force to include higher quality sales professionals and then we've enhanced also their sales effectiveness through the overall transformation as it relates to some things that we're surprised, we obviously didn't anticipate the Middle East conflict and the disruption there, it had a nominal impact on the top line. Really no impact to earnings or cash flow, just given the overall diversification of the business, and we view that as modest and transitory headwinds.

And we sized Q2. We just talked about the 100 basis points of headwind, but look, if you take a step back, I think, again, diversity and scale really matter in this business. And I think this business is very well positioned to deliver durable growth across a variety of macro environments.

Good. So let's talk about -- you mentioned Genius. I think that was the most popular subject of the call and from investors that wanted to talk about it. So I was hoping we could dig in on that. Josh, you just talked about some of the Genius numbers, the bookings being up. I think the yield with new clients being up 30% was really a strong call out for us. So I thought to start the Genius conversation, maybe walk us through the growth algorithm, right, across units and price. Maybe start with that on Genius.

Yes. So if you think about the bookings growth, it's really the 2 levers, the P times Q that I think everybody fundamentally gets. There's better performance in terms of the top of funnel opportunities all the way through sales execution, close ratio, implementations, we're seeing that at a pace that not only is more than we've ever experienced before, but continues to accelerate sequentially quarter-over-quarter.

So we feel very confident not only in the work that we've done, but it gives us a high degree of predictability as you think about the back half of the year. Around the yield increase, there's a couple of factors in play. One is that if you think about our historical sales model with POS, a lot of it was being sold through dealers and those dealers, I think Cameron highlighted on the call, we made it fairly difficult unintentionally for them to drag payments along with those sales. And we've done a lot of work to unlock both in our direct channel and in our indirect channel, the ability for our sellers to sell more of a bundled solution that includes the hardware, the software, the payments, the value-added services.

So we're seeing the overall value of the sale go up as they're able to distribute more product and service. And then the final component of that is, as we think about value-added service rollouts, we've been focused on this journey at Global Payments for the last couple of years, 1.5 years since we began the transformation, not only building out new value-added services, but unlocking and enabling those across all of the platforms, Genius, obviously, being a key one here.

So the availability of value-added services, the bundled selling approach, making -- I think we said at Investor Day, we want our best products to be in the hands of all of our distribution partners. In this case, that includes dealers, FIs, direct sales, et cetera.

Right. So if we're unpacking the yield, it's a byproduct of higher payments attach as well as pushing more [ batch ]. So how much more room is there to go in each of those categories?

So I think if you look at the yield itself as a separate metric from overall bookings growth, there's still opportunity. We're not at a 100% take rate on every value-added service. We're not at a 100% take rate on payments in every Genius Enterprise transaction as an example. So there's still some room to go there. But I think the more important runway around this yield improvement as an accelerator to overall bookings gives us a lot of confidence in the runway for Genius.

Okay. Good. Product velocity is a big theme as well in this category. I think Charlie from our team with the National Restaurant Association, he was really impressed by what we saw on Genius, especially in the stadium front, right, Charlie, and some of these other fronts. So give us an update there? What are you working on? What are you excited about on the product road map here? And what should we expect new product-wise?

Well, it sounds like Charlie already got to see it. So for those who didn't get to see it, we were very excited to launch a number of new things with Genius at the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago this week. Number one, that's getting an awful lot of buzz is around the new AI-first handheld. And there's both a hardware and a software component to this.

Our team, I think you guys know by now, we've been working with a common design language and philosophy across the entire stack of Genius hardware, where hardware hasn't been that attractive historically, but more and more in retail and restaurant, in card-present environments, we see small business owners and enterprises wanting to differentiate the client experience by the image that they present and what sits on the countertop and what you interact with as a kiosk matter or a digital menu board, those things matter to people.

So the hardware that we launched at NRA for mobile is really not a lot bigger than your mobile phone. It's not the sort of clunky mobile device with a payment device, wrapped in a big enclosure that's heavy and bulky that people have been used to, I think, in this industry historically. So that's very nice. The hardware is attractive. It's the first OLED screen on the market for payment devices, 78-hour battery life, custom charging cradles, all those sort of things.

More importantly, the technology behind it as a software matter, we've enabled the device to be an AI-first handheld. And what we mean by that is the processing infrastructure on that device is fast enough, robust enough to run AI locally. So it's not wholly dependent on things sitting in the cloud, sitting on servers behind the scenes.

So in terms of the experience of a user, think about an environment where maybe you're a table service restaurant waiter, waitress, you've got a handheld device and rather than staring at that and interacting with the device, you drop it in an apron or you're holding it in your hand, you're having a conversation with the table and the Genius handheld is able to identify the unique voices even in a noisy environment, it's building a ticket for you as people are talking to you and placing their orders.

And then all the server has to do is glance at the device ensure that's correct and send it off to our kitchen management system. And so it lets our business owners get back to what they want to do, which isn't build technology, and it isn't interact with technology. They're in the service of their clients, whether that's in food and beverage or gift or other retail environments, putting control back in their hands to focus on their core business.

Two other quick product announcements we made at NRA. One was around our new kiosk, which again follows that same design language is the countertop and the handheld, that's available on a stand-alone -- a freestanding sort of kiosk as well as wall mounts and counter mounts and lots of different environments and experiences.

And then the final launch was around our AI-enabled business management stack for Genius holistically, sits in the back office of Genius and allows a business operator to engage in conversational engagements with Genius to get business insights and help drive more performance out of their operation through the insights that it can drive.

Today, that's focused on reporting and data and insights and there's multiple releases that are scheduled to come out that also perform frequent business management functions on behalf of the operator. So using it as a true assistant, not an insight -- not just an insights partner.

Good. Good. I felt like the tech buzz was really good. I mean, I could hear it in your voice here, Bob, talking about it. Think about the handheld, right? It feels like the waiters and waitresses, they want the same experience that they have with their personal devices at home. And it does feel like it's bridging towards that, right, so good to get that update. So just to wrap up on Genius, thinking about the distribution side of it, right? Because that's the value of what Global Payments can bring is the actual distribution. So catch us up on the priorities there across, right, you have Worldpay, you got the financial -- the bank channel, international, of course, enterprise. How are you ranking those? What's on your mind with the distribution front?

So I think we're trying to take a balanced approach to this. But the focus -- the immediate ROI benefit, the biggest bang for our buck right now is investing in our direct sales team. And you see that with the announcement we made last year to add 500 new direct sellers in North America. We hired 200 in the fourth quarter -- or last year, the end of the third quarter, beginning of the fourth quarter. We've hired another 100 in the first quarter. So we're at 300 of the 500. We've got another 200 to hire over the balance of 2026. But it's not just that one kind of hiring initiative. If you think about the business holistically, we want to, like I said earlier, enable our best sellers and our best distribution channels with our best products, Genius certainly being a flagship. So Global Payments had an existing FI channel, and we think that banks are starving for technology solutions to sell right now.

Some of them have made partnerships. They're not happy with their performance around, some of them are still trying to figure out what products they want to bring to market, and we want to show up with a proposition that allows them to distribute Genius in partnership with Global Payments and serve their customers well there. Worldpay also brings another 6,000 bank branches, and they haven't historically had a point-of-sale solution in the market. So Genius is completely fresh to most of those relationships. And we think that's a big distribution lever, particularly in the United States, but globally as well.

As you move internationally, I think we want to be measured in our rollouts, I'm always cognizant of moving fast, but not moving too fast and burning the teams to try to do everything all at once. But we do think that outside of North America, there's an awful lot of greenfield opportunity where there's less penetration of software at the point of sale. It's a different competitor landscape, and we think Genius plays very well there. I also made comments before about the horizontal nature of some of these international markets that are less hyper verticalized than what we see here in the United States, in particular, where you've got such a large market for ISVs.

And we think Genius plays really well across those horizontal verticals there. So it lets us get to market much more quickly than having to develop specific functionality for a specific local market. And then maybe finally, as we think about international, Genius was built from the ground up to be multilingual, multicurrency, support fiscalization or tax-regulating authority integrations for tax reporting and all the things that they need to do there. So coupled with our physical presence in over 40 countries, it makes it a much easier proposition to take Genius global, where you've got infrastructure to sell, implement, support on an ongoing basis than maybe what some of our competitors have.

All right. Good. So let's do enterprise. Just to pivot to that enterprise. I think it was up 9%, right, from a booking standpoint. Where are you winning competitively? Why are you winning? What are you seeing on the road?

Well, I think every enterprise customer is a little bit different. So they have a different set of needs. There's some common themes though. And one of those is around just core capabilities that everybody cares about transaction authorization rates, access to geographies, multi-payment methods, alternative payment methods. They want to be able to accept as many of those as possible. Those are some common themes across all of them.

Certainly, as you think about some of the drivers of value for them, authorization optimization, particularly for e-commerce is #1 in forefront of their minds. Number two, generally, is around fraud. And I think our capabilities stack up really well in both of those venues. The breadth of our scale for Cameron -- sorry, Josh mentioned a minute ago, almost $4 trillion in transactions gives us the ability to do a lot of things around real-time trend identification and optimizing authorization rates for our merchants in partnership with the networks and with issuing banks. Our AI-enabled fraud solution, that's called Fraudsight, is also, I think, really differentiated in the market, not only in terms of the fraud rates that it drives, but the amount of control and insight that it gives a business owner. And in the enterprise space, a big part of what they're looking for is control over the customer experience, the transaction experience and the financial outcomes.

Another big theme I see around enterprise today is if you've been in the software business a long time, you've watched these cycles of everybody wants an all-in-one solution. No, we want best of breed. Right this minute, we tend to be in a best-of-breed sort of pathway with enterprise customers and our ability to deliver capabilities in a modular sense without them having to make an all-or-nothing binary decision to take the entire platform or none of it is a thing that separates us from a number of our competitors, both the more modern ones they're sometimes called and the more scale players.

So our ability to deliver point solutions as part of an a la carte menu, a bundle of value-added capabilities, the focus on AI, the drive for authorization optimization as well as fraud management capabilities or what's driving the primary success. The final thing I would say that's a little less direct in terms of a tie between decision and revenue is increasingly the scale of the business, our engagement with the next generation of innovation players, whether that's OpenAI or whether that's Google or somebody else, I think they're looking for an innovation partner to co-think with them and co-develop solutions with them and Global Payments position now, not only in terms of scale, but in terms of the solutions we have that are modern, that are innovative and that are market-leading leads them to view us as a partner for the long term.

Okay. That's good. You went through a lot there. Just to drill in on a couple. Can we separate this discussion quickly just on face-to-face or card-present versus card-not-present. You mentioned modularizing and auth rates, et cetera. But it feels like those discussions are different between card-present and card-not-present.

Sure.

So card-present is a little more mature, less load management, more single processor. How do you grow above market given what you just described on the card-present front?

Yes. Well, I think there's really only 2 levers in a mature market like that. One is to continue to take share and the second is to continue to offer value-added services and more things other than just the core payment capabilities into that market. So I think we we're being measured and conservative with the expectations that we've set with The Street about the rates of growth for that business, but we are still optimistic about it, and we value it to Josh's earlier point about diversification, exposure to grocery, exposure to pharmacy, exposure to some of these more nondiscretionary card-present markets does deliver a degree of resiliency that we really appreciate.

But we're not abandoning the opportunity to continue to grow in markets where we consistently are winning share and when we're very focused on delivering value-added services that matter in the card-present environment, not just in the e-com world of marketplaces and traditional e-com and omnichannel.

The final thing I would say around that is that the 2 businesses, the legacy businesses, Global Payments and Worldpay had slightly different approaches to card-present versus card-not-present and bringing the 2 businesses together gives us a much more robust set of omnichannel offerings. Worldpay was only in a few markets physically where Global Payments is in over 40. But Worldpay is processing e-commerce transactions truly on a global scale.

We're in nearly every non-sanctioned country, over 175 countries we're transacting in today. So that blend of robust physical capabilities, the e-commerce opportunity, the global reach and scale and then the product innovation, I feel like that's a winning combination.

Yes. No, omni is differentiated, given bringing the 2 companies together. I think that is probably underappreciated. Let's skip ahead -- time is moving here quickly. Just on the Worldpay front, I think I've asked you both this before. I'm going to ask it again, which is, it always stood out to me that you said that you're going to approach the integration differently than what you've done in the past, right. Josh, I think you and I have talked about this before. Now that you're in flight with it. Any surprises? Would you do things differently? Or is it moving full steam ahead?

No, look, I think it's moving full steam ahead, and I'm going to go ahead and date myself here a little bit, Tien-Tsin. So I've been involved in every integration dating back to -- yes, in 2016. And more than any previous deal, this integration is all about driving long-term sustainable growth. And I think the most pleasant surprise of this integration so far has been the overall cultural alignment from bringing these 2 businesses together. And look, that really matters. It allows us to produce tangible revenue synergies literally right out of the gates. And albeit they're not material, but it's helping us to accelerate things.

The Worldpay direct sales force is selling Genius. We're already selling Worldpay's e-commerce capabilities into the Heritage Global Payments merchant base in the U.K. And as I said, it's still obviously early days and the amounts are ramping. But we view 2026 as really the year where we're just laying the foundation and extending everything that we've been doing with the transformation to drive that top line growth. And look, that means aligning sales forces, that means harmonizing the management and also unlocking distribution channels on each side.

But if we think about 2027 as it relates to just the overall revenue synergies, we expect to see some financial contribution, but really, the revenue synergies are going to become more material in 2028, where we expect to go ahead and realize that $100 million in revenue synergies, and we'll exit the year in 2028 at our target of $200 million in run rate revenue synergies.

And then as it relates to the cost synergies, Tien-Tsin, we view those as, frankly, table stakes in this integration. Obviously, that's a huge piece of the overall value creation, and we'll be very deliberate about capturing them. But in 2026, we expect to realize doing $70 million and $80 million of cost synergies. We'll exit this year, run rating at $150 million. And then in '27 and '28, we'll run-rate those 2 years, exiting at $350 million and $600 million, respectively, and look, if you go back and you think about this integration, we had approximately 10 months to go ahead and plan for it. I think we have incredibly detailed plans in place. And look, we're 120 days into it, and I think we've made incredible progress so far.

Good. I'm glad to hear that. I did want to also ask around the Worldpay tech architecture. I think Nate and I have talked about this for quite some time, thinking about Worldpay, tech and the tech stack and its evolution. I think you said that you'll complete some of those decisions right at midyear from a tech architecture standpoint. What does that mean? I'm asking both from a P&L perspective, but also what does that unlock with that being done? What can we expect out of Worldpay tech-wise?

I think aligning on the target architecture model, first gives us the ability to focus our investment. As soon as we've decided which are the go-forward strategic platforms in a variety of categories where there's duplication. We can begin a process of winding down investment on stacks that are not going to survive and double down the investment in the pace of innovation on the platforms that will. So the primary P&L lever as we think about it, is really not a net gain or loss of expense primarily. We're primarily looking at accelerating the pace of innovation and deploying the $1 billion of CapEx something like 7% to 8% of revenue as we think about it on a go-forward basis against the platforms where we think we have the right to win, the right capabilities.

The great news is that both businesses were on a journey of simplifying their architecture and infrastructure Worldpay called it Helix, Global Payments called it something else, but it was really focused on this single in, single out. The idea that you integrate once and get access to everything and then you have one way of consuming the outputs, whether that's around reporting or portals or data APIs or whatnot. So getting more quickly to that allows us to more quickly pivot the investment.

The other great thing about it is it unlocks cross-sell more quickly. So as soon as we've got clarity on the TAM, then we're immediately going to focus on the orchestration capabilities that we talked about, I don't know, a number of quarters over the last year, 15 months or so, that allow us very quickly to unlock capabilities to customers who might be on different platforms today. So we don't have to wait for a platform demise or a client migration to expose services to them across the ecosystem. It feels to them like it's one single experience even though under the hood that might be serving a couple of platforms while we converge those over a period of time.

Okay. Good. And I'm glad I asked, it feels like it's an important moment. And so we'll wait and see how that pans out. But thanks for going through that. It's just 7 minutes left. I got a lot of other questions. We've been talking about agentic commerce a lot at this conference. Bob, I know it's a nerdy subject probably. But in a nutshell, what I'll ask just instead of getting into the details, just what would it take for Global Payments, right, to win in this channel? You have the scale. We talked about the $4 trillion. I know it's early, it's nascent. Seems like the 4-party model is going to be okay. Tell me if you agree with that. But how does Global Payments win here?

In less than 7 minutes? No, that's great.

I apologize. Bad time management.

Not at all. No, I think you're right about the 4-party model. And I think we've seen developments recently with OpenAI publicly talking about their pivot to really more search and discovery-based services rather than the full checkout experience. What we've heard consistently from merchants, regardless of their size, whether they're an SMB or a giant enterprise, they're not interested in operating a pick, pack and ship operation where their only mode of competition is around speed of delivery and price.

If they wanted to be in the warehousing business, they'd be in it. It's important to them to have a direct relationship with their clients to manage the checkout experience and frankly, to be able to choose the payment methodologies and rails that they're already engaged with.

They've made strategic choices for the rest of their business that's not operating on agentic rails. So I think that overall is a good development for the entire ecosystem. I think it helps OpenAI and Google and others to be focused on where they can play instead of trying to be everything to everybody. I think it gives merchants and other ecosystem players, the confidence to lean into this without fear of disintermediation or fundamental changes to the structure of their business.

But in terms of what it takes to win, I think, number one, it comes down to product and technology and the right partnerships. And both Global Payments and Worldpay heritage organizations were already engaged with the OpenAIs and the Googles around development of some of these standards, ACP and UCP and whatnot. Both organizations were among the first in market with production-ready MCPs, that model context protocol that the LLMs interact with to get inventory data to push transactions through the checkout experiences. I think this also plays well to global strengths. The combined business is really well tooled and has frankly grown over the last decades or two, solving complexity for clients in the ecosystem. That's really at the core of what we do.

And this introduces additional layers of complexity that merchants are looking for help in partnership to solve. And that modular approach to our enterprise clients, like I mentioned earlier serves us well in this space, too, with things like our credential vault that we sell on a stand-alone basis to clients today when identity and trust and verification of intent become really critical in this agentic world, having those sorts of solutions that can abstract credentials so that they're not being shared with everyone in the ecosystem, having a chain that can help verify trust and manage things like chargebacks and disputes, those are all really important and their core competencies for Global Payments.

So that doesn't mean I think we're an automatic winner here. But what I would say is, I think we're positioned well with the right partners and our scale, if nothing else gives us a seat at the table to influence the direction of things so that we're helping to steer the ship rather than trying to play catch up and then the capabilities and the way that systems are architected today plays well into the way it appears that agentic commerce is going to evolve over the next cycle.

Yes. I know it's moving fast in terms of laying the foundation, but probably still a little bit early. It sounds like you feel good about the position?

We really do.

Okay. No, thanks for going through that. It's educational. I know we're almost out of time. I'm trying to be taking the executive call here and want to ask -- I want to ask one more for each of you, if that's okay. Maybe let's do capital returns, if that makes sense just to hit that. You've done 2 consecutive ASRs, you're on track to hit the 3x of leverage by the end of '27. So visibility into future buybacks and the timing of that? I know de-leveraging is, of course, important. What's the latest there?

Yes. Look, returning capital to shareholders is a big piece of the overall narrative and the thesis. And Tien-Tsin, at these levels, there's really -- there's no better investment than in ourselves. I think if you go back to our Investor Day in September of 2024, we committed to returning $7.5 billion of capital to shareholders by the end of 2027. Last year, we returned approximately $1 billion of capital to shareholders, bought back 13 million shares. In Q1, we returned a little over $600 million, bought back 7 -- a little over 7 million shares. And obviously, on our Q2 call, we announced a $500 million ASR, and we said that once that was completed, we'd be in the market buying back shares in the open market.

And by the end of the second quarter, we will have returned more than 50% of what we committed to returning in 2026, which was a little bit more than $2 billion. If we look out into 2027, we expect to go ahead and return more than $4 billion in capital, and that will go ahead and put us right on top of that $7.5 billion and in addition to returning capital to shareholders, we're also very focused on getting our leverage point back down to 3x, and we feel that we have the right balance of returning capital to shareholders and de-levering. As it relates to M&A, we'll -- our main focus, like I said, is buying back shares, but any kind of M&A we do would just be on the peripheral, and there will be smaller tuck-in stuff.

Good. So in the last minute maybe for you, Bob, just thinking about -- and again, we're going to digest everything we've learned at this conference. I'm sure you're studying -- coming from APT, OpenEdge, you've seen a lot of things overseas. The ecosystem is evolving a lot. What do you think is important for us to track here? It feels like there's been a little bit of consolidation as well. You talked about agentic. What do you think is the most important thing to watch as the ecosystem involves in the next 6 to 12 months?

I think probably 3 things from my perspective. Number one is that distribution matters more than ever. We've seen a lot of folks with good product ideas that struggle to scale particularly as they look to move internationally or move into a more broad-based distribution outside of direct selling or DIY kind of digital customer acquisition.

So I think distribution is going to separate winners from losers in some of these cases or at least those who grow faster and those who grow slower. Number two, I think the consolidation point is a great one. If you think about kind of pre-COVID proliferation of payments companies coming to the market, probably some maybe sooner than they should have. I think what you're going to see is a rotation towards more consolidation in the space, especially with the pressure on valuations at these historically low levels, I think it's too tempting not to look at consolidation.

And I think that Global Payments is an early mover in this. And we came to market looking for the right asset, the right cultural fit and Worldpay couldn't be more complementary if we had designed it from scratch. So I think an ongoing theme of consolidation is likely to be the case. And then -- the final thing that we're watching, that I think everybody should be watching is AI. We just talked about impacts to the 4-party model, how are merchants feeling about that, how are the LLMs, hyperscalers, and everybody else thinking about that.

This inflection point is going to create opportunity, and I think companies need to be positioned with the right partnerships, the right technology, the right focus to ensure that they don't miss out on opportunities here. So we're very focused on being on our front foot, being a leader, not a follower here. And like I said, we're excited about the position that we find ourselves in that we've created for ourselves over the last couple of years.

Great. It's a great way to close it out. Thank you guys so much for being here.

Thank you.

Thank you, Tien-Tsin. We appreciate it.

Yes. Thanks.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to Global Payments First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's conference will be recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to your host, Executive Lead Investor Relations, Nate Rozof. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Welcome to Global Payments First Quarter 2026 Conference Call. Joining us today is our CEO, Cameron Bready; CFO, Josh Whipple, and COO, Bob Cortopassi.

Some of the comments made during today's conference call will contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied and we caution you not to place undue reliance upon them. They speak only as of this date, and we undertake no obligation to update them.

In addition, we will be referring to several non-GAAP financial measures -- for a full reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measure, please see our press release furnished as an exhibit to our Form 8-K filed this morning and the supplemental material available on our Investor Relations website.

Finally, the slide presentation that accompanies our prepared remarks is also available on our Investor Relations website, and Cameron's comments will begin on Slide 4. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CEO. Cameron?

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. We are very pleased with our financial and operational performance in the first quarter. Overall, our results exceeded our expectations, reinforcing our confidence in the trajectory of the business and demonstrating strong integration progress following the closing of the Worldpay acquisition in January.

I will begin today's call with an overview of our first quarter results in key areas of progress, including Worldpay integration activities, our go-to-market execution, the acceleration of our innovation agenda, particularly with our Genius platform and the increasing application of AI across our business to create new sources of revenue growth, accelerate product velocity and innovation and improved productivity across the enterprise.

I will then turn the call over to Josh to review our financial performance and outlook before I conclude our prepared remarks with a discussion of the key strategic initiatives we are executing to drive sustained long-term value creation. As the world's leading pure-play commerce solutions provider, our North Star remains driving sustainable growth through an unwavering focus on our clients, leveraging the strategic advantages that differentiate Global Payments and position us to win over the long term.

In the first quarter, we delivered normalized adjusted net revenue growth of approximately 5.5% or approximately 4.5% on a constant currency basis. This reflected healthy underlying consumer spending trends throughout the quarter partially offset by the lower Middle East airline volumes and slightly lower IRS payment volumes attributable to tax reforms under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Profitability remained strong. Adjusted operating margins expanded 110 basis points on a normalized basis and adjusted earnings per share grew 10% on an as-reported and constant currency basis. which demonstrates the consistency of our operating model and our continued focus on execution discipline. Capital allocation remains key to our strategy.

During the first quarter, we returned more than $600 million to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases, while achieving leverage of 3.5x exactly as anticipated. Robust free cash flow generation and capital returns are central pillars of our investment thesis. To that end, we continue to target $7.5 billion of capital returns for the period 2025 through 2027. In support of that commitment, we are entering into another accelerated share repurchase program to immediately repurchase $500 million of our shares. Following the completion of this ASR, we expect to resume open market share repurchases during the second quarter as well.

Turning to operating performance and execution. I will begin with our most significant accomplishments this quarter, the early closing of Worldpay and the Issuer Solutions transactions. The strong early progress we're making on Worldpay integration is very encouraging. Our teams have moved quickly and with purpose, alignment has been excellent, and execution has reinforced our confidence in the strategic and financial rationale for the transaction. We are off to a strong start as we bring these 2 organizations together and begin unlocking the value we see ahead.

As we advance our integration efforts, we are taking a deliberate best-of-both approach across talent, products and technology. The depth and quality of leadership and expertise we have brought together is exceptional, and we believe that the New Global Payments now has the strongest team in the industry. Importantly, the combined scale of Global Payments in Worldpay is already enabling outcomes that neither organization could have achieved on its own. We are seeing highly attractive commercial opportunities that further enhance our competitive positioning, and enable more differentiated outcomes for our clients.

Partners networks and alternative payment method providers are increasingly eager to access the breadth and depth of our global distribution channels and to leverage the strength of our go-to-market positioning. Execution on the ground has been strong. Worldpay's U.S. direct sales force began selling Genius almost immediately following the close, effectively addressing a long-standing product gap.

Further, we are seeing strong early interest in Genus from Worldpay's enterprise restaurant clients, relationships that are opening meaningful cross-sell opportunities we simply could not have accessed previously. Subway is a great example. Already a Worldpay client Subway recently selected our Genius Kitchen management software deployment across approximately 2,500 locations. We are also seeing momentum in new partner acquisition. During the quarter, Worldpay's business development team signed 2 new partners that was specifically motivated by access to Genius, wins that are unlikely to have materialized absent the combined platform. As we shared last quarter, we moved quickly to integrate Worldpay's e-commerce solution in Global Payments SMB distribution channels. The results have been compelling with new sales increasing 25% sequentially and more than doubling year-over-year, clear evidence of the power of the combined distribution.

Internally, our teams have established executable plans to achieve our synergy objectives. We have implemented our target operating model and go-to-market structure, integrated sales forces and are finalizing the design and implementation plans for our consolidated technology architecture model. Having only recently crossed the 100-day mark since the close of the transaction, our team has already made remarkable progress. Taken together, these early outcomes strengthen our confidence in the integration and our ability to achieve or exceed our revenue and expense synergy targets.

Turning to go-to-market execution. Our global distribution footprint remains 1 of our most significant competitive advantages, and we are expanding that distribution, both geographically and across new channels to support sustained growth. We operate at scale in more international markets than most of our peers, with sales and service professionals in over 40 countries around the world. In addition, we can facilitate payments in 175 countries, creating a powerful platform for continued global expansion.

On a combined company basis, bookings increased 8% year-over-year, an excellent start, particularly given that we are still finalizing our new go-to-market channels. Beginning with the enterprise channel, we delivered strong new sales performance, particularly across North America and Asia Pacific. We had several notable wins this quarter, starting with Abercrombie & Fitch & Company, where we signed a long-term agreement to serve as their acquirer for card-based payments in the U.S. Household brands like this continue to choose Global Payments for our differentiated service model, innovative solutions and consultative approach.

Within Software and Information Services, we had meaningful wins with auto books and a large multinational content-driven technology company. And we continue to be a leading provider in the grocery vertical. This quarter, Aldi Sud selected us across both North America and EMEA. Reflecting the strength of our service model, we expect Aldi to begin onboarding volumes as early as the second quarter, an impressive time line for a retailer of their scale. In addition, Morrisons, a leading supermarket chain and recent signing in the U.K. is also ramping their volumes with us. And we expect to have their full migration live this quarter.

Lastly, Brazilian cosmetics retailer, [indiscernible] Cosmeticos is another notable Q1 signing that we expect to have live before the end of Q2. Turning to the integrated and platforms channel. We continue to invest in geographic expansion. Integrated payments relationships are more commonplace in the U.S., but we are still developing in most other countries, and we are moving quickly to capture this opportunity. In fact, 20% of the new partners we signed in the first quarter are outside the U.S., demonstrating our ability to scale capabilities across new geographies.

We recently expanded integrated and platforms into the U.K. where early results are exceeding expectations. Partner signings are nearly double our planned performance and feedback continues to validate a strong product market fit. We're also integrating Worldpay's Australian business with our Oceania operations, 2 highly complementary businesses, each growing at attractive rates by winning share in this otherwise mature payments market.

In the U.S., we recently renewed and expanded our partnership with Lightspeed DMS, a leading dealer management system provider in the recreational industry. Lightspeed will now use Payrix to deliver a fully embedded payment experience that enhances customer engagement and lifetime value.

Finally, in our global SMB channel, we are continuing to invest across our footprint to increase capacity and improve productivity of our sales force. In North America, we are making progress building sales capacity, having now onboarded more than 300 of our planned 500 new sales professionals. We continue to be pleased with the quality of these hires with many coming directly from software businesses and POS competitors. They understand the industry, and they understand how compelling our new Genius platform is.

They're selecting global payments because of our high-quality on-site service and support, which gives them confidence that clients will be properly installed and onboarded, particularly compared to the self-service models common elsewhere. With these hires, we are also establishing a direct new sales channel in Mexico, complementing our primarily FI based distribution model. Mexico remains an important market for us in terms of future growth opportunities.

On the partner front, we were recently selected by Peoples Bank in Massachusetts-based financial institution, further expanding our North American reach and entered Croatia through our partnership with Erste Bank. In the U.K. and Ireland, we are expanding the size of our successful mid-market and small corporate sales teams and also successfully launched several new products to market.

First, we introduced Genius Mobile, enabling on-the-go acceptance and expanding our addressable market. Early adoption has been encouraging, surpassing 500 locations in less than 60 days. Second, we launched a first-to-market enhancement to our PayByLink Plus solution in February that enables our clients to run sales campaigns across social media platforms directly from our merchant dashboard and supported by an AI content generation tool. Together, our investments drove several notable wins this quarter.

In the Americas, CKE Restaurant Holdings, Inc. selected Genius as its exclusive U.S. point-of-sale software and also use Global Payments as its in-store payments provider for its iconic parties and Carl's junior brands, deploying our solutions across more than 2,400 corporate and franchise locations. In Bojangles purchased our digital menu solutions for its corporate-owned stores, expanding our long-standing relationship.

Across EMEA, we secured several major wins. In Spain, we won sporting goods retailer Decathlon, and grocery store chain [indiscernible]. In Poland, we signed electric vehicle charging station provider, LSAV, EcoPower and parking solutions provider, DG Park. In the Czech Republic, we signed home equipment retailer, Tascama; and lastly, in Greece, we won the large supermarket change, ScottMaddetes.

In Asia Pacific, we were pleased to be selected by KFC and Pizza Hut. We also continued our successful penetration of the hospitality vertical, extending our relationship with Marriott across the region, and we expanded our position in transportation with a leading ride-hailing company. further validating the strength and scalability of our global platform.

Turning to Genius. We continue to see strong momentum as we expanded footprint, deepen its capabilities and extend its relevance across an increasingly broad set of use cases and geographies. Genus bookings increased more than 25% sequentially and nearly doubled year-over-year. In addition to accelerating bookings growth, yields with new clients increased by more than 30% year-over-year reflecting the growing value new clients and Genus and they're willing to pay for its differentiated capabilities. We are continuing to expand distribution behind Genius. For example, we introduced Genius Days to accelerate adoption with our financial institution partners with on-site hands-on demonstrations designed to deepen engagement and drive conversion.

Looking ahead, extending Genius into Worldpay's financial institution partner channel is a key priority and a meaningful revenue synergy opportunity with initial contributions expected to begin in 2027. We Internationally, we continue to scale Genius across multiple markets, such as Germany and Austria with additional international launches planned later this year and next.

From a product perspective, we made meaningful progress advancing Genus as a scalable enterprise-grade commerce platform with advanced capabilities like kitchen management and digital menu solutions while preserving the simplicity and speed that matter most to small business owners. In addition, we continue to strengthen product market fit through vertical-specific functionality that improves day-to-day operations and drives adoption and priority verticals.

For example, in age-related retail, Genus now delivers an all-in-one point-of-sale solution supporting compliance, responsible selling, inventory management, vendor workflows and actionable sales insights. We also expanded Genius into the services vertical, delivering a unified operating system that brings together scheduling, invoicing, mobile enablement and built-in loyalty and marketing capabilities.

Beyond product enhancements, we are also investing in building Genius brand awareness. We launched a brand campaign in North America during the first quarter, anchored by a national television spot and amplified across digital and out-of-home media. The campaign delivered more than 330 million impressions and reached over 6 million unique consumers supporting awareness and future sales velocity. These development reflects a clear and consistent strategy. rapidly expand Genus' capabilities, distribution and brand awareness while extending enterprise-grade commerce functionality to SMBs globally.

Genus remains a central pillar of our growth strategy, and we are highly confident in its ability to drive incremental revenue, deepen client relationships and create durable long-term value for Global Payments.

Lastly, our work in Agentic Commerce and artificial intelligence continues to accelerate and recent developments across the AI ecosystem reinforced the critical role we play at the center of the next evolution in commerce. Open AI shift in focus towards AI-driven product discovery and traffic generation while intentionally leaving checkout, payments, risk and settlement with us plays directly to our strengths and strategy. It elevates the importance of our trusted scalable payments infrastructure and positions Global Payments as a central connected tissue between agents, merchants, networks and consumers.

We are uniquely positioned to shape this emerging channel anchored in our decades of payments expertise and scaled data-driven insights. We are protocol agnostic and prioritized advocating on behalf of our clients. In fact, we are currently activating several enterprise merchants into Google's UCP protocol so that they can be among the first to provide a genetic shopping experiences for their customers. We are simultaneously creating end-to-end modular flows with multiple players across the ecosystem, including commerce platforms, checkout partners and middleware developers, to ensure that we can support our clients across any configuration as protocols and use cases evolve.

Further, our own payments model context protocol is live and production ready. It enables in agent-driven commerce flows with minimal incremental development effort. As agents increasingly initiate transactions autonomously, trust, identity and risk management become even more crucial. Through Ravel in, our AI native fraud prevention platform, we are advancing a genetic risk capabilities that leverage enriched ecosystem signals based on our scale and diversity of data.

These capabilities help ensure that an agent-driven commerce scale, it does so securely and with the trust at its core for both merchants and customers. Beyond Agentic Commerce, we are embedding AI directly into our products and client servicing experiences with enterprise-grade discipline, governance and scale. We are building scalable AI capabilities that generate measurable, repeatable impact across authorizations, fraud mitigation and revenue optimization. Products such as 3D Flex revenue boost, dynamic routing and fraud side are already delivering tangible results, improving approval rates, reducing from losses and lowering false declines often with no incremental integration required.

Internally, we are also deploying AI to accelerate engineering, DevOps and quality assurance. Through our proprietary Fast Track studio platform, we are standardizing the path from experimentation to production ensuring security, observability, compliance and repeatability. We're also using agents as first-time responders for common tasks, freeing our teams to focus on higher-value initiatives. Our scale provides a clear advantage. We process trillions of dollars in payment volume and billions of transactions each year across geographies, channels and verticals. This depth and breadth of data creates a uniquely rich training environment, allowing our AI models to learn faster, generalize better and deliver superior outcomes, all while maintaining the highest standards for privacy, security and regulatory compliance.

In short, our scale doesn't just make our AI smarter. It drives better results for our clients and reinforces our position at the center of the future of commerce.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Josh.

Thanks, Cameron. We are pleased with our financial performance in the first quarter, which exceeded our expectations, thanks to the team's consistently strong execution. In the first quarter, we generated adjusted net revenue of $2.86 billion. Currency exchange rates provided a tailwind of approximately 100 basis points in the quarter, which was approximately 50 basis points lower than the outlook that we shared in February. .

On a normalized basis, adjusting for the stub period prior to transaction close, adjusted net revenue growth was approximately 5.5% or 4.5% on a constant currency basis. This is consistent with the presentation of our full year outlook for normalized adjusted net revenue growth of approximately 5% on a constant currency basis.

During the quarter and through April, we continue to observe resilient consumer spending trends across our business. We continue to monitor sources of macroeconomic uncertainty including the evolving conflict in the Middle East and its potential impact on global travel and inflation. Having said that, we believe the combined company is now more diversified than ever before in terms of consumer spending categories and merchant sizes, enhancing the durability of our business model across a variety of economic scenarios. In our first quarter operating as a pure-play provider of commerce enablement solutions, we saw strong commercial activity in each of our 3 go-to-market channels. In our SMB channel, Genius continued to achieve greater awareness and win rates. New Genius locations were approximately 25% higher than in the prior year quarter. And Genius' payment attach rate improved more than 20% versus the prior year period as we continue to deliver more value to our merchants and expand our share of wallet.

Our sales force transformation continues to drive greater commercial productivity and new sellers time to first deal accelerate across all SMB channels. Additionally, our sales force enhancements and Genius' ease of implementation have reduced time to go alone, which decreased by more than 50% for small business clients this quarter. Lastly, our sales force enhancements and early cross-selling success have kept the top of the funnel full. Marketing qualified needs for genius retail and small restaurant opportunities increased 36% year-over-year.

We also continue to focus on bringing Genius' enterprise-grade restaurant capabilities downstream to the mid-market segment where we've already built a pipeline of nearly 2,000 locations. We're also pleased with the performance of our enterprise go-to-market channel. Bookings this quarter were ahead of initial expectations and 9% higher than the prior year period. Additionally, Major signed enterprise merchants expected to go live in the near term, including [indiscernible], Morrisons and Gold Cosmetics provide greater visibility for in-year realized revenue in 2026.

Lastly, we've already had early success selling Heritage Worldpay's value line services into the Global Payments merchant base. Our enterprise e-commerce business saw a double-digit transaction growth this quarter. reflecting the resilient consumer trends we noted. This overall strength in spending volumes was somewhat offset by impacts from the Middle East conflict on our travel portfolio and some softness in our link to go tax payments business. While we remain very well positioned competitively as the IRS preferred digital payments provider, project record levels of refund stemming from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act have lower tax payment volumes this year.

We also saw continued momentum in our integrated payments go-to-market channel, where we added 44 new ISV partners in the first quarter. Our managed payment facilitation and payback offerings continue to drive exceptional growth with volume increasing more than 20% year-over-year. This underscores the distinctive suite of integrated capabilities that the combined company now brings to market and our ability to meet our software, marketplace and platform partners where they are and support any operating model.

From an integration standpoint, we have risen well through the initial stages of our finance and accounting work to resegment our business consistent with our new go-to-market channels and expect to be able to share our new reportable segments with our second quarter earnings announcement. Moving down the P&L, we generated an adjusted operating margin of 39.9% in the first quarter, reflecting approximately 110 basis points of normalized year-over-year margin expansion. -- excluding the impact of dispositions, which was in line with our expectations. The net result was adjusted earnings per share of $2.96 in the first quarter, reflecting growth of 10% on a reported and constant currency basis.

On an unrealized basis, adjusted earnings per share were $2.99, an increase of 11% from the prior year period on a reported and constant currency basis. For clarification, that figure includes $0.09 representing the pre-acquisition results of Worldpay and removed $0.06 associated with the results of Issuer Solutions which is consistent with the presentation of our full year outlook for normalized adjusted earnings per share between $13.80 and $14.

Turning to free cash flow. We generated adjusted free cash flow of $544 million, representing a nearly 70% conversion rate of adjusted net income to adjusted free cash flow, consistent with our typical conversion rate in the first quarter. As a reminder, for both Global Payments and Worldpay, the conversion rate is generally lowest in the first quarter, increasing seasonally as the calendar year progresses. We invested $261 million in capital expenditures during the first quarter, and our balance sheet remains extremely healthy.

As expected, our net leverage was 3.5x at the end of the first quarter. During the quarter, we issued $1 billion of senior notes on attractive terms to refinance a significant portion of our debt maturing in March. Our [indiscernible] is now approximately 95% fixed with a weighted average cost of debt of 4%. We made significant progress against our commitment to return capital to shareholders in the quarter. repurchasing approximately 7.3 million shares to a $515 million accelerated share repurchase program, including dividends, we returned nearly $620 million of capital to shareholders year-to-date.

Turning now to our 2026 outlook. We are reaffirming our full year outlook for the adjusted net revenue growth adjusted operating margin expansion and adjusted earnings per share. Starting with the second quarter, we currently expect the potential impacts from the conflict in the Middle East and softer tax payment volumes to be up to a 100 basis point headwind to adjusted net revenue growth. We also expect currency impact to be roughly neutral for the second quarter. For the full year, we continue to expect normalized constant currency adjusted net revenue growth of approximately 5%. Our outlook assumes a stable macro environment with a continuation of similar spending trends that we observed in the first quarter, and that travel begins to normalize by the end of the second quarter.

Given the recent strengthening of the U.S. dollar, we now expect currency exchange rates to be less than a 50 basis point tailwind to reported net revenue growth for the full year. We continue to expect our normalized adjusted operating margin to expand by approximately 150 basis points for the full year 2026, driven by additional operating efficiencies from our transformation and realized cost savings from the Worldpay integration, particularly in the second half of the year.

Putting it all together, we continue to expect adjusted earnings per share in the range of $13.80 to $14 for the full year 2026. Regarding cash flow, we continue to expect the conversion rate of adjusted net income to adjusted free cash flow to exceed 90% for the full year 2026. Because of the onetime transaction costs to effectuate the Worldpay acquisition, and issuer disposition were reflected in the first quarter, we also expect that adjustments to free cash flow will moderate as 2026 progresses.

Our capital allocation plans for 2026 and beyond remain unchanged. We continue to target capital expenditures of approximately $1 billion or 8% of adjusted net revenue for the full year 2026. Furthermore, we remain committed to preserving our investment-grade credit ratings and achieving our 3x net leverage target by the end of 2027. We continue to expect to return more than $2 billion to shareholders in 2026 through repurchases and dividends.

With the closing of the Worldpay and Issuer Solutions transactions now behind us, I'm proud of the solid foundation the team has established for new global payments. While the business environment has evolved since February, we remain intensely focused on execution and delivering on our commitments to unlock the benefits of the ongoing initiatives and drive durable top line growth, robust free cash flow generation and ongoing return of capital to shareholders.

And with that, I'll turn the call back over to Cameron.

Thanks, Josh. As you have heard, we are executing at a high level on all the initiatives within our control exactly as we had planned. We are continuing to monitor the conflict in the Middle East but expect its impact to be modest in transitory, underscoring the diversity of our revenue streams and the power of our scale. As anticipated, our pure-play focus is allowing us to move faster, deploy resources more effectively and serve customers and partners in a truly client-centric way. And with the addition of Worldpay, our combined scale is creating opportunities that neither organization could have accessed previously.

The breadth and depth of our global distribution network is a powerful competitive advantage. We're uniquely positioned to help clients and partners expand into new markets around the world, supported by local expertise, deep client relationships and disciplined execution. We continue to differentiate through feature-rich products, distinctive service and support and a reputation for delivering outcomes that exceed expectations.

From best-in-class enterprise payment solutions to platforms like Genius, Global Payments is at the forefront of modern commerce technology. And with approximately $1 billion in annual investment, we're also one of the few companies in our industry capable of innovating at this scale, anticipating and delivering solutions ahead of demand. At the same time, we remain focused on shareholder value creation and disciplined capital deployment. We are a proven compounder with substantial and durable free cash flow generation and remain committed to our capital return plans. We believe this combination of strategic focus, operational execution and capital discipline positions Global Payments to deliver attractive long-term value.

With that, we will open the line for questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Dan Dolev with Mizuho.

Congrats. This is really, really strong first quarter, and it looks like the year is shaping up really well. Congrats again. I wanted to ask you about genius. I caught that you said that the yields were up 30%, if I remember that correctly. I mean that's a huge positive sign in our view. Just wanted to get a sense of the progress on Genius and the yields because it looks pretty good. .

Yes, Dan, thanks for the comments, and thanks for the question. So look, as I take a big step back, we're obviously delighted with the progress that we're making with Genius. The metrics across the board continue to be very, very encouraging. And I would remind you, we're not even a year into Genius yet. So the enormous amount of progress we've made over the last 12 months in expanding Genius across new verticals, expanding Genius across new geographies, expanding Genius across different segments of the market where we think we can compete and win effectively. Again, just very proud of the team and the amount of work that they put into bringing Genius to life. .

We're also now starting to see a little bit better brand recognition around Genius, which we think is a good forward sign as it relates to future sales velocity is relates to the product overall. As it relates to the take rates, maybe I'll provide just a couple of comments, and I'll ask Bob to go a little bit deeper on those. I would call out 3 things in particular. One is, and this may feel obvious, Genius is just a much more feature-rich platform than anything that we've been selling historically.

So the capabilities we're able to bring to bear with Genius are just more superior than historical products we have brought to market, and we certainly see that resonating with the market more broadly. Two, and Bob talked about this in the past, as we revamped our sales plan, we put a much more significant emphasis on cross-selling and our ability to bundle other value-added services within the suite of solutions we're selling as part of Genius. And obviously, we're seeing some effectiveness there, which is resulting in, again, slightly higher yields with net new front book customers as we're selling Genius into the market.

And then the third thing I would say is we're seeing better penetration of payments through our dealer channel. Historically, if I'm being honest, we made it a little bit hard for our dealers to sell payments. We're trying to ease the process by which our dealers are able to attach payments to Genius when they're selling the solution into market -- and obviously, that's creating overall better yields with the portfolio of customers that we're selling through the dealer channel more broadly. So those are the 3 specific things I would kind of call out at a macro level.

I'll ask Bob if he has any color that he would want to add to that.

I think Cameron really nailed it, Dan. There's a couple of things maybe I would add. Number one, Cameron talked about the more robust solution we're bringing to market and cross-selling. What I think that means is not just cross sales in the traditional sense where we're bringing new value-added services to back book clients. But really, the bundled selling of Genius that targets a robust set of core capabilities, but then also wraps additional value around both the software and the transaction processing. That's helping to drive material improvements in the value of each deal as clients recognize the incremental value we're bringing and are willing to pay for those capabilities.

The other thing that I'll mention is really not product or technology related directly, but the sales transformation journey we've been on the last 1.5 years or so. We've talked about this in multiple calls in the past. But that's led to better sales talent with better training and better tooling and capabilities for our sales team. So this is both a product and technology improvement as well as an execution improvement of our sales organization.

Our next question comes from Bryan Keane with Citigroup.

Congrats on these results. I got 2 questions, I'll ask them upfront. Happy to see the accelerated repurchase plan of $500 million. So trying to get a sense of what that means for share buyback for the rest of this year and into 2027 as I know you're committed to the 3.0 net leverage by the end of '27. And then the second question, just a follow-up on Genius. What percentage of the market does Genius cover today and when the rollout is complete, how much of total SMB or total GPN sales will be coming from Genius because I know you're rolling out into the financial institutions and then Germany and Austria. So just trying to get a sense of where we are on coverage and where we're going to be and congrats.

Thanks, Brian. I'll take -- and appreciate the questions. I'll take the first one. Look, we're obviously very focused on returning capital to shareholders. That's a big part of the overall narrative. And look, at these levels, there is no single better investment than in ourselves. And as we talked about in our prepared remarks, in Q1, we bought back $550 million worth of shares. We returned approximately $620 million of capital to shareholders. And today, we obviously announced another ASR for $500 million, and we have plenty of capacity in Q2 to continue to buy back shares in the open market, which we plan to do after executing the ASR.

And look, by the end of the second quarter, we expect to return more than 50% of what we committed to return in 2026. And look, I'd say, we're well on our path to go ahead and return approximately $7.5 billion to shareholders by the end of 2027. So we feel very good about that. And we also feel very good about getting back to our leverage point of 3x by the end of 2027.

On your second comment, Brian, I think it's a very interesting one. I might start at the macro level and ask Bob to go a little bit deeper. But as I step back and think about the long-term strategy of the business. As we think about restaurant and retail, the mode of competition is the point of sale. And obviously, Genius is a highly competitive solution that we think allows us to compete enormously effectively in restaurant and retail and all the sub verticals they're under with our capabilities to continue to win share in that market going forward.

Over time, the rest of the market will continue to drive towards being more software enabled, which means more and more of our sort of sales will come through our integrated channel for channels where we don't own our own software. And this is a very U.S.-centric comment, of course, but over time, I expect the rest of the world is going to move in a similar direction, which is restaurant and retail will largely attack through Genius. That is our competitive, obviously, differentiation from a product and capability perspective to win in those channels.

And then more and more of the rest of our business will migrate towards our integrated and platform businesses as we attack other vertical markets through the partnership relationships, the deep relationships we have in that channel. So that's kind of an overarching view of where I see the business trending over time. I'll let Bob maybe go a little deeper around some of the specifics of your question.

Yes, Brian, I think it's an interesting question as Cameron noted. Clearly, retail and restaurant is the most obvious in direct application for Genius in kind of the core verticals that we serve. But we've also announced releases around service-oriented businesses with scheduling and invoicing capabilities. We've also launched Genius Mobile, which is a version that is slightly slimmer in terms of both of its device footprint and its feature functionality that's designed to be easier to use and more general purpose.

The other thing I would consider is as you move outside of the largest markets in the world for software, the U.S. certainly being at the top of that -- in international markets, merchant segments tend to be less hyper verticalized than here, and there's not quite as many software providers with niche solutions. And so we think Genius covers more of the horizontal approach to the market than maybe in the largest markets.

So if you think about the composition of Global Payments merchant revenue today with something like 50%-ish being driven by the SMB channel. I think over a period of time, very close to 100% of that SMB base can be addressed by a version of Genius that's not being served by our integrated and platforms business with another core software offering that's operating their business.

So in the U.S. today, it's largely retail restaurant, age-restricted verticals and service oriented. In our international markets, it's covering probably 75% or 80% of the MCC codes that we're serving across Europe and Latin America. So we're very bullish about its ability as a platform to scale from the smallest clients to the largest enterprise and to serve horizontally across multiple verticals without having to proliferate kind of point software solutions.

Our next question comes from Darrin Peller with Wolfe.

All right. Great. You highlighted some notable wins, including Subway and Abercrombie, among others. So what do you see driving those wins? And then just focusing for a moment also on sales adds and the integration of your sales. I mean, it looks like you're well on your way you're adding. I think you had 300-plus adds you said -- just touch on the integration and how it's going with those sales what type of impact do you expect to see post onboarding and really some timing if you can, in terms of the follow-through from adding in terms of new revenue and new opportunities.

Yes. Thanks, Darrin. Great question. I'll start. And again, I'll ask Bob maybe to add a little bit more color to my answer. As I step back and look at the commercial productivity of the business in the first quarter, I'd say it's very encouraging. As we called out on the call, we saw 8% overall bookings growth. We had 9% in enterprise and integrated and platforms. We added 44 new partners and obviously called out strong volume growth on both Parex and our traditional payment facilitation capabilities .

Genius sales nearly doubled year-over-year, obviously being the flagship sort of product than our SMB portfolio driving, obviously, the commercial activity, the lion's share of the commercial activity we're seeing in that business, dovetailing with Bob's comments a moment ago. So I think from my vantage point, what I see is we're building a very strong commercial engine that we can continue to scale and drive as a go-forward matter.

And then two, we have the product and capabilities to win competitively in the market. Our strategy at an overarching level is to continue to compete on product differentiation and capability. We want to lead with the solutions that we have that we think are differentiated. We want to lean into the feature functionality that we think really resonates with our clients, which is going to be slightly different across the 3 channels of the market that we go to market through, but we certainly feel like we have an ability to compete and win based on the strength of our product and capabilities across these 3 go-to-market channels.

Secondly, I think service and support is increasingly becoming a point of differentiation and distinction in the market. We're seeing more and more that our clients are looking for a more intimate for lack of better term, sales and service experience. They're looking for someone who can solution around their very specific needs. I think we have the DNA. We have the scale, and I think we have the expertise to be able to deliver that in much better ways than the vast majority of our competitors. And I think over time, that ability to bundle highly feature-rich product and capability with a service experience that feels unique and distinctive to Global Payments is a real competitive tailwind for us in the business as we go forward.

On the sales force front, what I would say is, first, from an integration perspective, things are going very, very well. We've aligned the vast majority of our new -- of all of our sellers against the new sort of go-to-market channels that we're leveraging, enterprise, integrated and platform in SMB. We're obviously kind of working through some of the, what I would call the plumbing of that, which is aligning sales compensation plans, quotas, go-to-market channels, et cetera, across the different sales resources. But I would say, overall, the progress there is quite good, and I would expect by the end of this quarter, we'll have the vast majority of that iron out and the go-to-market motion will be pretty smooth across the combined business.

To your point around the new sales heads we're adding, again, continuing to see very good quality of new sellers into our ecosystem. Many of those, as we called out in our prepared remarks, are coming from other software companies or point-of-sale competitors. I think they're attracted to the feature-rich platform that Genius offers as well as our ability to deploy, install and service relationships in a way, again, that I feel is distinctive relative to many of our competitors. We're seeing metrics across those new sales professionals continue to improve just in terms of their productivity, in terms of their speed to first deal ones in our environment. It's also allowed us to expand distribution in places like Mexico that we think is important as it relates to long-term growth trajectories in that market.

So overall, we feel I would say very good about the commercial engine that we are building as a combined company. And I think the thing that is most important to me is we're winning at strong levels, which demonstrates the product capability and service offering that we bring to market is truly competitive and allows us to win share. Bob, I don't know if you'd add any other color around that?

Maybe just 2 quick things. One, I think that the sales transformation we've been undertaking has given us a lot of confidence in the plans that we've built and the execution results that those deliver. So as we bring the businesses together, rolling out the very best of breed of tools, systems, training and sales enablement across the combined organization gives us a lot of confidence that the early wins Cameron highlighted are durable and lead to long-term competitive advantage of front book opportunities.

The second thing, more macro, I would say, is in an environment where countries are experiencing a resurgence of nationalism, Global Payments is not a U.S. company with worldwide distribution. We're a true global company. We've said in the past that we bring global scale and local expertise. And I think that is a market differentiator for us outside of the U.S. borders, whether it's in Canada or in Germany or in Poland or the U.K. or Australia or country in Asia, we're showing up with local teams embedded in the local community with local market knowledge and the ability to put feet on the ground and hands on keyboards to get business done, to help clients be successful and to grow as a part of the local economy.

So it's maybe a little more abstract, but I think both of those concepts are leading to like I said, near-term wins and long-term durable scale and benefit.

Our next question comes from Adam Frisch with Evercore ISO.

I wanted to dovetail a little bit on Darrin's question on the revenue synergies. You guys have obviously disclosed a ton of data and color around this. But just to make sure we're getting the right message, specifically on cross-sell, when do you expect that to start contributing more meaningly to revenue growth? Is that a '26 expectation or more into '27. And then also on AI, obviously, a big tool for cost reduction that you're leveraging would also ask you to expand how you're leveraging it to drive product acceleration and future revenue growth. And if you're using it to bring Genius up to some of the -- up to scale more quickly as well?

All right. Thanks, Adam. It's Josh. Let me -- I'll take the first question that you have. Look, as we talked about repeatedly, revenue synergies is really kind of the North Star and our big focus in 2026 is really laying the foundation and the groundwork to deliver the $200 million in revenue synergies that we've committed to. I'd say that the bigger opportunities around growth will really start to come in the 2027 time frame, but more so in 2028. And we would expect to realize approximately $100 million in revenue synergies in 2028 and then really exiting the year run rating at $200 million. .

Look, we've talked about these before. Some of the big things that we're focused on, obviously, is enabling the direct sales force to go ahead and sell Genius. We've already started to go ahead and roll that out with the heritage Worldpay direct sales force, selling e-commerce down market into our SMB channel, we have more than 5 million small and medium-sized merchants on the Heritage Global Payments side. We obviously have a physical presence in 175 countries around the globe. And so again, taking their leading e-commerce capabilities and enabling more of an omnichannel solution in those markets. That's a big opportunity.

And then really, the final point I'd say is it's really unlocking the full power of our distribution channels to sell Genius through the ISO channel, other indirect channels. And then obviously, Worldpay, the heritage Worldpay side had 6,000 bank branches. And so that's an area of focus of ours. And we've talked about Genius Day in our prepared remarks and how we're facilitating that FI channel. So those are really some of the bigger rocks as it relates to revenue synergies.

Yes. I'll add just maybe one point to that, Adam, and then I'll dovetail into the second part of your question. So I think the way I view the revenue synergies is we have tactical plans today to achieve the $200 million of sort of run rate synergies we expect over the first 3 years post closing of the transaction to Josh's earlier comment. .

The other thing we're sort of leaning into is where are the areas of investment that we really want to focus on that I would characterize as bigger beds. These are opportunities to maybe drive more meaningful sort of uplift for the business over a longer period of time. So these would be kind of incremental opportunities outside of the more tactical, I think, opportunities that come from putting Global Payments and Worldpay together. So our teams are starting to give some light to where do we think about investing in sort of bigger bets that may have more meaningful opportunity long term for the business as we think about bringing the companies together and perhaps the things that we can uniquely unlock given the size, scale, scope of resources that we have worldwide. So that's more to come on that as we get further down that path.

But very clear line side on the tactical plans that give rise to the numbers we've articulated. And we're also looking at things that we think we can uniquely do because of our positioning in the market and the scale that we bring I think on the AI front, as I step back and look at it again at a macro level, we're really focused across 3 primary sort of vectors for AI. The first is Agentic commerce, and I provided a lot of commentary in my prepared remarks around our positioning there and how we see the market trending, quite frankly, in a way that aligns completely well with our strategy and approach. And we feel very good about how we're positioned, again, to continue to help shape that evolving sort of channel of commerce for the future.

The second is embedding AI capabilities more broadly into our products and solutions. We called out a number of areas where we're already embedding AI capabilities to improve the feature richness of the products and solutions we bring to market. Genius is obviously a great example of that. And I don't want to get ahead of myself, but we have some exciting announcements that we'll be making in the context of the NRA coming up here in the next couple of weeks that certainly, I think, fit very nicely in the category of sort of how we can better leverage AI to enhance the capabilities around Genius and help grow and scale Genius more effectively going forward.

And then the last area of AI, of course, is around productivity improvements that we see in the business. And I think we have kind of a very unique position around this given the merger and integration with Worldpay as we're building out the new organization going forward, if we're aligning all of our functional areas, across the 2 business, and we're building new workflows and processes for the combined business. Obviously, we're building them in a way that we believe we can integrate AI to enable those workflows, those processes, the delivery of services to the business in a much more efficient and effective way. And I think that is a unique opportunity. In many ways, it comes out of the integration process is the ability to redesign process workflow with an AI-centric mindset. to build better efficiency, scalability, productivity into the operating environment of the company.

The other thing we're doing, and I called this out in my prepared remarks as well, is we've created our own proprietary fast track studio platform. And effectively, that allows us to massively accelerate product from experimentation to production. So it improves not only kind of the speed to market for new product and capability. It also includes the overall product velocity and our ability to obviously innovate at a much quicker pace going forward, which again we think competitively positions us very well and something that, again, comes out at the massive scale and innovation budget that we're able to bring to bear as a combined company.

Bob, I don't know if there's anything you would maybe touch on a little bit deeper.

The only thing I might add, Adam, are really around some things we've talked about before. not just AI alone, but some of the incremental investments we've made in the technology stack and the product and technology operating model that are accelerating the velocity of delivery and innovation. We talked, I don't know, a few quarters ago about orchestration capability that Global both acquired and was building in-house. We're using that orchestration capability heavily as part of the target architecture model and the integration of the 2 tech stacks. It's what's quickly enabling us to unlock the cross-sell of capabilities across the divergent platforms.

It's also allowing us to collapse platforms and reduce our overall technology footprint to amplify the impact of the investment dollars we're putting behind CapEx, technology, et cetera. The other thing is the organizational redesign that leads to this kind of an in a box model where you have engineering leaders, partnered up with product leaders, partnered up with business and commercial leaders all operating as one team with a shared set of goals, objectives, OKRs.

And it really democratizes decision-making a little bit and it distributes it lowering the organization. What that allows us to do is leverage leverage technology that we've acquired and that we've built and then leverage our operating model to respond quickly innovate at a faster pace and move more content into production more quickly. So we feel real good about how we're positioned to innovate at scale and at pace to continue to lead the market.

Our next question comes from Andrew Schmidt with KeyBanc. .

Good job on the steady results here. I hope I could drill down just on your comments on AI-related revenue. Obviously, there's a few sources. I don't want to part run in the announcement. It sounds like you have some interesting things rolling out. But if you could just talk about kind of the agent front, what you can do sort of capturing those flows and also what you can bring to merchants. And also, when we think about that fraud is also a big topic, obviously, recently, and you guys have an opportunity to bring that from a value-added services perspective. Just wondering just to get some more comments on the related revenue piece.

And then we work in one more question just on the technology environment and harmonization. Can you give us an update on where you're at in the major milestones. It seems like you're already increasing product velocity. But when you get that work done, it seems like catalysts to further unlock product velocity. So any more details there in terms of the transformation would also be helpful.

Yes. Thanks for the comments, Andrew, and great questions on both fronts. So I'll -- without repeating myself, I'll try to touch on some of the AI-centric sort of questions that were embedded in your overall narrative there. I would say, first and foremost, on the revenue front, what we're seeing right now is predominantly related to existing products that we have in the market where we've been able to enrich their capabilities and enhance their effectiveness by virtue of applying obviously, more AI capabilities around them.

So products such as 3DS Flex, revenue boost, dynamic routing, fraud side are already leveraging AI capabilities that are allowing us, again, I think, to drive differentiation and their effectiveness in the market, which is allowing us to win more cross-sells with those value-added services, particularly within our enterprise base. And we're seeing better results for our clients, which obviously improves our share of wallet and improves the stickiness of relationships that we have on that front.

I would say on the pure agent commerce side, it's very nascent, right? Most of what you're seeing right now is AI-generated discovery with human in the loop transactions, which really rely on traditional kind of payment rails, checkout processes, et cetera to effectuate what is Agentic commerce today. At the same time, we're obviously building all the connected tissue that would allow for fully agentic commerce to move forward at scale.

As I mentioned earlier and also commented on in my prepared remarks, we're seeing the industry really trend in a direction that we think is positive for us and our competitive positioning and strategic positioning around a genetic commerce. In particular, it just reinforces, I think, the critical role that we will continue to play around checkout, payment, risk and settlement, within Agentic commerce that allows us again to be the connective tissue that allows our merchants to be able to participate at scale in a very ubiquitous way across models and protocols, et cetera, to be able to take advantage of the promise that I think Agentic Commerce has, particularly in retail going forward.

Lastly, to your point around fraud, I think it's an excellent call out. As I look at our capabilities, [indiscernible] is a best-in-class sort of market-leading capability. that obviously is leveraging AI and I would say the scale of data that we have with inside of our ecosystem that I think is unique to Global Payments with $4 trillion of payment volume and over 100 billion transactions a year. sort of our own internal data, coupled with the data sources that we have available to us that I think are unique allow us to continue to grow and scale Ravlin as a fraud-related solution that can power a number of our products and capabilities. that I think, again, allows us to competitively differentiate in the market around our ability to manage fraud, particularly in an Agentic world. And we're excited about the things that we're going to be able to do on that front and the progress that we're making. And I think, again, it puts us in a very strong position as this new channel continues to evolve over time.

I think on your second question, the way I would characterize it is we are in the middle of sort of developing what we characterized as our target architectural model currently. This is a very important part of the integration because we're making decisions across the heritage Worldpay business and the Heritage Global Payments business around the platforms that we want to support, grow and scale as a combined going forward. as well as what platforms do we want to demise, what technology assets do we want a sunset over a period of time. So we make sure that the business is best positioned with the technology capability, solutions and capability to continue to compete effectively in the market, while minimizing the technology footprint that we're having to manage that allowed for quicker product velocity as a go-to-market matter. It allows us, I think, to better compete effectively in the market. It makes it easier to secure the environments that we're managing day-to-day has a lot of downstream benefits for the client -- for our company as well as for our clients as well.

I would say in the short term, Worldpay and Global Payments had a very similar strategy, which is very client centric in our approach. We want to create orchestration layers that allow our clients to be able to easily integrate into our environments to gain access to the full product suite and capabilities we're able to bring to bear on the market as a front book matter. I think we both have made great strides in allowing easy integration into our environments as well as providing consolidated data settlement and reporting out of the back end. I think those are the features that our clients are most looking for today in terms of how we deliver our capabilities in a more seamless, ubiquitous way globally. Both of us, again, have made enormous progress on that front.

So our short-term strategy is really to combine the orchestration layers in a way that allows the client to be able to gain access to the complete suite of capabilities that Global Payments and Worldpay can bring to bear on the market. While over time, we work to simplify behind the scenes, again, what I would characterize as the plumbing of our technology environment to minimize our technology footprint position us to be able to invest in our best go-forward platforms to support the combined needs of the business on a global scale and obviously minimize the amount of technology investments we're having to make to maintain those assets as a go-forward matter.

I expect that technology architecture plan to be complete, call it, midyear and we'll begin to work towards our execution plans around that as we get into the back half of '26 and move forward into '27 and beyond.

Our final question comes from Jeff Cantwell with Seaport. .

It's good to hear about the early momentum you're seeing with Genius and Worldpay. And I was hoping you could talk to us more about that. What are the boots on the ground saying about customer feedback? And can you just talk to us more about the sales momentum as it relates to Genius. It seems like enterprise clients are showing good demand. I thought those were called out in the prepared remarks. So my other question is, which nets -- are you gaining greater confidence in with Genius. I'm trying to see if we can anticipate which areas, what we hear more about as the year progresses.

And then lastly, I mean, clearly, we're all focused on synergies, even though it's early days here, do you feel at all that the ceiling being raised on the synergy targets as you think about the longer term because some of these early numbers look encouraging. I just wanted to ask for your fresh thoughts there now that your 100 days in.

Yes. Good question, Jeff. I'll start with the first part of your question and try to frame it. And I'm going to let Bob maybe provide a little more color around what we're hearing specifically, where we're winning and why, but as I step back and think about just the Genius platform as it relates to your questions around Worldpay and what we're seeing on that front. So as a reminder, we enabled Worldpay direct sellers to be able to sell Genius immediately kind of post closing of the transaction.

Now in fairness, Worldpay is direct sellers in the U.S., it's not a huge population of sellers, but it was a good early win for the organization and obviously, a good early win around incremental momentum behind Genius. The bigger opportunity with Worldpay, quite frankly, is being able to unlock their FI channel, as Josh called out earlier, roughly 6,000 branches in the U.S. as well as selling into their existing sort of ISO partner channel as we are looking to do in the Heritage Global Payments portfolio as well.

So I think about that as, quite frankly, pushing genius through all the distribution channels that we have today and obviously driving greater penetration and saturation of the market. leveraging the immense distribution that we have within the 4 walls of the combined Global Payments today.

I think the second area that's really interesting from a Worldpay perspective, and I appreciate you calling this out is what we're seeing on the enterprise front. We specifically called out that Subway has committed to purchasing some of our Genius technology. Subway is an existing payment relationship of Worldpay that we're able to tap into very early post closing of the transaction to unlock this new opportunity to sell our software solutions into existing Worldpay enterprise payments customers. We think there's more of that forthcoming in the market as we continue to bring the businesses together and unlock opportunities as a combined company.

The other comment I would just make about the enterprise market more broadly is we're seeing really strong receptivity to the embedded suite of capabilities that we can deliver across the Genius Enterprise solution from, obviously, point-of-sale, kitchen management software, digital menu solutions, drive-thru technology. We have an enormous array of capabilities that we can bring to bear on the enterprise space. And we're seeing strong, obviously, receptivity and excitement around what we're doing with Genius from an enterprise perspective.

As it relates to synergies, and I'm going to turn it over to Bob to obviously allow him to give a little more color around what we're seeing with Genius, but I'll just tackle the last part of your question, so we don't go back and forth. Look, we're delighted with the early progress we're making. I commented to our Board last week that the way our certainly executive leadership team and first couple of layers of management have come together to drive integration over the first. I think we're going on 120 days now is really remarkable. The way this organization is kind of come together over that period of time is very, very encouraging.

I don't want to get ahead of myself as it relates to where we are with synergies. We have a great deal of confidence in being able to deliver on the commitments that we've already established. And we continue to work every day to try to maximize the value proposition that we see in putting the 2 businesses together. As we move through time, we'll continue to update you on our progress on that front. But I would say, I certainly sitting here today, I'm very, very encouraged by the progress we're making from an integration standpoint and have a great deal of conviction in our ability to deliver on the commitments we've established.

Bob, do you want to maybe go a little bit deeper on Genius?

Sure. So Jeff, back to the enterprise versus SMB part of your question, I think it's probably patently obvious that we call out some of the enterprise wins because they're names that people would recognize. But they're really overshadowed by the vast number of Marcellus pizzerias and Joe's local bar and the Atlanta hub or whatever the people may not recognize, but are adopting Genius at an even more rapid clip than what we're seeing in the enterprise space. So we feel really bullish, frankly, about both ends of the spectrum. .

In terms of where we're winning specifically, look, I think in restaurant, particularly in the U.S., there are certain sub verticals within restaurant that we have had some historical strength, and we've certainly doubled down on that with incremental functionality capabilities around Genius.

We're also beginning to win competitive takeaways at a pretty consistent clip. I know there was some discussion some quarters ago about whether our approach was going to be back book related or front book related and certainly, we're seeing a blend of both. Our dealer network is going back to service clients that they sold historically with a very, very high percentage of close ratios on upgrades to Genius technology, whether that's around the new hardware, the new software and the value-added services we mentioned before.

We're also having a lot of success around stadium and event venues, foodservice management, both of those are complicated environments that often bring together the breadth of capabilities we have across device form factors and software technologies. So in one environment, you may need kiosks and digital menu boards and mobile access and kitchen management solutions, and we really feel very strongly about our capabilities in those complex environments not to mention things that were historical enterprise strength for us around drive-through and quick service restaurants.

On the retail side, I think we continue to have, frankly, very broad success retail Genius solution isn't really targeted at enterprise, whether that's inside or outside of the U.S. But in the small and mid-market kind of retail shops, counter service, coffee shops, things like that, we're experiencing really broad interest in the U.S., obviously, that's our largest market for that.

But even internationally, we're finding, in some cases, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80% of new opportunities are interested in taking the Genius retail, Genius sort of shops environment.

So I would say the -- the excitement is broad. It's across enterprise and SMB. We feel real good about our approach and our positioning in both retail and restaurant, while acknowledging particularly in restaurant in the United States, we've got strong competition, and we've got work to do here to continue to build out our functionality, build our distribution. And as I've highlighted before, to establish the brand recognition that leads to those kind of automatic sales when you become one of the first names that people think about when they think about restaurant technology. And the campaign that we've run in the last quarter has demonstrated our ability to move public perception and awareness of the brand that we think is going to lead to future success at the top of the funnel and in terms of take rates.

This concludes the Q&A. I will now turn the call over to Cameron Bready for closing remarks.

On behalf of Global Payments, thank you very much for joining us today. We appreciate your interest in our company, and I hope everyone has a great day. Thank you very much.

All right. Guys, we're really happy to have Global Payments here with us today and even happier to have the CEO of the company with Cameron Bready here. This is a company we've covered really for over 15 years, and it's gone through quite a bit of iterations and change, and it's become the biggest -- pretty much the biggest payments company in our country now from a volume standpoint post some acquisitions in terms of merchant acquiring and payment processing for merchants. Really great to have you with us. Thank you for joining.

Thanks for having me.

Like I said, I mean, there's a lot of change going on and a lot just in general for Global Payments, given both divestitures and acquisitions. So if we take a step back and think about the sales revamp, Genius investments, issuer processing divestiture and of course, Worldpay now, maybe where are you spending most of your time right now? And what are some of your key focus points and areas for '26?

Yes. It's a great question. And again, thanks for having me today, and thanks for joining us this afternoon. I would say I'm spending a majority of my time focused on execution. If you just take a big step back, and I think you framed the question well, we've been through a lot as a company. And the last couple of years, I would say, have been pivotal for our business. We've taken decisive action, I think, to make sure that our business is well positioned for the long term, that we're building an organization that can drive sustainable, healthy growth and continue to deliver on all of our sort of expectations for our various constituents, most importantly, driving returns for our shareholders over a longer period of time.

In 2024, we launched a transformation program that was really designed to streamline, simplify our business, improve our sales effectiveness. Genius was a big part of that naturally. And we've made substantial progress against that transformation agenda. At its core, it's really unifying our business around a single unified operating model globally, and we continue to bring that forward now into our Worldpay integration activities. And as you highlighted, we catalyzed that transformation last year when we announced the acquisition of Worldpay and the divestiture of our Issuer Solutions business. And we think, obviously, that was a pivotal moment for our company, making the determination that we were better off being a pure-play merchant solutions provider, really doubling down through the acquisition of Worldpay and finding a good value-creative home for our Issuer Solutions business.

We take a lot of pride in the transactions we're able to execute. And we think it was the right thing to do for the business strategically for the long term and making sure that we're repositioning the business as a pure-play merchant provider, I think, will be absolutely the right thing for us from a focus standpoint. And I think being a monoline business in an industry that is as competitive as ours with as much demand for investment and growth potential. I think being a monoline focused organization is really healthy and ultimately will be the right strategy for us to pursue.

So look, I would say, given the significant sort of decisive bold actions we've taken over the last couple of years, my focus here in the short term is making sure that all of that comes together well, that we continue on the journey that we're on with transformation, that we weave our integration activities into that, that we're positioning the business for long-term sustainable growth and success and really harnessing and unleashing, I think, the full potential of what the combined Global Payments and Worldpay business can bring to the market. And really helping to develop the new global payments that I think will be poised for growth and success for many, many years to come.

Yes. I mean you're putting 2 of the largest payments companies together. So on that note, you mentioned, I know integration planning started even before the deal closed. And so just walk us through what accomplishments you saw pre-close versus what shifted to post close. And I mean there's, what, $600 million in cost synergies expected over a few years, $70 million to $80 million, I think, this year and a couple of hundred million dollars of revenue synergy targets longer term. So just what's been actioned, what milestones should we expect in the next 6 to 12 months? A little more on the integration and the potential to go from just cost integration on synergies, too.

Yes, it's a great question. Obviously, a big focus for us, as I mentioned, in the short term. So as I step back and think about sort of the pre-close period, much of that time was really focused on a couple of things. One is just creating the blueprint for what we wanted the new Global Payments to look like. And that's really centered around operating model, how do we align the businesses or of the go-to-market matter, how do we want to operate and run this large combined sort of global business.

Secondly, we're very focused on establishing the first couple of layers of leadership. We thought it was very important when we got to close that organizationally, we had the first 2 layers of leadership well defined, announced to the organization in place and ready to execute from day 1. And then third, we are very focused on developing executable plans to go after the revenue opportunities and the expense synergies that you highlighted in the question itself. And I would say, as it relates to the integration, our focus from day 1 has always been on positioning the business for long-term sustainable growth and success. Our North Star from an integration perspective is driving the best growth outcomes we can for the business. I can get more expense synergies, but I'm really focused on making sure that we're striking the right balance between attacking the expense synergy opportunity that exists in the business, but making sure the business is positioned for growth and success for the future.

So as we've told the entire organization time and time again, the North Star from an integration perspective is growth. It's not maximizing expense synergies for the business. And I think we're well positioned to be able to deliver on that. And we have executable plans in place to go after the entirety of the $600 million of expense synergies over the next 3 years as well as the growth opportunities that we have called out. Now that we're at close, execution started from day 1. And I'm proud of the progress that we've already made in the business. We expect to deliver $70 million to $80 million of expense synergies this year. We have our organizational alignment in process. So we're down to probably the third and fourth, fifth layers of leadership. And by midyear, the entire organization will be aligned around our new leadership structure, operating model, organization around the globe, which I think positions us well as we move forward in time.

And we'll continue to move forward from here kind of relentlessly focused on executing against the revenue and expense synergies that we have in front of us. The other big focus for 2026 is laying the groundwork and foundations to deliver on the revenue synergies that are going to take a little more time and a little more investment to deliver. So the bigger opportunities around growth come, I think, in '27 and more so in '28 as we're able to make investments to align the 2 businesses, allow capabilities to be more ubiquitously deployed across Heritage Global Payments and Heritage Worldpay businesses and unlock some of the growth potential that I think exists in putting the 2 businesses together. But a lot of the groundwork that will give rise to those opportunities a year, 2 years out will start this year.

It's only -- it hasn't even been 2 months since you closed. But I mean in terms of it, it feels like you're seeing a lot longer right. And in terms of what you're seeing, you feel pretty good about that.

Yes, I feel better about it today than I did when we announced the transaction. I think seeing the 2 businesses come together and we really start to execute together over the last couple of months has only increased my confidence, number one, it was the right thing to do. And I think the opportunity that the combined business presents for the long term.

I think your leadership team is going to look about half legacy Worldpay folks and half Global Payments more or less. And you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm just curious if you think you have the right structure and right management team set up pro forma for this deal and how the culture is impacted by this?

Yes. I think it's 2 great questions. So first of all, on the leadership team, I'm absolutely thrilled with the leadership team we have in place, not just at the executive leadership level, but the leadership team we're putting in place 2, 3, 4 layers down in the organization.

Look, it's a big company, 26,000 people. And I think getting the leadership structure right is one of the most important things that we're doing as part of our integration efforts. And I think if you go down 3 or 4 layers in the organization, it's almost exactly 50% Worldpay heritage individuals and 50% Global Payments heritage leaders in the combined organization. And we didn't mandate that. That is just the way it's kind of worked out as we've worked through the leadership structure working down through the organization. And I would say the quality of talent we've been able to put together in the combined organization is immense. Anytime you can take 2 large multibillion-dollar acquiring businesses and take the best talent from both of them and put them together now to run this new Global Payments. It's an enormous opportunity, I think, to really elevate the level of talent that runs our business every single day. And I'm seeing that play out as we put the leadership structures in place.

And really thrilled with what we've seen thus far in terms of the decisions that have been made around the people leaders in a variety of different areas of the business, particularly around the commercial side of the business, go-to-market and the product side of the business, the capabilities of the combined organization are incredibly exciting. On the culture front, I would start by saying our cultures are very similar. We speak the same language. Interestingly, we have a lot of shared experiences, good and bad on both sides of the business. And I think from a foundational perspective, our cultures are very, very similar. I would challenge you, if I threw in a room of 100 Global Payments and Worldpay people and you didn't know them, you'd be very challenged to point to who came from which side of the business. But I think culture doesn't just happen. It's something that you need to be very, very deliberate about. And from day 1, we've been very focused on aligning the new Global Payments around a common culture that we want to represent the new company.

Now aspects of that mission, vision, values, behaviors, everything that underlies our culture are really drawn from what both Worldpay and Global Payments brought to the new company. So it feels very familiar, I think, to all of our team members. But from day 1, we established a new mission vision values for the organization. Those are clear underpinnings of the culture that we want to have. And I think people are, by and large, excited about the culture of the new business and what we're striving to achieve as a company.

$4 trillion in TPV you guys have now. It's a big number, just a high percentage of total PCE really when you think about the markets you operate in, in probably have one of the best pictures of what consumers are doing out there. So give us an update. What are you seeing in terms of consumer spending trends? Maybe help break it down as much by category?

Yes. I think general consistency kind of across the board is the way I would describe it. So the trends that we really saw exiting 2025 have, by and large, persisted into 2026. The consumer remains very stable and resilient. I think as we look across the board, the level of resiliency I think we've seen across consumer spending, I have to admit, it's been a little surprising. Even recently. I thought it would be -- yes, I thought it would be different even over the last probably year I thought it would be different. But the consumer remains very, very resilient and the stable trends that we saw kind of exiting the year persisted through the first part of 2026. There's been some weather-related activity here and there, but I think that's, by and large, kind of normalized itself as you look across the first couple of months of 2026.

I think as you look beyond that, it's largely driven by, look, the labor market. And if I'm keenly focused on one thing from a macro perspective, it's really the labor market, particularly here in the U.S. And wage growth has been good. It's been supportive to consumer spending. We want to see those trends continue. We're obviously monitoring unemployment rates and layoffs. But by and large, the labor market has remained relatively constructive and the wage growth that we're seeing, not just across the higher end, but across all levels of the consumer segmentation of the market continues to be quite good. Obviously, more recently, geopolitical matters may throw a little bit of a wrinkle into the macro environment more broadly. I think time will tell. Obviously, we're watching oil prices and the potential trickle-down effect that might have on inflation and how consumers react to just a more uncertain geopolitical environment.

And then, of course, for us, in particular, there's a little bit of modest headwind because we serve 12 of the largest Middle Eastern airlines. They are great clients for ours and every flagship that you could think of that flies in and out of that region are generally going to be clients for us. So closed airspace in the Middle East isn't ideal. So I would expect a little bit of a modest headwind in Q1 and potentially Q2 depending on how long it persists for our business, but I mean, pretty minimal impact on earnings and cash flow, just given the size and diversity of the business more broadly. But certainly, on the margin, I would prefer that not to be happening for a variety of different reasons, including what it means for our clients.

Right. Hopefully, that's transient. All right. Let's shift gears a little bit just because, I mean, look, your stock is trading at a level that obviously implies questions still about the industry, more broadly, competitive dynamics. You guys have done a good job investing in a new product and new go-to-market and Genius is one of the major pillars of that, right? So I mean, some good KPIs recently, POS locations up 25% in fourth quarter for Genius, new signed partners up 19%. Maybe just give us a quick update on the traction there. I think this is one of the major themes that could really drive multiple expansion if you succeed with a differentiated point of sale in the market. And so help us understand what you're seeing.

Yes. I think, look, we're very proud of what we've been able to accomplish with Genius. And if you don't mind, I'm going to take 2 seconds, just to rewind the clock. It's been less than a year since we rolled Genius out. So the amount of progress that we've made over the course of what amounts to probably 10 months now is pretty remarkable in my humble opinion. We've launched across different vertical markets, restaurant, retail, campuses, age-restricted, professional services, field services, et cetera. We've launched across geographies, U.S., U.K., Canada, Mexico, Austria, Germany, and we've got more markets coming. And we've launched across distribution channels, our direct.

We're launching it into our wholesale channel. We're introducing it into the FI channel. We're seeing enormous receptivity to it, which,, again, we're incredibly proud of, and we have a lot of ambitious plans for Genius as we move forward in time. So in terms of what we've been able to accomplish with Genius in a really short period of time, reorienting our entire POS sort of go-to-market around a single new platform that we think is highly competitive, differentiated in many ways relative to other POS environments in the marketplace today. I'm incredibly proud of the team and the progress that we've made. Getting back to the specifics of your questions, I think the trends that we saw coming out of 2025 have largely persisted as we've headed into 2026. We're continuing to see very strong adoption rates. We're continuing to see our sellers have a lot of success and market receptivity with new sales. We're continuing to see sort of the level of new rooftops grow at consistent rates relative to the exit rates from 2025.

So everything that we kind of hope to see as it relates to Genius getting better penetration and saturation into the market is continuing to happen. We've launched a pretty large-scale awareness campaign. I think when we have a swing at bat, I think we perform really well. We just need to have more swings at bat, and some of that is just around the awareness of Genius itself. So it's not a brand -- it's a new brand, and it's not a brand that is well known as some of our competitors in the market. So we're putting some emphasis behind making sure that there's good brand awareness around Genius so that when we have an app at bat, we have a good opportunity to win new business. But everything that we hope to see from the platform and product we're seeing in the market in terms of how it is allowing us to compete, how we're able to win new share, attachment rates for payments, new rooftop growth, et cetera. So all the trends continue to perform pretty consistently with what we saw exiting the year and gives us a lot of optimism that we're on the right track.

And as we continue to move forward in time, Genius is going to be a flagship product that helps drive the growth in the business for many years to come.

Right. So now you have the product. You've always had pretty good distribution around the world, but you're also adding sales, right? I mean you've added about 200 so far, and your goal is, I think, 500 incremental for sales for the year. Maybe help us understand what you're looking for from productivity measurement in terms of results and how we should have confidence this could help drive acceleration.

Yes. If I'm candid, I think our old sort of sales model was a little long in the tooth, particularly around the compensation programs and the structure around it, it needed reinvestment. And it needed reinvestment around the tooling, the capabilities sort of the marketing that will drive better leads into the channel. And we needed to refresh, I think, the talent to some degree in the sales force as well. We've redesigned the entire compensation program. We've obviously made significant investments in technology tooling capabilities to help drive productivity for our sellers. And now we're investing in incremental sellers.

And I think what we've seen thus far is, one, the new program structure, the investments we're making behind sales effectiveness is allowing us to attract a higher caliber seller. We're hiring sellers that are coming out of other software sales environments. We're hiring sellers that are coming out of other POS selling environments from some of our competitors. We're hiring sellers that I think are tremendously excited about the product we can bring to market, how it competes feature by feature relative to others in the space as well as the investment in the resources and the scale we can put behind it. So early trends from our efforts to bring new sellers in. I think we're up above 200 now. We hope to be at that 500 level by, call it, midyear or slightly thereafter. We've seen new seller attrition decrease dramatically, probably north of 25% for the cohorts that have achieved 90 days with us, new seller retention is up 50%, which is excellent.

We're seeing time to first deal down by 38 days, like 70%. And we're seeing sort of a sort of 50-plus percent increase in deal size, which reflects a couple of things. One is, I think the effectiveness of our sellers to be able to cross-sell, add more value into the selling relationship with the client, which is obviously a very positive trend for the business. So, so far, so good. It's something that we're being very careful. We're not just adding quantity. We're adding quality through this process. And so we're being very deliberate about who we bring into the organization, and we want to see and make sure that we're continuing to scale as we bring incremental new sellers into the environment. But really pleased with the progress thus far.

Most importantly, again, the quality of the resources and the sellers we've been able to bring in. And they're largely focused across U.S., Mexico and Canada and again, largely focused on selling Genius.

Okay. So I mean, look, you have the product with Genius, you have the sales and go-to-market and distribution, clearly, you have synergy opportunities. How about AI? I mean is that something that could derail the excitement of the story in terms of you having all the pieces? Or is that an opportunity?

No, I think it's an accelerant to the story in many ways. I think about our investments in AI and our approach to AI kind of crossed 3 paradigms. One is -- and I'm sure you can't go a day without hearing about agentic commerce. I would say sitting here today, it's very nascent, right? Look, the amount of agentic commerce happening today is largely centered around agentic discovery leading to a consumer making a traditional purchase. And that's great. And I actually -- for the foreseeable future, I think that's going to continue to be the lion's share of how AI drives commerce in our ecosystems.

But over time, you will see more autonomous activity by agents themselves acting on behalf of consumers. And that's where agentic commerce, I think, most particularly in the retail space will really start to come to life. So given the massive position we have in digital native environments, the massive scale we have, we are at the forefront of everything that's happening from an agentic commerce standpoint. We've been a part of every major protocol that's been released and announced across Google, OpenAI, et cetera. Mastercard made an announcement this morning that we're involved with around really making sure you can verify intent when an agent acts on behalf of a consumer. That's really important in creating a trust ecosystem around agentic commerce. And I think the tools and capabilities that we bring to agentic commerce create real opportunity for our business long term. I'm not a big believer agentic commerce is going to replace everything that happens from a commerce standpoint, but it becomes a new channel that our clients are going to want to participate in.

And I think given the leadership position we have in the industry, it's important for us to be at the forefront of everything that's happening from a agentic commerce perspective, and we're doing that today, and we'll continue to do that as it evolves over the course of time. So you'll see us play a very prominent role in shaping what the future of agentic commerce looks like, establishing the rules and trust frameworks and credentials and authentication and verification necessary to make that ecosystem work in a ubiquitous way for both the protocols, the agents and payment providers like ourselves.

There's also the opportunity to augment our capabilities with AI. So we're investing in AI behind our authentication rates, chargeback management, fraud, disputes, et cetera. There's lots of ways AI is already increasing. I think, the capabilities of our own products and solutions that we're selling into the market today, and we're able to drive differential outcomes, differentiated outcomes for our clients, and that has real value that we've been able to articulate to them, and it's increasing the demand for a lot of our value-added services. We're also investing in AI to support products like Genius that we spent a lot of time talking about. We're investing in AI to help do reputation management for our clients within Genius. They can do review management, they can respond to review. We're developing a native -- we have developed and are deploying a native language AI agent that sits inside of Genius that SMB clients can speak to help understand trends in their business in native voice, which we think is going to be a very powerful feature of the Genius platform.

And then, of course, this is a business that has an enormous amount of operating technology environments to support us day in and day out. There's huge opportunities to deploy AI to drive efficiency in our business, everything from how we do software development, how we are increasing productivity of our developers, increasing cycle times, speed to market for new product, product velocity, everything to how do we do settlement account reconciliations on the back end, et cetera. There's enormous opportunities, particularly as we're bringing Worldpay and Global Payments together to leverage AI to support the integration, streamline processes and repeatable work that happens inside of the business every single day that are going to drive real efficiencies and increased scale in the business over the long term. And we're investing, I would say, heavily across all 3 of those paradigms as we move forward because it's a transformational opportunity around AI. Yes, there's an enormous amount of hype, but there's also an enormous amount of real benefit that can be deployed in a large business like ours, and we're seeking to do that.

Right. That makes sense. So you seem like you have a lot of the pieces in place. Your valuation is obviously attractive to yourself in the sense of the buyback that you're talking about. You authorized a $2.5 billion buyback, $550 million ASR recently and then you're targeting $7.5 billion of capital return in the next couple of years through '27. That's 30% of your market cap. Just help us understand the balance now where the share price is between buybacks or deleveraging or even M&A down the road when you have a 3x leverage ratio. Just help us understand where your head is on that.

Yes, I think it's fairly straightforward. Certainly, in the near term, we're very focused on striking the right balance between delevering and returning capital to shareholders. We target to be at our 3x leverage ratio by the end of 2027. And over that period of time, we expect to be able to return cumulatively from '25 to '27, the $7.5 billion that you highlighted earlier. And we've targeted this year, we said we'll return a little north of 2 and the balance then would come in 2027. And by the time you get to 2028, this is a business that will produce levered free cash flow of about $5 billion annually. So we have enormous capital capacity in the business as we move forward to continue to invest in growth, continue to return capital to shareholders. And obviously, we think we'll be well rewarded for that, and we'll see the multiple move and expand over time as we continue to execute on integration. But sitting here today, there's no better investment than ourselves. Given the confidence we have in the future of the business, all the things that we're doing, returning that capital to shareholders, I think it's the best thing that we can do to drive value for our shareholders.

I also think while we're in a period of integration, we're very focused on integration, and we're investing all the areas that we need to in the business. We're going to invest over $1 billion this year in new innovation, new product capability within our business. So we're investing plenty in the business. We're very focused on integration. And during this period, we're going to return capital to shareholders. And when we get to 2028, we'll look at the horizon to see what the best opportunities are to deploy capital to create value for the long term.

Great. You guided 5% growth for the year. You said you prudently started off below 5% in the first half, I think above 5% for the second half of the year in terms of the trajectory. What underpins the acceleration? First of all, that growth rate itself would be better than what's in your stock right now. So just the conviction in that sustainability and the address. Given the market dynamics we're seeing, what are you seeing in the market that gives you confidence in the acceleration of it?

Yes. Certainly, all the investments we continue to make behind Genius, sales effectiveness, et cetera, those continue to improve, obviously, our effectiveness from a selling standpoint, which will improve growth rates for the business over time.

Secondly, as we bring the 2 businesses together, I think our guide is kind of accommodated for the fact you're bringing 2 large multibillion-dollar businesses together. We want to get our go-to-market activities aligned. We're working on brand alignment, unifying around the Global Payments brand. There's a lot of things that we're doing here over the course of 2026 that I think position the business well for the long term. And I think the approach that we took to the guide was prudent. We had some tough comps in the first half of the year. And as we continue to build momentum around integration activities, transformation activities, we certainly have a lot of confidence in the ability to accelerate on the back half and exit the year certainly north of that 5%, which obviously, I think, sets us up well as we head into '27 and '28 to get to an overarching growth rate that's kind of in that mid- to high single-digit range, which is what we aspire to achieve as a business.

Okay. In terms of trends recently, it sounds like other than just the nuance of an airline here and there, I mean, still on track?

Very stable. Yes, as I said before, the consumer remains very stable. I saw some data from BofA yesterday that would suggest consumer spending in February is pretty good, probably a little bit of bounce back. Yes. Some of the weather issues have probably impacted January on the margin.

Now, the only thing that I'm focused on in the short term is just what are the implications of this sort of conflict in the Middle East on our client base in that region. And as I said, that's modest, but it is something that we're watching.

Okay. Free cash flow. I mean, you had $891 million of free cash in the fourth quarter, 100% conversion from on an adjusted basis from a year and then 90% plus expected for '26. You guys are expecting $4 billion in free cash in '27 and I think $5 billion in 2028. Think about that relative to a $20 billion plus market cap, right? I mean -- it's pretty big numbers. So just help us understand what's going to drive that acceleration, that pickup on free cash. And also, I guess, we get a question a lot about the adjustments, right? I mean, in terms of GAAP versus non-GAAP free cash, given your transformation and given all the integration. When do we expect those things -- those 2 to narrow?

Yes. I think they'll just continue to narrow naturally over time. As we continue to progress our transformation and we continue to progress our integration activities, there will definitely be a narrowing of our GAAP free cash flow to our adjusted free cash flow, particularly as you get into '27, '28 and beyond. So look, if I'm honest, one of the downsides of doing a large transaction as is you do end up with a lot of onetime expenses that cuts against the grain a little bit around our direction of travel for Global Payments stand-alone and continuing to narrow our GAAP to non-GAAP free cash flow in particular. But we called that out very explicitly irrespective of the onetime costs that we're incurring to support our transformation and integration activities. We're still returning this massive amount of capital to shareholders in the short to medium term.

So the cash flow characteristics of the business are enormously strong. And obviously, as we continue to move forward in time, they only improve. And the growth conversation, I know is incredibly important. We are obviously very focused on driving growth. But to some degree, whether it grows 4%, 5%, 6% really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't move cash flow meaningfully at all. So the cash characteristics of the business are just enormously powerful. And I think you'll see that play out in terms of the return plans that we have over the next couple of years while deleveraging that I think will set us up well as we continue to move forward.

You also have 150 bps of margin expansion expected with about $70 million to $80 million of synergies in there. But I mean, how much of that is just operating leverage in the business? How do you get there?

Yes. There's a decent amount of operating leverage in the business. It's sometimes really hard to discretely quantify how much is coming from transformation because those things are really designed to help create more operating leverage in the business and help create better incremental margins in the business versus how much is coming from pure integration.

But I think if you try to parse it, there's probably 20-plus basis points coming from just operating leverage, some coming from transformation, net of investments that we're still making back into the business. And as we said, there's about $70 million, $80 million of operating income benefit flowing through from pure integration-related activities this year. And look, we think that trend will continue as we get into 2027 and 2028. Obviously, as we're continuing to realize integration synergy benefits, we'll continue to see nice margin tailwinds. But the combination of, obviously, the growth opportunities we have in the business, the success we're seeing with Genius sales effectiveness, the deployment of more AI capabilities the operating leverage we have in the business for the long term beyond integration, I think, remains enormously strong.

Great. Well, a lot of exciting things happening right now. And so with that, guys, anyone have any questions, happy to take maybe 1 or 2. I think we have time for maybe 1 or 2.

All right. Well, why don't we leave it there then.

Okay. Excellent.

Cameron, thank you so much for joining us, guys. I'm trying up on stage next at 1:45. So in about 7 minutes. Cameron, thank you so much.

Thanks.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to Global Payments Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, today's conference will be recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to your host, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations, Nate Rozof. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Welcome to Global Payments Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Conference Call. Joining us today is our CEO, Cameron Bready; CFO, Josh Whipple; and COO, Bob Cortopassi.

Some of the comments made during today's conference call will contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied and we caution you not to place undue reliance upon them. They speak only as of the date of this call, and we take no obligation to update them.

In addition, we will be referring to several non-GAAP financial measures. For a full reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures to our most comparable GAAP measure, please see our press release furnished as an exhibit to our Form 8-K filed this morning and the supplemental material available on our Investor Relations website. Finally, I'd like to note that we developed a slide presentation to accompany our prepared remarks, which is also available on our Investor Relations website. and Cameron's comments will begin on Slide 4. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Cameron Bready. Cameron?

Thanks, Nate. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. As I'm sure you've seen by now, we successfully completed the acquisition of Worldpay in January, alongside the simultaneous divestiture of our Issuer Solutions business, marking an important milestone in the strategic transformation we've been executing over the past 18 months.

I want to take a moment to extend my sincere appreciation and best wishes to our Issuer Solutions colleagues and to warmly welcome the talented team members of the Worldpay to the Global Payments family. Their expertise, passion and commitment have strengthened our organization from day 1. Our combination with Worldpay is not about creating a larger version of our 2 companies. It is about creating a better Global Payments, one with the enhanced scale capabilities and the focus necessary to compete and win as the worldwide partner of choice for commerce solutions. And we have greater conviction today than ever that this transaction will allow us to do just that.

We have a lot to cover today, so let me briefly outline the agenda. I will begin with Global Payments standalone results for the fourth quarter and full year. Next, I will introduce the new Global Payments and highlight the key strategic initiatives we are focused on executing in 2026. I will then turn the call over to Josh to share more detail on our financial performance and outlook.

We are very pleased with how we ended the year, delivering exactly as expected and fully aligned with the outlook we provided last February. For the fourth quarter, we reported 6% constant currency adjusted net revenue growth, excluding dispositions, 80 basis points of adjusted operating margin expansion and 12% adjusted EPS growth. Our Merchant Solutions business maintained strong momentum with adjusted net revenue growth accelerating to slightly above 6%.

For the full year, we executed on all of our key objectives. We accelerated adjusted net revenue growth from 5% in the first half to 6% in the second expanded adjusted operating margins by 100 basis points, well ahead of our expectation of 50-plus basis points and delivered 11% adjusted EPS growth at the high end of our expectations.

Importantly, we generated strong free cash flow in 2025 with over 100% adjusted free cash flow conversion. This provides us with the flexibility to return $1 billion to shareholders in 2025, while simultaneously reducing leverage in preparation for the closing of the Worldpay transaction. In addition, our portfolio divestitures have enabled us to return an incremental $1.2 billion to shareholders.

Robust free cash flow generation and returning capital to shareholders remains central pillars of our investment thesis. With our major transactions now closed, we are resuming our share repurchase programs as we execute on our $7.5 billion capital return target for 2025 to 2027. At current valuation levels, we see buybacks as a highly compelling opportunity to drive shareholder value, given the clear dislocation between our share price and the fundamental performance and outlook for the business.

To that end, our Board of Directors recently approved a $2.5 billion share repurchase authorization, and we are entering into an accelerated share repurchase agreement to immediately repurchase $550 million of our shares. We expect to return capital through a combination of open market purchases and accelerated share repurchases in addition to maintaining our stable dividend.

Beyond our financial results, we also made substantial progress on our transformation program this year. We successfully transitioned from a holding company structure to a unified operating model globally, eliminating silos, increasing accountability and improving organizational performance, speed and efficiency. As part of this program, we continue to modernize and simplify our global technology stack, improving reliability, accelerating innovation cycles and enhancing ease of use and the overall experience for our merchants, partners and team members.

Further, we are investing in the adoption of our new AI-enabled development tools and enhanced product operating model, allowing for increased productivity and quicker speed to market for new functionality. 2025 also marked the successful rollout of Genius, which is performing exceptionally well and remains in the early innings of what we see as a meaningful long-term growth opportunity.

Finally, we continue to invest in our sales transformation. We have deployed a new technology platform with embedded AI capabilities to better manage lead flow and improve our performance. And we've already onboarded 200 of the 500 new sales professionals we announced on our third quarter call.

As we enter 2026, we are well positioned to be the world's leading pure-play commerce solutions provider, and our North Star remains consistent, driving sustainable growth in M&A from an unrelented focus on our clients, leveraging our strategic advantages. [indiscernible] starts with our worldwide omnichannel reach, serving over 6 million merchant locations across online, in-store and in-app experiences in more than 175 countries. This breadth provides meaningful diversification and exposure to the full Global Payments TAM that is unmatched by any single competitor.

Our advantage also extends from our go-to-market approach. We compete on product differentiation, service, reliability and fit to customer need, supported by a direct sales force of more than 5,500 professionals worldwide including approximately 1,500 experienced sellers from Worldpay. Alongside our direct channel, we operate a vibrant partner ecosystem with more than 1,700 financial institutions and thousands of software and platform partners, complemented by a robust dealer network that in solves Genius and supports customers end to end.

For merchants preferring self-service, we offer that as well for streamlined install reporting upgrades and enhancements, all without human interaction. And with approximately $4 trillion in annual payments volume, our scale enables us to serve the largest global enterprises to small merchants alike and everything in between and to be highly price competitive, where we choose while still leading on capability and service.

While these embedded advantages are significant, we are not standing still. We plan to invest approximately $1 billion annually in commerce technology to help our customers grow, expanding omnichannel offerings, advancing our AI-enabled product road map and accelerating innovation across Genius and our platforms.

With our newly combined profile, we have taken the opportunity to evaluate the fundamental elements of our identity. Our aspiration is clear, to be the worldwide partner of choice for commerce solutions. And the value proposition that is reflected in our vision comes down to 2 simple things: igniting business growth in enriching lives around the world.

We are not just a company that provides payments and software solutions. We are a company built to fuel the growth of businesses of all sizes with innovative payment and commerce solutions. And when we enable seamless, frictionless payments and delightful experiences we enrich people's lives through commerce. That brings us to our mission, which is to make every day commerce better.

When our clients think about Global Payments, we want that statement to define who we are and the value we deliver. We will bring our aspiration vision and mission to life by leveraging our competitive advantages across 4 strategic pillars.

First, our pure-play focus. Being exclusively focused on commerce solutions allows us to move faster, allocate resources with greater precision and amplify the impact of every dollar we invest to ensure that we have the best products and solutions in the markets in which we choose to compete. While some competitors are spread across a broad set of competing priorities, we are narrowing our focus, enabling us to execute more quickly and more effectively for our clients and partners.

Second, our truly client-centric approach. This is a meaningful point of differentiation. Many competitors organize around their product lines, be it point-of-sale systems, payment gateways, embedded finance platforms, et cetera. Each team optimizes for their feature set. Then the client has to stitch together to make it work for their business. We organize around client segments.

Our teams understand the full end-to-end requirements of large enterprises, SMBs and software platforms. And we build solutions that actually align with how they run their businesses. We provide dedicated relationship managers who architect the right combination of capabilities. We do not just simply sell what is on the shelf. This is a fundamental structural advantage, and we have the scale to deliver across every client segment we serve.

Third, our enhanced capabilities and continued investment in innovation. From best-in-class enterprise payment tools to the feature-rich Genius platform, the breadth and depth of our capabilities are unmatched, and we will continue to invest to drive innovation and differentiation. Fourth, our global reach with local expertise. Our extensive geographic footprint enables us to help clients expand into new markets and unlock new sources of growth. And because we pair that reach with deep local knowledge, understanding domestic payment methods, customs and regulations we are uniquely equipped to help them succeed in every market they enter. These 4 pillars, pure-play focus, client centricity, innovation and global reach work together to multiply what's possible for our clients and partners.

In 2026, we are focused on 4 initiatives to drive near- and long-term success for Global Payments, seamlessly integrating Worldpay, accelerating our go-to-market strategy and activities rapidly expanding Genius and boldly leveraging AI to create new revenue streams and drive productivity across the business.

Beginning with Worldpay integration, our synergy initiatives are already well underway, and we remain confident in our ability to achieve $200 million in annualized revenue and $600 million in expense synergies over the next 3 years. Thanks to more than 8 months of preclosing preparation, we are already off to a great start with integration execution. Worldpay's U.S. direct sales force is already enabled to sell Genius. They have boarded their first cohort of new clients and the pipeline continues to build. This quick success demonstrates that Genius has a very short sales cycle and time to go live that is measured in days, not weeks.

We are also progressing our next key priority to integrate Worldpay's e-commerce capabilities into our SMB offerings, an important driver of revenue synergies, and we're already having early success in the U.K. where we were able to quickly bring Worldpay's SMB e-com offerings to Global Payments sales channels.

As we advance our integration program, we are taking a best of both approach across our teams, products and technologies. Further, we have made substantial progress with establishing our new leadership structure, having announced our new executive leadership team and all the senior leaders reporting to them. Consistent with our goal to unite is one global team. Our leadership team is now roughly evenly split between heritage Global Payments and Worldpay executives.

And we are currently executing a comprehensive organizational design effort across the rest of the company, identifying top talent, eliminating duplication and maximizing efficiency as we bring the organizations together.

Turning to our go-to-market strategy. We have organized our combined business around 3 channels: enterprise, integrated and platforms and SMB. Ultimately, these channels will enhance our value proposition and align with our unified client-focused operating model. [ Gabriel de Montessus ], leads enterprise, which serves merchants with over $50 million in annual payments volume online and in-store. Gabriel joins us from Worldpay, where he's led this business for the past 5 years.

Within [ Enterprise ], we are uniquely positioned to continue winning share because of the breadth and depth of our capabilities. And with the combination, we can now unlock growth in markets where Global Payments has operated historically, but lacked the full suite of enterprise-grade solutions necessary to serve more sophisticated global clients. In addition to delivering highly reliable and scalable payment acceptance in this channel, we help our clients to generate incremental revenue by continuously bringing new innovative products to market that enhance authorization rates and avoid abandoned shopping carts.

Recent innovations include our new [ 3DS Flex solution ], which utilizes AI to achieve best-in-class authentication rates compared to peers, including over 7% higher authentication success rates in key markets like the U.K. and our revenue boost solution delivered more than $2 billion in measured approval rate uplift for merchants in 2025, igniting their growth.

We simultaneously help our clients to save money by leveraging our scale, investments in data. For example, our [ Disputes Defender ] product uses AI to automate charge-back responses utilizing more than 500 data points. It protected over 40,000 merchants last year, increasing chargeback win rates by an average of 15%.

Our dynamic routing solution also consistently delivered savings. In 2025, we optimized nearly 8 billion debit transactions, saving our customers over $200 million, an increase of more than 10% year-over-year. The strength of our competitive position led to several noticeable successes in 2025, including new wins with Domino's Canada and [ tax layer ].

Key new e-commerce wins include Pfizer, global sports streaming network to zone, European rideshare [ at Volt ] and a notable omnichannel cross-sell with Polish Airlines. The team also executed multiyear renewals with over 50 of our largest clients in 2025, representing over $1 trillion in annual payments volume, including numerous leading enterprises.

Turning to integrated and platforms. [ Matt Downs ] leads this business serving [ ISVs, PayFac, ] platforms and marketplaces across more than 100 verticals. And Matt also joins us from Worldpay, where he led the Platforms business. Matt is a veteran of integrated payments businesses with deep knowledge and experience in the sector, including leadership roles in SaaS businesses.

In this channel, we are uniquely positioned to support partners across the full operating model spectrum from traditional [ ISV ] referral and managed [ PayFac ] as a service to full [ PayFac ] in every configuration in between. The combined business gives us purpose-built flexibility to match how each software platform partner wants to monetize payments and control the experience, whether they need low code referral simplicity, a curated all a card stack or end-to-end [ PayFac ] capabilities.

Critically, we can tail our operating models for the most sophisticated platforms and still deliver them at scale with attractive margins, leveraging our unified APIs, onboarding risk and managed services to keep partners agile as they grow. We've seen this come to life through recent wins with leading software providers, including [ ABC Fitness ], LightSpeed and [ Vital Edge ] as well as recent multiyear renewal with one of our largest [ PayFac ] clients. And by combining with Worldpay, we will be able to further accelerate our global expansion of this channel.

Lastly, our global SMB channel supports businesses with less than $50 million in annual payment volume and is led by [ David Ram ], a 14-year veteran of Global Payments. Our SMB business may stand to benefit most from our combination with Worldpay. Together, the breadth and depth of our distribution positions us very well competitively. We have the unique ability to sell new products and commerce solutions through direct and partner channels and markets around the world and we can cross-sell and upsell our innovative capabilities across our base of 6 million merchant locations.

We also bring enterprise-grade capabilities to SMBs, such as our machine learning-based payments optimization tools, and integrating Worldpay's e-commerce capabilities will create a more powerful omnichannel solution. Our SMB team is executing with urgency, expanding distribution, rapidly enhancing Genius and making adoptions simpler and faster for customers.

Turning to Genius. We continue to see substantial growth opportunities for this platform, and it remains a central pillar of our strategy. We have strong conviction in the product, and we'll continue to enhance its feature set to make it even better. In November, we hosted our first Genius users conference at Truist Park, a great stage to showcase the pace of innovation and hear directly from our clients.

One highlight of the conference was the introduction of Genius [ Drive-thru ], our multilane solution that pairs a seamless order flow with our patented camera vision system, so each vehicle is automatically matched to the right order. The outcome is simple, faster lines, fewer errors, happier guests. We also announced Uber Eats as our preferred delivery partner in the U.S. and Canada. Restaurants can self onboard in minutes, and orders updates and cancellations since instantly between Uber Eats and Genius, reducing workload at the counter and allowing clients to unlock incremental demand faster.

As we continue to invest in Genius, we are widening where Genius can win. We launched Genius for services and extended support into higher education and age-related verticals. Further, we expanded distribution to our wholesale channel, successfully piloted Genius in Germany and introduced mobile payment capabilities for on-the-go businesses in the U.K. And we unveiled the industry's first modular point-of-sale hardware that combines a contemporary aesthetic, which functionalities that most systems cannot match.

By modular, we mean that each of the components is interchangeable, allowing our customers to configure the point of sale to meet their specific use case. The screen, stand, CPU and connection hub can be easily swapped out, which future-proofs the solution by allowing clients to upgrade individual components without needing to replace any of the rest of the device.

Earlier, I described our vision to ignite business growth in enrich lives around the world. In Genius is doing exactly that for [ 7 brew ] drive-through coffee, which is one of the fastest-growing coffee chains in the U.S. [ Seven Brew ] chose Genius to preserve what makes their brand special, personal, high energy service, while streamlining order flow and back of house operations.

We implemented Genius at more than 500 locations in just 65 days, and they have kept growing at roughly 10 new rooftops a week, which underscores Genius' scalability. We also added [ Bram's ice cream ] with 320 locations in Loves travel shops. Further, [ SeaWorld ] deployed nearly 100 genius kiosks across 5 theme parks and [ Diamond Baseball Holdings ] brought Genius into an additional 6 of its minor league stadium.

Even with all this progress, we are not slowing down. We recently launched a comprehensive marketing campaign across 4 key U.S. markets, TV, radio, digital signage and more to put Genius in front of more prospects more often. And for 2026, we plan to continue investing in feature functionality to meet the needs of several professional services verticals that will further expand distribution through Worldpay's channels including their 50 largest referral banks and more than 6,300 branches. Internationally, we will scale in Germany and expand into Ireland and the Czech Republic and we will roll out our new mobile form factor, including [ Tap ] to pay on phone into additional markets worldwide.

Finally, our fourth important initiative for 2026 is expanding our investment in AI and agentic commerce. AI is rapidly advancing and has become a foundational initiative permitting all aspects of our organization to both strengthen our top line and accelerate our efforts on cost efficiency. We are leveraging AI across 3 strategic paradigms, agentic commerce, AI embedded within our products to improve client outcomes and AI-enabled productivity and operational efficiency.

First and foremost, agentic Commerce is the next evolution of the retail experience, where AI can research, select and even complete transactions on behalf of consumers. With our leading scale and sophisticated e-commerce capabilities, we are differentiated by our ability to act as a universal connector across genic platforms and protocols for merchants of any size anywhere in the world, operating in any vertical.

To position Global Payments at the center of the shift, we've been a founding member of every major protocol announced, including Google's Universal Commerce protocol and OpenAI agentic commerce protocol. In fact, we've just completed our implementation of the latter, so our merchants can accept payments originating from ChatGPT as well as Google's AI chat interfaces.

We also launched our own model context protocol or MCP in November, which makes it easier for AI agents to initiate in query payments in automated operational workflows. Our stand-alone acquired agnostic [ tokenbalt ] and credential management systems are world-class and a crucial capability for an agent world where tokens underpin secure handling of credentials between agents, merchants and other entities. We were also in partnership discussions with several leading ecosystem players to support our merchants with additional value-added services that become increasingly relevant in the world of AI-led commerce, including product need optimization, now your agent functionality, agentic fraud prevention and disputes management and many others.

As for embedding AI into our products and capabilities, we are already seeing results in our business. Across our global e-commerce business, we are using deep transaction insights and intelligent routing to help merchants capture more revenue with less friction. Our AI-powered authentication optimization service goes far beyond legacy rules-based systems by dynamically choosing the path with the highest probability of issuer approval or regulatory compliance.

In 2025, it delivered a 4-point uplift in approval rates for pilot merchants by deciding when to invoke or bypass [ 3D SECURE ] based on issuer behavior and risk signals. This is a great example of how our scale and data convert declines into approvals, reduce friction and protect revenue that otherwise would be lost at checkout.

Within Genius, we are leveraging AI to solve real problems for small businesses. For example, we can automatically gather customer reviews from multiple social platforms and use generative AI to drive personalized on-brand responses on behalf of our merchants. And we are launching a natural language agent assistant within Genius that will provide insights to business owners.

And lastly, we continue to embrace AI to drive productivity and operational efficiency throughout our business. Our engineering teams have adopted AI-assisted coding tools, which accelerates requirements gathering and development cycles by nearly 20%, while also improving coke quality. Productivity and output quality have continued to increase as adoption has scaled. And as we integrate Worldpay, AI will play a central role in automating repeatable processes, driving greater efficiency and helping us capture the expense synergies we have outlined.

By embedding AI into core operational workflows, everything for merchant onboarding and risk reviews to service ticket routing, settlement reconciliation and partner support we can dramatically reduce manual effort in cycle times, allowing teams to focus on higher-value work, improve accuracy and consistency across shared processes and enabling us to scale the combined organization far more efficiently.

Likewise, we are leveraging AI to further accelerate our technology consolidation efforts across the combined enterprise. Enhanced data-driven visibility into our application and infrastructure landscape will help us rationalize platforms reduce redundancy, expedite migrations and facilitate the retirement of duplicative systems. These initiatives will allow us to continue to simplify our technology stack, improve capital efficiency and enable us to concentrate investment on the scalable future-ready platforms, strengthening our operational agility.

Lastly, our scale gives us a distinct advantage as we deploy AI. Every year, we process trillions of dollars in payments volume and billions in individual transactions across geographies, channels and verticals. This breadth and diversity of data creates uniquely rich training environments for our AI models. Because we see such a wide cross-section of global commerce in real time, our models learn faster, generalize better and detect patterns and ways unique to our scale.

That allows us to improve authorization rates, reduce fraud, enhance risk scoring and deliver more personalized insights for our customers. Importantly, we also do this with strict adherence to privacy, security and regulatory requirements. In short, the scale of our data does not make our AI better. It drives better results for our customers.

With a clear focus on these 4 key initiatives, we are well positioned to deliver on our targeted outcomes and advance our priorities for 2026. Specifically, we expect to achieve the following this year. First, we will firmly establish the new global payments. We're building on work already in motion to fully leverage our new business profile, bringing together capability, systems and brands while executing disciplined integration plans to support future growth.

To further accelerate this progress, we are advancing our technology and innovation strategy, including aligning orchestration capabilities to continue to deliver a modern experience and single integration point for clients as well as exposing the full breadth of our capabilities globally.

Secondly, we will unite as one global team. Bringing together the full strength of our team members, talent and payments expertise is essential. When we operate as one team, we move faster and make better decisions and unlock the full potential of our combined organization.

Third, we will deliver exceptional value and experiences for our clients and partners. This includes client-focused product innovation, expanding Genius across high-growth verticals and geographies, broadening our omnichannel capabilities globally and scaling our marketplace solution. We want Global Payments to be synonymous with exceptional value and experience. That is a key priority for 2026.

Finally, these initiatives will drive sustainable growth and long-term value creation. We are a proven compounder. We grow through all phases of the economic cycle. In 2026, our priority is squarely on building durable top line performance by building strong sales momentum, expanding distribution for innovative commerce solutions and beginning to execute on our revenue synergy opportunities across every clients' segment. With that, I'll turn it over to Josh.

Thanks, Cameron. We're pleased with our financial performance in the fourth quarter and for the full year, which were consistent with our expectations. I'm particularly proud that we delivered these results while meaningfully progressing our transformation agenda, preparing the separation of our Issuer Solutions business and navigating a complex regulatory approval process and conducting extensive planning for the integration of Worldpay. As a reminder, the following figures reflect the last quarter of results for stand-alone Global Payments, which includes Issuer Solutions, and excludes Worldpay for the full quarter.

Starting with the full year 2025, we delivered adjusted net revenue of $9.32 billion, an increase of 6% from the prior year on a constant currency basis, excluding dispositions. Adjusted operating margin for the full year improved 100 basis points to 44.2% or 80 basis points, excluding dispositions. The net result was adjusted earnings per share of $12.22, an increase of 12% compared to the full year 2024 or 11% on a constant currency basis.

The top line accelerated in the second half as we expected. And in the fourth quarter, we delivered adjusted net revenue of $2.32 billion, an increase of 6% from the prior year period on a constant currency basis excluding dispositions. Adjusted operating margin for the fourth quarter increased 80 basis points to 44.7%. The net result was adjusted earnings per share of $3.18 and an increase of 12% compared to the prior year period or 11% on a constant currency basis.

Our Merchant Solutions segment achieved adjusted net revenue of $1.78 billion for the fourth quarter reflecting growth of slightly over 6% on a constant currency basis, excluding dispositions, consistent with our expectation for modest acceleration from the third to the fourth quarter.

We saw continued momentum across our POS and software business, which achieved high single-digit growth again in the fourth quarter, excluding dispositions. Genius continues to resonate in the market and its rapid adoption has been accelerated by our realigned go-to-market efforts. New POS locations in the fourth quarter were 25% higher than new locations in the prior year period and our enterprise restaurant rooftop count at year-end was more than 50% higher than the number at the end of 2024.

Genius' payments attach rate in the Enterprise segment nearly doubled in the fourth quarter, enhancing customer lifetime value and demonstrating the tangible financial benefits of our sales force transformation emphasizing cross-selling efforts. And in the retail vertical, new Genius rooftop [indiscernible] in Q4 were 40% higher than in the prior year period.

Our integrated [ Embedded ] business also grew in the high single digits in the fourth quarter and continues to win share. We continue to launch partnerships across the more than 100 verticals that we serve, including [ SiteView and Vision Care and lawnbuddy ] in field services, among many others. At the end of the fourth quarter, our pipeline of signed partners yet to go live was 19% larger than it was at the end of 2024, which will support and drive revenue growth well into 2026 and 2027 as those partners are fully integrated and the relationships ramp up.

Core payments showed continued strength and delivered mid-single-digit growth in the fourth quarter, benefiting from our unrivaled distribution channels around the world. In the U.S., new sales in the fourth quarter were 35% higher than in the prior year period, representing our strongest quarter in several years as we benefited from the onboarding of our new sales professionals and the enhanced effectiveness of our transformed go-to-market organization.

Internationally, revenue in Central Europe grew in the mid-teens, and our business in Greece had one of the strongest quarters on record as we continue to benefit from strong secular trends in these markets. For the fourth quarter, Merchant Solutions delivered an adjusted operating margin of 49.2%, an increase of 120 basis points compared to the prior year period. This performance reflects the ongoing realization of benefits from our transformation as we continue to streamline our organization and see higher returns from our investments in our sales force.

Turning to cash flow. We produced strong adjusted free cash flow for the fourth quarter of $891 million, resulting in a conversion rate of adjusted net income to adjusted free cash flow of over 100% for the full year 2025. We invested $168 million in capital expenditures during the fourth quarter and $618 million for the full year 2025, equating to roughly 7% of revenue as we continue to enhance our leading technology, products and infrastructure. This was slightly lower than our initial 2025 target as we intentionally moderated our CapEx spending while we were planning the Worldpay integration.

Finally, for the full year, we repurchased 13.2 million shares for approximately $1.2 billion which represents more than 5% of our shares outstanding and includes repurchases using the proceeds from the sale of our payroll business. Our balance sheet remains very healthy. In the fourth quarter, we ended the quarter at 2.9x leverage. Shortly after the end of the fourth quarter, we closed the Worldpay and Issuer Solutions transactions. Our debt at the close of the transaction was approximately $22.3 billion, which includes the $6.2 billion of senior notes that were issued in November and incremental short-term borrowings. Post closing, more than 95% of our outstanding debt was fixed rate, and our weighted average cost of debt was approximately 3.95%.

We're also pleased to report that our investment-grade credit ratings were affirmed by all 3 rating agencies in connection with the transactions. Following the close of the transactions, we continue to have ample liquidity with approximately $5 billion available in total across excess cash and capacity under our upsized revolving credit facility.

Today, we're pleased to share our 2026 outlook for the new Global Payments, which represents our expected performance following the close of the sale of Issuer Solutions and the acquisition of Worldpay. We provided quarterly historical supplemental combined financial information in the appendix to [ age ] your modeling. These present all prior periods for adjusted net revenue and operating income to include Worldpay and exclude Issuer Solutions. We've also incorporated the conforming adjustments by period to align historical results of Worldpay with Global Payments accounting policies.

Consequently, our outlook for 2026 adjusted net revenue and adjusted operating margin is presented on a combined basis as if we owned Worldpay for the entire year. For 2026, we expect constant currency adjusted net revenue growth of approximately 5%, excluding dispositions. This outlook assumes a continuation of the trends we saw exiting Q4, namely resilient consumer spending growth and a generally stable macroeconomic backdrop.

Our full year outlook further assumes that constant currency adjusted net revenue grew slightly below 5% in the first half of the year. We see opportunity for modest sequential acceleration over the course of the year, and we expect to exit the year with constant currency adjusted net revenue growth above 5%. Further, we anticipate reported adjusted net revenue will benefit from foreign currency exchange rates by a little less than 50 basis points for the full year 2026, which will primarily impact the first quarter. We expect adjusted operating margin expansion of approximately 150 basis points for the full year 2026, which includes realized cost synergies in 2026 as we begin executing on our integration initiatives.

Moving to nonoperating items. We currently expect net interest expense to be approximately $850 million this year, and our adjusted effective tax rate to be approximately 15.5%, which reflects certain cash tax benefits from our acquisition of Worldpay. We also expect our capital expenditures to be approximately $1 billion in 2026, representing approximately 8% of adjusted net revenue, which is consistent with our prior outlook. And we anticipate a conversion rate of adjusted net income to adjusted free cash flow of greater than 90% in 2026.

Regarding capital allocation, we expect to return more than $2 billion of our capital to our shareholders this year through share repurchases and dividends which includes the $550 million accelerated share repurchase plan Cameron mentioned earlier.

Putting it all together, we expect adjusted earnings per share of $13.80 to $14 in 2026, which represents growth of approximately 13% to 15% over Global Payments 2025 earnings per share of $12.22 and we expect adjusted earnings per share growth to accelerate modestly in the second half of the year relative to the first half as we continue to see greater benefits from the integration and our ongoing transformation activities.

Finally, we believe our 2026 outlook demonstrates the attractive financial profile of the combined company and provides us with ample free cash flow this year and beyond to further the capital allocation priorities that we've articulated over the past 18 months. As we look to deploy capital, we remain committed to maintaining our investment-grade credit ratings and plan to delever back to our 3x net leverage target by the end of 2027. Additionally, we will continue to invest for growth maintaining capital expenditures in the range of 7% to 8% of revenue, all of which will be focused on driving innovation as a pure-play merchant services business.

And importantly, we'll harness the power of our free cash flow to return capital to our shareholders. This will include our current steady dividend and significant share buybacks targeting $7.5 billion over the 2025 to 2027 time period.

In summary, we are pleased with the progress we've made in advancing our transformation agenda, completing 2 transformative transactions ahead of schedule and commencing the integration of Worldpay. We're proud of delivering Q4 and 2025 results that were in line with our expectations and we believe the business is very favorably positioned to execute our 2026 objectives and continue our ongoing return of capital to shareholders. And with that, I'll turn the call back over to Cameron.

Thanks, Josh. I could not be more proud of our team's execution this year and excited for what we can accomplish going forward as we combine with Worldpay. The Worldpay acquisition represents a pivotal moment in our evolution. And as we integrate our businesses, our focus remains on driving consistent durable growth through an unwavering commitment to our clients and the strengths that are distinctive to Global Payments.

Our new pure-play orientation allows us to move faster, deploy resources more effectively and serve clients in a truly client-centric way. And we will differentiate through feature-rich products, [ white blood ] service and support experiences that consistently exceed expectations. With unmatched payments experience in deep fluency across nearly every vertical and client type, we are uniquely positioned to deliver tailored technology solutions, not one size fits all approaches.

And now with our expanded geographic footprint, we have an unparalleled global reach. We can ignite growth for our customers and partners by helping them expand into new markets around the world, supported by local expertise and deep relationships, from best-in-class enterprise payment tools to feature-rich platforms like Genius, Global Payments is at the forefront of modern commerce technology. And with $1 billion in annual investment, we are one of the few companies in the industry capable of innovating at this scale, anticipating our customer needs and delivering solutions before they even ask.

Finally, we remain laser-focused on delivering shareholder value and maintaining a disciplined capital return framework. We are a proven compounded with substantial free cash flow generation. Based on our current share price, our capital return plans enable us to repurchase the equivalent of roughly 30% of our market cap over this year and next. Operator, would you please open the line for questions.

Our first question comes from Dave Koning at Baird.

Great job. I guess, first of all, 5%-ish organic constant currency growth, that's great to hear. What's the split maybe between enterprise and SMB and then between Worldpay and global? Or are all parts of the business growing about mid-single digits?

Thanks for the comment. I'll ask Josh maybe to kind of walk through the guide and then give you a little more color on the expectation for 2026.

Yes. So thanks, Dave. It's Josh. Look, as I said in my prepared remarks, our guide for the full year is at that 5% constant currency ex disposition. And our merchant business, we exited the year a little bit over 6% organically. And Worldpay exited or approximately 4%, which kind of gets you to the 5% for the full year.

As it relates to kind of the first half versus second half, we've adjusted -- we've closed the transaction. We felt that it was prudent to guide the first half to modestly below 5% as we kind of line and bring those businesses together. And as we move through the year, we expect to see modest acceleration on the top line with top line growth in the back half of the year over 5%, and this is largely driven from the increasing benefits from our sales expansion as well as improving our sales effectiveness from the transformation and then the continued ramp of Genius.

As it relates to the overall split, as you think about the pro forma splits of the business, SMB is approximately 50% of the revenue composition and then as you think about platforms and enterprise and e-commerce, that represents the other 50% of the pro forma and they're probably equally split. So that's about 25% for each of those 2 businesses.

And Dave, it's Cameron. Maybe I'll just can add a couple of comments, if you don't mind. I think first and foremost, I think the outlook that we gave for the combination of the 2 businesses back in April remains our outlook over the medium term. in terms of where we see revenue growth for the business. I think as we thought about 2026, with the businesses coming together very early in the year, we wanted to take a fairly prudent approach to the outlook for 2026.

So these are 2 large businesses. We're very focused, particularly in the first half of the year to make sure that we get off on the right foot together. We're focused on our integration activities and particularly around realigning our go-to-market channels, as I described in my comments around enterprise platform and integrated and from our vantage point, we think this is the right approach to take for the guide for 2026.

So I think it's worth noting that we closed the business about 6 months earlier than we originally anticipated. And obviously, that factors into I think, our outlook as well. But we're exiting the year, as Josh highlighted, above 5%. I think that gives us good momentum to kind of accelerate growth heading into 2027. And obviously, I think that puts us on track to get to kind of the medium-term outlook that we had for the combined business that we shared when we originally announced the transaction.

Question will come from Darrin Peller at Wolfe.

A nice job and congrats on closing the deal early. Could we touch on the, a, the trajectory of the synergies you're expecting as the year progresses? And then maybe a little bit more color on what you're incorporating into the guide around synergies again, just to remind us where you stand on that.

And then I guess just -- I'll put it all together as one question. Just really understanding the cross-sell into the SMB business at Worldpay, utilizing what you're seeing with the success of Genius. I know that's been a business that has some real potential and so I'm curious to see what you're seeing given the -- it's been a couple of months since you closed and working towards the close for some time.

Darrin, it's Josh. I'll take the first part of the question on cost synergies. So as we discuss probably, we expect to realize $600 million in cost synergies over the course of the next 3 years as we integrate these 2 businesses. And look, in year 1, we expect to realize or 2026, we expect to realize $70 million to $80 million of cost synergies.

And look, we spent a lot of time planning, obviously, over the last 6 months as we approach the closing date. We feel very, very good about that number. We have very, very detailed plans in place, and we've already started executing on that. So we expect to see kind of that $70 million to $80 million in cost synergies in 2026.

Yes. And Darrin, it's Cameron. I'll take the second part of the question. Look, I think we have a lot of optimism around what we can do as a combined company, particularly in the SMB channel, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, particularly around the ability to cross-sell our capabilities into the existing Worldpay base and also leveraging the Worldpay distribution platforms to get better penetration and saturation of our solutions into the market.

As I noted, we've already enabled Worldpay to sell Genius through their channels, their direct channels here in the U.S. market, and they've already sold a number of solutions into the marketplace and have a nice growing pipeline of opportunities as well. We're also going to introduce Genius into Worldpay's FI platforms here in the U.S., as well as our wholesale channels as we look to expand the distribution through which we push Genius moving forward in time.

So I see lots of opportunities to leverage kind of the existing Worldpay distribution channels. here in the U.S. market to bring more of our products, Genius and our other commerce enablement solutions to the market, as I said before, to get better adoption of those capabilities more broadly. And then, of course, in the U.K., where Worldpay has a large presence today. We also plan to bring Genius to the U.K. distribution platforms for Worldpay in the SMB channel and obviously look to cross-sell Genius into the existing sort of back book of customer base that exists with the Worldpay business in the U.K. as well.

So the combination of our 2 SMB businesses gives us much better and diversification of distribution, more channels by which to bring Genius to market. And obviously, an embedded back book of customers a significantly large probably 5-plus million merchant base of customers. that have the potential to cross-sell commerce-enabled solutions and Genius into as we move forward.

Our next question comes from Dan Dolev at Mizuho.

Well, great results here. Congrats. I love seeing the stock going up, well deserved. Cameron, question for you. The stock is clearly very undervalued in our view, and you're firing in all cylinders, you're buying back a lot of stock, like very good. Maybe can you discuss what are the puts and takes of staying public here versus alternatives? Because I think the message to the market is that there's going to be a lot of really good things down the road, staying public. So maybe some views here would be great.

Yes. First of all, Dan, thanks for the comments. And obviously, we agree with your conclusion as it relates to the valuation I think, look, first and foremost, we're focused on integrating Worldpay and unlocking the promise that we see in the combination, which we think obviously is immense. And we're also very focused on executing against our capital return plans.

That said, as we continue to do that, we continue to assess all options to maximize value for shareholders. We think that's our responsibility and it's something that we take very, very seriously. What I would tell you is, look, if we get to a point after a period of time of integrating the businesses, producing results, returning capital, if the public markets continue to not fairly value the business, I think we owe it to ourselves to look at all alternatives and evaluate all alternatives.

And what I would say around that is there's an enormous amount of private capital that's obviously on the sidelines, and then you're seeing bigger and bigger deals getting done. So it feels like a more feasible option now than it ever has been. But I think in the short term, we're focusing on delivering on the commitments we've made, executing well on the integration, and we'll continue our capital return plans, and we'll see where we are as time progresses.

Our next question comes from Ramsey El-Assal at Cantor Fitzgerald.

I had a question about the expansion of your sales force and your plans to hire another 300 sales heads this year. What parts of the business will these sales additions be stacked against? Is it mostly SMB and Genius? Is it Worldpay offerings, cross-selling? I guess, where are you going to deploy these folks to make the biggest difference?

Ramsey, it's Bob. Thanks for the question. Most of the expansion of the sales force heretofore has been focused on North America and specifically our sales of the combined Genius payments and value-added service offerings. I think that's the segment of the market that we still see opportunity to add incremental sales resources, particularly as you go up market from the very smallest of into the upper end of SMB and beginning into the mid-market space.

We continue to see that largely is driven by relationship sales activities. There's certainly merchants who are interested in self-service options, and we provide a full spectrum of digital sales and customer acquisition channels and tool sets to serve them. But the more complex sales do, in our view, require a the engagement of a relationship, consultative sort of sale. And so we're going to continue to stack resources against that as we see opportunities to expand and accelerate Genius adoption.

Our next question comes from Adam Frisch at Evercore.

On Genius, our check suggests that the SMB space is obviously still very competitive, but none of the major players are pricing irrationally in the market that would threaten current business models. My question is, would you agree with that? And then a quick tangential question. There's been some speculation around toast renewing with you. [ Artex ] pointed to a competitive deal, but you would retain them if you're able to provide any update on that, that would be great.

Yes. Maybe I'll start. Thanks for the question, and I'll ask Bob to add a little bit more color as well. I'd say, look, from our vantage point, the market -- the competitive market around point of sale does remain very competitive. Obviously, there's a number of strong players in the space. We believe that we are one of them, and we are building momentum around everything that we're doing with Genius, and we feel very good about where we are I think, in the progress that we have made.

I think as we look across the things that we're doing, we're growing well in the areas that we've already launched our capabilities. And I think that's evidenced by the commentary that Josh provided in his prepared remarks this morning in his script, we're also expanding into new markets and new geographies, new subverticals, new form factors, and as well new distribution channels, as I commented on earlier, all of that gives us, I think, enormous confidence we're going to continue to build momentum around Genius and continue to see very positive results and gain more share with Genius in the marketplace.

I would say as it relates to the pricing environment, it remains fairly rational to your point. I don't think we're seeing a lot of irrational behavior from a pricing standpoint. It is very competitive. I think one of the things that we feel very good about is given the enormous scale that we bring to the business, particularly from a payment standpoint, we can be as price as competitive as anybody.

But our goal remains to be with our distribution diversity the capabilities and feature richness of our solutions and obviously, the distinctive service experience that we think we can deliver to customers. As it relates to the second part of your question before I turn it over to Bob, maybe to provide a little more color around the POS market. We have renewed with Toast on a multiyear deal. So that is done, and we're proud to continue to support them from a payments perspective going forward.

Yes. Adam, I think Cameron well covered the competitive environment. It still is a very competitive marketplace. We continue to feel very strong about our opportunities to win there. And I think we are demonstrating that with the share gains that we're executing on sequentially quarter-over-quarter since the Genius launch last year.

The one data point I might offer around this is that particularly in our POS sales team, the signed annual revenue per deal is up nearly 50% on a year-over-year basis. So I think that speaks not only to sort of the constructive pricing environment that continues to represent value as we go to market, but also the value of the combined solution that we're driving today with Genius attaching sales, attaching value services and delivering that to merchants of compelling value size and opportunity for the business.

And if I could add maybe one more anecdotal data point. As we talk about sort of 200 sales reps that we've hired recently as we're building towards the $500 million, a number of them are actually point-of-sale sellers that have come from competitors in the marketplace.

So I think that's a good sort of data point as it relates to their confidence in the product and capability that we're bringing to market and their ability to be effective sellers inside of our environment, given the tools that we've provided. Obviously, the lead flow that we're able to bring to them and, of course, the product and capability we're bringing to market. So we're proud that we've been able to do that and feel good about, again, how the product is positioned as a competitive manner going forward.

Our next question will come from Tien-Tsin Huang at JPMorgan.

Thanks for going over so much stuff here. It's great to consume. Just thinking about the revenue growth algorithm, maybe in a little bit more detail. Would you encourage us to focus on performance across the enterprise, integrated and the SMB channel? Is that the best place for us to study the business? And any big picture thoughts on growth contribution from, say, units, volume, net sales, pricing, that kind of thing or even Worldpay versus Global Payments. I know it's a lot to cover there. But just trying to get a better sense of the growth algorithm.

Yes. Look, Tien-Tsin, it's a great question. I appreciate you asking some of this, we're going to be able to dig into a little bit deeper as we get to Q1. We get the channels completely realigned. We only closed a month ago, and we're obviously working through getting all the channels kind of aligned on a historical basis and a go-forward basis, et cetera.

So we'll be able to give you a little more visibility around the business. We prepare for the call, particularly across the enterprise integrated platform and SMB channels. So more to come on that front. I would just say around the growth algorithm more broadly. Obviously, given the significant investments we've been making in commercial activities. Obviously, we expect that to be the primary driver of growth for the business going forward. We'll always continue to make sure that we're optimizing price and yield in our portfolio given the level of value in service and capability that we bring to the market.

But we think we've done a pretty good job over the course of time of optimizing our pricing in the business. So our goal is really to lean more into the commercial capabilities of the business, given all of the investments that we've made through transformation, obviously, the increased capabilities that we have through the Worldpay acquisition to such that commercial activities and new revenue growth generated from our go-to-market activities will be the primary driver of growth in the business, coupled with the core same-store sales and just organic growth in the customer base that we have.

So that's a good way to think to think about the growth algorithm more broadly kind of across the business. And as I said before, we'll give you a little more color around the individual channels as we get to the first quarter and leading up to our Q1 call.

Our next question will come from Andrew Schmidt at KeyBanc.

Cameron, Josh, Bob. Great to see the state results here. Congrats I want to just ask about the Worldpay growth expertise for this year into next. Maybe just talk about the sort of e-commerce SMB integrated payments breakout. So where the largest opportunities are there. It sounds like there might be a little bit of step up into next year to get to that sort of intermediate term growth rate.

Obviously, a lot of opportunities with these organizations coming together, but a finer point there on the subsegments. And I understand this will be consolidated at some point. But any detail there, that would be helpful.

I'll try to give you a little bit of color and as I said before, I think we'll be able to give more detail around the individual channels as we get to the first quarter. As we -- at the Worldpay business more broadly, we talked about sort of their normalized growth in 2025, which was essentially on top of what we underwrote as part of the transaction. So we feel good about the trajectory of growth in the business.

As we talked about before, they're on their own sort of transformation journey, accelerating growth across the business, and we're continuing to see good progress within the world-based and stand-alone business. And now as we bring our 2 companies together, our goal is to continue that trajectory for the combined business to get to the medium-term outlook that I shared earlier, which remains our medium-term outlook for the business.

Look at the -- in the Worldpay business, their enterprise e-comm capabilities are best-in-class and they're highly competitive, and we're seeing very attractive growth rates there in terms of both volume and revenue. They're more legacy card present enterprise business. That's more of a GDP grower. So you blend those 2 together. And you have a healthy growing business. It's a good mix of very strong e-com growth and slightly lower kind of enterprise, more card-present oriented growth.

The platform business, again, is a bit of a tale of 2 stories. The Payrix and managed PayFac solutions is growing very, very nicely. Obviously, as we've talked about in the past, Worldpay has a book of integrated referral partners that probably hasn't been nourished as well over time. So the overall channel is growing kind of around the average rate for the combined business that we've outlined for 2026, but it's a little bit of a tale of two stories in terms of the composition of that portfolio.

And I think SMB is the area where Worldpay perhaps was more challenged kind of as it exited FIS. Obviously, the combination with Global Payments brings better product capability to those distribution channels. I think Worldpay has really good distribution in the SMB space. They just need better product in solutioning to serve SMB customers. And I think, obviously, Global Payments brings that in spades which gives us a lot of confidence as we put their SMB business together with ours, we're going to be able to drive attractive growth rates for that combined channel going forward as a combined company.

So gives you a little bit of color as to how we think about the different elements of the Worldpay business, as we said before, their growth in 2025 was on top of what we underwrote as part of the deal. And we're continuing to see good activity and obviously, signs that they're on the right track in terms of continuing to accelerate as we move forward in time. And our goal, as I said before, is to build on that as we bring our 2 companies together here this year.

Our next question will come from Dominic Ball at Redburn.

Super interesting data point on the platform business now to moving to the back book in Genius, you're being quite clear over the last sort of 9 to 12 months, you wish to sort of migrate merchants on to Genius from the [ bad book ]. Initially, this was sought to be led from merchants or more merchant led. There's been a few instances we've seen here and there like mobile [ bits ], where it seems to be more of a proactive migration. So can you clarify sort of the philosophy around from book versus back book migration how proactive do you intend to be? And then kind of a time line on this as well?

Dominic, it's Bob. I think our strategy around it hasn't fundamentally changed. What you might be seeing are some differences in market dynamics amongst some of the legacy portfolio. So our focus is still on front book opportunities primarily and serving the back book migrations as and when clients are ready to make that move. We've instantiated no sort of formal deprecation program or wind-down strategy for the legacy platforms that are forcing people to make a choice to move.

So what both our direct sellers as well as our dealer network are doing are responding to the demands of those clients. In some cases, people known about Genius for many months now. We've been talking about its launch since early last year. Momentum has been building and excitement has been building around the platform. And so we do have pent-up demand in the back book and both our direct sellers as well as our dealer network, as I mentioned, are serving those as and when they're ready to migrate.

The great news, as we mentioned is that while Genius is an entirely new platform, it's built on top of technologies that we've been developing over the past 3 to 5 years or so. So it provides for a fairly streamlined conversion and upgrade experience for those clients looking to upgrade both software and hardware services to the newer Genius stack.

So just to sum it all up, we're responding to our customers. We're there and ready when they're ready, but we're not putting again to anybody's head to force a migration. And we're still very excited about the front book opportunities that we continue to convert at a pretty steady and accelerating clip.

Yes. And I would only add to that, and I think that's exactly my view as well. The only thing I would share is as we think about the back book, if a client wants to make a move or is looking to make a move more broadly, our goal is to make that as seamless and easy as possible. So if a client is willing to go through the process of making a change, it should be easier to move to Genius than any other third-party solution in the marketplace. And certainly, our goal is to make it as easy as possible creating as little disruption for that client as possible.

So recognizing that someone making a decision to upgrade platforms are going to have to make some change. Our goal is to be able to minimize change and obviously, continue to build on the goodwill we have with that client and make it easy for them to move to Genius. So that's really our focus versus to Bob's point, a forced migration that puts clients in a position of having to make a change in some cases against their will.

Our next question will come from [ James Cantwell ] at Seaport.

The one I have for you is about Genius. The question is, what does Genius offer right now in terms of value-added services? There's never an op story for merchant yet. And some of your competitors, particularly in the SMB space, about success with that. Can you maybe talk to us about whether that is part of the thinking now going forward?

[ James ], it's Bob. I'm going to address the question, but could you restate -- you broke up a little bit what functionality are you asking about specifically?

Sure. Just maybe just go through what Genius offers right now in terms of value-added services and also if there's any plans for op store for merchants particularly with regards to SMBs.

Got it. [ App Store ]. Thanks for clarifying. So in terms of value-added services, what I would say is that there's a suite of value-added services that comprise 2 big categories. One is things that are available to everyone who's using Genius or maybe more specifically or useful to everyone who's using Genius and those are things around tools like embedded finance, client loyalty, social reputation management, scheduling and bookings engine, those sort of things.

Then there are specific value-added service or feature functionality that's specific to a vertical. So when we think about something like [ spa salon ], where you've got scheduling and client communications and those sort of things built into the workflow or when you think about an enterprise restaurant where you might be looking at a drive-through management and digital menu boards in kiosks and things of that nature or you look at a field services business where you've got mobile invoicing and text to pay links and a mobile operating form factor and a distribution management scheduling of service providers or deliveries or whatever the case might be.

So there's a pretty broad stack of feature functionality by vertical and value-added services that span all of it. Specific to an app store, look, I think our approach to that is one of making available easily the ability to integrate incremental value-added services and feature functionality to the core Genius platform. And that same ease of integrating is used and consumed by our own developers but also available to third parties to plug in other value-added services. the idea of trying to reinvent an app store and create an open marketplace of a variety of quality of solutions, a variety of quality of integrations and a variety of quality of support for those plug-ins or apps.

Frankly, I haven't seen that work very well in the market today and providers who've taken that approach end up with a graveyard of hundreds of failed solutions that are poorly integrated and poorly supported. So we're much more interested in curating a holistic, high-quality experience, whether those value-added services come directly from Global Payments or in partnership with a third party.

Our final question of today will come from Jason Kupferberg at Wells Fargo.

Guys, I had 2 questions. I'll ask them upfront. First, just on the free cash flow. Are we reiterating the outyear targets? I think we had been talking about $4 billion in '27, $5 billion in '28, at least on an adjusted basis. So if we can cover that as well as what those numbers might look like on a GAAP basis, and then just any specific areas of conservatism you might point to in the initial top line outlook for '26?

Yes, Jason, it's Josh. Let me take the free cash flow question. So yes, we expect '27 to be over $4 billion in levered free cash flow and the $5 billion marker that you mentioned in 2028 from adjusted free cash flow perspective. And look, what I'd say from a GAAP perspective, as we move through the integration, and we expect our onetime cost to come down so that our GAAP free cash flow will go up. So again, that's something that we're very, very focused on across the transformation and the integration. So you should expect those onetime costs to come down and get free cash flow to go up.

And Jason, it's Cameron. Maybe on the second part of your question. I would just reiterate some of the comments I shared earlier, which is, look, as the businesses are coming together for the first time here early in 2026, I think we've taken a fairly prudent approach to the outlook for the year. As I said, we're very focused on making sure that we get started on the right foot with the 2 businesses.

We are realigning go-to-market activities based on client channel versus product, which is how we were oriented previously at Global and we just want to make sure that, obviously, as we're doing that, that we're able to focus on integration when we're getting the businesses and aligning go-to-market activities in the right way, so we get ourselves off on the right foot.

Our outlook over the medium term, I think, remains the same. And as Josh highlighted, we expect to be exiting the year at a rate above 5%, which I think sets us up well heading into '27 and '28 as we talked about earlier.

This concludes today's Q&A back to management for any final remarks.

Thank you very much for joining us this morning. We apologize for going a little bit long, but we had a lot of content that we wanted to share. We appreciate your support in Global Payments and look forward to speaking with you very, very soon. Have a good day, everyone.

All right. Welcome, everyone. We are very glad to have with us today the CEO of Global Payments. We have Cameron Bready joining us. Cameron, it's a pleasure having you here in Arizona here for the second year in a row. Thank you so much for making the trip and joining us.

Yes, of course. Thank you for having us, and thanks, everyone, for joining this morning.

All right. Well, we have a great list of topics today. We're going to talk a little bit about the Worldpay transaction. We're going to touch on Genius. We're going to touch on some of the recent changes made in the sales teams and some of the commissions. We're going to talk a little bit about the industry and how competition looks. We'll talk about the Integrated and Embedded segment, and then we'll wrap up with a little bit on the financials and kind of the outlook.

So with that, Cameron, maybe we can start with the first topic, which is the Worldpay transaction. So it's looking to close in early 2026. And as we near that transaction close, and you've done this many times, you have lots of experience with it, but this is a pretty big integration. And when we think about the 2 different businesses, right, Worldpay skews a little bit more towards e-com and enterprise and Global Payments a little bit more towards SMB and owns multiple software platforms. So with all that context, maybe you could tell us a little bit more about how you plan to manage this integration and some of the synergies across the 2 businesses?

Yes, I'd be happy to. Maybe I'll start by saying, obviously, we're delighted with the path that we're on to close Worldpay. We've been able to pull in our originally expected schedule of the first half of 2026 into the first quarter. And we continue to knock down regulatory milestones, it feels like every week. So we're trending really well to be able to close in the first quarter. Obviously, the sooner, the better from my perspective, I don't love being in regulatory purgatory as I like to call it, as we're waiting for close.

But I would say the flip side of that is it does give us a lot of time to be well prepared for integration. And we've used that time really wisely to make sure that when we ultimately get to close that we are as well prepared as we can be to begin integrating the businesses day 1.

And I would tell you, look, we've done a lot of M&A in our history. I've done a lot of M&A in my career. I've never felt better prepared for an integration than I do for the Worldpay transaction. And there's a couple of things that I think are different about how we're approaching this versus other deals that we've done in the past.

First is we've taken a very uncompromising view around the operating model that we want to see for the combined business. We've worked very hard at Global Payments over the last year to really transform our operating model from a holding company operating company structure to a single unified operating business globally. And that is the model that we will leverage for the combined business. So in the past, I think around acquisitions, we've made a lot of compromises around the operating model. That's not the case with Worldpay.

I think the second area that's really different is our North Star for integration is really around growth. In the past, it's been more indexed around just getting expense synergies. But as we think about the Worldpay opportunity and the uniqueness of the opportunity, we're really focusing our integration efforts around growth.

How do we make sure that we put the 2 businesses and position the combined company for sustainable healthy growth for the long term? How do we make sure we use this opportunity to improve our competitiveness in the marketplace so that we can drive better growth rates longer term.

So our orientation around growth, I think, is really different in this transaction. We're also very focused on making sure we unifi as one company, one team, day 1. So historically, we've operated with different brands. There's been a lot of fragmentation in our business post acquisitions that we've done. That won't be the case in this transaction either.

And then I'd say the last area of focus for integration is really around building the best team, I think, in the industry. We have a unique opportunity given the depth of experience and capability inside of Global and the depth of knowledge and experience inside of Worldpay to really create a tremendously strong team across the combined business. And I think when we ultimately are able to announce kind of the leadership structure for the combined organization, it will have a healthy mix of Global Payments and Worldpay team members working together. And I think we're going to have, quite frankly, the strongest team in the space that gives me a lot of confidence.

And I think end of the day, look, our objective from an integration standpoint is to unlock, I think, the immense opportunity that exist in putting the 2 businesses together. These are highly complementary businesses that I think when we think about how we can extract long-term value putting the businesses together, they very much belong together.

To your point, Worldpay's oriented towards enterprise, e-comm, in particular, Global Payments is more SMB oriented. We both have a strong foundation in integrated payments. The combination of the 2 businesses are incredibly powerful largely because they complement each other so well. And I think it creates immense opportunities for the combined company once we're able to get to close.

Excellent. All right. That was a great way to kick it off. Thank you, Cameron. We're going to move to another important investor topic, which is the Genius transformation. So historically, just at the table, you've had many different point-of-sale brands within the restaurant retail verticals from Heartland, right? There's a Vital, GPOS, Xenial, some of these were more SMBs, some of them were more upmarket. But the go-forward look is very much consolidated around, at least for the front book sales, a single brand of Genius. And maybe you could talk a little bit more about some of the recent rollouts and this overall approach and strategy.

Yes. I think you're sort of running through the litany of POS brands sort of illustrates the point I was making earlier around fragmentation. We've been far too fragmented as a POS matter historically. And certainly, when we kicked off our transformation journey, a big part of our emphasis around how we wanted to reposition the business was really to unify our point-of-sale offerings and to create a new platform as a go-to-market matter that harnesses the best capability we had inside of our ecosystem, into a new platform with a brand that we can begin to elevate in the marketplace. And that really is what Genius represents for us.

But in that, I think it's important to note, it's not just a branding exercise. This is a new platform. So Genius is built from the ground up. It does harness a lot of capabilities that we had inside the various point-of-sale environments inside of our company. The Genius isn't a rebranding exercise. It's a new platform and ultimately forms the foundation for how we'll bring our POS capabilities to market as we go forward across restaurant and retail.

I think we've made a tremendous amount of progress in the very short period of time. Since we've launched Genius, we've rolled it out across restaurant and retail for SMBs. We rolled it out across enterprise. We've rolled it out for higher education. We introduced a new hardware suite, first in the industry modular component hardware capacity for the countertop solution for Genius, purpose-built for that platform. And also have rolled it out across a number of geographic markets.

As we think about the go-forward strategy for Genius, we're going to continue to invest in those capabilities, bring new feature functionality, capability to market, bring it to all the physical markets around the globe where we operate today, which I think is a growth vector that many of our competitors don't have in terms of -- we have strong foundations, distribution and capability in markets outside the U.S. where we can introduce Genius. So we have significant ambitions behind what we can do with Genius. And putting a lot of investment behind it, but obviously, delighted with the early progress we've seen.

All right. Excellent. Well, you really set the table there, Cameron. So the next 2 topics are somewhat related there. So one is around the investment behind the product, and we'll get to this later, and we'll talk about the sales teams and some of the hiring goals that you've recently mentioned. But on the product side, I think the investment community is well aware that some of your competitors are heavily investing in product development. But you have a lot of free cash flow coming your way over the next few years with the combined company, which gives you a lot of room to compete and to invest behind Genius. And maybe you could just talk to investors a little bit about what kind of investment and what kind of dollars might be able to go behind the Genius platform?

Yes. I think, look, I'll start by saying Genius is a highly competitive solution today. And I think it competes very well with the best-of-breed in market. I think it's -- I always describe it as better than most, but competitive with all. And certainly, as a market positioning matter, that's really important to how we want to position our business from a competitive standpoint. We believe strongly that our ability to win in the market starts with having highly competitive, hopefully, differentiated product capability, feature functionality. We always want to lead with that.

We try to marry that with a distinctive service experience that hopefully, customers enjoy with Global Payments that I do think is unique to us relative to many of our competitors in the marketplace. And then we combine that, I think, with the level of scale, particularly on the heels of the Worldpay transaction that allows us to be price competitive with anybody, given the massive amount of scale that we're going to bring to the merchant acquiring space post closing of the transaction.

So from my vantage point, it all starts with having the right feature functionality and capability. And I think the early experience with Genius thus far suggests it's really resonating with our clients in the market more broadly because of the richness of the feature functionality, how scalable it is from SMB to enterprise, how easy it is for our clients to be able to utilize. We put a tremendous amount of investment in bringing forward a product, again, that we think is highly competitive and in many ways, differentiated.

And part of our strategy as we move forward will be to continue to invest against that platform to maintain that competitive positioning. Combined with Worldpay, we'll invest over $1 billion a year in capital investments in the business, and much of that will go towards continuing again to make sure that Genius stays at the forefront of the industry in terms of feature, functionality and capability again, so we can continue to lead our go-to-market activities with a strong product that really resonates with the marketplace.

Thank you, Cameron. We're going to move on to the next topic, which is sales hiring. So in addition to the product investments that we just mentioned that Global Payments is making and some of the competitors are making there's also sales teams hiring. So a company we just had on stage a little bit ago, is hiring a few hundred salespeople. You mentioned on your earnings call you're looking to hire 500 more in North America alone. And just for context, when we -- and we recently published this table that had a comparison of everyone's number of salespeople and really, no one is really close to you guys, especially with the addition of these 500. So maybe we could talk a little bit about that?

Yes. I think as I look at our business, I talked about how we want to position ourselves competitively. But certainly, the breadth of distribution that we have inside of Global Payments today, including our direct sales force, which I'll get to in a minute. I think it's a real competitive advantage for us relative to against many of our peers in the marketplace.

On the direct sales front, I think we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,800 to almost 4,000 sales and sales support professional around the globe today. About 75% of our business is U.S. oriented. So that's roughly probably consistent with the sales force as well. And we're adding about 500 to that, largely across the U.S., North America and Canada here in -- U.S., Mexico and Canada here in North America over the short term.

And ultimately, our view is we now have a fantastic product to be able to sell in the marketplace. We're seeing real momentum behind everything that we're doing with Genius. We've made a lot of changes to our sales effectiveness and sales model over the course of the last year or so, and I'm sure we'll talk more about that in a minute. But we feel like now is the right time to invest more behind our direct sales resources to be able to continue to capitalize on the momentum we have with Genius. And a lot of the investment we've made in our sales and go-to-market activities to be able to drive better new sales performance as we move forward into the '26 and '27 time frame.

So we feel very good about, I think, the investments we're making, that was a part of our transformation initiatives was to be able to create the capital and free up the capacity to invest in more sales resources. And I think we've done a good job of that and the early progress we've seen suggests to us is now is the right time to do it.

I think I would add on top of that, though, we have multiple modes of distribution in the business, not just our direct sales force, and the diversity of distribution that we have, again, I think, is a real competitive strength. And one thing we're doing differently now relative to how we've operated historically is we're deploying Genius through all of our distribution channels.

In the past, we would keep our best product and capability really for our direct sales and not distribute it through other distribution channels that we have in the business. And ultimately, I don't think that's the right way to position the business for the long term. So we're now deploying Genius through our FI channel or ISO channel through our VARs and dealers and making sure that we're really leveraging the strong depth and breadth of distribution we have in the business to bring our best product to market. And ultimately, I think the early success that we're seeing around Genius is partly due to that as well.

All right. Perfect. Well, you did hint at this topic. So we're going to hit this a little bit. So you made a little bit of a commission sales, the commission structure change. So you went from a 100% commission-based structure to now a base pay plus commission. I do want to hit on that briefly. But maybe more importantly, I was hoping we could talk about just the expectations of a salesperson in terms of when you're making this investment, what kind of productivity are you looking for? What kind of paybacks, LTV to CAC those types of things?

Yes, it's a great question. And we tend to focus a lot on the sales compensation plans. And rightfully so, it's an important part of the changes that we've made in our go-to-market activities and our sales effectiveness program. But it's a lot more than that. We were historically operating under a sales model that I think it outlived its usefulness in terms of driving the right behaviors and driving the right outcomes for the business. It was 100% commission-based structure. We have evolved that to be more of a base plus commission and bonus oriented compensation structure.

I think the early results that we're seeing from that are quite positive, and we feel good about the changes we've made there. Much of that work was done in the first part of 2025. And I think we're starting to see the benefits of that materialize in terms of the performance and productivity we're seeing out of our new sales professionals operating under this new compensation plan. But we've also made significant investments in our marketing technology and platforms, really driving better lead flow, our ability to qualify leads more effectively through our platforms today.

We've also made investments in streamlining. We had multiple different CRM platforms by which our team members went to market every day. We consolidated those CRM platforms down to just a couple. I think that gives us much better effectiveness in terms of how we're managing leads in the ecosystem, making sure that no lead is left behind. We can capitalize on all the leads that we're building inside of the business. We're doing a better job of feeding those leads to our sellers so that they can be more productive. So it's not just the change in the compensation plan. But certainly, the investments we've made behind sales effectiveness more broadly, I think is allowing for us to drive better productivity from our sellers that certainly, the compensation plans are helping as well.

I think what they're really allowing us to do, particularly with Genius is we're able to attract, I think, better quality sellers. We're able to retain our sellers more effectively. We're able to drive better productivity from our sellers and the average sort of revenue -- new recurring revenue from a new win is much higher because it's often coupled with software or other commerce enablement value-added services that we bring to market.

So we're effectively seeing a compensation structure that has a lower customer acquisition cost for us. And we're seeing better LTV for our customers because they're higher average revenue per unit. And certainly, we think by being the software provider to those merchant clients, the longevity of them will be much better.

So the overall CAC to LTV ratio will dramatically improve for us as we continue to move forward with the changes that we've made from a sales execution and effectiveness perspective.

All right. I think we covered that quite well. Thank you so much, Cameron. We're going to move on to -- I mean this is a Genius topic, but it's really an industry topic, right? And you've been a leader in the industry for many, many years, and I think your perspective will be really valued on this topic for investors.

So the industry kind of operates a little bit in a tale of 2 cities, if you will. Meaning the front book is typically competitive and back book, given, especially with the software solution, can be more sticky and there can be some pricing actions. And when we just look at some of the evidence in the public market, some of your competitors have talked about elevated hardware costs, right? Maybe they increase CAC a little bit. It's come up on a few earnings calls lately.

But at the same time, we've seen examples of pricing on the back book. And really, we were just hoping you could give some perspective on how that is the same or different? Or really, is that just the way the industry has been for many years.

Yes, I think it's not new to your point, I think the industry has always operated that way. I think the front book has always been highly competitive from a price standpoint, and that's the nature of operating a competitive industry like this. Winning that net new customer, your pricing always has to be competitive. And I think our philosophy on pricing has been pretty consistent for a long period of time. We don't lead with price. We really lead with product capability, service, the experience.

Obviously, you have to be price competitive on the front book, and we believe we are. And obviously, with Worldpay, we bring sufficient scale to be price competitive with anyone, but we don't necessarily want to lead with price as we think about managing the front book in driving new front book wins inside of the business.

The back book and this has been this way for the industry, certainly for as long as I've been in it, it's always a function of trying to optimize yield and managing the correlation between yield and attrition. And its portfolio management theory, I think, by and large, across the sector and different companies have taken different perspectives around how they manage that back book to your point. Some are pushing through more pricing increases. Others maybe have pulled back on some of that. But it's largely in terms of how do they manage the correlation between yield and attrition in their own back book and portfolios.

And I think every provider in the market has probably a little bit different perspective on that. But front book has always been competitive. That hasn't changed. That won't change. I think our goal remains consistent, which is, again, we don't want to lead with price. We want to lead with product and differentiation and distinctive service and we'll be price competitive, obviously, to win net new business, and we bring more scale than anyone that I think gives us a real competitive advantage there. But -- we want to continue to get paid fairly for the level of value and service that we're delivering to our clients, and that's how we think about managing the back book inside of our portfolio as well.

All right. Excellent. In the remaining time we have, it looks like we're going to try and cover Integrated and Embedded. We'll talk a little bit about the outlook and some of the capital allocation and then time permitting, we'll touch on agentic commerce.

But with that as the agenda, let's hit Integrated and Embedded. So you added about 60 new ISVs in Q3, and you said about half of those were outside North America. That's the Global Payments Integrated business, but you've got Worldpay and Payrix coming your way upon closing. And maybe you could just talk a little bit about what the Payrix asset does and how it bolsters this integrated business?

Yes, I'm happy to. Look, the Integrated business is one we've been in now for a dozen-plus years. We have a very strong foundation in Integrated Payments as does Worldpay for that matter. And look, I think it's interesting how that market has evolved, and I'll get back to sort of how we think about the benefits of putting the 2 businesses together.

But look, the industry really started more as a referral model. With ISVs referring business to integrated providers like ourselves. And it's evolved over a period of time such that today, almost every conversation we have with the software partner starts with them suggesting that they want to be a payment facilitator. There's lots of consultants out there that have sort of built a cottage industry around directing ISVs to become payment facilitators.

Certainly, every PE firm that buys the software business suggests that they should become a payment facilitator and maximize their economics from payment flows. The reality is when you actually get under the hood and you start having those conversations, most software providers aren't equipped to be payment facilitators. Actually, there's very few true registered payment facilitators in the market today. What most of them are looking for is some greater control over the experience, the experience they're able to deliver to the clients, maybe the experience that they're able to provide around how funds flow occur, how settlement happens, how they manage the subaccounts within the platform. So they're looking for greater control over the experience.

They don't really want to become payment facilitators and have to take on all of the underwriting KYC risk, transaction monitoring risk. They don't really have the infrastructure and don't want to invest in the infrastructure to be a real payment provider. They just want greater control over the experience. And over time, we've been investing in our capabilities to allow for ISV partners to have just that, which is they don't necessarily want a straight referral model. They really shouldn't be a payment facilitator. They want something in between. They want a hybrid solution. And we've invested in our capabilities to really be able to deliver a distinctive hybrid solution that's really tailored to the needs of a sophisticated ISV partner.

Many of our competitors offer a model and you either fit in that model or you don't. I think our approach has been more white glove and it's been more developing bespoke solutions that are hybrid that really are tailored to the underlying needs of the particular ISV. Where Worldpay really comes into play is their Payrix platform, which is their managed payment facilitation solution, so almost PayFac-as-a service helps to facilitate and deliver that really well-articulated hybrid solution to ISV partners.

And it gives great technology strength to the hybrid offering that we want to bring to market, accelerates our road map dramatically around technology investments we wanted to be able to make to deliver that hybrid opportunity. And combined, I think we'll have an ability to deliver really unique, very tailored, very bespoke solutions to meet the needs of more sophisticated ISVs in the market to be able to serve everything from a very traditional referral relationship, all the way up to a true payment facilitation offering in every variation in between.

And I think that will make us really uniquely positioned in the integrated space relative to any other competitor that we work with or that we compete against. And I'm really excited about the prospects of putting those capabilities together because I think it will be very powerful for that sector.

Excellent. Thank you, Cameron. I think we could probably loop these last few into one because really it's hitting on 3 financial topics. The first is on revenue growth outlook. The second is on the margins. And then importantly, the capital allocation and returns that you're expecting to give to shareholders over the next few years.

But just start on the revenue side. So in terms of '26 and '27, you talked about mid- to high singles for the stand-alone and high end of mid- to high singles for the combined business. And importantly, the recent guidance for Q4 suggests that even this year, you'll be exiting on an organic basis or ex dispositions above 6% in Q4. So it looks like on track for that. So just was hoping you could put a little bit more context on how investors should think about the revenue growth in '26 and '27? And if you don't mind just tackling some of the margin outlook there as well. We'll wrap up on capital allocation.

Yes, I'd be happy to. I'll kind of focus on the combined business since we expect to close in the first part of 2026. I think that's important. As we think about putting our 2 businesses together, to your point, we're really delighted with where Global Payments is today. We've delivered on everything that we said we would do over the course of this year. The revenue has accelerated first half to back half as we anticipated, and we feel like we're very much on the right trajectory as it relates to the benefits, our transformation is having in terms of our ability to drive consistent, sustainable top line growth at a healthy level.

And certainly feel good about the exit rate heading into 2026, all else being equal, given it's a little hard to predict the macro. But Worldpay is also, I think, performing well. Their 2025 results are very much consistent with the plan that we underwrote as part of diligence, and we're very pleased with the progress that they're making. We would characterize them today as a solidly mid-single-digit grower. So as we think about putting the businesses together, heading into 2026, obviously, they're growing solidly in the mid-single digits. We're exiting at a nice rate. We think the pro forma business for '26 is set up to deliver very solid results on a combined basis. And as we begin to realize synergies across '27 and '28, it will take a little time to generate the revenue synergies inside of the business.

But we remain confident in our ability to accelerate growth towards the higher end of that mid- to high single-digit range as we articulated when we announced the transaction back in April. So I think every month -- everything that we're seeing in the business still aligns with the objectives that we laid out. We think putting the 2 businesses together gives us a lot of confidence around our ability to generate the kind of growth that we were anticipating and then ultimately accelerate as we're able to realize synergies over a period of time.

I think on the margin front, obviously, as we realize expense synergies, putting the 2 businesses together, we would expect to see more meaningful uplift in margin over the next couple of years, '26 and '27 in particular. In the 100 to 200 basis points annually, largely reflecting good underlying organic growth in the business, but obviously, the benefits of expense synergies flowing through to margin expansion over that period of time as well.

And obviously, we then think that combination sets up for a very strong cash flow characteristics over that time frame as well, which leads us to capital allocation as you were describing earlier. So with the top line growth we expect to generate, the strong margin expansion coming to the business through an execution of organic activities and synergies, the business is poised to produce very strong cash flow over the next 2 years.

That cash flow will be used to reinvest back in the business. As we talked about before, we anticipate investing over $1 billion a year back into the business in terms of capital investment. We'll reduce leverage from the transaction back to our 3x target within 18 to 24 months kind of post-closing of the transaction. And the balance of capital available to us will return to shareholders. Our expectation is to return that to shareholders over the '26 to '27 time period as well.

We committed back in September of '24 and reiterated more recently, our plans to return $7.5 billion of capital to shareholders over the '25 to '27 time frame. Thus far, we've returned about $1 billion, excluding returns associated with asset divestitures that we've made. So that means they're $6.5 billion that will return over the '26 to '27 time frame. That will be a little more skewed towards '27, obviously, as we ramp synergies, but maybe it's 35-65 or 40-60, something like that. But we're obviously well poised to return meaningful amounts of capital to shareholders in '26 and '27 to get to that $7.5 billion capital return expectation through 2027.

And if you fast forward to 2028, the businesses are largely integrated, leverage free cash flow for the combined business, we expect to be around $5 billion, which gives us a significant amount of capacity to think about obviously driving value for shareholders and we're obviously pretty delighted with the cash flow characteristics of the combined business. That's 50% higher than what Global Payments would have been standalone had we not executed the transactions that we're executing and divesting our issuer business and acquiring Worldpay.

Excellent. We're right on time, Cameron. I want to thank you again and the Global Payments team. I should have mentioned earlier, but Nathan Rozof. Thank you for also making the trip here to join us in Arizona. We really appreciate you being here and being such a big part of our event here in Arizona.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Tim, thanks so much for having us and thank you for...

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to Global Payments Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] And as a reminder, today's conference will be recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to your host, Head of Investor Relations, Nate Rozof. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Welcome to Global Payments Third Quarter 2025 Conference Call. My name is Nate Rozof, and I'm Head of Investor Relations. Joining me on today's call is our CEO, Cameron Brady; our President and COO, Bob Cortopassi; and our CFO, Josh Whipple.

Our earnings release and the slides that accompany this call can be found on the Investor Relations area of our website at www.globalpayments.com. I'd like to remind you that some of the comments made during today's conference call will contain forward-looking statements, including expected operating and financial results, among other matters. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. For additional information on these factors, please refer to our press release and filings with the SEC.

We caution you not to place undue reliance on these statements. Forward-looking statements during this call speak only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to update them. We will be referring to several non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are more reflective of our ongoing performance. For a full reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures discussed on this call to the most comparable GAAP measure in accordance with SEC regulations, please see our press release furnished as an exhibit to our Form 8-K filed this morning and other supplemental material available on the Investor Relations section of our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Cameron Bready. Cameron?

Thanks, Nate, and good morning, everyone. We are pleased to deliver third quarter adjusted results that accelerated sequentially across our key financial metrics. Our team continues to execute at a high level, driving growth and efficiency across the business as we advance our transformation program. Importantly, our year-to-date performance positions us well to deliver on our expectations for the full year, and we are building positive momentum as we prepare for the closing of the Worldpay acquisition. .

To that end, we recently received approval for our acquisition of Worldpay from the Competition and Markets Authority in the U.K., which is a critical regulatory milestone. Given the strong progress we have made with the regulatory approval process, we now expect to close our acquisition of Worldpay and divestiture of Issuer Solutions in the first quarter of 2026. Naturally, our teams are eager to complete the Worldpay transaction and begin unlocking the compelling opportunities it presents, including accelerating our strategy to transform Global Payments into a pure-play merchant solutions provider with sustainable growth, leading scale, focused investments and meaningful value creation.

We are also pleased to have closed the divestiture of our payroll business in September, further simplifying our business and allowing us to return an incremental $500 million of capital to shareholders during the third quarter through an accelerated share repurchase program. Lastly, before turning to the quarter, I am happy to announce that we partnered with Google to enable Agentic Commerce using the Agent Payments protocol. It will enable us to provide secure, reliable and interoperable agent commerce for our customers and partners.

We are helping our customers and partners to successfully enter this emerging commerce channel by building bridges between protocols to enable our merchants to access all agentic payment types. With this and other agent AI frameworks, we are also developing the authentication layer that is necessary to verify that AI agents are legitimate to maximize authorization rates and thus maximize revenue for our customers.

For the quarter, we reported 6% constant currency adjusted net revenue growth, excluding dispositions, 110 basis points of margin expansion and 11% constant currency adjusted EPS growth compared to the same period last year. We also produced adjusted free cash flow of $784 million in the quarter, allowing us to end the quarter at 2.9x adjusted net leverage below the 3x target we had committed to and earlier than the year-end date we had previously anticipated.

Our merchant business exhibited ongoing momentum with adjusted net revenue growth accelerating to 6% constant currency, excluding dispositions as we continue to execute across the three pillars of our strategy. First, in POS and software, our strategic priority remains on the development and rollout of Genius. Consistent with our focus on front book opportunities, currently more than 90% of Genius sales are to new customers. In the markets where we have launched Genius, sales to new locations increased by more than 20% year-over-year during the third quarter, with new sales ramping nicely throughout the quarter. In fact, monthly recurring revenue from new sales increased 75% from June to September and the average deal size more than doubled. This rapid uplift in new sales demonstrates how well Genius is resonating in the market.

Genius is an incredibly robust business software platform that is architected to be highly modular, configurable, scalable and extensible. As we talk about Genius today and in the future, you will hear us highlight our support across multiple form factors for mobile phone applications to specialized handheld devices, all the way up to our unique countertop, kiosks, digital menu board and kitchen management devices. We will also discuss vertically targeted configurations supporting retail, restaurants, campuses, field services, professional services, age restricted and more. We may also comment on go-to-market bundles of specific feature functionality to assist customers with diverse needs at multiple price points designed to allow us to specifically tailor our offerings to meet customers how and where they want to be met.

With all the impact we are driving across the world with Genius, it is important to understand that this is still one Genius platform. We are unlocking capabilities, geographies, configurations and pricing bundles. We are not launching new discrete products or platforms. To that end, having successfully introduced Genius for the restaurant and retail verticals during the second quarter, which are primarily targeted at SMBs, I'm happy to share that we expanded Genius' feature set to support enterprise businesses in September and higher education institutions in October. Genius' enterprise offering provide a unified modern and modular commerce enablement solution designed to meet the complex needs of multi-location, quick-serve and fast casual restaurants, sports and entertainment venues and food service management environment for enterprise customers.

On the heels of this launch, we were pleased to be selected by Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment to be the official payment technology provider for the Prudential Center and the New Jersey Devils. We will integrate Genius across all food and beverage locations for the Prudential Center, helping to optimize how fans place, pay for and receive their orders across the venue while optimizing back-end operations. While it's still very early for Genius in the enterprise space, we have also already been selected by franchisees of several leading QSR brands to deploy Genius across more than 400 locations.

Our expansion of Genius functionality for higher education is ideally suited for a range of campus use cases, including on-campus merchants, dining halls, recreational facilities, departments and clubs, stadiums and more. Many universities do not have the necessary digital payments infrastructure to support their move away from cash and check. Genius fills that gap with easy-to-use commerce enablement solutions, including campus-wide payment acceptance capabilities and reconciliation. It drives commerce and simplifies back-end processes by centralizing transaction visibility while maximizing revenue streams, minimizing staff time and streamlining compliance.

In terms of new form factors, we recently launched our new handheld device for Genius. It features an advanced 6.5-inch high-definition touchscreen, seamless connectivity across WiFi, Bluetooth and 5G, and an upgraded processor that speeds performance. Demonstrating the power of Genius' highly modular and configurable platform, I'm pleased to share that the University of Illinois selected Genius, and we use our new mobile form factor across revenue centers campus-wide.

After geographic expansion, in addition to offering Genius across North America and the U.S., Canada and Mexico, we recently launched in the U.K. and Austria. And our first enterprise win in the U.K. came within days of our launch with the restaurant chain in Glasgow that has ambitious expansion plans.

Before the end of the year, we still expect to introduce Genius in Germany. In early 2026, we will also bring it to Ireland and the Czech Republic, followed by Spain, Romania, Poland and Australia. Lastly, we are actively deploying Genius through all of our distribution channels to help drive penetration across the entirety of our front book.

In addition to our large direct sales force, we recently launched Genius in our dealer VAR financial institution and ISO channels. The feedback from our partners in these channels has been resoundingly positive. Our digital menu boards and new handheld devices, particularly resonated with our dealers, and our loyalty solution is highly regarded across our partner channels. It is encouraging to see the ramping of new sales and all of our distribution partners invigorated by Genius. In addition to our success with Genius, we have several notable wins across other software businesses, including Alterra Mountain Company, Oakwood University and Stillwater Public Schools.

Turning to our Integrated and Embedded business. We had another outstanding quarter for partner signings with nearly 60 new partners added globally. To continue to drive partner wins, we are investing in our developer experience, including launching easy-to-use tools, modernized documentation and a unified API platform that makes it easier to integrate and deploy our services. In addition, we are excited to have expanded our long-standing partnership with PayPal, continuing to leverage our technology footprint across North America, Europe, the U.K. and Asia Pacific. This multiyear partnership also expands our relationship into the U.S. market and paves the way for global expansion into new verticals, creating significant opportunity for volume growth with PayPal.

As part of our transformation program and sales effectiveness initiatives, we are expanding our distribution for this channel, which has historically been solely served by an inside sales rep team by adding a dedicated outside sales force and enabling integrated referrals to all of our direct sales teams. With the addition of a field sales force targeted towards integrated opportunities, we expect to increase our win rate in complex verticals like automotive, health care, dental and veterinarian where clients continue to prefer to have face-to-face interaction. We also expect this to be a point of differentiation as we compete for new partners going forward.

As for our core payments business, we achieved several notable wins in high-growth geographies, including Max K convenience stores in Chile, Moovio Railways in Poland, Airlines in Greece, and La Meridian Kaula Lampur in Malaysia. In North America, we renewed Verizon Wireless and the State of Illinois extended our relationship for a new 10-year term. United Petroleum was a notable win in Canada, and we are expanding into nearly 200 Pizza Hut locations across Mexico.

I'm also excited to share that we launched our new merchant dashboard that facilitates cross-selling and value-added services. We built and deployed a modular and open dashboard that allows for a common interface supporting multiple client personas to customize the experience of delivering critical data and KPIs, generative AI data discovery interface, access to our robust client experience, engagement and loyalty components, and the ability to purchase and interact with a rich suite of personalized commerce enablement services and embedded finance tools. These modern and robust points of interaction deliver the capabilities and experiences that our clients and partners desire and expect.

Turning to Issuer Solutions. We again saw accelerating sequential trends with revenue growth increasing to 5% on a constant currency basis this quarter. This was largely driven by continued growth in accounts on file and stable underlying transaction volume trends as well as strong project-related revenue. We recently renewed our partnership with Avancia, a leading European digital bank and OLV, a leading bank in the German market. We also signed new agreement with Elanza Bankia in BrendisGard and continue to have a solid pipeline of new business that extends into 2027.

Further, we remain on track with our cloud modernization program and moved two more products into production this quarter. We are on schedule with our modernized efforts and expect to make all customer-facing applications commercially available by year-end.

As I noted in my opening comments, we continue to make great strides on our transformation journey as we streamline Global Payments into a single unified operating company worldwide. At the core of this effort is investment in our technology strategy to unify our capabilities and expose them ubiquitously to customers around the globe. To facilitate this, we have architected a single-end single-app customer and partner experience, leveraging modern API environment, complemented by AI systems to integrate and consume our services.

With the orchestration platform capabilities we have discussed in prior quarters, we're enabling the single-in, single-out experience across all of our platforms in all of our geographies on an omnichannel basis. This strategy and architecture allows us to deliver the modern customer experience at clients' demand and insulate them from the complexity of our processing environments, while providing us with the ability to simplify our infrastructure by technologies at a more measured pace without a material impact to our customers and partners.

For example, this approach has already facilitated our EVO integration by supporting all net new volume and enabling us to migrate clients away from EVO's 7 legacy gateways with minimal client impact. Notably, Worldpay is on a similar journey of using orchestration to enable technology and systems consolidation. Our strategy is to align our orchestration capabilities, which gives us confidence in our ability to integrate and consolidate our technology stacks, unlocking more value and growth more quickly than we could have in the past.

In addition to enabling cost savings and margin expansion through infrastructure consolidation, our modern orchestration layer also enables us to distribute products more easily across multiple geographies. This accelerates our pace of innovation, making us more nimble and improves our speed to market. With our API environment and the new dashboard I referenced earlier, this architecture works in harmony to deliver our holistic single-in and single-out vision.

To further accelerate product development, we have also aligned our teams around a new product operating model, a foundational shift in how product and technology come together to solve customer challenges at Global Payments. We are already seeing tangible benefits, faster execution, tighter alignment to our priorities and meaningful reductions in churn and waste as well as accelerated delivery of new capabilities. Our Genius rollout is a prime example of this.

Further, we're embracing artificial intelligence to improve the productivity of our engineering teams and the experiences of our customers. So far, our teams have used AI to generate nearly 1 million lines of code, saving tens of thousands of hours of manual coding time. AI assisted coding is also reducing defects, which is accelerating testing and integration cycles. Overall, the integration of AI is enhancing our end-to-end product development life cycle by enabling faster innovation and improved velocity across our technology portfolio. The power of AI is often dictated by the availability of data to train it. Once we combine with Worldpay, we will process nearly $4 trillion in annual volume across 100 billion transactions and serve millions of merchants and thousands of platforms and software partners. That scale of payments data will help us unlock AI-powered insights for our customers as their trusted partner. For example, we will be able to provide our customers with access to fraud tools, predictive inventory analysis, dynamic pricing models and churn risk analytics, all based on detailed transactional data and delivered in real time.

In addition to the investments we're making in our product and technology environments, we're also investing meaningfully to transform our sales force, which is obviously our primary point of contact with many of our customers. As we previously discussed, during the first half of the year, we transitioned our sellers from our 94 compensation plan, which was 100% commission-based structure to a new compensation program that incorporates base pay plus commissions. This change yields multiple benefits for us. First, it enables us to incentivize solution-based selling, which is critical when we are introducing new solutions like Genius, and 100% commission-based plan, sellers will often take a wait-and-see approach to new products, preferring to take the past of least resistance to closing a new sale. Under our new plan, we have targeted our strategic commerce enablement solutions in addition to overall sales quotas.

This model also makes it much easier for us to hire strong experienced sellers. As we continue to focus on selling more software and commerce enablement solutions, this structure is more consistent with the market for software sellers, allowing us to attract the right talent to sell our capabilities. With this new structure in place and the early proven results, we are expanding the size of our sales force to improve our engagement in the market. Today, we are actively recruiting for 500 additional field sellers in North America.

We have also deployed a consistent sales methodology across our sales force, which improves the portability of new leads across channels and the customer experience. This lead portability is facilitated by the last key pillar of our sales transformation, unifying the technology that enables it.

We have mentioned in the past that we are consolidating our CRM systems, which is a critical enabler to passing leads between sales channels and harmonizes how we get to market. Now sales professionals from different channels can see the lead in its entire history through the same CRM system. This also allows for a greater ability to manage the overall inventory leads we receive, recycle unsuccessful leads and ensure that no lead is left behind in our environment.

We are also deploying sales intelligence tools to automate pipeline management as well as AI agents to summarize our sales call in real time and document any need to follow up. While it's still early, our new sales methodology and compensation programs are increasing deal count and size. Overall, we are seeing double-digit increases in signed annual revenue per deal and mid-single-digit increases in deal count. We're also seeing speed to first deal increase with our earliest adopting channel improving by almost 40%. Lastly, we've seen attrition in new hires in the first 90 days improved meaningfully. For example, the first sales group to move to this new plan has seen more than a 50% reduction of new hire attrition since adoption.

Our transformation will be catalyzed by the acquisition of Worldpay and simultaneous divestiture of our Issuer Solutions business, positioning Global Payments as a pure-play merchant solutions provider. With the transactions expected to close during the first quarter of 2026, integration planning for Worldpay is well underway with all critical milestones established. Our disciplined approach will ensure alignment with our operating model and drive value creation. Our integration strategy focuses on accelerating growth, enhancing competitiveness, realizing synergies and investing in innovation while unifying under a single brand and leveraging top talent from both organizations.

Through our integration, we are striving to be a better version of the companies we have been until now, not just the larger one, one that maximizes scales and prioritizes growth to ensure lasting results for our customers, our shareholders and our team members. And we will do this by leveraging our unmatched global scale, processing nearly $4 trillion annually across 100 billion transactions and a complementary set of capabilities that strengthen our value proposition. Together, we will expand distribution, enhance our product suite and scale innovation.

Our North Star for integration is growth, growth in M&A from an unrelenting focus on the needs of our customers. This incremental growth will be driven by a number of actionable opportunities that leverage the strength of the combined business. For example, we will immediately begin selling Genius and other software solutions into Worldpay's SMB base, while using their channels to broaden reach. Further, Worldpay's Payrix platform and PayFac capabilities will deepen our support for software partners and platforms. Their enterprise and e-commerce strength will also enhance our omnichannel offerings and diversify our client mix while also providing capabilities we can cross-sell across the breadth of our combined merchant base. We will also extend Worldpay's digital capabilities to SMBs and pursue geographic expansion in the 40 markets where we already operate.

As previously noted, we also have a significant opportunity to drive synergies by leveraging a unified orchestration layer to consolidate platforms and reduce technical debt. Further, our ability to deploy approximately $1 billion in annual capital investments to support a cohesive merchant-centric product road map will serve as a powerful catalyst. This strategic alignment is expected to create a flywheel effect accelerating innovation, enhancing efficiency and further strengthening our offerings.

In support of our execution of all these opportunities, in September, we were pleased to announce the appointment of two new independent directors to our Board of Directors, who filled seats vacated by retiring Board members this past April. Our new directors, Patty Watson and Archie Deskus, bringing a wealth of leadership skills, experience and financial technology expertise to our boardroom. Their guidance will be helpful as we continue to execute on our strategic ambition to be the worldwide partner of choice for Commerce Solutions. The Board has also established a new ad hoc integration committee to oversee the integration of Worldpay following the close of the acquisition. This committee will represent a governance best practice for Global Payments going forward. While we currently provide the Board with detailed updates on acquisition integration, the formation of a dedicated committee will allow for deeper engagement and more focused oversight. Leveraging the Board's diverse expertise and experience in this area will be invaluable as we execute on this critical initiative.

With that, let me turn the call over to Josh.

Thanks, Cameron, and good morning. We're pleased to have reported another solid quarter, highlighted by accelerating revenue growth, healthy margin expansion and strong adjusted free cash flow generation. Importantly, the performance delivered is exactly consistent with the expectations we outlined at the beginning of the year as we continue to execute against our strategy and transformation agenda. Specifically, we delivered adjusted net revenue of $2.43 billion for the third quarter, an increase of 6% from the prior year on a constant currency basis, excluding dispositions. Adjusted operating margins expanded 110 basis points to 45% or 80 basis points, excluding dispositions, resulting from strong execution and benefits from the transformation we began executing last year. The net result was adjusted earnings per share of $3.26, an increase of 12% on a reported basis and 11% on a constant currency basis. Year-to-date, we've generated $2.1 billion in adjusted free cash flow, representing a 96% conversion rate from adjusted net income.

Taking a closer look at performance by business. Merchant Solutions produced adjusted net revenue of $1.88 billion for the quarter, reflecting growth of approximately 6% on a constant currency basis, excluding dispositions. This represents a 50 basis point improvement sequentially, consistent with our outlook that we set at the beginning of the year, and the expectations outlined at our investor conference last year. Further, the macroeconomic backdrop remains consistent as we continue to see stable volumes supporting our view that the consumer spending remains resilient.

Our POS and software business achieved high single-digit growth, excluding dispositions for the third quarter. We're encouraged by the acceleration in new Genius locations sold having seen a 37% monthly increase since launching in June. We continue to build on this momentum in Q4, we hosted our Genius Dealer and VAR Conference in late September. The conference was well attended with over 200 dealers and key highlights including introducing new Genius handheld along with displaying our enterprise-grade capabilities like digital menu boards to SMBs. We're excited about the progress we've made in rolling out Genius as our singular point-of-sale technology platform across our business. We'll have much more to share in the coming quarters as we build on these accomplishments.

Turning to integrated embedded payments. This business also delivered high single-digit growth for the third quarter. We added nearly 60 new partners globally during the quarter, and notably, about half of these new ISV partners were outside North America, underscoring the distinct value we bring as a provider with unmatched global reach. And the compounding power of those one to many ISV relationships continues to propel our top line as they ramp. For example, year-to-date, we have seen a 68% year-over-year revenue growth from the cohort of partners that we signed in 2023, while the ramp from new partners signed last year is nearly 15x their contribution in 2024.

In core payments, we delivered mid-single-digit growth during the quarter. Our international markets demonstrated relative strength with high single-digit constant currency revenue growth across Central Europe and Asia Pacific as we continue to benefit from strong secular payment trends in these markets. This reinforces our commitment to expand our foothold to meet strong demand and provide our best-in-class suite of capabilities across geographies. We delivered an adjusted operating margin of 51.1% in Merchant Solutions, an increase of 110 basis points over the prior year or 70 basis points, excluding dispositions, again highlighting the impact of our transformation.

Moving to Issuer Solutions business, we generated adjusted net revenue of $562 million for the third quarter, reflecting growth of over 5% on a constant currency basis. This represents over 150 basis points of acceleration sequentially and also marks an improvement from our performance in the first half of the year as expected. Revenue growth was primarily driven by new implementations and growth with existing customers as our strategy of aligning with market share winners continues to drive benefits. We also benefited from the recognition of project and fees for service revenue that we had previously expected in Q4.

We added 16 million traditional accounts on file this quarter, bringing us to a record of 917 million traditional accounts in total. We completed 2 implementations in the quarter, and we continue to see sustained growth in transaction count. Insurer Solutions delivered an adjusted operating margin of 46.9%, which is a 150 basis point improvement from the prior year period. As I mentioned, reported adjusted operating margins expanded by more than 100 basis points in both merchant and issuer. This reflects not only continued cost discipline, but also incremental benefits we've realized from our transformation efforts. In addition to beginning to unlock top line growth, as Cameron described a moment ago, our transformation has yielded significant cost efficiencies as we streamline our businesses and functions.

From a cash flow standpoint, we produced strong adjusted free cash flow for the quarter of approximately $784 million, representing a conversion rate of adjusted net income to adjusted free cash flow of approximately 100%. We invested approximately $170 million in capital expenditures during the quarter and expect capital expenditures to be roughly $700 million or approximately 8% of revenue for the full year, consistent with our previously stated target.

We continued our commitment to returning capital to shareholders this quarter, repurchasing $500 million through an accelerated share repurchase in connection with the sale of our payroll business, bringing our total share repurchases to approximately $1.2 billion year-to-date. We continue to see buying back our shares as a compelling opportunity given our confidence in our strategy and long-term growth profile.

We're pleased to report that we've reduced our leverage faster than anticipated. Our net leverage position was 2.9x at the end of the third quarter, down from 3.15x at the end of the second quarter and below our long-term target of 3x. Our continued strong free cash flow generation gives us confidence in our ability to delever back to 3x within 18 to 24 months of closing the Worldpay acquisition.

Our balance sheet remains extremely healthy, and we ended the period with approximately $4.1 billion of available liquidity. Outstanding indebtedness is almost entirely fixed rate with an attractive weighted average cost of debt of 3.4%.

Moving to our outlook for the full year 2025. We continue to expect constant currency adjusted net revenue growth of 5% to 6% over 2024, excluding dispositions. We anticipate dispositions will impact reported adjusted net revenue growth by approximately 400 basis points for the full year, which now reflects the sale of our payroll business in September. As we discussed the past 2 quarters, the foreign currency exchange rate environment has continued to evolve since we established our initial 2025 guidance. We now expect a modest tailwind of approximately 50 basis points from foreign currency exchange rates in Q4. And for the full 2025, we expect foreign currency exchange rates to be broadly neutral to reported revenue and EPS growth. And we expect full year adjusted operating margin to more than 50 basis points, excluding dispositions, which is consistent with the guidance that we provided last quarter. We expect Q4 performance to be generally in line with our year-to-date trends and similar to Q3.

At the segment level, we still anticipate our merchant business to deliver adjusted net revenue growth of roughly 6% on a constant currency basis, excluding dispositions for the full year, and we continue to expect adjusted operating margin expansion for merchants to be greater than 50 basis points, excluding dispositions for the full year.

For Issuer Solutions, we continue to expect adjusted net revenue growth of approximately 4% on a constant currency basis for the full year. This implies Q4 growth of roughly 4% due to the pull forward that I mentioned a moment ago. We expect adjusted operating margin expansion for the issuer business to be greater than 50 basis points for the full year. We continue to anticipate adjusted free cash flow conversion to be greater than 90% for the full year and we expect to end the year at or below our 3x net leverage target.

Altogether, for the year, we remain confident in the trajectory of the business, and we continue to expect adjusted earnings per share growth to be at the high end of the 10% to 11% range on a constant currency basis. In sum, we delivered another quarter consistent with expectations and we remain on track to achieve our outlook for the full year for revenue, margins, EPS and free cash flow. And with that, let me turn the call back over to Cameron.

Thanks, Josh. I could not be more proud of our team and the positive impact we are seeing in our business from our transformation. The anticipated closing of the Worldpay acquisition and the concurrent divestiture of Issuer Solutions business early next year represent a pivotal moment in our company's evolution. Far from a departure from our strategy, these actions are a natural extension of it, providing unique opportunities to accelerate our transformation. Together, they will crystallize Global Payments position as a pure-play merchant solution provider and a leading provider of commerce enablement solutions with unmatched global scale in an industry where scale matters more than ever.

We remain intensely focused on driving sustainable growth through a combination of expanded and more effective distribution, a more comprehensive suite of products and solutions and our ability to invest in innovation at scale. With approximately $1 billion in annual capital investment dedicated exclusively to merchant and commerce enablement solutions, we are uniquely positioned to accelerate our product road map and deliver differentiated value to our customers. These transactions also reinforce our transformational objectives to enhance operational efficiency and maximize cash flow. Leveraging our increased scale and realizing meaningful synergies, we expect to generate significantly more levered free cash flow than what would have been achievable absent these strategic actions.

And our commitment to disciplined capital allocation remains unchanged. In addition to the $1.2 billion we have already returned from the disposition of assets, we remain on track to return $7.5 billion to shareholders between '25 and '27 while simultaneously delevering to 3x within 18 to 24 months of closing the Worldpay transaction. By 2028, we expect to generate approximately $5 billion in annual levered free cash flow, which is 50% more than it otherwise would have been. This level of actual generation will provide us with significant flexibility to continue returning capital to shareholders on a sustained basis, while simultaneously investing in innovation to drive sustainable long-term revenue growth and operating leverage. With that, I'll turn it back to the operator to open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question will come from Dan Dolev with Mizuho.

Cameron, Josh, great results here. It looks like everything is on track and better than expected. I wanted to touch on your comments, Cameron, on free cash flow. I mean the generation is very impressive, and you're pushing probably $9 billion of return right now. So as we get closer to this 2028, how do you think about capital returns given the massive amount of free cash flow that GPN is throwing?

Yes. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for the kind comments. I would say our philosophy remains very consistent. As you highlighted over the course of the '25 to '27 time frame, we expect to return close to $9 billion. That's $1.2 billion from dispositions that we've made and obviously utilized the proceeds from those to return capital, and we're still targeting $7.5 billion from just cash flow that we're generating in the business is capital returns over that same time frame. As I just commented, we expect to have free cash flow in the neighborhood of $5 billion by the time we get to 2028. And I would say, given where we are today, our priority would remain returning that capital to shareholders. Obviously, we want to be able to continue to invest in the business to drive growth and make sure that we're innovating at the pace that we want to and maintaining our competitiveness in the market, but recognize that our free cash flow expectation is already built in a $1 billion plus of new investment in innovation annually. So we think we have ample free cash flow in 2028 to return a significant amount of capital to shareholders while still positioning us to be able to invest in the business the way we need to, to drive sustainable long-term growth.

The only thing I would add, Dan, is look, you saw in the quarter, we continue to generate really, really strong free cash flow. Year-to-date, we generated over $2 billion of free cash flow, we converted at 96%. And you also saw that we delevered down to 2.9x. And just given the cash flow profile of this business, we feel very confident that we'll delever back to 3x within 18 to 24 months of closing the Worldpay acquisition. So we feel really good about that.

Our next question comes from Jason Kupferberg with Wells Fargo.

I wanted to ask on merchant, a two-part question. The first part is on Genius. I wanted to get a sense of what the complexion of some of these initial wins look like? Are you mostly winning restaurants and retailers that are moving to Genius from a non-cloud solution? Are you getting competitive takeaways from the other cloud providers? And then the second part of the question is just on pricing and the environment there. Last week, one of your competitors talked about rolling back some fees in parts of its SMB merchant base. So I wanted to get your take there. Just on the overall pricing backdrop, are you seeing any more price aggression in the market since last quarter?

Yes, Jason, it's Cameron. Thanks for the question. I'll start and maybe ask Bob to provide a little more color on specifically what we're seeing with Genius. But to maybe answer your question very quickly, I think it's a little bit of all of the above. We're delighted with the progress that we're seeing with Genius. We called out some stats, obviously, in our prepared remarks, but certainly, the momentum we're building around Genius is palpable. I think the reception of the market is highly constructive as it relates to the product, the capabilities, the form factors, in all the feature functionality that we're able to bring to bear through the platform. So as we commented, we're already live in a number of markets internationally. We have plans to bring it to more markets. 90% of our new sales are to new customers, which is really encouraging, and it aligns with our focus, as we've described before, on front book opportunities. We saw new locations increase kind of 20% quarter-over-quarter and a 37% increase since we launched in June and new ARR, importantly, not only are we selling more locations, but the value of those locations is increasing as well as new ARR is up almost 75% since we launched in June with an average deal size, it's greater than 50% what it was prior to launching Genius. So I think as it relates to the early sort of proof points around how Genius is resonating with the market, we feel very enthusiastic about the reception we've received and obviously, the momentum we're building. I'll let Bob talk a little bit more about specifically kind of what we're seeing on the wind front.

Yes. Thanks, Cameron. Jason, the way that we think about -- the way that I think about the front book opportunities that we're winning is that the motive competition really varies by geography. And that's less about the intensity of competition or what the product market fit is, and it's more about the maturity of the market sort of inherently. So as you think about where we've got Genius rolled out so far over the last few months, it's primarily North America-based although I think we mentioned that we're live in the U.K. now as well. And across North America, the U.S. is a very different market than Mexico in terms of the penetration of POS technology systems as opposed to kind of legacy payment methods themselves. And that's the primary driver of the source of the wins. When we go head to head in a market like the U.S. that's fairly mature, deep competitive landscape, a lot of established software providers there. We feel very confident about how our software and capabilities stack up against them, and we're winning a lot of those head-to-head battles as well as competitive takeaways. We're also winning in markets where software adoption is less than it is in the United States. And some of those wins are coming from head-to-head and competitive takeaways. Some of those are coming from people who are leaning into a full POS software stack to manage their business for the first time. But regardless of geography of distribution method, whether that's dealers or direct and regardless of kind of who the competition is, today, I wouldn't say that there's one spot we're winning in a spot that we're concerned, we feel really strongly about our opportunity to win when we get in deals. You didn't ask this, and I probably shouldn't volunteer it, but if you ask like where are you struggling? Where do you have challenges today? It's not about product, and it's not about customer demographic, it's frankly about mind share. Some of what we're doing is new to our clients and new to our prospective clients and we're competing against people who've got some established mind share. So we're being very aggressive about how we think about the marketing opportunities to get the Genius name and the Global Payments brand in front of our prospective customer base. We're thinking a lot about how to leverage our existing distribution and maximizing the performance of that channel. An example of the thing that we've done this quarter has come alongside some of our FI or other indirect distribution partners, not only offering Genius to them, but offering sales assistance with Genius. So we've got a number of, for example, FI partners who are really excited about the opportunity to service their customers with more technology solutions, but they don't always feel like they've got the sales expertise inside of the bank to go and sell software as software. And so we're coming alongside them and offering to partner them up either with our direct sales team or in some cases, with regional dealers where they can go to market jointly.

And Jason, I want to circle back on the second part of your sneaky two-part question there. So on the pricing environment, what I would say is it remains fairly constructive. And our philosophy, I think, from a pricing standpoint, really hasn't changed. We want to price our services and solutions given the level of value and capability we're bringing to our clients. We don't strive to be the low-cost provider in the market, and we want to be paid fairly and appropriately for the level of value and service that we think we can deliver. So we're not leading with price. But obviously, we must be price competitive and we are price competitive for our solutions. I think the reference that you made was really as it relates to more of a back book pricing sort of action as opposed to front book opportunities. And as I said, we're always price competitive as we think about sort of new front book opportunities in the business. The last thing I would just leave you with is with the Worldpay, obviously, acquisition and the significant scale that we will bring to the competitive landscape as we move forward, I don't worry about being price competitive really with anybody. We want to make sure we're differentiating our capabilities based on the future functionality and level of service that we bring. And will always be price competitive, but we think we bring something distinctive from a functionality and service standpoint, and we want to be paid fairly and appropriately for that.

Our next question will come from Adam Frisch with Evercore ISI.

Cameron, I'm going to have a very unsneaky two-parter here for you. If you could just provide some color on the primary components of the organic growth number and specifically call out some pricing increases to the back book, which are channel checks have suggested some pretty significant ones in recent months. And then the second one on the sales force expansion, super interesting. What kind of companies are you sourcing from the most and where do you see the most opportunity?

Yes, Adam, I'll take the first part and I may ask Bob to jump in on the second part just in terms of where we're sourcing kind of new sales professionals and the success we've seen on that front. I would say there's nothing sort of out of the ordinary in terms of organic growth for the business in this quarter. We're continuing to see much of that driven from new sales productivity. And actually, as we've called out, we're seeing better productivity from a new sales standpoint and better results from a new sales standpoint in the quarter, which obviously is a little bit of a tailwind to the overall growth in the business. And then secondly, obviously, we're seeing fairly stable same-store sales trends across the business as well, which are the two biggest drivers, obviously, our organic growth and the performance we're seeing in the business. As it relates to pricing, we're continuing to exercise the same philosophy that we've had over a long period of time, as I mentioned in my answer to the earlier question, we focus on pricing our services and solutions based on the value of the services and capabilities that we're bringing to our client base. What we have been doing through our transformation is looking to harmonize all of our pricing sort of structures across all the different portfolios that we've acquired over a long period of time. So as part of that, obviously, we are looking to harmonize kind of the pricing structures and capabilities that we're utilizing to make sure that we're getting paid fairly and appropriately for the level of value and service that we're delivering. But I would say on the pricing front, there was certainly nothing unusual in the quarter as it relates to how we think about pricing our solutions and actions that we may take from a back book perspective, as we're looking to harmonize those pricing structures kind of across our portfolios. .

Yes. And in terms of where we're sourcing kind of sales talent and the pipeline for that, I would say, again, it's very broad. Obviously, we're targeting software salespeople who've got experience doing that motion. Whether they're coming from fintech or whether they're coming from other types of kind of core business management software. But I think the differentiating point here, as you think about kind of a legacy sales rep and a new sales rep, if you will, is that this is a much more consultative sale process than sort of commodity purchasing. Some people, particularly younger folks want to be able to interact digitally and and acquire through that sort of methodology, but not everybody feels comfortable fully articulating their needs, understanding the complexities that may be associated with large-scale implementations and rollouts, and we find it very constructive to have consultative sales talent and sales engineers, certainly as the enterprise space to come alongside them and be able to deliver those capabilities at scale for both SMBs as well as enterprise clients.

Our next question will come from Dave Koning with Baird.

Nice job across the board. And I guess, my question, Genius, you talked a lot about new sales to new clients, but the back book, about 10%, it sounds like sales are coming through. I'm wondering what's the, I guess, experience so far with attrition in yield when you do move the back book? And if that's good, are you going to more aggressively kind of push into that?

Yes. Thanks, Dave. We talked about this a number of times, and I think our strategy is relatively consistent, and that is to be in front of our customers and leverage the relationships that we have, ensure that they're aware of the capabilities that Genius brings to bear and be prepared to help them migrate at a time that is comfortable and convenient for them to do so. As a reminder, Genius is not a new from the ground up brand new technology stack, much of Genius core capabilities comes from existing solutions that we already had in the market. So as we think about customer migrations, in many cases, this isn't really a migration per se. This is simply unlocking the incremental capabilities that we've built over the past 18 months or so as we've been working to bring Genius to market across the globe.

The second thing related to sort of yield and average revenue per customer, as Cameron mentioned, the overall deal size is increasing. A little bit of that has to do with the sorts of customers that we're able to target with Genius as a solution, but part of it is also about the breadth of capabilities we have to monetize. We have to provide to deliver incremental value to those clients. So as we think about a migration experience, there is not any meaningful price compression associated with that. I would say it's neutral to slightly enhanced given the take rate on some of the incremental capabilities.

As we think about the strategy against the back book, look, there's a time and a place for that. But as I mentioned earlier on one of the responses about mind share, we're very focused on getting Genius in front of as many prospective clients as possible, and establishing a footprint so that all of you on this call, when you walk into anywhere you do business in your normal life, you begin to see more and more of the Genius brands. So we're very aggressively focused on front book opportunities. We're prepared and we're here for our back book clients as they migrate. And in most cases, as I mentioned, that's not a full-scale data conversion, migration that's simply unlocking incremental capabilities on the new unified platform.

Our next question comes from Bryan Keane with Citi.

Solid results here. Cameron, I just want to ask you a little bit more directly about that peer that we talked about that reduced the guidance. In particular, they talked about short-term revenues that were unsustainable and driving higher revenues and margins. Is that something that's common practice in the industry? Can you maybe talk a little bit about the yields that you see versus volume? You guys have been pretty consistent on that. And then any kind of ability for you guys to competitively take away some business as a result of that?

Yes, Bryan, thanks for the question. Look, it's hard for me to comment too much on another company or another competitor. I certainly don't have perfect visibility into everything that's happening with their business. I'm really intensely focused on the things we're doing and how we're executing as a business. I wouldn't say that the things that they called out were common in sort of practices. And I think much of the commentary, particularly around merchant related to one specific international market and some idiosyncratic sort of issues there that were propping up kind of growth, of FX rates and inflation, et cetera. So as I look at kind of the business more broadly, as I said before, I'm really focused on the things that we're doing, and I can't get too far down the path in terms of commenting on someone else. To that end, I would tell you, I'm really pleased with what we're seeing in our business and how effective our transformation is in terms of positioning us for a better sustainable growth and value-creation future as a business. And I'm really pleased with the momentum we're building in the business. We've been at our transformation journey now for about 15 months, and I'm really pleased again with the success that we've seen and the direction of travel as it relates to all the key initiatives that we have really been investing against over that period of time.

We reoriented our operating model to make sure that we are well positioned for the growth future that I described before. We've had terrific success with Genius, which we spend a lot of time talking about today. Our sales effectiveness initiatives are progressing really well, and we're seeing a lot of positive trends coming out of those. And the technology strategy that we outlined today, we think strikes the right balance between delivering client experiences that are modern and contemporary and aligned with what customers are looking for in the marketplace, while positioning us to be able to deprecate infrastructure and streamline and harmonized technology environments over a longer period of time that will drive additional cost savings and margin uplift in the business without creating a lot of customer distraction.

And of course, as we thought about our business and the market more broadly in the competitive landscape, we obviously put that into context as we thought about the transactions to acquire Worldpay and the best our Issuer Solutions business. We think these transactions further catalyze everything that we're doing from a transformation perspective and obviously, will position us going forward as a pure-play merchant solution provider really with unmatched global scale in an industry, as I said before, where scale matters more than ever.

So as I look at the things that we're doing, we're incredibly enthusiastic about the progress that we're making. We feel very good about how we're building a sustainable growth-oriented engine here that's based on healthy growth fundamentals and obviously, positioning the business competitively. And with the Worldpay combination, obviously, we think we'll bring a level of scale to the industry that positions us extraordinarily well, continue to grow, continue to innovate and continue to generate significant cash flow, obviously, that allows us to invest for the future while rewarding shareholders with significant capital returns.

Our next question will come from Andrew Schmidt with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Good to see the consistent results here. Maybe you could ask just about Merchant Services or Merchant Solutions organic growth. It looks like the exit rate pretty consistent with what you guys had outlined previously, slightly above 6%. Maybe talk about just the progression into 2026. And whether any thinking has changed there, particularly in terms of drivers? I know POS and software is obviously a big driver, Salesforce is a big driver and a number of things going on. But just -- maybe just if you think about just the progression into 2026 and some of the key drivers, that would be great.

Yes, I'll start. I'll maybe ask Josh to add a little bit of commentary as well. I think, look, 2026 is right around the quarter. So the drivers as we think about the business organically heading into 2026 are really centered around the things that you just described. Obviously, Genius continues to be a very significant focal point for us in terms of driving growth in our business. We have incremental market expansion opportunities in 2026 that we're looking to deliver. Obviously, we continue to build momentum in the markets where we've already rolled it out, and we're seeing strong progress on that front. And then, of course, our initiatives around sales effectiveness, the incremental sales force professionals we're looking to hire and bring to bear on the market. Their ability to be productive more quickly and obviously drive a level of productivity that's superior than what we've been able to see historically under our old sort of plans, I think, gives us a lot of optimism around the direction of travel, relates to organic growth heading into 2026. So I don't think the underlying theme as it relates to how the business is positioned heading into next year has really changed. And I would just note also that they're very consistent with what we called our conference a little over a year ago. Obviously, as we highlighted on the call today, we're poised to close the Worldpay transaction early in 2026. And I think as we look at the combination of the two business -- look for the combined business next year, I would just ask you to reflect on what we shared in Q1 of this year around the medium-term outlook for the combined business, that remains kind of our outlook as we sit here today for the combined business as we get into 2026.

Yes, Andrew, the only thing I'd add is, I think if you go back to the beginning of the year, we're doing exactly what we said we were going to do. You go back in the first 3 quarters, the shaping of merchant is right in line with what we see acceleration in the back half, and that's primarily related to the transformation initiatives as Cameron and Bob called out around Genius and sales effectiveness. And then to Cameron's point, we gave our medium-term outlook for '26 and '27 for the pro forma business on our Q1 call. So I would point you back to that where you can see kind of what we're expecting for the business in 2026.

Our next question comes from Darrin Peller with Wolfe Research.

Look, when we see some of these data points like the sales revamp showing us increases on deal counts and even the Genius stats are obviously strong, looking at some of these with 90% sales to new customers, increases, et cetera. I guess our question would just be when we would start to see that play out in volume growth? I know it's early now in some of these initiatives, but your 5% growth rate, I would like to see that show some traction and acceleration. Do you expect acceleration in volume growth, specifically the KPI you've been disclosing in the same manner as we go into next year as a result of these initiatives? And then sort of related, but a follow-up would be the Worldpay SMB segment, I know is an area that you should be able to really capitalize your Genius program with post close. And so just how are you thinking about integrating that, rationalizing the two SMB go-to-market organizations and the uplift potential that we can see in volume overall as a result of that as well.

Yes, Darrin, good question. So on the first question, we did see, obviously, volume uplift from Q2 to Q3. And obviously, that's reflected in the metrics and the disclosures we provided today. But I think the longer answer to your question is, of course, over time, as we continue to make progress with Genius, we expect to be able to drive incremental uplift in volume all else being equal across what's happening in the macro environment. As you can imagine, a lot of different factors sort of shape the ultimate sort of volume growth we see in the business. But certainly, we are seeing new sales of Genius driving incremental volume to the business, which is obviously driving overall volume trajectory in the right direction. And obviously, as we continue to move forward and make progress against expanding our footprint with Genius to Bob's point, growing mind share around Genius and having more success with front book opportunities, we expect that to continue to drive margin opportunity -- excuse me, volume opportunity and growth in volume in the business over a period of time.

I think as it relates to the Worldpay opportunity, certainly, we think the overlap and complementary nature of the distribution platforms in SMB is really attractive. Today, Worldpay really lacks a product suite that we have that's really geared towards serving the SMB segment of the market. And we think that our ability to leverage that product suite across our distribution channels is going to be really powerful. The other thing I would say is their distribution platforms, again, are largely complementary to what we do today. Their FI channel is, again, incremental largely to what we do from a distribution standpoint. Their wholesale relationships are largely complementary to the relationships that we have. They don't have a significant direct sales force in the U.S., they do in the U.K. But the FI channel and the wholesale channels in the U.S. are very much complementary to our distribution channel. So our ability to leverage those channels to get greater breadth and depth of product expansion into the marketplace across SMBs, I think, is a really powerful part of the proposition of putting Worldpay and Global Payments together, and we're excited to be able to bring those distribution channels to life as a combined business going forward.

Thank you. This does conclude the Q&A portion of today's program. So I'd like to turn the call back over to the speakers for any closing or additional remarks.

Well, on behalf of Global Payments, thank you very much for joining us today, and I wish everyone a very happy Tuesday. Thanks for your interest in our company.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's program, and we appreciate your participation. You may disconnect at any time.

Great, everyone. Thanks for joining. My name is Tien-Tsin Huang. I follow the payments and IT services sector at JPMorgan. And I was telling Cameron, really grateful to cover a space and have learned a ton over the years, and there's been a lot of change and delighted to have Cameron Bready, who's the CEO of Global Payments, give us an update. We've had Worldpay on the stage here before Cameron. And of course, you're going through this transaction with them. And I gathered a lot of questions from the audience. So hopefully, we can just get through some of that, if that's right. But thank you for being here.

Yes, of course. Thank you so much for having us, and thanks for joining this morning.

Yes. So it's fitting from an all-source conference standpoint, just from a scale angle. Global is going to be quite large post the transaction next year. But before we get started and get into the fundamentals, Cameron, I just thought we'd start with a priority question just to kick it off because there's a lot going on with you closing the deal. Of course, you're executing your own agenda at Global Payments. You have the macro to deal with as well and satisfy a sales force. Give us an update on how you're prioritizing the day-to-day and meeting the short-term goals, but also getting ready for this transaction as well?

Yes. As you can imagine, we're spending a lot of time sort of balancing those priorities. Obviously, we have near-term objectives that we're trying to meet. The reality is we're a public company, and we have quarterly milestones that we need to be able to demonstrate that we're meeting to our investors. And we're also doing, I think, a tremendous amount of work to make sure the business is well positioned for the long term. So as I think about sort of where we are in our journey, about a year ago, we launched a fairly meaningful transformation effort inside of Global Payments. This is a business that has grown pretty dramatically over the course of the last decade. When I joined the company, it was probably a little over $1 billion of revenue. Today, we're close to $10 billion, and that's over an 11-year period of time. And a lot of that acquisition was fueled by M&A.

When I took over as CEO a couple of years ago, I kind of stepped back to look at the business and think about how do we make sure we're well positioned for the next decade of growth. The playbook that got us from where we were to where we are now is probably not the one that's going to get us to where the company is going to be 5, 10, 15 years down the road. And as part of that transformation journey, we're really focusing on a couple of things. One is reorienting our business from a holding company, operating company structure to a single unified operating company model globally. I think that's the best way to position the business for long-term growth and success. I think it's the best way to position the business for healthy, sustainable rates of growth. And it's the best way to unleash, I think, the full potential of our business to be able to, I think, deliver all of our products and capabilities more ubiquitously to our clients in all the markets around the globe that we're serving them.

And then secondly, of course, and you alluded to this before, we're acquiring Worldpay. And as part of that transaction, we're exiting our Issuer Solutions business. So as we step back to think about where we wanted to position the business for the long term, we really came to the conclusion that focusing all of our time, energy, investment and resources on Merchant Solutions was the right thing for the business. So we came as part of that exercise upon the unique opportunity to exit our Issuer Solutions business and acquire Worldpay, which I think certainly allows us to have that sole focus on Merchant and the combination of Global Payments and Worldpay, I think, creates a more sustainable growth engine for the future, one that's able to serve any type of merchant software platform partner in over 175 markets around the globe with immense scale, as you noted earlier, while at the same time, again, reorienting to that sole focus on Merchant, which I think is going to be incredibly powerful for the business for the long term.

So we have a lot of things we're trying to accomplish as we think about, obviously, continue to execute day-to-day in the business, continuing to deliver on the growth outcomes we want to achieve, executing on our transformation and preparing our business to integrate Worldpay, but certainly tremendously excited about the direction of travel for the business, the momentum we're building and the long-term value creation that we think putting Global Payments and Worldpay together will bring for our shareholders.

Good. No, I think the focus has definitely come through, and I know you're passionate about that, Cameron. So we're excited to see how that comes together. Digging into some of the pieces. I think the most popular question, Cameron, I got from everyone for me to ask you is about Genius. So let's talk about Genius and I know you launched retail restaurant in the first half of the year. You've launched in the U.K. We're sitting here in London. Tell us more about what you've learned so far? Have you made any pivots? Are you double downing on any specific areas of Genius as you go out? And maybe just update everyone on what Genius is.

Yes, sure. Maybe I'll start there. That's probably a good way to jump into the question. So Genius is our effort, and I want to be very clear, Genius is not a rebranding exercise. Genius is really how we are reorienting the various sort of point-of-sale capabilities we have in our business today to a single unified platform to support restaurant and retail customers around the globe with point-of-sale software and payments to help them run and grow their businesses more effectively. As we think about the 2 largest consumer spend verticals around the globe, it's generally going to be restaurant and retail environments. The mode of competition for payments is really through the point of sale. And we've had strong point-of-sale capabilities historically, but they've been fragmented across way too many platforms.

So as we launched our transformation exercise, we really are leaning heavily into creating a world-class point-of-sale solution that better positions our capabilities for the long term. And that involves unifying all the best feature functionality and capability onto the Genius platform. And then finally, for once, having a brand -- a more recognizable brand around our point-of-sale capabilities that we leverage around the globe in all the markets that we bring point-of-sale solutions. And Genius is that platform and brand that we will leverage as we move forward. So seeing great progress thus far with Genius, I'm happy to report we've met all the key milestones and deadlines that we established for ourselves in terms of launching Genius for restaurants in May, Genius for retail in the June, July time frame, and we just launched Genius for enterprise in the U.S. and of course, Genius for restaurants here in the U.K. just a couple of weeks ago.

We have a fairly ambitious plan to continue to bring Genius to other markets, Canada and Mexico here in the short term, other international markets, some in Europe, some in Asia Pacific starting in 2026. And again, it will be our flagship point-of-sale brand and platform that we leverage in the different markets around the globe that we serve point-of-sale customers. I think our positioning around Genius is really to make sure that we are competitively positioned in restaurant and retail to continue to win market share. As we think about how we are trying to position ourselves competitively, it starts with the Genius platform itself. It's a highly feature-rich, highly configurable, flexible, easy-to-use and integrated platform that can scale up and down in the SMB to enterprise segment as necessary to support the needs of our clients.

So we're really delighted with the product and the solution, the feature functionality and capabilities. And we think from a point-of-sale standpoint, it all starts with the features and solutions that you can bring to bear on those clients. It's a highly competitive space. We have great competitors that have good features and good products, and we need to be sort of competitive with them as a feature functionality perspective. But at the same time, we think we can differentiate our offerings through the level of service that we bring to our clients. I think our service infrastructure and capability at Global Payments has always been a hallmark of our business. I think we provide exceptional service to our clients, white glove, more personalized service experiences to them that I think is really distinctive in the marketplace, and it's an area that we can differentiate.

And then, of course, again, harkening back to your earlier comment, we can bring a level of scale and competitive economics to the point-of-sale environment that many of our competitors can't match. And I think the combination of a highly feature-rich capable product, distinctive service and really competitive economic positioning with the scale we can bring obviously positions us extraordinarily well to continue to grow and gain share in the point-of-sale space as we move forward. Tremendously excited about the progress we've made. We got a lot of work in front of us to continue to grow and scale and get better market penetration and awareness of the Genius brand. But obviously, I think we're off to a terrific start.

Good. I know distribution is, of course, important in payments as well. So let's talk about that for Genius, but broadly across Global Payments. You're doing a pretty large transformation, updating a lot of the commission and the comp structures. Where are you with that? I think the retention was what, Cameron, like 90% is what you talked about last quarter.

It was. Yes.

Give us a little bit more on what you're trying to translate that into with -- on the performance side.

Yes. A big part of our transformation journey is also kind of leaning into the commercial side of the business to try to drive better outcomes from a sales execution standpoint. So there's a lot of initiatives that sort of underlie the sales force of the future model, which is kind of our nomenclature to capture a lot of the things that we're trying to do to improve that commercial go-to-market muscle and capability we have. A lot of it starts with, to your point, the underlying sales compensation structure that we leverage predominantly in the U.S. It's obviously our biggest market that our sellers have been utilizing now for many, many years. I'm a little embarrassed to say our sellers worked on a plan called the '94 Plan. Why was it called that? Because it was created in 1994.

And I don't want to leave you with the impression it hasn't evolved a little bit over time, but the core underpinnings of that structure have been around a long time. And I think it had probably outworn its welcome and usefulness in the business. So we've reoriented the sales compensation program for our sellers to be one that's, I think, much more balanced in terms of trying to drive the right outcomes for the business, trying to incentivize our sellers in the right way to be able to be more productive, to produce better outcomes for the business. It ultimately results in a lower cost of selling for us. And more importantly, perhaps, it is a model that is far easier and better equipped to recruit new sellers into our ecosystem. So we put a lot of emphasis around converting our sales force from our old plan to this new plan. We've had 90% plus retention as we work to convert those sellers over, which we're really proud of.

And while we're doing that, we're also making significant investments around all of our marketing investments, lead gen, demand gen, the CRM infrastructure that supports the business, making it easier for our sellers to cross-sell, making it easier for them to be more productive, to be able to manage leads, effectuate leads and drive to actual closed sales, putting a lot of investment around the customer experience side of things as well as you first interface with us as a sales matter, whether it's how you integrate into our environments to the onboarding and procurement experience of product and equipment to just the approval, trying to increase speed to revenue in the business.

Significant investments going around sort of improving the commercialization aspects of the business. But really, again, delighted with the progress we've made. The biggest part of that is behind us in terms of converting our sellers. We're seeing the productivity benefits we expected to see, continuing to scale that in the business. But a big -- I think a big milestone for us is getting that work behind us around converting all those sellers and obviously now having them on the right plan, the right structure with the right incentives and the right capacity to be more productive to drive better outcomes for the business for the long term.

So new product, new branding, you've got to revamped sales and go-to-market, Cameron. So with all of these things together, I know competition is always a question. But what should we be tracking on performance? I mean, how quickly can we see a change in whether it be growth or retention or gross new sales, you tell us?

Yes. And I think we've laid out a pretty clear path for the business to accelerate growth outcome delivering on those. Obviously, Worldpay, the combination with Worldpay will help catalyze that to some degree as well. But if we look at our stand-alone Global Payments business before the acquisition of Worldpay, we laid out a pretty clear path by which we're going to accelerate growth over the next few years, largely driven by all the work that you described we're doing in our business. And look, I think thus far, we're a few quarters into this. We've really delivered on every milestone that we said we would deliver on. We're delivering on the growth while we're working through this transformation journey. We're delivering on the key milestones that we laid out around the transformation journey itself. We're providing, I think, quarterly metrics that give some insight into how things are progressing, particularly on the new sales front.

And we're also providing, I think, a good amount of commentary around where we're seeing the productivity benefits and the key milestones and all the transformation work that we're doing. So I feel from an execution standpoint, yes, we have a lot of balls in the air and the team is working very hard to deliver day in and day out. But I'm really proud of what our organization has been able to do over the last several quarters, hitting all the major milestones, delivering on the outcomes we expected to deliver and building the right momentum in the business as we exit sort of '25 and head into 2026 to be able to accelerate growth and drive the overall outcomes that we committed to our investors we'd be able to deliver.

Okay. Great. I know you and Josh are working hard on all of that. So thanks for that update. So let's transition to Worldpay. A lot of investors want me to ask you about that. What's left to do in terms of getting the clearance to close the transaction? I know the competition committee and others are taking a look. What can you tell us about the performance of Worldpay that you're willing and able to share? And then I'll ask you a readiness question after that.

Yes, absolutely. So I'll start on the regulatory approval front, just given the nature of the business we operate in around the globe, it's a highly regulated industry. We have numerous sort of regulatory approvals we need to achieve to be able to close the transaction. I would say, thus far, we're making really good progress on that. We received HSR approval in the U.S. We're well through the antitrust approval here in the U.K. The CMA actually noted yesterday that they've officially begun their process, which is, I think, good news overall, and we're tracking well to be able to work through the approval process here in the U.K. and the EU more broadly. But as we sit here today, we very much remain on track to be able to close the transaction in the first half of 2026. As we committed when we announced the transaction back in April. And thus far, everything is tracking to be able to deliver on that outcome, and we feel good about the progress that we've made. So everything is kind of moving in the right direction on that front, which is really exciting.

I would say as it relates to the underlying Worldpay business, we continue to be pleased by what we're seeing. They're delivering on certainly the expectations that they set with us and that we obviously spent a lot of time vetting through the diligence process. The business remains very much a solid mid-single-digit grower, also building good momentum in their own business around future trajectory for growth and continuing to deliver on the key milestones and I think the objectives that they have to continue to position the business for the long term and a good growth outcome for the long term. So thus far, we see everything we see kind of coming out of the business is very much what we expected and delivering on all the expectations that we had for the business as we went into the transaction. Naturally, we're very excited to get to close, highly focused on getting to close as soon as practical. And a lot of people inside of our organization are executing against that every day.

Yes. It's a long time to close, obviously. So I would imagine the readiness will be there once the deal is consummated officially. But the bigger question I have is just you'll be the #1 acquirer post Worldpay. So assuming the readiness is there and you can close this and get off the ground and push through the agenda that you've talked about publicly, Cameron, what's the plan or what should investors think about there? How do you leverage the scale you have to differentiate against maybe some of the pure plays that lead with technology? Tell us what the vision is with combined Worldpay?

Yes, I'd be happy to. Maybe I'll spend 2 seconds on readiness because I do think that's important. We are working very hard to make sure that we have the right foundation upon which to integrate Worldpay when we get to close. So I think much of our transformation work will be behind us by the time we get to the closing of the transaction. We're accelerating some of our transformation initiatives to make sure that we have the right foundation when we do get to closing. So there's a lot of effort internally right now, making sure that the business is well prepared to execute day 1, but more importantly, to execute an integration plan around Worldpay that's really centered around 2 -- well, 3 primary objectives.

One is better positioning the combined business for growth outcomes for the long term. As we thought about the Worldpay transaction, we don't want to just be a larger version of who we are today. We want to be a business that can drive better rates of growth. Two, we think we have a unique opportunity combining the business to better position ourselves competitively, and I'll come back to that in a second because it really gets to the latter part of your question. And then third, we have a unique opportunity to combine and create, I think, the strongest team in the industry. Obviously, there's an immense amount of talent in the Global Payments organization. There's an immense amount of talent in the Worldpay organization. Combining those teams and really putting together, I think, what will be the industry's best team is certainly another outcome of this transaction that we want to make sure that we realize.

So that sets us up well then for how do we then compete, position the business for the long term. And I think as I look at the combination of Worldpay and Global Payments, I think we really are uniquely positioned to be able to compete effectively and really create something that the industry has never seen before, which is a combination of a business at the size, scale and scope we are that can innovate and innovate with pace and agility and nimbleness, but also, at the same time, bring a level of scale, scale economics around the globe that I think will be difficult for other competitors to be able to match. So the combined business is nearly $13 billion in pro forma revenue, $6.5 billion of pro forma EBITDA. Perhaps more impressively, we'll process $4 trillion of payments annually operating in 175 countries, 40 of those physically.

That reach, global scale, the capabilities and the complementary nature of the capabilities that come together from the Worldpay business and the Global Payments business, I think, is tremendously powerful. So you talked about some of the newer players and that lead with technology. I think we'll have a technology capability and ability to innovate products and features and solutions that compete favorably with everyone in the marketplace today. And we'll be able to do that in a way that I think brings sort of more differentiated service because of the scale that we have and scale economics, as I mentioned before, that, again, competitively, I think others are going to have a challenge in sort of being able to keep up with the things that we can do.

And we'll have breadth of distribution, we'll have breadth of global reach that I think is going to be incredibly powerful to position the business for the long term. So I think it's difficult to overstate, I think, the benefits of putting these 2 businesses together. Their strengths are our weaknesses, our weakness -- our strengths are their weaknesses. The businesses are highly complementary as a product and capability and segment of the market that we serve today. The global reach and scale that we're going to have, it's -- look, if we can get all the execution right behind that, the power of the combined business, again, I think is really difficult to overstate.

No, I totally agree. The overlay is almost perfect, right, in terms of, like you said, offsetting weaknesses and amplifying strengths.

Well, there's a reason we've been trying to do it for a better part of the decade. So we finally got to a place where we could execute the transaction and we're tremendously excited about it because we've long coveted the combination of the 2 companies, just given how it's rare to find 2 businesses in the same industry that are as complementary as these 2 businesses are. .

Agreed. Yes. And I've been thinking about it for a couple of decades to get to this point. It's amazing to actually see it. But let me ask this. This was another popular question, right? Again, sitting in London, a lot of folks here know the Worldpay asset well. And it's been in, let's say, consolidation mode for some time, right? And we've heard about them even when they're public before, Vantiv going through a lot of exercises to consolidate systems and what have you. But the strength in the e-commerce or the root in e-commerce has always been there, and there's been strength in enterprise as well. What have you studied or learned from them during the diligence process to understand and get comfortable with the tech platform today and its competitiveness in e-comm and enterprise?

Yes. As you can imagine, that's an area that we've spent an immense amount of time in diligence. 50% of their business today is enterprise and digital native multinational e-commerce. Those are areas where Global Payments really doesn't play today. Most of our business is oriented towards SMBs around the globe in all the markets we operate in. So the core asset in Worldpay that we're most excited about is obviously the enterprise and e-com capabilities. And what I would tell you is they have, to some degree, maybe over-indexed on investing in building out their capabilities in the enterprise and e-commerce space over the last several years. It is the primary driver of growth in that business today. And they have a really highly competitive, highly attractive set of capabilities, products, value-added services and a technology platform that competes with the best in that space.

And they are winning share every single day. They're delivering attractive growth rates in the enterprise and e-commerce space. And I think they're well positioned to continue to grow and scale with that business. And the combination of the 2 companies and market access that we can provide that they don't have today, capabilities to deliver omnichannel solutions for enterprise customers in all these different markets around the globe. There's an immense opportunity by putting the 2 businesses together to further catalyze growth, I think, in the enterprise and e-commerce space. But it all starts with a really attractive business that's built on a strong technology platform that was purpose-built to serve that enterprise and e-commerce segment of the market. I think they invested somewhere north of $1 billion in their platform to be able to serve that business well.

A set of products and capabilities and value-added services that resonate with the client base, a risk and compliance infrastructure that allows them to serve the businesses really well and manage risk and fraud in highly competitive ways. Authorization rates that I think a lot of competition in the enterprise and e-commerce space is driven by your ability to authorize at a very high rate, and they do exceptionally well in that area. And importantly, vertical market expertise that really resonates with the client base that they're trying to serve across a variety of different enterprise and e-commerce verticals around the globe. And I think that's an area of distinction for them as well.

Many of their other competitors sort of tend to focus on 1 or 2 verticals. They have much broader vertical reach and vertical expertise that I think positions that business really well for sustainable growth for the long term. So very excited about the enterprise and e-commerce asset inside of Worldpay. It's a big part of what we were hoping to get our arms around through the diligence process, felt very comfortable with the conclusions we reached and certainly excited to have those capabilities as part of the combined Global Payments Worldpay business going forward.

I know Worldpay stand-alone struggled in SMB. You mentioned they over-indexed enterprise and e-comm, they've got big brands there. We know that. On SMB, they've been challenged. Is Genius platonic to make that asset work again?

Yes. I think -- look, I think Genius is a big part of it. I think you're right. On the SMB side, they have had more challenges. Part of that is because they've been investing more heavily in enterprise and e-com. And part of it is really a lack of product and capability, I think, in the SMB space that has left them a little bit more exposed to competition over the last several years. And look, the one thing I don't worry about in the SMB space is product and capability on the Global Payments side. So I think our ability to bring product capability, whether it's Genius, other commerce enablement solutions or value-added services that we can bring to bear on the SMB market, there's immense opportunity for us to bring our product capability into that segment. In the SMB channel, they have really good distribution. They just need better product, better capability, and I think Global Payments brings that in spades. So we feel very good about being able to reaccelerate growth in the SMB channel, leveraging their distribution with our product and capability that's going to make that business far more attractive in the future.

And then just to close that SMB part of the equation out for Worldpay. I know the integrated embedded business -- they made a big bet with that with Mercury back in the day, which was a well-known asset in the U.S. You bought Payrix to have a more hybrid model to go after integrated embedded. So how does that piece work, integrated embedded that is relative to what you have with Genius. Do those things work in harmony? And how do you expect to expose that to Worldpay?

Yes, I do think they work in harmony. So just as a foundational matter, we've been in the integrated business for well over a decade, probably 12, 13 years now and probably have far more vertical diversification in our integrated business today. We tend to focus on more sophisticated ISV software partners who need a little more complex sort of solutioning, need a little more white glove service, need a little more tailored operating model to fit their needs. And that's really core to our integrated business, and we've been very successful with that strategy for a long period of time. .

Worldpay, to your point, had a similar business, but more restaurant-oriented through Mercury. That business has faced more challenges over the course of time, largely with the evolution of competition for point-of-sale software in the restaurant vertical, and that has created, I think, some challenges for the Mercury legacy Mercury business. I think Genius can help alleviate some of those challenges, obviously, because we can bring those capabilities into that back book and provide, I think, some offerings there that will be helpful in terms of trying to protect that business for the long term. But I think more importantly, Worldpay has invested heavily in more of the PayFac and managed PayFac area of the integrated market. They acquired Payrix, which is a fantastic platform to serve that more managed PayFac or PayFac-as-a-service type offering. That complements very nicely the work that we do with more sophisticated ISV partners.

So the combination of the 2 businesses in the integrated space, which is really important to where we're driving the business in the long term, our ability to serve all types of ISV partners, marketplaces, platform partners around the globe. The immense sort of capabilities that we bring together with Global Payments and Worldpay, us more on the sort of sophisticated, more traditional sort of integrated model, theirs with the Payrix asset. We can serve any type of software partner, platform partner, marketplace partner with an array of operating models, technology capabilities, platforms and solutions that really meet any need within the ISV space at scale in multiple markets around the globe.

And I think that's really unique as we think about putting these 2 businesses together. So it's another good example, again, where our strengths have been a little bit of their weakness and their weaknesses or areas -- or their strengths, excuse me, are areas that we haven't invested heavily in, Payrix being a good example of that. And the opportunity to bring those things together, I think, has tremendously value-enhancing sort of prospects for the combined business.

Yes. No, thanks for going through all that. It's helpful for me. I hope it's helpful for everyone else. But it does -- just going through that for the last 10, 15 minutes, right, thinking about all the unlocks across the 2 businesses. It's exciting to think about what can come.

It's really exciting. And that's why as we think about integration of this business, it's a little bit unlike anything we've done in the past because there's so much more orientation around growth. In driving growth outcomes from putting these 2 businesses together and the opportunity to unlock revenue potential that neither one of us could really get at on our own. And a lot of our integration planning up until this point has really been focused on making sure that day 1, we have a well-articulated list of opportunities as a revenue and growth matter that we can start to invest against very early on to be able to unlock some of the potential that we see in putting the 2 businesses together.

The expense synergies are kind of table stakes, and I don't want to take them for granted. We never do, but the reality is that's a well-formed muscle inside of Global Payments today, the ability to combine the businesses, get to the expense synergies. Our targets there are not heroic given the size and scale of the combined business, probably 18% of the underlying operating expense base. Relatively, I think, modest in the grand scheme of these large-scale type acquisitions. So I feel very confident in our ability to get to that, but we're orienting our entire integration approach around how do we make sure we really unlock this growth potential of the combined company? And how do we make sure that putting the 2 businesses together ends up with a combined organization that's more competitive in all the markets that we serve today than either one of us has been able to be standalone.

Yes. That's very clear. I think that is the unlock, and I think we'll see if that unlocks the value, right, for the stock. So that's going to be important for us to track on the outside. So let's -- thanks for going through all the Worldpay. Again, I thought it was important given where we sit. Let's pivot a little bit and talk about some big picture themes, alternative payment methods. You mentioned value-added services a few times earlier. There's been a lot of activity in the capital markets with buy now pay later, pay by bank, stablecoins as well. Can you discuss the implications there for Global Payments? How do you see it? What does it do for take rates? Is anything cannibalistic? Or do you view it as all net additive?

I think, by and large, it's net additive. I think as we look at the proliferation of different sort of payment methods at the point of sale, generally, it's good news for our business. To some degree, the more complexity there is at the point of sale, the more sort of we're solving that complexity for our clients and the more valuable, frankly, we are to our clients. What most of our clients care about around the globe are they want consumers to be able to pay for goods and services, however, their consumers want to pay. They don't care so much whether that's buy now pay later, traditional cards, debit, local debit schemes, QR code-based payment, account-to-account, whatever it is, they just want consumers to be able to transact with no friction. And that's largely the service that we provide to our customers.

And what they care about on the back end is consolidated data, analytics, insights, settlements, flows, payouts in the way that they want to receive them. And again, that's the role we play in the ecosystem, and so we're supporting our Merchant customers. So as long as it's digital, I'd like to say it's good for our business. And yes, there may be a little bit of cannibalization of one digital mechanism to another over time, but more of the cannibalization has continued to be around cash in the ecosystem, what remains. And generally, those are good sort of tailwinds for our business. And look, on average take rates over time, it's generally going to be pretty consistent for us.

So we're not overly worried about one payment mechanism over another as long as it's digital and as long as we're well positioned to be able to serve the needs of our clients in terms of simplifying that complexity, allowing them to get paid in the way that they want to get paid and providing the consolidated data reporting, insights, analytics, value-added services around that, that really enrich the experience that we bring to our client base. That's our focus as a business. And everything that's happening from a payment rail perspective is supportive, I think, of that overall business model.

How about on the stablecoin front, Cameron?

Yes. I think that's an interesting development to continue to watch. I certainly think the near- to medium-term sort of use cases are largely going to be driven around payouts, right? How clients, particularly larger multinational clients choose to receive settlement flows and funds. Obviously, some probably extension into B2B payments and particularly around cross-border payments. And that's something that I think we will continue to monitor and position ourselves around as well. There's not interoperability of stablecoins. I think there's still a lot of barriers to it becoming a more ubiquitous sort of mechanism by which commerce is effectuated every day. I think we're a long way away from consumers using stablecoins to pay for goods and services at the point of sale.

But certainly, there are use cases that I think stablecoins can help solve, particularly around cross-border business-to-business payments, how settlements and payouts are made to different customers. That's an area that we're investing -- Worldpay is investing to make sure that we can deliver those capabilities for our customers and clients in the way that we think the market is going to evolve. So lots of near-term noise, I think, largely in the area of sort of payout and sort of cross-border B2B. But longer term, it's a trend that we need to continue to monitor. But I think we're obviously well positioned to be able to make sure that we're well equipped to be able to meet the needs of the market as it continues to evolve. But as it relates to day-to-day commerce, I think we're a long way away from it having any sort of impact on day-to-day commerce.

Just one more in terms of your own treasury and settlement and ability to reduce cost by leveraging stablecoin and some of the more volatile currencies. Is that something that could move the needle here?

I think there's real opportunity there. Whether it's a needle mover or not, I think, remains to be seen, probably candidly, more opportunity in the Worldpay business because they tend to support larger multinational digital native clients that probably have more FX, more cross-border money movement in their ecosystems than many of the SMB-oriented customers that we serve today. But certainly, I think there's a potential value unlock there that we'll be able to tap into as we bring the businesses together and as the stablecoin market continues to evolve.

Okay. Great. Let's quickly do the divestitures. You did divest the payroll asset, and I think that puts you on track to the number you said to in terms of revenue at Investor Day that you would divest, but you also said that you're still revaluating the portfolio given Worldpay. Can you remind us of where you are with that and what might be considered?

Yes, happy to. So just to rewind the clock a little bit, going into our investor conference last year, we talked about wanting to streamline and simplify the business. And as part of that, we've made the decision to look at exiting a few lines of businesses, geographies that we didn't think were strategic or core to where we wanted to drive the business long term. So year-to-date or sort of activity to date, we've divested about $550 million of revenue. We had targeted $500 million to $600 million, so kind of right in the target that we had established. From that, we've returned about $1.2 billion of capital to shareholders from those divestitures. But we made a lot of those decisions before we had the opportunity before we even knew that we'd have the opportunity to acquire Worldpay.

So I think it behooves us to kind of circle back and revisit some of the decisions we made around specific assets kind of going into our investor conference last year and making sure as we think about the composition of the pro forma business, given that we're acquiring another $5 billion of revenue, we're going to be, as I said, nearly $13 billion of pro forma revenue after adjusting for the Issuer sale, do we still want to be in all those same businesses? And does it make sense? And I think the conclusion we'll likely reach is there may be a couple of other assets that we would look to exit. Same playbook going forward, assuming leverage neutrality and we address any tax consequences of exiting these assets, we'll return whatever proceeds remain to our shareholders that we've done with the prior divestitures. And we're in the process of evaluating those assets now. And obviously, we'll keep investors apprised of any future decisions we make around that.

And the capital you've raised from the divestitures, you've earmarked that towards buybacks?

Correct. Yes.

Given where the stock is and the flexibility that you have, just remind us how you balance the buybacks versus deleveraging?

Yes, it's a great question. So as we sit here today, we're targeting 3x leverage at the end of the year, and we're very much on track to be able to achieve that. We've committed to return over the 2025 to 2027 time frame, putting aside this conversation around asset divestitures, just from regular capital -- or cash flow in the business, we're going to return $7.5 billion of capital to shareholders. And that positions us over the '26 and '27 time frame, in particular, to return pretty significant amounts of capital to our shareholders. I think year-to-date, we've probably done $700-ish million, excluding, again, the capital associated with asset divestitures. That means over the next couple of years, we're going to return a pretty meaningful amount of capital to shareholders to get to that $7.5 billion target over the '25 to '27 time frame. .

At the same time, we'll reduce our leverage from at close with the transaction will probably be around 3.5x. Over an 18- to 24-month time frame, we'll reduce that leverage ratio to 3x as well. And that's kind of our targeted leverage ratio for our business. So we think it's a good balance of obviously maintaining balance sheet strength, flexibility and financial capacity in the business, while at the same time, returning meaningful amounts of capital to shareholder, and we feel very good about the prospects for our business over the '25 to '27 time frame to get to that $7.5 billion. Plus maintaining, again, a leverage profile for the business that we think is appropriate and well sustainable for the future, again, targeting that 3x ratio within 18 to 24 months post closing of the transaction.

I think what's maybe even more interesting then as you think about the '28 time frame, and I know it feels like a long way out, but in reality, it's right around the corner. This is a business that's going to generate leverage free cash flow of nearly $5 billion in 2028 with a 3x leverage. That's an immense amount of capacity given our current market cap and overall enterprise value, immense amount of capacity for us to think about ongoing shareholder returns and obviously putting that capital to use to drive incremental value for shareholders.

So we talk about the scale of the business in terms of competitively, how it's going to position us and the things we can do from an innovation and investment perspective. But the amount of capital and cash that we're going to have available to return to shareholders to drive shareholder returns is enormous, particularly as you think about that 2028 level of $5 billion. And interestingly, that's 50% higher than it would have been had we not done the Worldpay and Issuer transaction. So if we looked at the stand-alone plan we had for 2028 in our pro forma plan with the transactions we're executing, exiting Issuer, acquiring Worldpay, that $5 billion is 50% higher than we would have been on a stand-alone basis. So enormous, I think, value creation potential, leveraging, obviously, the capital allocation we'll have available to us, the strategies we'll have available to us going forward.

Okay. Good. So we went through a lot here. I just wanted to zoom out and close out with a couple of chessboard questions, if you don't mind, Cameron, because we talked over the years, and I've always learned a lot from you and thinking about Global Payments back when it was NDC, I think you and I have talked about this. I've sort of long visioned or thought that like a lot of other tech sectors in payments, you might get to 2, 3 large-scale players, and then you have a lot of niche players that develop and similar to what you see across tech and even financial services, right, Visa, Mastercard or in payroll, you have 2 big players, and you can pick your software companies as well in different verticals. But Global is basically going to be 1 of those 2 or 3 large players.

So thinking about the chessboard, how do you think the ecosystem here evolves? What do you look to across other -- whether it's tech or financial services to inform your decisions on what that next chessboard move will be in '26, '27, '28. I'm sure you're not going to stand still and do nothing in '28. So my question is that how do you see the ecosystem evolving in payments now that we've come to this place where we're close to 2 very large-scale players?

Yes. I think it's an interesting question. It's one we spend a lot of time on. I just think -- I think this is an industry naturally where scale matters. It always has, but it probably matters now more than ever for lots of different reasons. And I think a couple of those are just the pace of change and the ability to invest in innovation at the levels that you need to, to maintain your competitive positioning in the market. I think scale is hugely important to being able to do that. Given just the amount of technology and the implications of technology in the industry, some of the topics we talked about today, whether it's I can't believe AI hasn't come up, but whether it's AI, agentic commerce, stablecoins, innovation and the ability to invest against these things, scale is critically important to that.

And it's a big part of the thought process that went into acquiring Worldpay. I think focus is incredibly important to that. As we thought about our business and wanting to exit Issuer, it was largely with an eye towards, look, our business is enormously complex, enormously competitive, having all pro forma 28,000, 29,000 team members around the globe, thinking about focused on Merchant Solutions every day, I think, is incredibly important. That focus in a highly competitive, highly dynamic business that's changing at the rate our industry is, I think being solely focused on it is critically important for us as well.

And I think the reality is this is a business that is -- the regulatory intensity continues to increase in every market around the globe. And scale matters when you're trying to deal with just the regular complexity from a regulatory standpoint for the business. And scale matters, I think, to our large enterprise customers who care about compliance, who care about who they're working with and how compliant you are and are you meeting the regulatory standards and requirements in all of these markets, that really matters to them as well.

So I think this is an industry where long term, again, scale matters more than it's ever mattered. And I think we've been through a very sort of aggressive expansionary cycle in our industry, a lot of new players, a lot of new fintech, a lot of capital being thrown at payments. I think inevitably, we're now looking at a consolidation sort of cycle in the space where you're going to see more consolidation. You're going to see businesses positioning for better scale so that they can invest, they can compete, they can maintain sort of their regulatory and compliance posture. I think those things are really important to how the business is evolving. And I think we're ahead of the game, quite frankly, on that front with a set of assets and capabilities and an amount of scale, again, that I think most of our competitors, irrespective of what moves they make, they're going to have a challenge sort of keeping up with that.

That's the supplier side. Let's close it out on the consumer side, right? Payments has been pretty slow, right, to change behavior of consumers. Do you see that changing? You mentioned agentic and whatnot, taking robots away or do you see the consumer side changing over the next 3 to 5 years or the pace of change?

I don't know that the pace of change is going to be all that dramatically different than what it's been in the past. I think the reality in our space and probably people underestimate how difficult it is to change consumer behavior. And I'm old, so I'm probably not the best use case. But certainly, there are younger consumers that are going to change probably more rapidly than older consumers. But the overall consumer space more broadly is very hard to change the consumer behavior. Will all these things have impact? Is there going to be agentic commerce? Will that have an impact? Absolutely. Is the level of impact in the short term as immense as people think? Probably not, at least in my opinion. Are the long-term implications what people think they will be? Probably.

I think there's a certain segment of the population, younger generations are going to be more comfortable with agents making buying decisions on their behalf and those types of things. But I think in the short term, it's largely going to be oriented around the search experience and how people get to making a buying decision versus having agents actually making decisions on behalf of their consumer. And -- but all these things are going to drive immense change over time. I think in the payments ecosystem, I just think it's always a little slower than people anticipate because end of day, changing consumer behavior takes time.

Agree. Cameron, Josh, thank you both for being here and supporting the conference. I always enjoy the conversation.

Great to be here with you, and thanks, everybody, for spending a little bit of time with us today. Have a great rest of your day.

Thank you.