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spk01: Thank you operator and welcome to the deluxe second quarter 2024 earnings call. Joining me on today's call are Barry McCarthy, our president and chief executive officer, and Chip Zint, our chief financial officer. At the end of today's prepared remarks, we will take questions. Before we begin, and as seen on the current slide, I'd like to remind everyone that comments made today regarding management's intentions, projections, financial estimates, and expectations about the company's future strategy or performance are forward-looking in nature, as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Additional information about factors that may cause actual results to differ from projections is set forth in the press release we furnished this afternoon in our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2023, and other company SEC filings. On the call today, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, including comparable adjusted revenue, adjusted and comparable adjusted EBITDA and EBITDA margin, adjusted and comparable adjusted EPS, and free cash flow. In our press release, today's presentation, and our filings with the SEC, you'll find additional disclosures regarding the non-GAAP measures, including reconciliation of these measures to the most comparable measures under U.S. GAAP. Within the materials, we are also providing reconciliations of GAAP EPS to comparable adjusted EPS, which may assist with your modeling.
spk00: And with that, I'll turn it over to Barry. Thanks, Brian, and good evening, everyone. I'm pleased to report our second quarter results reflecting sustained earnings momentum across the enterprise. including continued year-over-year improvement to both comparable adjusted EBITDA dollars and rate, which improved 80 basis points to 19% during the period. We also continued to deliver strong operating cash flows, reflecting expected sequential growth versus our first quarter results, and a very robust year-to-date improvement versus the first half of 2023. These results are reflective of our continuing strong execution across core capital allocation priorities and initiatives of our North Star operating plan. These efforts are accelerating the growth of these key profitability metrics and further demonstrate our ability to consistently expand earnings faster than revenue. During the quarter, We continue to deliver strong revenue results across both the data solutions and merchant services segments in particular, reflecting year-to-date growth rates through the first half of 2024 at 13% and 8% respectively, which I'll cover a bit more in a few moments. Accompanying this growth, we also experienced some ongoing revenue headwinds across the B2B payment segment, as well as expected secular declines within the print portfolio. Based on these trends and our updated outlook, today we're pleased to reaffirm our full year guidance ranges for earnings and free cash flow. We're modestly adjusting our revenue range, given some lingering macro uncertainty over the balance of the year. Importantly, each of our operating segments has continued to maintain strong year-to-date adjusted EBITDA margins in line with both the operating leverage demonstrated in our total enterprise results and North Star objectives. Now, prior to reviewing our second quarter enterprise and segment highlights in a bit more detail, I'd like to provide a couple of additional comments on the broader macro environment and on North Star progress. As we've discussed previously, Deluxe monitors trends around both small business sentiment and consumer discretionary spending, as well as the interest rate environment. We review many sources of data, including from the card brands, Federal Reserve, and other economic forecast providers, as well as our own proprietary data. These trends impact multiple areas of our portfolio. Reminder, our North Star goal remains to unlock $80 million of incremental adjusted EBITDA and $100 million of annualized incremental free cash flow, both by 2026. Consistent with my update following the first quarter, we've continued to make meaningful progress across all 12 North Star workstreams shown here. Initiatives comprising roughly two-thirds of our goal
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