Fidelity National Information Services, Inc.

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the FIS Fourth Quarter 2020 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Mr. Nate Rozoff. head of corporate finance and investor relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Good morning. And thanks to everyone for joining us today for the FIS fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings conference call. The call is being webcasted. Today's news release, corresponding presentation, and webcast are available on our website at FISglobal.com. Gary Norcross, our chairman, president, and CEO, will discuss our operating performance. and share our strategy to continue accelerating revenue growth and maximizing shareholder value. Woody Woodall, our Chief Financial Officer, will then review our financial results and provide forward guidance. Bruce Lothers, President of Banking and Merchant Solutions, will also be joining the call today for the Q&A portion. Turning to slide three, today's remarks will contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties as described in the press release and other filings with the SEC. The company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law. Please refer to the Safe Harbor language. Also, throughout this conference call, we will be presenting non-GAAP information, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net earnings, adjusted net earnings per share, and free cash flow. These are important financial performance measures for the company, but are not financial measures as defined by GAAP. Reconciliation of our non-GAAP information to the GAAP information information are presented in our earnings release. With that, I'll turn the call over to Gary who will begin his remarks on slide five.

Thank you, Nate. Good morning and thank you for joining us. I'm pleased to announce our fourth quarter and full year results starting on slide five. 2020 was an unprecedented year for the world and for FIS, with the COVID-19 pandemic impacting the world on a human as well as an economic level. Despite the extraordinary year, we leveraged our scale and resources to keep the global economy running while delivering solid results. We generated $12.6 billion in revenue as our balanced solution portfolio allowed us to offset weaker consumer spending trends with strong demand for our banking capital market solutions. As we close out 2020, all three of our business segments ended the year with record annual sales, continuing to prove that our solutions and technologies are winning share around the globe. Our backlog grew 7% organically to $22 billion. This gives us exceptional visibility into our future growth trajectory and drives our confidence in accelerating organic revenue growth for our banking and capital market segments. From a merchant perspective, given the accelerating rollout of COVID vaccines globally and improving trends and economic indicators, we are confident we will see strong merchant revenue acceleration throughout 2021. Our team continues to execute at the highest levels demonstrated by our ability to expand adjusted EBITDA margins by 120 basis points for the full year, despite near-term COVID challenges. We also made great progress with the WorldPay integration, remaining well ahead of plan and exited the year generating more than $200 million in revenue synergies and more than $750 million in cost synergies. With this impressive momentum, we are excited to build on our strengths as we look ahead to accelerating organic revenue growth in 2021. Turning to slide six, FIS had a very successful year operating the business, and I couldn't be prouder of the team's accomplishments and unwavering commitment to support our clients and communities. The modernization and innovation investments we've made are paying dividends, enabling us to accelerate organic growth across our entire business. Amazon, a long-term merchant client, added our capital markets industry-leading treasury management system to the growing portfolio of services that we provide them. Further, Walgreens and Giant Eagle expanded their long-standing relationships with FIS. Walgreens selected our integrated payable solution, and Giant Eagle selected a series of our back-office financial solutions from our comprehensive banking suite. We also recently developed an innovative benefits card solution with United Health Group that combines strengths from across FIS. In this partnership, we created a fully in-house solution where we accept transactions as the merchant processor, route them through our network, and finish with our own authorization and settlement engine. 2020 highlighted how our unique capabilities are being successfully combined to serve our clients in ways that they can't find anywhere else. We continue to invest in cutting-edge technologies for the future, including contactless, voice-enabled and self-service solutions, as well as AI and automation. We launched over 60 new products in 2020 with a focus on enabling our clients to grow their revenues and operate more efficiently. All of this enables FIS to emerge from the pandemic in an even stronger competitive position. We also continue to be relentlessly focused on improving our own operational efficiencies. We made exceptional progress in integrating WorldPay as well as consolidating platforms and data centers with over 70% of our global compute now running in the cloud. To continue our upward margin momentum, we are beginning the next phase of our enterprise transformation. We will leverage data analytics and automation to reduce our cost and create new efficiencies by upgrading and consolidating our technology platforms as well as continuing to simplify our technology architecture. As a result, FIS will be faster, more agile, and deliver frictionless service by transforming our operating model and streamlining our organization. Given the tremendous achievements from our data center consolidation program and ongoing cost synergies, I am confident in our ability to deliver 45% adjusted EBITDA margins this year and then continue to expand them in each year for the foreseeable future. From a market viewpoint, demand continues to increase. Both our sales pipeline and backlog continue to grow. and we are finding new sources of revenue synergies and cross-sell wins to accelerate our business further. Turning to slide seven. In banking solutions, we continue to win share and accelerate revenue growth. Our investments have enabled us to build a differentiated offering, winning new logos across markets of all sizes, and actively expanding wallet share with existing clients. As a result, our backlog within the banking business expanded by 8% organically, and generated $3.5 billion in new sales during 2020, which is our largest selling year ever. Cross-selling of new solutions into our existing client base is also up, including a 23% increase in cross-selling solutions to our top 100 clients. In addition, three of our recent Modern Banking Platform wins are now live, and we project that the Modern Banking Platform will generate in excess of $100 million of revenue in 2021. We expanded our relationship with Bank of Hawaii to power their digital banking product offering. They will implement our Digital One solution to bring modern, best-in-class capabilities to both self-service and banker-assisted channels. Lastly, U.S. Bank, a top five bank, selected our bill pay solution due to our simple integration and personalization across digital channels. Our multi-year sales success, strong revenue backlog, continued strength in the pipeline and ability to consistently drive innovation into the market lay out a clear path for banking to accelerate revenue growth in 2021. Turning to slide eight. In merchant, we will leverage our technology advantage and leading competitive position to continue to win share, all while taking advantage of the revenue tailwind being presented by recovering economic and pandemic indicators. We continue to outpace the industry regarding total volumes being processed, indicating not only the overall strength of our capabilities, but our continued ability to gain share throughout the pandemic. We are also seizing the opportunity created by the rapid shift of consumer spending to online and digital channels, where our e-commerce volume, excluding travel and airlines, grew 32%. We provide advanced and highly differentiated omnichannel capabilities, including buy online and pick up or return in store, which merchants must have to compete in the digital economy. Our expanded relationship with Walmart to process e-commerce transactions is a great example, and we are also winning new business with innovative online providers like Grubhub. Norton LifeLock also selected FIS to provide global e-commerce acquiring using our innovative Access WorldPay gateway, which the Strawhecker Group just recognized for having the highest authorization rates in the industry. Looking forward, our global reach, tailored solutions, and innovative technology will continue to drive share gains for us as changing merchant and consumer behaviors play to our strengths. Moving to slide nine. Demand is strong for our end-to-end front, middle, and back office solutions within capital markets and our leading regulatory compliance technology. We continue to gain traction with our SaaS-based delivery model, which drove a 7 percent increase in new sales for reoccurring revenue in 2021, including a 19 percent increase in the fourth quarter. In addition, new logos contributed to 26% of our fourth quarter new sales, and average deal size grew 9% as we continue to add to our portfolio of leading buy-side and sell-side clients. All of these are strong indicators for accelerating growth in 2021. A few sales highlights include BNP Paribas, who recently chose to expand our relationship. We will transform their post-trade derivatives clearing platform, which will allow them to benefit from significant costs and operational efficiencies, as well as enhance customer service, all while reducing risk. We also signed an agreement with Allianz, a large global insurance company, to provide payment and cash processing platforms. On the buy side, Vanguard recently expanded their relationship with us to include outsourced tax reporting, highlighting one of our leading RegTech solutions. Our differentiated end-to-end solutions are winning share, and our transition to reoccurring SaaS-based revenue streams is also taking hold. which gives us confidence in our ability to further accelerate this business. I'd like to underscore that we are pleased with our full year 2020 results across all of our business segments. We expect this positive momentum to continue into 2021 and beyond. Woody will now provide additional detail on the financial results for the quarter, as well as forward guidance.

Woody? Thanks, Gary, and thank you all for joining us. Starting on slide 11, I will touch on our fourth quarter results before transitioning to our forward guidance. We remain excited about the trajectory of our banking and capital market segments and look forward to significantly rebounding growth in our merchant segment as global economies reopen. On a consolidated basis, organic growth was flat during the fourth quarter and adjusted EBITDA margins expanded by 60 basis points to generate adjusted EPS of $1.62. We expect to exit 2021 generating $400 million of run rate revenue synergies based on strong client demand for our premium payback solution, growing distribution with new bank referral partners, as well as geographic expansion and cross-sell initiatives across the enterprise. These revenue synergies will help supplement our organic revenue growth profile, giving us increased confidence in achieving 79% organic revenue growth on a sustained basis. We also have line of sight to execute an additional $100 million of operating cost synergies, bringing that total to $500 million exiting 2021, or 125% of the original OpEx target. Turning to segment results on slide 12. In banking, organic revenue growth accelerated to 5% and strong execution more than offset lower termination fees. Based on our large and growing backlog, as well as our growing pipeline of new opportunities, we continue to expect the banking segment to accelerate into the mid to high single digits. Our merchant segment revenue declined 9% organically or 7% on a normalized basis when excluding the step-up in debit routing synergy that we achieved following the WorldPay acquisition. As we begin to laugh the impact of COVID-19 in the second quarter, we expect merchant revenue growth to rebound sharply, driving mid to high teens growth for 2021. Our capital market segment continues to exceed expectations with organic growth of 3% in the quarter, which includes about a point of headwind associated with the timing of license renewals. This segment is positioned for low to mid-single-digit organic growth in 2021, driven by another strong year of new sales and recurring revenue growth. On slide 13, we provide more detail about how client mix is affecting merchant revenue growth during the pandemic. The significant difference in consumer spending trends between discretionary and non-discretionary verticals is creating an unusual revenue mix headwind for us. Discretionary spending verticals, which typically carry higher yields, experienced a sharp contraction during the pandemic. Meanwhile, non-discretionary verticals and most of econ typically comprise of lower priced, large enterprise and multinational clients experienced strong demand. As a result, merchant revenue declined even as volume continued to grow. Beginning in the second quarter, we expect these mixed headwinds on yield to reverse as discretionary verticals rebound over easy comps. This should create a significant yield tailwind for our merchant revenue growth that extends until these verticals rebound fully. Turning to slide 14, I want to touch on the strength of our balance sheet, cash flow, and liquidity position. We generated over $3 billion of free cash flow in 2020, which was up about 50% over last year. We invested over $1 billion in CapEx in order to drive new technology and solutions to the market. We made the strategic decision to maintain our capital expenditure budget through the pandemic as others were forced to retrench in order to continue to accelerate our new sales and competitive momentum relative to our peers. Even as we continue to invest in innovation and growth, our liquidity position continues to grow and reach $4.6 billion by the end of the fourth quarter, which is up by about $400 million sequentially. Looking forward, we expect free cash flow conversion to continue to improve, up from 24% of revenue in 2020, increasing to 25 to 27 percent of revenue in 2021 as we continue to drive integration and efficiency throughout the business. Turning to slide 15, I want to touch on our capital allocation priorities in light of the large share repurchase authorization and simultaneous dividend increase that we recently announced. Over the long term, organic growth and M&A opportunities have been and will continue to be our first priority for long term success. We will invest aggressively in our fastest growing businesses and target high-growth assets for M&A to accelerate or extend our growth profile. If it fits our overall strategy, drives accelerating growth for our company, and is actionable, we will execute accordingly. Next, share repurchase will continue to be a primary tool for returning excess free cash flow along with consistent 10% to 15% dividend increase each year. In the short term, we believe that FIS shares are trading well below their intrinsic value, creating an opportune time to buy back stock. We recently announced Board approval to buy back 100 million shares, which represents approximately 16% of our shares outstanding, or over $13 billion at current stock price. The Board's decision to approve this program reflects continued confidence in the strength of our financial position and the durability of our business model. There is no time limit on this authorization, and we expect to begin buying stock as soon as we can. I'd like to begin our discussion of 21 guidance with a view into our adjusted EBITDA margin expectations on slide 16. We expect to achieve 250 to 300 basis points of adjusted EBITDA margin expansion in 21. The biggest driver of this will be high incremental margins as revenue growth accelerates. We anticipate approximately 100 basis points of margin expansion associated with our ongoing achievement of operating expense synergies. Unwinding our COVID-related short-term cost actions will create approximately 150 basis points of headwind in 2021 as these costs come back online. We continue to anticipate meaningful margin expansion beyond 2021, supported by our one-to-many operating model and ongoing efficiencies as we continue to optimize our infrastructure. Turning to our guidance on slide 17. In the first quarter, we expect organic growth of 1% to 2% generating revenues of $3.13 to $3.16 billion. Once we lap the COVID pandemic comps in late Q1, we expect revenue growth to accelerate materially beginning with the second quarter and driving us to our full year expectations. We expect to generate $1.25 to $1.28 billion of adjusted EBITDA for a margin of approximately 40 to 40.5% as we begin to fund our bonus pool. This will result in adjusted EPS of $1.20 to $1.25 for the quarter. For the full year, we anticipate revenue of $13.5 to $13.7 billion. This represents 8% to 9% organic revenue growth, which is higher than the 7% to 9% range that we initially expected, reflecting our increased confidence as Gary described. Further, we expect to generate $6 to $6.15 billion of adjusted EBITDA for a margin of approximately 45%. As a result of our accelerating revenue growth and expanding margins, We expect adjusted EPS to grow 14% to 17% to a range of $6.20 to $6.40. Finally, we provide some additional guidance assumptions in the appendix material. As we enter 2021, I'm excited about our accelerating revenue growth and free cash flow generation. I believe we are uniquely positioned as a sustained higher growth large cap stock and will be able to drive consistent long-term shareholder value. Operator, will you please open the line for questions?

Of course. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question will come from Jason Kupferberg with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for sharing some of the questions. Merchant volume data, I think, clearly shows that there's no signs of market share loss here. But I wanted to actually start with a question on the banking segment. Obviously, it's still your largest segment. And I wanted to just get a sense of your conviction level and the growth acceleration path for banking during this year. What are the potential risks there and any year-over-year comp issues around termination fees or other dynamics we should be aware of, aside from obviously the lumpiness and the transaction-based portion of that business?

Yeah, Jason, Gary, that's a great question. We're very confident in accelerating growth in the banking channel. It's clear when you look at the backlog, you've seen acceleration over the last several quarters, which is a testament to the sales engine closing a business. So now, as we enter into this year, it's really all about implementing that backlog, getting it stood up, I thought it was important to let everybody know that, for example, the modern banking platform, we had three deals already go live this year, which is a good testament to that platform. It's now in market processing. Obviously, we've got a lot of sales behind that that are in the implementation cycle and continue to progress. But we feel good about where we are. It's hard to predict termination fees. at this point, but we see no indications that we're going to have challenges with termination fees or growing over termination fees. So I think it's just going to be good execution on behalf of banking through the implementation channel. Obviously, we want to continue to have our sales engine continue to add to that backlog so that growth acceleration maintains going into 2022. But we feel good about 2021.

Jason, to add a little color on the cadence of the year, we anticipate Q1 to continue to accelerate off of Q4 and continue to see solid growth each quarter over the course of 2021.

Okay. And then just for my follow-up, Woody, just maybe two clarifications for you. First off, Have you factored any of the share buyback into the EPS guides for the year? Because it looks like the full year share count outlook is actually up from what you just reported. And then can you just run us through the first quarter segment level growth expectations? Thanks, guys.

Yeah, we have not factored in share repurchase into the EPS. That's an upside opportunity as we go into market over the course of the year. We think we'll be in market over the entire span of 2021. and we'll continue to pay back debt as well to meet year-end leverage at below three turns, but anticipate absolutely driving share repurchase over the course of the year, and it's not in the EPS guide right now, Jason. Along with the segment guide, you're looking at capital markets having a difficult comp in Q1 and then seeing significant growth over the remainder of the year. We anticipate merchant revenue to be roughly flat for Q1 this year with accelerating growth heavy acceleration in Q2 and ongoing acceleration as we lap COVID pandemic comps. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question will come from George Milos with Cowan. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, guys, and thank you for taking my questions. I wanted to start off with sort of a high-level question maybe for Gary and for Bruce, and that's just, you know, when you look at the banking segment and you highlight a cloud-native technology that you're going to market with Maybe you can just kind of explain to us cloud native versus cloud enabled. What does that differentiate for you in the eyes of your customers? What are you able to deliver, whether it be faster or more of, that would be a differentiator? And then maybe related to that, as you look at the landscape of newer competitors in the market, has that changed at all in terms of the competitive landscape and maybe their ability to sort of move upstream to larger customers?

Yeah, no, George, a great question. And I'll start, and then I'll turn it over to Bruce. I think you're hitting a very important point. We were well ahead of the cloud migration, as you remember, going back five years ago, where we started moving and enabling our capabilities in the cloud and taking advantage of that. And the advantage in market was certainly resiliency, availability, speed, et cetera. Advantage to us was lowering our overall cost. We then started three years ago building cloud native applications to sit on the technology framework. And what you're seeing there is a totally different paradigm shift. And you are starting to see some startups in the market. But I would say we're well ahead, whether it's our modern banking platform, our Code Connect platform, our digital one. All of those are about enabling speed, lowering overall costs, being able to deploy in more componentized architecture and really take advantage of the cloud.

Yeah, I would just add on. I think it's right. It's been an evolution for us over the last few years, as Gary just stated. And the benefit for us has been able to drive more product into market. And you can see those new products coming to market are fueling our growth rate.

That's great, Colin. Just a quick follow-up on the M&A side. You know, Gary, there are a lot of assets out there. Is FIS willing to do sort of a larger acquisition that will accelerate revenue growth but might be dilutive to earnings over the near term? And then just, you know, how are you thinking about targets, whether they be on the merchant side or the banking side?

Yeah, I think it's a great question, and Woody tried to address that in some of the capital allocation and the prepared remarks. As you think about it, M&A is going to continue to be an important pillar in our strategy. We're going to continue to look for things that accelerate our growth further from where we are today. You know, large transformational M&A, we think we're extremely good at integrating those kind of companies. You see the success rate we've had now. with well over $740 million of cost out of world pay and over $200 million in revenue at this point. So we think there's a way to drive scale and to drive complements to that. As we think about it, our aperture can be pretty wide. Our diversification of revenue is an important differentiator for us. You've seen us actually do very well against our peer group. in the middle of a pandemic, which is all due to that diversification of revenue. So opening our aperture and looking for things that maybe could drive those kind of benefits I just described would be important. But we also, to Bruce's point earlier, given our investment in innovation, given our investment in technology, our ability to launch new product and capability, we don't have to do M&A to continue to grow. But if we could find something that accelerates our growth, brings the necessary scale that we're looking for, additive scale, that's the ability to take out costs, integrate that company, absolutely we would do another M&A transaction. Thanks, Gary.

Thank you. Our next question will come from Darren Peller with Wolf Research. Please go ahead.

All right. Hey, thanks, guys. You know, your margin targets are back to what you said they would be when you pretty much announced the deal at world pay at 45%. And so, you know, we get a lot of questions on where margins should be given scale and operating leverage in the business combined with, you know, versus investments you're making. So I'd love to talk through, first of all, the areas of focus of investments you want to make this year and And then going forward, make sure we're still back on track. I think you said before, or Gary, maybe it was you earlier, that you'd expand margins in years after. Is it back to that 50 to 100 basis points type model of margin expansion going forward? And then maybe, again, just really focusing on where you guys plan to lay out incremental dollars for investments throughout this year and next.

Yeah, thanks. I'll touch on the margin profile beyond 2021. You're right. We're seeing significant operating leverage in the business as we anticipated, as we see revenue rebound. Again, that's roughly 300 to 350 bps. We are seeing incremental synergies driving us up another 150 basis points with some headwind across the short-term cost actions that we have. Within the operating leverage component, there is some incremental investment there to drive the sustained growth. If you look beyond 2021, I think you're right. We're more back into a roughly 50 to 100 basis points a year of annual margin expansion that we feel good about based on ongoing initiatives, operating leverage within the business, and continued focus on cost initiatives to take cost out of the business long term.

Yeah, let me add a little color on that, Darren. I mean, as you think about our investment strategy, we obviously have concluded our day center consolidation, which was very successful, and we've talked about that a lot. Now it's our opportunity to really move to the next evolution of our technology. And so, as Woody talked about, we'll be investing in our businesses, not only in new product that actually Bruce brought up and deploying more new product faster in market, which is going to be very important, we have a really unique opportunity to now start consolidating our platforms and getting significant cost out. So we're very confident in continuing to accelerate that 50 and 100 bits beyond this year, all while maintaining what we would view as really industry-leading investment back in innovation and growth. And so we've been able to maintain that balance throughout the data center consolidation, and we would expect that to be no different with this next wave. but very comfortable in continued margin expansion on an ongoing basis.

Okay. And just one quick follow-up to George's question before, I think, was, you know, when we think about M&A versus capital, I mean, allocation, you guys obviously moved your thresholds to three turns at the end of the year for debt, which gives you more flexibility on buybacks this year. Is that a signal that, you know, we're hanging tight a little bit on buybacks? I'm sorry, on M&A, rather? Or... I know you mentioned you're looking for potentially both types of growthy tuck-in, but also large transformational. What would you prefer, Gary? Would it really be to do a large transformational, given I know FIS is good at that, or do you have any preference?

Thanks, guys. I think our preference would be the one that drives the most shareholder value at the end of the day, right? Something that fills a gap in our capability, brings the necessary scale that we would need in a particular area that we're focused on. I think that can be translated into whether it's tuck-in or large transformational M&A. I also would tell you we also have been pretty disciplined in our approach over the years, right? So this is not a company that has to do M&A in order to continue to grow and accelerate, and you see that with our guide. When we did the WorldPay combination, we guided to 79% growth, and this year we're going to be in that range, and obviously we feel comfortable we can maintain in that range going even into 2022 and beyond with margin expansion based on things we've talked about. So, you know, we'll continue to look at things that make sense for the company, things that drive scale, things that fill in product, things that we see perhaps the markets moving in a direction where we think doing some type of M&A activity will be faster and us building it ourselves. All of that will be taken in consideration and making sure that it drives the appropriate shareholder returns. All right, that makes sense.

Thanks, guys.

Thank you. Our next question will come from David Togut with Evercore ISI.

Thank you. Good morning, Gary and Woody. Good morning, David. Good morning, Gary. Could you give us a sense of how you expect Q2 to Q4 to play out, both in banking and merchant solutions? When we think about the underlying drivers, for example, in merchants, of yield where you've been a little challenged given the pressure on the smaller merchants. So yield, T&E, how that might play out through the year, particularly travel, and any other factors for merchant. And then thinking through banking solutions, can you give us a sense of when some of these big deals might convert by quarter? You called out $100 million in MBP revenue expected. And any thoughts on sort of demand and banking solutions on kind of the cross-sell and up-sell side would also be appreciated.

Yeah, I'll touch on the cadence of the growth there, David, and then we can touch on the MVP impact as well. You know, we anticipate significant growth, particularly in merchant and Q2 as we lap COVID impacts. We anticipate... the mix to flip the other way, as we've talked about before, when we see volumes coming back in the discretionary areas and in travel and airlines to improve. We certainly do not have travel and airlines at the same pre-COVID levels throughout 2021. We think it'll take into 2022 before that actually comes back 100%, but certainly see outsized growth expectations in Q2 and Q3 and Q4 of 2021. The remainder of the business, banking, again, we anticipate acceleration off of Q4 into Q1 and then continue to see good, solid growth in each quarter. And then capital markets, we anticipate actually to accelerate over the course of the year with a difficult comp in the first quarter and then second and third quarter to move on. If you think about the cadence of EPS for the year, as we've outlined the numbers, the information around Q1 versus consensus estimates. Obviously, we think consensus estimates are a little too high for Q1. We think Q2 and Q3 are roughly in line, and Q3 is a little low to give you sort of a full cadence of the year for Q4, a little low. Excuse me. So that's a little bit of there. MBP, we have converted three customers that are live now, and we do anticipate it to drive $100 million of revenue in 2021. and we continue to work through the conversions of additional sales that we made throughout 2020.

Bruce, why don't you take that?

Just adding on to Woody's comment, from a demand perspective around MVP in particular and banking as a whole, continue to see excellent demand for MVP. Our qualified pipeline has doubled coming out of the year, and so we really see a lot of activity in this space, certainly in the large areas. bank categories. So I feel very positive about continued momentum in MVP. And then on the cross-sell, again, I think as Gary mentioned early on in the call, it was a record sales year for the group in banking, actually, in all three segments. And we're continuing to see a lot of opportunities and a lot of success really driving our synergy numbers as well. So a great pipeline for cross-sell.

Yeah, a significant indicator of that, David, was I mentioned in the top 100 financial institutions, we saw a 23% increase in cross-sells. That's significant for the year. And, you know, continuing to see that from a pipeline standpoint. So obviously we've really differentiated ourselves on the large end of the market in banking. and that level of cross-sell, given the new product capability that Bruce and the team are bringing online, it continues to be a very important indicator.

Understood. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question will come from Dave Koning with Baird. Please go ahead.

Yeah. Hey, guys. Thanks so much. And I guess my first question just revenue last quarter, I think, in merchant was down mid-single digits kind of on a core normalized basis, and it went to negative nine, but volume actually accelerated from 2% to 4%, and like you said, that's very much market growth in volume. Why did that gap widen? Was there something in Q4 specifically that just the move away from high-yielding merchants just kind of accelerated in that quarter?

Yeah, I think you had two things really rolling through the fourth quarter, Dave, where Volume and non-discretionary continued to increase, which carried a lower yield as we described in the prepared materials. The combination of lower travel into Q4, which we saw even lower travel into Q4, and the very tight lockdown in the UK, which impacted retail and restaurant in the UK, certainly we saw impact from that in the fourth quarter that continues to show that separation. If you remember, we saw yields in the second quarter move away from volumes. We saw those come back some in the third quarters as economy reopened. And then as you saw lockdowns go back in place in fourth quarter, we saw yields diverge again. So certainly a trend around that that we're seeing at this point and can kind of predict and get some expectations around. I think at the end of the day, it's around when do the economies reopen. And certainly either way, we are going to lap the COVID items by the end of March this year. regardless. You're going to see, you know, easier comps over the remainder of the year, no matter how fast the vaccine comes out. Gotcha.

Thanks for that. And then the second question, this is kind of two parts, they're both short, but what moved out of banking and capital markets into corporate? And then secondly, margin by segment this year, are cap markets and banking kind of normal 50 to 100 bps of expansion, then merchant up like five, 600 bps? Is that kind of how we should think of it?

Yeah, a couple of things in there. We did move a couple of things that are non-strategic for us into corporate and other. And think about like an India ATM business, for example, be one area. And then Cat Markets had a smaller piece that was put over in there. We anticipate either selling or winding down those businesses as they don't fit long-term strategically or structurally not as solid as the remainder of the business. It's about 3% of total revenue. It is anticipated to impact 2021's organic growth a very small amount, less than a half a point. With regard to the margins, you're right. We anticipate good solid margin growth in both banking and cap markets over the course of the year with obviously outsized margin expansion in the merchant business.

Great. Thanks, guys.

Thank you. Our next question will come from Chanson Huang with JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Thanks so much. Good morning. You covered a lot of stuff here. I just want to ask about merchant. As the world reopens here and we see new business formation come back, do you feel confident they have the right distribution channels to capture the shift in where the merchants are going? Seems to be a shift, for example, to marketplaces and software-led sales and integrated payments and that kind of thing. Do you think you have enough muscle in those areas as we reopen?

Yeah, I think it's a great question. I think we actually do have good muscle in that space. We've done a really nice job increasing our direct sales force. We also had a lot of success last year increasing our partner-led sales. I mean, a lot of our partner growth areas were up four and five times over the prior years, whether that's banking referral or even some of our ISV referral programs, which will pay huge dividends to us. going into the recovery. But I think we're well positioned to take advantage of it. We also have made a lot of investments in our technology as well, which really allows for more rapid onboarding of merchants. So all of those things would be great indicators of us being in a really good position on the recovery.

Okay. Great. And just a quick follow-up then, just with all the retail trading going on that we've seen recently. Any impact to your capital markets business? And also just a clarification on the margin side. Are we capturing an unusual amount of implementation cost this year on margin that you might get relief from next year? Just wanted to make sure I caught that. Sorry for two quick follow-ups. Thank you.

Yeah, I don't think you're seeing an impact on the trading side of any significance based on recent activity there. And then on the margin side, a number of those implementation dollars get capitalized in the balance sheet and amortized back off over time, so we don't anticipate a significant lift-up associated with that. It'll be more than that normal 50 to 100 basis points a year in ordinary course of operating leverage and focus cost reduction. Thank you, Beth.

Thank you. Our next question will come from Ashwin Shirvaikar with Citi. Please go ahead.

Hi, thank you. So I guess my question is, first of all, on overall growth. In 4Q, you were talking about the 7 to 9 expectation. The organic expectation now is 8 to 9. And as I look at it, there's, you know, potential underlying improvements. There's the 4Q results, which result in a rebaselining. There's a, you know, you're excluding, I think, corporate now from the baseline definition, and there's FX. So can you walk through the breakout of what changed? And as for the underlying improvements part of it, maybe perhaps you can even break down what's coming from better synergies versus net new sales.

Yeah, I think you've got a combination of things there, Ashwin. First and foremost, the new sales we've been talking about from banking and the growth in the backlog are is what's driving us to accelerating growth expectations in that segment into the mid to high single digits. You know, we outlined an accelerated expectation for Q4. We delivered on that. As I described earlier in the call, we anticipate continued acceleration over the remainder of the year, so that's pretty solid there. We've got a difficult comp in cap markets, but we anticipate accelerating growth into the mid to high – with accelerating growth over the remainder of the year. I think that is a combination of the SaaS story we've been talking about, where we're seeing more visibility into the revenue and less license sales and ongoing SaaS-based subscription-type revenue in the capital markets group. And then merchant, obviously, we're looking at a COVID rebound as we lap comps and continue to see economies reopen and some of the volumes come back. If you look at the corporate and other components, Again, it's about 3% of overall revenue. The impact of that moving in there is less than a point, less than half a point actually of 2021, so very minuscule impact. But we are going to look to monetize and or wind down some of those things that just aren't going to be a strategic fit on a go-forward basis.

Got it, got it. And then on the merchant piece, are you actually incorporating a – you know, a second-half rebound in travel, retail, restaurants, the discretionary parts, or is that kind of the upside on the range? And as that comes back, the flip of the question on the margin side is, could you talk a little bit about how we should think about yield progression through the course of the year?

Yeah, we do anticipate some rebound on some of the discretionary verticals that we mentioned in the material. We do not see travel coming back 100% in 2021. We've got that kind of model back into 2022 being sort of back at pre-COVID levels. We certainly do anticipate restaurant and retail to come back over the course of the year with obviously seeing Q2 probably with the highest level of growth because it's the easiest comp based on what happened last year in Q2. So, yes, we have an expectation of it growing in there. Ashland? but I wouldn't say that that's what gets us to the high end or the low end of the range, but it certainly is an area that we've got to continue to monitor over the course of the year. But we do have modeled in, obviously, rebound from COVID coming into Q2, Q3, and Q4 next year, or this year, excuse me.

Got it. Got it. Thank you for all the color. This is great. Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question will come from Matt O'Neill with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Yeah, hi. Good morning, gentlemen. Thanks for taking my question. I was hoping we could follow up on David's question a little bit more specifically on the modern banking platform. So you have three that are now live, and you're expecting $100 million in revenue for 2021. Can you just parse for us, is the $100 million explicitly from those three that are live, or does it incorporate additional wins that have been announced but haven't yet gone live in that number? And then can you also just give us a little bit of the high-level kind of glide path talking about, just reminding us again, how you kind of get started with a modern banking win and then what the longer-term kind of cross-sell and up-sell opportunities look like and if there's been any sort of traction with that, obviously understanding we're only with three live and kind of in the first year here.

I'll take the revenue question and then let Gary and Bruce kind of chime in on the model around it. With regard to the $100 million we talked about, certainly includes the three that are live now, but would also include some level of expectation of conversion over the course of the year of previous sales that we made throughout 2020. So there is a ramping, if you will, of the MVP over the course of 2021.

Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. I mean, basically, you look at the $100 million commitment, What we're seeing is a steady ramp over the year with implementations. We'll also, as Bruce talked about, our backlog's more than doubled on that front, so being able to drive additional sales. The nice thing about the business being reoccurring in nature, you'll grow from there, right, going into 2022, so it'll continue to accelerate with more pipeline being added. From a cross-sell standpoint, do you want to take that, Bruce?

Yeah, it's just like all of our core platforms. It really is the center of a lot of our cross-sell activity. So MVP will follow that same trend where we have the opportunity to sell digital front ends to the application. We'll have a whole suite of products. We have over 20 products on average with our core customers today. We expect that we'll be able to continue to drive new product into those MVP clients.

Yeah. I mean, just to build on that, we talked about in prior calls, uh, you know, our focus on the lending side over the next several years, we did, uh, you know, we, we build these solutions in a very agile, uh, agile way, as you would expect being a modern technology, uh, being cloud native. And so the reality is we did make our first drop on, uh, our unsecured lending. So we're starting to build out those capabilities. So that'll also be a cross-sell opportunity in the back half of this year and going into 2022. But to Bruce's point, keep in mind that becomes the center of all of our cross-sells to drive our back office services, some of our rec tech capabilities, the list goes on and on and on. And as you've seen last year, we saw a huge increase once again in our top 100 cross-sells at 23%.

Got it. Thanks very much. As a quick follow-up to that, are these predominantly from banks that had been insourced or competitive takeaways or a good mix?

Yeah, right now, early on, we consistently see the early adopters, and we want to make sure that everybody understands we're just getting started on this, right? So as you start thinking about people really moving to cloud-native core banking, a lot of it has been either on in-house built systems or very, very old legacy technology today. What we're starting to see gather in the pipeline is as we get launched now with some of the customers, you've got another wave of people now really starting to evaluate existing technology they're on that would be more modern in nature but still not cloud native and taking advantage of that. But the early adopters have been primarily coming off more in-house developed systems or systems that are multiple decades old.

That makes sense. Thanks so much. I'll hop back into the queue. All right. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question will come from Timothy Chiodo with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

Thanks a lot for taking the question. We've covered a lot of great ground here. I want to see if we can shift gears over to premium payback. So clearly that was one of the earlier and larger revenue synergies. It sounds like you're making great progress there. You've announced Walgreens, BP, PayPal. Maybe you could just give us a brief update on how that program's doing, maybe size the revenue contribution expected for 2021. Would appreciate any added context there.

Yeah, this is Bruce. I'll just jump in on the overall program. I'll leave kind of revenue to Woody, but the program itself continues to see a lot of positive momentum. So we continue to see a very, very strong pipeline. I think the only impact to premium has been through COVID, right? So it is a transaction that is driven by retail purchase, so that COVID is going to have some impact there. But we expect that product to really rocket forward and continue to move. it's really met delight, right? It's the customer's delight, the retailer's delight, and the financial institution's. It's just a positive win for all three. And there's very few products that kind of come to market that have that kind of success.

We haven't given a specific number around the product-related revenue for competitive reasons, but I can tell you it's built into the confidence level we have in the acceleration of revenue synergies. up to $400 million exiting 2021. Absolutely.

All right, great. And the brief follow-up is still related to premium payback. Could you just talk a little bit about how that mix could evolve in terms of in-store and e-com? Clearly, PayPal being a partner helps with that. But anything you could talk around how we could start to see this show up on websites a little bit more?

Yeah, so... As we move forward with premium payback, it really was not designed to be necessarily in-store or online. It was really just about, as I said, kind of a surprising delight for a consumer that it shows up at the checkout and allows you to pay for a portion of your transaction through the points that you've aggregated. And it's really bringing financial assets that were hard to get access to and bring those to the consumer and allow them to monetize those assets that they've acquired over time. And so whether it's online through someone like PayPal or some of our e-com clients or it's in-store, at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter. It just shows up at the point of sale, whatever that may be, whether it's your mobile phone or in-store. And, again, it's really the surprise and delight that consumers love about it. All right, great.

Thank you for all that context.

Thank you. And today's final question will come from Brett Huff with Stevens. Please go ahead.

Good morning, Gary, Woody, Bruce, and Nate. Hope you're all well. Hey, Brett. How are you? We're doing great. Good. Two questions. One, I just want to make sure in all the commentary on the growth, Woody, that you gave us, the kind of midpoint is call it 50 basis points above the long-term growth. I'm trying to sort through the puts and takes. I understand that some moved into corporate, and that may have given us a little benefit of growth, but also I'm trying to figure out where, you know, beyond that, is the above kind of long-term growth, is that more an easy comp from a merchant point of view, or is it more confidence in the banking and modern banking platform? You know, as you guys sat and thought about how do we guide What got you over the long-term kind of range or midpoint and got you a little higher?

Yeah, I think, first of all, the impact of moving some stuff into corporate and other was less than half a point. It's not much at all in terms of our expectation. I would tell you that our confidence level is really in banking and the backlog around banking and seeing it accelerate. We've moved that up to mid to high single digits. You saw 5% in Q4. We anticipate that to accelerate into Q1. So I think that moving into mid to high single digits is a good bit of the confidence. Previously, too, we have talked about cap markets in the low single digits. We've actually kind of moved that up slightly into low to mid single digits. So we anticipate cap markets to see better growth than historical this year as well. So I think those are the two biggest items. that have kind of moved our confidence level up from the 7 to 9 to the 8 to 9 specific 21 guide versus outsized merchant. Merchant, we just anticipate mid to upper teens and could be higher than that if we see rebounds faster. We don't anticipate anything below mid-teens out of merchant this year in any scenario that we have.

Great.

Just a bigger picture follow-up question.

You guys talked a little bit about the need to continue investing organically. And Gary, you mentioned over the last few calls that dumping a lot of money into the modern banking platform and new SaaS technology. It seems like the price tag of competing effectively in bank tech and payments is going up. And so there's a bit of an arms race. As you guys think about the capital intensity of the business and that 50 to 100 basis points kind of big picture margin expansion, how do we balance you know, participating in that arms race and winning that arms race, along with still needing to, you know, still wanting to drive some of those scale advantages and showing that margin expansion to investors?

Well, you know, honestly, Brad, I think it's a great question. I think, you know, whether it's an arm race or not, hopefully what you're seeing is FIS is leading that. You know, we started our cloud-based deployments five years ago, and at this point in time, We're well in excess of 70% of all of our compute now in the cloud, and that'll trend over 80% here over the first half of this year. If you look at our investment, Woody highlighted almost a billion dollars of capital a year. Keep in mind, that is us driving 60 new products in market, modern banking platform, retooling our payments one initiatives, digital one, the you know, a cloud-native omni-channel platform on deployment, as well as all the things we're doing in capital markets and merchant with our Access World Pay Gateway and others, and also NAP conversion. So I think we're balancing it very well, and we're doing that because these new technologies not only allow you to compete on the revenue front, they should and will drive cost out, right? If you start driving true AI into your organizations, you're going to eliminate costs. There's no way around it. If you automate, you're going to eliminate costs. And so our balance that we've done over the last several years as we went through the cloud migration that's now complete, we're doing the exact same thing with our platform rationalization as well as the exact same thing with new product launches, all while balancing. But we think we're in a really good position with about 8% of our revenue being deployed back into capital. Keep in mind also, as Woody talked about our free cash flow converting, we will have our debt completely reloaded by the end of this year, no sense paying our debt structure down faster. So that'll even give us additional capital to deploy across that strategy, whether it's increasing share buybacks, whether it's increasing M&A, or whether it's increasing new product capabilities to continue to drive our organic revenue growth in those upper single digits and then moving from there.

Great. I appreciate the perspective, guys.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's question and answer session. I would now like to turn the call back over to management for any closing remarks.

Thank you. I want to provide some closing thoughts before we end the call. While the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic isn't something we may celebrate with joy, I strongly believe there are reasons to applaud our collective perseverance and our passion for standing up and doing what's right. In this same time period, dominated by daily challenges of the virus, we stretched ourselves to evolve, to think, and deliver differently. At FIS, we took these challenges head on, and I firmly believe that we are a stronger, more resilient company from where we were a year ago. As the backbone to the global financial ecosystem, we ensured that transactions and accounts continued to be processed 24 by 7 while we reimagined our system implementation processes, enabling us to implement systems in a 100% virtual environment. We rapidly implemented a real-time lending platform for our financial institution clients, streamlining and speeding the processing of more than 225,000 PPP-approved loans under the CARES Act. So far in 2021, we've expanded our reach and successfully processed nearly $8 billion of Triple P loan applications for more than 68,000 U.S. merchants and small businesses. We also manage the rollout and distribution of expanded EBT benefits under SNAP in 28 U.S. states and territories, helping over 10 million children. Just as important, we double down on our commitments to support our communities by executing global give-back programs to donate PPE and E equipment and prepaid cards to support our frontline healthcare workers. We also recognize our responsibility to push for sustained social change, both domestically and globally. As you have heard us mention before, increasing inclusion and diversity, financial inclusion, and climate change initiatives are important goals for all of us at FIS. Building an environment that enables our colleagues, clients, and communities to thrive demonstrates how we are leveraging our technology and innovation at scale to create lasting change that benefits everyone. To our colleagues, thank you for all your hard work and ongoing commitment to our clients, communities, and each other. And for everyone else on the call, thank you for joining us today and for your ongoing support. If you have any follow-up questions, please reach out to our investor relationships team. This concludes our Q4 earnings call. Have a great day.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.