Fidelity National Information Services, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the FIS first quarter 2022 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 we 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 Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thanks, Cherie. Good morning, and thank you all for joining us today for the FIS first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. The call is being webcasted. Today's news release, corresponding presentation, and webcast are all available on our website at fisglobal.com. Gary Norcross, our Chairman and CEO, will provide a business and strategy update. Stephanie Ferris, our president, will discuss our operating performance. Woody Woodall, our chief financial officer, will then review our financial results and provide forward guidance. And finally, Eric Hogue, our deputy CFO, will also be joining the call 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, and 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 financial information are presented in our earnings release. With that, I'll turn the call over to Gary.

Thanks, Nate, and thank you for joining us today. Starting on slide five, we had a strong start to the year, significantly exceeding our revenue expectations and achieving the high end of our EPS guidance. Revenue increased 9% organically to $3.5 billion, and adjusted EPS increased 13% to $1.47 per share. All of our segments beat our organic growth expectations in the quarter. Banking grew 7%, exceeding our 6% expectation. Merchant grew 15% versus our low double-digit expectation. And capital markets grew 6% with 8% growth in reoccurring revenue. New sales increased our backlog 8% organically to $22.5 billion. This consistent strength and backlog aligns with our midterm outlook for 7% and 9% organic growth, and our sales pipelines remain strong. I'd like to thank the team for their sharp focus on serving our clients and for their continued execution. Turning to slide six, the pace of change in our industry is very exciting. We've invested ahead of this change and throughout the pandemic to position FIS for success. We moved our technology infrastructure and application architecture to the cloud, and we continue to bring new or significantly upgraded solution suites to market. In banking, our multi-year investment strategy has positioned us with the best-in-class capabilities across core and digital banking, issuer processing, and wealth management. We further expanded the modern banking platform's geographic reach this quarter by enabling public cloud deployments with Microsoft Azure. This will expand our reach into key markets like the UK, Thailand, and New Zealand. Our team has also successfully launched our new banking as a service hub. This platform offers an all-in-one finance experience for our clients and enables them to rapidly create and deploy new embedded finance offerings for their customers. We recently formed a partnership with Circle to enable our merchants to receive settlement in USD coin, and Crypto.com will be our first pilot customer. In addition to our ability to quickly deploy advanced technologies, international reach is also a true differentiator for us. Our merchant business added seven new countries in 2021 and plans to add 15 more by the end of 2023. In keeping with the crypto theme, capital markets recently announced a new partnership with Fireblocks to enable our clients to store and issue digital assets, as well as to gain access to decentralized finance. Across multiple verticals, industries, and client types, we continue to develop mission-critical systems at global scale that empower our clients to innovate and grow. The power of FIS doesn't stop with our ability to deliver unique solutions. The true value unlock is leapfrogging from leading solutions for individual client types to offering expansive embedded finance experiences that can bring all of our capabilities to bear for every client. We have technology platform initiatives underway to simplify the consumption of our cloud-native capabilities, either as end-to-end solutions or as individual components. More and more, our clients are asking for access to solutions from all three of our operating segments, to enable robust transformations across their enterprise. These initiatives will speed access for them and open up rich new revenue streams for us. We are also evolving our go-to-market strategy by aligning our sales organizations to directly target these new opportunities. Despite market fears about disruption, at FIS, we think we are the disruptor, and we will help our clients win now and into the future. With that, I'll turn the call over to Stephanie to describe how this vision is translating to our operating segments and to review their first quarter performance.