Fidelity National Information Services, Inc.

good day and thank you for standing by welcome to the fis first quarter 2026 earnings call at this time all participants are in a listen-only mode please be advised that today's conference is being recorded after the speaker's presentation there will be a question and answer session to ask a question please press star 1 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced to withdraw your question please press star 1 1 again i would not like to hand the conference over to your speaker today George Mihalos, Head of Investor Relations.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the FIS First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. This call is being webcasted. Today's news release, corresponding presentation, and webcast are all available on our website at fisglobal.com. With me on the call this morning are CEO and President Stephanie Farris and our CFO, James Keogh. Stephanie will begin the call with a strategic and operational update, followed by James, who will review our financials. 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 the call, we will be presenting non-GAAP information, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net earnings, and adjusted net earnings per share. These are important financial performance measures for the company, but are not financial measures as defined by GAAP. A reconciliation of our non-GAAP information to the GAAP financial information presented in our earnings release. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Stephanie.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. Q1 was a strong quarter for FIS, not just in terms of our financial performance, but in terms of what the performance signals about the trajectory of our business. We outperformed across every financial metric. Revenue is strong, margins expanded, free cash flow more than doubled, and our commercial momentum, particularly on new ACV, reached new levels. Earlier this week, we hosted our annual client conference focused on community and regional banks with over 4,000 attendees. There, we announced an industry-shaping agreement with Anthropic, a first of its kind in financial services, which will usher in an entirely new era of modern banking. We also unveiled a number of new solutions, including our new data and AI platform, our new digital asset platform, Lyric, and Project Keystone, our new tokenized deposit bank owned network that includes five US banks. The common thread across all this progress is that today's innovation runs through FIS, not around us. From the world's leading financial institutions to the most advanced AI firms and the future of digital currency, they're all running through FIS. I told you last quarter that FIS is better positioned today than it has ever been before. and we are excited to be leading the next era of modern banking. Lyle, let me walk you through the strategic highlights of the quarter, and then James will take you through the financials in detail. Turning to slide five. I'll start with the headline. We delivered 6.5% pro forma revenue growth above expectations. Adjusted EBITDA margin came in at 39.6%, with margin expansion of 87 basis points driven by favorable mix and cost savings. Adjusted EPS of $1.36 represents 12.4% growth year-over-year. And the metric that stands out most? Free cash flow of $474 million, up 111% versus the prior year. Turning to slide six. Equally impressive, our recurring ACV growth of 24% year-over-year is signaling strong commercial momentum. The pipeline is converting, and the market is validating our strategy. Banking recurring ACV increased 13%, with capital markets up 45%. Across some of our key growth vectors, money movement hub ACV tripled as we continue to see strong demand from regional community banks. Lending grew 63% and digital ACV was up 25%. ACV is a leading indicator of our future revenue. We started 2025 focusing on our commercial excellence and high growth verticals like digital. And by the end of the year, we had scaled that momentum across the entire enterprise. And what you're seeing in our first quarter of 2026 will translate in a durable, predictable revenue growth and margin expansion in the quarters ahead. Turning next to slide seven. I'm proud of our team for their execution, and in particular what our commercial wins foreshadow for the future. But what gets me really excited is something that has defined FIS since the beginning and defines us still. Innovation in financial services doesn't just happen in this industry. It runs through FIS. For more than 50 years, through every market cycle, every technology shift, every moment of disruption, FIS has been where financial innovation takes hold. That was true when we built the infrastructure that runs the modern bank, and it's true today. The most important innovations in financial technology right now, AI, digital currency, data, are all running through FIS. That's not a coincidence. This is why AI leaders like Anthropic choose to collaborate with us. We sit on 73 billion annual payment transactions across approximately 1.1 billion accounts on file. And now, the FIS data and AI platform brings those data sets together as fuel for a real-time AI-native future. Last week, we announced Project Keystone, a first-of-its-kind digital asset collaborative bank network with digital currency flowing through us. Why us? because we are trusted based on a decades-long track record, because of our rich system of record data, because of a bank-grade compliance network built over decades, and now we have built a trust-by-design, agentic architecture for what comes next. Unlike horizontal data platforms, FIS brings the regulated infrastructure, system of record data, and compliance architecture that makes AI deployable in banking today. That is a durable advantage. It is our modern competitive moat. Turning to slide eight for highlights of our Anthropic Agreement. What makes this different from a vendor relationship is what it will deliver. Co-built financial crimes agent for financial institutions, combining Anthropic's frontier AI capabilities with FIS's scale, data, and regulatory expertise. With the engineering knowledge transferring to FIS to build the agents that come next. This is a deeply collaborative model with Anthropix forward deployed engineers embedded alongside ours to design and build this agent from the ground up and enable us to scale them across our platform. FIS provides the foundation through our data governance and infrastructure, ensuring AI operates safely and effectively in a regulated environment through our trust by design architecture philosophy. To be clear, FIS owns the agent and the regulated infrastructure, everything that is deployed to the bank. Anthropic provides the underlying LLM model. Client delivery remains fully owned and protected by us. Our strategy reflects a shared recognition that scaling across financial services requires deep regulatory expertise and bank-grade infrastructure alongside advanced AI models. Our first agent focuses on financial crimes. one of the most urgent and costly challenges for banks today, with an estimated $2 trillion in illicit funds moving through the global financial system, creating a $35 to $40 billion spend across the industry. BMO and Amalgamated Bank are our design partners for this first agent. The co-built agent will automate the evidence gathering and analysis, reducing investigation time from days to minutes. Our goals are to significantly reduce cost per case and decrease low-value manual work. Investigators remain in control with the agent, enhancing decision-making rather than replacing it. This human-in-the-loop design is essential to trust in regulated banking environments. This is the beginning of a broader roadmap of purpose-built agents across the banking lifecycle, spanning credit decisioning, deposit retention, customer onboarding, and fraud prevention available to our clients through a single, governed data and AI platform. Turning to slide nine. This collaboration is also a concrete example of our broader orchestrated intelligence architecture, where AI, data, and regulated infrastructure work together at scale to deliver real regulated outcomes for financial institutions. Orchestrated intelligence is how we describe the way FIS brings AI to life in banking as a coordinated architecture where models, data, governance, and workflow operate together in a way no single technology provider can replicate alone. The word orchestrated is intentional. Anyone can deploy an AI model. What's hard and what FIS uniquely provides is the orchestration layer, connecting frontier AI to system of record data, routing it through bank-grade compliance infrastructure, and delivering it through the trusted relationships we have with financial institutions and regulators around the world. Our financial crimes investigation agents are our first proof point and operate end-to-end across the full financial crimes lifecycle. It plans, decides, and acts in alignment with regulatory requirements and governance frameworks. This same architecture and the same orchestration is what will power every agent that follows across credit, fraud, onboarding, and beyond, regardless of the LLM model used. The orchestration across the AI model in a regulated industry is the difference between trust and risk. Ensuring every decision is transparent, compliant, and auditable, and ensures planning, decisioning, and action are consistently informed by bank-grade controls. This is defining a new category of participation in financial services and is shaping the next era of modern banking. And FIS is the platform it runs through. We own it and we distribute it. Turning to slide 10. To close my remarks, Q1 was a strong quarter on every dimension. Revenue was strong, margins expanded, free cash flow more than doubled, and commercial momentum continues to build. More importantly, the strategic narrative is connecting to today's generational moment. AI, data, and digital currency, the key market trends, run through FIS. I'd like to thank our colleagues around the world who wake up every day to help us advance the way the world pays banks and invest. I am confident in our full year outlook, and I am confident in the trajectory of this business. With that, I'll turn it over to James for the financial details.