Global Payments Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to Global Payments first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will open the lines for questions and answers. If you should require operator assistance during this call, please press star, then zero. And as a reminder, today's conference will be recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to your host, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations, Winnie Smith. Please go ahead.

Good morning and welcome to Global Payments first quarter 2025 conference call. 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. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that some of the comments made by management during today's conference call contain forward-looking statements about, among other matters, expected operating and financial results. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors, including the impact of economic conditions on our future operations that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. Certain risk factors inherent in our business are set forth in filings with the SEC, including our most recent 10-K and subsequent filings. 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 also 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 in 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 our supplemental materials available on the Investor Relations section of our website. Joining me on the call is our CEO, Cameron Brady, our President and COO, Bob Cortopassi, and our CFO, Josh Whipple. Now, I'll turn the call over to Cameron.

Thank you, Winnie, and thanks, everyone, for joining us to discuss our first quarter results and the exciting start to our year. We had a solid first quarter, which is a testament to the resilience of our business model and our relentless focus on execution in what continues to be a fluid economic environment. Specifically, we delivered over 5% constant currency adjusted net revenue growth, excluding dispositions, 70 basis points of adjusted operating margin expansion, and 11% constant currency adjusted earnings per share growth compared to the same period in 2024. Notably, both our merchant and issuer businesses saw growth consistent with where we exited 2024, and our overall performance was exactly in line with our expectations. While delivering this performance, we were also aggressively executing against our overarching transformation agenda, including advancing a significant number of key initiatives. Since launching the program last year, we have successfully simplified and streamlined our organizational structure and operating model, unified our merchant business globally, advanced our technology harmonization program, and increased our overall benefit target by 20% to $600 million. Importantly, as we progress our transformation over the next year, we are positioning ourselves with a strong foundation to quickly and fully integrate WorldPay post-closing. Josh will cover more details on the quarter in a moment, but we plan to spend the majority of our time today discussing our recently announced transactions to divest our issuer solutions business and acquire WorldPay. Since announcing the transactions, many of you have asked about the timing and how it aligns with our refocus strategy and transformation agenda we outlined last September. You have also asked about recent trends in the WorldPay business and how they have progressed their own efforts to improve growth and better position themselves competitively. Further, you asked about how bringing global payments and WorldPay together drives opportunities to accelerate growth over time. You also want to understand our plans to integrate this business when their previous integration was not successful. And lastly, you have asked for clarity as to how the transactions we announced align with our plans to prioritize capital returns to shareholders. We plan to touch on all these items today. To start, I want to discuss our conviction that the transaction with WorldPay and divestiture of issuer solutions will accelerate our transformation and build an even more durable and differentiated platform for long-term success. Let's start with the strategic rationale for what we announced. We know WorldPay well and have long recognized the complimentary nature of our two merchant businesses. We also know firsthand that selling issuer processing solutions into large financial institutions is a very different go-to-market motion than bringing commerce solutions to merchants of all sizes globally. This is part of the reason we communicated at our investor conference our intent to evaluate options for the issuer business that serve to achieve our strategic objectives and accelerate value realization. So when this unique opportunity to execute these two transactions simultaneously presented itself earlier this year, we've moved quickly and thoughtfully to structure a deal that would yield better outcomes in our standalone transformation journey. And we have high confidence that these transactions will do just that and accelerate our long-term strategy. One of the core tenants of our transformation program is to simplify and streamline our business to ensure we have a strong platform for the next decade of growth. Underpinning this is our desire to become a more focused organization, recognizing that we can unlock substantially more value in our business through greater clarity of purpose. This transaction not only sharpens our focus, but also enhances our global scale and cements our position as a leading pure play commerce solutions provider for merchants of all sizes around the world. It also allows us to concentrate on a simplified business and orient investment exclusively towards merchant solutions, driving better growth outcomes and improving our ability to win share in the market. And through the combination with WorldPay, we're bringing together highly complimentary capabilities and distribution networks. Global payments bring strength in SMB solutions, leading point of sale technology, and vertical-specific software that WorldPay does not have today. WorldPay contributes best-in-class e-commerce and enterprise capabilities, managed PayFax solutions, and a presence in attractive geographies where we do not operate currently. Simply put, this combination creates a complete commerce solutions platform with complementary capabilities and extensive distribution across the merchant spectrum. Together, we will accelerate growth and innovation and deliver enhanced client experiences for merchants of all types and sizes. The combined company will also dramatically advance its innovation pipeline for future success. With capital investment in excess of $1 billion annually, we will be better positioned than ever to deliver the next generation of capabilities, from point of sale and software and integrated and embedded payments, to advanced commerce enablement and global omni-channel solutions. And importantly, since all of our investments will be focused on merchant solutions, we will be able to better amplify their impact across our organization and drive better returns on invested capital. We are already actively engaged with our customers, and their feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Specifically, clients are excited about how complementary the businesses are and how the combined company will bring expanded capabilities, even better service, and greater innovation to help power their businesses. This transaction also meaningfully enhances our financial profile. We expect approximately $12.5 billion in pro forma adjusted net revenue and $6.5 billion in adjusted EBITDA post transaction close. We see clear opportunities to achieve at least $600 million in cost synergies from aligning our merchant business operations and go-to-market strategies, streamlining technology and infrastructure, and eliminating duplicative corporate and operational support structures. The path to achieve these savings is already identified, and they represent low-risk opportunities, well within our reach given our team's significant integration experience. And to be clear, these synergies are fully incremental to the $600 million in benefits we expect to deliver through our operational transformation. Further, we are highly confident in our ability to achieve revenue synergies of at least $200 million by cross-selling our software and commerce enablement solutions expanding omnichannel capabilities, and deepening penetration in high-growth verticals, all while leveraging our combined 6.5 million merchants worldwide, including more than 500,000 enterprise clients. Together, we have clear line of sight to accelerating both our revenue and earnings growth framework, while also meaningfully expanding our long-term commitment to return capital to shareholders. With that background, I'd like to spend a moment on how this transaction aligns with what we outlined at our investor conference. In September, we unveiled a strategy to transform global payments into the worldwide partner of choice for Commerce Solutions, focused on moving aggressively to position the company for the next phase of its growth journey. As part of this, we unified our merchant business across three product pillars, point of sale and software, integrated and embedded, and core payments. Our strategy is squarely focused on the end customer. We have built our business around knowing what merchants need to succeed across more than 100 vertical markets. We know the intricacies of their business and their goals. And we support them with exceptional service from the sales process to onboarding to ongoing support when they need us. The transactions we announced accelerate the transformation we began last year, while also creating a company with unmatched global scale in an industry where scale matters more than ever. Importantly, the acquisition of WorldPay directly supports each of our three merchant pillars, making them stronger, more scalable, more competitive, and more valuable to our clients. Starting with POS and software, we will be able to immediately sell our Genius Point of Sale and other software and commerce enablement solutions into WorldPay's existing SMB merchant base. We will also leverage their existing distribution channels to bring these capabilities to market and it feed better penetration and saturation. In integrated and embedded, WorldPay's PayRix platform enhances our ability to serve software partners, marketplaces, and platforms across more regions and operating models. And in core payments, WorldPay brings world-class e-commerce capabilities that enhance our payment acceptance solutions and enables us to deliver seamless omni-channel experience to merchants of all sizes across our combined footprint. Additionally, WorldPay strengthens our international presence and distribution in existing geographies and expands our footprint to new attractive markets like Japan, France, and the Nordics. We have made substantial progress on our transformation initiatives, and the plans we are pursuing over the next year provide a strong foundation in which to integrate WorldPay. We have already consolidated our merchant, technology, and operations organizations. These newly defined organizations are focused on driving sales, delivering new products to market, while ensuring differentiated service levels and availability. Importantly, we will approach this integration with a clearly defined operating model, scalable processes to support execution, and an uncompromising strategy regarding how we plan to fully integrate the business and run the combined company. By the time we close the WorldPay transaction, we have completed the launch of our genius retail and restaurant point of sale platforms globally. Fully revamped the sales organization through our Salesforce of the future initiative. It will be a far more nimble and agile business with a customer led and product centric mindset focused on speed and quality of product development. Leveraging our new operating model, Global Payments and WorldPay will be better positioned competitively in the market with a durable business structure, increased investment capacity, significant runway for growth, and an enhanced ability to deliver sustainable performance. As a combined company, we will have significant scale, processing nearly $4 trillion in annual volume across 100 billion transactions, significant merchant coverage, serving millions of merchants and thousands of platform and software partners, comprehensive capability scanning physical card present environments to global e-commerce, and extensive global reach across 175 countries with a sales force of over 4,000 professionals. We will be capable of providing end-to-end service across the entire merchant journey, from onboarding through transaction processing to settlement, reconciliation, and business intelligence. And all of this is supported by our global distribution and service infrastructure. We will enhance our managed payback capabilities, which will broaden our leading integrated offerings, allowing us to support a wider array of operating models for software, marketplace, and platform partners. Together, Global Payments and WorldPay's singular merchant focus and significant scale will enable us to accelerate innovation to further differentiate and compete. Unlike new entrants who often build around narrow solutions, the combined company will offer the full spectrum of highly innovative products, powered by best-in-class technology with scaled processing economics while delivering enterprise-grade reliability, security, and compliance that stands apart. Now I'll hand it over to Bob to discuss the WorldPay business, details regarding our revenue synergy opportunities, and more specifics relating to our approach to integration. Bob?