Good morning, everyone. My name is Charles Nabhan. I lead the Payments and Transaction Services Research Practice at Stephens. I want to thank you for joining us today. Today, we're pleased to host Deluxe Corporation. With us from the company is CEO Barry McCarthy and CFO Chip Zint. Gentlemen, thank you for making the trip. Really appreciate it.
Glad to be here. Thank you.
Great. So just as a starting point, for those that are unfamiliar with the story, could you just provide us with a brief overview of the company and its segments?
Sure. So the company today has four operating units. It has the legacy business, which is a print-based business where we print checks and promotional items. We have three areas that we grow, which are our data-driven marketing business, our B2B payments business, and our merchant services business. And the strategy for the company is very clear that we are using the relationships, cash flow, brand, and reputation that come from 100 years in our print business to help us grow the data-driven marketing B2B and merchant business. The data B2B and merchant business each have great positions in their respective markets. In the data-driven marketing business, we have built the largest data lake, we believe, in the country that combines over 100 different data sources that allows us to put AI tools on top to identify potential target customers for our customer to market to.
So the customer there is anybody that has a high lifetime value that's going to be expensive to market to acquire that customer. In the recent history, the business has been doing very well, particularly around helping financial institutions find low-cost deposits, but also for property and casualty insurers, unregulated utilities, anyone that has that high lifetime value of a customer. Our B2B business is primarily receivables automation and management business. That business has eight different modules, and they're all software-based. They do everything from operating a lockbox to remote deposit capture to disputes and reconciliation to archiving of information. We've recently put those all together with a common UI/UX that allows us to sell an integrated cloud-based solution to mid-size businesses to manage their receivables.
The other part of that business is actually processing payments using our own software, where on behalf of customers, major billers, major banks, they hire us to run our software on their behalf and to process those inbound payments: mail, telephone, etc. Our last business is our newest business, which is our merchant services business that we acquired in June of 2021. And that business is a classic merchant acquiring business. We are not an ISO, so there's lots of folks that you may hear about that are ISOs that are simply renting processing from somebody else. When we entered the business, we entered as a processor, and we actually own the back-end processing system, which means that we are managing a credit card transaction at the point of sale, sort of beginning to end.
And we're actually moving the money at the end of every night and settling in the multiparty every night. That business has great growth prospects, great growth trajectory, and we believe we could help it grow faster, and we have. And every quarter we've owned it, it has grown faster than when it was owned previously. We believe that that business has great growth prospects going forward. So in summary, we have a print business, which is in modest secular decline, and we have three businesses in data-driven marketing, B2B payments, and merchant payments that have strong mid to upper single-digit growth trajectory that allows the company to grow organically, and most importantly, perhaps, to grow our profit faster than we're growing revenue, which we've now done successfully and proud of that outcome. Do you want to add anything on that?
I think you said it well. The last piece of what we're doing right now is we have a North Star program, which I'm sure you'll ask about, Chuck, but we're leveraging that as well to drive further efficiency in the business, to really help drive our capital allocation priorities and bring our leverage ratio down. So as revenue grows low single-digit organically, with profit growing faster than revenue, we'll be able to improve the leverage ratio in conjunction with it.
Well, that's a good segue. Why don't we double-click on that because that was my next question. Let's talk about North Star. What led to it? What are some of the specific initiatives you have underlying the strategy, as well as remind us of some of the targets you put out there as well?
Yeah.
North Star was a logical evolution of what we had been doing ever since the 2021, 2022 period in time. Shortly after Barry joined, we had some fundamental foundational things we had to do to help the business be a firm foundation for this growth strategy. It started with improving the infrastructure, modernizing our technology, just making sure we had a really solid operating platform. We had to divest businesses, simplify the portfolio. There were a lot of things we were doing to set up the long-term strategy. And so North Star became the logical evolution as we migrated our way through that first phase of that into what's next. And it was really about looking out over a multi-year horizon and saying, what are going to be the secular declines of the business?
How do we drive more EBITDA expansion, more cost efficiency, more revenue growth levers to go ahead and offset that over a three-year horizon and really accelerate the strategy towards our value algorithm, which is what we talked about, the lower single-digit revenue with profit growing faster than revenue and leverage improving? And so that was how things played out. And so we launched this program the midpoint of last year with very clear goals. The first was to go find $130 million of total profit improvement value so that after you net secular declines, we could net $80 million of incremental Adjusted EBITDA by 2026, full-year run rate by 2026. In conjunction with that, we targeted $100 million of improvement in free cash flow, again, annual run rate by 2026.
And so in order to do that, we put financial targets out there of what the one-time spend would be to drive it. We put a range of $115 million-$135 million. On our last earnings call, we signaled that we're now to the lower end of that, about $110 million would be our estimate, which leaves us $30 million to do as we wrap up the program, which we think we will have done sometime in the second quarter. So we're in a good place. Against our goals, we've got more than $100 million of program value in what we call our implementation phase, which means we've picked the strategy, we've awarded RFPs, we've done what we need to do. We just haven't fully realized the savings throughout the P&L. And again, we expect that that will occur by 2026.
So I think we're in a good place about the goals we've set. And again, it's all aligned to those capital allocation priorities. And one of the underlying visions of North Star is improved free cash flow conversion, improved quality of earnings as we exit, as we bring restructuring dollars down, and ultimately bringing the leverage ratio back below three times, which we believe will happen in 2026.
Got it. So on the topic of capital, you had a recent announcement this week with a debt restructuring. Can you just give us an update on that?
Yeah. So just to rewind the tape for a second, our previous debt structure came about from the 2021 acquisition of the merchant business. So at that time, we had $500 million of bonds due out in 2029, but we also had bank debt that matured in June of 2026.
That bank debt is what we wanted to make sure to be prudent and get ahead of and make sure to refinance and extend maturities well in advance of it going current next year. That's what we've been working on. This week, we announced that in conjunction with that, we've pushed all of our maturities out to 2029 now. Our kind of revised debt stack is now $900 million of a bank group with a $500 million Term Loan A and $400 million revolver. We just put in place $450 million of secured notes maturing in 2029 at 8% rate.
And so market conditions have changed a lot since we did our financing back in 2021, but we feel really good about the execution we've had, the demand we had in the market, and of course, the partnership we've had with the bank group to help deliver a really good outcome for us and take the next level of concern that an investor may have off the table and really give us a nice clean pathway to continue executing North Star, the strategy, and everything we need to do. So we feel great about where we are. And as a result of we were able to upsize the secured bonds slightly. So it gives us slightly more liquidity, a little bit more room under the revolver, which just continues to give us great flexibility going forward.
Got it. Great.
I'm going to dive into the segments now, starting with merchant services, which came out of the First American acquisition a few years ago that you had mentioned. Could you give us a sense for how large that business is as a contributor to overall revenue, how big it could potentially be? And then from there, maybe we could get into the verticals you serve and how you're differentiated.
Let's just start with the size and the scale of the market. It is a very, very large TAM. It's multi-billion-dollar market size. We have a good footprint in a couple of verticals that we think have great growth potential, but also have good stickiness. They've got longevity. We're particularly good in state and local government. We're especially good at not-for-profit and then some parts of specialty retail, including auto repair, among others. Those tend to be businesses or market areas that have great volume that is very predictable and continually growing. We like those. Those also are markets where the churn is relatively lower. Now, we have a portfolio in addition to that, which is around independent sales organizations or ISOs that take our processing, package it up, and sell it to individual different markets.
Whether it's a geographic basis or it's a market vertical basis, they take our solution, we sell it to them wholesale, and they go sell it at retail. We also have a good business in independent software vendors or ISVs. And the reason we like those is that once the software, once our payments are embedded in the software, every time that specialized software is used by a retailer and they load it on their system and they open it and say, "Would you like to accept credit cards?" We are there accepting those leads. We also have an important distribution channel in banks, financial institutions. And one of the theses when we acquired the business was that we could accelerate the penetration of our 4,000 bank partners, which we have done, and it has helped to deliver growth in that business.
Overall, it's approaching a $400 million business with attractive margins in the low 20s%. We think as we add more volume to that business, it becomes a bigger scale business, spreading the relatively fixed cost across more transactions with low marginal cost of the next transaction.
Got it. So this question came up on the last earnings call, and I think it's maybe worth diving into a little bit because it's been a theme here in Nashville this week. The theme of bank consolidation, which a lot of people are expecting over the next year or so with the administration change. So given that banks are a major channel partner for you or method of distribution, can you talk about how your business would be impacted by consolidation in the bank space?
So we love the question because we love bank consolidation. Bank consolidation is almost always good for us. I'll give you a couple of examples. When Truist was formed from the combination of SunTrust and BB&T, we were a big winner. We had half of the business, for example, on our check business. We ended up with all of it. Anytime that there's bank consolidation, we have an opportunity to compete, to win the whole piece of the business, and our success rate is extremely high. Now, it's not perfect, but extremely high. So on the print business, for sure, but also on our B2B business. And we consider most of the banks that are being consolidating, honestly, great targets for our merchant business. And our merchant business does very, very well in the regional, the super regional market spaces.
We're not trying to be or compete with Bank of America or Wells Fargo or J.P. Morgan Chase. We're talking about the next segment down. And we've proven very effective in that space. We've had some number of key wins there, and you've seen it help grow our business. So we actually think bank consolidation could be a net positive for us, and as it has been in almost all of the recent history.
Got it. And while many of your verticals, including public sector, are relatively durable, you do have consumer exposure. So I guess the obligatory macro question would be what you're seeing from a consumer standpoint, maybe thus far in the fourth quarter and any expectations for as we head into the next year?
Yeah. So let's just talk about the trajectory of the year. So earlier in the year, we were pretty clear that we saw some shifting away from or towards less discretionary categories, which would suggest that the consumer was under a bit of pressure. What we said during our third quarter release just a couple of weeks ago is that we seem to see that shifting moderating. We're not saying we're seeing that we're not seeing it go back to the former mix, but we're seeing that that shift towards less discretion seems to have moderated, which we would see as an indication of some stabilizing of consumers. Now, we're not saying the consumer's in a fantastic place, and you can see it in some of the retailers' reports.
We're not saying the consumer's in a great place, but we think that sort of the decline and the shakiness has stabilized.
Got it and just from a financial standpoint, you had guided to a high single-digit revenue CAGR through 2026. Could you walk us through the drivers behind that revenue target?
Specific to the merchant business?
Correct.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's really a function of the overall strategy of the business. So as Barry mentioned, the ability to cross-sell and expand more partnerships with FI is critical. So we build it as a function of what are the base volumes of the verticals we serve and going to do, right? And we believe that's a business that's growing kind of in the 4% range, kind of on a GDP plus type level base business. And then our ability to roll out new products, features, expand kind of the wallet share we can get within the merchant portfolio, give them more offerings, more kind of average value per merchant, and then just expand the overall growth of the business by adding more merchants, more bank partners, more ability to drive volume onto the platform. So that's an organic-based target. It's not based off M&A.
I think we feel really good about the progress we can have to take market share, put more merchants on the platform, win because of our service, our product quality, how we serve that middle market, and the opportunities we have there.
If we could dive into the cross-sell component of your response in terms of some of the value-add services or additional products you're cross-selling into your base as a driver of growth, I think that would be helpful as well.
So let me start slightly higher than just on merchant and just talk about the scale and scope of what the company has and why we're able to deliver the transformation that we are. The company has 4,000 bank partners where we have master service agreement. We're already supporting 4 million small businesses and hundreds of the world's leading brands. One of the things that we identified and have been very focused on as we started the transformation was the ability to get something we call One Deluxe, which is bringing the best of our company to every one of our customers. It was a driving thesis for the acquisition of First American Payment Systems, which we now call Deluxe Merchant Services. We've proven that we are very effective at doing this. The proof points are a couple.
I will talk to you about a large-sized bank. I will talk to you about a mid-sized bank, and we'll talk about a couple of other examples. So a large-sized bank, PNC Bank, and we had a single product that we had partnered with PNC, which was in our data business, which was helping them manage one part of their consumer portfolio, helping them drive leads. We went to them and said, "Hey, talk to us about the rest of the problems that you have as a company," and identified that they had challenges marketing not only to this one segment, but across the institution broadly. They had an army of people that were managing actually the deployment of the offer into the market.
They said, "We've got a problem of coordinating, and that's a challenge for us." We said, "You know, you probably didn't know this, but we can do all of that for you. We can outsource all of that. We can do all of your data-driven marketing. And by the way, we can manage fulfillment, including print, mail, all the way to delivering an offer to the customer." It turned into the single largest sale in the company's history. We took what was a piece of business, expanded it to a large piece of business, a multi-hundred-million-dollar sale that's going to happen over that we will enjoy over about the next. There's probably about five years left in that relationship. Give you another example of a mid-sized financial institution, which is Fulton Bank, which is southern Pennsylvania to sort of Mid-Atlantic region.
They had a good quality merchant portfolio, and they're a check customer, etc. So they use multiple products. When they understood that we were now in the merchant business, we were successful at winning that business away from one of the big three processors because we already had a relationship and we could show them the quality of what we could do for them in the merchant space. That has been driving very significant growth over the course of this year. It went live last November, and it was a very important win, not only because it grew revenue for us, but we think it demonstrates our ability to compete strongly in that middle market for merchant services, which is a place where the former First American Payment Systems was not able to penetrate. We were able to show that we could jump into that space.
There are many other examples, but I think those are two good examples that talk about the ability to cross-sell across our portfolio. Now, what the question you're really asking was, can we sell additional products and services specifically within our merchant portfolio? And the answer there is yes. And also, which is we are able to sell additional features, functions across the portfolio. But I think the more important thing to note there is that our portfolio is now of significant scale. So industry groups that are trying to reach consumers at the point of sale are hiring us and paying us to implement their solutions across our portfolio. And you heard us last fourth quarter talk about that we had implemented a new wallet technology that is being brought to market by banks collectively called Paze. And they came to us asking us and encouraging us to implement.
We have done that across the portfolio. I think we're really past an inflection point now where we were a very material player in the merchant processing space. Certainly not the biggest, but material.
Got it. Well, with that, I want to switch gears to B2B. So obviously a tremendous TAM that I think many of us are aware of, but you touched on some of the offerings within that segment. But could you maybe give us a sense for what gives you the right to win within B2B and where you're specifically differentiated?
So I love the question. The market TAM is gigantic, and it is significantly underserved. The number of mid-sized businesses that have a true end-to-end solution today is very, very low. The penetration of digital and integrated solutions is low. The reason, let me tell you what the solution is that we are bringing to market, and then I'll explain. I think it'll become pretty obvious why we are well-positioned to win. We have these eight different software modules. One of them is software that manages a lockbox, and we have historically sold that on a license basis, but we have moved that to a SaaS basis. We also have these eight modules do everything from remote deposit capture, where you're actually taking an image of a check.
You don't have to physically walk a check to a location, to disputes, reconciliations, archiving, where you're keeping data on file to manage any claims for up to seven years. We have historically sold each of those modules individually, and a customer would buy them. And just to give you a sense of scale in that business, our lockbox software processing that we do on behalf of customers or customers that are using our software to process on their own is processing about $3 trillion a year in payments volume, nominally 15% of the U.S. GDP. Our reconciliation and dispute management tool is actually run by the U.S. Federal Reserve System system-wide. So our software is running truly the nation's dispute or exception processing. So our job is not to build scaled solutions.
Our job is to put those together in a meaningful way, end-to-end, for a mid-sized business to manage their receivables, and that's exactly what we've done as we've launched a product called Remote Receivables 360 or R360, and what that product does is instead of having eight individual modules all with their own unique user IDs, passwords, logons, we have built a single sign-on across all eight of them with a common UI/UX, so a customer that's using any one of them can easily expand to the other modules, so when you start with an embedded base of thousands of customers using one or more of the modules, and now we're putting them on a common UI/UX, just simply cross-selling to our installed base is a huge opportunity for us.
Where others that are trying to get in the space are building what we think are attractive UI/UX, and we respect that, we're starting from the other angle, which is we already have the customers using the modules that someone else is trying to put a UI/UX on top of. Our job is just to get customers more active. So we think we've got great prospects there.
So that being the case, is it fair to say the vertical concentration within B2B more or less mirrors that of some of your other businesses?
Yeah. We think it's pretty distributed, honestly. We don't think we have excessive concentration there. We think Bank Channel Partners will be a great distribution channel for the solution. And it's already happening where banks are taking this bundle and they're branding it with the bank's name on it. And it is the bank's treasury solution and receivables management tools that they're selling to their customer. It just happens to be us in the background. We also sell direct. So we think that those tools are really attractive for the broad middle market. So it's not really vertical dependent. I would just think about us having multiple distribution channels to reach it.
Got it.
What I would add here is that this whole B2B transformation is a bit of a culmination of the whole Deluxe story, right? You got the legacy lockbox business, highly tied to check paper flows, and we continue to take market share. We continue to run the business efficiently. It's very like the overall Deluxe Print story, but it's migrating to these digital solutions and our right to win and our ability to grow, and so as you would imagine, everything Barry described directionally correct. You did okay. That's been impactful to the financials, right? To grow, given the nature of our business, as you migrate this on-prem sales to a recurring, we've had to weather declining top line in that business, and so in the third quarter, we slightly grew.
So we feel like we're turning the corner in this business transformation journey, which should be very helpful as we get our way into next year. And I really think the success of B2B, even though it's about a $300 million top line business right now, is core to the long-term growth trajectory of Deluxe. And I should also add, we put a plus behind R360. So that should be worth another turn of multiple.
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So it's a good segue because I was going to ask you about the targets for that business that you've laid out. Anything you could share on a margin or revenue growth?
Yeah. And so just to double-click, in the first half of the year, top line declined 8%. The third quarter, as I said, it grew just under 1%. And we expect it's going to be improved here in the fourth quarter, sequentially improved. Over the long term, I think Barry said it well, we think it's a business that can grow mid to upper single digits. And it's really, it'll be more of a recurring SaaS-based solution. So we think that'll be very, very sustainable. The bigger part is the margins today are in the low 20s. And if you think about migrating your way to a platform as well as improving the efficiency and the operations of the legacy lockbox side, we think it's a business that can get multiple hundreds of basis points improvement in margin rates.
So over the next few years, migrate its way towards the mid-20s in terms of even a margin rate, which would be very accretive to the company. It will help that story of EBITDA growing faster than revenue. And so I think we feel really great about the transition we've gone through and the path forward.
Got it. I want to quickly touch on the print business. Could you just give us an update on what you're seeing there? I know, as you've said, and as many of us are aware, that's a very strong cash flow business that helps subsidize some of the other units. But any updates on what you're seeing there from a secular standpoint, how we should think about the financial profile?
You know, we've been very clear. So roughly, it's about a $1 billion revenue business. And we've said it's going to decline anywhere from low single digits to mid-single digits over the long-term horizon. And in the third quarter, it declined just a little over 2%. And I'll tell you, there's no magic to that number. There's not a big market share gain. There's nothing unusual. That was base volumes continuing to do what they do, our entire fundamental journey to manage the secular declines, take responsible pricing where we can, gain market share ever so slightly. It was exactly that. So I think we feel great about how that business has performed. That's a great number. Inside of that number, checks actually declined slightly less than 2%.
And part of the reasons of that is when you really look into our check portfolio, two-thirds of our check revenue is on the business side, right? So a lot of people like to think about the check environment from the personal use case. The personal check market has been disrupted for a long time, right? But the business side is much more sticky. More than 40% of business-to-business payments today happen on the check. We still ship more than 90,000 check packages a day. We're still sending 70,000 marketing ads from the check space. So it's just still a very robust market. And so we think it's going to perform very well over the long term. We feel good. Now, we know it's declining, but we feel like that trend that we see, those high single-digit secular decline trends on unit volumes are very predictable and very sustainable.
Our ability to take market share, run the business efficiently. We've invested in the printing technology and our ability to just manage costs, run the business efficiently, maximize cash flow. We feel great about that trajectory and our ability to deliver on that.
Got it. I want to quickly touch on data. Obviously, you talked about that business a little bit earlier. Could you give us a sense for who your competitors are in that space and, again, how you're differentiated?
The key feature and the key asset that we have there is what we believe is the largest data lake in the country. We've aggregated more than 100 different data sources. We have all three credit bureau data, but we have much, much more than that. We know pretty much everything there is to know about you as a consumer or as a small business. We can then build these lead lists that convert at a very, very high rate. The competitors in the space are generally affiliated with much larger organizations, advertising agencies as an example. But what our key differentiation is the quality of our data, our ability to build effective models, and then the technology that we put on top of it.
And when we go head-to-head competition with anyone else in the marketplace, almost always we win because our targeting is more precise and our conversion rate at the end is better. Our conversion rates are so good, we actually can deliver the service in two different models. One where we go to market and we deliver it as a standard fee-for-service. You want us to deliver 10,000 messages to target customers, pay us for those delivering those targeted 10,000 customers. The other model that is increasingly popular is pay-for-performance, where a customer comes to us and says, "Hey, I don't really have a marketing budget, but I can give you a share of revenue." So it becomes a contra revenue for them. And you take all the expense on your side.
You do the data work, you do the print mail expense, you do all of the delivery costs on your side, and we'll give you a bounty for every customer that actually converts. And so we're so confident in our ability to target and get conversion that we actually like that model a lot. And our customers like it a lot because they move what had been an OpEx to contra revenue, which means they don't have budget limitation if they want to go to market and win. And again, I said it, I think earlier, that's been very, very popular, especially in this last chapter when banks were aggressively courting low-cost deposits. We were able to help them do that in a very, very efficient way.
Got it. And in terms of.
So from the competitive landscape, there's no one competitor we're competing with: ad agency, PR firms, and quite frankly, internal marketing capabilities inside of the customer set. But what we really win on is the amount of campaigns. So Barry talked about the data, the talent, but if you think about it, the amount of campaigns we're doing across any given year, our data set, our quality is going to far outweigh what anyone else can be because it's running so many different algorithms inside the platform, getting smarter and driving a better outcome. So there's no one common competitor. And we really like the markets we play in. Our core is in the FI space, which is about an $8 billion TAM. And we're migrating to B2B marketing and credit card marketing, which are about equal-sized TAMs as that.
So we see a huge market opportunity to continue to grow this business. And I think fundamentally, one of the limiters of it is just continuing to add the right talent, right? It's really, it's not a heavy capital investment business. We like the data platform. We like what we have. It's really just growing the business, growing the talent that can bring the offering. And we can control that, obviously.
Terrific. I want to get away from the segments a little bit and just talk about capital. You ended the quarter at 3.6 times leverage. Could you give us a sense for what your capital allocation priorities are at this point, how we should think about leverage over the long term?
Yeah. So we have four very clear capital allocation priorities. The first is to pay down the debt. We've very clearly stated externally that our goal is to get back below three times net leverage, which we expect to do towards the end of 2026. And we have confidence we can do that even with the next three priorities. And the next three priorities are to internally invest in growth in payments and data. We have roughly $100 million of CapEx spend today that we think can come down a little bit over the next few years. We've rotated a lot of that spend towards growth investments. And so we believe even with that fundamental number one priority of paying down debt and getting the leverage ratio down at the level of CapEx we're spending today, we're properly fueling that growth investment. We're going to continue to do that.
The third is just disciplined M&A, right? We've done a lot of divestitures over the last few years. We've only actually done one acquisition over the last five years, and it was the merchant services business. So very disciplined, focused on getting the right set of assets, which we feel like we have now, and being very, very mindful of the hurdle rate and what would come the next time we buy something. We don't see anything on the horizon, but we can never say never, right? We want to grow a business. We want to strategically continue to rotate to payments and data, but very disciplined approach on M&A. And then the last piece is our dividend. We pay a dividend today, $0.30 per share per quarter. It's approved quarterly by the board.
We believe we have high confidence that we can continue to delever, hit our leverage targets while sustaining that dividend over the near term and just continue to grow our way out of the yield. If you do it on a yield basis, the yield seems high, but it's really just a function of the muted equity market cap. We believe we can continue to execute. We can bring the overall valuation of the company up, bring that yield down, and we don't have concerns about the cash flow use from that dividend. We feel very clear about those four priorities and really, above all else, just continuing to attack the debt and bring the leverage ratio back down below three times.
Could we double-click on the growth investment piece just in terms of where you're investing, what your product roadmap is?
Sorry.
Go ahead.
I'll do the first part. You can tell me where I'm wrong, so at the highest level, if you think about $100 million of CapEx, about 60% of that is growth-oriented. About 40% is what we would call maintenance or keep the business running. It's important to note of the 100, about 70%-80% is internally developed software capitalization, right? We're building our platforms. We're working on our platforms. And so really, the way I think about it is when you think about the growth side, we're putting a lot of our money into the B2B and the merchant side, right? B2B, I think it's very clear, building out these eight modules, putting them on that platform, the common UI, migrating everything to the cloud, continuing to develop the features, functionality.
A lot of money is going there, both on our AR side, which is what Barry described, and we also have an AP side, a digital AP side, so good amount of growth investments going there, and then a lot of growth investment is going in on the merchant side. Barry talked about the Paze partnership. There's a lot of features and functionality we're delivering to expand the feature set there, the robust nature, how it can integrate into ISVs and just continue to grow the trajectory of that business, but over the last few years, it hasn't been all about that. We've invested about $30 million total over the last three years in our print business to drive improvements in print operations, the product quality, take cost out of the process, variabilize the cost structure. We've been investing. We focus on investing in high-return internal projects.
And so if there's a project that comes along that yields our IRR threshold, we will do the right things while maintaining our capital allocation priorities. And so I think the good news is we continue to move further and further along that roadmap strategy in the B2B and merchant side. And like I said, over the next few years, I think we can normalize the long-term capital spend somewhere more towards $80 million-$90 million. More, you want to say around the product roadmap?
I think that's great.
I mean, specifically, the places where we're focused, as Chip said, on improving receivables payables, which is this new UI/UX that we brought to market, but it's also moving everything to the cloud. And we have what we call the Deluxe Payment Platform in our merchant business, which will make us a better omnichannel commerce company, allow us to do an even better job for ISVs, help us grow faster there, and in the faster-growing segments in the industry. And in our data business, we continue to invest in what is now our cloud-based data set, the data lake.
Got it. Well, running out of time, I want to stop there and see if we have any questions in the audience. Any closing thoughts, or?
Yeah, where I would just leave everyone is that this company is not the company most people think of. We have made a fundamental change in our trajectory and what the company is about. The strategy is very clear, using our legacy check business to grow our three areas: B2B payments, data-driven marketing, and merchant services. And we have a clear pathway for deleveraging. And our future is very bright as a payments and data company.
Great. Chip, Barry, I really appreciate you guys joining us again, and I want to thank everybody in the audience for listening and attending. Have a great day. Thank you.
Thanks, everybody.
All right.
Thanks again.
Great questions.
Thank you.
Thank you, Chip.
Appreciate it.