Are you going to pull up our presentation for us?
Yep, I am right now. It slipped away on me for a minute. Just one second.
No worries.
It's here.
While he pulls that up, we'll skip the most exciting page in the deck, which is the cautionary statement. Just as a reminder, some of our projections are forward-looking in nature and obviously inherently our estimates. You can refer to our filings around other factors that matter, but we're going to tell you more about the broader story here when you can see the presentation, which is here we are.
There we are. Here's the look. I'm guessing for most folks that are listening to this today, you may have known the company at one point in time, but the company we are today is very different than the company you may have known just a few short years ago. These are the numbers about the scale and scope of the company today. We're traded under the stock ticker of DLX, of course, and the company generates about $2.1 billion of revenue, over $400 million of EBITDA, but it's a very scaled business. We're processing over $40 billion in merchant card processing. That's credit cards, debit cards at the point of sale, over $2 trillion a year in payment volume through our lockbox operation and B2B business.
We generated $100 million of free cash, and our dividend has been yielding a 6%, but given the market dynamic we're in today, we're trading at our dividend is almost at 8%. You can see the scale of the company. It's a Fortune 1000 company, and we serve a very diversified portfolio of customers. 180 of the top 200 financial institutions are our customers. Millions of small businesses across the country and hundreds of the world's leading brands are using one or more of our products. It's a very storied company that has strong economics and has undergone pretty foundational transformation, which we'll talk about in the next couple of pages. If you look at the history, Marc, if you'd advance for me, that would be great.
If you look at our history and our timeline through 2000, from the late '90s to 2007 or so, the company was still very focused on its print business with very heavy focus on the check business. In the decade or so before we started our current transformation, the company had gone on a very, very aggressive acquisition campaign, buying over 50 different businesses in very disparate different marketplaces, everything from web hosting in Australia to a logo design company in the UK, a payroll processing company in Canada, a specialty packaging company in the U.S. called Bags & Bows, and many more. When we started the transformation, really early in 2019, we got very focused on building a cohesive foundation for the company, significantly refocused the portfolio, exiting dozens of the businesses that had been acquired previously.
The only business that we've acquired in this period was First American, which gave us a very meaningful footprint in merchant acquiring, and that's credit cards, debit cards processing. With great product platforms across the portfolio, we've moved everything to the cloud with our infrastructure, so we operate on a modern infrastructure today, and we have great success in going to market as One Deluxe, meaning that we're bringing all of our products and services to the market together, not operating in a series of silos, and that's proven very helpful for us to drive cross-sell across our portfolio.
If you go on to the next page, I think it will give you a really clear vision for what the strategy of this very different company that you knew of before is. The legacy print business is about $1.2 billion of revenue that brings with it incredible brand, great relationships with financial institutions, and great distribution through sales and otherwise. We are taking some of those assets and investing, or those benefits, and investing them to grow our payments and data businesses, which are about $900 million in total. The businesses on the right that you can see in the red boxes across the top are Merchant Services, B2B Payments, and Data. These are the businesses that we are really investing for growth. Merchant Services is accepting credit cards and debit cards at the point of sale. B2B Payments is really about managing accounts receivable and payables.
The data business is where we help businesses using data identify who to target for a marketing message to help them grow their business. The economics of both of these businesses are attractive. The legacy print business has a terrific blended margin at 31%. Our payments and data businesses are in the low 20%. The legacy print business is in slow secular decline, and the payments and data businesses are well positioned for growth going forward. If we move on to the next slide, I'll have Chip talk a little bit about—actually, I'll cover this a little bit more, and then we'll have you come right after this. The check business, this is exactly what you think it is, is printing checks for small businesses and large businesses and consumers.
The part of the business that's pretty sturdy here is around business-to-business checks, which are still about 40% of all business payments today. We continue to produce checks in that marketplace and win. We are a share gainer in this marketplace because the chief rival in this space has not invested in their infrastructure, and our product is superior, as is our financial condition as a company. Promo products is exactly what you'd believe it is. Everything from giveaway promotional products you might get at a dry cleaner all the way up to extremely customized high-end merchandise apparel for motorsports racing, as an example. A double click just for a minute more on Merchant Services . We're processing about $40 billion a year in electronic payments in the B2B space, where we're managing inbound payments on behalf of mid to large-sized businesses.
We're processing a couple of trillion dollars a year in that space. In the data business, we're using AI tools to look into a database which we believe is the largest data lake that's been created around consumer and small business marketing. You can see across the bottom, each of these markets has a very large addressable market, which gives us an opportunity for growth. In the case of the print business, it gives us a great opportunity to hold on to the cash flow that that business generates going forward. Maybe I'll pass to you and have you talk next.
Yeah. I'm going to skip this one, Marc. I'm going to do a deep dive into each of the segments and kind of their long-term trajectory. Really quick, we've put our guidance out there.
You guys should already know this, but you can see our guidance range for revenue implies a midpoint growth of approximately 1% on the top line, with EBITDA growing faster than that, expansion in the EPS line, and most importantly, free cash flow conversion improving this year, a free cash flow range of $120-$140, which is nice expansion and really helps along our stated capital allocation priorities to deliver the P&L, which I'll get to in a minute. Just fundamentally, to move us along, given we want to save space for Q&A, let's just click ahead real quick, Marc. Let's talk about at the highest level, just where we're shooting for, what our overarching strategy is, and how we create value. Everything Barry laid out is pointing us towards this trajectory. This is our three-year value creation algorithm.
We want to sustainably, organically grow our top line, low single digits, with EBITDA growing faster than revenue, paying down debt, increasing free cash flow, bringing our leverage ratio back down below three times, bringing free cash flow conversion back north of 30%. We're doing that via the growth strategies, which I'll highlight on the segments in a minute, as well as co-mingling that with our North Star Plan, which is a fundamental integrated strategic plan we've been executing to improve both cash flow and EBITDA out to 2026. We're the majority of the way through that journey. We have a little bit more work to do, and we're starting to realize the benefits in the P&L, both now, this year, and into 2026. We have our dividend, which, as Barry already indicated, has a very attractive yield. It's $0.30 per share per quarter.
All of this combined, as we pay down debt, we accelerate the growth, we return cash to shareholders. It all leads to very easy math to follow that equates to really solid shareholder returns. Let me quickly try to go through each of these pieces, and then we'll save time for Q&A. Really quick on North Star. North Star is a program we launched back in towards the mid to late part of 2023, and it was really targeted about improving both profitability and cash flow of the business by the time we get to 2026. It's an integrated plan linking our long-term strategy with near-term execution. It covers 12 different work streams. Across targeting these initiatives, we're working to find about $130 million of gross EBITDA improvement, a third of that coming from revenue-driven initiatives and two-thirds coming from cost initiatives.
The reason we're going after 130 is that when you build in the secular decline of the business, you can offset those headwinds and we can net to 80. As we do that, we'll expand cash flow and we'll help accelerate the debt paydown. If you keep going, Marc, you can see here a bit of a flavor for the work stream. Blues represent the revenue initiatives, anything from pricing analytics and further revenue capture all the way to thinking about how we further improve the effectiveness of our sales organization or our marketing investments. You can see the heavy focus on spend, whether it's through real estate consolidation, procurement efficiency, working our processes, thinking about how we deliver service to the customers, and ultimately simplifying our tech stack and starting with org design we did at the beginning of the project.
Two-thirds of this program is all about costs, and we're executing well, and we're in the near ending stages to finish all the remaining initiatives this year and drive value in the full run rate value in 2026. Marc, if you click ahead, this is kind of the fundamental architecture of the program. We launched this program at the end of 2023. At the time, our comparable adjusted or organic EBITDA, not factoring in divestitures, was roughly $390 million. We're shooting to grow EBITDA to $470 million in 2026. That's that net 80 improvement. You can see between the North Star program, you realizing 120 between those two pillars and 10 we had already realized before we did this. You can see kind of the math to get us there. As we go through and do it, as I mentioned, it's not just about the EBITDA.
It's also about the free cash flow expansion. Marc, on the next tab, you guys will see the anticipated improvement in cash flow as we're expecting to see. As we improve profitability, as we pay down debt and lower our interest expense, as we bring restructuring down, even assuming conservative offsets for things like taxes, other changes in working capital, we see a nice trajectory to improve free cash flow by $100 million. At the time we put this guidance out there, our current guide was $60 million -$80 million. We've strongly signaled $160 million -$180 million worth of free cash flow for next year in 2026, which will improve that conversion ratio, as I indicated. If you click ahead, Marc, it will lead to accelerated debt paydown. We're trying to get our leverage ratio back below three times.
We're on a trajectory to do that here by the end of 2026. Our guidance for 2025 implies we're going to split the difference between where we are now and where we need to be next year. We're going to be in that low kind of 3.3, 3.2 level by the end of this year, which is showing some really good progress. If you click ahead, Marc, we are very focused on very clear capital allocation priorities. Our number one priority right now is strengthening the balance sheet, paying down debt, getting the leverage ratio back below three times. That's a function of the expanded free cash flow that I already mentioned, as well as growing EBITDA. Both those things are enabled by the North Star Plan, and we remain very focused on that as the top priority, improving the balance sheet, getting leverage back below three times.
We believe we can do that while balancing the next two things. We can continue to invest profitably in our growth businesses. We spend roughly $90 million -$100 million a year in CapEx. The majority of that has rotated itself towards growth-related investments over the last few years now that we have fixed the underlying infrastructure. We are very disciplined stewards of that capital. We look for projects with north of a 15% IRR. We annually and quarterly pressure test how things are going, and we make sure we are getting the right returns there. We believe while we are paying down the debt on our trajectory to three times, we can continue to invest smartly in profitable growth while maintaining the dividend. As Barry mentioned, very, very attractive yield, roughly $0.30 per share per year. It equates to $55 million or so of annual cash flows.
We can manage that with spinning off the cash flow we are overall, paying down debt, investing inside that number. We believe maintain the dividend for now and expand our overall performance and have the yield come down because the business is improving. Marc, if you click ahead, if you think about the capital structure itself, we just went to work and redid this late last year. We refinanced our debt. We now have a $500 million Term Loan A maturing in 2029 with very manageable lower near-term amortization payments throughout the 2025-2028 timeframe. We have a $400 million revolver, which, as you can see on the far right side, we have nearly full available liquidity underneath it, very little outstanding at the end of the year.
We have two bonds due out in 2029, a $475 million 8% unsecured note, and a $450 million eight and an eighth secured note that we just did as part of this exercise. A lot of flexibility in our debt stack, no near-term maturities. We're roughly 60% fixed rate debt, 40% floating, which gives us a ton of flexibility as interest rates hopefully continue to come down. It gives us a lot of prepayable debt in the near term, and then we're in a space with call ladders where we can start to work on our 2029 unsecured notes to give us even more flexibility here in the next 12 months or so. We feel good about where we are, refinancing behind us, a lot of access to liquidity, tons of flexibility moving forward.
Lastly, just to land the overall page, and then we can get to questions. Let's just do a quick double click into each of the businesses. Barry talked about the market opportunity, the right to win, why we're excited. Here's kind of the trajectory for each. On the Merchant Services business, we see this business growing roughly 7%-10% on a CAGR basis over this near-term horizon. As it does that, we do see margin expansion. We have our own platform, which gives us scale. As we onboard more volumes, we innovate, we integrate with ISV partners, find more volume, grow the revenue.
We should get margins of scale, be able to expand margin rates, and move from kind of the low 20s up a hundred basis points or so towards the 22 % -23% range, get margin expansion, and continue to grow this business at kind of that upper single digit level over the near-term horizon. On the B2B side, similar story, a lot more margin potential here. Over the horizon, we see this business growing mid-single digits, if not slightly better. This is a business going through a business model journey, leveraging legacy lockbox operations, moving itself to a subscription-based digital AR and AP business. What really gets us excited here is the chance for significant margin expansion. As we rotate more into the SaaS-based side of the world, high fixed or relatively fixed cost structure there, it gives us room for margin expansion.
We would expect what's a low 20% blended margin business today expanding to that mid-20s over the next few years. On the data side, data is our fastest growing segment currently. It grew just a little bit north of 10% last year, and that's the upper end of our three-year CAGR with a 6%-10% range, relatively stable margins there that we would expect, and just continuing to gain more scale, get new logos, continue to help our clients find their clients. Lastly, as Barry said, the print business, a very predictable, very sustainable low to mid-single digit top line decline with margins remaining stable in those low 30s. A lot of the investments we've made to drive efficiency help variabilize our cost structure. The cost out we're doing as part of North Star, that's helping here.
We feel really good about the ability to hold on to those margins, deliver cash flow for the organization, leverage the brand, the reputation, the cross-sell capabilities to, again, use this to help grow the other side of the business. You put it all in a nutshell, we're delivering guidance towards that value creation we showed, delivering an overall low single digit CAGR top line over this multi-year period with margins growing faster than revenue, all heading towards that $470 million overall target for 2026, which, Marc, on the last page is directly in line and in sync with our three-year value creation formula. Hopefully that was a really quick spin through the company where we're at, and we'd welcome questions that are out there.
Excellent. As a reminder, folks, if you would like to ask a question, just click on the QA button at the bottom of your screen, and we will be able to get to as many of those as we possibly can as I shift it back into analyst mode. One of the things that we've sort of noticed just to start and before we jump into the QA that's come in, I guess the main question of the day has certainly been around sharing thoughts and views as to what we've seen from a macroeconomic and political view of how things have been since the beginning of the year, what you're hearing from your clients, and type of feedback that folks are sharing, given the landscape that we're in currently.
I was wondering if you could share if there's any things that you've heard from clients or any thoughts of how it might fit for Deluxe going forward.
At our fourth quarter earnings call, we talked a bit about the everyday consumer being under pressure. We are aware, and we read all the same headlines that everyone on this call does around the uncertainty that's being created in the marketplace on a number of fronts, whether it's tariffs or otherwise. The good news that makes Deluxe, we think, a particularly attractive company is that in just about any economy, Deluxe does fine or better because what we do is central to commerce in general. If there's a consumer that's using a credit card to buy something at the point of sale, we're there.
If they're paying a bill and they're mailing a payment in or otherwise making a payment, we have a chance to make profit there. Even in our check business, it's a function of the economy moving. When the economy moves or money moves, we have a real play there. Similarly, when customers are trying to find additional customers, we have a play there as well. I don't know that we have particularly new insight that people haven't seen as well in the headlines today. We track it very closely, and we express concern about a bit of concern about the everyday consumer. I don't think we have any new news that we haven't shared before.
Okay. One of the questions came in regarding free cash flow generation in terms of the $160 million -$180 million of free cash flow that you're pointing toward. Do you think that there's an opportunity for that trajectory to continue beyond 2026, or at some point does that sort of level off, do you think, as far as free cash flow generation in the future?
No, we do. I mean, expanding free cash flow conversion remains a top priority of ours. We are on our way. We delivered $100 million last year. The guidance this year is $120 million -$140 million. We are making significant progress towards that $160 million -$180 million. I would expect we can continue to make progress. The restructuring will be behind us. The amount of cash flow out the back door going to restructuring-related initiatives should effectively go to zero, if not an extremely immaterial amount. We can continue to pay down debt, which will bring down our interest, our debt service costs.
At some point, we'll be able to level off the capital investment to something more in the $80-$90 range. There are levers there. We're going to continue to work to optimize working capital. My long-term strategy would be to get free cash flow conversion back north of 50%, which gives us a lot of room to drive this number past the $160-$180, well up towards $200 or beyond over the next horizon. I think it's an area that delivers a lot of upside to our valuation and our ability to rapidly bring down debt and give ourselves room to grow.
Okay. As part of the presentation included in the information on your views of the growth opportunities and growth rates within the segments, maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the contributions there, maybe how you see pricing as potentially being part of that equation or operating leverage as well, particularly within Merchant Services and B2B Payments and Data.
Pricing is absolutely part of our formula. Because of the quality of the services that we have and that we deliver, we have the ability to regularly put forward responsible pricing actions. In the merchant business in particular, we serve multiple different market segments, but we have particular specialization in four or so that what we offer is a very differentiated service along with better customer service that allows us to win.
We are particularly focused in the markets around state and local government, not-for-profits, specialty retail are areas that are really great places for us to compete and win. It is also great because it gives us opportunity across the spectrum to earn revenue and grow our business. Similarly, in our B2B business, we have similar capability to grow revenue there by not only delivering new products to market, like our product we call Receivables360 Plus that integrates all of the things that a treasurer would need to do to manage their receivables all in a great user experience on their desktop, along with the payment processing in the back end around lockbox, where we have the ability to price for that service as well.
Okay, great. Let us see. There's one question, I guess, and this is pretty commonplace, but regarding government exposure, maybe you could spend a little bit of time on federal, I guess, and I'm assuming there's some federal government exposure on B2B or the check segment standpoint, and maybe your views on what exposure you may have there to federal spend and how those may or may not impact that.
We have pretty limited exposure at the federal level. Our payments businesses are primarily focused at state and local level. We don't expect that those directly are going to have impact for us. If those did have the outcome of moving more responsibility towards the states, that could end up being a positive for us if the states collect more in taxes or have to receive more payments to help run the states if, for example, there were less federal support.
It's way premature to be able to understand what would really happen there. I think for the folks listening, we don't have much federal exposure, so that's not going to be a particular direct challenge to us. Right. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the industry verticals of your customers and sort of how you're seeing their activity, maybe how they finished last year, if there were any particular industry verticals that you think stood out as far as activity levels or maybe sort of growth-driven initiatives, if you will. We continue to have a great foothold and strength in financial institutions. By the way, I should have commented on that in the merchant business as well, which I did not. We deliver our products and services through financial institutions. It's a terrific channel of distribution for us.
In our B2B business, they distribute our product often branded with the bank's brand. Also, in the merchant business, we have banks distributing our merchant product branded often for the bank. Of course, they distribute our check products, and they're a big customer for our data-driven marketing solutions. The reason we have such a great position with financial institutions, of course, is the company's legacy, but also we deliver differentiated service, and we provide quality product at a fair and competitive price. That has allowed us to gain market share across all of these businesses over the last couple of years with notable wins in each business we have with financial institutions. I'll just highlight one since I didn't talk about it in the merchant business, but we acquired First American. It's now Deluxe Merchant Services.
A regional bank in southern Pennsylvania over into the Mid-Atlantic region called Fulton Bank selected us to take over management of their ongoing merchant portfolio and merchant business. It was the single largest sale in the Deluxe Merchant Services history, and we won that business in two ways. First of all, we had an existing relationship with Fulton Bank because of our check business. Second, we had a superior product to what their customer, their partner was providing to them with much more flexibility. Third, we could prove that we can deliver much better customer service and support. If you're a regional bank, delivering great service to your customer is a primary point of differentiation versus other big banks in your market, and we could deliver on that.
It helped us win the Fulton Bank deal, and we've had many other bank wins in merchant as a result of those relationships we've had for a long time, and we expect that to continue. Excellent. We've reached pretty much the end of our time together. I just wanted to turn the call back over to you for any closing remarks. Here's what I would wrap up with, where we started at the beginning. If you have not paid attention to our story in the recent past, I would encourage you to think again about our company because it's a very different company, really different economics and different sources of revenue and growth trajectory than you've seen before. We think the value algorithm for great returns for shareholders is very clear, and we think there's a great opportunity for shareholder returns. Excellent.
Thank you so much. I want to thank all of our participants for joining us today, this afternoon, and thanks to Deluxe Corporation for joining us. Everybody have a wonderful and productive remainder of the day. Thank you so much, Edmund. Thank you.