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Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2024

Sep 11, 2024

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

All right. So, I'm Will Nance, cover payments and fintech here at Goldman. Next up, we're delighted to have Stephanie and James from FIS here. You know, you guys, I think, have been steering the ship through a really interesting transformation over the last couple of years, culminating with an investor day earlier this year. Stephanie, you laid out a three-part framework for how to think about the company. So, money at rest, money in motion, and money at work. Could you talk about that strategy, how you think about the story about it for FIS from here?

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

Yeah. So thanks for having us. In May, we presented the new FIS in terms of thinking about serving clients across a money life cycle. So like you said, starting at money at rest, money in motion, and money at work. And so when you think about money at rest, think about it in terms of our overall ledger and core banking applications and digital transactions. Then money in motion around payments, treasury, and risk as we move the funds flow across the ecosystem, and then money at work in terms of trading and processing and commercial lending in our capital markets business. We view the world there, and that money life cycle at about $100 billion worth of TAM, and we're about $10 billion of revenue. So lots of opportunity across that ecosystem.

We serve about 15,000 clients globally. We think we're differentiated in terms of globally scaled technology, a large global distribution and sales force, and then marquee products as you think about that. So in terms of the money life cycle, we think it's a big TAM. We have a very large set of primarily larger clients to serve across that ecosystem, and are pretty excited about the opportunities within each of those.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Great. So maybe we can dig into the banking side of the house. The recurring revenue growth of the business has been improving this year, notably in banking. How has the confidence in the building blocks of organic growth in the business changed over the last two years, and how are you thinking about it to go forward?

James Kehoe
CFO, FIS

Yeah, I think if you look first at the adjusted revenue, last year we did 2%. This year, we're looking at 3%- 3.5%, and going forward, 3.5%- 4.5%. You know, you've seen the first couple of quarters. Last year was flat, and banking adjusted, and then it accelerated in the subsequent quarters. We have a very good line of sight to the third quarter. We'll be solidly within the guidance range. And, as we said on the last earnings call, we have great visibility into the fourth quarter. We're lapping a fairly weak fourth quarter of the prior year.

You look at the building blocks and, you know, what we laid out at the Investor Day was a 3% of transaction growth, so essentially coming from transactions plus, accounts, number of accounts. We call that almost like same-store sales, and you could almost approximate it to the TAM growth on the banking business, so call it three. And then there's a very deliberate shift into digital, which is a market growing at 10%, and the payments business, which is high single digit, and it's a large business. It's about 50% of our banking business. And the plans we've put in place on either enhancing products or focus within sales are really starting to deliver.

That will drive a hundred and fifty, two hundred and fifty basis points on top of the three hundred basis points, and it does include some contribution, anticipated contribution from M&A. So I would say, so far, so good. We're bang on in the third quarter. Great visibility, fourth quarter. We're actually probably we're doing quite well on the building blocks we're putting in place in terms of incentives within sales, focus on the payments business, which lacked a little bit as we went through the Worldpay, the build of Worldpay. There was a lack of focus on the core banking business. So we're pretty happy with this. This is a business with 83% recurring sales.

If you look back over the last four years, the recurring sales in banking grew at 4%, and we expect to outpace the adjusted revenue consistently over time on banking with stronger recurring. We're very happy where we're the business is sitting right now.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

That's great. That's great to hear. Maybe just to follow up on just how you think about kind of communicating the strength in the business. The backlog metric has been de-emphasized over time as a tool for predicting the business. Could you talk about what you and the management team look at to gauge the growth runway?

James Kehoe
CFO, FIS

Yeah, it's basically what I said already. We've seen limited correlation between banking and the accelerated performance across the business, because let's face it, there's been a big step up in the current quarters compared to prior year, and the backlog essentially doesn't move-

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Right.

James Kehoe
CFO, FIS

It's too big a number. Internally, we spend most of the time focused on recurring. You know, we do look at the non-recurring, we look at the professional services, but, you know, 80% of the total business is recurring. It's much more profitable, it's highly predictable, and as I said, in banking, it's been consistently 4%, with capital markets probably doing a 7%-8% recurring, depending on the quarter. So we have strong recurring. The incentives in sales are increasingly more focused on the recurring business.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Yeah.

James Kehoe
CFO, FIS

Internally, we use an awful lot more measures than recurring. We look at retention rates during bidding, we look at total ACV on a quarter compared to prior years' ACV split between recurring, non-recurring, termination fee. Like, it's very, very detailed. We just think it's confusing for the market to have too many measures, and the long-term terminal value of the business from our point of view is percentage of recurring, and is it growing at mid- to high-single-digit, depending on the business?

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I know you talk a lot about visibility.

James Kehoe
CFO, FIS

Yeah.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

You know, the approach to implementations has shifted. There was a time when FIS was experiencing longer implementation times. Can you talk about, just operationally, what sort of changed in your approach to implementing?

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

Yeah. So when I came into the CEO role, we made a market shift in both in terms of how we were gonna sell and who was gonna sell, to James's point. We had been really focused on very large, transformative type deals that brought a lot of lower margin type, whale hunting into the company, and so the implementations around those were slower as you thought about, very large transactions. We put in a new chief revenue officer. We really focused on, recurring revenue, high tech margin growth, singles and doubles, and we still do the whale hunting, but that wasn't what we were primarily focused on. And so as we did that, and we looked at selling, highly recurring, high margin revenue growth within capital markets and banking, you get a much faster time to implementation.

And so we've been able to see a speed up in terms of the sheer timeline from what we're selling. In addition to that, we, as part of our Future Forward strategy, have really focused on time to revenue as one of our big levers, operational efficiency, improving customer experience. And so around implementations, we put a new leader over that and have been experiencing a much higher implementation rate, which has helped with the recurring revenue growth as we have also had record wins over the last couple of quarters, which we talked about in the second quarter. So all of that has been good.

It's also resulting in higher NPS scores for us as we sell and implement more quickly and get customers the benefits that we've committed to them in a much faster timeframe.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Yeah. So FIS has always been known for its skew towards larger banks. Despite the significant exposure you still have to the regional community bank space, I think recently you talked about kind of recommitting the business to the lower end of the market, making sure you're addressing that part of the business just as well as the upper end. So can you kind of talk about, you know, any kind of share gaining opportunity you see kind of down market?

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

Yeah. So with the, with the focus and the chief revenue officer and, in the banking business in particular, we absolutely have the lion's share of $10 billion banks and above. These are primarily growing banks with big commercial banking customers. The core banking system that we offer there serves both consumer and commercial banks. So if you start to become a larger bank and you're typically serving commercial customers, we are your marquee core and digital offering that you would come to. So as you think about going down below $10 billion, of which we have a lot of clients there, in fact, we just announced a $5 billion bank that was pretty competitive in the last second quarter, we also play very well there.

We've just been very targeted in our sales in terms of where our products show up and where we can win versus just a general broad, let's try to win everything. We don't play very big in the credit union core space. We do in the payment space with respect to credit unions. So as part of that new sales and the chief revenue officer role, we've been very targeted and are spending our time where we think we have the best-in-class products to serve that set of customers. So community banking, we still have a very big client base there. It's our Horizon core. It's very specific for them. It's very valuable. They really, really like it. And then our core upmarket, our $10 billion , is IBS, and then very, very large is Modern Banking Platform.

So we've gotten very targeted in terms of which of those cores and the products around them, and where do we think we can win versus just being, doing a broad brush across the entire marketplace.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Great. Now, you have a background in banking and payments. Where's FIS today in terms of getting their fair share of the debit and credit issuing of your customer base, and as well as the debit network wallet share as well?

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

Yeah. So our payments business is about 50% of our banking revenue in general. And payments, thinking about it, is issuing debit, credit, as well as our network and our money movement capabilities and loyalty programs, which is pretty exciting for someone who comes from payments, because historically, I've been pretty much an acquiring girl. So when you think about this set of assets together, it's pretty fantastic because you can really, as we talked about, serve the entire money in motion space. So whether you're talking about ACH, wire, real-time payments, debit, credit, it's very valuable. And as you think about regulatory changes or you think about the changing landscape in terms of Durbin, et cetera, those assets become very valuable as those things change.

But what I would say is, with respect to debit, I think over 80% of the payments business is primarily in the debit issuing space, as you would expect, because with our core business comes debit. That being said, I think 70%—we only have 70% of our cores taking our debit, so we still have an opportunity to cross-sell into that core. As a matter of course, generally, if you have our core, there is a very significant amount of add-on products that go with it. And debit is part of the biggest opportunity there. It's a great product. It's high margin. There's obviously consumer same-store sales growth in it. It's very predictable. It doesn't usually go up and down with consumer cycles.

So we see, we continue to see an opportunity in debit, but we also think about our network, which continues to be pretty significant. If you think about the number of networks in the U.S., we have. It's a scarce asset, and we use it. I think in our debit cards, there's only about 60% of our debit cards have our network on the back, so there's a cross-sell opportunity there.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Oh, wow.

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

To James's point, I think as we bought the Worldpay acquisition and really focused there, we lost a bit of focus in the banking business. And so as we bring that focus back and really focus on best-in-class sales to our existing clients as well as new clients, cross-sell within banking and then across capital markets and banking. We just see a huge opportunity in terms of being able to execute and focus and make sure not only do we have commercial excellence, but we also have pricing excellence as we do that.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Curious what you see in the RTP space. Obviously, FedNow, you know, about a year out from the launch. What's the opportunity for FIS in RTP for your bank customers? And maybe secondarily, and probably necessarily, how do you think about the fraud solutions that come with that and the opportunity to help banks manage that risk?

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

Yeah, it's a great, it's a great point. So what we see is larger financial institutions have always had pretty significant money movement capabilities. So whether it's ACH, real-time payments, FedNow, et cetera. However, as you go down market and you're down below $20 billion banks, they want to have their own set of money movement capabilities. So we've had pretty significant success in terms of cross-selling that into our existing bank space, including the FedNow capability. I think the big challenge in terms of seeing that grow significantly is the use case that the banks and the banks' customers see from that. So we've enabled it all, and then kind of waiting to see if the use case picks up. So I think that's interesting, more of a longer tail, and we enable all money movement capabilities.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Yeah.

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

Fraud in itself is a huge opportunity. I was just with our fraud team. They actually are out here in SF yesterday for a team meeting, and, you know, thinking about fraud continues to be a very significant cost for a bank, and most of fraud and fraud tools are built on AI machine learning. And so we are really focused on how do we use AI and GenAI to make these, what are typically models that are built, and you have to change and update every month or day or week to start to learn on their own and no longer have the bank or us do a set of rules that the machine can learn on its own. And we're seeing really interesting improvements there.

As a measure, some banks want to do their own fraud rules that we enable, and then we provide a managed service on fraud rules ourselves if you're smaller and you want us to run fraud rules. Fraud rules, in general, the more data you have, the better the rules are. So typically, banks will look for somebody like us that can see the entire fraud across all sets of financial institutions. So really exciting stuff.

When people ask me about GenAI across FIS, which I think you're going to get to that question, I would say from our standpoint, I think about fraud as the biggest product opportunity across all of our ecosystem, because with almost all money movement capabilities, even in the treasury space, on the capital market side, we have fraud capabilities, and so I think it's a big opportunity for us TBD.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Yeah. I do want to come back to AI, but I think at the Investor Day, one of the bigger announcements was Atelio and the embedded finance opportunity. So just the trend of non-banks and fintechs embedding more traditional financial services into their platform has only been growing, and at the Investor Day, you unveiled your approach to offering that and the new fintech platform, Atelio. Could you talk about how that platform is positioned in the market and what the reception from clients has been?

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

Yeah. So we launched Atelio, and I was thrilled with how much positive momentum we've gotten out of it. And we announced three key clients that are very different in terms of Atelio. The first one is Worldpay, being the distribution channel for Atelio. So think about their ISVs. They have an embedded payments capability, and we're going to help them offer an embedded issuing capability and then moving from there. So that's a very big opportunity that we're working on getting them live by the end of this year and first quarter. Then we talked about KeyBank, which is a bank customer. And so think about them wanting to do, again, embedded finance, but out through their... Same thing, they want to sell to a software company, but out through their treasury capabilities.

Issuing as a service is a capability that we're going to be providing both to Worldpay and to KeyBank, who are trying to go after that same set of software companies, whether they're lending to the companies on the KeyBank side or they're processing for the companies on the Worldpay side. Royal Pay, which was a specific software company, ISV, who is looking to enable more than just card payments at their radiology centers around the U.S. They want to also let you pay by bank. All of those capabilities are embedded in our core banking technologies, but if people want to take those, componentize them, and offer them out in an as-a-service way, whether you're a bank... It's been really interesting.

A lot of the interest on Atelio has come from our banks, who want to be very competitive out to their commercial lending customers, who are also software companies, so we're actively focused on the enabling of those three. We've got a lot of inbound interest, but I was just with, as I said, the team yesterday, and we're making sure that we get those up and delivered.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Great. You mentioned just now some of the collaboration that you still have with Worldpay post the separation, so you made sure to preserve some of those strategic alliances. Could you talk about how the cross-sell and the synergies that you envisioned post-separation are functioning, and where you see the most sales volume coming in from that channel?

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

Yeah. So we were very successful when we put Worldpay and FIS together in terms of revenue synergies around selling our loyalty network, Premium Payback, into Worldpay's merchant base. And we continue to have a very large commercial agreement with them, where their merchants continue to partake there. We also have relationships around embedding their payouts capabilities into our core banking capabilities. So it goes both ways. It was very important as we looked at separating the Worldpay business, that those commercial activities, which are very important from an end market standpoint, continue to be available, interoperate and operate as if it's one client to the or one company out to the out-facing marketplace, even though it's technically two. So those are up and running. Some of them are very deep because we've been doing them.

Some of them are the new things that we're seeing, and we're going out to market together, and they're going very well. We have very close relationships, obviously, across both, and retain a 45% stake in Worldpay, so we have mutual alignment on financials.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Great. So, I want to pivot to capital market here in just a second, but just before we wrap up on banking, I think some of your competitors have been a little bit more bullish on the prospect of seeing more bank M&A. Curious what you're kind of hearing in conversations, how you think about, you know, what that impact entails, both for activity levels in the market, also for some of, you know, the more non-recurring sources of revenue that, that kind of result from that?

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

Yeah. I think so we generally serve the larger part of the bank market, which tends to be the acquirer. So when M&A activity does pick up, we tend to be on the positive side of that, although it goes both ways in any particular market or quarter. It's definitely still slow. I think there is a big desire to do more M&A primarily for community banks that either, you know, CEOs who are ready to retire or if you have to make a very significant technology investment and you're smaller, or you're hitting a regulatory hurdle that you just don't think from a financial standpoint you can afford to invest in, but it isn't really a very big driver right now.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

So I would say I see a lot of demand for it. I think the regulatory environment isn't very positive for it. I do think when it restarts, we tend to be a beneficiary of it.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Great.

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

So we'll see where it goes.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Yeah. Okay, so let's pivot to capital markets. The organic growth profile here has improved significantly, and it's emerging as a new center of growth within the business. You talked about a $120 billion addressable market for that business, growing mid- to high-single digits at the Investor Day. Can you talk about your positioning in the industry and, you know, where the improved performance is manifested?

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

Yeah. I mean, kudos and hats off to the team that's been running this kind of inside, FIS, since it was acquired in SunGard. So they've really focused on putting all of their technology into the cloud, componentizing it, and offering it in as a service way to their traditional customers. So think about trading and processing, buy side, sell side, which is, I think, is what most people thought capital markets was primarily only. What they've done then is they've taken those capabilities, as well as they have a very significant treasury and risk piece of software that they've been selling out to corporates and into other verticals that, while they also componentize and offer in a SaaS way, has become very, very growth-oriented for them.

And then finally, asset finance and commercial lending, where they had some very significant technologies there. Same thing. They've been able to componentize it and offer it as a service way. So a lot of SaaS capabilities they've been building, and they're quite distributed in terms of not just being trading and processing, but being outside of that market in TAMs that are growing quite nicely and into corporates and insurance and auto finance type verticals, which brings more opportunity. I think 30% of their revenue is outside of a traditional capital markets business and in the non-traditional verticals. So kudos to them, and we're continuing to grow that. So I agree. I think it is.

I tell them all the time, "Welcome to being the growth business within FIS," and then James says, "And you have to expand margins," so they are definitely the growth pieces. We continue to invest there. The teams are doing really well, and we're pretty excited about what they can be, and you should expect to potentially see us also do some M&A in those categories, because if you think about FIS broadly, we have scale technology, global distribution, and a marquee set of clients. That being said, it's hard for us to organically invest every place we need to be.

In the capital market space, where they're very successful, if there's products that we haven't built, and we think there's a category where we can buy, put it on our platform, and push it through our distribution channel, it's quite accretive to both revenue and margins.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Yeah. James, and since it's your favorite topic on margins here, one notable part of that segment has been the shift towards a more recurring footprint over time. Obviously, that's beneficial for margins. How do you see that progressing? What inning are we in in that shift? And, you know, maybe for Stephanie, how has that impacted client pricing discussions and the growth algorithm?

James Kehoe
CFO, FIS

Yeah, we're pretty much into it, thanks to the modernization of the platforms we've done. So over the last three years, the recurring has gone from 68 to 72, and our plans are probably to add a point every year. So think about it, in 2026, it'll probably be 75 recurring. And then beyond that, we'll continue to build over time. I think if you look at the business, it's exciting for another reason, is this 30%. They've got 30% of their clients who only buy one product, and they've got 6,000 clients across 150 markets. So they've got a huge cross-sell opportunity. That's one. But we've got significant pricing power across capital markets, best-in-breed products, global positioning. And it's not just selling into the, call it, the non-traditional customers, it's actually selling more to the customers we have.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Yeah.

James Kehoe
CFO, FIS

So this is why we think there's an exciting long runway on this business. We called out a long-term growth of 7.5%-8.5%, some M&A. We've got great products. We have huge cross-sell opportunities, and we have this intense focus on moving more away from licenses. I t's a very international thing.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Mm-hmm.

James Kehoe
CFO, FIS

And the business is roughly 50/50 U.S. international. So this is an incredible footprint that's growing like gangbusters. Margins are expanding. It has huge natural leverage within the business, so we're very excited by this.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Great. Could you describe in a bit more detail just how your go-to-market is structured in that business? How do the sales cycles and implementation times differ relative to the banking business?

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

Yeah. So the sales cycles are generally shorter, and it is a very global distribution channel. They're generally. There is some specialization, as you might expect, because if you're selling our trading and processing businesses or products, so they're set up in solution sets. So they'll talk about selling to the Office of the CFO, and in the office of the CFO, for example, they'll sell to you their treasury capabilities, the risk capabilities, the pay and payouts capabilities, and then they'll talk about selling to, and they've really broadened how to think about trading and processing because they see alternative lending, buy side, sell side, kind of converging in terms of the types of technologies and product sets they all want to offer, and so there's a lot of blurring of the lines and merging.

So they've put together a solutions bundle to sell into that space. So it is a little bit specialized. It's also very global, and we did close one transaction at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, whereby we've seen immediate success in terms of having those products and putting them in our global distribution and having access to this size of clients. I mean, part of the challenge, as you might expect, is to sell into a lot of these very global companies. It can take years, and we already have relationships there. So we're seeing very significant uptick in that, and continue to track that very closely.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

And you just hit on the opportunity to cross-sell within the capital markets organization. I think another part of the strategy is cross-selling between the capital markets organization and the banking side. I think you shared that 70% of the large U.S. FIs were consuming products from both sides of the house, and 30% of- but only 30% of cap markets clients are taking multiple FIS solutions. So, you know, can you talk about how you've implemented that cross-sell initiative in the go-to-market?

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

Yeah. I mean, that's really important as we got a lot of questions coming into Investor Day, why do these two businesses, why should they be together? There was a lot more cross-sell. There's a lot more joint clients. And the bigger you are, especially in the global financial institution world, the more relevant you are and the more negotiation power you have. So it was really important for us to lay that out. That being said, we think there's been, and I've been, really pushing on an Amplify initiative, which is the cross-sell across banking and capital markets. We track it. It's going well. I think it could do better.

And that's been the big push in terms of trying to break down the traditional silos and make sure that the salespeople are incented to not just sell their existing products, but also sell into the solution set. So admittedly, we've been working on it for the last two years. It's going well. I just always think it could be going a lot better. To James' point, there's a lot of single customers, a lot of those around the world. There's a lot of payments capabilities on the banking side that could be very relevant for selling into those, existing capital markets clients. So I think there's a long runway here, and there's a lot of opportunity. I think we continue to push on it.

James Kehoe
CFO, FIS

Yeah, we quantified this at Investor Day as being worth about $400 million. And then the second part, you know, we covered the cross-sell within capital markets. There's also a cross-sell within banking.

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

Right.

James Kehoe
CFO, FIS

Around 70% of our core customers take our issuer processing. If we got that to 100, that's another $400 million. So there's large opportunities, and I agree with Stephanie on this. We're only at the beginning of this. We're starting to track it more aggressively, set goals more aggressively. In the last quarter, cross-sell was up 15% compared to the prior year. So this is a true case of detailed tracking, setting targets by customer type. But this will back up the revenue growth projections over the next five years.

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

Yeah.

James Kehoe
CFO, FIS

Yeah.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

So I did want to touch on AI, and wouldn't be at that conference without talking about it. So you talked about the opportunities in fraud earlier. There's also a lot of just development and implementation work at FIS, and in the investment community, we've seen a heightened focus on just ROI around A-

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

Mm-hmm.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Around AI spend, so where have you seen the biggest efficiency gains around AI within the organization?

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because our CTO has been talking about it, and I agree with him now in terms of there's a bunch of table stakes for all of us in corporate in terms of taking taking advantage of core GenAI capabilities. So Copilot, we've had launched in our development organization. We've seen upwards of 20%-30% productivity lifts there. We've typically reinvested those in the business, but we are seeing a higher productivity, which drives faster revenue for us. That's there. That will continue to be there. I think at some point, we'll- we should get enough productivity that we could, you know, help drive margin. But really, in the development side, it's been more of productivity to drive higher revenue.

The other place that I would say we're all taking advantage, and I see a very high ROI for it, is in customer experience, in particular the contact center, and making not just you as the customer contacting us and potentially interacting with a, you know, a GenAI chatbot, but more importantly, our agents becoming much more knowledgeable, much more quickly. If you think about we have thousands of products, so to get some of our contact center people up to speed on the number of products and capabilities is very difficult. Sometimes it take, you know, we train them all the time, but there's a large turnover.

So we've been using external companies who've really built out capabilities with GenAI to pop up as the person calls, and as soon as the words are used, the person that's answering the questions, it comes up much faster and serves it up to them. So for that, for us, that makes a much better customer experience and takes out costs from the contact center. Those are generally what I would say in the back office. I think those are gonna end up being table stakes for all of us. The returns on them are pretty easy, for us.

I think the big opportunity is really around our own product set and how do we embed the GenAI capabilities into those products and make them not just better, but how do we make them meaningful to our end customers in changing the trajectory of their business? Either reducing the costs, both in terms of reducing fraud, but also potentially the fraud operators who are using the fraud capabilities we're bringing in. So that's where I think we're making investments. They're not huge. They don't need to be. And really spending time with our customers to say, what's gonna be needle-moving for them? I think that's a much longer path, and I think we'll see a lot of benefit from it.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Great. I wanted to hit on the Future Forward and margin expansion targets. I mean, one of the first actions that you undertook was implementing an enterprise-wide efficiency plan. It's called Future Forward, and that now seems to be transitioning to more of an ongoing mindset about how you run the business. So can you talk about that, and how do you envision the spirit of Future Forward living on in terms of just margin expansion and operational excellence?

James Kehoe
CFO, FIS

Yeah, I think, I think it's evolved. I think Future Forward became less of a cost initiative and more of a way of working. But don't let it be lost on you, we set quite aggressive goals at Investor Day for cost reduction. We have TSAs that are coming off over the next two years of $200 million, so we actually specifically said we need cost reduction in 2025 of $190 million. I think the way we're approaching it now is a lot of efficiency and effectiveness has, has been focused on the, call it the, the business units. We're now shifting it into corporate, and we have a corporate reinvention program, and reinvention is deliberately chosen. We're moving away from the banner of Future Forward, and it is, how do you reimagine functions given that you lost 30% of your revenue?

It is GenAI, it is business process outsourcing. We will take out and streamline our processes. We're looking at GenAI and machine learning across financial forecasting. Everything is up for grabs, and we're currently going through. Actually, we're quite advanced in developing the vision for each function, the cost goals to get the best-in-class profiles, KPIs, key outcome measures on how much cost we're gonna take out. And we're gonna be very determined on hitting our margin goals over the coming years, which we said 40 to 60 basis points over the next two years, offsetting the TSA headwinds.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Yep.

James Kehoe
CFO, FIS

Then beyond 2026, we see consistent margin improvement in excess of sixty basis points. It's the natural leverage of the business is around eighty basis points, ninety basis points, which is for revenue growth in mid- to high-single-digit, plus carefully managing your costs throws off this kind of leverage. We want to get into this as a way of day-to-day working, as opposed to episodic cost reduction and initiative.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Got it. I think with that, we're just about out of time. Stephanie, any final thoughts you'd leave us with?

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

No. I think you can hear how optimistic James and I are. We're... We were excited in the second quarter, felt really good about, record wins and core, and look forward to seeing you guys all in the third quarter.

Will Nance
VP, Goldman Sachs

Great. Well, thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it.

Stephanie Ferris
CEO, FIS

Thank you.

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