We're excited to have the CEO of Fiserv, Takis Georgakopoulos, if I didn't butcher that too.
Close enough.
Yeah. I'm Bryan Keane. I cover research here at Citi for the FinTech stocks. We have a list of questions we want to go through with Takis, and hopefully, we can understand the position of Fiserv and some of the turnaround. With that, Takis, you have been CEO since the middle of June, and I wanted to start kind of more higher level now that Fiserv has anniversaried a lot of the non-recurring transitory headwinds that kind of plagued the company the last 12 - 18 months. What were the key headwinds that are now behind Fiserv, and then now what do you see as the kind of the midterm positive tailwinds into the business?
Yeah. We are very much looking forward to First of all, thanks for having me here. We are very much looking forward to kind of clean quarters, which start from the next quarter, where all of the elevated non-recurring revenues that the company had for a period of time, first on the positive direction, and then as you anniversary them in the negative direction, we will have all of those behind us. From the fourth quarter, as we said, and you saw that in the third quarter on the FS side of the business, the numbers start to normalize because the underlying trend lines of the company in terms of the recurring revenue growth, the volume growth, and everything else, it's been pretty stable throughout that period.
It's that elevated non-recurring, which was higher before and then kind of lower this year, drove all of the noise in the results that we've had in the past several quarters.
Got it. This strategic review is now complete, and Fiserv plans to sell several assets. I was hoping to get a sense of how material these sales could be. Is it a couple points of revenue, or how do we think about that? Any update on selling one of the debit networks that you talked about previously?
Yeah. The portfolio review was kind of very important for the company to do, right? This company has both the old Fiserv and the old First Data, have a lot of assets that they acquired over a long period of time, and some of these assets, like Clover, have been hugely successful, some others less so. So the portfolio review was about reviewing every product and every P&L that the company has, every legacy asset that the company has, with a view to defining what is our end state, and do all of these assets fit with that end state or not? I would say the biggest outcome of the portfolio review is more than a dozen small businesses, smaller P&Ls, with either no growth and/or no profitability that we will shut down over a short period of time.
Obviously, we need to be careful with customer impact, et cetera, and make sure we have the right solution for clients, but these are things that are dragging down growth, dragging down profitability, and are taking away from the focus that the company needs to have to deliver on its core priorities. As part of that review, there are also a few larger assets which, again, are not strategic, and these are the ones that we're going to look at to see if there is an alternative ownership structure that makes sense. You mentioned the debit network.
Having a debit network is a key competitive advantage for Fiserv. If you think about it, we have a big issuing business, we have a big acquiring business, and then the debit network pretty much connects both, which means that we can help our clients, especially our enterprise clients, achieve better outcomes, both for their customers and for themselves, in terms of higher authorization rates, lower cost of payment acceptance, et cetera. Having a debit network is a competitive advantage. We have two of them, and what we are going to do thoughtfully over the next few quarters is just migrate clients from two to one, because we do not need to have two. They are almost interchangeable in terms of their capabilities. Thoughtful about client impact, we are going to migrate clients from two to one.
That will leave an empty network, and for that empty network, we are going to look if there is an alternative ownership structure that makes sense. For the rest of the assets, it is a little bit too early to give you order of magnitude. It is binary, as you know. Either there is a buyer at the right price or there is not. Obviously, these are not small. Because they are small, they are probably not worth the effort, but we are also not distressed sellers.
It is really a question of can we find a buyer at a price which would be attractive to our shareholders. We will be updating everyone as these things become more concrete. But we have a number of those that are in play right now, and we have interested parties and process in place.
Got it. No, that is super helpful. Just on the debit network, I think you said previously that if you do not find a buyer, then it just makes sense to wind it down.
Yeah. We will either take the costs down, or we will find a buyer that sees more value in that network.
Okay, great. Project Elevate increased $500 million - $1 billion in cost saves, and it was led by some of this wind-down that you talked about with 12 or so products and AI initiatives. I was trying to get a sense of how much is it the wind-down of those products, the sunsetting of those 12 or so products, versus the increase of AI and other initiatives?
Yeah, it's hard to separate those things. I think as a company, we need to focus on the things that are at the core of what this company does and are important to our clients, and these are things like banking cores, our issuing business, our merchant business, Clover, et cetera. Each one of those has a big book of work in front of them, and AI is an accelerator on how that book of work is going to get delivered. Again, it's hard to put numbers. Anything that we do, AI will make it better, faster, and cheaper.
A lot of the delta between the $500 million and $1 billion comes from that portfolio rationalization work. AI is accelerating, and its impact is becoming more significant. Stuff that we thought would take quarters, even six months ago, now we think is going to take weeks.
AI continues to be a driver of the acceleration of the work. If I had to put approximate numbers, I would say a third, a third, a third between AI, focus, and then automation of processes. Even before you think about AI, there are a lot of complex processes, for example, in operations that the company has, that even without AI, you can make them better. So, rough order of magnitude, I would say a third, a third, a third between those three. That adds up to $1 billion. I would say also Elevate is actually more than $1 billion, but some of those things do take a long time, like decommissioning legacy platforms takes a long time. You need to move the last client out. So $1 billion is our best estimate of a three-year number. Also, keep in mind, it's a little bit of a static picture.
The $1 billion of Elevate means that as the company is today, we can run it $1 billion more efficiently than we run it right now. As you look out three years, there is a whole host of other stuff that are happening. AI is becoming better, hardware costs are becoming more expensive, competitors are doing a bunch of things. All of these are going to play out in a more dynamic way, and we will always optimize our investments and our cost savings for the long-term benefit of the business and the shareholders.
This came up a little bit on the call, but how could AI and interoperability drive faster revenue growth for Fiserv over the midterm?
In a number of different ways, right? First of all, if you think about our clients, whether they are Clover or merchant or banks, one thing that they want to see is they want to see modernization, especially on the banking side, because they want. We heard the session before on digital assets, and then there is a whole host of new UI capabilities and new payment capabilities and new agents and all of that they are going to need. On the Clover side, we need to deliver agents so that we make it easier for small businesses to run, we make it easier for them to show up in LLM searches and in social media, et cetera. So, that is how it is going to impact product development. Sorry, your question is how will it improve?
The revenue side.
Oh, the revenue side. Yes, because it will help us deliver new value propositions to clients. On the Commerce Hub side, again, as agentic commerce, for example, is taking off, we will need to deliver solutions to clients. And then more kind of tactically, we see AI as the great equalizer, because when we look on the merchant side between, let us say, ourselves and some of our modern competitors, what they do really well is APIs, developer experience, et cetera, which are all things that are relatively easily AI-able, or AI can help you accelerate how you deliver on those things. So, we see it as accelerating both on the front end, what we deliver to our clients, and on the back end, the speed with which we can modernize.
Yeah, I wanted to ask, how do you weigh investments versus the operating margin improvement over the coming years due to some of these improvements in Elevate and automation in general? I think your plan is to reach adjusted operating margins of 37%, but you didn't raise that 2029 adjusted margin target besides increasing Elevate. Is a lot of that going back into for investment, or does that just leave potential upside?
Yeah, so we didn't revise our long-term guidance. Obviously, when we deliver fourth quarter results, we're going to give guidance for 2027. As I said, the $1 billion shows the static picture of what you can do, of what we can do, and we are going to start moving down in that direction. We are moving down in that direction as quickly as we can, and that's partly why we simplified the company and we simplified the number of SVPs that we have and so on and so forth. We are moving to capture the Elevate savings as aggressively as possible. We are moving to focus our technology investments and our CapEx spend on the things that are most important to our clients, but it's also a very dynamic environment, and we know we will need to invest, and we will make those trade-offs over time.
Okay, that's helpful. Just wanted to think about going through some of the pieces of the business. First, starting on the merchant business. I know that's expected to grow 6%-8% organic in the fourth quarter. I wanted to start with Clover, I guess, first. The 3Q volume, excluding gateway conversion, I think it grew at 11%, and processing revenue grew 12%. That's still below a little bit of that 15%-20% target. What areas inside of VAS can maybe drive that higher yield to get us into that 15%-20% Clover revenue target?
Yeah. So, starting first with continuity among all of the noise of the past several quarters, what we've seen is both GPV growth and processing revenue being very, very stable and consistent over time. The delta between the 12%, which is the processing revenue, and the 15%+ on revenues will really come from increased VAS penetration. All of the investments we've been making on Clover throughout the past year have been in that direction. We see Clover investments in two dimensions, horizontal and vertical. Vertical are things that are specific for industries, for industry sub-verticals on the SMB space, and horizontal are things that are relevant across the board. We see opportunities on both. On the horizontal side, we spoke about the opportunity to continue to grow Clover Capital, which continues to grow at high double digits.
We talked about, and we've just launched Clover Savings, which is the ability to offer to SMBs high-yield savings account while depositing those savings with our financial institutions that need deposits, and that creates a stable source of deposits for them. There is a whole host of other FinVAS initiatives that are on kind of late stages and we will be announcing in the near future. On the vertical side, some of the things that we are very excited about, one is getting into the healthcare space, which we did with Rectangle Health. It's obviously a very large TAM. It's under-penetrated by us and overall for the industry. What we've seen with Rectangle Health, again, it's too small to drive the overall results yet, but we see high growth, we see high GPV merchants there, so we know that's going to be a driver.
The second thing that's going to be a driver is retail, where historically we've been very successful on the card-present side, but we know that each and every one of our retailers wants an online presence, wants a social media presence. Through our partnership with Google, for example, we are enabling Google Ads. We've created the kind of one-click web development for our clients. Again, these are not Shopify type of clients. They are not digital native, they are not online first. They have a brick-and-mortar store, but they want to be able to show up in online searches, and that we think will be a second unlock of the growth. The third unlock of the growth is we are moving beyond a key kind of constraint for Clover, which is Clover could not move upmarket enough.
When you had a restaurant or you had a retailer, they were growing, their needs were becoming more sophisticated, multi-location, things like that. Clover was not able to support those, and therefore we were losing those clients either to competitors or we had to migrate them to our enterprise business, and that constraint will be removed in 2027 as we are launching Clover for Enterprise and we are able to support those larger merchants. So, when you think of all of those three things, they all drive VAS and they all help us go more upmarket and capture more business and more VAS.
I was going to ask about the moving upmarket to enterprise. Will that be mostly a conversion of the existing kind of the Clover book, or will you also sell that as a standalone now?
This will be a standalone offer, so we can go after some of the larger SMBs that we were not able to go after competitively before. It will also help us with attrition because as clients grow up, we won't have to migrate them or lose them to others because now we will have a solution. In addition to those two things, that creates a brand-new opportunity for Clover. As you guys know, we have a lot of larger merchants, and we did not have a hardware solution for those merchants, and we would have to work with third parties on those. By having a Clover hardware embedded with Commerce Hub, we will be able to offer a more competitive integrated solution that would include Clover hardware.
Yeah, and part of that integration is combining both VAS and the Commerce Hub together up towards enterprise?
That's correct. It's actually bringing three things together. E-commerce, card-present, with a hardware that can support both and can support the omnichannel experiences.
Got it. How about Clover International penetration and the volumes as we head into FY 2027? How does the outlook look there?
I would say there is still a lot of upside. When we do Clover International well, and I will explain what I mean by well, we see really high uptake, we see really high penetration in the markets, and high growth rates. I would put Canada, I would put Mexico, I would put Brazil, and for better or for worse, Argentina in that list as well. In all of those markets, we see high market share, we see high growth. The key success factors there is, number one, we bring all of Clover, not just hardware, but software as well. Number two, we go to the market with strong distribution partners, usually banks. Then third, we bring to the market something that does not exist.
Whether it is kind of the native Pix connectivity that we have in Brazil, whether it is anticipation in Argentina, we bring to the market something that is a competitive difference to what exists in the market today. That is exactly what we are trying to do in Japan. We partnered with the largest local Japanese bank. We bring both hardware and software in the market. It is going to go live. It is already in pilot, and it is going to go live in the first quarter of 2027. We are very excited about what we can bring in that market. It is a very large market.
It is very complicated for foreigners because of all of the local payment methods and the language and all of the habits and the complexity of that market, but going with a large bank that understands the local market gives us high confidence that we will be successful. That is the right model in my mind, and that is what we will try to replicate in markets where we are today, but we have not seen that same growth, and I would put Europe and the U.K. in that category.
Got it. That is super helpful. Wanted to ask about the non-Clover SMB book. It is still the majority of the SMB revenue. It is declining in the third quarter. What is the strategy to turn that back book into Clover revenues, or what other drivers can we do to turn around and get that non-Clover SMB book positive?
The Clover SMB book is a whole host of different things, some of which we think fit in our sell box and can grow and can migrate to Clover over time, and some are legacy things coming from old JVs that have been disbanded, et cetera, where we have just much less control over those clients, and where we are likely going to continue to see a decline as that book naturally attrites. On the first part of the book, we do continue to see an opportunity. These clients have pretty high customer satisfaction. The attrition is not very different from the attrition that we see in the overall book. What we have not done in that book is any concentrated effort to migrate them into Clover, and we are going to do that, and we are going to do it in a thoughtful way.
We've spoken before at Investor Day on the approach that we are going to take, which is kind of a non-disruptive, value-add way to do it, because just moving them from left to right and telling them, "Do exactly what you were doing, but here is a Clover device," does not generate incremental revenue uplift for the company, and it is disruptive for the client. Instead of doing that, we are going to focus more on the value-added services, things like capital and like savings, which create immediate value for the client and brings them into the Clover dashboard and the Clover ecosystem, and then the migration to the hardware will happen kind of in a natural way whenever it makes sense for them.
We have not done that yet, at least not at any scale, because first, we wanted to pilot different offers, which we've done throughout the year, and then second, we were waiting for that full suite of products, including the web development, including Clover Savings, to be ready for prime time before we go into the back book.
Is there anything inside that non-Clover SMB book that could be potentially sold or wound down just because it's not profitable or it's just not growing anymore?
Again, some part of that we have no direct access to because we only have access to that indirectly through our partners, so that we do not have a lot of control over. The rest of it is, again, it is a very profitable book, and there is opportunity to go and cross-sell, so it is very hard to carve it out and sell it to someone, and plus, why would we do it? It is profitable, it is stable, and there are opportunities to grow it. For example, portions of our ISV business are in there, and they are actually growing quite nicely, and the Clover VAS would be a very natural cross-sell there.
Yeah.
We just never did it.
Yep, yep. Wanted to ask about Argentina in particular. Anticipation revenue has been a drag on the merchant business, but fundamentally, I think it remains healthy. Can you just talk about the strategy for growth in Argentina?
Yeah. So, leaving aside the volatility of revenues that Argentina has through a combination of inflation, exchange rates, interest rates, et cetera, which are things that are fundamentally unpredictable by us, the P&L of that business is actually quite healthy, and it is quite healthy through the cycle. And we have a high market share in the market, and the combination of Clover, processing, and anticipation remains a very attractive business. And by the way, that strong presence in Argentina is a competitive differentiator when we talk to clients. Even if you think about enterprise clients that want access to Latin America, a lot of other companies can give them access to Brazil and Mexico. When you think about markets like Argentina, it is very hard for a lot of our competitors, so it remains a competitive advantage. So, we like that business.
Obviously, the volatility created a lot of noise in our financial results. I would say a lot of that is behind us. The headwinds from Argentina are largely behind us. Interest rates have come down, inflation has come down. It becomes much less noisy as we look into 2027 than it was in the past. If that noise resumes because it's Argentina, and who knows what happens in 2027 and beyond, we will just be very transparent about what part of our revenues or what part of the volatility comes from Argentina, but it's a much smaller contributor today than it was a couple of years ago.
Yeah, no doubt. Okay. At the Analyst Day, enterprise transaction growth was targeted at 9%-12% through 2029. I think it was around mid-single digits in this past quarter. What's Fiserv's strategy to get that faster-growing channels like platforms and omnichannel there?
Yeah. I'm very excited about the opportunities that we have on the enterprise side. It's a tale of, again, legacy versus the future, and the legacy of Fiserv or First Data on the enterprise space is a very strong, very compelling, very sticky card-present business. We have an incredible share in traditional businesses, whether it is retail, whether it is groceries, whether it is petrol, et cetera. We are deeply embedded within those ecosystems, and those ecosystems are very, very complicated, and that's why that business is very stable. On the other hand, it's not growing very much because the underlying growth of those companies themselves is kind of at the level of GDP or GDP minus. Starting from the time I joined Fiserv, we went on a very kind of deliberate journey to grow to the higher growing verticals, which are e-commerce and omnichannel.
And on those things, in order to be able to compete, you need to have a modern platform. You need to have a modern gateway, you need to have a modern developer experience, and then you need to have all of the value-added services that will allow you to compete with the best in class. The good news is we start from a very, very low point, so there is no downside for us. It's simply a question of how much of the upside can we capture. And that's why we delivered Commerce Hub. We delivered it in record time with the help of AI and with the help of a team that has actually done it before and knows what good looks like.
Commerce Hub not only there, multiple countries, multiple currencies, but also with a GPV that is doubling every year, and we expect that to continue. Now, it is still a small percentage of the overall merchant business and of the overall enterprise business, but it is growing quite rapidly, and it is growing with some highly sophisticated companies. The interesting thing about e-commerce is that these companies are very sophisticated. They are very used to a multi-acquirer model, so they are always looking for ways to improve the outcomes that they get, and these outcomes come in two forms. One is, what is the price per transaction? The second is, what is the outcome per transaction in terms of authorization rates, fraud rates, and cost of payment acceptance?
That is where the scale of Fiserv, whether it is in processing, whether it is in acquiring, or our debit network, become a competitive advantage because we believe we can deliver those outcomes. So, the doubling of Commerce Hub every year is a sign that we are moving in the right direction. As we deliver on all of those things, we deliver more countries, more payment methods, and better outcomes, we expect that we are going to be gaining a higher and higher share of that e-commerce volume, which, as I said, is completely a new upside for the company.
What about adding VAS inside of enterprise and becoming more of that financial infrastructure?
Correct. So, the value that you get is not from core processing. Core processing is commoditized, and it is going to go in one direction, which is going to be down. So, the way you make money in enterprise is twofold. One is you deliver better outcomes and you price for those, meaning you can price for better auth rates and lower fraud rates. You can price for value-added services, like, for example, platforms that we have like SnapPay or Biller or Loyalty. These are things that companies can pay for, and then companies can pay for niche parts of the value proposition, whether it is countries or payment methods that are more rare, and that is where places like Argentina become competitive advantages.
On top of that, I think the biggest unlock that we have is with platforms, as we did with DoorDash and as we announced with Alibaba, where you can bring big e-commerce companies. They run marketplaces, they need to bring together buyers and sellers, and there you need more than just payment acceptance. You need payouts, you need issuing, you need ledgering, you need to be able to do all of that at scale, and that's where we bring the rest of Fiserv, whether it is our issuing business or whether it is Finxact, our modern cores. That then becomes a very differentiated outcome, which, frankly, maybe a couple of other companies can do globally at best.
Yeah. You throw that all together, and you've been in the merchant business for a long, long time. It should spit out to something like 6%-8% organic growth.
I think it can deliver a lot, and I've done it before. I think it's been hugely successful. At Fiserv, we can actually do it better because we have our own issuing business and our own network. The only thing to keep in mind, which is why I don't want to overpromise on enterprise, is these are relatively long sale cycles, right? Not only you have to be one of their providers, you need to prove the outcome, then you are going to start getting higher share of their volume, et cetera. So, it's a journey. The pipeline that we see is extremely healthy. First step is converting the pipeline to sales, and then from the sales, start seeing that higher volume.
We are happy with the logos that we are onboarding on Commerce Hub, but it's going to take some time before that becomes significant enough to accelerate the overall growth of the company.
Okay. That's really helpful. Wanted to turn to the financial segment. I know it grew + 2% in the third quarter, and that was good to see. You talked about on the Q3 call about banking attrition improving. What's solving that attrition problem?
Yeah. Again, these are even longer sale cycles than what I mentioned for enterprise merchant. The attrition, the elevated attrition that we saw similarly was created by decisions that were made three or four years ago. When I look at the improvement, I think it's the natural outcome of the work that the company started doing not now, but I would say over the past more than a year. We started more than a year ago with the first and very basic thing that we need to improve, which is platform stability and resiliency.
Again, that takes time, but we've been consistently investing on that over the past many quarters, and today we are in a much, much better situation than we were two years ago. With platform stability, I think incidents are down 75% year- over- year and are continuing to improve. So that's topic number one.
You should not give your clients any reason to doubt that you are investing and that your platforms are stable. Topic number two is you should not give them any doubt that you care about them and that you are delivering the right customer service and the right coverage, et cetera. Again, a lot of that work started from the beginning of this year, and we've been consistently executing with more relationship managers, a better level of service, and that continues to improve. You can't do that for a quarter. You need to do that consistently, and I think our customers are recognizing that. Then the third thing is you need to go and deliver real value to them.
No bank CEO wakes up and says, "I want to think about a new DDA platform," as long as that platform works and they feel that you care about them. But what they want to hear from you and what they want to hear from us is, "How can you help me grow my business? How should my digital banking be? What is the data and insights that you can provide to my company? How should I be thinking about deploying AI safely in my ecosystem?" Et cetera. We've started having those much more constructive conversations with the clients, and I think you take those three things together, and it's not a surprise to me that attrition is moving in the right direction. Now, on top of that, what we did not do historically is just be more proactive in the rest of the market.
Fiserv covers 3,500 out of the more than 8,000 banks and credit unions that exist in this company. We spend so much time of our sales teams talking to clients about stability or talking to clients about moving them from Fiserv solution A to Fiserv solution B, that we did not go and proactively prospect and proactively talk to clients about the unique product set that Fiserv has. Contrary to our more monoline competitors in the FIG business, we don't only have cores. We have digital banking, we have issuance, we have StoneCastle, we have agentic solutions, we have a commercial banking platform, we have a whole host, we have Clover and SMB, we have CashFlow Central, we have payments, we have a whole host of end-to-end solutions that can help a bank modernize.
It can help it monetize much better the customer base that they have and be prepared for an AI future. We just need to be much more proactive talking to prospects about those solutions. Historically, we never did that. We started doing that, and we will do much more of that. The result of all of those things is, number one, a kind of monotonically improving attrition, which we saw throughout 2026, and we saw it actually accelerating in the third quarter. At the same time, from almost a standing start, increasing the number of wins that we have. Once again, as we put more resources against that, we expect that to improve. We are not where we want to be. Attrition remains elevated compared to the long-term average and compared to where we want it to be.
Both attrition and new client wins are moving in the right direction, and over time, we expect those lines to intersect so that net attrition becomes first zero and then becomes a tailwind to the business, which will allow the banking business to resume growth at some point in the future.
That's helpful. I want to ask about the digital payments segment. I know the bill pay business is dragging there a little bit. What are the drivers expanding in CashFlow Central and VAS to drive improvements to digital payments to get it back to more normalized growth rates?
Yeah. The headwind from the legacy bill payment is there. Obviously, as it continues to decline, it will become less of a headwind over time. That is compensated by the modern payment methods. Think of Zelle and real-time payments, et cetera. On the future, the growth will come from things like CashFlow Central and from better monetization of our digital platforms. That is monetization both for us and, more importantly, from our clients as they move to the more digital solutions like Experience Digital and our commercial banking solution, which we have spent a lot of time cleaning up, and it is now at a point when we can start helping our clients monetize that. On CashFlow Central, it was a long process, a little bit like when you sell Clover to banks, there are two parts to the sale process.
One part is sell the solution to the banks, and we have done that, and we have a couple of hundred banks on CashFlow Central or on the pipeline to convert to CashFlow Central. The second sale motion, which is, in some respects, much harder, is getting the adoption of the solution with the small business clients that the bank has. We have seen that with Clover. We have more than 1,000 banks on Clover. Only a minority of those banks have seen the penetration that we would expect. What we have done with Clover, and we are doing the same thing with CashFlow Central, is there are a bunch of best practices that make all of the difference. In the case of Clover, it is removing the friction of the referral process. It is embedding Clover within the bank's digital banking. It is relying on the bank KYC.
It is making that onboarding very easy. On the CashFlow Central side, I am sorry, it is that plus getting the adoption of a set of few key features that are driving the economics, both for us and for the banks. We have seen all of that moving in the right direction. So CashFlow Central today has 60,000 SMBs. We have seen revenue per SMB grow double digits. So we are at, I think, very close to the inflection point where, forget the number of banks, the number of SMBs will continue to grow very rapidly, and the revenue per SMB will grow very rapidly as well. So, we think that is going to be a real tailwind into 2027.
Got it. I want to ask about capital allocation. I know you announced the resumption of the buyback, buying $500 million in the fourth quarter. What is the plan and strategy going forward with buybacks, debt paydown, and acquisitions?
Yeah. The plan has not really changed. We said that we want to reduce our leverage to below 3x . Once we saw the results of Q3 and the line of sight that we have on Q4, and we took down our debt, that created an opportunity to accelerate the buyback compared to what we thought in the last quarter. And buybacks will continue to be a very attractive way to deploy our free cash flow into 2027 as we bring our leverage down. Now, the company is a very natural acquirer because we have this massive distribution set, whether it is small businesses, whether it is enterprise clients, and whether it is banks.
If we find great products that are lacking distribution, and that kind of was a big driver of the growth of the company in the past, we would be in a great position to add value to those companies. Critically though, if we do that, we will do it in a very different way from the way we've done it in the past, which is you buy, you integrate, and you offer distribution, rather than you buy, you keep it standalone, and you never get the cost synergies and the technology synergies. With all of that said, buybacks remain a very attractive way to deploy our free cash flow, and we expect to do more of that in 2027. As we do Q4 earnings, we will announce our plan for 2027.
Okay. We got about a minute left, and this isn't on my list, but I was just thinking, going from Frank to Mike to yourself, it just feels more stable, that we're now, do you have the management team in place? Do you have things I mean, obviously, the quarter was a good start, and the guidance obviously looks promising, but it just feels like there's more stability here. So, I guess my question just is, as you look forward here, do you have everything in place to turn this ship around?
I mean, 85% or more of this company is recurring revenue, so this should be a highly predictable company in terms of its revenue trajectory, its OI trajectory, its EPS trajectory, because we kind of know 90% of the outcome. There will always be a little bit of noise, and there will be some large contracts and some large wins and some large losses, et cetera, which will create a little bit of volatility, but that volatility should be on the margin. We should not be in a situation like the one that we were for the past several quarters. Whenever there are these kind of one-time things, we will be much more transparent whether they are on the upside or on the downside. I want to make that company a highly predictable company with good growth and good margin expansion.
In terms of the team, I think we've done a lot of the groundwork to bring in really good product people and really good technologists that will help us accelerate that transition towards our modern platforms, which is critical to our future growth. And we are always looking for opportunities to bring in new people where we have gaps, and the company still has a number of gaps in a number of international markets, in some of our business development areas, et cetera. So we will always look to bring in new talent that will bridge the old and the new. We still have legacy infrastructure, we still have new capabilities that we are building, and we're always looking for people that will help us accelerate that trajectory.
All right, great. Well, thanks for the update, and good luck, and we're rooting for you guys.
Thank you. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you, guys.