Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us today, both of you here in the room at the New York Stock Exchange, and those joining us live on the webcast. We appreciate your interest in Global Payments and are excited to spend the morning with you. Regarding the agenda today, we will kick off with Cameron Bready, our CEO, who will cover our vision and strategy. Next, we'll hear from Bob Cortopassi, President and Chief Operating Officer, who will cover our Merchant Solutions business. He'll be followed by Gaylon Jowers, President of Issuer Solutions. We'll then take a brief 15-minute break. When we're back, Phil Littlehale, CIO of Global Platform Engineering, will present on our technology strategy. Then our CFO, Josh Whipple, will provide our financial strategy. Finally, Cameron will wrap up before the executive team returns to the stage to take your questions.
Following the formal program, we invite those of you in the room to stay for lunch and visit our product showcase just outside of Freedom Hall. You'll also have the opportunity to spend some time with our team and explore the products and solutions we have on display. Here is our normal disclosure regarding forward-looking statements that you made, we made today, and you can find more information in our SEC filings and on our website. And with that, let's get started.
Commerce is evolving fast. Consumers demand instant everything. Great for them, make or break for businesses. But while others come and go, you have Global Payments, trusted by millions, powering everyday commerce seamlessly and securely, deploying global expertise locally, supporting millions of customers across 38 countries and 75 billion transactions annually. Financially strong with world-class products, building every layer of commerce for small businesses, developers, and financial institutions, with tech and tools to run better and scale smarter. But we're not stopping here. We're laser focused on what's next, making everyday commerce better. We've built a solid foundation. Untapped value is ready to be unlocked. With focused strategy and bold execution, we're reimagining what great looks like, driving sustainable performance like never before. Our path is clear. What we've achieved is just the beginning. Now, we amplify to be the worldwide provider of choice for commerce solutions.
Good morning, and welcome to our 2024 Investor Day. We are delighted to have you with us and appreciate your interest in Global Payments. We're excited to share more about our company, our industry, and the significant opportunities we see ahead to create value for our customers, partners, and shareholders. We're moving aggressively to position Global Payments for the next phase of its growth journey as a leader in payments. Our goal for today is to provide you with a better understanding of the strength of our assets, how we have focused our strategy, and the ways we are transforming our business to unleash our full potential. I hope you leave today confident that we are on the right path to reach our aspiration to become the worldwide partner of choice for commerce solutions. What does it mean to be the partner of choice?
For us, it means when a new small business thinks about payments and the tools they need to grow, they choose Global Payments because we have leading solutions, are the easiest to work with, and deliver the best value for their money. It means when a restaurant or retail owner is evaluating point-of-sale systems to run their business, they choose Global Payments over other providers because they trust we will help them grow sales and improve their operations through our ecosystem of solutions. And it means when a bank, retailer, or fintech partner wants to provide its customers with card solutions, they choose Global Payments because of the richness of our features and the consumability, scalability, and security of our platform to deliver the experiences their cardholders expect.
To achieve this, we are dedicated to providing our clients with a broad suite of world-class, differentiated products and services that make everyday commerce better. We are winning in the market today with our capabilities. We know our clients. We understand their needs and what their customers expect. We know the intricacies of their business and their goals, and we support them with exceptional service from the sales process, to onboarding, to ongoing support when they need us. We are committed to excellence in execution and delivering flawlessly, and as our name implies, we do this at scale globally, supporting customers in key geographies worldwide. Before we turn our attention to where we are going, it's useful to take a moment to reflect on where we are and remind you as to how we got here, as well as the compelling strength of the enterprise we have built.
Global Payments today is a leader at the intersection of software and payments, generating roughly $9 billion of revenue annually and $4 billion of operating income. Our scale is significant. We support over 5 million business locations across over 100 verticals and more than 1,900 leading financial institutions globally... We process more than 75 billion transactions a year. That's more than 200 million every single day, and we have 830 million traditional accounts on file. We have a physical presence in 38 countries, and our global reach is supported by our commitment to local service, with 27,000 team members worldwide. In short, we have an incredibly strong foundation to build upon.
Over a decade ago, we set our sights on becoming a Fortune 500 company as a proxy measure for our desire to enhance the size, scale, and scope of our business. We also identified where the market was going and how those trends would impact the needs of our clients, and we strategically positioned ourselves to take advantage of these opportunities. We were one of the first to identify and respond to the convergence of software and payments, becoming a leader in integrated payments, while also pursuing opportunities to own software solutions in select verticals. This has provided us with an enviable position in some of the most attractive areas of the market that will serve as key drivers of growth moving forward.
We also built meaningful scale, growing revenue from roughly $1 billion in 2010 to nearly $9 billion in 2023, while expanding our global presence to gain exposure to secular growth markets and support our clients with what they needed, where they needed it. And we diversified into Issuer Solutions , positioning ourselves to benefit from being on both sides of payment transactions with complementary offerings. During this period, we augmented our organic growth with an aggressive M&A-driven capital allocation strategy that accelerated our expansion. Leveraging our strong cash flows and balance sheet, we identified and acquired leading businesses, assets and distribution that positioned us to benefit from where the industry was moving and extended our global reach.
While on this journey, we have intentionally amassed a broad array of leading products and capabilities, and we have assembled a deep bench of payment experts, know-how, and relationships that enable us to help our clients solve mission-critical problems. Our full range of solutions allow us to deliver on our promise, making everyday commerce better. In merchant, we seamlessly combine payments and software. In certain verticals, such as restaurants, retail, real estate, and education, we own our own solutions. In others, we partner with more than 7000 ISVs to provide products and services that extend our reach to over a 100 verticals. Of course, we process payments, both C2 B and B2 B, but we differentiate ourselves by focusing on helping our customers run, and importantly, grow their businesses.
We do this through industry-leading expertise and service quality, flexible commercial models, and a suite of capabilities we refer to as commerce enablement solutions. These include a variety of offerings from human capital management and payroll, inventory management, AR automation, and customer loyalty programs, to digital menu boards, service, self-service kiosks, and mobile order to pay, all seamlessly integrated into an ecosystem. In issuer, we empower FIs, retailers, and fintechs with end-to-end services to launch, manage, and deliver card programs for consumers, small businesses, and larger enterprises. Our best-in-class capabilities enable issuers to deliver exceptional experiences at scale, making everyday commerce better for their customers. We also offer a range of commerce enablement solutions to our issuer clients, with best-in-class B2 B commercial card solutions, data and predictive analytics, AI-powered fraud solutions, program management, together with output and managed services.
And with the accelerating growth of embedded payments, our capabilities allow us to participate on both sides of the transaction. When we can facilitate an authorization at a merchant through a settlement at an issuer, we have the ability to make everyday commerce easier for all constituents. Leveraging products across our business, including virtual cards, AR/AP automation, and expense management, we can also benefit from providing new ways to further digitize B2 B payments. Quite simply, there is a convergence happening in payments, and we are well positioned to capture this trend. We are very proud of our capabilities, and while we are winning in the marketplace with them today, we believe there is significant untapped potential for us to pursue. Although we achieved significant success, built capabilities, expanded into new markets, and extended our scale, it's important to also acknowledge that our journey has created some challenges.
Specifically, the nature of our growth made us a more complex company and stressed our operating model. It also complicated our business, making it more difficult for investors to understand us, and at times, making it harder for our customers to interact with us. And candidly, we lost some of our strategic focus as we fell prey to trying to be all things to all customers in all markets. While executing on our M&A initiatives, we were intentional with our integration efforts, constantly balancing the level of integration with the impact on value realization and growth. Some acquisitions were more integrated than others, but in general, we were fairly flexible in accommodating different operating models and structures with many of the acquisitions we made.
The cumulative effect of this and the rapid growth we experienced has resulted in too many silos across our organization, too much duplication of effort and investment, and overall, a less efficient and agile operating structure. We see meaningful opportunities to streamline and simplify the business. As we position Global Payments for the next decade of growth, we are tackling these challenges head-on to unlock significant value and drive better returns over time. Earlier this year, we launched a holistic review of our business. As part of this review, we examined our strategy, our operational fitness, and an ability to deliver sustainable performance. Our approach was deliberate and our process was rigorous. We took a first principles approach to examining growth drivers, market positioning, go-to-market alignment, product portfolios, and potential to optimize our assets.
From there, we refreshed our strategy to ensure we are focusing our resources and efforts and investments in the areas of the business that will drive the best opportunities for growth, many of which are markets where we are already winning today. With this renewed clarity, we then evaluated organizational structure and operating model and capacity to execute against this strategy. This gave rise to a broad operational transformation agenda to ensure we are poised for success. This process identified numerous opportunities to transform our operations and drive sustainable performance over the long term. They will help us unlock value, aligning our strategic focus on where we can capitalize on scale and differentiation, remove distractions, and allow our organization to realize its full potential.
Our strategic review was also informed by the secular drivers and trends we believe will influence demand for our solutions, and against which we are best positioned to continue to win. These include the continued importance of SMBs as a driver of growth, and with that, the necessity of offering comprehensive point-of-sale and vertical market software to meet industry-specific requirements. It also reinforced the need to deliver embedded commerce enablement solutions that extend beyond just payments. Embedded payments in the increasing digitization of the economy will become ever more pervasive over time. The ascent of digital wallets and tokenized cards is embedding payments further and further into commerce and blurring the boundaries between physical and online. More and more customers also want greater convenience, with flexible and frictionless payment options that are speedy, secure, and effective.
Everybody wants everything instantly, whether it's the ability to process payments or the ability to use a new credit card. And highly available is no longer good enough. Always available is the new standard. Lastly, being a scale player in this industry matters more than ever. The increasingly complex environment in which we operate and the regulatory requirements associated with that are becoming more stringent for us and our customers, and security concerns are growing, and the investment to maintain compliance is escalating. More and more, compliance is becoming a point of differentiation globally. Our review objectively assessed our competitive strengths, where we have differentiation, and why we win today, while also identifying where we have gaps. The clear conclusion from this was to concentrate on the strategic markets and opportunities where we have the best ability to compete and win.
The salient outcome is more concentrated investment in the areas that will be most impactful to driving growth in our business and our ability to continue to win share in the market. Quite simply, we are leaning into our differentiation. In merchant, this means being laser-focused on SMBs, where our combination of solutions, market knowledge, and commitment to customer engagement position us ideally to gain share and grow. In mid-market and enterprise, it means being more selective to pursue opportunities where we have leading distinctive solutions. We can't be everything to everyone, and we'll be more disciplined about where we play. In terms of our key verticals, we will concentrate on markets with higher payment attachment rates, where the quality and breadth of our solutions is recognized, as well as those where we see strong potential for further expansion with investment that can be amplified more broadly across our business.
Further, we will prioritize extending our suite of commerce enablement solutions. This allows for us to expand revenue pools directly and with partners and grow wallet share while increasing the number of services per customer to boost retention and fuel differentiation. We also recognize that global does not mean everywhere. We will provide greater discipline to our organization and to our global presence and focus investment in geographies that can contribute meaningfully to our growth and where we can operate at scale. As a result of this review, we have identified certain assets, markets, and lines of business that lack alignment with our strategic focus. Although these are all quality assets in their own right, we're moving to exit them, provided we are able to achieve acceptable valuations. Our review process also yielded several key takeaways for our Issuer business.
First, it reinforced the strategic value of issuer to extend our capabilities across the payments value chain, and that our move to the cloud is crucial to maximizing the value of the business. Our refreshed modernization strategy now has us on the right path to success, and we believe we will be at an inflection point upon completion of our cloud journey. Second, it increased our belief that cloud modernization will further amplify our right to win and grow share across existing and new addressable markets, enhancing the strong leadership position we command today. It will also assist in increasing our penetration of the broader pool of B2B payments that is primed for card-led digitization. Third, we will continue to explore and evaluate options for the Issuer business that may serve to achieve our strategic objectives and accelerate value creation for our shareholders.
In the meantime, we're moving forward to bring our strategy to life. Anchored against our aspiration to be the worldwide partner of choice for commerce solutions, our strategy aligns to our four line of business pillars, enabled by three enterprise-wide priorities. The simplicity, focus, and clarity of these pillars creates our North Star for serving our customers, empowering our teams, and unlocking our full potential to deliver shareholder value. One of our most important strategic shifts is to fully unify our merchant business worldwide to be product-led across three pillars: point of sale and software, Integrated and Embedded , Core Payments. It's a move away from the geographic market and distribution channel-first orientation we had previously. By doing so, we will harmonize across these three lines of business to leverage all of our product and capabilities globally.
This will enhance our customer focus and the value we can deliver to clients with unified teams, roadmaps, and platforms. These changes will also amplify the impact of our industry-leading direct and partner distribution channels to sell the full suite of our capabilities across markets to address customer needs, while orienting them towards the best opportunities to drive growth in the business. More than ever, winning in the SMB space means leading with a competitive, differentiated set of software-based solutions and capabilities that are vertically fluent. It's about anticipating customer needs so that we can provide what they need, when or even before they need it. In the restaurant and retail vertical markets, this includes point-of-sale software, which is more and more the mode of competition for delivering payment solutions. The point-of-sale market is competitive and advanced, but it remains in its early stages in terms of opportunities.
Our POS solutions are robust and are winning, and there is significant value to unlock by consolidating our products and platforms, focusing more investment, and broadening our go-to-market approach. Bob will share more about how we plan to do this shortly. Of course, it's not practical for us to own software across all the verticals where we want to compete, and our Integrated and Embedded channel will remain a key driver of growth and area of continued focus. We will leverage our unparalleled leadership position in this space to expand share with distinctive offerings that extend globally. Our capabilities to support embedded solutions remain differentiated in the market, and we intend to further invest to expand our competitive moat.
We have unmatched expertise and solutions to meet partners how and where they want to be met, with the unique ability to tailor our offerings across a continuum of operating models and commercial structures to align with their targeted outcomes. Finally, in merchant, Core Payments channel remains foundational to our business, providing a stable source of revenue and cash flow, as well as further opportunities for growth. We have a broad set of payment products that we deliver directly to clients in the markets we serve around the globe, and also embed in our own POS software solutions and those of our partners to power payment acceptance. These include traditional physical and digital acceptance, as well as our ability to distinctly blend them for fully integrated omni-channel offerings, while also capturing wallets, BNPL, QR codes, domestic switches, and over 140+ alternative payment methods around the globe.
In Issuer, we will build on our market position as a leader where we win today with the broadest and most feature-rich capabilities, particularly in the complex and highly regulated credit card space, and with the scope of unmatched commercial payment solutions we bring. And we are further widening our competitive advantage with our cloud modernization program. As we continue to modernize, we will expand into new target addressable markets and accelerate new use cases for our services as we improve the consumability of our capabilities. We will also simplify and accelerate the onboarding process, enhancing the customer experience and speed to revenue. Lastly, we are well positioned to capture the growing opportunity that digitization provides in commercial and B2B payments, where we are a leader today. Our three enterprise-wide initiatives will enable our lines of business to achieve their full potential.
We will drive growth and differentiation with an expanding set of commerce enablement solutions. SMBs require more than point solutions. They need partners that can help them grow their business, streamline their operations, and deliver better customer experiences with an ecosystem of capabilities that work seamlessly together. We have built an enviable portfolio of these innovative, market-leading, and tightly integrated capabilities, positioning us to support our customers with the solutions they need. And we will look to deliver these more aggressively across all of our distribution channels. In issuer, we have a significant opportunity to drive cross-selling through our client base, with products in data and analytics, fraud, in origination and authentication, supported by continued progress on our cloud journey.
And across all of our lines of business, the increasing demand for use cases with both money in and money out services will provide opportunities to link our merchant and issuer capabilities. Further, payments is a global business, and we will continue to pursue targeted international growth across our business. We will prioritize investments in markets where we have a leadership and scale position or a path to both in the short term, and where we can incorporate solutions across our ecosystem with minimal customization. Finally, we initiated and are rapidly progressing through an operational transformation program to address the complexity of our business, enhance our agility, and better position our organization to execute against our refocused strategy. Our operational transformation program is centered around the essential need to shift our organization to a unified operating company globally.
This starts with aligning our Global Payments brand identity across all assets and solidifying go-to-market activities under a common umbrella. Soon, you will see a single brand, Global Payments, across our business. As I noted earlier, we have unified our merchant organization into a homogeneous worldwide business aligned around three lines of business pillars. In doing so, we will focus on better serving customers and driving sustainable growth. We will reduce silos, enhancing collaboration, increasing focus on customer segments, and fostering a global product development mindset. This will allow us to maximize our investments across geographies, reduce duplication of investment, and ensure horizontal capabilities are able to be leveraged across the enterprise. We have also consolidated all of our technology organization and teams under common leadership.
Our technology development and operations were too fragmented, resulting in duplication of effort and investment, a lack of standardized tools and practices, and a somewhat inefficient operating environment. With this change, we'll become a more nimble and agile organization with a customer and product-centric mindset focused on speed and quality of product development. Another critical move we've made was to centralize our operating functions to enhance our service models while still leveraging our local knowledge and global reach. We're focusing on improving the customer journey, leveraging best-in-class technology and providing differentiated service experiences to our clients, allowing us to better support their growth journeys and further distinguish our capabilities from those of our competitors. With these transformational changes, we are streamlining and simplifying and unifying our organization. As we do that more effectively going forward, we will drive efficiencies, remove friction, and realize greater value from our assets.
While this operational transformation is critical to positioning us to effectively execute against our refocused strategy, it is also a significant source of value creation for the business. We currently expect our operational transformation initiatives to deliver more than $500 million of run rate benefit by the first half of 2027. As we refocus our strategy and leverage our operational transformation program to redefine how we operate and service our customers, we are better positioned to deliver sustainable performance well into the future. The win-win of sustainability is organic growth. We intend to get back to basics of focusing on investments, on what matters, delivering our full suite of capabilities in a frictionless way, and boosting our customers' success through our service offerings.
We will also maintain disciplined growth in those markets and geographies where we have earned the right to win by leveraging scale across the enterprise. Importantly, these are opportunities we are positioned to pursue with the assets we already have today. From a capital allocation perspective, we are prioritizing returning capital to shareholders with limited tuck-in M&A transactions to enhance our solutions and market presence in focused way. Our target is to return $7.5 billion of capital to shareholders over the next three years, while continuing to invest organically in the business and maintaining our investment-grade balance sheet. We have set a realistic, achievable midterm outlook that reflects the potential of our business and our focus on delivering against our commitments, and we will track our progress with KPIs that provide additional clarity into where we are on our journey.
We believe this combination of sustainable top and bottom line growth, improved returns on invested capital, and superior returns to our shareholders will result in significant value creation. I hope you now have a better understanding of where we are taking the business and why we are so excited about the opportunities ahead of us. The journey that brought us to this point has resulted in a great foundation upon which to build, and I am confident that our refocused strategy and our new operating model will position us well for our next chapter of growth and success. Before I turn it over to Bob, let me summarize a few highlights from my commentary this morning. We're a market leader operating at the intersection of software and payments, delivering innovative solutions worldwide.
We will pursue the most significant global opportunities across our business, and we'll concentrate our investments in a unified suite of products, capabilities, and platforms to drive outsized returns. We will streamline and simplify our operating environment through our operational transformation to unlock substantial value and support obtainable - sustainable, excuse me, top-line and bottom-line growth. We are pursuing and will continue to evaluate portfolio actions where they unlock value, and we are committed to prioritizing capital returns to shareholders while continuing to invest in the future. With that, let me welcome Bob to the stage.
Thanks to Cameron, and it's great to be with all of you today, both those here in person and those joining us on the webcast. I'm excited to tell you more about our Merchant Solutions business, a scaled global business with approximately $7 billion in annual revenue and a significant opportunity to further gain share, given our total addressable market of more than $100 billion. As we take the next step in our journey, we're starting from a position of strength. There are very few players in our space with the expertise, reach, and relationships of Global Payments. More than 5 million merchant locations, 39 billion transactions processed annually, more than 1,800 financial institution partners, including leading global banks, and over 7,000 software partners serving more than 100 different vertical markets.
We respect the quality and diversity of our competition, but given the size of the overall TAM, we have plenty of headroom for growth, and payments is not a winner-takes-all market. We remain well-positioned to continue to grow and win in the segments of the market where we choose to play. We're a market leader with scale and geographic presence, winning new business today and driving continued growth, and we believe our refocused strategy and operational transformation will allow us to improve upon this in the future. Our goal is to be the partner of choice for our clients. Cameron provided a few thoughts on what this means to us, and I'll take a moment to amplify how we're delivering on this aspiration. Although it may seem basic, it starts with listening to our clients and being vested in their success.
It means leveraging our vertical market fluency to ensure we understand them better than anyone else and can provide what they need, when and where they need it. This is a core competency of ours. Being able to meet our customers with knowledge of their broader industry and specific business has allowed us to succeed and build deeper relationships that lead to long-term success. We thrive in environments of complexity. SMBs come in a variety of personas with different capabilities and needs. There's a customer for the simplest solutions, and we have products for them. However, our core market is really serving more discerning buyers, both partners and merchants, who are growing their business and require more functionality, broader capabilities, and a higher level of tailored service and support. Being the partner of choice also means we innovate and help our partners to innovate.
We get creative to solve tough problems together with a hands-on and consultative approach. We deliver best-in-class products and services and help our clients grow and prosper. It's about providing holistic solutions that are integrated, embedded, and intuitive to use. It's about extending our advantage by leveraging our common technology platforms to enable commerce and better experiences for our clients and partners every day. And it means focusing our efforts on the solutions, markets, and service experiences that matter the most. As Cameron mentioned, innovation doesn't mean doing everything, and, and global doesn't mean being everywhere. In describing our business, it's helpful to bring it to life by illustrating how Global Payments enables multiple aspects of commerce experience, empowers our clients to deliver for their customers. Think about a typical day.
You leave the house and buy a coffee from your local shop, which uses our holistic point-of-sale solutions to run their core business. Human capital management, payroll, digital menu boards, mobile ordering, delivery integration, the shop's loyalty app, and POS and payments, too. You drive to the office parking garage, where a software partner is using our embedded solutions to provide ticketing capabilities, payments, too. You step out in the middle of the day for a dentist appointment that you booked using our scheduling components, which are integrated into the practice management system. We also provide electronic forms, billing, text to pay for the tooth whitening, which was a suggestion offered to you through our cross-sell and upsell technology. You refill your child's prepaid account through our K-12 education platform that also helps the kitchen comply with nutritional management guidelines and powers the cafeteria and spirit store point of sale.
Then maybe you end the day at the ballpark with your family, where the stadium leverages our solutions to facilitate a complete fan engagement experience, including ticketing integration, loyalty, retail POS, food and beverage POS, mobile ordering, payments, e-commerce, digital kiosks. It's all wrapped in enterprise reporting, and we also provide a number of other services. Our deep vertical fluency makes it easy and intuitive for businesses to accept payments in person or online, and to manage other tasks that are key to their normal workflow and business operations. It's an ecosystem approach to making everyday commerce better. Let me further expand on what I mean by an ecosystem approach, and frame how the pieces come together to enable a wide range of differentiated commerce experiences. Across our business, we start with a context and understanding of our client's specific vertical.
From there, we can draw on our vast set of capabilities to tailor solutions to fulfill their needs. We're taking our vertical market expertise and delivering differentiated capabilities based on a wide array of core and commerce enablement offerings. We deliver these solutions through a unified technology stack that allows us to simplify access across a broad range of direct and indirect distribution channels globally. We know that our clients are focused on enhancing the customer experience, and we're transforming our operating model to address those needs. We're aligning brands, harmonizing product teams, better aligning distribution, and integrating PNLs to move to a single merchant team that goes to market in a unified manner. Importantly, none of this is aspirational. We're delivering it all today and winning with new and existing customers.
Our focus and next steps will be to further simplify and unify these efforts to drive our growth. We're also working to enhance the value we provide our clients every day. Payments functionality is foundational to what we deliver for the majority of our clients, and we view these capabilities as table stakes. We're focused on expanding our wallet share with more meaningful, value-driving, and commerce-enabling features and functionality. We also believe it's important to extend our reach by delivering all of our differentiated solutions across all of our distribution channels. In a world where the physical and virtual have increasingly converged, our geographic footprint with local expertise and our leadership in physical SMBs, positions us well to serve clients where in-person and online interactions are treated as a single customer experience.
The combination of broader and more distinctive capabilities, matched with a vertical fluency and seamless blend of physical and digital, is a key driver of why we win today and will continue to, to fuel our future growth. The net result is a deeper relationship with a premium experience as we solve more and more of our clients' critical needs. Of course, customers who use multiple services tend to have lower churn and higher lifetime value, so it's a win-win. There's really never been a better time to be partnered with Global Payments. Cameron mentioned three pillars of growth within our unified merchant segment, POS and software, Integrated and Embedded , Core Payments.
Across each of these, we'll seek to further differentiate our offerings with market-leading commerce enablement solutions, provide the full suite of these capabilities across priority markets globally, and engage in transformational initiatives that ensure we're maximizing the effectiveness of these efforts and the efficiency with which we pursue them. In doing so, we'll increase our value proposition to our clients, amplify our ability to pursue and realize growth opportunities, optimize our asset base, and generate higher returns on the capital we invest. I'll begin with POS and software. Today, we go to market in POS and software with a range of brands and solutions. We built meaningful capabilities in cloud-based point-of-sale for restaurant and retail, and we differentiate in many verticals, including education, healthcare, communities, and real estate with leading software. Our POS products are robust and continue to get stronger. We win with sophisticated buyers and when performance matters.
It's evident in our hometown Atlanta stadiums and similar venues worldwide, and we win with SMBs, the lifeblood of economies around the world. Our solutions are feature-rich and market-validated. We sell them through a variety of distribution channels, supporting our clients with a superior level of service. To harness the richness of our portfolio, we're making bold changes in how we do business and moving more aggressively to invest in areas where we have the products and capabilities to win. We're consolidating POS assets across branding, technology, team structure, and distribution. We're focusing on those market segments and geographies where we see the best opportunities for growth, while continuing to ensure we're on the front lines of integrated marketplace enablement. We're winning in the market today with a fragmented and less than optimized approach, but we see a significantly greater opportunity for growth and share gains by making bold changes.
We're excited about the game ahead, as it's still in the early innings. Maybe to continue the baseball theme for a moment, we work closely with Truist Park to deliver a modern digital fan experience, while refining our POS capabilities that can be deployed across a spectrum of restaurants and retail environments. To see the versatility, let's step into Truist Park with the Atlanta Braves for more on how we enable multiple venues and experiences.
Welcome inside Truist Park. Today, we're going to take a look at how Global Payments technology gives fans faster transactions, which means more live baseball, with innovation that delivers. This season, several areas in the ballpark have gone through upgrades, starting with the Braves Clubhouse Store. First, let me tell you, this place is huge. It's your one-stop shop for Braves merchandise for the whole family. Fans can check out faster than before with the new POS systems powered by Global Payments. There are 16 POS devices for fans to have access to more registers to get through quicker. Faster checkout results in less pay time, more play time. Speaking of play time, let's go and check out a new location at the park. Welcome to the Blue Moon Beer Garden.
This area is one of the new popular spots for fans to meet inside the ballpark, offering the largest variety of Molson Coors beer options and unique food pairings that can't be found anywhere else at the ballpark. It also features food stalls local to Atlanta, like Fred's Meat & Bread and Conecuh Sausage Company. There are regular concessions for a quick purchase, but also a self-checkout option for quick service, grab-and-go beer. Using the self-checkout allows fans to get back into their seats faster and not miss any of the game action. In between innings, visit The Markets on the 300 level, which offer both food and drink options for fast self-checkouts. In total, there are 53 Global Payments' self-service kiosks around the ballpark, where guests can get an easier, faster, and more accurate ordering option.
The Braves want to give a big thank you to official commerce technology provider, Global Payments, for providing fans with faster checkouts, more transaction options for a better ballpark experience.
It'd be easy to think of stadiums and event venues, franchise businesses, as enterprise customers, and on some levels, they are. In terms of functionality, they behave very similar to a collection of SMBs. From payments to kiosks to mobile ordering, delivery and payroll and more, our scalable solutions can be flexibly deployed to meet the needs of SMBs while maintaining the versatility to serve more complex environments. We're bringing advanced, reliable, resilient, and scaled technology to market, and the solutions I've been talking about, they're not coming in the future, we're delivering them today. The key to our versatility is the breadth of the capabilities and configurations that we can enable from the cloud. We allow customers to run their business their own way, or conversely, we can preconfigure for quick implementations in a scalable manner.
We do this while pairing our embedded payments platform with commerce enablement products and expanding into deeper restaurant services such as digital signage, mobile ordering, cloud data management, line busting, and human capital management, and payroll. Incremental products can be quickly and easily added to an existing deployment to deepen our relationships with restaurants as they grow, providing additional functionality as their needs evolve. There's no better way to demonstrate that our POS assets are feature-rich and market-validated than through our partnership with CosMc's. CosMc's represents one of the most sophisticated buyers of POS solutions in the world. After a rigorous vetting process, we were selected to embark on the growth journey as their POS technology ecosystem partner. We're thrilled to be supporting them as they pilot this new, exciting concept.
While the CosMc's partnership demonstrates the scale and versatility of our POS ecosystem, we're laser-focused on deploying our point of sale and commerce enablement platform with our largest customer segment around the world, SMBs. Our feature-rich, cloud-based point of sale delivers a world-class front-of-house experience, payments, reporting, and customer engagement solutions. This provides the foundation from which to expand our wallet share with other commerce-enabling software and services. We've developed tremendous relationships in this customer segment, and now I'd like to share a story about the archetype of customers we're focused on serving.
My name is Chris Navarra. I own Prost and 13 other places, I think, for now. Prost means cheers. I grew up watching the TV show, Cheers.
You know, it was the place to let off steam. It was the place to celebrate, and so he wants that to always be available to the regulars, new customers, everyone.
I didn't really mean for it to get to where it's at, honestly, because I didn't know how to run infrastructure. Kind of just learn by doing, and I've got good partners to help us through the whole process.
It's such a rush to open new places, especially for my position of overseeing so many different bars and restaurants across the state. There's just so many tools that we can now use with our Heartland POS system because it is cloud-based. As operations, that's my biggest goal, is that I give everyone the tools that they need to succeed, and if they need help, I'm here for them.
You get in the business with people that have your best interests at heart. That's what Heartland does for us. First week we were open, this lady came in, she was pregnant, and she had her baby a week after we opened. And now being that we're 21 years old, she brought her daughter in to have a beer, her first beer at Prost, and I'm like, "That is exactly what I wanted to build.
... You've seen that our technology's proven and competitive, and we continue to experience strong demand for our solutions while benefiting from our next-gen releases and new product enhancements. We can meet the complex requirements of buyers such as CosMc's. We can serve clients with concentrated, high-volume transactions, such as our hometown stadiums of Mercedes-Benz, State Farm Arena, and Truist Park, and we can drive these solutions to SMBs, as you saw with Prost, both in the U.S. and around the world. We've built this portfolio through internal innovation and acquisitions. Some of those acquisitions included multiple POS products. While we've taken steps in the past to organize around go-to-market segments, as we transform Global Payments, we're now fully unifying our teams under a singular technology platform and go-to-market strategy. This flagship POS software, tightly coupled with our commerce enablement ecosystem, is called Genius.
Our Genius product family is more than simply a marketplace of point solutions. It's a fully integrated and seamless set of capabilities that can be deployed to all of our clients through our modern, scalable, cloud-based software. This consolidation will enhance our ability to grow, make us more efficient, and accelerate value delivery for our partners and clients while realizing a greater return on our invested capital. We're serving customers holistically and improving lifetime value as we do. We're also focused on unifying our distribution. Our deep institutional knowledge as the partner of choice for SMBs in the U.S. and around the world, allows us the benefit of that scale and that launchpad. We're excited about what we'll achieve with our unified Genius point-of-sale solution. Now, let's focus on the second pillar, Integrated and Embedded payments. Integrated payments has long been a cornerstone of our growth strategy.
We excel at embedding payments in core business management software, whether through our own platforms or our thousands of software partners. We deliver those capabilities in the physical and digital world seamlessly. We also integrate our capabilities with shopping carts, ordering platforms, marketplaces, and other digitally oriented businesses through the same embedded payment stack we leverage with more traditional, vertically specific ISVs. Often, we partner with those technology providers as a go-to-market matter, while at other times, we'll integrate with a customer's chosen technology provider. As part of the unification of our merchant business, we've combined these channels as we see benefits in aligning our teams and better orchestrating our investments to support our broad suite of technology partners. This is largely a recognition of the way we were going to market with these complementary offerings, rather than a major shift.
An exciting aspect of both owning and partnering with business-enabling software and other technology partners is the level of innovation and velocity of change across the more than 100 verticals we serve. Our partners are always looking for ways to deliver more value to their customers, and we continue to evolve our payments technology, as well as deliver commerce enablement services, such as scheduling, B2B capabilities, demand generation, buy now, pay later, loyalty, and more through this channel. We offer open connectivity models that meet our software partners where they are, whether that means self-service APIs, cloud-native tools and payment stack, automated onboarding, or jointly developed customer experiences. We partner with ISVs and other technology providers to help them meet their goals and succeed.
Software partners come in a wide variety of personas, from individual developers early in their life cycle to large multinationals, distributing scaled software platforms worldwide. On that spectrum, we've built capabilities around technology, people, and service, that allow us to serve more demanding partners with a broader set of needs. We continue to deliver more self-service resources to support the smaller companies or individuals, but our sweet spot is and always has been software businesses with greater needs, scale, and partnership expectations. Our single API supports omni-channel and international commerce. Our developer portal supports fast, seamless, and tailored integration, a full end-to-end test environment, sample code, and mature documentation, and it's all backed by white-glove developer assistance.
In addition, our Meet in the Cloud API solves for virtually any environment, no matter how complex, and allows partners to get to market with Integrated and Embedded payments in a fraction of the time. We continue to meet partner demands by delivering exceptional value through our simple-to-consume solutions. Working with our partners to jointly design and build solutions, leveraging our commerce enablement capabilities, we empower them to provide more features and services to their end customers, driving additional value and revenue opportunities. We work with partners to enlarge the pool of revenue opportunity to share, rather than just ceding more economics in a smaller revenue pool in order to win their business. This has driven our success, protected our margins, and led to deeper relationships with our partners. We also understand that while software developers want to provide commerce functionality to their end customers, they're not all payments experts.
We can meet them where they are and facilitate their ability to provide payments and other capabilities as part of their solutions. Whether it's a pure referral model, a ProFac, or a PayFac, we can offer solutions that unlock the capabilities of payment facilitation for software providers, while also providing the appropriate level of support. Importantly, these flexible operating models, they're not discrete. We can work with a partner along the continuum, both with payments and our commerce-enabled products, to arrive at the meaningful dynamic solution that our partners are looking for over the long term. These dynamic models, with the ability to deliver commerce-enabled products through our partner software platforms, will allow us to continue decoupling volume and revenue growth in the future. We've spoken today about being a partner of choice.
While that term can get tossed around, I think it's important to reflect on our success to date. With more than 7,000 total technology partners and nearly 3,000 of them actively managed, over 30,000 developers using Global Payments developer toolsets across more than a 100 vertical markets, driving more than $600 billion of annual volume, we have a strong position on which we'll continue to build. We have valuable relationships and deep capabilities driving growth of our combined solutions through vertical integrations, digital native partnerships, and the full spectrum of embedded opportunities. We also continue to invest in our capabilities through initiatives to further unify our platform, simplify the onboarding experience, and maintain a focus on the most compelling opportunities within the SMB space. It enhances our winning formula. We're not guessing about where the market's going.
We know where it's going based on the business we win every day. I think this testimonial from our partner, Carestream Dental, may say it better than I can.
At Carestream Dental, we provide world-class oral health care devices and really best-in-class practice management software. As we think about our customers, we want to make the experience seamless, and that's not just the patient, but also the practice employees. If they can do their jobs faster, simpler, without having to learn a bunch of new steps and a lot of new workflows, they can focus ultimately on providing exceptional patient care. Our integrated solution that we work with Global Payments on is really what helps drive meeting the needs of our dental practices. The beauty of it is it's built right into the practice management software. Payment processing then becomes a seamless activity as opposed to a burden. We chose and continue to choose Global Payments for a couple reasons.
The integrated processing is absolutely incredible, and it's also future-proof, so as the modes of payments change, we're very confident that Global Payments will keep us on the cutting edge of the modern dental practice. One thing we appreciate about working closely with Global Payments and the Global Payments ecosystem is the access to different technologies under the Global Payments umbrella. So we almost have a menu to choose from, of solutions that we can employ to bring to our dental practice partners. Last year, we exceeded $2 billion of sales. That's really a testament to the work that our sales and account management team has done in working closely with our onboarding and installation team at Global Payments. The beauty of our partnership is that we're successful by being invisible to both the practice and the patient.
As I think about how our partnership comes together and grows over the next 20 years, I see areas not only just in payment processing, but really the entire patient experience. It simplifies their workflows, and it gives them sort of that one-stop-shop. They can go to get all the solutions that they need to run their practice as efficiently as possible.
Core Payments business is focused on building a set of broad capabilities that can be delivered independently, in addition to being embedded in POS and business management software from Global Payments or our partners. Clients today need more than simple card acceptance. With the rise of digital wallets, BNPL, national QR codes, mobile acceptance, domestic switches, and a variety of alternative payment methods around the world, the payments market that some consider legacy is still a place of rapid change and an opportunity to differentiate and grow, particularly internationally. Our strong relationship with over 5 million merchant locations positions us well to be the trusted provider of POS software, commerce enablement functionality, financial services, and referrals to trusted technology partners.
Whether a business begins their journey with us through POS software, a partner integration, or our core payment capabilities, we have many opportunities to deliver incremental solutions, incremental value, and earn incremental revenue over the course of time. Our financial institution partnerships across Europe, Asia, and the Americas can take many forms to help drive more value in monetizing payments and commerce enablement services. These range from referral channels to tightly aligned marketing agreements to fully interdependent joint ventures. These durable and long-standing relationships provide us with a platform for growth. They're symbiotic relationships that help us gain footing in a new market and help our partner banks maintain competitive advantage against new tech entrants by leveraging our technology and platforms. We advance their solutions in line with market dynamics, bringing new software capabilities to bear in the process.
We greatly value our bank partnerships, but also diversify our distribution in these markets to ensure we're positioned for longer-term trends. As we bring our unified platform to a market, we can expand share via direct distribution that's not purely dependent on the referrals coming from the bank. In fact, our partners look at this additional distribution channel as a way to grow their own book of business within the country or countries they serve. Building on our long and successful history of international expansion, we continue to look to Europe for growth through owned assets, partnerships, and joint ventures. Most recently, we acquired takepayments in the U.K., which provides a well-engineered and purpose-driven distribution channel, selling innovative and easy-to-use POS to SMBs. The EVO acquisition we completed last year has opened new markets to Global Payments as well.
We continue to see healthy growth in expanding our partnerships with the Bank of Ireland, the recently announced Commerzbank joint venture in Germany, the National Bank of Greece, and PKO in Poland, as well as strengthening our long-standing relationships with both CaixaBank and Erste Group. This is a strong, stable, and resilient business. Our robust global distribution capabilities give us a complementary set of routes to market. We can leverage resources, capabilities, market expertise to drive pan-European growth by delivering our products and technology cross-border to help us grow in each of our focus markets. Beyond payments and POS, we're also able to export other successful products across geographies.
Examples include U.S.-born TouchNet and School Solutions, which now provide software, payment services, and other functions for universities and K through 12 schools in the U.K., Canada, and Australia, as well as components of our Australia-born Sentral Education Suite in the United States. Paul Leverton from Cardiff Metropolitan University in the U.K. helps to drive the point home. Partnering with the university, we were able to provide a seamless student and parent experience while offering flexible payment options and simplifying their administrative workflow. This is one of many clients we've won internationally with our focus on exporting our best software beyond the borders of the country where it began. We've unified and simplified our merchant business, aligning it around our key strategic product pillars that we continue to scale and deliver through all of our various distribution channels globally.
If you want to think about our merchant business in the most straightforward way, we're about software. Utilizing our retail and restaurant POS and our other own vertical solutions, we provide the software that runs our clients' business, laying the foundation for delivering many complementary solutions. We'll continue driving growth through our strong market position and access to attractive international markets. Second, Integrated and Embedded solutions, delivering on a flexible technology stack, operating model, and commercial framework that allows us to address the wide range of needs and capabilities within the partner community. We're meeting them with the right solutions, partnership models, and high-touch service engagements that will drive their business success. Finally, Core Payments business is anchored in payment acceptance, with an opportunity to expand wallet share and client engagement through a growing variety of commerce enablement solutions and business value propositions.
Part of our transformation is to offer the best of our capabilities across all channels and markets, while orienting toward the best opportunities to drive growth in the business. Across all three product and strategic pillars, we're leveraging our broad base of FI partnerships, joint ventures, wholesale and indirect relationships, and one of the premier direct sales teams in the industry. To bring us back around to where Cameron kicked us off, let me ground some key takeaways. First, we're unifying our already successful POS businesses under a common brand, Genius. We've shown you that we have what it takes to win in complex environments with the most discerning buyers, and most importantly, with SMBs around the world. POS is a key catalyst for growth globally.
Second, we're building on our long history of innovation and success with ISVs, financial institutions, and other technology partners by supporting them with a full ecosystem approach to embed payments and commerce enablement products within their solutions. We're investing in incremental capabilities to extend our leadership position. And finally, we're unlocking the growth potential of our best products and services by making them all available through our broad-based distribution networks across the globe. The combination of more focused investment in our key products and markets, a base of over 5 million merchant locations where we can deliver more value, and a unified go-to-market approach will provide the environment for long-term, sustainable growth. We believe this is a winning combination that will be a catalyst for acceleration of market share gains around the world. And now let me turn it over to Gaylon for more on the Issuer business.
Thanks, Bob. It's great to see you all. It's great to be here this morning. Thank you all for joining us here today, online and in person. It's really my pleasure to be here today to discuss how the Issuer Solutions business is well-positioned for continued growth and long-term success. Bob noted that the merchant business is operating from a position of strength, and I would echo that as well for the Issuer Solutions business. We are the leading global card processor, placing first or second in all of our core markets. We generate more than $2 billion of annual revenue, with 830 million traditional accounts on file. We have a tremendous opportunity for further growth, given our over $12 billion TAM, and that's just in our core issuer market. We'll speak in a minute later about our B2B market.
Our competitive advantage comes from our global scale, depth of capabilities, leadership and commercial processing, and long-term client relationships, many of which span more than two decades. We are continuing to modernize our business from end to end, inclusive of technology and operations. We can activate our cloud-native product services across multiple market segments, use cases, and regions, serving our clients with greater speed to market and agility, and always in a secure and compliant environment. We are proud of our position and the strength of our global footprint, along with our scaled operating model. We are confident we will keep growing our already enviable market share as we continue to deliver for our customers. Now, I'll provide a bit more detail on what we do so well today and why we feel our strategy will propel us to greater success.
If we take a step back for a moment, I want to provide context on our suite of end-to-end solutions. We support consumer, credit, debit, commercial and small business, virtual card with instant issuance and BNPL, just to name a few. So it's important to understand that we are not just about core processing, about our core services. Our products and services add value throughout the entire cardholder life cycle. Over 70% of our revenue comes from high-margin, software-driven solutions, which support our strong recurring revenue profile. Our product-led growth strategy will further expand our proportion of tech-driven revenue going forward. We also provide access to a robust suite of managed services, including card management, card personalization, contact center solutions, and document preparations. Clients also take advantage of our expertise through a broad range of professional services. There are significant differentiators that resonate strongly with our clients.
It's important to note that we serve a diverse range of client types with tailored products and solutions to address their unique needs, from the largest global issuers and community banks to credit unions, retailers, and fintech startups. Our technology is designed to drive speed to market while reducing complexity for our clients and partners. Our rich functionality is the gold standard, empowering the most successful and innovative card issuers across the globe. Our investment in modernization will expand our opportunity among smaller issuers in the community, credit union, fintech, and neobank segments. Historically, we built our business with a direct sales approach to larger and mid-sized financial institutions. More recently, we're evolving our go-to-market approach to utilize partners as a key enabler of our broadening and deepening market reach, in addition to expanding our P roduct Solutions.
I'd like to expand on how our solid foundation for growth, global scale, and differentiated technology will accelerate our growth. First, the work we've done and are doing to advance our technology platform, allowing us to migrate to the cloud, will help us more quickly deliver the services and solutions that our clients want and need. We can test code faster, onboard new products and partners more rapidly, and provide deep pools of data to be consumed across a broad range of products. This agility, combined with our strong market position, makes us an attractive distribution partner for new entrants into our industry. Our modernization efforts, combined with our enhanced distribution, expands new addressable segments of the market, which, along with focused international expansion, positions us to capture a larger portion of the $12 billion TAM.
By leveraging our partners on top of our direct sales force, we can pursue more product cross-selling opportunities, driving growth with our clients. Additionally, we can expand our strong commercial card processing business to deliver more value to our B2B clients. We will do this by enhancing our existing services and introducing new commerce enablement solutions. All of this will facilitate better engagement between our clients and end customers. In short, we're here for them so that they can deliver faster and better, improving loyalty and customer satisfaction. Offering outstanding service, along with market-leading technology and functionality, has always been the cornerstone of our success. Modernization of our core processing platform will further advance our leadership position. Our move to the cloud will enable us to deliver enhanced, unified capabilities, greater efficiencies, new features to our clients at an accelerated pace.
With API-enabled solutions, we are able to deliver the platform in its individual components or in its entirety. Additionally, our cloud-native platform will allow us to offer these services at scale with greater efficiency, meeting our clients wherever they are in the world, aligning ourselves to their own client journey. Our real-time, event-driven architecture was designed to elevate digital experiences for cardholders. By leveraging these capabilities, issuers can instantly issue cards to digital wallets and then hyper-personalize the interactions at the account, cardholder, and transaction levels. These targeted experiences will significantly increase customer loyalty. Cloud enablement means we can either enter new markets quicker, create new use cases, and offer our services on a modular basis. This allows issuers to target their customers with unique propositions, addressing specific needs and requirements.
Because we started this journey early, our clients can leverage our experience and learnings to help them achieve their own transformational goals. Currently, we have ten product pilots in progress with existing clients. By the end of 2025, we will be exclusively selling cloud solutions, paving the way for widespread adoption. We are moving to a future of an increased scalability, efficiency, and client satisfaction. Importantly, we believe our rich functionality, coupled with our latest technology advancement, will further enhance our client retention and growth. Our relationship with AWS supports our delivery of cloud-based services. This partnership supports secure and efficient delivery of innovation products at scale. Leveraging the AWS Cloud provides capabilities to provide services wherever our clients are and whenever they choose to expand. Moving beyond technology modernization, we completed a comprehensive assessment of the market outside of our core markets.
This assessment identified six expansion markets with a combined TAM of approximately $4 billion. Our cloud-based solutions allow us to more easily and efficiently expand in these markets. Recent wins give us the confidence in our ability to grow, expand, and thrive in these geographies. Similarly to our core markets, we aim to capture at least 20%-30% share in the expansion markets over time. For example, we reached a position of market leadership in Canada and Ireland in less than five years after entry. Furthermore, the opportunity doesn't end with just these countries. As we succeed, we can utilize our cloud services, continuing growing in adjacent markets through our regional hubs. Our experience and success in the U.K. is instructive. We made investments with targeted clients with the goal of being a true long-term partner.
Now, let's hear from Nationwide Building Society, the world's largest building society, about our long-standing partnership in the U.K.
We provide banking facilities, savings, mortgages, personal loans, and credit cards to over 16 million customers in the U.K. The key thing for me with our partnership with Global Payments is that it's a really strong and enduring relationship, so multiple touchpoints with Global Payments and lots of support is offered. But in addition, we benefit from a couple other things that I wanted to highlight. Firstly, the benefits of scale that come from leveraging a multi-tier platform, and also the deep expertise that Global Payments are able to provide and help us as we move our plans forward in the credit card market. In terms of future focus in our relationship with Global Payments, continuing to maintain excellent resilience and remaining focused on that is, and will always be my number one priority.
But at the same time, really focusing on improving our customer capabilities, the options and features that we offer to our customers, and by that, I mean leveraging the capabilities that Global Payments have to offer.
If we continue to expand our footprint, we're exploring every opportunity to differentiate ourselves through commerce enablement solutions. Our robust payment processing platform, complemented by our suite of fully digital products and services. This compelling combination allows us to make everyday commerce easier and more tailored for the cardholder. We work alongside our customers to understand their portfolio and growth goals, enabling us to deliver comprehensive solutions addressing problems and delivering actionable insights. These new products are being developed both in-house and through third-party integrations, including enhancements to our current capabilities in authentication, fraud, collection services, data analytics, and fully digital customer experiences, just to name a few. For example, our fraud prevention product leverages AI to reduce both false positives and negatives, enabling our clients to maximize transaction volumes while minimizing exposure to fraudulent transactions, making for a better overall cardholder experience.
Our digital capabilities facilitate personalized interaction between clients and their cardholders, driving improved satisfaction and retention. As we look at the commercial and B2B markets, we have a meaningful presence as the number one processor of commercial credit cards in North America. We currently capture a significant share of the growing $2 trillion annual commercial card payments volume in the U.S. This $2 trillion amount represents only a small portion of the nearly $36 trillion B2B payments market. As spend continues to move away from cash, wire, check, and ACH, the convenience and data richness of cards will allow our clients to drive innovation and growth in this expanding sector. We're operating from a position of strength in the B2B payments market, with significant opportunities for further penetration and retention of our existing clients, as well as the growth of our new B2B prospects.
Today, our clients enable 96 million traditional commercial card accounts and another 65 million virtual accounts. Our plans include leveraging this position to further penetrate the high-growth B2B payments ecosystem as we partner with our clients to convert traditional legacy B2B payments of checks, ACH wire into safe, secure virtual card payments. When employees across North America or in the U.K. and Ireland, or many of you in this room today, book their corporate travel or pay for a client dinner, it's highly likely to be a Global Payments processed account. Increasingly, whenever a corporate AP department pays a monthly invoice using traditional purchasing cards or virtual card, the transaction is probably processed by Global Payments.
By partnering with our clients directly, we'll be able to offer their end corporate customers a full suite of products, including commercial or virtual cards for AP spend, or provision into a mobile wallet for T&E and expense management. All of these services will be protected by robust risk and fraud capabilities. PNC is another valued customer that is capturing the digital trends we are seeing in B2B, leveraging our capabilities and unrivaled partner support. By capitalizing on our strengths, we see numerous opportunities in the great growing B2B market. Let's hear what PNC has to say.
Our partnership with Global Payments goes all the way back to 1995 , and at the time PNC was looking for a significant technology and service provider related to our commercial card program, which is a key element of our corporate payments business, and we examined everyone in the field, and Global stood out versus others due largely to unique combination of scale, service, and technology that was unmatched in the market. Global has really distinguished themselves at PNC for their ability to not only deliver great customer service, understand what PNC's priorities are on the corporate payments front, and design products and technology to match those, but how they've kept up in terms of reliability, cybersecurity, technology. Being on the forefront of technology developments is really unique.
So as we look into the future, we see a tremendous opportunity to add value to our clients by modernizing the corporate payments world and obviously need a great partner from the technology side of that, one that is constantly innovating and developing, and that's what Global's been for us over time, and we think that'll continue into the future.
All right, we're having a bit of a technical glitch. Just bear with me a moment. Slide. There we go. We see significant opportunities across our businesses for B2B-focused solutions, including accounts payable, accounts receivable, virtual cards, all looking to drive further adoption of these products across multiple channels in Global Payments. You've heard a couple of times today. We are focused on and guided by our clients and their needs. We are modernizing how we commercialize our solutions to reduce complexity from the sales cycle. This enables our sales team to engage differently with new and existing clients. Today, we're already known as a trusted advisor. Going forward, we will continue to enhance and refine our go-to-market approach, making it easier to clearly articulate and understand the value of our end-to-end solutions.
Our technology transformation will drive faster implementation processes, allowing us to onboard new clients and revenue more quickly, while our digital enablement approach will allow us to streamline service and support. Citizens Bank has seen firsthand what the positive impact of a collaborative and consultative approach means to our partnership. Now let's listen to what Citizens has to say.
We've got four verticals focused on serving the needs of Citizens' customers. We've got a credit card business, a student lending business, home equity lending business, and then we've got Citizens Pay, which is our point-of-sale financing business. Most of our credit card business really runs through this relationship with Global Payments, core processing, and many of the ancillary services as well. And so our success is really dependent upon their ability to continue innovating and continue providing reliable service to our cardholders. We renewed our relationship with Global Payments this year. We've got an ambitious roadmap in our credit card business, and it was really important for us to find the right partner to carry us forward over the next several years.
As we surveyed the marketplace, we found that Global Payments and TSYS really offered an unmatched combination of value, reliability, relationship management capabilities. The team we work with very closely takes the time to understand our goals and objectives, and they consistently bring forward solutions to help us achieve those goals, and I think that's exactly what we're looking for in a partner.
It's clients like Citizens that endorse our forward-looking views in the payments landscape, allowing us to constantly bring unmatched value, reliability, and innovation as the market leader in our space. We will remain the global partner of choice through a clear strategic focus. Going forward, we will leverage our investment in the cloud and complete our modernization journey. We will also increase market share in key geographies while expanding our commerce enablement solutions through enhanced product capabilities and partner collaboration. Additionally, we will expand our B2B presence and innovative payment solutions aimed at displacing cash, check, ACH, to capture a greater share of the B2B TAM, and as part of the modernization effort, we are transforming our operations to better serve our clients by leveraging AI, process automation, and enhanced workflows.
We are removing the complexity from commercializations in the sales process and accelerating our time to onboard new clients and products. All of these changes will allow us to accelerate growth and enable us to continue to deliver the best service, technology, and functionality in the industry today. Thank you so much for being here today, and I look forward to taking your questions at the end of the presentation. Now, we will have a 15-minute break before Phil will discuss how our technology strategy supports everything we are doing across the enterprise. Thank you.
Hello, everyone, and welcome back from the break. Let's jump in. Global Payments is a leader in the convergence of software and payments. Our team of 11,300 skilled engineers embodies a commitment to innovation and quality that sets us apart. With over $1.5 billion in annualized technology investment, we deliver best-in-class architecture and seamlessly integrate cutting-edge technology. Our collective expertise enables us to tackle complex challenges, ensuring that we exceed our clients' expectations. We empower our global engineering teams with modern technologies and resources to deliver the products and services to allow us to win in the marketplace.... With a robust foundation built on collaboration, a commitment to investing in our capabilities, and a relentless pursuit of improvement, we are dedicated to shaping a better, more sustainable future through engineering excellence and the provision of always available services.
We strive every day to provide our clients and their customers with reliable, always-on service, making everyday commerce better. We are not resting on our achievements. Everything we do as a technology organization is to ensure we take full advantage of our position of strength. We are building on the capabilities we possess to support our business objectives as we enter our next phase of growth. Importantly, a key component of our operational transformation, we have combined our worldwide technology teams and assets into a unified organization under a single leader. In this consolidated organization, we are accelerating the speed of product delivery deployment across borders and channels. We are doing this to amplify the wins we've already recorded with our market-proven software solutions. It will enhance our clarity and to be customer-centric and product-led.
In doing so, we have meaningful opportunities to unlock significant value and enhance returns over time, and technology sits at the heart of much of that opportunity. By continuing to provide our customers and partners with advanced solutions and services, and efficiently delivering those innovations, we are positioned to optimize our assets, expand our reach, and fuel sustained growth. Our strategic review has given us an opportunity to rethink how we build and deploy our products and services for efficient distribution to the marketplace. Our approach starts with the continuous enhancement of a technology foundation using modern architecture. Over the last 4 years, our rationalization efforts have allowed us to successfully decommission 17 data centers and migrate over 40% of our total workload to the cloud. We anticipate this doubling over the next several years.
Within technology, we're taking an outside-in perspective, starting with the customer experience, defining their needs and functionality requirements, evaluating our products and solutions to achieve those outcomes, and standardizing on the platforms on which they operate. We are consolidating our tools, streamlining our processes, enhancing the developer experience, and leveraging AI capabilities to drive further efficiencies. We are investing in our team members and augmenting our resources by continuing to hire the best talent. We are proud of our highly skilled engineering team and view them as a key competitive differentiator. At Global Payments, our strength is our advanced technology capabilities and ability to adapt quickly. We are dedicated to delivering modern, cutting-edge technology that outpaces our competition. Our unified technology platform offers seamless integration and interoperability across systems. As Bob laid out, our cloud-native, API-enabled platform enables us to unlock market opportunities and expedite our service delivery.
Surrounding this, we are also simplifying how we work and manage our solutions through global standardization of our operational processes, as well as further empowering our teams through management delayering. This will add speed to an already agile organization, and we will continually accelerate the delivery of new products to the marketplace. We're excited about our cloud journey as it delivers elasticity to our capabilities at a lower cost. We've established deep relationships with all of the major cloud providers and have committed significant investments over the next several years. This will further enable our capabilities and enhance the value we can deliver to our clients. A key differentiator of our technology stack is that our API-enabled solutions are designed for global deployment, providing a significant strategic advantage by allowing rapid activation anywhere in the world.
This capability reinforces our commitment to enhancing collaboration with our key partners and enabling greater visibility throughout the entire value chain. Additionally, we're making significant investments in leveraging the latest technologies available in the marketplace. For us, AI holds significant potential commercial opportunities, and we're investing in common data and AI platforms to support these efforts. In addition, AI will drive operational efficiencies and power commercialization of new products and capabilities from our insights into customer spending patterns and behaviors. Of extreme importance and focus to Global Payments is regulatory compliance and information security. As more and more of our clients face greater levels of scrutiny and seek trusted partners who operate with the same high standards, we are continuing to invest to ensure that the products and services we provide are not only resilient, but secure.
We have implemented advanced scanning capabilities to more quickly detect, isolate, and remediate threats within our environment. We do this in an automated fashion as we scan over 220,000 assets and 360 billion lines of code each month. This is a true testament to our strategic focus to protect our company, our customers, and offers additional value and peace of mind. ... To drive the enablement of our merchant strategy, let's talk specifically about what we're doing. As Bob mentioned earlier, we have an impressive array of POS capabilities, specifically built for the retail and restaurant verticals. These products have been developed using modern cloud-based technologies and feature sleek, user-friendly interfaces. We are combining the best of our capabilities into an integrated solution under our Genius brand.
Our product breadth and depth, range of commerce enablement solutions, and robust integrations with ecosystem partners position us well to grow share in this marketplace. In the Integrated and Embedded commerce space, we have a feature-rich API platform, which offers payment and embedded commerce solutions that partners can directly incorporate into their software applications. This platform is developer-friendly and engineered to accelerate speed to market for our partners. As an example, we have an exciting new Gen AI search agent tools that can recommend which APIs can solve their use case. The agent can also generate code and test cases, allowing a partner to go code faster. This is just one of the many ways we're leveraging Gen AI to continue enhancing our partner experience, which is why we were able to attract some of the most innovative software partners across so many verticals.
Core Payments processing is robust, supporting merchants and FI partners across geographies. We are moving this estate to our modern cloud-native tech stack to enhance our speed, scalability, and availability. By leveraging microservices, containerization, distributed computing, we provide a payment infrastructure that is flexible, always available, and capable of processing hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. With a microservices architecture, we break down processing into individually coupled services, such as transaction validation, fraud detection, tokenization, payment processing, clearing, and settlement. Each microservice operates independently, which allows us to scale specific parts of the payment flow based on demand. Bringing this all together across POS software, Integrated and Embedded , and Core Payments, we have implemented solutions to meet our customers' needs using the latest orchestration technologies to provide elastic scalability.
For instance, we are able to scale our capacity through dynamic orchestration for events such as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé concerts, and football and baseball games. At Mercedes-Benz Stadium, we were able to process transactions two times faster than their previous provider, resulting in a 17% increase in halftime transactions. Our approach to ensuring success with merchants begins by being both customer-centric and product-led. We prioritize features that solve real problems by listening to our customers' needs. For instance, we built a secure payment QR solution for a European airline to maximize their sales in a range of areas such as excess baggage. The passengers could simply use the QR code to remit payments without the need for physical POS devices. This led to increased revenues, and the solution is now benefiting other European customers.
By consolidating our technology organization, we've sharpened our focus on delivering solutions that matter most to our customers. The strategic alignment allows us to channel our resources and investments, amplify their impact, and enhance the value of our products. We follow a continuous delivery model, which allows us to keep improving our products without disrupting our clients. Automated testing and deployment have become crucial to our delivery model. With automated pipelines, every code change is tested and deployed in minutes, reducing the chance of human error and improving our operational stability. Operational excellence is the backbone of our service. We have designed our systems for maximum uptime, handling millions of transactions. Our robust incident protocols ensure that even during peak holiday shopping season, whether you're a cafe in Prague or a retailer in North America, our platform remains secure and reliable.
As already noted, we have leadership positions for our Issuer Solutions across our primary markets, with sights to secure similar positions in key areas around the globe. While it's relatively simple to build for basic debit use cases, our strength lies in addressing the complexities of credit. We offer the most advanced features and functionality, and are able to meet the regulatory demands at scale globally. This provides us with a significant competitive advantage that continues to grow as we modernize our technology and deliver it through cloud-native environments. We are already starting to see wins for our modernization efforts, as we've recently gone into production with a large client in a fully cloud-enabled environment. This has resulted in us onboarding a total of 4.6 million cards and 3.6 million accounts.
To maintain our leadership position, we have a broad modernization agenda to move all issuer processing to the cloud. While several competitors in this space have modernization programs underway, let me tell you how we're doing it differently. First, a large proportion of our customer-facing applications have already been re-written using OpenAPI standards with modern tools and languages. For remaining workloads, and in contrast to some of our peers, we are not lifting and shifting to the cloud, putting a wrapper around legacy services. We're instead writing new software and taking advantage of modern cloud-native capabilities. This will in turn drive further long-term agility, significant cost optimizations, and another point of differentiation. Second, we are committed to a model where we can run our software anywhere. Our services are built using modern architecture and leveraging microservices to accelerate our capabilities and drive further value.
To bring this to life, our issuer processing in the box solution enables us to rapidly enter new markets in a cost-efficient way to capture and win market share. This comes as a result of how we've approached modernization and is a key factor in how we will win. And lastly, another point of differentiation is how our architecture allows us to write software globally and deploy locally. We are building the core architecture to quickly adapt to regional laws and regulation changes without the need to replicate entire environments. Not only will this approach accelerate the capture of global market share, but enable us to retain an industry leader in this space. The key takeaway is this: we are winning in issuer. We have the global capabilities to operate at scale, and as we continue our technology modernization efforts to move our premier issuer capabilities to the cloud.
As you've heard up to this point, our vision, approach, and technology platform is compelling, but it doesn't stop there. Our development and methodology and innovative product strategy set us apart. It all begins with a deep understanding of our customers and their markets, and allowing us to anticipate their needs and tailor our features accordingly. By continually assessing our capabilities, we ensure that our product roadmaps are aligned with client demands. Our two-in-the-box approach pairs market experts with technology delivery owners to maximize the value of our products and services. We are committed to becoming a more agile organization with a customer-centric focus. To achieve this, we are standardizing developer experiences, unifying our tools, and harnessing the power of AI to enhance our coding capabilities. For global talent development, we're expanding our offshore development centers to train and upskill our next generation of leaders.
We will continue to invest in global development capabilities, leveraging consistent tools, frameworks, and practices to improve efficiency, accelerate development cycles, and increase speed to market for features and products. This will enable us to create a scalable, customer-focused, and highly innovative microservices-based architecture. The combination of a modern technology stack, standardized development practices, and skilled workforce has already proven to be a winning combination and one we will look to expand on further to all of our newly combined technology organization. We have adopted an AI-driven approach, continuously challenging our existing workflows to identify opportunities for full AI enablement. We have seen a 40% increase in development productivity within our development community, a 30% increase in our customer engagement, and a 25% increase in our fraud detection and prevention. We have crowdsourced hundreds of other ideas to apply AI from our teams.
Due to our scale, reliability, and focus on security, we are rapidly able to take advantage of AI and other such innovative solutions in the marketplace. For example, we use AI models to dynamically analyze customer behavior and preferences, enabling a more comprehensive customer engagement strategy. This approach helps us to predict and prevent customer attrition and will continue to improve customer engagement. We have invested in our platforms to aggregate and filter this information to drive and correlate insights with generative AI. This has not only improved how we manage our environments, but has also helped us develop new solutions across our business. As we explore monetization opportunities and find other ways to drive value for our customers, our partners, the potential value opportunity is tremendously exciting.
We are focused on developing an unrivaled software organization, which will outperform our peers, and have the necessary investments in place to continue to drive innovation. At Global Payments, our significant and targeted investments have allowed us to remain at the forefront of driving the convergence of software and payments. We win in the market today based upon the depth of our features and functionality, leveraging platforms that are modern, increasingly cloud native, and reliable and secure. We do this at scale while solving complex problems in an environment of ever-changing regulations. Our refreshed strategy and operational transformation will allow us to concentrate investments against key priorities and to accelerate unification of our capabilities into easily consumed services that extend well beyond Core Payments to provide an array of integrated commerce enablement solutions.
Unifying our organization unleashes the power of 11,300 technologists to bring new innovations, such as AI enablement, across our entire suite of products at pace. Just as our line of business teams operate with vertical and market fluency and customer knowledge, be they merchants, partners, fintechs, FIs, or retailers, our engineers have deep domain expertise to innovate and deliver exceptional customer experiences through software. Our customer-centric product-led development enables us to rapidly introduce new products and capabilities, whether through open APIs, microservices, or module applications. We enable simple, frictionless orchestration of complex workflows. I'm excited by the magnitude of value that we can help unleash across the organization. We will drive higher returns on every technology investment and optimize the utilization of the assets we have amassed. Everything we are doing. We will not only fortify our leadership position and widen our competitive moats.
With that, I'll hand it over to Josh to review our financial strategy.
Thanks, Phil. Hold on one second. We have a little bit of a technical issue right now. Welcome, everyone, and you know, thank you for spending the morning with us today. Throughout the day, we've spoken about our refocused strategy and operational transformation. Cameron outlined our aspiration to become the worldwide partner of choice for commerce solutions. Bob and Gaylon discussed the key priorities for our businesses. And Phil outlined our technology strategy, which will unleash the full power of our capabilities. Now I'm gonna bring it all together and speak about what this means for our financial framework and how we plan to capitalize on the long-term value creation opportunities ahead. We have an exceptional financial profile, and there are four key messages I want you to walk away with today.
First, we have a strong and consistent track record of financial performance in returning capital to shareholders. Second, our business model is resilient and well-positioned for strong top-line growth, given our significant presence in attractive markets and leadership position at the intersection of software and payments. Third, we have a clear path to compounding growth and earnings per share as a result of our focused strategy, transformation initiatives, and strong execution. Finally, we believe the combination of the performance we expect to deliver over the medium term and our strong free cash flow and disciplined capital allocation strategy will drive superior returns for our shareholders. I wanna take a moment to reflect on how we've scaled as a business and performed since 2010. We're extremely proud of our track record.
Specifically, we grew adjusted net revenue at a 17% CAGR, expanded adjusted operating margins by 1,000 basis points, and increased adjusted earnings per share at a 16% CAGR, while our adjusted free cash flow improved tenfold during this period. And from 2021 to 2023, since our last Investor Day, we grew adjusted net revenue at a 9% CAGR, or 7% to 8% organic constant currency. We also expanded adjusted operating margins nearly 500 basis points and grew adjusted earnings per share at an 18% CAGR. Our free cash flow increased by approximately 25% during this period. Our capital allocation priorities helped us produce these strong results.
Focusing on the last three years as we exited the pandemic and post our merger with TSYS, we generated over $7 billion of adjusted free cash flow, and we took a disciplined and a balanced approach to allocating our capital. This included investing in key acquisitions like EVO Payments, Zego, MineralTree, each of which advanced our strategy. We also continued to make long-term strategic investments in our business, allocating roughly 7% of revenue annually to capital expenditures to enhance our leading technology, products, and infrastructure, and we returned a significant amount of capital to shareholders through share repurchases and dividends, reducing our share count by more than 13% during this timeframe. Additionally, we optimized our capital structure while maintaining our investment-grade credit rating.
It's also worth noting that we received a $1.5 billion strategic investment from Silver Lake, which established an important long-term partnership with a preeminent technology investor. We've assembled some of the best payments and software assets in the world, and our focus going forward will be to better position them for strong organic growth and returns. Looking ahead, we have a clear path to maximizing shareholder value. It starts with disciplined, sustainable, organic top-line growth, driven by our refocused strategy. As you've heard today, we're leveraging our strong foundation of existing assets to pursue the highest growth opportunities where we have earned the right to compete and win. Second, we are simplifying and streamlining our business and executing an operational transformation agenda to unleash our full potential.
This will drive top and bottom-line efficiencies that support continued margin expansion and strong free cash flow generation, and lead to a better return on invested capital as we concentrate our investments on the strategic priorities we've outlined today. We will prioritize capital returns and expect future M&A activity to focus on targeted tuck-in opportunities. And we expect this framework will allow us to generate sustainable double-digit EPS growth. Now I'll take a minute to provide a more detailed view of the drivers of our top-line growth algorithm. As Bob discussed earlier, today, we have unified our global merchant segment around three lines of business: POS and software, Integrated and Embedded , and our Core Payments channels. In our point-of-sale and software businesses, we're focused on some of the largest addressable markets globally. These include restaurant and retail, where we're aligning our platforms and unifying under the Genius brand.
Coupled with other attractive vertical markets where we own software, as well as our targeted geographic expansion efforts, we expect our POS and vertical software growth rates to be high single digits to low double digits annually over the medium term. Our integrated embedded payments business represents just under half of our merchant revenue. Our differentiated and value-driven approach and our commerce enablement solutions will allow us to both expand our current partnerships and position us to win with new partners. We expect it to continue to lead in this market and grow at a high single digit to low double-digit rate. While our Core Payments businesses are growing at a somewhat slower rate, they are very stable, and we maintain a leading position in numerous markets globally.
They also have a compelling financial profile that supports reinvestment in high-growth opportunities and will continue to focus on delivering incremental commerce enablement solutions through these channels over time. Our Issuer business contributes approximately a quarter of our consolidated adjusted net revenue. The continued evolution and modernization of our issuer platform will open up significant new addressable markets in additional geographies and customer categories. We're also focused on capturing the B2B opportunity through our leading commercial business. In total, we expect issuer to achieve mid-single-digit growth with the potential for acceleration over the medium term as we further progress our modernization journey. Through our operational transformation, we're taking additional steps to simplify our organization and drive enhanced customer experiences, product innovation, and better outcomes for our customers and our business, and as you've heard today, we are already executing against these goals.
Altogether, we expect our operational transformation initiatives to unlock more than $500 million of run rate operating income benefit by the first half of 2027. We expect a portion of this to be reinvested in the business, particularly in the early part of the transformation. In terms of phasing, we expect to realize 30% of the operating income benefits in 2025, and the remainder in 2026 and 2027. And further, we anticipate one-time costs to be roughly two-thirds of the benefit. Now, let me take a minute to provide you with some color on the four major areas where we're driving change. First, as Cameron mentioned, we're becoming an integrated operating company, better aligning our entire organization to our strategy. This includes streamlining business units, consolidating our technology teams and operating environments, and unifying our brands.
Next, we are concentrating our investments, enhancing customer experiences, and leveraging our economies of scale. Specifically, we will streamline onboarding, improve sales productivity, and accelerate customer-driven product development, while also prioritizing key markets and verticals. Further, we're committed to product-led innovation to address the changing demands of a rapidly evolving market. This requires accelerating customer onboarding, reducing time to market for new products, and enhancing our suite of commerce enablement offerings. And finally, we'll maximize the potential of our portfolio by cross-selling our products and solutions, while also taking advantage of significant operational efficiencies, such as location optimization, product rationalization, and automation. Now let's take a closer look at a couple of the specific examples of the initiatives we just discussed. The first example aligns with our efforts to enhance efficiency by creating an integrated operating company.
As part of this initiative, we're unifying our technology organization, eliminating redundancies, and aligning our resources to capture the highest return opportunities. The second example highlights how we can deliver customer-centric, product-led innovation through improved productivity. As we optimize distribution, we'll also enhance our sales model and efficiency. Specifically, we're reorienting the sales function across our merchant business, prioritizing software and integrating solutions, leveraging new systems, tools, and processes. We'll also utilize technologies throughout the sales life cycle, while building teams with deep product expertise to improve cross-sell effectiveness. We'll implement this model across all of our distribution channels to ensure we realize its full benefit as we evolve our sales organization for the future. These are just two examples of hundreds of initiatives that we have in our plan. Both of these initiatives are already underway, and together will drive meaningful run rate operating income benefits once complete.
Let me take a minute now to share some insights about segment-level margins to enhance your understanding of our ability to sustainably drive adjusted operating margin expansion. Global Payments already generates peer-leading margins, and all of our lines of business benefit from meaningful operating leverage, which will be driven by our strong top-line growth and further enhanced by our operational transformation. Additionally, we sharpened our strategic focus we've discussed today will provide broad tailwinds across our business. Within Merchant Solutions, we expect an adjusted operating margin in the POS and software businesses to continue expanding from the current high 30s level, driven by increased scale, payment monetization, and cross-selling opportunities. We also expect Integrated and Embedded payments to expand adjusted operating margins beyond the current low forties level, driven by cross-selling and the leverage inherent in the business, given our scale and leading distribution.
For our Core Payments channels, we expect adjusted operating margins to remain stable over the long term in the high forties, and as I mentioned, this channel provides a stable source of revenue and cash flow that can be reinvested elsewhere in the company to pursue opportunities with higher growth potential, and in Issuer Solutions, our modernized platform, cross-selling efforts, and entering into new markets will allow us to maintain adjusted operating margins in the mid-forties, consistent with the levels we're delivering today. Across all of our businesses, we'll leverage a common infrastructure to drive efficiencies, optimize investments, and support our growth plans. Let's unpack the drivers of our performance further. We're sharing some of the key indicators that we track internally, which we believe will help investors better understand the trajectory of our business.
We're also providing organic LTM growth rates as of Q2 for each of our lines of business to provide some color on their core performance. Going forward, we plan to enhance our disclosure with these KPIs as a complement to our financial results. We'll continue to evaluate our disclosures and consider providing additional KPIs in the future. For Merchant Solutions, the number of locations we serve with POS software, in addition to the new partners onboarded in a given period across our integrated and Core Payments channels, are key to our success. And I'm pleased that we're seeing favorable trends in all of these metrics. Starting with POS, over the last 12 months, we've added over 12,500 new locations, representing an increase of more than 20% in new locations relative to the prior period.
Across our POS and software businesses, over the last 12 months, we've achieved 12% new bookings growth, while the channel grew roughly 10% organically. In Integrated and Embedded , we added 280 new software partners over the last 12 months, representing an increase of 30% in new ads over the comparable period. We also saw a 10% improvement in estimated annual recurring revenue with new merchants in this channel over the same period. Combined, the channel grew roughly 8% organically over the last 12 months, with each of our more traditional integrated and our embedded payments channels contributing equally to this growth.
Shifting to our Core Payments business, we added 720 new partners over the last 12 months, representing an increase of 15% in new wins over the comparable period. We also saw a 5% improvement in estimated ARR with new merchants in our Core Payments business over the same period, which is consistent with the overall organic growth we saw. Shifting to SMB, we believe it's important to detail our volume growth for this segment of the market, given this is our focus. As you can see, we have delivered a 7% volume growth over the last 12 months in SMB, which drives the vast majority of our adjusted net revenue in Merchant Solutions . For Issuer Solutions , the main drivers of our business are the number of traditional accounts on file and transaction volumes.
We added 49 million traditional accounts on file over the last 12 months and continue to have a near record implementation pipeline of over 65 million accounts. Additionally, we processed over 35 billion transactions in the last 12 months, which is an increase of more than 2 billion transactions or 6% growth compared to the prior 12-month period. With that background on financial performance, let's shift our focus to our go-forward capital allocation strategy. As Cameron discussed at the start of the day, as I noted earlier, we have historically deployed a meaningful amount of capital to advance our strategy through M&A. Today, we are a leading payments and software company with a robust portfolio of market-leading solutions, and we're well-positioned to address the opportunities we see ahead, largely with the existing capabilities we've built and accumulated.
Our focus today is primarily on organic growth and transforming the business to maximize returns and shareholder value. As a result, our top capital allocation priority going forward will be to return capital to shareholders, and in total, we plan to return approximately $7.5 billion of capital to shareholders over the next three years. This will allow us to preserve financial flexibility to pay down debt and reinvest in the business without stressing the balance sheet. As a result, we expect to have ample liquidity for tuck-in acquisitions, further debt repayment, and additional returns to shareholders, depending on market conditions.
To provide more detail, capital expenditures as a percentage of adjusted net revenue will be slightly elevated in the 8% range in 2025 and 2026 as we invest in our transformation before returning to a more normalized rate, consistent with our historical capital spend of 7% of adjusted net revenue in 2027. Finally, we expect to target modest tuck-in M&A going forward. Any acquisition we pursue must meet our stringent criteria. Number one, it must advance the strategy that we've outlined today. Number two, it must be easy to fully integrate into our new operating model. And number three, it must exceed our return on invested capital hurdles and be a competitive use of capital relative to share repurchases. In addition, as Cameron mentioned, we're actively exploring options to monetize select assets, and we'll remain objective about these assessments.
Any divestiture proceeds will be used to enhance shareholder returns. As always, our exceptional free cash flow generation is what supports these capital allocation priorities. We expect our adjusted free cash flow conversion to remain strong at more than 90% of adjusted net income, resulting in between $8.5 billion and $9 billion of cumulative free cash flow over the next three years. Finally, we're committed to our long-term net leverage target at or below three times, which we expect to reach by the end of this year and will maintain going forward. This will position us to preserve strategic flexibility, comfortably maintain our investment-grade credit status, and return cash and interest expense at a reasonable level. We believe these capital allocation priorities are appropriate given where the business is today and will position us for long-term success and shareholder value creation.
Now, let's turn to our outlook, starting with our preliminary outlook for 2025 . We won't establish formal guidance for next year until we report this year's fourth quarter results, but we're pleased to share our initial view. For context, we consider 2025 to be a transition year as we execute on our strategy, streamline and simplify our business, and begin to execute on the operational transformation agenda we highlighted today. We remain confident that the business will continue to have good forward momentum. We expect adjusted net revenue to grow in the mid-single digits, excluding any potential dispositions and market or line of business exits, with at least 50 basis points of adjusted operating margin expansion. Consistent with our commitment to return capital to shareholders, we expect to execute share repurchases totaling roughly $2 billion.
Adding it all up, this leads to approximately 10% adjusted EPS growth in 2025 . As I mentioned earlier, we have reviewed our portfolio and identified candidates for potential divestiture or exit. Collectively, these represent annual adjusted net revenue in the range of $500 million-$600 million. If and when we close meaningful divestitures, we'll provide an update about their potential impact. With that said, we'll only complete divestitures that create value for shareholders. These are quality assets and will not transact at levels that do not reflect fair value. For any disposition we ultimately execute, we'll return any proceeds to shareholders, subject to leverage constraints. Now I'll turn to our outlook for 2026 and 2027. While 2025 will be a transition year, we expect the business to achieve consistent, normalized results thereafter, improving over the period.
We're confident in our ability to deliver sustainable mid-single digit to high single digit adjusted net revenue growth and consistent adjusted operating margin expansion between 50 and 100 basis points. In combination with our commitment to share repurchases, this translates to durable low teens adjusted EPS growth. Importantly, in each of the next three years, we expect to achieve at least 90% adjusted free cash flow conversion annually. I would note that since we have seen very little traction on renewing the favorable tax treatment of R&D expenses, we are now including the impact related to the requirement to capitalize and amortize R&D expenses in our outlook for adjusted free cash flow, which we previously excluded. Delivering on these expectations positions us to generate adjusted EPS growth in the mid-$14 range for 2026.
As I mentioned, the realized net benefits from our operational transformation are reflected in our outlook. Again, we believe our renewed strategic focus, our organizational simplification, the powerful operating leverage in our model, and our commitment to return capital to shareholders will underpin these strong results as they compound over time. Lastly, our medium-term outlook reflects our current reporting convention. As we head into 2025 , we're evaluating our reporting structure, including how we treat items like stock-based compensation. We expect to make some changes beginning in 2025 to better align our convention with those of our peers, and we'll also provide comparative data for the historical periods. We do not expect any of these modifications to change the growth outlook we are providing today. In closing, we are a leader in software-based payments across key verticals.
POS and integrated payments offer unmatched capabilities in Issuer Solutions and are positioned to benefit from being on both sides of the transaction as we see the ongoing convergence in payments over time. We complement all of this with superior technology, scale, and service know-how to deliver distinctive value to our customers globally. The result is a compelling financial algorithm for our investors, with durable, recurring revenue streams that grow at sustainable rates, consistent margin expansion, and strong free cash flow. These characteristics will only be amplified by the initiatives and strategic focus you've heard about today. We have a renewed commitment to a shareholder-first capital allocation strategy, and our exceptional free cash flow generation will enable us to return approximately $7.5 billion to shareholders over the next three years.
Our business capabilities are the strongest they've ever been, and we're confident that Global Payments will unlock even more value for shareholders on the journey ahead, and with that, I'll hand it back over to Cameron for some closing remarks.
When you make everyday commerce better, every day is opening day, launch day, payday, work day, line out the door day, delivery day, game day. But while others come and go, Global Payments delivers for our customers, unlocking value, helping to run and grow their business, making us the worldwide provider of choice for commerce solutions today and every day.
We covered a lot of ground today. I want to thank all of you for being with us, both here in the room in New York, as well as those of you joining us online. Before I turn to questions, I just want to take a few minutes to summarize some of the key takeaways from our session.
...We are relentlessly pursuing our ambition to be the worldwide partner of choice for commerce solutions. We went in the marketplace today with a strong set of capabilities that are differentiated. We have a commitment to service across the customer life cycle and a track record for delivery in solving tough customer challenges, and we operate at scale with reliability and security. We have taken stock of what we have, what we do well, and what we need to improve, as well as what we want to achieve. We have refocused our strategy. We are streamlining and simplifying our business. We are unifying teams and capabilities. We are changing for the better. This change is not a shift to something dramatically different.
Rather, it's a simple notion to play to our competitive strengths, to better leverage what we already have, and to focus our energy and investments on the most attractive opportunities where we can differentiate in the market. We operate in a payments market with a massive TAM, creating ample headroom for growth. We know SMBs. We offer feature-rich point-of-sale and software with vertical market fluency. We lead in Integrated and Embedded payments. We deliver Core Payments worldwide, and we excel in the issuing space. We will remain a leader at the nexus of software and payments. As we enter the next chapter of our growth journey, we strongly believe we are poised to capture and unlock significant value with our renewed strategic focus and clarity for several reasons. First, we have an enviable asset portfolio of assets, delivering sustainable organic top-line growth in a significantly untapped TAM.
Second, our transformation is unleashing an already successful business to deliver all of our solutions to all of our channels in a more frictionless way and drive higher return on invested capital. And third, we are committed to shareholder value creation, targeting returns of $7.5 billion over the next three years. There's never been a better time to be invested in Global Payments. Thank you again for being with us today. Please bear with us for just a moment as we set up for the Q&A session.
We're now ready to begin the Q&A session. If you'd like to ask a question, please raise your hand and we'll bring you a microphone. Before asking your question, if you could please just state your name and firm, and if you could also limit yourself to one question so we can accommodate as many of you as possible, that would be great. Thank you. So we'll take our first question from Brian Keane.
Hi, it's Brian Keane, Deutsche Bank. Congratulations on putting this together. I know it takes a ton of work. I guess the key question I have is just looking at the 2025 guide, the mid-single digit, it looks like a slight step down in organic growth from the numbers that you guys disclosed there. Can you talk about why that would be? And then what are some of the couple things that accelerate the growth in 2026- 2027 from that mid-single digit growth in 2025?
Yeah, I think it's obviously a fair question, and I guess the way I would position it, Brian, is we're trying to be realistic about where we are in this moment of transformation as a company. There's a lot of things, as you've heard today, that we're trying to do internally to realign our capabilities around three lines of business and merchant. There's a lot we're trying to do to unlock, I think, the full potential of the distribution assets that we have globally. As much as we all want to sit here and say, "Oh, flip a switch," and all this stuff happens overnight, there's 4,000 salespeople that have to be reoriented. There's partnerships that need to be reoriented in some way.
I think as we're in this moment of transition, kind of heading into 2025, it's largely about, let's be realistic about how much the organization can absorb as a change matter, how quickly we can work through the changes that we want to make that position us, I think, for a better sustainable growth outcome over time, that you start to see materialize more fully in kind of 2026 and 2027 as we have accelerating trends through that period. A little bit of, is it, one, wanting to set ourselves up for success, clearly, and two, recognizing that there's a significant amount of work that's being done internally as we work through this moment of transformation to build a stronger, more durable model for the long term.
We'll take our next question from Ramsey.
Hi, thanks. Ramsey El-Assal from Barclays. You mentioned through the day kind of a focus on verticals and channels where you guys can win, you know, think you can win, where you might have sort of a proprietary advantage you can lean into. Could you elaborate a little bit more specifically on where across this really diverse business you see particular, you know, opportunities, that you can kind of lean into to reaccelerate growth?
Yeah, I'll start, and I'll maybe ask Bob to jump in a little bit as well. So look, from my perspective, it starts with a lot of the focus that we spent time on today. It's restaurant, retail, POS. We're obviously aggressively working to harmonize all of our product offerings, harmonize our teams and platforms, rebranding as a go-to-market matter around Genius. We're super excited about the prospects for that as we move forward in time. We think we have an incredibly competitive suite of capabilities and ecosystem of solutions we can deliver in a frictionless way that are fully integrated and operate seamlessly together. I think the value proposition there is immense, not just here in the U.S., but globally as well.
You know, we all obviously have heard quite a bit about the POS market in the U.S., but as we look around the globe, there's substantial opportunity to grow our Genius business in all the key markets in which we operate. So clearly, that's an area of intense focus for us as we move forward. I think beyond that, it's really areas of strength that we have today. You heard a little bit about our education vertical, where we've been successful in leaning into developing capabilities and exporting them to markets outside of the U.S. You've heard quite a bit about the success we've seen in the U.K. market.
You heard from one of our clients over there, at least as it relates to the testimonial that was shared, about our ability to bring some of our educational software solutions to markets outside the U.S., where we already have a key, scaled presence. So that's another area where I think we would lean into. Beyond that, without getting into other specific verticals, look, we're very focused on verticals where there's a strong nexus between payments and software, where we can attach higher rates for payments by either owning partner or owning software or partnering with key software vendors to unlock those opportunities. And more importantly, where we own, we want to own software in verticals where we can invest ways that we can amplify more broadly across our business.
When we entered the enterprise QSR space through the Xenial SICOM acquisition, we obviously expanded that vertical into stadium and event venues and took those capabilities and invested in a way that opened up whole new channels of growth, including food service management. So we're looking for verticals where we can own and invest and amplify that investment more broadly. We're less open to owning in verticals that require a lot of bespoke investment that's truly only suitable for that specific vertical market. So a lot of our focus is finding ways to better amplify the investments we make in the business, driving higher attachment rates around payments, where our capabilities and ecosystem of commerce enablement solutions are recognized and can drive more value for the business. Bob, I don't know if you'd add anything to that?
I think Cameron hit it square on. The other spot I might think about a focus beyond just verticals is also in distribution channels, and Integrated and Embedded , where we have leveraged distribution. I think that's an area that we believe we've got distinctive capabilities and advantages that are gonna drive growth at accelerated rates. And certainly, as Josh was covering KPIs for the business, I think you see that, the acceleration on an LTM basis, kind of period over period, with the number of new partnerships and new merchants and those sort of things. So I think it's the vertical focus, but it's also the distribution footprint and capabilities we have, both through integrated and through the other sorts of partnerships that we support still on the Core Payments business.
Jason Kupferberg?
Good morning, Jason Kupferberg from Bank of America. Appreciate all the new disclosure and transparency, but I wanted to come back to the 2025 guide, the mid-single-digit revenue growth. I'm assuming basically the same for both merchant and issuer. If that's the case, then how would you break down that merchant growth among the three subsegments for next year?
Josh, you want to jump in?
Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, Jason, so the way we're thinking about it is in 2025, the POS and software and embedded integrated payments is gonna be slightly better than the mid-single digits, and it's the Core Payments which is gonna be slightly less than the mid-single digits. So that's gonna go ahead and get you to that average blended rate. I think what we said for issuer was mid-single-digit range. So those are kind of the piece parts and how we're thinking about 2025.
Yeah, and the only other comment I would add to that is the way we thought about 2025 obviously largely stems around this moment of transition that we're in and transformation we're in with the business. But we're also unlocking value that's gonna deliver double-digit EPS growth in 2025 as well. So we're very focused on compounding double-digit growth in earnings per share. We get to double digits in 2025, and as we get to 2026 and 2027, that accelerates into the low teens. So we feel good about the trajectory of the growth profile of the business as we work through transformation, we realign the organization as we've described today, and then the earnings outcomes that we're able to deliver over that period of time, I think are very powerful.
Great on top of that, of course, our renewed commitment to, I think, a shareholder-friendly capital return policy, which is targeting $7.5 billion of capital returns over that period, including, as Josh highlighted, $2 billion next year. So we think the combination of all those things, obviously, is rewarding to our shareholders, while also allowing us to position the business for long-term sustainable growth and success. And really, as I think about it, it's building the right platform for the next decade of growth for Global Payments.
It's not so much about what 2025 will bring. It's where is this business as we move forward in time, and making sure we're building sort of the right model to support the growth profile that we see over the next decade, which is largely centered around unleashing the full value and potential of the assets that we already have today, and operating the business as a unified operating company globally, that we think is gonna drive substantial value creation over that period.
Yeah, and I'd just add to that. You know, I think as Cameron pointed out, as you think across the cycle, you know, we're focused on double-digit earnings growth. And I think if you, you know, Jason, you think about the midpoints of the guide this year and the number that I talked about in my presentation, you know, about EPS of about 14.5 , that's about a 12% CAGR in 2026. So again, very focused on continuing to expand margins over the cycle, as well as delivering double digit EPS growth.
Will Nance?
Hey, Will Nance, Goldman Sachs. Thanks for all the helpful details today. So I think you're calling for the high single to low doubles in the integrated payments and embedded vertical. I think the slide showed that business growing at roughly 8% over the last 12 months, and so I was hoping you could kind of talk about what drove that outcome, whether there's any impact of rolling EVO into that vertical, for instance, maybe that had a lower growth rate, and just any thoughts on just kind of how to get back into that kind of high single, low double range? Thanks.
Bob, do you wanna maybe jump in on that?
Sure. I think the way that we think about the drivers of growth there. There's clearly the performance of the existing partnerships and the products and services we've been selling over a period of time. There's also, as we talked about today a bunch, the commerce enablement set of ecosystem products and services that we're driving into there. As an EVO matter, specifically to address that, it's a very small part of the business overall. There's a couple of spots that there's a little bit of overlap, but it's very de minimis. A very small part in Spain, and a very small part that this, you know, B2B sort of software focus we've talked about before, that we believe is a growth catalyst, but was not, you know, a material contributor to that growth in this period.
So I'd think about that, you know, I don't know if you'd agree, Josh, but that's largely organic, driven by the performance of the existing business. Very little to no M&A impact on that.
Yeah, just to be clear on that point, the number that we provide, the growth rate, is an organic growth rate for the business. I would say EVO, the small bit of EVO integrated business that's in there, is probably not growing at quite the same pace as the historical Global Payments, but it's not also a big contributor to that number overall. So as I think about it, over the last 12 months, you know, and as we think about sort of the go forward, to Bob's earlier point, we're investing in Integrated and Embedded , similar to how we're investing in point-of-sale. This is a key area of focus from an investment standpoint. It's a key area where we think we have differentiation in our capabilities today.
We've launched our ProFac offering over the last 12 months, which is helping to gain traction in that space. We obviously have a broad range of commercial models and operating models that we can deliver in that space, and we have a broad swath of technology partners that we are working with and building relationships with and expanding with around the globe. I think what you saw also in the metrics is an acceleration of our ability to sign new partners in that channel, which will yield better long-term outcomes, obviously, for that channel. So as I think about that, and particularly, there's no question that we still have the right capabilities, the right solutions, the right commercial models, and the right operating models to meet the needs of where the Integrated and Embedded channel has moved over a period of time.
And obviously, our objective is to continue to be able to accelerate growth in that channel, particularly as we get through this moment of transformation into 2026 and 2027. Though, that area, plus what we're doing in point of sale and software, that's really the catalyst for growth to drive back towards kind of that high single digit level for the merchant business.
Tien-Tsin Huang ?
Hey, thanks, Renee. Just, yeah, Tien-Tsin Huang from J.P. Morgan. So maybe for Gaylon, on the issuing side, can you remind us of the timeline on the conversion to the cloud? Any risk in the conversion of the back book to the cloud? And when might we see some of the upside that you alluded to with respect to growth? And one more, I know I'm asking a lot of questions here. Why no margin expansion on issuing, given the lower cost of delivery to the cloud? Thanks.
Let me start. As Phil indicated earlier today, we've largely written all of the client-facing applications are already written, and they're going through pilot. Many of them are already on a pilot on that.
... We believe we're gonna have the vast majority of the back-end system, which has less impact on client and less change. That will be completed largely by the end of 2025 , in terms of that. As to the back book, the way we took on the design approach for this, and as we've indicated today, this is not just a lift and shift, this is a completely rewrite into microservices. It's not gonna, you know, distribute it, just operating in the cloud. We've actually took a comprehensive approach to developing the platform with all the existing functionality today. That's our hallmark, is our deep credit engine, our deep functionality, that's why we continue to win today. And we've taken that and put it into the new version, and all of that is being ported over.
The reason we've done that is for the back book of business, so that as they want to start migrating over, it doesn't really require a big bang conversion event. We learned a lot from our migration from TS1- TS2. In that case, we didn't do it, and every one of those installations had a decent amount of coding involved, and it took, you know, many, many years. In fact, we still have a couple of clients that still clinging on to TS1 and don't wanna move, but so we've done it that way so that we can actually move clients at their discretion, whenever they wanna move. We're not going to force people to do it.
We do have a lot of folks, early adopters and innovators in our client base that are itching to start moving, and we've got people signing up as we speak. But we feel very good about the way we've done that, so that it mitigates some of the longer term impacts of trying to get the back book transitioned over. I don't know, Cameron, do you have anything to add?
Yeah, the only thing I would add is, probably twofold. One is, as Gaylon mentioned, as we get into 2025 , we're exclusively selling cloud into the market. So we'll be positioned to be able to board any net new issuer client who wants a journey, obviously, to the cloud and wants to board on our cloud capabilities, you know, starting obviously, in 2025 . We already have some clients that are operating in the cloud with us today, as Gaylon highlighted in his prepared remarks. The second, I would say, specifically around the margin question is, while we're converting clients from our existing on-premise environments to cloud environments, we're obviously running multiple environments.
So we're trying to create a path for all of our existing clients to be able to convert over time, you know, largely at their pace and in a way that aligns with their business objectives and their own priorities within their business. But we also recognize during that period of time, of course, we've got to run our cloud environment, and we'll be ramping up there, and we'll be running on-premise environments that we can't fully wind down. We can begin to wind them down, but not fully wind down until we have all of our clients move from current environments to cloud environments. That's not a unique journey for us. Obviously, a lot of companies go through that as they're working through a technology modernization very similar to the one we're doing.
I think from a margin perspective, we think relatively stable margin over that period of time. Of course, as we get to the cloud, as Phil highlighted with a lot of his commentary today, we see opportunity, obviously, for cost efficiency, that'll drive margin expansion for the Issuer business over the longer term. In this medium term, sort of outlook period, we're obviously working through converting existing clients from our current environments and platforms to the cloud, and we think in recognition of that stable margin performance is a good outlook for the business. As I step back and think about maybe that question more broadly, look, we're managing a complex, large business around the globe.
Our goal is to drive margin expansion for the company, and there are certain areas that are going to be driving margin expansion, and there are certainly areas that are going to be driving more stable margins, but the goal is to raise margins for the whole business, and as our outlook implies, we're successfully doing that in 2025 and even accelerating that as we get to 2026 and 2027. So we feel very good about the margin profile of the business, recognizing, of course, we're already at industry-leading margins in our existing business today.
Take our next question from Darren Peller.
Hey, thanks, guys. It's Darren Peller from Wolfe Research. I guess I just want to start off first on the divestiture and the capital allocation comments, and just maybe first understand the timeline you're giving yourselves to identify whether or not you have the appropriate buyers for the appropriate valuations-
Yeah.
Before you find, you know, you say one way or the other, if we're going to continue that review. And then maybe a little more description of what you're looking at. Is it growthy assets that can get great valuations but maybe don't fit the core, or is it something that doesn't grow as well? Just curious what kind of a little more description. And then, I just want to ask one more quick follow-up for maybe both Cameron and Josh, on your philosophy on guidance and thinking going forward now. I mean, is conservatism a part of your outlook now? It looks like with mid-single digit, it probably is, but have you factored in a variety of scenarios, macro and otherwise, that gives you really good conviction that that's the starting point with upside?
Yeah.
Thanks, guys.
Yeah, great question. Look, I understand there's a lot of interest in the specific assets that we're looking to exit, and I clearly recognize that. I hope you will also appreciate at the same time, our goal is to maximize value, and we want to preserve the integrity of the processes that we're running around these assets to try to maximize their value in the marketplace. I don't think we want to create this notion that there's some fire sale around any particular asset that we're looking to exit. The way we tried to frame it up today is obviously give you a size of revenue that we're looking to potentially exit, and we'll obviously update you as time progresses, as we have more news around assets that we are successful in, in exiting and the valuation that we're able to achieve.
And obviously, as Josh highlighted in his prepared remarks, you know, our plan is to return after-tax funds raised to shareholders through share repurchases from any disposition that we actually successfully execute. I would say as far as the time frame, I'm not putting any sort of artificial limit around that. Our goal is obviously to move as quickly as we can to try to maximize the value of the assets that we would like to exit. My hope is that some of that can get done in the latter part of 2024, certainly in, as it relates to signing definitive arrangements, and it'll probably drift into 2025 as well, given the nature of some of the processes we're running and our desire to try to maximize value and making sure that we're looking at every opportunity to do that around assets.
But our goal is to be transparent when we have things to announce, and we'll obviously provide more detail around successful divestitures. Hopefully today, we've given you enough around size that we're looking to exit. In terms of characteristics, it probably runs the gamut. You know, there probably are some, you know, growthier, for lack of a better term, assets that we think don't necessarily fit well strategically around what it is we want to focus on as a business going forward, and/or represent assets that maybe, you know, we want to be able to leverage strategically, but we don't feel like we necessarily have to own it to do that. And there may be a better owner for the asset outside of us, while still allowing us, through a commercial relationship, to sort of utilize the capabilities in a way to deliver on the strategic objectives we have.
So it probably runs the gamut of types of different assets that are included in there, and I clearly recognize an interest in wanting to know more specifics there. But again, our goal is to maximize value, and we want to preserve the integrity of the processes we're running and to make sure that we're looking through every opportunity to try to maximize value for our shareholders. Second part of your question is, and I think, you know, it was covered in my prepared remarks. Look, we think we've set achievable midterm outlook for the business, and our goal is to consider a variety of factors in that outlook for the business.
Certainly, in this moment of transformation that we are in, you know, we're taking a lot of things into consideration as we think about how do we change the organization in the ways we want to? How do we realign the business around, particularly merchant, around these three core product capabilities globally? How do we better leverage distribution around the globe to push more product and capability through all of our distribution channels, as we described? There's a lot of change that happens in that, that I think we're being realistic about just what it means for the business as we get through the 2025 period, and how we're able, in that timeframe, also, to invest in our business to drive better growth outcome for the business over a longer period of time.
So I don't like to label it one way or the other as conservative or aggressive or whatnot, but clearly, our goal was to set achievable, you know, midterm guidance and an outlook that we think we have a high probability of achieving or exceeding. And that's the way we think about, you know, setting an outlook, setting a guide, is we try to take all the factors available to us, and we wanna make sure we're positioning ourselves for success, and we've got a lot more risk of outperforming than we do risk of underperforming.
I would just add to that, you know, I'd say that, you know, Darren, if you think about the business, you know, this year, we're gonna do close to, you know, $9.5 billion in revenue. And given the size of the business and what we've outlined for our, you know, medium-term guide, 2025 margin. You know, top line growth, mid-single digit, you know, margin expansion of 50 basis points in 2025, accelerating, you know, going into 2026 and 2027, mid- to high-single-digit, and expanding margins, you know, 50- 100 basis points and growing EPS in the low teens. And, you know, when you think about the size of the business, you know, that feels appropriate.
So, you know, there's, you know, we have industry-leading margins, you know, 45% margins, and just given the overall size of the business, it feels appropriate.
Our next question comes from Andrew Schmitt.
Hi, Andrew Schmidt from Citi. Thanks so much for all the information today. Really appreciate it. I want to dig into the core payment segment, and I know you mentioned that there's a good stability there. Could you just comment on what drives that stability? And then, it sounds like there's a re-acceleration in 2026 . Can you talk about the visibility and drivers on that re-acceleration? That would be great. Thank you very much.
Yeah, happy to. Thanks for the question, and thanks for, for being here as well. So the Core Payments business is a mix of markets, right? You have some slower-growing markets, which I would say would be sort of Canada is a good example of that, and then you have some faster growth markets in there as well, more particularly, international secular growth markets, where we're seeing better growth trends around the business. You amalgamate it kind of all together, and it gets to sort of the overall $2.3 billion-ish as of end of last year for Core Payments. So I think there's a few things happening in that portfolio today. One is, a lot of distribution in our business today has been oriented towards that channel.
And as you've heard today, part of what we're trying to do is reorient distribution to other channels that have better growth outcomes over time. So certainly, the short-term impact in that is probably less sort of net new sales in that channel, while we're focusing more of our distribution resources on areas where we think there's better longer-term growth prospects for the business. The other thing that we're trying to do in that channel, of course, is to drive more sustainable long-term growth within the Core Payments. That means unleashing all of our product capabilities across all of our distribution channels, many of which obviously are driving Core Payments growth in our business globally.
It's being able to bring a lot of our product differentiation that exists here into markets outside of the U.S., to be able to invest to nativize those for the local market in which we want to bring them, particularly around point-of-sale capabilities, other commerce enablement capabilities. Bringing those to markets outside the U.S. will drive accelerated growth opportunities in some of the core payment markets that we operate in today as well. So my perspective is, again, 25 around Core Payments, reorienting distribution, trying to align it better with where we see areas of other outsized growth, is gonna cause a little bit of slowdown for Core Payments, as Josh kind of highlighted.
But our ability to bring new products to new markets, our ability to bring commerce enablement solutions across distribution channels that we've never leveraged them historically to deliver, is gonna drive more growth opportunities that will accelerate kind of in the 2026 and 2027 timeframe. We used to have this philosophy internally that, look, we want to save all the best products and capabilities for only our direct channels, but as Bob shared with you today, we have amazing distribution across partner channels that we need to do a better job of leveraging. So our perspective going forward is all of our capabilities can be sold through all of our channels, and we'll have the right commercial relationships and structures to make sure we're getting paid fairly and appropriately for the distinctive product that we're delivering through those channels.
But we owe it to ourselves, and frankly, we're silly not to leverage every distribution channel we have to bring our best capabilities to the market, and we're gonna get paid for that, but it's gonna allow us to, I think, drive better growth outcomes for the business over a longer period of time.
We'll take our next question from Tim Chiodo.
Thanks a lot. Tim Chiodo, UBS. So a lot of the investors here are probably familiar with Clover's approach, where they have this large book of back book business, which is their non-Clover SMB business, and they're going through a transition where they're trying to move that over to Clover, which is their software. Is there a story for Global Payments as well, where the Core Payments business, which is sort of akin to the non-Clover SMB, could be a source of growth for your point-of-sale and software businesses, and we could think about a conversion strategy over time?
Yeah, it's a great question, Tim, and it's absolutely a part of our strategy. That Core Payments book represents a lot of customers today who largely just have a payments relationship with Global Payments and more of a direct payments relationship with Global Payments. Part of the reason that channel doesn't really accelerate much beyond kind of that mid-single digit, and that's the outlook, is, look, that's a hunting ground for our point-of-sale capabilities, and in some cases, our Integrated and Embedded capabilities as well. If we have a Core Payments customer today who wants to move to an integrated partner software solution, we want to move with them. We want to move with that customer from a direct relationship to an integrated partnership relationship. We'd rather do that than have them go a different direction from a payments perspective and lose the business entirely.
So that Core Payments business, particularly here in the U.S. market, is a channel for growth for our point-of-sale and software businesses and our Integrated and Embedded business over a period of time as well. So there's a clear strategy internally, again, as we think about leveraging distribution, maximizing the value of the assets we have. How do you convert a lot of that book over to the other two channels? Which is why we expect them to be higher growth channels over a longer period of time, and Core Payments to be more of a mid-single digit grower that's kind of stable in that range as we work through that transition.
Dave Koning?
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thank you. Dave Koning at Baird. And it's great to see the improved financial clarity around several items. And I guess a couple questions along that: Are you gonna give revenue by subunit, the way you kinda outlined there, each quarter? Are you gonna give the revenue dollars? And then secondly, I know you have some new transformational non-recurring expenses. When should all of, kind of, those non-recurring expenses be passed and you're kind of back to, you know, GAAP and non-GAAP, kinda closer, at least on that line?
Yeah, Josh, do you wanna start, and then I'll come in?
Yeah. No, absolutely. Yes, so we fully expect to go ahead and provide the disclosure around those three merchant segments that I went through today, and we expect to do that on a quarterly basis. You know, as it relates to the transformation, you know, I said in my prepared remarks that about two-thirds of the benefit will be one-time costs. And so we would expect those to come in over the next two, two and a half years, as it relates to those one-time costs.
What I would say is that, you know, a third of the benefit we expect to see in 2025, we expect to go ahead and reinvest, you know, the majority of that benefit in 2025. And then equally, we expect to see, you know, the benefit in 2026 and in 2027. So it'll be pretty, you know, evenly, you know, spread out as it relates to that for the one-time costs. And look, I think, you know, the one thing that I would say is, if you think about the model and the medium-term outlook, you know, we're gonna return, you know, $7.5 billion of capital, you know, back to shareholders over this time period, and we expect to generate nearly, you know, $9 billion in adjusted free cash flow.
So that, you know, as you call it, you know, that two-thirds is, you know, about $300 million or so, which is, you know, on a percentage basis, it's, you know, well less than 5% of the overall expected adjusted free cash flow that we expect to generate over the cycle.
Yeah, and the only point I would emphasize there is, look, we're investing in ourselves, right? Those are just one-time costs. We're investing in ourselves to drive better outcomes for the business and make sure the position is, the business is built and positioned for long-term sustainable growth. To Josh's point, it's about 3% of the adjusted free cash flow we expect to generate over the next three years, and it doesn't change our targeted shareholder return outcome of $7.5 billion over that period of time. I think from our perspective, you know, the way we frame up the story more broadly is, look, we're investing in ourselves to drive better growth outcomes over time.
We're rewarding shareholders with double-digit earnings growth over that period, accelerating to low teens in the 2026, 2027 timeframe, and we're obviously returning a massive amount of capital to shareholders, $7.5 billion over that same period of time. So it's a balanced story around making sure the business is well poised for the future, and we're unleashing, I think, our full potential to drive better outcomes over a longer period of time, and rewarding shareholders while we're on this journey together, with obviously good returns and good compounded growth in earnings per share, still above double digits and accelerating into the low teens.
... Andrew Bauch?
Andrew Bauch from Wells Fargo. I wonder if you could speak to the brand consolidation you have going on in the point of sale, and part of the question is why now for this consolidation? I know it's part of the transformation process, but, and how does that brand being Genius stack up to peers on, you know, a brand testing level and gives you the right to win?
Yeah, great question. Bob, do you maybe want to start and I'll add a couple comments at the end?
Sure. I think you're right that the time is now for a variety of reasons, not least because we're in this transformational moment for the business. In terms of the branding itself, Genius, we've run testing on a number of brands, assets that we already own, as well as some that were perhaps speculative or exploratory. We've done those sort of brand perception studies, both domestically as well as internationally. And Genius tested, you know, consistently better than almost anything else that we looked at. And Genius is a brand that we already own inside of the Global Payments family. So I think it has a strong reputation in enterprise retail, as an example. And so we feel really good about it as a branding matter.
In terms of the broader question, though, about why now and why this and all the rest of that, I think the way that both we were structured, the way that we were operating, and to Cameron's point, our focus that was really on growth from a size perspective via acquisition as a large driver, didn't give the opportunity, I think, in that moment, to pull back and say, "You know, where do we really want to focus? Where are our best capabilities? Where do we think we're a player who has a right to win in that space?" So we've done that work at this point. We feel good about the assets that we've accumulated, and we've now built some experience, some muscle, if you will, around integration and combination of technologies.
You saw on the slide the, you know, numerous, numerous POS brands that we've acquired over a period of time. Those aren't all still operating 100% independently today. We've acquired capabilities that we leveraged in other core stacks, and so we have a muscle of bringing capabilities in, where appropriate, converting customers where it's necessary, and consolidating capabilities to build best in breed. So this is the right time, we think. These are the right assets, and we've got the muscle we need to bring capabilities together, take those to market effectively, and then bring customers on the journey with us at a pace that, that's manageable for them.
The only thing I would add, and I think that covers it really well, is, look, we're winning today, and we're winning today with a highly fragmented approach to the market around point of sale. So we have an amazing array of capabilities, features, functionality that's distributed across the different point of sale brands that you saw on the slide that we showed you today. Harnessing all those together, platforming on one common go-to-market POS solution that we can bring to all the different markets around the globe that we want to serve with a brand that we think has strong name recognition and obviously tested well to Bob's earlier comment, we think positions us well to grow, meaningfully in point of sale. And as you've heard today, that's a significant area of investment and growth opportunity for this business longer term. So look, I'm biased.
I think Genius stacks up really well with any other POS brand name that's out there. We've got good testing around how we think it resonates with the market that we're trying to serve. And unquestionably, we have the right products, capabilities, features, and functionality to win in the marketplace and win at a much bigger scale and at a much better pace than we have been historically. And I think bringing it all together... Look, I'll debate Bob on one point. Now is the time. It's probably overdue. We probably should have done this before, but we're now in a moment where we absolutely have conviction around this being the right thing to do for the business, and we're driving forward very hard to bring Genius to life in all of our markets around the globe.
Bryan Bergin?
Thank you. Bryan Bergin with TD Cowen. So, question kind of on issuer synergy. As you modernize issuer, does that open up further synergy opportunities with merchant? And maybe talk about how important that aspect is or not to the strategy here and the balance between integrating versus maintaining optionality on issuer.
Yeah, it's a great question, and there's no doubt that modernizing the issuer platform is going to open up more use cases, I think, to bring the breadth of merchant and issuer capabilities we have in our business together to solve new use cases and solve new opportunities to drive growth and solve client sort of challenges in the marketplace today. So a big part of the modernization program, as we've talked about, is deconstructing the feature-rich capabilities that are embedded in sort of the monolithic issuer platform today into microservices. And by doing so, not only does it make our capabilities more consumable for clients on the issuing space, it also makes those services more consumable, combined with other merchant capabilities, to start better solving use cases that are coming about through this convergence we talked about in the payments ecosystem.
Our ability to leverage core functionality that sits inside of the feature-rich TSYS platforms today and bring them to market with other solutions to start solving some of these more complex embedded payment, embedded finance use cases that we want to be able to bring to bear, absolutely is driven by the modernization program itself. That's part of our excitement around it and part of the reason we came to the conclusion as a strategic matter. There's a lot of opportunities by being both sides of the transaction.
... And obviously, by unlocking some of the feature functionality that sits in issuer and being able to better leverage it to solve some of these use cases in the marketplace, we think that's an incremental driver of growth that's going to help position our business longer term, and allow us to continue to remain competitive relative to some of our other peers in the marketplace who are able to deliver similar type capabilities. So it's certainly a big part of what we're focused on, and modernization from an issuing perspective is a key to unlocking those opportunities as we move forward.
Vasu?
Hi, Vasu Govil from KBW. Thanks for the presentation today. Just a quick clarification on the $500 million in run rate savings by 2027. It sounded like that is a gross number, and you plan to plow back some of that as investments into the business. How should we think about the net cost savings over this time period?
Yeah, so, so again, in 2025, there's about a third of the benefit, which is, you know, about, call it about $150 million, and the majority of that will be reinvested in the business. And then we expect to realize an incremental 30% in 2026 and 2027, and about $200 million will flow down to the bottom line in 2026, and then another $200 million in 2027. So a total in 2027 of about $400 million that will flow to the bottom line.
As we get beyond that period, these are run rate benefits.
Right.
For our business. So we'll be on sort of the transformation investment period, and you'll see more of that flow through as sort of a run rate matter as we get beyond that 2027 kind of horizon.
Jamie Friedman?
Thanks. It's Jamie Friedman at Susquehanna. Let me echo the compliment. Appreciate the additional disclosures today. I wanted to ask a question about issuer. If you look back over the landmark deals that TSYS has signed over the years, whether it was Capital One or Bank of America, still a significant portion, maybe half of the industry's insourced. And I'm just wondering, in terms of what it would take to convert some of the major insourced issuers, American Express or Consumer at J.P. Morgan, is there anything that sets up in the prior conversions that seem similar to the conversations that you're headed towards now to unlock some of, you know, what's left on the insourced side of the market?
Gaylon, do you want to start?
Yeah.
I'm happy to jump in.
Thanks, Jamie. That's a good question. So, you know, first, we lead with functionality and capability. We do have the benefit and pleasure to serve some wonderful partners today with a large volume. We're at a unique period in time in the issuing business, in our business. If you think about where we are in the journey, over really 80% of banks are going to replatform or planning to replatform to the cloud, which are going to open a lot of opportunities. All of these, you know, are struggling with the same. This is a very difficult endeavor for anybody to do, whether in-house or...
So as we see every, you know, as we position ourselves and move our platform forward, we see immense opportunity for issuers all around the world that have to replatform to a cloud-based, and they're all looking to do it really with what we've done. Not many want something that's been wrapped around an old core and, you know, just moving some peripheral edges out to the edge gate for, you know, true cloud native. So we literally, you know, have taken a complete design approach, moving that feature functionality. So we do believe, Jamie, if you're- I think the heart of your question is, do I think that's going to bring some people that have non-traditionally, you know, been outsourced? Yes, I think that's going to open up some wonderful opportunities for us going forward.
The only thing I would add to that, and I think it's a great question, Jamie, is the other thing modernization does, kind of going back to the question that was asked earlier, is that by deconstructing our capabilities into more microservices, there are use cases we can solve for in-house processors who may not want to do a full sort of outsourced arrangement. So we can start to bring incremental product and capability to them that they can leverage without having to be on the entirety of our platform. So we can open up new channels of growth that start with, "Well, you don't have to do a full conversion to access some of the solutions that we're able to deliver to the market." We're going to make them more easily consumable. They're going to be their own independent microservices.
They can be delivered, whether you have an account on file or an account not on file with us, and that opens up another channel of growth for the business, recognizing not everybody's going to outsource over time. We think the cloud journey itself, that most of the banks that we're working with, who are insourced today, who we're trying to target, we think that's going to drive a catalyst to more outsourcing and obviously more leveraging of our capabilities. But we don't have to convince an in-house provider today or in-house processor today, to fully outsource, to be able to unlock growth opportunities for the business longer term. So we're excited about that as being another growth vector, as we think about the issuing business and where we see growth materializing over a longer period of time.
Harshita?
Hi, thanks for the presentation today. Harshita Rawat, Bernstein. Just coming back to the guidance and acceleration implied for 2026, 2027. I know you talked about 2025 being a transition year, but what measurable goalposts will you be monitoring to kind of gauge success and for investors to kind of gain confidence into the acceleration into 2026?
... is it improving bookings, partner, location growth? And also, is there a cadence throughout the year in 2025 that we need to kind of think about in revenue growth? Thanks.
Yeah, I'll start, and maybe I'll let Josh-
Sure.
Cover the latter point. So look, I think we shared with you today the metrics we're looking at, and the key performance indicators and operational performance indicators we're looking at, that are gonna demonstrate that we are building positive momentum as we work through 2025 and into 2026 and 2027, that are gonna drive to better growth outcomes over that period of time. So it leads with our success in identifying new locations to sell our point-of-sale software into. That's gonna yield to better growth outcomes over time. It's our ability to sign new partners and, obviously, monetize those partner relationship with their existing back book, as well as selling net new in our Integrated and Embedded channel.
It's new partners in our Core Payments channel, which obviously continues to be a good source of distribution to grow Core Payments domestically in markets outside of the U.S. as well. And, of course, new estimated annualized recurring revenue from both of those channels, our Integrated and Embedded , and our Core Payments channel is critical, obviously, as it relates to where those businesses are growing over time. They also show that we're winning in the market, right? It's. We have a business today that is successfully winning in the market. We're working on ourselves and building muscles internally to better position us for sustainable, longer term growth in the business. But we are confident, and we have metrics that demonstrate, and we shared with you today, we are winning in the market.
We have the right products, we have the right solution, we can deliver them better, we can make them more easily consumable, we can align our people and platforms and capabilities in better ways to drive better outcomes, but there's no doubt we can win in the marketplace. The metrics that we shared on the slide that Josh went through with you earlier today are largely the things that we're looking at internally to demonstrate we are on the right path as we work through the medium-term outlook that we shared. As it relates to 2025, and I'll let Josh... I think it's a little early to get too granular around what we think the quarterly cadence of that might be. It's a preliminary outlook for 2025, but I'll let Josh jump in.
No, I think that's right, Cameron. It's, you know, we are a little bit early for that, but, you know, Jason asked a, you know, a similar question, Harshita, as it relates to just, you know, 2025 and how we should think about the components of merchant, and I would just go back to the answer that I gave him. You know, if you think about POS and software, and you think about integrated embedded, that's gonna be, you know, above the, the, the mid-single digit, you know, number that we have out there, and then Core Payments is gonna be on the other side of that.
It's gonna be, you know, in the low single digit range, and that's gonna kind of get you to the mid-single digit, you know, for the overall consolidated business, with issuer being right in the mid-single digit range as well.
Our final question from John Davis.
Thank you. Good morning, guys. John Davis, Raymond James. Josh, just on the 2025 EPS outlook, you know, I think you're gonna need about five points of growth from the buyback with mid-single digits. You're also calling for margin expansion. So just thinking through, are there any below the line puts or takes or maybe some conservatism?
Yeah. So look, you know, we've committed to buying back, you know, + $2 billion in shares and returning $2 billion of capital to shareholders. You know, I think that's, you know, about roughly, you know, 2 points, not 5 points. But what I would say is that as we continue to go ahead and invest in the business from an overall transformation, you know, perspective, we're gonna go ahead and see some benefit, you know, from that. Underlyingly, I would say, you know, we'll see some nominal growth, you know, in margins. And then the, you know, the remainder of it's gonna be, you know, come through from, you know, from a transformation perspective. And so, you know, we're focused on that 50 basis points of margin expansion.
Like we talked about earlier, you know, 2025 is really setting us up for 2026 and 2027, where we expect to see accelerated top-line growth and then margin expansion in the 50-100 basis points range.
And I would just add, I don't have my 12C in front of me, but I think your assumption assumes you do all that $2 billion at one time versus doing it ratably over the course of the year as you're actually generating cash to return it to shareholders. So I think that's probably the delta and underlying assumption. So as it relates to top line, as we said, we're targeting kind of mid-single digit with 50 basis points of margin expansion, and obviously, capital allocation drives the increment to kind of get to that 10%. Was that our last question?
Yeah.
Sorry, I missed that part. So, just in conclusion today, again, thank you very much for taking the time to be with us in person. Thank you to all of you that joined us online as well. I do wanna just pause and just take a moment to recognize our team that worked so hard to put on today's event. I know it feels like it probably is just something that we woke up last week and decided that we wanted to do and put together, but believe it or not, it took a lot more time, effort, and resource to present it. So, I do wanna recognize our team, thank them for all their hard work, and let them know how much I appreciate all the effort they've put into today's materials, as well as hosting this event with you.
Please join us for lunch. Please do take an opportunity to visit our demo center outside as well. We have some gifts for you that you can-