Why don't we go ahead and get started? Again, thank you for everyone joining us this morning here at the Day 2 of the Wolfe FinTech Forum here in New York City. Really happy to have everybody here with us. Look, really happy to have you with us, Josh, CFO of Global Payments, and Winnie and team. Thank you guys for joining us. It's really great to have you back with us again.
Yeah, thanks, Darrin. It's great to be here and great to be at the conference again this year. I look forward to talking about the opportunities ahead for Global Payments.
Thanks, Josh. Just maybe we kick in and start off over the year-to-date trends you're seeing in the business. A lot going on at the company, a lot going on in the market broadly. Really just thinking about some of the most recent trends first. Then we'll go a little bit further into 2025 and medium term and macro assumptions you're contemplating as well.
Yeah, sure. No, absolutely. Yeah. Look, to answer your question, I'm pleased to say that we're seeing a lot of the same trends that we saw exiting 2024 in the months of January and February. It relates to our guidance at a very, very high level. Our 2024 guidance on a constant currency adjusted net revenue basis is in that 5%-6% range. I think it's important to note, Darrin, that this is consistent to slightly better than what we had communicated at our investor conference. On the fourth quarter call, I did say that we expected to see some acceleration in the back half of the year relative to the first half of the year as we start to see some of those transformation initiatives ramp. Then we lapse some of those Issuer contract renewals that we talked about.
As we also start to see the increased benefit of the conversion activity through the balance of the year. As it relates to just the overall general macro environment, we expect to see a relatively stable macro through the balance of the year. With that said, we never guide to perfection. With any outlook, we make a number of assumptions. We build in contingency, which we feel allows us to absorb for different outcomes as long as there is not a significant disruption to the overall macro environment. Darrin, sitting here today, we feel pretty good about what we communicated on our Q4 call. We are still wrapping up February. Right now, we feel like we are currently trending in line with what we said on our Q4 call.
That's great to hear, especially in the backdrop of all these headlines and macro. It's good to hear that things are trending in line with what you hoped.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, on that note, you exited the year roughly 6% growth. We definitely had some investors wondering, just given the magnitude, given the transformation you're going through, if the 5%-6% guide you gave really does conservatively incorporate the potential headwinds around that transformation you're undertaking. I know there's sales realignment, branding changes, enterprise merchants being shifted or exited in some cases. Maybe just reiterate and revisit that again for one more moment. I mean, the back half weighted nature of the guide, what does drive the reacceleration exit growth rate back to the +6% range first?
Yeah, great question. Our guidance for the year assumes that we see a slight decel from where we exited 2024 in the first half of the year. That builds in the potential for there to be some disruption to the business as we ramp some of these transformation initiatives. However, we expect as we ramp more of the transformation initiatives to go ahead and see some acceleration in the back half of the year. As it relates to merchant, on our earnings call, we provide a lot of details around the timing and the milestone of several initiatives. I think it's important to note, Darrin, we have over 600 initiatives that we're currently working on across the company. This touches every part of the organization.
Some of our bigger initiatives is obviously the release of our Genius POS system, which we expect to go ahead and release in the U.S. for retail and restaurant in the second quarter of the year. We will follow that by the release of Genius Enterprise in the September timeframe. We will release Genius to the international markets in the back half of the year. Another big initiative that we have, Darrin, is the Sales Force of the Future Program. We talked a lot about that on our fourth quarter earnings call. That is retooling and retraining our sales force. In addition to that, we have also rolled out a new sales compensation plan for our sales force. We started rolling that out in the back half of 2024. We are going to continue to roll that out into 2025.
In fact, we've rolled that out to more than 50% of our overall sales force. As we execute on these initiatives, we do expect there to be some potential disruption. A lot of that work is happening in the first half of the year. We expect to see some of those benefits materialize in the back half of the year. If we're to put some numbers around it, our merchant outlook for the year is for 6% constant currency adjusted net revenue growth ex disposition. In the first half of the year, we expect to be a little bit below that. In the second half of the year, we expect to be a little bit above that.
We expect to exit the year at our strongest quarter of growth going into 2026, which is very consistent to what we commented on at our investor conference. As it relates to Issuer, we talked a little bit about this on our Q4 call. We have a very strong conversion pipeline currently right now, over 70 million accounts that extends into 2026. As we execute on this pipeline, we lap some of these renewals. We expect to see growth accelerate through the balance of the year. Our outlook for our Issuer business is roughly 4% on a constant currency basis. Q -- we exited Q4 approximately 3% constant currency. We expect to see some modest acceleration in Q1 and then steady improvement through the balance of the year.
Again, with Q4 being our strongest quarter of growth for the year and solidly exiting the year in that mid-single digit range and positioning us well for 2026, especially, Darrin, on the heels of our commercial launch of our modern platform that we've been talking about in Issuer.
Yeah. All right. I mean, clearly the market needs to see some of these results because the multiple certainly does not reflect that growth. I mean, 5%-6% growth is a lot better than 8%-9% times earnings. It is good to hear your conviction around it. I mean, you still have the same confidence it sounds like you had when you first gave it a few months ago, right? Or not even a few months ago, a month ago.
Yeah, absolutely. Look, I mean, look, we know more today than we did in September. We have made a lot of progress with the transformation. We have over 600 initiatives that we are currently working on. Look, sitting here today, we have accomplished a lot so far. We have a lot more to do. We feel good about everything that we have done and the outlook for the business.
Okay, great to hear. Maybe we could just quickly clarify just to level set from an organic standpoint. I know the guide excludes currency and dispositions. Takepayments , excuse me, Takepayments closed mid-summer along with a small orchestration platform you bought. So just to clarify for us, the organic assumption relative to the 5%-6%, is it closer to 5% for a moment?
Yeah, look, the guidance we gave, we provided was on a constant currency ex disposition basis. However, the contribution we expect from M&A executed in 2024 is relatively immaterial. So the organic growth is consistent with that overall range. Specifically, as it relates to Takepayments , we closed that acquisition in the second quarter of 2024. For 2025, it's going to contribute a little bit less than 25 basis points. Takepayments in the first quarter will be fully offset by the headwinds from lapping leap year. In the second quarter, we would expect Takepayments to contribute a little bit less than 50 basis points given that we closed that in the second quarter. As it relates to the orchestration platform that you talk about, look, that was a very, very small technology acquisition. We're really excited about it.
It gives us the opportunity to go ahead and distribute our products across multiple platforms and multiple geographies more easily. That is not going to contribute anything to the overall top line growth. Again, our organic growth is in that 5%-6% range, which we outlined on our call.
Very helpful. Just very quickly on the EPS guide, just remind us how we should think about the actual dollar-based EPS guide given the absorption of stock comp now, which you're introducing in Q1. I think all of us are just happy to see across any company that does that from a quality standpoint.
Yeah, I know. I heard what you're saying. Look, at our investor conference, we did say that we were evaluating how we're going to handle our reporting structure going forward. Stock-based compensation, we'll treat that as an expense in our adjusted earnings going forward. If you think about 2024, we had about $164 million of stock-based compensation expense. That's about $0.50. Our adjusted EPS for 2024 would be a little bit over $11 a share. Again, that's not going to impact our growth outlook for the full year that we guided to on the Q4 call. That math would imply that we're somewhere in the $12 range at the midpoint of the overall guidance range for our adjusted EPS for 2025.
Okay. I mean, frankly, I think investors like us and analysts have hopefully been looking at stock comp expense anyway. But it's good formally to, I think, introduce it to the--
Sure. I think it better aligns with our peers.
Correct. Yeah. Let's go to the medium-term outlooks of accelerating from what you basically talked about for 2025 being mid-single digit growth to the mid- to- high single- digit growth by 2026 and 2027. Just help us understand if you could walk through the transformation efforts, their impacts to 2025, and their drivers that are going to really enable that reacceleration into 2026 and beyond.
Yeah. Great question. Darrin, as I mentioned, we have over 600 initiatives right now that we're executing across the company. As I said, that touches every part of the company. Let me give you a little bit more detail on a few of the things that I touched on before. Look, our first major initiative is harmonizing all of our best products and capabilities across the company globally. That release starts with aligning all of our POS solutions under one common brand, Genius, which we're super excited about. We've completed the full branding effort around Genius. We're going to be rolling that out, as I mentioned, in the second quarter in the U.S. for retail and restaurant. We'll follow by Genius Enterprise in September. We'll roll it out internationally as we go through the year.
We are also making progress converging a lot of our technology capabilities across our POS platforms, which will create significant upsell and cross-sell opportunities. The second major initiative that we have talked about is our Sales Force of the Future Program. That is repositioning and modernizing our overall sales force. That includes upskilling and retooling our sales organization, aligning incentives to accelerate cross-selling, and improving our lead gen capabilities. As part of that, we have also rolled out the modernized sales compensation plan, which we talked about. Other initiatives that we have underway are going to be exiting certain markets. We are not going to renew certain contracts, or we are going to stop working on doing things that do not align to our overall strategy. There are a lot of things that we are doing, and these things could have a modest impact on growth in the first half.
That is why as we thought about the guide for 2025, we said that we expected to see a modest decel in the first half. In that first half of the year, we would expect to be on the lower end of the 5%-6%. In the back half of the year, we start to see some of those transformation initiatives materialize. We start to see the benefit from that. We would expect to be on the higher side, closer to that 6%. As I mentioned earlier, we expect to exit the year across both our merchant and our Issuer business at the strongest level of growth, which we feel really positions us well for 2026 and is consistent with what we discussed at our investor day.
That's helpful. With gaming and A MD now both divested, I mean, how should we think about the strategy going forward in terms of where you're investing behind in merchant and just broadly what your thought process around any other divestitures or anything along those lines?
Yeah. Look, as we talked about at Investor Day, we feel that we've built a market-leading portfolio of vertical software businesses. Although we don't see any significant gaps in those businesses, markets evolve over time. With that said, we'll certainly look to continue to build on our existing assets. We may target some additional verticals and some geographies that align with our strategy. In fact, Darrin, we do have some smaller tuck-in M&A built in the model over the next three years for strategic tuck-in acquisitions. They have to meet a very, very strict criteria. They have to align with our strategy. They have to be easy to integrate. They have to exceed our ROIC hurdle. They have to be competitive with the alternative uses of capital.
As it relates to Advanced MD and gaming, a lot of the revenue figures that we gave you with Advanced MD and gaming, those did not exclude some of the commercial partnerships that we talked about. Advanced MD and gaming, as we think about streamlining and simplifying the business, we just did not feel like those businesses were the best fit for us longer term. We were pleased that we were able to maintain that strategic partnership with both of those businesses to be able to provide integrated payments and commerce enablement solutions for those businesses going forward.
In terms of the potential for anything else on the horizon on that front, are we in a good place now in terms of the merchant segment beyond M&A and just divestitures?
At our Investor Day, we said we were divesting up to $500 million to $600 million. At this point, we have divested over $300 million. We obviously have Advanced MD and some of those markets in Asia-Pacific. There are things that we have in the market now. I do not want to go ahead and get into specific details. Again, we will continue to look. We will continue to consider those assets there depending upon the price and the value and all that stuff and the returns.
Can you just talk about the joint venture strategy for a minute? I mean, it's definitely an area that we've seen you excel in. Should we expect more of these? Can you remind us of the moving parts with winding down Asia and the strategy there and the investors with the inverse happening also?
Yeah, sure. Joint ventures, Darrin, we've had a very proven track record of being able to generate substantial returns with our bank-based joint ventures. I think it's important to note that with our JV in Spain with CaixaBank, we established that over 15 years ago. Our JV with Erste Bank in Central and Eastern Europe, we launched that over a decade ago. These are just two examples of longstanding partnerships that we have. I think if you ask any one of our bank partners, they would tell us that we've been an incredibly effective partner for these banks and driven meaningful growth for their businesses and significantly transformed their merchant acquiring business. Darrin, when we go into a market or a new geography, we need distribution. It's very difficult to go into these new geographies greenfield.
Banks have provided a very good way to go ahead and do that. In the short term, we benefit from the secular trends in those markets. As the markets mature over time, we will bring product and we will bring innovation and new technology. That will support very, very long run rates of growth.
Can we shift and just talk about from a geographic standpoint? Remind us if you can on where your biggest markets are outside the U.S., obviously. Really where you see it going after the moves you've been making and the realignment of the business going out a couple of years from now. What kind of geographic positioning and mix is it going to look like? Maybe also while we're at it, just talk about the model, the go-to-market model you have in different markets, whether it's ISOs or it's independent or it's your own sales or other partners.
Yeah. Look, for our merchant business, the U.S. is our largest geography and our largest market. It'll continue to be a significant driver of growth going forward. The U.S. is also where we generate the vast majority of our software and POS revenue and our integrated and payments revenue. As we discussed at our Investor Day, we're going to leverage all of our distribution channels to extend our reach to sell more software and technology. Additionally, Darrin, we've built a significant presence outside the U.S. in international markets. Those markets are still in the early stages of adopting software and technology. We see these markets as a great opportunity to not only sell Genius, which again, we're going to be releasing into selected international markets in the second half of the year, but all of our other software and integrated payments.
Look, I think a great use case of this is the success that we've had in taking our U.S.-born education businesses outside into international markets. We've had a tremendous amount of success in bringing our international businesses to the U.K., Ireland, and Canada. Again, as I mentioned, excited about launching Genius in the second half. As it relates to our Europe business, just overall, our Europe business is about 20% of our overall merchant business. We have leading market positions in the U.K., Spain, and Central Europe. We also added attractive new geographies through our acquisition of EVO, Poland, Greece, and Germany. Europe will continue to be a very strong market for us. If we think about our LATAM market, Mexico, it's less than 5% of our overall revenue. Through our acquisition of EVO, we've added significant scale to that market.
In an effort to combine things and simplify our model, we announced on the fourth quarter call that we plan to go ahead and buy HSBC stake in our Mexico business. That will allow us to go ahead and harmonize our go-to-market strategy and just create better scale in the overall market.
Okay. That's really helpful. One of the most important takeaways from your investor day, I think, was definitely consolidation of the point of sale assets you have around the Genius brand, which we've known for some time as a brand, but we haven't seen it really wrap around much of the company beyond what it was when you first took it on, I think under Cameron originally, if I remember correctly.
That's right. Yeah.
If we could just take a step back, I think this is an important point for investors to understand. There's Heartland Retail, Heartland for Restaurants. There's Vital. There's a few others, more on SMB and a little more upmarket. If you could just bring to life the end state vision of the point of sale offering, how much is Genius a revamp of underlying tech you already have, rebranding of existing tech, or maybe both in some cases? Just what is this really going to do for the business relative from a competitive standpoint?
Yeah. Another good question. Look, our POS, I think, is our best example of the opportunity to consolidate platforms across the organization. We've been running 16 POS businesses that were highly fragmented from a product and capability perspective. Some of these are legacy platforms, and some of these are more modern cloud solutions that were all spread across the business and not centrally managed. We now have created one channel associated with POS and software that's responsible for the go-to-market strategy. We've centralized it under one leader. We've also completed the rebranding, so it's very distinctive to Global Payments. We don't have multiple offerings out there in the marketplace that are competing with one another. Finally, we're replatforming our core offering, which will include the best features and functionality across restaurant and retail that will be ubiquitously available in the market.
When we launch Genius beginning in the mid-May timeframe, we'll have all the best solutions across our platform.
Okay. When we think about what that could mean for your customers to have to rebrand, I mean, a common question we get is whether there's disruption around that or anything along the lines of transition risk. How do you make that transformation in as seamless of a way as possible from what somebody's using currently today to the Genius offering?
Yeah. Look, some of this will be able to update just through APIs and the technology. We have a very specific roadmap on how we're going to roll that out. That will start looking at the backbook in 2026. Our focus initially is going to be going after net new customers.
Okay. You said this goes into effect basically second quarter, I think, right?
That's right. Yeah. Second quarter in the U.S. for retail and restaurant. Enterprise will be in the September timeframe and then selected international markets in the back half of the year.
Okay. It's probably one of the most important things we, -- I think, we're going to want to watch for, right, as the year progresses. Moving on to the core side, I mean, it's just one of the more traditional portions of the business. You laid it out at your investor day. The segment was guided to mid-single-digit revenue growth once we get into the 2026 and 2027 timeframe. Maybe just revisit that again and talk a little more about the competitive positioning and core payments in that segment. If you could talk a bit more again about the mix between international and U.S. and the bank channel mix versus direct as well would be helpful.
Yeah. Look, our core payments channel remains foundational to our overall business. It provides a stable source of revenue and cash flow to the business and also provides future opportunities of growth. Our U.S. business is comprised of our U.S. direct business and our wholesale business. That is about 50% of our adjusted net revenue in the core payments business. The other half is our international business. Historically, our U.S. direct business has grown in that mid-single-digit range. Our wholesale business has grown a little bit slower than that. That is in kind of the low single-digit range. Our international business has a balance of mature markets and faster growth geographies. The more mature category includes markets like the U.K. and Canada, which are somewhat slower growth overall.
The faster growth geographies include markets like Spain, Central Europe, and several of the other markets that we acquired through EVO, which would include Poland, Greece, as well as Mexico. These markets typically grow at different rates of growth, but they all generally grow in that double-digit range. Darrin, I view core payments as really a feeder channel for us going forward for our software businesses. I think eventually the customers in our core payments channel will make the move to more integrated software solutions, and they'll move from this channel to one of our other two channels that we commented on.
Okay. Very helpful. Look, so putting it all together, I mean, what are you most excited about in terms of growth within the merchant segment post the transformation? I guess going into 2026 and 2027 and coming out of this year.
I think it's many of the things that we talked about today. I think consolidation of platforms. I think that's something that we needed to do, one go-to-market strategy around POS. I think we have a tremendous value proposition. I think the opportunity is immense, not only in the U.S., but globally. I think that's the other thing that really excites me. You go outside the U.S. into those markets where we have leading market positions, strong secular trends across each of those markets. Think of Poland, think of Germany, think of Spain. To take this product in there, I think that's really exciting. I think we'll see very, very strong tailwinds there. Finally, I think it's the Sales Force of the Future Program.
Any time that you can go ahead and reinvest in your people to make your people stronger, to go ahead and improve your overall sales force, that's key. Look, you can have all the great, the best product in the world, but if you don't have distribution and you can't get it to market, that's a real problem. That's something over the last 55 years that we've developed with the type of distribution that we have and the geographic footprint that we have. I would say the good news, Darrin, is that all these things that we have currently are underway. As we get further in the year, we're going to start to see that acceleration and start to see all these things transform and really position us for 2026 and beyond that we talked about at our Investor Day.
Okay. Just going to the Issuer side for a moment, I know you said you exited the year around 3%. You're talking about 4% or so over the year. Maybe just revisit with a little more granularity of that segment, given how important it is for, I think, the valuation of the overall company. You mentioned in recent quarters, some items like consumer volume being a little slower on some of these cards, delays from products and service investments in the banking partner. That happened late in the quarter. You also, as you talked about earlier, have, I think you said 70 million, right, in terms of accounts on file. It's a pretty big number on a base. What's the base again now? $500 million, $600 million or so in terms of the core?
Accounts on file? Yeah, $850 million.
Right. For all of it, commercial and consumer.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, it's still, it's a very large number coming on, 70 million over $800 million in terms of the year. When we think of the add-ons versus the lapping of pricing, just help us remind us of the trajectory of the segment and what the dynamics are there.
Yeah. Look, we saw a nice acceleration from Q3 to Q4. That was largely driven from our consumer card transactions. We saw strength there. That aligns with what you heard from a lot of the FIs that they highlighted on the Q4 call. Commercial card, we continue to see the same trends that we saw coming out of Q3. Corporates continue to take a very cautious approach to spending. That trend has continued. Separately, I think a bright spot was in Q3, we said we did see some weakness around bank investment and products and services. We saw that pick up and return back to normal in Q4. We have a healthy pipeline of these banks and the investments that they're going to make in 2025.
What I would say, Darrin, is if we think about the business in 2025, it really goes to the pipeline that we have, 70 million accounts on file and lapping these customer renewals. As we think about the outlook for 2025, that first half of the year, we expect to be in that 3%-3.5% range. Look, in the back half of the year, we expect to be in that 4.5% range. That gets you kind of that roughly 4% constant currency, which we talked about. Again, I think coming out of 2025, that fourth quarter, we expect to be solidly in that mid-single-digit range, which really feels positions us well, as I mentioned earlier, for 2026. Also on the heels of launching our modern platform. We feel like Issuer is pretty well positioned for the balance of the year.
You guys, from a capital return standpoint, guided to pretty big numbers. I mean, $7.5 billion of capital return over three years, $2 billion plus per year buyback. I mean, think of it, it's over 30% of the market cap, right, in terms of buyback and capital return in total, I should say, over the next few years. When we think about that, just a brief comment on capital return from you and updated thoughts on that, as well as just a reminder on debt paydown pace and goals.
Yeah, sure. Over the next three years, we're going to generate somewhere between $8.5 billion-$9 billion of free cash flow, which is about a 90% conversion rate. To your point, Darrin, we expect to return $7.5 billion. If you kind of just think of the role over the years, in 2025, we expect to return $2 billion in capital to shareholders. $1.8 billion of that approximately will be share repo. The balance will be in dividends. In 2026 and 2027, we expect to return in excess of $2 billion in share repos. That is in addition to dividends. Again, focused on returning capital to shareholders. We do have some M&A built in the model for some small tuck-in stuff.
If it does not obviously fit our strategy or if that does not materialize, we will look to go ahead and return that capital back to shareholders. Obviously, we talked about this earlier, that we plan to divest between $500 million and $600 million of revenue through the transformation. We have only done $300 million. If we divest some other assets, we will look to go ahead and return that capital to shareholders, retain, continue to be leverage neutral. As it relates to just overall leverage ratio, we are targeting that 3x leverage ratio. We are pretty well there now. We will continue to keep that leverage point generally in that vicinity.
All right. Just the last one for me is just on the margin side and the savings side. I mean, you had guided to $600 million plus of run rate savings by the first half of 2027, delivering around 50 to 100 basis points of annualized margin expansion. If you could just talk about the timeline and the drivers of that going forward one more time.
Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Look, we're pleased that we're able to go ahead and raise that from $500 million to $600 million, as I said earlier. We have a better line of sight now than we did back in the September timeframe. In 2025, we expect to realize about 30% of that OI benefit that we talked about. We'll invest the majority of that back into the business. In 2026, we expect a little over $200 million of that OI benefit to flow down to the bottom line. In 2027, a little bit over $400 million. I think it's important to note that these are not only cost efficiencies, but these are also revenue initiatives as well. That comes in at a lower margin.
That's kind of how we see the shaping of these OI benefits over the next two to three years.
Okay. Very helpful.
Yeah.
Josh, that was a great update. Thank you. Guys, any questions from the audience? I'm happy to take this one in the third row.
Hi, thanks. Can you just touch on new business wins in Issuer processing and what's really allowing for share gains there?
Yeah, absolutely. I think if you think about our Issuer business, a lot of the new sales are coming as it relates to our cloud-based platform, which will be rolling out at the end of this year, beginning next year. There is a pipeline or there is a lag in the pipeline as it relates to any kind of Issuer processing. These banks tee these up years in advance. That is where we see a lot of the growth coming in the overall Issuer business.
Any other questions, guys? All right. Why don't we stop there then, guys? Thank you so much. Josh, thank you for joining us. Thanks, guys, from the team Global Payments. Next up on stage is in about five--