Okay, we can get started. Start a little bit late. Hey, Josh.
My name is Tien-Tsin Huang . I cover the payments and IT services sector at JPMorgan, and super excited to have Cameron Bready back from Global Payments. He's the CEO of the company. Cameron, thank you for being here with us.
Thanks for having us.
Cameron, I always—I do not know if it is a fair statement, but I always think of you as a student of the industry. You always listen, and I always appreciate our back and forth. I know there is a lot going on, and you are really busy, so thank you for being here.
No, absolutely.
Let's dig right into it. I, of course, polled everyone and tried to gather a lot of good questions to take advantage of the time that we have with you. I figured, just to kick it off, I thought it'd be good to just get an update on, of course, the transaction, the three-way transaction, how you're feeling now. It's been, what, a month or so since the announcement of the asset swap with you taking on Worldpay and divesting Issuer. How do you feel a month in?
Yeah, look, I think it's fair to say we feel great about the transactions. Obviously, clearly recognize we announced them at a time when there was a lot of market sort of macro uncertainty and a little bit of volatility. Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, not the ideal time to announce a transaction like this. The reality is you can't always plan for when these types of transactions come together. This was such a unique opportunity that it's something that we had to pursue. We thought it was clearly in the best long-term interest of the business to pursue it. Certainly, it's not lost on us that the timing, perhaps from a market standpoint, wasn't ideal.
Be that as it may, we're driving sort of long-term value creation, and we're trying to position the business as best we can strategically for the long term. Clearly, this transaction is a very compelling opportunity for our company. There's not a scenario that I contemplate where we're not better off by doing this transaction than we were, obviously, continuing forward with our standalone plan. Look, the last month has been terrific. It's been giving us a real opportunity to kind of deep dive with investors around the opportunity, the strategic rationale, the financial profile of the combined business, how this enhances sort of our financial position meaningfully. We've got a great deal of conviction from the board down that this was absolutely the right thing for us to do as a company. The long-term value creation potential is significantly better than it would have been on our standalone journey.
Yeah. I could feel that through your tone here and through the call. I got to say, Cameron, I think thinking back over time, I've always felt like we'd see eventually two large processors on the merchant side. Timing is one thing. Directionally, I feel like we've been going down this path for some time. It's interesting to see that it's coming together now.
Yeah, I think that's right. As I step back and look, our business and the Worldpay business are extraordinarily complementary. I mean, more so than probably anything else I've seen in my career.
100% agree.
Their strengths are not our strengths, and our strengths are not their strengths. When you think about putting the two businesses together, it's an incredibly powerful combination. What I love about it, more than anything else, and I think there's probably an underappreciated element of it, is, look, it's the ability to blend innovation at a level that, quite frankly, is astounding. At over $1 billion a year, we'll be investing in new product capability and innovation in the business. Marrying that with a scale profile, $4 trillion of processing volume, that, let's be honest, very few can match from a competitive standpoint in the marketplace. The ability to marry kind of best-in-class product and capability on a level to innovate ongoing in the business with the scale benefits that combined company brings is really powerful.
The flip side is our Issuer business kind of belongs with FIS. Their go-to-market motion is all about FIs, and that's what our Issuer business is really centered around. It's a great fit for them, and it's a fantastic fit for us. It's rare in life. That's why it's such a unique opportunity and why we had to move on it when it became available to us to ultimately structure a transaction like this that results in good outcomes for all the parties involved.
Yeah. I know it's not easy. I know it takes courage. Yeah, glad to see it come through. Let's just get this obligatory macro stuff out of the way, if you don't mind, Cameron. I have to ask you, right? If there's any update on the consumer SMBs, you see a lot of volume, of course. How healthy is the macro?
Look, I think the consumer remains very resilient, and the trends we continue to see in the business have been consistent throughout the course of 2025. I think you step back and look at just the broader environment for spending, it's actually pretty good. Like the labor market's fairly solid. Wage growth continues to be steady. Inflation seems to be under control, as evidenced by the print this morning. If you look at the backdrop for spending, it's actually pretty good. Even Q1 GDP, which got a lot of headlines, if you strip out the impact of imports, core consumption was up to 2.3%. That's not a bad number. I think it suggests that the underlying consumption trends and the consumer is very stable, very resilient. Naturally, like everybody, we're watching what happens with tariffs and potential risk around that.
That seems to be working itself out. I think the backdrop, look, I'd love it to be better, but it's stable and it's resilient. I think we feel good about the underlying trends we're seeing in the business. I have to say, though, I mean, it obviously starts with our own execution. What we're seeing in our business from an execution standpoint is really good. I'm really proud of our team for what we've been able to accomplish, not just in terms of the day-to-day running the business, but doing that while also delivering on our transformation initiatives and the progress that we're making on that front, which I really think positions our business incredibly well, not only for the future, but also gives us the right foundation in which to integrate Worldpay.
Yeah. The first quarter was clean, as we described it. I think no surprises. I figured I'd ask you before we go on, any surprises from your side on the first quarter?
No. I think we were really pleased with the result. As I said, it starts with really solid execution kind of across the business. The trends, by and large, were what we were anticipating: good, healthy sort of consumer activity across most of the markets around the globe in which we operate. We saw some better trends in some of the international markets. Asia had a good quarter. We saw a little more cross-border activity than we've seen in a while there, which was encouraging. By and large, it was, pardon the golf analogy, it was pretty center of the fairway for us. Really pleased with the momentum we're kind of carrying into the balance of the year. Obviously, we reiterated our guide for the year, which we've got a lot of confidence on delivering on that while also working to get the Worldpay transaction closed.
Good. I'm trying to think how we should move forward. Let's do merchant, just to stick with that. The quarter itself, and I'm thinking about revenue performance here, was pretty steady for Global Payments. The theme leading up to your quarter was the peer group couldn't quite live up or overcome the leap year piece. You saw a little bit of deceleration. We didn't see that at Global Payments. I'm curious to hear why that might be the case. Was there something else from a mix or pricing or that you were doing that drove the difference?
No, I think it's really just, again, stable underlying trends across our business. I try to remind people of this all the time because I think it's important. We're not the market, right? Our results are largely a function of sort of the unique dynamics in our own business. Look, coming out of Q4, I had people asking me, why didn't you see a little more volume uplift with the holidays? I'm like, we're not well exposed to sort of the retail, big-box, digital-native trends around the holiday that drives a lot of the volume. Same thing in Q1. We're not exposed to the fact that Easter was in Q1 last year and is in Q2 this year. We didn't really have that headwind. I would say there's nothing specific I would call out.
Again, it starts with good execution across the business, good stable underlying trends. I do think some of the new sales performance that we saw in the back half of last year obviously is helping and is a nice tailwind as we get into 2025. We see good momentum continuing on that front. I think, by and large, it's just good stability in the underlying business while we continue to work through the transformation journey that we're on.
Okay. Good. Back to the deal itself, if you don't mind, Cameron. Just on the call, something that stood out to me. On the call, you said that you will approach the integration of Worldpay differently than you have in past deals. Can you elaborate on what that means?
Yeah, I'd be happy to. I might start by just saying, look, integrating like-for-like transactions is a core competency of ours. We've done a lot of it. I think that's a good muscle that we have in our organization. I think our ability to execute from an integration standpoint, I have no concerns about that. I have a lot of confidence in our ability to do that. My commentary on the earnings call is more about philosophy and mindset, right?
Philosophy of what? I'm sorry.
Philosophy and mindset around how we think about sort of bringing these two businesses together. We are working through our own transformation to create sort of a unified operating model globally. We are not going to compromise on that. We are not going to go back to a holding company-operating company structure. We have put a lot of effort into building the right operating model, building the scalable processes in our business to support our standalone business. That is what we are going to leverage as we go forward, and we will not compromise. We are also going to combine the businesses day one under a common brand. I know that sounds like a small thing, but it is a really important thing, I think, in terms of how we want to drive the business and how we want to unify our organization as we go forward.
I think as it relates to fully integrating the business from a technology-operating environment, commercial go-to-market perspective, again, we're not going to compromise on the outcomes that we want to drive. Our goal is to drive this to be a fully unified, integrated business as early as we can under a common brand with a common go-to-market motion, leveraging common technology and operating environments, leveraging the model that we built inside of our business now. That's when I talk about approaching it differently. It's really that philosophy and mindset around the outcomes we want to drive and how we're going to approach the actual activity. It's not the execution arm itself, which I, again, have a lot of confidence in our ability to do that well.
Got it. No, that's very, very clear. Bringing it up another level from a strategy standpoint, we always like to talk about depth versus breadth. When I talk to some of the consultants all the time, we're always debating strategy on the chessboard, right? Depth versus breadth. I'm sure investors are tired of hearing me say it. Global Payments is choosing depth, right? Removing issuing makes a lot of sense, like you talked about. Talk to us about the importance of depth here versus breadth. Do you think of those as mutually exclusive? Am I looking at this incorrectly when you bring in Worldpay and it's more of a bet on depth within merchant?
Yeah, I don't know that I see it exactly that way. I certainly understand the perspective, but I still think of the business as having depth and breadth. I think of it, though, as having pure focus now on merchant. I think we will have depth and breadth in merchant, which I think having sort of a collective view of purpose in our organization, supporting merchants with commerce enablement solutions globally, is really what we're trying to drive the business towards. I think this is a unique opportunity to have depth and breadth. As I think about the combined business, there's not a merchant from SMB to enterprise that we can't serve. There's not a use case from card present to card not present to omni-channel that we can't serve. There's not a software partner, platform partner, marketplace partner globally that we can't serve.
The collective capabilities to bring both depth and breadth to our market offerings is incredibly powerful. It goes back to the conversation we were having a second ago. I do not think of it as choosing one or the other. I think about it as choosing having depth and breadth in merchant. If you're going to be pure-play merchant, I think it's important to have depth and breadth of capabilities across the full spectrum of merchant opportunities. This transaction allows us to do that in spades. That is part of the value proposition that we see.
Of course. Thinking about scale, I think you'll be right there with JPMC based on the Nielsen data, just under 20% share. A lot of scale there. You do have competitively players that are more vertically oriented. You know that very, very well. Some of the software players that are leaving their distribution. You have the diversified players that are trying to cross-sell and may or may not embed merchant within that. From a scale standpoint, how do you then differentiate and grow above market?
Yeah, I think it's a fair question. It's something I spend a lot of time thinking about. Again, I'll kind of go back to I don't think you have to choose between the two. I think the power of this combination is it allows us to bring best-in-class capabilities, product solutions, feature functionality, whether it's supporting the needs of digital-native e-comm multinationals to point-of-sale to vertical market software to commerce enablement solutions. We bring best-in-class product and capability and feature functionality to the market. We're marrying that with a level of scale, again, that I think is truly impressive. An ability to invest to innovate at a billion-plus dollars a year that's going to allow us to continue to remain very competitive in terms of our product suite and capability.
Again, still marry that with a level of scale and service experience that I think is truly distinctive. It is that combination that I do not think is really fully understood completely yet about this transaction. As I think about the market and clients choosing to work with us, you do not have to choose between fintech that has really good product and capability, but maybe does not support me in the right way. I do not have to work with that big-scale player where I feel loved and they are sort of catering to my needs, but I am a little lacking on product. We bring both. I think that is something that hopefully over time we will be able to better articulate and demonstrate in terms of how we bring the companies together and our success in the marketplace.
That's the most powerful part of this transaction that perhaps I haven't done the best job articulating, but I think isn't well understood yet, that I hope over time will be much better understood.
Yeah. Hey, scale, distribution, very, very important. You know, on merchant, you've been.
Look, it's a competitive industry. And having really attractive product and capability, feature-rich solutions that really resonate with clients, it starts with that. I don't want to differentiate on price. That's not the goal. Look, there's a great benefit to being able to marry the product and the sort of scale economics. But the goal for our teams are not lead on lower price. It's going to be lead with the feature richness of the capabilities. And we can price compete with anyone given the scale in the business.
Sure. Makes sense. Yeah, you talked about a billion in investment dollars available to the company. That's big. We've heard from Toast today. We heard from Block. I mean, Jack talked about how Square is back. They showed their new hardware, et cetera . Investors ask a lot. I want to ask you about it. You're about to relaunch Genius platform. You're standardizing your point-of-sale onto Genius. I think we'll learn more in some of the launches that are coming up. Just give us a sales pitch on Genius and how it's differentiated versus the peer group company.
Yeah, I think it's a great question. Not to pick on your words, but it's not a relaunch. It's a launch.
Launch.
Yeah.
There has been a demand for it.
I think that's important. I think it's important because, look, as I think about our business, we've always had a really good point-of-sale product. Unfortunately, it's been highly fragmented in our own environments. Multiple platforms, multiple different lines of business, multiple sort of duplicative investment across them to be able to bring features and product to market. But we have really good products. We have really good features and capabilities and solutions. We've just done a poor job of bringing that to market ubiquitously, organizing ourselves and aligning as a go-to-market matter and having any sort of brand recognition in the market that starts to resonate and build momentum with clients. Genius is really our opportunity to get that right. We're consolidating all of our key functionality, capabilities, features onto common platform.
We're aligning around a go-to-market strategy that leverages the entire breadth of our distribution globally to bring those capabilities to market. We're aligning around a brand that we think over time is really going to resonate and build equity and start to demonstrate that we are a significant player from a point-of-sale perspective. As I look at that, it becomes a great backdrop. There's a lot of excitement and energy in our business around what we can do with Genius long-term. Where is it differentiated? I would say in a couple of ways. One is, look, it's designed for the fast-paced, dynamic environments that you find in restaurant and retail environment. The way I like to describe Genius is it's better than most of our competitors, but competitive with all.
I think it's a platform that is feature-rich, incredibly functional, that is going to compete very effectively in the market. And quite frankly, in our humble opinion, is better than most of our competitors. I think what really differentiates it as a platform matter is it's not a marketplace of point solutions. It's a fully integrated, seamless offering of all of our capabilities that are delivered through a modern, scaled cloud-native environment to clients. What I really like about it is we can solve sort of the unique kind of workflow use cases of small independent businesses, but also effortlessly scale to kind of meet the complex requirements of high-volume environments. Think enterprise QSR, stadiums, et cetera.
Having that full functionality range inside of the ecosystem allows us to sort of create pre-configurations for smaller businesses to benefit from some of the capabilities that larger enterprise customers have, but also allows them to manage it and configure it in a very dynamic way to meet their own sort of unique requirements in their business. I think that functionality difference is really differentiated for the platform. The second area, I think, of differentiation is the white-glove service that we wrap around that experience. I think we have a good track record of demonstrating we can operate effectively and support clients in the most sophisticated of environments while sort of scaling down to meet the requirements of tens of thousands of SMBs globally.
It's a rare ability, I think, to have the enterprise depth in our business from a service and support standpoint, combined with the agility that you need to support SMBs on a global scale. The uniqueness of bringing that all together in a common platform with a common delivery model, with a common support structure, I think will really differentiate our offerings over time.
Good. Good. No, thanks for going through that. That's important. We're excited to see it in more detail as we're excited to release it. We're excited to see it in the field as well. Okay, good. Good to go through Genius. I have to then ask about on the Worldpay side. I think through FIS, we get to see some of the EMI. We do not have a lot of access to the data, but it does sound like the Worldpay asset has improved its growth profile. What can you share from diligence that they've done to change the asset and get to a point where you can be comfortably talking about synergies and how it does not change your growth profile, et cetera?
Yeah, it's a great question. As you can imagine, through diligence, this is an area that was a significant focus for us. We wanted to get ourselves comfortable in the growth profile of the business, where they were from a product and capability standpoint, and just the trajectory that they were on as a business. Look, I give a lot of credit to Charles and the GTCR team. They've done an immense amount of work to put that business on a far better footing than it was, I think, a few years ago as it kind of worked through the FIS merger. I think it starts with, look, this is not nuclear physics. We're not splitting atoms here. This business is all about product and capability and distribution. They've invested heavily in both.
We're seeing the benefits of that materialize in the growth profile of the business. It's a solidly mid-single-digit grower today on a trajectory to improve that as we get to 2026 and 2027. It starts with significant investments they've made in product and capability, particularly in the e-comm and enterprise space. They have highly competitive, best-in-class offerings in a variety of places supporting enterprise and e-comm customers globally that are really attractive. Obviously, that's 50% of their business growing at high single digits with the digital-native side growing a little faster, enterprise growing a little slower, but an overall attractive growth rate in that business. They have an amazing array of capabilities across FX, auth rate optimization, payouts, fraud management, and risk management. It's a very attractive business. We're seeing the fruits of their labor in terms of the new wins.
The growth profile and the sort of new sales pipeline of opportunities is really very attractive. We feel really good about that business. Again, it's 50% of their company. It's something we don't do today inside of Global. That's purely additive to what we do. We've also seen really good performance on the pay rate side. The managed Payfac solution that they're bringing to market has really attractive growth rates. It's very competitive in the marketplace today. It accelerates roadmap investment that we had on our own pipelines to support our integrated and embedded business. It's definitely additive to our integrated sort of strategy and go-to-market positioning.
It really positions us, as I mentioned at the beginning, where we can serve any software platform marketplace partner with the right tools and capabilities, but more importantly, with an operating model that's really tailored to the specific needs of their business. It's not a situation where you go to market with, "Here's your API. You integrate to that, and you get what you get." We can tailor solutions, I think, in really unique and compelling ways across software platform and marketplace partners that others are not going to be able to compete with. I think in terms of where we see the integrated business going longer term, the investments they've made around pay rates are really attractive to the business. They're seeing good growth as a result of that. On the SMB side, I think their challenge has largely been product.
They didn't invest in a lot of SMB product. They didn't invest in a lot of SMB distribution. Obviously, we bring all of that to Worldpay. They've done a nice job stabilizing the SMB portfolio. They're investing in distribution. That'll be additive to what we're doing. They no longer really need to invest in a lot of product there because we'll bring that to them. It gives us better distribution and more distribution arms by which to drive better penetration and saturation of our own SMB-oriented portfolio of commerce enablement solutions to the market. The long and short is the business is in a healthy place today. It's on the right trajectory.
Combined, our two businesses are going to be able to drive better growth outcomes, better top-line growth, certainly over the medium to long-term horizon than what we could have delivered on a standalone basis.
Good. You're streamlining. We talked about the relaunch of Genius. Worldpay sounds like it's in a good place in terms of what Charles has done to get it back to mid-single-digit growth. You're executing well. You sound pleased with retention and growth and backlog and all that good stuff, Cameron. My question is, just from a focus standpoint and integration work, we talked about that earlier, but how confident are you that you won't miss a beat here, right? That these trends won't continue as you're focusing on this complex integration? I call it complex from the outside, but I know you've done a lot of these before. Give us a little bit more on why we should be comfortable that you won't miss a beat in terms of execution. More importantly, how will customers see the new Global Payments together with Worldpay once it closes?
Look, I think it's a very fair question. I clearly understand why investors are focused on it and why you're focused on it. I would say a couple of things. The reality is the world we live in, it's going to take probably a year to get this transaction closed. That gives us an entire year to continue to work on our own transformation, build the right foundation, make sure that we've fully tuned our operating model, our ways of working, our processes are scalable so that when we integrate Worldpay, we're integrating into the right platform and foundation. That's kind of point number one. If we announced a Worldpay transaction and we were going to close in 60 days, I would have felt differently about it.
Knowing that we have a good amount of time to continue the journey that we're on, very happy with the momentum. There's more that we want to get done before we get to close. We're very focused on executing against that seamlessly over that period of time. The second thing I would say, and I think people forget this in sort of the conversation, is we're divesting 25% of our company that I would argue certainly occupies more than 25% of my mind share in attention and bandwidth given where that business is. Our issuer business is a great business, but it's in the midst of a multi-year technology modernization program that's not going to be done this year. It's in the midst of a multi-year conversion process with existing clients to move from its current environments to the new cloud-native environments.
It is a business where we are having to spend a significant amount of time obviously trying to drive growth outcomes that once we divest that business, that is going to free up a lot of time, effort, attention, and bandwidth inside of our organization to be able to execute on the integration of Worldpay. I think from my perspective, look, there is risk to getting out of bed in the morning. There is risk to everything that we do in life. I think our ability to manage the risks around executing against our transformation, integrating Worldpay, I have got a lot of confidence in our team. Let's be honest, we are doing it in the business that we know the best. We are doing it in merchant. We know merchant, I think, really well. I have a team around the globe that I think is first class.
I've got an amazing amount of confidence in their ability to execute. This just boils down to our ability to execute. The opportunity is immense if we get this right. I have every confidence we'll get it right. It's largely an execution game that we're focused on every single day.
Yeah. Yeah. I know you and Josh have done a lot of these, but I hope you appreciate why I asked the question.
Of course, I do.
It is important. No, we're excited to see how it comes together. One more on the cost synergy side, Cameron, just with Worldpay. I know it's been through a few changes of ownership. I'm sure GTCR addressed it a little bit. What's your line of sight into the cost synergy that you've laid out bringing in Worldpay?
Yeah, it's a good question. I would say I tell people I lose sleep over a lot of things at night. I don't lose sleep over the ability to realize the cost savings. As I step back and think about it, yes, it's been through some transactions, but it's now been re-stood up as a standalone company. All that corporate administrative overhead, some of that's being provided by FIS today under TSA. Some of it's now been built up in the Worldpay business. That's clearly addressable. Technology-wise and operating sort of model-wise, it was being integrated in a business that didn't have any like-for-like technology. There's immense opportunity from a technology harmonization and rationalization perspective. There's an immense opportunity around the operating cost structure of the business as well as you're putting like-for-like businesses together.
I think if you look at the 600 in context, it's like 18% of their expense base. That's probably lower than most of the deals that we've done in recent history that are like-for-like mergers of this nature. We've got a lot of confidence in the 600. Look, I know we can get to those numbers. More importantly, we can get to those numbers while remaining true to our plans around our own operating model, the kind of business we want to run without damaging any of the investment that they're making in the business or damaging any investment in distribution or the trajectory that the business is on. Again, there are a lot of things that worry me, but that is, I think our ability to execute on that is not high on my list.
Good. No, it's important to have the right focus and the right energy. I'm glad that you're not losing sleep over that. I think just a couple more to make sure we ask divestitures. I know you have a little bit of time before this deal closes, but you're still not quite done with some of the divestiture work on the streamlining side. Any update there and when we might expect something?
Yeah. I can't give you really any definitive timeframe on what's going to come next or when it may come. All I would say is just going back to what we talked about at our investor conference in September, we plan to invest somewhere between $500 million and $600 million of revenue. We've done about $300 million. So we've got a little ways to go. We have things in our pipeline that we're continuing to work. These are really attractive, valuable businesses. We're not going to give them away simply to get to a number. We are working very hard to be able to continue to deliver on what the expectation we set was around the amount of revenue we would divest. As we have more to update on that, we will.
The other thing I would just emphasize is when we do make divestitures, our plans are to return those proceeds to shareholders once we maintain sort of leverage neutrality. Obviously, it creates an opportunity to obviously return more capital. I think it positions us well for a more streamlined, simplified business as we move forward.
Okay. And then sticking with the capital front, I have to ask, right, with the stock, I know you've called it cheap and it's certainly at a low level here, just your ability to buy back stock, Cameron, versus the deleveraging commitments that are out there. Update us on that.
Yeah. We still have ability to buy back stock. You should assume that we are. Obviously, we're very focused on maintaining the investment grade credit rating. That's a priority for us without a doubt. Very focused on getting to three times leverage at the end of the year, which we're on a trajectory to do. That still gives us capacity to continue to buy back in the interim opportunistically. You should assume that we're doing that. As we think about the transaction, we'll be three and a half times levered at close, there or thereabouts, very focused on that metric because we think it's important to sustaining our investment grade credit rating. We de-lever very, very quickly. Over an 18 to 24-month timeframe, we'll be back to that three times levered.
As I think about the transaction, look, I understand it came at a time that probably surprised people. The reality is we can execute this transaction and over the 2025-2027 timeframe still roughly return the same amount of capital that we had committed to return at our investor conference, $7 billion versus $7.5 billion. There or thereabouts. There may be opportunity to improve on the $7 billion. More importantly, as you get to the 2028 sort of timeframe, our leverage free cash flow is 50% higher than it would have been on a standalone plan. We are looking at share returns or capital returns to investors in 2028 north of $4 billion. Again, 50% greater than what we would have had the capacity to do on a standalone basis.
There's not a financial metric that we look at where this isn't a much more compelling opportunity than our standalone plan. Our priorities from a capital allocation standpoint haven't changed. We're still prioritizing capital returns to shareholders. Over the 2025 to 2027 timeframe, we're doing roughly the same. Interestingly, in 2026 and 2027, we're actually doing more than what we had in our original plan. By the time you get to 2028, we're 50% higher than what we otherwise would have been able to do on a standalone basis. Look, if we get all this right, which I have a high degree of confidence we will, the value creation opportunity is immense. We have every intention of executing against that.
Good. No, it sounds like you've thought through that very, very clearly. So thanks for going through that. Time flies. We're almost done. Forty seconds. I wanted to ask just a big picture question. Cameron, with the asset swap, we've seen a few companies go private here recently. We've seen some strategic investments and some different deal activity. Do you see the industry maybe going through a phase of consolidation again, given where we are in the cycle and maybe with what's happening competitively? I'm curious how you see the broader landscape.
Yeah, I do. I think, look, we're coming off the heels of a multi-year sort of expansionary cycle in our space. I think, to be honest, it's oversaturated right now with investment opportunities. I think naturally, this is a business of scale. Over time, you're going to go through periods of expansion. You're going to go through periods of contraction. I think we're entering into a time when you're going to see more contraction in the space. You're going to see more consolidation. You're going to see more M&A. That probably makes Greg happy. I do think we're approaching kind of a cycle where, look, scale matters. It matters now more than ever in our business. You're going to start to see people move towards more consolidation opportunities, driving more scale. The regulatory intensity around the business continues to grow.
I think scale is obviously helpful in being able to address that effectively. I think naturally, we're going to see that period in front of us coming off of a multi-year kind of period of a lot of expansion and a lot of saturation of new names in the space.
Okay. Cameron, it was great to talk to you.
It's great to see you. Thanks for having us.
Thanks for having us, sir.