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All right. Welcome, everyone. We are very glad to have with us today the CEO of Global Payments. We have Cameron Bready joining us. Cameron, it's a pleasure having you here in Arizona for the second year in a row. Thank you so much for making the trip and joining us.
Yeah, of course. Thank you for having us, and thanks, everyone, for joining this morning.
All right. Well, we have a great list of topics today. We're gonna talk a little bit about the Worldpay transaction. We're gonna touch on Genius. We're going to touch on some of the recent changes made in the sales teams and some of the commissions. We're gonna talk a little about the industry and how competition looks. We'll talk about the integrated and embedded segment, and then we'll wrap up with a little bit on the financials and kind of the outlook. So with that, Cameron, maybe we can start with the first topic, which is the Worldpay transaction. So it's looking to close in early 2026. And as we near that transaction close, and you've done this many times, you have lots of experience with it, but this is a pretty big integration.
And when we think about the two different businesses, right, Worldpay skews a little bit more towards e-com and enterprise, and Global Payments a little bit more towards SMB and owns multiple software platforms. So with all that context, maybe you could tell us a little bit more about how you plan to manage this integration and some of the synergies across the two businesses.
Yeah, I'll be happy to. Maybe I'll start by saying, obviously, we're delighted with the path that we're on to close Worldpay. We've been able to pull in our originally expected schedule of the first half of 2026 into the first quarter, and we continue to knock down regulatory milestones, it feels like, every week, so we're trending really well to be able to close in the first quarter. Obviously, the sooner the better from my perspective. I don't love being in regulatory purgatory, as I like to call it, as we're waiting for close, but I would say that the flip side of that is it does give us a lot of time to be well prepared for integration.
And we've used that time really wisely to make sure that when we ultimately get to close, that we are as well prepared as we can be to begin integrating the businesses day one. And I would tell you, look, we've done a lot of M&A in our history. I've done a lot of M&A in my career. I've never felt better prepared for an integration than I do for the Worldpay transaction. And there's a couple of things that I think are different about how we're approaching this versus other deals that we've done in the past. First is we've taken a very uncompromising view around the operating model that we want to see for the combined business.
We've worked very hard at Global Payments over the last year to really transform our operating model from a holding company-operating company structure to a single unified operating business globally. And that is the model that we will leverage for the combined business. So in the past, I think around acquisitions, we've made a lot of compromises around the operating model. That's not the case with Worldpay. I think the second area that's really different is our North Star for integration is really around growth. You know, in the past, it's been more indexed around just getting expense synergies. But as we think about the Worldpay opportunity and the uniqueness of the opportunity, we're really focusing our integration efforts around growth. How do we make sure that we put the two businesses in position, the combined company, for sustainable, healthy growth for the long term?
How do we make sure we use this opportunity to improve our competitiveness in the marketplace so that we can drive better growth rates longer term? So our orientation around growth, I think, is really different in this transaction. We're also very focused on making sure we unify as one company, one team day one. So historically, you know, we've operated with different brands. There's been a lot of fragmentation in our business post-acquisitions that we've done. That won't be the case in this transaction either. And then I'd say the last area of focus for integration is really around building the best team, I think, in the industry. We have a unique opportunity, given the depth of experience and capability inside of Global and the depth of knowledge and experience inside of Worldpay, to really create a tremendously strong team across the combined business.
I think when we ultimately are able to announce kind of the leadership structure for the combined organization, it'll have a healthy mix of Global Payments and Worldpay team members, working together. And I think we're gonna have, you know, quite frankly, the strongest team in the space. It gives me a lot of confidence. And I think end of day, look, our objective from an integration standpoint is to unlock, I think, the immense opportunity that exists in putting the two businesses together. These are highly complementary businesses that I think when we think about how we can extract long-term value putting the businesses together, they very much belong together. To your point, Worldpay is oriented towards enterprise, e-com in particular. Global Payments is more SMB-oriented. We both have a strong foundation in integrated payments.
The combination of the two businesses is incredibly powerful, largely because they complement each other so well. And I think it creates immense opportunities for the combined company once we're able to get to close.
Excellent. All right. That was a great way to kick it off. Thank you, Cameron. We're gonna move to another important investor topic, which is the Genius Transformation. So historically, to set the table, you've had many different point-of-sale brands within the restaurant and retail verticals from Heartland, right? There's Vital, GPOSS, Xenial. Some of these were more SMB. Some of them were more upmarket. But the go-forward look is very much consolidated around, at least for the front book sales, a single brand of Genius. And maybe you could talk a little bit more about some of the recent rollouts and this overall approach and strategy.
Yeah, I think your sort of running through the litany of POS brands sort of illustrates the point I was making earlier around fragmentation. We've been far too fragmented as a POS matter historically. And certainly, when we kicked off our transformation journey, a big part of our emphasis around how we wanted to reposition the business was really to unify our point-of-sale offerings and to create a new platform as a go-to-market matter that harnesses the best capability we had inside of our ecosystem into a new platform with a brand that we can begin to elevate in the marketplace. And that really is what Genius represents for us. But in that, I think it's important to note it's not just a branding exercise. This is a new platform. So Genius is built from the ground up.
It does harness a lot of capabilities that we had inside of various point-of-sale environments inside of our company. But Genius isn't a rebranding exercise. It's a new platform and ultimately forms the foundation for how we'll bring our POS capabilities to market as we go forward across restaurant and retail. I think we've made a tremendous amount of progress in the very short period of time since we've launched Genius. We've rolled it out across restaurant and retail for SMBs. We've rolled it out across enterprise. We've rolled it out for higher education. We introduced a new hardware suite, first in the industry, modular component hardware capacity for the countertop solution for Genius, purpose-built for that platform, and also have rolled it out across a number of geographic markets.
As we think about the go-forward strategy for Genius, we're gonna continue to invest in those capabilities, bring new feature functionality, capability to market, bring it to all the physical markets around the globe where we operate today, which I think is a growth vector that many of our competitors don't have in terms of we have strong foundations, distribution, and capability in markets outside of the U.S. where we can introduce Genius. So we have significant ambitions behind what we can do with Genius, and putting a lot of investment behind it, but obviously delighted with the early progress we've seen.
All right. Excellent. Well, you really set the table there, Cameron. So the next two topics are somewhat related there. So one is around the investment behind the product, and we'll get to this later, and we'll talk about the sales teams and some of the hiring goals that you've recently mentioned. But on the product side, I think, I think the investment community is well aware that some of your competitors are heavily investing in product development. But you have a lot of free cash flow coming your way over the next few years with the combined company, which gives you a lot of room to compete and to invest behind Genius. And maybe you could just talk to investors a little bit about what kind of investment and what kind of dollars might be able to go behind the Genius platform.
Yeah, I think, look, I'd start by saying Genius is a highly competitive solution today, and I think it competes very well with the best of breed in market. I think it's. I always describe it as better than most, but competitive with all, and certainly, as a market positioning matter, that's really important to how we want to position our business, from a competitive standpoint. We believe strongly that our ability to win in the market starts with having highly competitive, hopefully differentiated product capability, feature functionality. We always want to lead with that. We try to marry that with a distinctive service experience that hopefully customers enjoy with Global Payments that I do think is unique to us relative to many of our competitors in the marketplace.
Then we combine that, I think, with a level of scale, particularly on the heels of the Worldpay transaction, that allows us to be price competitive with anybody, given the massive amount of scale that we're going to bring to the merchant acquiring space, you know, post-closing of the transaction. So from my vantage point, it all starts with having the right feature functionality and capability. And I think the early experience with Genius just so far suggests it's really resonating with our clients in the market more broadly because of the richness of the feature functionality, how scalable it is from SMB to enterprise, how easy it is for our clients to be able to utilize. We put a tremendous amount of investment in bringing forth a product, again, that we think is highly competitive and in many ways differentiated.
Part of our strategy as we move forward will be to continue to invest against that platform to maintain that competitive positioning. Combined with Worldpay, we'll invest over $1 billion a year in capital investments in the business. Much of that will go towards continuing, again, to make sure that Genius stays at the forefront of the industry in terms of feature functionality and capability, again, so we can continue to lead our go-to-market activities with a strong product that really resonates with the marketplace.
All right. Thank you, Cameron. All right. We're gonna move on to the next topic, which is sales hiring. So in addition to the product investments that we just mentioned that Global Payments is making and some of the competitors are making, there's also sales teams hiring. So a company we just had on stage a little bit ago is hiring a few hundred salespeople. You mentioned on your earnings call you're looking to hire 500 more in North America alone. And just for context, when we recently published this table that had a comparison of everyone's number of salespeople, and really no one's really close to you guys, and especially with the addition of these 500. So maybe we could talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, I think, as I look at our business, I talked about how we wanna position ourselves competitively. But certainly, the breadth of distribution that we have inside of Global Payments today, including our direct sales force, which I'll get to in a minute, I think it's a real competitive advantage for us relative to, again, many of our peers in the marketplace. On the direct sales front, I think we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,800 to almost 4,000 sales and sales support professionals around the globe today. You know, about 75% of our business is U.S.-oriented. So, you know, that's roughly probably consistent with the sales force as well. And we're adding about 500 to that, largely across the U.S., Mexico, and Canada here in North America over the short term.
Ultimately, you know, our view is we now have a fantastic product to be able to sell in the marketplace. We're seeing real momentum behind everything that we're doing with Genius. We've made a lot of changes to our sales effectiveness and sales model over the course of the last year or so. I'm sure we'll talk more about that in a minute. We feel like now is the right time to invest more behind our direct sales resources to be able to continue to capitalize on the momentum we have with Genius and a lot of the investment we've made in our sales and go-to-market activities to be able to drive better new sales performance as we move forward into the 2026 and 2027 timeframe.
So we feel very good about, I think, the investments we're making that was a part of our transformation initiatives, was to be able to create the capital and free up the capacity to invest in more sales resources. And I think we've done a good job of that. And the early progress we've seen suggest to us that now is the right time to do it. I think I would add on top of that, though, we have multiple modes of distribution in the business, not just our direct sales force. And the diversity of distribution that we have, again, I think is a real competitive strength. And one thing we're doing differently now relative to how we've operated historically is we're deploying Genius through all of our distribution channels.
In the past, we would keep, you know, our best product and capability really for our direct sales and not distribute it through other distribution channels that we have in the business, and ultimately, I don't think that's the right way to position the business for the long term, so we're now deploying Genius through our FI channel or our ISO channel through our VARs and dealers and making sure that we're really leveraging the strong depth and breadth of distribution we have in the business to bring our best product to market, and ultimately, I think the early success that we're seeing around Genius is partly due to that as well.
All right. Perfect. Well, you did, you did hint at this topic. So we're gonna hit this a little bit. So you made a little bit of a commission sales, the commission structure change. So you went from a 100% commission-based structure to now a base pay plus commission. I do wanna hit on that briefly. But maybe more importantly, I was hoping we could talk about just the expectations of a salesperson in terms of when you're, when you're making this investment, what kind of productivity are you looking for? What kind of paybacks, LTV to CAC, those types of things?
Yeah, it's a great question. And we tend to focus a lot on the sales compensation plans. And rightfully so. It's an important part of the changes that we've made in our go-to-market activities and our sales effectiveness program. But it's a lot more than that. You know, we were historically operating under a sales model that I think had outlived its usefulness in terms of driving the right behaviors and driving the right outcomes for the business. It was a 100% commission-based structure. We have evolved that to be more of a base plus commission and bonus-oriented compensation structure. I think the early results that we're seeing from that are quite positive, and we feel good about the changes we've made there. Much of that work was done in the first part of 2025.
And I think we're starting to see the benefits of that materialize in terms of the performance and productivity we're seeing out of our new sales professionals operating under this new compensation plan. But we've also made significant investments in our marketing technology and platforms, really driving better lead flow, our ability to qualify leads more effectively through our platforms today. We've also made investments in streamlining. We had multiple different CRM platforms by which our team members went to market every day. We're consolidating those CRM platforms down to just a couple. I think that gives us much better effectiveness in terms of how we're managing leads in the ecosystem, making sure that no lead is left behind. We can capitalize on all the leads that we're building inside of the business.
We're doing a better job of feeding those leads to our sellers so that they can be more productive. So it's not just the change in the compensation plan, but certainly the investments we've made behind sales effectiveness more broadly, I think, is allowing for us to drive better productivity from our sellers that, you know, certainly the compensation plans are helping as well. I think what they're really allowing us to do, particularly with Genius, is, you know, we're able to attract, I think, better quality sellers. We're able to retain our sellers more effectively. We're able to drive better productivity from our sellers. And the average sort of revenue, new recurring revenue from a new win is much higher because it's often coupled with software or other commerce enablement value-added services that we bring to market.
So we're effectively seeing a compensation structure that has a lower customer acquisition cost for us. And we're seeing better LTV for our customers because they're higher average revenue per unit. And, you know, certainly we think by being the software provider to those merchant clients, the longevity of them will be much better. So the overall CAC to LTV ratio will dramatically improve for us as we continue to move forward with the changes that we've made from a sales execution and effectiveness perspective.
All right. I think we covered that quite well. Thank you so much, Cameron. We're gonna move on to, I mean, this is a Genius topic, but it's really an industry topic, right? And you've been a leader in the industry for many, many years. And I think your perspective will be really valued on this topic, for investors. So the industry kind of operates a little bit in a tale of two cities, if you will, meaning the front book is typically competitive and back book, given especially with a software solution, can be more sticky, and there can be some pricing actions. And when we just look at some of the evidence in the public market, some of your competitors have talked about elevated hardware costs, right? Maybe they've increased CAC a little bit. It's come up on a few earnings calls lately.
But at the same time, we've seen examples of pricing on the back book. And really, we were just hoping you could give some perspective on how that is the same or different, or really if that's just the way the industry's been for many years.
Yeah, I think it's not new to your point. I think the industry has always operated that way. I think the front book has always been highly competitive from a price standpoint. And that's the nature of operating a competitive industry like this. You know, winning that net new customer, your pricing always has to be competitive. And I think our philosophy on pricing has been pretty consistent for a long period of time. You know, we don't lead with price. We really lead with product capability, service, the experience. Obviously, you have to be price competitive on the front book, and we believe we are. And obviously, with Worldpay, we bring sufficient scale to be price competitive with anyone. But we don't necessarily wanna lead with price as we think about managing the front book and driving new front book wins inside of the business.
The back book, and this has been this way for the industry, certainly for as long as I've been in it. It's always a function of trying to optimize yield and managing the correlation between yield and attrition. And it's portfolio management theory, I think, by and large across the sector. And different companies have taken different perspectives around how they manage that back book, to your point. Some are pushing through more pricing increases. Others maybe have pulled back on some of that. But it's largely in terms of how do they manage the correlation between yield and attrition in their own back book and portfolios. And I think every provider in the market has probably a little bit different perspective on that. But front book's always been competitive. That hasn't changed. That won't change.
I think our goal remains consistent, which is, again, we don't wanna lead with price. We wanna lead with product and differentiation and distinctive service. And we'll be price competitive, obviously, to win net new business. And we bring more scale than anyone that I think gives us a real competitive advantage there. But we wanna continue to, you know, get paid fairly for the level of value and service that we're delivering to our clients. And that's how we think about managing the back book inside of our portfolio as well.
All right. Excellent. In the remaining time we have, it looks like we're gonna try and cover integrated and embedded. We'll talk a little bit about the outlook and some of the capital allocation. And then, time permitting, we'll touch on agentic commerce. But with that as the agenda, let's hit integrated and embedded. So you added about 60 new ISVs in Q3.
Right.
And you said about half of those were outside North America. That's the Global Payments Integrated Business. But you've got Worldpay and PayRex coming your way upon closing. And maybe you could just talk a little bit about what the PayRex asset does and how it bolsters this integrated business.
Yeah, I'm happy to. Look, the integrated business is one we've been in now for a dozen plus years. We have a very strong foundation in integrated payments, as does Worldpay, for that matter. And look, I think it's interesting how that market has evolved. And I'll get back to sort of how we think about the benefits of putting the two businesses together. But look, the industry really started more as a referral model, with ISVs referring business to integrated providers like ourselves. And it's evolved over a period of time such that today, almost every conversation we have with a software partner starts with them suggesting that they want to be a payment facilitator. You know, there's lots of consultants out there that have sort of built a cottage industry around directing ISVs to become payment facilitators.
Certainly every PE firm that buys a software business suggests that they should become a payment facilitator and maximize their economics from payment flows. The reality is when you actually get under the hood and you start having those conversations, most software providers aren't equipped to be payment facilitators. Actually, there's very few true registered payment facilitators in the market today. What most of them are looking for is some greater control over the experience. The experience they're able to deliver to the clients, maybe the experience that they're able to provide around how funds flow occur, how settlement happens, how they manage the sub-accounts within the platform. So they're looking for greater control over the experience. They don't really wanna become payment facilitators and have to take on all of the underwriting KYC risk, transaction monitoring risk.
They don't really have the infrastructure and don't wanna invest in the infrastructure to be a real payment provider. They just want greater control over the experience. And over time, we've been investing in our capabilities to allow for ISV partners to have just that, which is they don't necessarily want a straight referral model. They really shouldn't be a payment facilitator. They want something in between. They want a hybrid solution. And we've invested in our capabilities to really be able to deliver a distinctive hybrid solution that's really tailored to the needs of a sophisticated ISV partner. Many of our competitors offer a model, and you either fit in that model or you don't. I think our approach has been more white glove, and it's been more developing bespoke solutions that are hybrid that really are tailored to the underlying needs of the particular ISV.
Where Worldpay really comes into play is their PayRex platform, which is their managed payment facilitation solution. So almost PayFac as a service helps to facilitate and deliver that really well-articulated hybrid solution to ISV partners. And it gives great technology strength to the hybrid offering that we wanna bring to market, accelerates our roadmap dramatically around technology investments we wanted to be able to make to deliver that hybrid opportunity. And combined, I think we'll have an ability to deliver, you know, really unique, very tailored, very bespoke solutions to meet the needs of more sophisticated ISVs in the market, to be able to serve everything from a very traditional referral relationship all the way up to a true payment facilitation offering and every variation in between.
And I think that will make us really uniquely positioned in the integrated space relative to any other competitor that we work with and or that we compete against. And I'm really excited about the prospects of putting those capabilities together 'cause I think it'll be very powerful for that sector.
Excellent. Thank you, Cameron. I think we could probably loop these last few into one 'cause really it's hitting on three financial topics. The first is on revenue growth outlook.
Yep.
The second is on the margins, and then, importantly, the capital allocation and returns that you're expecting to give to shareholders over the next few years.
Yep.
We'll just start on the revenue side. So in terms of 2026 and 2027, you talked about mid to high singles for the standalone and high end of mid to high singles for the combined business. And importantly, the recent guidance for Q4 suggests that even this year you'll be exiting on an organic basis or exit ex-dispositions above 6% in Q4. So it looks like on track for that. So just was hoping you could put a little bit more context on how investors should think about the revenue growth in 2026 and 2027. And if you don't mind just tackling some of the margin outlook there as well.
Yep.
We'll wrap up on capital allocation.
Yeah, I'd be happy to. I'll kind of focus on the combined business since we expect to close in the first part of 2026. I think that's important. As we think about putting our two businesses together, to your point, we're really delighted with where Global Payments is today. We're delivered on everything that we said we would do over the course of this year. The revenue has accelerated first half to back half as we anticipated. And we feel like we're very much on the right trajectory as it relates to the benefits our transformation is having in terms of our ability to drive consistent, sustainable top-line growth at a healthy level. And certainly feel good about the exit rate heading into 2026, all else being equal, you know, given it's a little hard to predict the macro.
Worldpay is also, I think, performing well. Their 2025 results are very much consistent with the plan that we underwrote as part of diligence. And we're very pleased with the progress that they're making. We would characterize them today as a solidly mid-single-digit grower. So as we think about putting the businesses together heading into 2026, you know, obviously they're growing solidly in the mid-single digits. We're exiting at a nice rate. We think the pro forma business for 2026 is set up to deliver, you know, very solid, you know, results on a combined basis. And as we begin to realize synergies across 2027 and 2028, it'll take a little time to generate the revenue synergies inside of the business.
But we've remained confident in our ability to accelerate growth towards the higher end of that mid to high single-digit range as we articulated when we announced the transaction back in April. So I think every month, everything that we're seeing in the business still aligns with the objectives that we laid out. We think putting the two businesses together gives us a lot of confidence around our ability to generate the kind of growth that we were anticipating and then ultimately accelerate as we're able to realize synergies over a period of time.
I think on the margin front, obviously, as we realize expense synergies, putting the two businesses together, we would expect to see more meaningful uplift in margin over the next couple of years, 2026 and 2027 in particular, you know, in the 100-200 basis points annually, largely reflecting, you know, good underlying organic growth in the business. But obviously, the benefits of expense synergies flowing through to margin expansion over that period of time as well. And obviously, we then think that combination sets up for very strong cash flow characteristics over that timeframe as well, which leads us to, you know, capital allocation, as you were describing earlier.
With the top-line growth we expect to generate, the strong margin expansion coming to the business through an execution of organic activities and synergies, you know, the business is poised to produce very strong cash flow over the next two years. That cash flow will be used to reinvest back in the business. As we talked about before, we anticipate investing over $1 billion a year back into the business in terms of capital investment. We'll reduce leverage from the transaction back to our three-times target within 18-24 months, kind of post-closing of the transaction. The balance of capital available to us will return to shareholders. Our expectation is we'll return that to shareholders over the 2026-2027 time period as well.
We committed back in September of 2024, and we reiterated more recently our plans to return $7.5 billion of capital to shareholders over the 2025 to 2027 timeframe. Thus far, we've returned about $1 billion, excluding returns associated with asset divestitures that we've made. So that means there's $6.5 billion that will return over the 2026 to 2027 timeframe. That'll be a little more skewed towards 2027, obviously, as we ramp synergies. But, maybe it's $35 billion, $65 billion, or $40 billion, $60 billion, something like that. But, you know, we're obviously well poised to return meaningful amounts of capital to shareholders in 2026 and 2027 to get to that $7.5 billion capital return expectation through 2027. And if you fast forward to 2028, the businesses are largely integrated.
Leverage-free cash flow for the combined business, we expect to be around $5 billion, which gives us a significant amount of capacity to think about, obviously, driving value for shareholders, and we're obviously pretty delighted with the cash flow characteristics of the combined business. That's 50% higher than what Global Payments would have been standalone had we not executed the transactions that we're executing and divesting our issuer business and acquiring Worldpay.
Excellent. Well, right on time, Cameron. I wanna thank you again and the Global Payments team. I should have mentioned earlier, but Nathan Rozof, thank you for also making the trip here to join us in Arizona. We really appreciate you being here and being such a big part of our event here in Arizona.
Excellent.
Thank you.
Tim, thanks so much for having us and thank you.