All right. Terrific. Let's get going. Thanks everyone for joining. My name is Tien-Tsin Huang. I'm the Payments and IT Services Analyst at JP Morgan. I was just telling the team here I've learned a ton. Super grateful for getting all these companies come through, especially Global Payments who supported the conference for many, many years. Want to thank the Global Payments team. From Global Payments, we've got Bob Cortopassi, the President and COO, Josh Whipple, CFO, as well as here, of course, [Nate Phil] as well from the investor relations group. Thank you guys for joining.
Yeah, thanks.
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Yeah. Should be good discussion. I've gathered a lot of questions from the investors to ask. They were all pretty consistent. Let's get through it and should be fun and hopefully learn some stuff. Just to ask the standard macro question, if that's okay, just to get it out the way. What are you seeing on the ground from consumers, from small businesses especially? Any leading indicators or signals that are interesting that you'd like to share?
Yeah, sure. First, Tien-Tsin, it's great to be here at the conference. It's an exciting time to share the Global Payments story and as we continue to go ahead and advance our transformation. To start with the macro, sitting here today, in May, we're seeing a continuation of the same trends that we saw at the end of last year and exiting Q1. Naturally, we're continuing to go ahead and monitor the Middle East, and the conflict there potentially brought implications on the overall macro environment.
Sure.
So far, the consumer spending has been surprisingly healthy. As it relates to our Middle East exposure, we talked a little bit about this on our Q1 call. We service the 12 largest airlines in the Middle East. They've been excellent customer relationships for us, longstanding customer relationships. Obviously, given the events in the region, we've seen a fairly meaningful reduction in capacity since March.
Sure.
Been anywhere between 30% and 70%, depending upon who the carrier is. As I called out on our Q1 call, we expect up to 100 basis points of revenue headwind in Q2, as a result of the conflict. We've also factored in a potential impact from our Link2Gov tax payment business. We've seen some weaker volumes in that business just due to the overall big, beautiful bill. Look, if we take a step back, following the Worldpay acquisition, this business is more diversified than it's ever been.
Sure.
We're more diversified in terms of geographies, consumer spend categories, and merchant size. With the acquisition of Worldpay, we acquired a pretty significant enterprise business. I've always said, Tien-Tsin, scale matters in this business.
Sure.
This year, we'll process approximately $4 trillion in volume. To put that into context, that's equivalent to the seventh largest country in the world from an overall GDP perspective. It's really staggering. What I'd say is, following the Worldpay acquisition, we're better positioned now to absorb those transient headwinds.
As a result, our 2026 outlook remains the same. That assumes that travel normalizes at the end of the second quarter and the overall macro remains stable. If those assumptions hold, then we expect top line growth to be more than 5% in the back half, and then we'll finish the year at 5%. Tien-Tsin, with the deals behind us, we're intensely focused on execution.
Just staying with some of the results and, of course, the scale, like you said, is tremendous. It's sometimes hard to fathom. We take it for granted. You just reported the quarter. Any surprises, any call-outs? I don't need you to go through every single detail, but it'd be great to just get a quick takeaway. What did we learn? What was better or worse than expected beyond.
Yeah.
The macro you just discussed?
Yeah. No, absolutely. Look, as I said on the call, our Q1 results exceeded our expectations. We're really proud of all the work that the team has done to close the transactions ahead of schedule. We completed many of our day 100 integration milestones ahead of plan. I feel like we've built an incredibly strong foundation for the combined business going forward. We're also pleased with the rapid adoption of Genius.
Sure.
Bookings nearly 2x on a year-over-year basis. Merchant locations increased 25% year-over-year, and payment attach rates were more than 20%. Those metrics were better than really anything that we've ever seen pre-Genius.
I think it's not only because of the modern technology, but it's also because of the feature-rich product. It's also because we've enlarged the SMB direct sales force to include higher quality sales professionals, and then we've enhanced also their sales effectiveness through the overall transformation. As it relates to some things that were a surprise, we obviously didn't anticipate the Middle East conflict.
Sure.
The disruption there. It had a nominal impact on the top line, really no impact to earnings or cash flow, just given the overall diversification of the business. We view that as modest and transitory headwinds. We sized Q2. We just talked about the 100 basis points of headwind. Look, if you take a step back, I think, again, diversity and scale really matter in this business. I think this business is very well positioned to deliver durable growth across a variety of macro environments.
Good. Let's talk about, you mentioned Genius. I think that was the most popular subject of the call and from investors that wanted to talk about it. I was hoping we could dig in on that. Josh, you just talked about some of the Genius numbers, the bookings being up. I think the yield with new clients being up 30% was really a strong call-out for us. I thought to start the Genius conversation, maybe walk us through the growth algorithm across units and price. Maybe start with that on Genius.
Yeah. If you think about the bookings growth, it's really the two levers, the P x Q that I think everybody fundamentally gets. There's better performance in terms of the top-of-funnel opportunities all the way through sales execution, close ratio, implementations. We're seeing that at a pace that not only is more than we've ever experienced before, but continues to accelerate sequentially quarter-over-quarter.
We feel very confident not only in the work that we've done, but it gives us a high degree of predictability as you think about the back half of the year. Around the yield increase, there's a couple of factors in play. One is that if you think about our historical sales model with POS, a lot of it was being sold through dealers.
Those dealers, I think Cameron highlighted on the call, we made it fairly difficult, unintentionally, for them to drag payments along with those sales. We've done a lot of work to unlock, both in our direct channel and in our indirect channel, the ability for our sellers to sell more of a bundled solution that includes the hardware, the software, the payments, the value-added services. We're seeing the overall value of a sale go up as they're able to distribute more product and service.
The final component of that is, as we think about value-added service roll-outs, we've been focused on this journey at Global Payments for the last two years, one and a half years since we began the transformation, not only building out new value-added services, but unlocking and enabling those across all of the platforms, Genius obviously being a key one here.
The availability of value-added services, the bundled selling approach, making, I think we said at Investor Day, we want our best products to be in the hands of all of our distribution partners. In this case, that includes dealers, FIs, direct sales, et cetera.
Right. If we're unpacking the yield, it's a byproduct of higher payments attach.
Yep.
As well as pushing more VAS. How much more room is there to go in each of those categories, about?
I think if you look at the yield itself as a separate metric from overall bookings growth.
Yeah.
There's still opportunity. We're not at 100% take rate on every value-added service. We're not at 100% take rate on payments in every Genius Enterprise transaction, as an example. There's still some room to go there. I think the more important runway around this yield improvement as an accelerator to overall bookings gives us a lot of confidence in the runway for Genius.
Okay. Good. Product velocity is a big theme as well in this category. I think that Charlie from our team went to the National Restaurant Association. He was really impressed by what he saw in Genius, especially in the stadium front, Charlie, and some of these other fronts. Give us an update there. What are you working on? What are you excited about on the product roadmap here, and what should we expect new product-wise?
Well, it sounds like Charlie already got to see it. For those who didn't get to see it, we were very excited to launch a number of new things with Genius at the National Restaurant Association show in Chicago this week. Number one that's getting an awful lot of buzz is around the new AI first handheld. There's both a hardware and a software component to this.
Our team, I think you guys know by now, we've been working with a common design language and philosophy across the entire stack of Genius hardware, where hardware hasn't been that attractive historically, but more and more in retail and restaurant, in card-present environments, we see small business owners and enterprises wanting to differentiate the client experience by the image that they present.
what sits on the countertop, and what you interact with as a kiosk matter or a digital menu board. Those things matter to people. The hardware that we launched at NRA for mobile is really not a lot bigger than your mobile phone.
It's not the sort of clunky mobile device with a payment device wrapped in a big enclosure that's heavy and bulky that people have been used to, I think, in this industry historically. That's very nice. The hardware's attractive. It's the first OLED screen on the market for payment devices. It's got an 8-hour battery life, custom charging cradles, all those sort of things. More importantly, the technology behind it as a software matter, we've enabled the device to be an AI-first handheld.
What we mean by that is the processing infrastructure on that device is fast enough, robust enough to run AI locally, so it's not wholly dependent on things sitting in the cloud, sitting on servers behind the scenes. In terms of the experience of a user, think about an environment where maybe you're a table service restaurant waiter or waitress.
You've got a handheld device, rather than staring at that and interacting with the device, you drop it in an apron, or you're holding it in your hand, you're having a conversation with the table, the Genius handheld is able to identify the unique voices, even in a noisy environment.
It's building a ticket for you as people are talking to you and placing their orders. All that the server has to do is glance at the device, ensure that's correct, and send it off to our kitchen management system. It lets our business owners get back to what they want to do, which isn't build technology, and it isn't interact with technology.
They're in the service of their clients, whether that's in food and beverage or gift or other retail environments, putting control back in their hands to focus on their core business. Two other quick product announcements we made at NRA. One was around our new kiosk, which again follows that same design language as the countertop and the handheld.
That's available on a standalone, a freestanding sort of kiosk, as well as wall mounts and counter mounts, and lots of different environments and experiences. The final launch was around our AI-enabled business management stack for Genius holistically. Sits in the back office of Genius and allows a business operator to engage in conversational engagements with Genius to get business insights and help drive more performance out of their operation through the insights that it can drive.
Today, that's focused on reporting and data and insights, there's multiple releases that are scheduled to come out that also perform frequent business management functions on behalf of the operator. Using it as a true assistant, not just an insights partner.
Good. It felt like the tech buzz was really good. I could hear it in your voice here, Bob, talking about it. Thinking about the handheld, it feels like the waiters and waitresses, they want the same experience that they have with their personal devices at home, and it does feel like it's bridging towards that. Good to get that update. Just to wrap up on Genius, thinking about the distribution side of it. Because that's the value of what Global Payments can bring, is the actual distribution.
Catch us up on the priorities there across, you have Worldpay, you got the financial, the bank channel, international, of course, enterprise. How are you ranking those? What's on your mind on the distribution front?
I think we're trying to take a balanced approach to this, but the focus, the immediate ROI benefit, the biggest bang for our buck right now, is investing in our direct sales team. You see that with the announcement we made last year to add 500 new direct sellers in North America.
Right.
We hired 200 in the fourth quarter or last year, the end of the third quarter, beginning of the fourth quarter. We've hired another 100 in the first quarter, so we're at 300 of the 500. We've got another 200 to hire over the balance of 2026. It's not just that one hiring initiative. If you think about the business holistically, we want to, like I said earlier, enable our best sellers and our best distribution channels with our best products, Genius certainly being a flagship.
Global Payments had an existing FI channel, and we think that banks are starving for technology solutions to sell right now. Some of them have made partnerships they're not happy with the performance around.
Some of them are still trying to figure out what products they want to bring to market, and we want to show up with a proposition that allows them to distribute Genius in partnership with Global Payments and serve their customers well there. Worldpay also brings another 6,000 bank branches, and they haven't historically had a point-of-sale solution in the market.
Genius is completely fresh to most of those relationships, and we think that's a big distribution lever, particularly in the United States, but globally as well. As you move internationally, I think we want to be measured in our roll-outs. I'm always cognizant of moving fast, but not moving too fast and burdening the teams to try to do everything all at once.
We do think that outside of North America, there's an awful lot of greenfield opportunity where there's less penetration of software at the point of sale. It's a different competitor landscape, and we think Genius plays very well there.
I also made comments before about the horizontal nature of some of these international markets that are less hyperverticalized than what we see here in the United States in particular, where you've got such a large market for ISVs. We think Genius plays really well across those horizontal verticals there. It lets us get to market much more quickly than having to develop specific functionality for a specific local market.
Maybe finally, as we think about international, Genius was built from the ground up to be multilingual, multicurrency, support fiscalization or tax regulating authority integrations for tax reporting and all the things that they need to do there. Coupled with our physical presence in over 40 countries, it makes it a much easier proposition to take Genius global, where you've got infrastructure to sell, implement, support on an ongoing basis than maybe what some of our competitors have.
All right. Good. Let's do enterprise. Just to pivot to that. Enterprise, I think it was up 9% from a booking standpoint. Where are you winning competitively? Why are you winning? What are you seeing on the ground?
Well, I think every enterprise customer is a little bit different, so they have a different set of needs. There are some common themes, though, and one of those is around just core capabilities that everybody cares about: transaction authorization rates, access to geographies, multi-payment methods, alternative payment methods. They want to be able to accept as many of those as possible. Those are some common themes across all of them.
Certainly, as you think about some of the drivers of value for them, authorization optimization, particularly for e-commerce, is number one in forefront of their minds. Number two generally is around fraud. I think our capabilities stack up really well in both of those venues. The breadth of our scale for Cameron, or sorry, Josh mentioned a minute ago, almost 4 trillion in transactions gives us the ability to do a lot of things around real-time trend identification and optimizing authorization rates for our merchants in partnership with the networks and with issuing banks.
Our AI-enabled fraud solution, that's called FraudSight, is also, I think, really differentiated in the market, not only in terms of the fraud rates that it drives, but the amount of control and insight that it gives a business owner.
In the enterprise space, a big part of what they're looking for is control over the customer experience, the transaction experience, and the financial outcomes. Another big theme I see around enterprise today is if you've been in the software business a long time, you've watched these cycles of everybody wants an all-in-one solution.
No, we want best of breed. Right this minute, we tend to be in a best of breed sort of pathway with enterprise customers, and our ability to deliver capabilities in a modular sense without them having to make an all or nothing binary decision to take the entire platform or none of it is a thing that separates us from a number of our competitors, both the more modern ones they're sometimes called, and the more scale players.
Our ability to deliver point solutions as part of an à la carte menu, a bundle of value-added capabilities, the focus on AI, the drive for authorization optimization, as well as fraud management capabilities are what's driving the primary success. The final thing I would say that's a little less direct in terms of a tie between decision and revenue is increasingly the scale of the business, our engagement with the next generation of innovation players, whether that's OpenAI or whether that's Google or somebody else.
I think they're looking for an innovation partner to co-think with them and co-develop solutions with them. Global Payments' position now, not only in terms of scale, but in terms of the solutions we have that are modern, that are innovative, and that are market-leading, leads them to view us as a partner for the long term.
Okay. No, that's good. You went through a lot there. Just to drill in on a couple, can we separate this discussion quickly just on face-to-face or card present versus card not present? You mentioned modularizing and auth rates, et cetera, but it feels like those discussions are different between card present, card not present.
Sure.
Card present is a little more mature, less load management, more single processor. How do you grow above market given what you just described on the card present front?
Yeah. Well, I think there's really only two levers in a mature market like that. One is to continue to take share.
Right.
The second is to continue to offer value-added services and more things other than just the core payment capabilities into that market. I think we're being measured and conservative with the expectations that we've set with the Street about the rates of growth for that business. We are still optimistic about it, and we value it, to Josh's earlier point about diversification, exposure to grocery, exposure to pharmacy, exposure to some of these more non-discretionary card present markets does deliver a degree of resiliency that we really appreciate.
We're not abandoning the opportunity to continue to grow in markets where we consistently are winning share, and when we're very focused on delivering value-added services that matter in the card present environment, not just in the e-com world of marketplaces and traditional e-com and omnichannel.
The final thing I would say around that is that the two businesses, the legacy businesses, Global Payments and Worldpay, had slightly different approaches to card present versus card not present. Bringing the two businesses together gives us a much more robust set of omnichannel offerings. Worldpay was only in a few markets physically, where Global Payments is in over 40. Worldpay is processing e-commerce transactions truly on a global scale. We're in nearly every non-sanctioned country.
Over 175 countries we're transacting in today. That blend of robust physical capabilities, the e-commerce opportunity, the global reach and scale, and then the product innovation, I feel like that's a winning combination.
Yeah. No, the omni is differentiated given bringing the two companies together. I think that is probably underappreciated. Let's skip ahead. Time is moving here quickly. Just on the Worldpay front, I think I've asked you both this before. I'm going to ask it again, which is, it always stood out to me that you said that you were going to approach the integration differently than what you've done in the past. Right, Josh? I think you and I have talked about this.
Yep.
Before. Now that you're in flight with it, any surprises? Would you do things differently, or is it moving full steam ahead?
No, look, I think it's moving full steam ahead, and I'm going to go ahead and date myself here a little bit, Tien-Tsin Huang. I've been involved in every integration.
Right.
Dating back to Heartland. [crosstalk]
You're the right man to ask.
Yeah, in 2016. More than any previous deal, this integration is all about driving long-term, sustainable growth. I think the most pleasant surprise of this integration so far has been the overall cultural alignment from bringing these two businesses together. Look, that really matters. It allows us to produce tangible revenue synergies, literally right out of the gates. Albeit they're not material, but it's helping to us to accelerate things. The Worldpay direct sales force is selling Genius.
We're already selling Worldpay's e-commerce capabilities into the heritage Global Payments merchant base in the U.K. As I said, it's still obviously early days, and the amounts are ramping. We view 2026 as really the year where we're just laying the foundation and extending everything that we've been doing with the transformation to drive that top-line growth.
Look, that means aligning sales forces, that means harmonizing the management, and also unlocking distribution channels on each side. If we think about 2027 as it relates to just the overall revenue synergies, we expect to see some financial contribution. Really, the revenue synergies are going to become more material in 2028, where we expect to go ahead and realize that $100 million in revenue synergies, and we'll exit the year in 2028 at our target of $200 million in run rate revenue synergies. That, as it relates to the cost synergies.
Yeah.
Tien-Tsin, we view those as, frankly, table stakes in this integration. It's a huge piece of the overall value creation, we'll be very deliberate about capturing them. In 2026, we expect to realize between $70 million-$80 million of cost synergies. We'll exit this year run rating at $150 million. In 2027 and 2028, we'll run rate those two years exiting at $350 million and $600 million respectively. If you go back and you think about this integration, we had approximately 10 months to go ahead and plan for it. I think we have incredibly detailed plans in place. We're 120 days into it, I think we've made incredible progress so far.
Good. No, I'm glad to hear that. I did want to also ask around the Worldpay tech architecture. I think Nate and I have talked about this for quite some time, thinking about Worldpay's tech and the tech stack and its evolution. I think you said that you'll complete some of those decisions right at mid-year. From a tech architecture standpoint, what does that mean? I'm asking both from a P&L perspective, but also what does that unlock with that being done? What can we expect out of Wor ldpay tech-wise?
I think aligning on the target architecture model first gives us the ability to focus our investment.
Yeah.
As soon as we've decided which are the go-forward strategic platforms in a variety of categories where there's duplication, we can begin a process of winding down investment on stacks that are not going to survive, and double down the investment and the pace of innovation on the platforms that will. The primary P&L lever, as we think about it, is really not a net gain or loss of expense, primarily. We're primarily looking at accelerating the pace of innovation and deploying the $1 billion of CapEx, something like 7%-8% of revenue as we think about it on a go-forward basis.
against the platforms where we think we have the right to win, the right capabilities. The great news is that both businesses were on a journey of simplifying their architecture and infrastructure. Worldpay called it Helix. Global Payments called it something else.
It was really focused on this single in, single out, the idea that you integrate once and get access to everything, and then you have one way of consuming the outputs, whether that's around reporting or portals or data APIs or whatnot. Getting more quickly to that allows us to more quickly pivot the investment. The other great thing about it is it unlocks cross-sell more quickly.
As soon as we've got clarity on the TAM, we're immediately going to focus on the orchestration capabilities that we talked about, I don't know, a number of quarters over the last year or 15 months or so that allow us very quickly to unlock capabilities to customers who might be on different platforms today. We don't have to wait for a platform demise or a client migration to expose services to them across the ecosystem. It feels to them like it's one single experience, even though under the hood that might be serving a couple of platforms while we converge those over a period of time.
Okay, good. No, I'm glad I'd asked. It feels like it's an important moment, we'll wait and see how that pans out. Thanks for going through that. seven minutes left. Got a lot of other questions. We've been talking about agentic commerce a lot at this conference, Bob.
I know it's a nerdy subject probably, in a nutshell, what I'll ask, just instead of getting into the details, just what would it take for Global Payments, right, to win in this channel? You have the scale. We talked about the $4 trillion. I know it's early. It's nascent. Seems like the four-party model is going to be okay. Tell me if you disagree with that. How does Global Payments win here?
In less than seven minutes?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I know. I know, I apologize.
No, that's great.
Bad time management.
Not at all. No, I think you're right about the four-party model, and I think we've seen developments recently with OpenAI publicly talking about their pivot to really more search and discovery-based services rather than the full checkout experience. What we've heard consistently from merchants, regardless of their size, whether they're an SMB or a giant enterprise, they're not interested in operating a pick, pack, and ship operation where their only mode of competition is around speed of delivery and price. If they wanted to be in the warehousing busin ess, they'd be in it.
It's important to them to have a direct relationship with their clients, to manage the checkout experience, and frankly, to be able to choose the payment methodologies and rails that they're already engaged with. They've made strategic choices for the rest of their business that's not operating on agentic rails. I think that overall is a good development for the entire ecosystem. I think it helps OpenAI and Google and others to be focused on where they can play instead of trying to be everything to everybody.
I think it gives merchants and other ecosystem players the confidence to lean into this without fear of disintermediation or fundamental changes to the structure of their business. In terms of what it takes to win, I think number one, it comes down to product and technology and the right partnerships. Both Global Payments and Worldpay heritage organizations were already engaged with the OpenAIs and the Googles.
Around development of some of these standards, ACP and UCP and whatnot. Both organizations were among the first in market with production-ready MCPs, that Model Context Protocol that the LLMs interact with to get inventory data, to push transactions through to checkout experiences. I think this also plays well to Global’s strengths. The combined business is really well-tooled and has frankly grown over the last decades or two, solving complexity for clients in the ecosystem.
That’s really at the core of what we do, this introduces additional layers of complexity that merchants are looking for help and partnership to solve. That modular approach to our enterprise clients, like I mentioned earlier, serves us well in this space too, with things like our credential vault that we sell on a standalone basis to clients today.
When identity and trust and verification of intent become really critical in this agentic world, having those sorts of solutions that can abstract credentials so that they're not being shared with everyone in the ecosystem, having a chain that can help verify trust and manage things like chargebacks and disputes, those are all really important and they're core competencies for Global Payments.
T hat doesn't mean I think we're an automatic winner here, but what I would say is I think we're positioned well with the right partners, and our scale, if nothing else, gives us a seat at the table to influence the direction of things.
Okay.
That we're helping to steer the ship rather than trying to play catch-up. The capabilities and the way that systems are architected today plays well into the way it appears that agentic commerce is going to evolve over the next cycle.
Yeah. No, I know it's moving fast in terms of laying the foundation, but probably still a little bit early. Sounds like you feel good about the position.
We really do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay. No, thanks for going through that. It's always educational. I know we're almost out of time. I'm trying to take an executive call here on what to ask. I want to ask one more for each of you, if that's okay. Maybe let's do capital returns, if that makes sense.
Sure.
Just to hit that.
Yeah, absolutely.
You've done two consecutive ASRs. You're on track to hit the three turns of leverage by the end of 2027. Visibility into future buybacks and the timing of that, I know de-leveraging is, of course.
Yeah.
Important.
Yeah.
What's the latest there?
Yeah, look, returning capital to shareholders is a big piece of the overall narrative and the thesis. Tien-Tsin, at these levels, there's no better investment than in ourselves. I think if you go back to our investor day in September of 2024, we committed to returning $7.5 billion of capital to shareholders, by the end of 2027.
Last year, we returned approximately $1 billion of capital to shareholders, bought back 13 million shares. In Q1, we returned a little over $600 million, bought back a little over 7 million shares. Obviously, on our Q2 call, we announced a $500 million ASR, and we said that once that was completed, we'd be in the market buying back shares in the open market.
By the end of the second quarter, we will have returned more than 50% of what we committed to returning in 2026, which was a little bit more than $2 billion. If we look out into 2027, we expect to go ahead and return more than $4 billion in capital, and that will go ahead and put us right on top of that $ 7.5 billion.
In addition to returning capital to shareholders, we're also very focused on getting our leverage point back down to three times, and we feel that we have the right balance of returning capital to shareholders and de-levering. As it relates to M&A, our main focus, like I said, is buying back shares. Any kind of M&A we do will just be on the peripheral and it'll be smaller tuck-in stuff.
Good. In the last minute.
Yeah.
Maybe for you, Bob, just thinking about, we're going to digest everything we've learned at this conference. I'm sure you're studying. Coming from APT, OpenEdge, you've seen a lot of things overseas. The ecosystem's evolving a lot. What do you think is important for us to track here? It feels like there's been a little bit of consolidation as well. You talked about agentic. What do you think is the most important thing to watch as the ecosystem evolves in the next 6-12 months?
I think probably three things from my perspective.
Okay.
Number one is that distribution matters more than ever. We've seen a lot of folks with good product ideas that struggle to scale, particularly as they look to move internationally or move into a more broad-based distribution outside of direct selling or DIY kind of digital customer acquisition. I think distribution is going to separate winners from losers in some of these cases, or at least those who grow faster and those who grow slower.
Number two, I think the consolidation point's a great one. If you think about pre-COVID proliferation of payments companies coming to the market, probably some maybe sooner than they should have. I think what you're going to see is a rotation towards more consolidation in the space, especially with the pressure on valuations at these historically low levels. I think it's too tempting not to look at consolidation, and I think that Global Payments is an early mover in this.
Sure.
We came to market looking for the right asset, the right cultural fit, and Worldpay couldn't be more complementary if we had designed it from scratch. I think an ongoing theme of consolidation is likely to be the case. The final thing that we're watching, and I think everybody should be watching, is AI. We just talked about impacts to the four-party model, how are merchants feeling about that, how are the LLMs and hyperscalers and everybody else thinking about that.
This inflection point's going to create opportunity, and I think companies need to be positioned with the right partnerships, the right technology, the right focus to ensure that they don't miss out on opportunities here.
We're very focused on being on our front foot, being a leader, not a follower here, and like I said, we're excited about the position that we find ourselves in, that we've created for ourselves over the last couple of years.
Great. No, it's a great way to close it out. Thank you guys so much for being here.
Oh, thank you, Tien-Tsin.
Thank you, Tien-Tsin. Appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks.