Hello, everybody. I'm perceiving you can hear me. Welcome to the Barclays Emerging Payments and FinTech Forum. Mercifully, it's back in person this year. It's been 3 years virtual. It feels good to be back in the real world, as it were. Couple of very quick housekeeping items. The sessions will just roll. There's about a 5-minute break between them. We put out lunch midday. If you have any issues, you know that where the registration room is. It's room L, just straight down there to the right. Otherwise, I can think of no better way to kick off the conference with our first fireside chat with Jeff Sloan and Cameron Bready from Global Payments. I feel like this is a CEO two-fer almost, which is a rarity.
I do appreciate it. Thanks so much for joining us, gentlemen.
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Terrific. Jeff, why don't we start with your, you know, your recently announced decision to leave Global Payments after a lengthy successful tenure. What, what was the rationale behind your leaving?
Well, I wanna start off by thanking Cameron for putting up with me for nine years. I'm sure he was focused on having me leave sooner rather than later. You know, in all honesty, Ramsey, we just produced the best quarter that we've produced in the Q1 of 2023 since 2019 across our businesses. Our businesses are very healthy financially, operationally. Strategically, we finally closed the three deals that we've been working on, really starting in November of 2021, but announced publicly in February of 2022. It took about 14 months, 13, 14 months to get to the finish line.
In the case of EVO, which we announced, along with the others on August first, I think we had to go through nine kind of foreign country approvals. In the case of Netspend, we actually had to get all 50 states to approve on the money transmitter license transfer over to the buyer, plus the federal government, plus we had to do one state twice. It was actually 52 approvals. Of course, we closed Gaming also on April first. A lot of these things have been in process for 18 months, and certainly very much in process for the last 9 to 14 months.
I really didn't wanna move on from that company while COVID was raging, while the businesses were in flux, you know, from a strategy point of view, and also with, you know, your help and Barclays' help, raised a fair amount of fixed income capital in August of 2022 as well as in March of 2023. The business is in a very healthy financial and operating position today, probably the healthiest it's been since really pre-pandemic. The strategies that Cameron and I have worked on for the last nine years are now been fully put into effect, and the businesses we have today are really the businesses that we go forward with, right, for the foreseeable term. I thought from that point of view, the company was in a good position and is very much ready.
As I kind of alluded to at the beginning, you know, Cam and I have worked closely together for the last, you know, 9 years, and Cameron's held every important senior position in the company as our CFO and now our President and COO for the last 3.5 years. By the way, I was our President and CEO, COO for 3.5 years before I took over. You know, I think he's been ready for some time. I'm just glad that the company is in the right place, financially, operationally, and now strategically, you know, for us to effect the transition. It's some time in the making and the timing happened to work out.
I'm gonna obviously get to Cameron's, you know, immediate priorities in just a second. What about plans for the future? Do you have any, immediate plans for the future? What do you see yourself doing in the next, you know, next stretch?
I remain on a number of boards. Flywire is one of the boards I'm on. I anticipate adding a couple more boards. I also think doing private equity and venture capital investing is something I certainly would look at, have been doing that for a long time. To be clear, it's been 13 years of Global and probably 30+ years of running a P&L and having operational and P&L responsibility. I don't see doing that, you know, anymore. That I think we can truly rule out. I'm really pleased with where we've, you know, taken the company and the position that it's in, and I'm not looking to, you know, to do more of that going forward.
I think the private stuff is the most likely, and I'm very much, you know, excited about doing it.
Makes a ton of sense. Cameron, as Jeff mentioned, you know Global Payments about as well as anybody. What about your top priorities, kind of first 100 days, what do you think you focus the most on here?
It's obviously a good question. I would say first and foremost, what investors shouldn't expect is any sort of radical deviation from what we've been doing. As Jeff highlighted, we've worked together side by side for nine years. We've architected together kind of the strategies that we're pursuing. I very much believe in those, I support those, and they're the ones that we're gonna continue to pursue going forward. The four-pillared strategy that we're executing against today is gonna remain our focus as a business. The other thing that I think Jeff has brought to the company, certainly over his time there, and in particular over the last decade as CEO, is this relentless focus on execution, and we're certainly not gonna take our eye off of that either.
I think that's a hallmark of Global Payments, and it's something that I hope to be able to continue at the current level that we do it today. I do think it is one of the things that separates us from others in the marketplace. I think there's a lot of good companies with good strategies, good people, but I think our ability to execute consistently the way we have over very long periods of time is truly a testament to Jeff's leadership, but also a muscle that we built at Global Payments that I think it's important to continue to build on going forward.
Obviously, over time, I'll put my own sort of fingerprints on things, but as it relates to, you know, the strategies we're pursuing, how we operate the business, the expectations we have around performance, and the commitments we made around our growth trajectory over the next several years, nothing on that front is really gonna change. For the first 100 days, you know, what's most important to me is ensuring that everything remains seamless from a transition perspective. I plan to spend a lot of time on the road visiting with our clients, our customers, investors, and spending time with team members in all the different major locations that we have around the world, and ensuring that, again, we deliver a very strong Q2, which I think we're poised to do.
Just ensuring again that the consistency of execution and the seamless transition that Jeff and I have really put in motion, you know, continues to play out.
Obviously there's a lot of headlines and a lot of noise in the marketplace on macro volatility. There always seems to be this recession that's like a mirage on the horizon that's just always out of reach. You guys have a great view of this stuff. You see a lot of data, your own data. Give us your take on what's going on with the macro environment, what's happening with the consumer.
Do you want to start on merchant, and I'll kind of comment afterwards?
Yeah, I'll start. I think, you know, we said publicly on our Q1 call, we had a really good start to the year. January and February were very strong months for us, and some of that I think was due to a slightly easier comp. Some of it was due to, I think, just good momentum kind of coming off of 2022 from an overall consumer perspective. March moderated a little bit relative to that, and I think us, we saw April that was relatively consistent with kind of March. Not quite as constructive as it was in the early part of the year. Sitting here today, I think still a relatively healthy consumer overall, I think when you look at it in perspective.
I think our outlook for the balance of the year suggests that that consumer is by and large going to hang in there. Obviously, we, like everyone else, read headlines about this recession that's coming. It's been coming, I think now for quite a while. It's hard to know exactly when it's going to be here and if it's going to arrive at all. I think as we look at the balance of the year, we look at the different markets we're serving, the businesses we have and the momentum we built kind of coming off of Q1. We certainly feel good about the range of outcomes we've provided in our guidance for the balance of the year. I think sitting here today, you know, again, we have a lot of confidence in our ability to deliver against that.
We don't forecast the business merchant in particular, you know, assuming everything's going to be perfect in every quarter. We allow for variation, I think from an overall macro environment perspective. We allow for things to go bump in the night. That's just the nature of running a business across 40 physical markets and over 170 virtually around the globe. From our point of view, we don't expect everything to be perfect. I think from an expectation standpoint, we can withstand in our guide a range of outcomes around the macro. We can withstand some softening in the back half of the year if we actually see that. You know, if, knock on wood, things improve, obviously, I think there's room in the upside of our guidance for things to improve as well.
That's generally our philosophy on managing the business, and I think our job is to continue to produce consistent, predictable results through various macro cycles.
I'd also say just, this is more of an issuer kind of comment. On the issuer side, we see continuing strength in that business, and there's a variety of reasons for that. One is Barclays, who's one of our larger in the U.S. and U.K., customers in our issuer business. Because we said in our call, as Cameron mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Ramsey, our issuer business is really money center and SIFI-centric, multi-nationally. If you think about who our customers are there, in addition to Barclays, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citi, Capital One, four of the top five banks in Canada, obviously you all, you know, at Barclays, CIBC, HSBC, that kind of thing.
At the end of the day, I think a little bit of gallows humor, but at the end of the day, the migration of deposits and activity away from the regional and small banks and toward the money center SIFIs has been a tailwind for our business. We said that in our call a couple weeks ago. I think in our Q1 relative to our Q4 of 2022, we talked about 20 million accounts on file, you know, sequentially increasing, which is a really big deal, particularly for the Q1. I think those trends are really continuing. We do have this tailwind of movement toward our core customer base on the issuer side. Of course, our issuer business is about 25%, you know, of our revenue.
I think that's a trend that I agree with everything Cameron said, but that's a trend that I think is durable for the near to intermediate term. Once those deposits move over to Barclays and Bank of America from small to mid-sized regional banks, they're not going to move back, you know, anytime soon. I think that's one thing I'd look for as we see, you know, continuing share shifts in the economy.
I also wanted to ask another sort of high-level question, one for which, about which I've been scratching my head for some time. It feels like in general, investors in the Fintech space have, you know, maybe lost the thread a little bit. I look at the fundamentals of the business and they seem, you know, with some company-specific issues to be somewhat unchanged since, say, 2018, 2019. It seems like investor sentiment has changed quite a bit with the sector. I guess the question is, you know, what do you think is going on and, maybe that's an opportunity for you to show to the long-term sort of drivers of the business over many years.
Well, I'll start and then ask Cameron to provide more detail. I mean, let's be honest. I mean, we are consumer-centric GDP derivative businesses. When consumers are surging and very healthy, that's generally good news for all of us, but it's true in banking, you know, too. When there are fears, as you and Cameron just describing, when there are continual fears of economic malaise, yeah, that's generally not good news, you know, when the businesses that depend on consumer centricity. I think a lot of what's going on, whether it's us or some of our peers and the like, I think a lot of what's going on, Ramsey, is concerns about the economy. I think you saw the flip side of this, you know, when COVID 1.0 was kind of receding in the Q1 of 21.
All of us kind of zoomed ahead because everyone thought small businesses and consumers had kind of escaped, you know, unscathed. Now we're in an environment where it's a little bit of the reverse, where, you know, people are coming out with retail sales and The Home Depot said whatever it said yesterday and that kind of stuff. I think all of us, you know, depend on a global kind of healthy consumer. I would say, you know, as we've kind of looked at it, I think in my opinion, the macroeconomic environment we're in is by far the biggest determinant, you know, kind of multiples in this sector relative to the S&P 500 multiple in the immediate term.
If that sentiment were to shift, as Cameron was alluding to, because the recession's mild, or it doesn't happen, or it's delayed indefinitely or whatever, I think you would see a reversion.
You know, back to the median. I think that's the most important thing to look at. The second thing I would say is just the supply of new entrants into the, into the business. For all of you who are efficient market theorists, I know it's not everybody, but there's a decent chunk, you know, in the, in the buy side. Look, the market's spoken, those companies are all 80% to 90% below their IPO prices years later.
I think the excess liquidity that came into the system immediately post-COVID 1.0 in the form of quantitative easing, of course, now we've got the tightening, quantitative easing resulting in a flood of companies that have been around for quite some time, but really never should have gone public in the first place, are really a series of use cases belong on Shark Tank, you know, not on the New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq. As a result, like, I think a lot of capital has gone in there, and there's been a lot of value disruption, in the payments, you know, public market, ecosystem. I don't think that's helpful, you know, to the overall kind of thing. Nonetheless, I go back to the first point, which is, I think it really is a conversation about the health of the worldwide, economy.
At some point, that perspective will turn, and then I think you'll see a reflation of most of the stuff we've been describing. You want to talk more micro about it?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't have a ton to add to that other than to say, in building on Jeff's second point, you know, all of those entities that kind of came public were all telling a very similar story, right? Telling a story about disruption, telling a story about market share gains. Everybody was kind of the same, leading with technology. I think it created this narrative where, you know, everybody looked at everyone and basically said they're all kind of the same. To some degree, I don't think that's been healthy for multiples as well, and it's created sort of at least a narrative going back in time around you had fintech disruptors and legacy players and all of that nonsense, which I think is largely, you know, proven to be basically that, nonsense.
I think over time, as obviously companies like us that have a tremendously strong track record of value creation over a very long period of time, has a durable, sustainable business model operating at scale in as many markets as we are around the globe, I think we'll continue to separate ourselves just as a performance matter from the pack. I think that re-rating will come back over time. The market will rationalize some of these other players and the winners. I don't want to say winners and losers, but certainly companies that have, I think, good track records of profitability, durability, cash flow generation, et cetera, I think will rise to the top yet again.
I agree with you for what it's worth.
Well, that's good to hear.
I think that there's a trajectory where a lot of the folks whose fundamentals remain intact, just through sheer execution, will gradually basically run back up into the into a better ZIP code in terms of, in terms of multiples. One follow-up question there. You know, to put a finer point on it, the environment, the competitive environment, the technology, there's nothing that's fundamentally shifted from before the pandemic to today. It's not like you're looking at a different competitive environment where you can say, "You know, this is, this is fundamentally changing.
I'll talk on the merchant and maybe you can talk more on issuer. I would say on the merchant side, I actually view it a little bit differently. I think the competitive environment is more constructive now than it has been in a while.
This has always been a competitive space, let's be honest. It's been competitive for time immemorial. From my point of view, you know, the degree of competitive tension sort of ebbs and flows over periods of time, and I think we're actually entering a period where the competitive landscape is more constructive for us. Now that capital is not free-
There is an expectation that a lot of our competitors now have to produce returns. They have to produce earnings and EBITDA and growth in those metrics over a period of time. I think we're seeing a few things. One is obviously less capital chasing these, you know, shiny new objects. Point number two, you're seeing more rational behavior in the marketplace around pricing, around just how some of our competitors are going to market and the things that they're doing now that they're having to focus their businesses on different outcomes than they were before. It's not growth at all costs. I think from that point of view, we view the competitive landscape probably as more constructive than it's been in a long period of time. We know how to compete. We know how to win.
I think we're very good at that. We know where we want to play, we know where we think we have a right to win, and I think we're very good at executing on that day after day. Just going back to the earlier comment, I think over time you'll see that play out more and more with just consistency of performance and results, and we'll get rewarded for that. I'm actually more sanguine about the competitive landscape than I've been in some time. Jeff tells a funny story. He used to get asked, "Well, how can you compete with these guys that have no expectation for, you know, ever producing earnings?" You know, quite frankly, it's a fair question, but that's not, that's not a perpetuity business model. You know, no one runs a business in perpetuity expecting never to make a profit.
I think we're now seeing more rationalization as a result of that. Again, I think the competitive landscape is gonna come back more in our favor.
Yeah, I think, you know, in the issuer business, it's actually also true, you know, Cameron, in our omni-channel business. I can't think of an RFP, Ramsey, and of course, these are large, you know, kind of issuer customers and large multinational customers in the case of our e-com omni-channel business. Most customers tend to win RFPs, whether they're existing or new customers, but just focused on new customers for a second. They're gonna go out to all the usual suspects, Adyen, Stripe, in the case of issuer, you know, us, obviously, Fiserv, Marqeta, you know, go to the list of folks, including the newer vintage kind of fintech disruptors.
I can't think of a time, particularly in the last five years, but you know, been there 13 years, the last five years, where I can't think of a time where TSYS or Global Payments, an issuer merchant, didn't make the final round and was in the last, like, one, two or three. There are times you don't win. There are times you don't make a change. There are times you don't win. That can be over pricing. That can be over some product in some market that we just happen not to offer, and it's not worth, you know, kind of building.
When you think about where the universe is for the smartest, largest, most capable, most sophisticated customers and potential customers, I can't think of an instance where we weren't one of one of two, one of three after multiple rounds of things. I think more than anything, in addition to our results and our bookings and all these other things, more than anything, I think that speaks to how competitive I think our technologies, our people, our products and services, our operating environments are that these smart, big guys run these multi-period RFPs, and here we are at the finish line, you know, and that kind of thing. I think we're very proud of that, and I think it speaks to what's really going on, you know, as it relates to the competitive landscape.
Q1 is still somewhat fresh. Maybe a couple questions about the quarter. Merchant volumes and revenues came in well, came in very nicely. Remind us which parts of that business are firing, you know, maybe above expectations. What's driving the growth? Are there any areas of concern? Just a little bit of an overview on merchant business maybe as it pertains to performance recently.
Maybe I'll start and Jeff can add some color as well. The way I like to think about it, Ramsey, is we used to talk about our technology-enabled strategies as more being the tip of the spear for growth. You know, now effectively they are the spear. I mean, when we think about how we've transformed the business, accelerated our investment in more technology enablement across our business, and we look at where the performance is coming from today, clearly it's our technology-enabled channels that continue to drive, you know, an outsized portion of the growth in our business, and that's gonna just continue to grow over a longer period of time.
When I step back and look at the business, Jeff highlights a lot our e-com and omni business that grew in the high teens in the Q1, which was an acceleration off of where we were in Q4 of 2022. We continue to be delighted with the progress we've made in that business. Our UCP platform continues to resonate with our customers. Our ability to blend virtual and physical worlds in more markets around the globe than our competitors, I think, really is a competitive differentiation for us. To couple that with a level of service, a distinctive level of service that I don't think most of our competitors can match because they don't have the same physical footprint and scale that we operate in in these markets around the globe, that really does sell.
As a predominant trend in the business continues to be sort of the morphing of the virtual and physical worlds, I think that plays to our advantage over a long period of time. We continue to lead with software, whether it's our own software or our partnered software solutions. We continue to see those businesses perform extraordinarily well. As integrated payments and more embedded financial technology becomes a growing theme in the marketplace, like we continue to be a leader in that, in that space. Our integrated channel grew mid-teen this quarter, a long series of continual quarters growing in that same sort of trajectory. We actually had our best sales performance quarter, excuse me, ever in that business since the 10-plus years we've been in it.
That's a very strong sign for things to come in that business going forward as well. In our vertical markets businesses, our collection of software assets grew in the double digits as well. As I think about what's really driving growth in the business, it really comes down to the technology-enabled strategies we've been pursuing some time, those continuing to mature and continue to be a bigger part of the business. I think that gives us a lot of confidence that we've got good momentum going forward as well. As I step outside of that and look at the rest of the world, it was nice to see some recovery in Asia. That was a good tailwind for growth, albeit small. It's rather have that growing than, you know, relatively flat, which it's been because of COVID restrictions for a period of time.
Obviously, we saw good strength on the continent in Europe, and we continue to gain significant share across the central European markets in which we're operating, as well as Spain, which continues to be just a tremendous success story. I don't think there's a better investment that we've made as a company in the history of Global Payments than our investment in Spain. Obviously the UK macro is soft. I don't have to tell you, working for a British bank, you probably see that and feel that to some degree, every day. The UK macro is not as constructive as we would like it to be certainly, and that is a little bit of a headwind. Certainly, I think as it relates to Q1, a lot more tailwinds than headwinds as it relates to performance in the business.
We do think, as I said earlier, that sets us up well for the balance of the year.
What about margins in the segment? I know you've got EVO coming in, having a bit of a near-term impact. I mean, what do you think about the longer-term trajectory there of margins in merchant?
Yeah, I think it's a fair question. You know, we are rebasing them slightly lower with EVO coming in. It did have a lower margin profile. As we realize synergies over time, obviously we'll improve upon that and get back to where we were and begin expanding from where we were on top of that. I think if you look at the overall company, it's relatively simple. Merchants now 75% of Global Payments post the divestitures and the acquisition of EVO, and we're targeting 50 to 75 basis points of margin expansion over the cycle. You're not gonna get that unless 75% of the business is contributing to it. I think that overall range of outcomes that we're anticipating for the overall business is a good proxy for what we anticipate, you know, for the merchant segment more broadly.
I would say, obviously, our margins are fairly rich, you know, relative to competitors. I think we've done a fantastic job scaling our business over a long period of time, making investments in higher margin businesses that have better growth trajectories. All of that obviously lends itself to better margin profiles over time. I think, you know, we are obviously continually balancing reinvestment back in the business, wanting to sustain these rates of growth, while at the same time allowing margins to continue to drift higher over a period of time. I think the overall target that we've established for the business is a good proxy for what we expect to see out of merchant.
You mentioned synergies. What's the lowest hanging fruit there? What do you think about the timing, you know, in terms of extracting those synergies from EVO?
Yeah. Clearly, like any merger or acquisition of this nature, the lowest hanging fruit is gonna be across just merging duplicative corporate functions that we have in Global Payments today and that EVO had as well. As we think about the realization of expense synergies over a period of time, and I'll focus on revenue in a second, but on the expense side, it clearly starts with those immediate overlaps from a corporate functional standpoint. We move into how do we better align our go-to-market strategies. Obviously, there's opportunities to rationalize costs associated with go-to-market activities in the business. We step into the heavier lift, which is really bringing technology environments together, creating, you know, harmonized platforms across the two businesses, which allows us to then realize some of the revenue synergies that are obviously in the pipeline as well.
From an expense standpoint, it's generally gonna fall into a third of corporate kind of overhead duplicative costs, a third of aligning go to market in businesses in a way that yields expense benefits for the company, and a third's gonna come from that technology alignment, of the two businesses over a period of time, which then also, as I said before, kind of paves the way for a lot more revenue opportunity from the combined business.
That makes sense. I wanted to ask, maybe Jeff, you can kick this one off, with on B2B and the sort of longer-term B2B strategy. Obviously, that's something where you guys had a couple of assets, you bought some assets. You're kind of seems like, you know, creating some momentum, building a little bit of a new path on B2B. How do you see that playing out over time?
I'm gonna stick Cameron with this responsibility. I'll lay out the goalpost, and we can kick the ball down the field, so to speak. Look, I think it's Ramsey, we're in the early innings of B2B, and I would say, in my opinion, B2B today in payments, is where eCom Omni was in the late nineties. I think we're at the very beginning of an incipient secular logarithmic growth cycle. The nice thing here is, unlike in merchant, where you generally have to displace somebody, to pick up share, in the case of B2B, you're really competing against cash, check, ACH and clerks. That's really what you're selling.
In MineralTree, when we're selling cloud SaaS payable software, what we're saying to somebody is pay us $20,000 a year or whatever the pricing is for mid-sized business, and you can think about the savings relative to a handful of clerks, you know, as an automation matter. I think it's a pretty easy sale. The other thing I would say is that we bring unique assets as part of TSYS and Global Payments to the B2B story. In addition to MineralTree, which we bought a year and a half ago and is growing nicely, I think we said normalized growth of 20%. The Q1 target for this year is 30%. We're also bringing virtual card. TSYS is one of the largest virtual card issuers on the planet.
I think they did 50 million virtual cards last year with, like, $30 billion, you know, of outstandings. We obviously bring MineralTree on the payable side. Now with EVO, we bring accounts receivable on the invoicing side, which gives us one of the few platforms that's really a complete ecosystem, meaning payables and receivables. It's primarily a mid-sized to enterprise level story. There is applicability, particularly in invoicing to small merchants, but in general, it's kind of a mid-market to large market. You think about what we bring there, Ramsey. We've got 7,000 ISV VAR partners who we can cross-sell our B2B businesses into. Importantly, we've got 1,500 financial institutions, Barclays being one. 1,500 financial institutions we can cross-sell virtual card and our payables and receivables technologies into.
We announced a quarter or two ago, U.S. Bank, Citizens as being two banks that we signed in our virtual card business through TSYS in the last number of quarters. We're also bringing thousands of software partners, great examples at enterprise quick service restaurant at the franchisor level, like a Burger King. We can kind of cross-sell payables and receivables into these larger corporates that I was referring to before. I think we have distinct assets that we can cross-sell, monetize. We are doing that today. I also think we have more or less a complete ecosystem. I think this is a lot like where the business was 20 years ago. Unlike Amazon, I don't think there's gonna be kinda one winner. I think there's gonna be a lot of winners, you know, in this business.
You may know better than I, but even Visa, Mastercard, B2B is like 1% of revenue. It's like some de minimis. I think we're very early on. As I said, I've gotta task Cameron with that task. Today we've got like 30, you know, salaried commission salespeople in MineralTree, et cetera, tasked with selling B2B, you know, assets. That needs to be like 300. Like, when we got to the company pre-Heartland at Global Payments, Cameron and I probably had 125 people in the United States who are salaried commission salespeople. Today in the U.S., we have 1,500, and globally we have 3,500. That's the kind of investment I think you need to see in B2B.
You gotta take something that's $125 -$150 million of revenue compounding at double digits, and that's gotta be in the billions, you know, five or 10 years from now. That will then transform permanently the growth trajectory of the business in the issuer B2B side far beyond what it is today. I think that's kinda where we are.
Cameron, pursuing that strategy, executing on that strategy over the next, the next stretch here, can you leverage M&A to accelerate the strategy? Is that something that we should be mindful of?
Yeah. I certainly think M&A is a lever to continue to scale that business over a period of time. To Jeff's point, I feel like today we have the assets we need to bring a fully kinda comprehensive, and not just comprehensive, but a fully integrated offering to the market, which is something I wanna touch on that Jeff highlighted. I think an area where we're unique right now is we have the ability to create a fully integrated AR/AP, money in, money out solution with integrations back into all the major ERPs that are running mid-sized businesses across, you know, the U.S. market today. Ultimately, there's global applicability around this as well. Let's just focus on the U.S., which is a massive market. I think we're uniquely positioned in that space from an asset and capability perspective.
The question is, to Jeff's point earlier, how do you grow and scale? How do you do that organically? Obviously, by investing in the business, investing in integrating to create that fully harmonized sort of integrated offering. How do you invest in distribution? Are there assets in the marketplace that are going to help you accelerate what it is you're trying to do? Look, from my standpoint, there's no better place right now to invest. We want to continue investing in all aspects of the business. When you say, "Where's the most opportunity for us over a longer period of time to grow and scale a business from where it is today to something that's much more meaningful to Global Payments?" It's B2B. It's a market that's at least 3-4 times the consumer market. It's incredibly highly fragmented.
There's no clear winner in the marketplace today for the capabilities that we can bring to bear. It's a market where we feel like we have the right assets, the right to win. We have the right scale already to be able to go and accelerate growth. You know, we're gonna use our balance sheet appropriately to continue to support that strategy over a long period of time.
Fantastic. We're out of time, unfortunately. Great conversation. I appreciate.
Thanks for having me.
joining us, gentlemen. Yeah.
Thanks for having us, Ramsey.
Thank you.
Thanks.