Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to Global Payments' Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will open the lines for question and answers. As a reminder, today's conference call will be recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to your host, Senior Vice President Investor Relations, Mr. Nate Rozof. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Welcome to Global Payments' Third Quarter 2026 Conference Call. Joining us today is our CEO, Cameron Bready, CFO, Josh Whipple, and COO, Bob Cortopassi. Some of the comments made during today's conference call will contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied, and we caution you not to place undue reliance upon them. They speak only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to update them. In addition, we will be referring to several non-GAAP financial measures. For a full reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measure, please see our press release furnished as an exhibit to our Form 8-K filed this morning and the supplemental material available on our investor relations website.
Finally, the slide presentation that accompanies our prepared remarks is also available on our investor relations website. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Cameron.
Thank you, Nate, and good morning, everyone. We are pleased with our third quarter performance, which was consistent with our expectation and reflects the continued disciplined execution of our team members worldwide. Adjusted net revenue accelerated sequentially to more than 4% on a constant currency basis, excluding dispositions. Adjusted operating margins expanded 220 basis points, excluding dispositions, reflecting ongoing integration execution and synergy realization, and adjusted earnings per share increased 10%. Capital allocation remains a central pillar of our investment thesis. We returned over $200 million to shareholders through buybacks and dividends during the third quarter and continue to expect to return more than $2 billion to shareholders in 2026, keeping us on track to return approximately $7.5 billion cumulatively over the 2025 - 2027 timeframe.
Our integration of Worldpay continues to track ahead of our plans, and given the strong progress we've made, we are raising our run rate expense synergy target from $600 million- $650 million by the end of 2028. With the foundational elements of the combined company now firmly in place, we are focused on the strategy that will shape the next chapter of Global Payments. I will use my time this morning to outline that strategy and highlight the execution already underway across our business. Global Payments is fundamentally a different company than it was a year ago. With our combination with Worldpay and the exit of our Issuer business, we are now solely focused on providing commerce solutions around the world. That gives us much greater clarity of focus, and it brings together tremendous scale, reach, and capabilities that create significant potential for our company.
Our opportunity is to mobilize our scale and capabilities in ways that create greater value for our clients and partners and position us to compete and win in a rapidly changing market. Our ambition is clear: to become the worldwide partner of choice for commerce solutions. Our strategy provides the path to get there, and it is anchored in three pillars. The first is delivering differentiated products and solutions. We will compete on the value and capabilities we bring to the market, not simply on price, through software, embedded financial services, data and insights, fraud and optimization capabilities, and AI-enabled solutions and experiences that help our clients run and grow their businesses more effectively. Second is providing a distinctive client and partner experience.
We are making Global Payments simpler and easier to buy from, integrate with, grow with, and stay with, combining strong digital capabilities with expertise and high-touch engagement where it matters most. Third is harnessing our immense scale and reach. We're making better use of our global distribution, relationships, data, and investment capacity to accelerate innovation, expand adoption, and bring our best capabilities to more clients and partners worldwide. These pillars reinforce each other. Better products create better outcomes for our clients, better experiences deepen our relationships, and our scale and distribution allow us to extend those advantages more broadly. Many of the investments that underpin this strategy are already well underway. What the strategy provides is greater clarity and alignment around where we will focus our resources and how we will win in the marketplace. Importantly, we have already established the foundation needed to execute this strategy.
Our new organizational structure is now in place across our entire team. We employed a best-of-both approach to select the strongest leaders and team members from both heritage organizations, providing us with a wealth of expertise that is unmatched in the industry. We are also now fully organized around our three go-to-market segments, SMB, Enterprise, and Platforms, supported by shared capabilities across product, technology, and operations, with clear accountability for faster decision-making. In addition, building on the target technology architectural model we defined last quarter, we are rapidly advancing our plans to move to our future state architecture. This work will make it easier to integrate with us, allow us to expose existing and new products to market faster, and scale them across our segments and geographies while reducing complexity and cost over time. Our strategy also reflects a deliberate choice about how we serve our clients.
Some providers in our industry have built single-stack models in which clients realize the full value of their tools only when they consolidate all of their processing onto one platform, in effect, a walled garden. We are taking a different approach. We are designing our products and value-added services to be modular, in many cases, acquirer agnostic, so clients can use them regardless of who processes their payments. Through our curated open ecosystem, we combine our own differentiating capabilities with best-of-breed partner solutions to build tailored offerings that meet each client's specific needs, rather than asking clients to adapt to a one-size-fits-all model. Although we have an overarching company strategy, each of our lines of business has a distinct role in bringing it to life to their customer segments with the key priorities they are pursuing.
In SMB, our priorities are to grow beyond payments, with Genius as our platform to deliver software payments and value-added services, to accelerate our distribution advantage, and to excel at customer experience. in August, we hosted our inaugural Genius World Conference, bringing together approximately 1,000 attendees. The agenda showcased our full suite of Genius capabilities, our innovation roadmap, and our vision for the future of Genius. Genius is no longer a new initiative for us. Rather, it is now the flagship offering for our SMB business. Genius World was a great opportunity to demonstrate to clients, partners, and prospects how far Genius has come since its launch in May of last year. Genius now serves clients across restaurants, retail, campuses, age-restricted verticals, professional services, and field services in a growing number of markets across North America and Europe. Genius bookings more than doubled year over year during the quarter.
Along the way, Genius has won marquee brands such as Subway, Carl's Jr., Hardee's, and the New Jersey Devils, as well as iconic venues and university campuses like the Prudential Center and the University of Illinois. We also recently secured new payments deployments with Compass Group and the Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium at the University of Memphis. Genius continues to win across the spectrum of customers, from SMBs to large multi-unit operators as well. During the quarter, Genius expanded to more than 100 additional seven Brew locations. Pollo Tropical deployed Genius kiosks for all of its locations, and Jeremiah's Italian Ice rolled Genius out across 90 additional locations. We also completed the Genius deployment across CKE's approximately 300 corporate locations, and its franchisee rollout will begin in the first quarter of 2027. Our distribution advantage continues to expand.
Following a successful pilot with three Worldpay financial institution partners, we began rolling out Genius across Worldpay's financial institution channel in October, extending Genius to more than 30 strategic bank partners. During the quarter, we also entered the convenience store market, enhanced our appointments and vendor management modules, introduced a new loyalty solution for restaurants, and expanded our dual pricing, surcharging, and cash discounting capabilities. Further, we completed integration of Genius with our TouchNet higher education commerce platform, opening meaningful new opportunities in this vertical. Yale University Housing is an early win and is using Genius to create a more connected campus commerce experience. Internationally, we recently launched Genius in the Czech Republic to help clients prepare for new tax reporting requirements. We are launching Genius Mobile Pay in the Philippines and across several European markets over the next few quarters.
In Mexico, we are expanding Genius with the launch of our small business offering this quarter through both our direct sales force and our financial institution partners. Turning to our enterprise segment, our strategic priorities are to deliver superior core payment performance, expand acquirer-agnostic value-added services, and enable emerging verticals, business models, and technologies. Our modular approach resonates with both existing and new clients. We recently signed Air Serbia for all of its international traffic, leveraging our configurable offering, including payments and a suite of value-added services. We also recently went live with our credential management solution for one of the world's largest consumer technology companies on a standalone basis, expanded our payments relationship with another hyperscaler client to include additional value-added services, and deepened our relationship with Athletico by cross-selling additional solutions.
This quarter, NASCAR named us as its official merchant services provider, supporting ticketing and merchant services at its 12 owned and operated racetracks across the U.S., including the Daytona International Speedway, Phoenix Raceway, and Talladega Superspeedway. As a leading payments infrastructure provider, we also won several emerging payments platforms, including Cacto in Brazil, South Korean cross-border payment service provider Eximbay, U.K. and Australia-based omnichannel payments provider Latpay, U.S.-based international money transfer provider Shaka Express, Asia-based global payment and monetization platform Waffo, and Norway-based B2B payments provider ZTL Payment Solution. We are continuing to enable new business models and markets in this segment. We went live with Aani, the UAE's account-to-account payments method, and completed our first point-of-sale pilot of Alipay+ at the Laver Cup in London.
In Asia Pacific, we received regulatory approval from the Bank of Thailand, clearing our way for new client go-lives in the Thai market, including Centara Hotels & Resorts. Our payouts platform is now ready to pilot payments to PayPal and USDC stablecoin wallets. At the same time, we are extending our lead in payment performance. The AI-powered intelligent decisioning within our Revenue Boost solution is now delivering a significant incremental uplift in approval rates, and it is ready for broader deployment across Europe and Asia Pacific following a North American pilot that began in October. Within platforms, our priorities are to aggressively pursue high-potential software partners with our embedded solutions, to drive adoption of new products and value-added services, and to accelerate our growth in international markets.
During the third quarter, we signed 52 new software partners ahead of our plan, including strong momentum in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. We are also expanding the value-added services we deliver through our partners. Real-time payments is now generally available on dynamic payouts, enabling our partners to offer instant funding to their customers, and we are extending capabilities such as fraud prevention, debit routing, and account updater across more of our partner base. We are making it easier for partners to work with us. We've reduced average time to revenue for new partners by about one-third compared to 2025, and AI automation has cut the setup time for a new partner from weeks to minutes. Zero-touch underwriting is also now generally available for our Payrix partners, simplifying onboarding and accelerating activation for their customers. Across our business, AI is not a corporate strategy.
It is an enabler of everything that we do, from how we differentiate our products and improve the experiences we deliver, to how we operate and prepare for emerging areas of commerce. We continue to enhance our platform-agnostic modular set of capabilities that allow our clients to participate in new agentic commerce models regardless of channel, agent, or payment method, and we are helping to shape the standards for this channel. As an inaugural member of the Payments Tech Council for Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, we are helping to define the payments roadmap across authentication, fraud, authorization, and disputes. Our clients are also beginning to move from pilots into production. Transactions through ChatGPT are now live on our platform in the U.S. for one of our largest clients, with more on the way. Within Genius, AI is at the center of our product innovation.
Genius AI is an agentic assistant that allows clients to ask questions in their own words and get instant answers from their own business data. In May, we unveiled our AI-first Genius handheld, designed to run AI directly on the device so servers can have natural conversations with their customers while the order is built in the background. We are now piloting AI-powered drive-through vision and order routing with several large QSR restaurant clients to increase the throughput and improve the visibility across multi-lane drive-throughs. We are adding additional capabilities to Genius AI, with upcoming releases moving beyond insights to help clients run their businesses, from smart menu and pricing updates to simplified AI-powered configuration and setup for large multi-unit operators. We are also increasingly leveraging AI to improve how we operate, making our business more efficient and effective while enabling our teams to execute with greater speed and precision.
In treasury, AI is helping us improve cash forecasting, anticipate currency exposures, and identify interchange savings opportunities. Across our commercial organization, AI models are identifying cross-sell opportunities, predicting churn risk, and prioritizing the highest potential leads for our sales teams. We are also automating the ingestion and processing of chargeback information and disputes, while in underwriting, we have deployed an AI-enabled solution designed to reduce review times from roughly an hour to just 10 minutes, allowing us to significantly increase capacity without adding headcount. As we scale these capabilities across the organization, we expect AI to become an increasingly important driver of productivity, allowing us to operate with greater agility, scale more efficiently, and create additional structural opportunity for margin expansion over time. Overall, our results this quarter and the progress each of our businesses is making against our strategy reinforce our confidence in the long-term opportunity ahead of us.
With that, I will turn the call over to Josh to discuss our financial performance and outlook.
Thanks, Cameron. In the third quarter, we generated adjusted net revenue of $3.18 billion, representing growth of over 4%, excluding dispositions. This performance reflects resilient consumer spending trends across our business, partially offset by the ongoing headwind to our travel customers from the conflict in the Middle East. Currency exchange rates had no impact on growth in the quarter. Adjusted operating margin was 42.5% in the third quarter, representing an expansion of 220 basis points, excluding dispositions. As we anticipated, margin expansion accelerated in the third quarter as we realized additional Worldpay integration cost synergies. The net result was adjusted earnings per share of $3.58, representing an increase of 10%. In the third quarter, we continued to make substantial progress on the Worldpay integration. Among other accomplishments, we consolidated corporate applications and standardized our HR, finance, procurement, and expense management processes across the combined company.
Additionally, we further reduced management layers, renegotiated major technology and marketing vendor contracts to leverage our combined purchasing scale, and continued to consolidate overlapping facilities. As a result of this progress, we are increasing our total cost synergy expectation from $600 million- $650 million on an annualized run rate basis by the end of 2028. Turning to our segment results, we saw solid performance across each in the quarter, which reflects our execution against the priorities Cameron outlined. As a reminder, we report SMB, Enterprise, and Platforms on a contribution margin basis, with overhead costs reported in Corporate and Other. In the third quarter, SMB accelerated sequentially, generating adjusted net revenue of $1.55 billion, representing normalized growth of 5% excluding dispositions. We delivered $928 million of adjusted operating income in the SMB segment, representing a contribution margin of 60%.
Genius continued to build momentum during the quarter. The number of locations sold increased approximately 65% year -over -year. Among our larger multi-unit restaurant clients, total Genius locations grew more than 10% sequentially. Yields on new Genius bookings expanded nearly 60% year -over -year, again demonstrating that our clients recognize the value of the solution. Enterprise generated adjusted net revenue of $836 million, representing normalized growth of 8%. Enterprise volumes grew 10%, which included an approximately 200 basis point short-term benefit associated with load testing for one of our largest clients, while the revenue impact was immaterial. We do not expect this to reoccur in the fourth quarter. Card-not-present revenue, which primarily represents global e-commerce, grew 8% on a normalized basis. We delivered $658 million of adjusted operating income in the Enterprise segment, representing a contribution margin of 79%. Commercial momentum in Enterprise remains strong.
Bookings increased 23% year over year through the third quarter, with cross-sells to existing clients a key driver, up 29% year- to -date, led by our modular value-added services, particularly in the EMEA region. Our pipelines are robust, and we continue to convert signed, not live business into revenue. Platforms generated adjusted net revenue of $625 million, representing normalized growth of 8%, and segment volume grew 11%. We delivered $279 million of adjusted operating income in the Platform segment, representing a contribution margin of 45%. As Cameron noted, we saw strong new partner signings in the quarter, including in our international markets. Value-added services revenue and platforms grew 22% on a normalized basis, and volume in our embedded payments business, which includes our PayFac and Payrix-managed PayFac offerings, grew 16%.
We generated adjusted free cash flow of $870 million in the third quarter, representing a conversion rate of adjusted net income to adjusted free cash flow of approximately 92%. We invested $232 million in capital expenditures in the quarter, representing approximately 7% of adjusted net revenue. In addition, we returned more than $200 million to shareholders during the quarter, including buybacks and dividends, bringing our year-to-date capital returns to more than $1.4 billion. Our balance sheet remains healthy. We ended the third quarter with approximately $6.3 billion of available liquidity and 3.4 x net leverage. Our indebtedness is more than 90% fixed rate, with a weighted average cost of approximately 4%. With our third quarter results in line with our expectations, we are reaffirming our full-year outlook.
We continue to expect normalized constant currency adjusted net revenue growth of approximately 4%-5% and normalized adjusted operating margin expansion of approximately 150 basis points for full year 2026. We continue to expect adjusted earnings per share of $13.60-$13.80, representing 11%-13% growth, and we continue to expect currency exchange rates to have roughly no impact on reported growth for the full year. Our outlook assumes a stable macro environment and a continuation of resilient consumer spending trends. As we discussed on our second quarter call, our outlook further assumes that the impact of the conflict in the Middle East on our Enterprise segment's travel portfolio continues through the remainder of 2026. Travel in the region remains below pre-conflict levels, and we continue to believe this is the most prudent planning assumption.
Regarding cash flow, we expect the conversion rate of adjusted net income to adjusted free cash flow to be approximately 90% for the full year 2026. Our capital allocation plans for 2026 and beyond remain unchanged. We continue to expect to return more than $2 billion to shareholders in 2026 through share repurchases and dividends, while investing approximately $1 billion in the business, or approximately 8% of adjusted net revenue. Furthermore, we remain committed to preserving our investment-grade credit ratings and achieving our three times net leverage target by the end of 2027. To conclude, our third quarter results demonstrate the durability of our business model and the progress we are making as we execute our strategy. The team's focus continues to be on commercial excellence across all our go-to-market channels and disciplined execution of our integration with Worldpay.
We remain confident in our prospects for sustainable growth, cash flow generation, and return of capital to shareholders. I will turn the call back over to Cameron.
Thanks, Josh. As you heard this morning, we have taken important steps over the past year to strengthen and reposition Global Payments, and we have established a clear strategy to fully leverage the scale and capabilities of the combined company. Our ambition is to become the worldwide partner of choice for commerce solutions, and we will achieve that by delivering differentiated products and solutions, creating a distinctive experience for our clients and partners, and leveraging our immense scale and distribution. We are already seeing our strategy come to life across our businesses. Genius is growing rapidly and reaching more clients through new channels, markets, and verticals. Our enterprise business is winning with modular capabilities tailored to each client's needs, and our platforms business is making it easier for software partners to launch, grow, and monetize payments and other value-added services.
With approximately $1 billion in annual investment, we are among the few companies in our industry with the resources to innovate at this scale, anticipating and delivering solutions ahead of demand. At the same time, we remain focused on disciplined capital deployment and maximizing total shareholder return. We are a proven earnings compounder with durable and diversified revenue streams and substantial free cash flow generation. Overall, our clear strategy, integration execution, innovation investments, and disciplined capital deployment position Global Payments to deliver compelling long-term shareholder value. Operator, please open the line for questions.
Thank you. At this time, if you would like to ask a question, please click on the raise hand button, which can be found on the black bar at the bottom of your screen. When it is your turn, you will receive a message on your screen from the host allowing you to talk, and then you will hear your name called. Please accept, unmute your audio, and ask your question. As a reminder, we are allowing analysts one question and one related follow-up today. We will wait a moment to allow the queue to form. Our first question comes through from the line of Dan Dolev from Mizuho. Please go ahead with your question.
Hey, guys. Can you hear me?
Yes. Good morning, Dan. How are you?
Hey. Good morning. Good morning. Congratulations on fantastic Q3 results. Cameron, I just had a question and one follow-up, please. Obviously, there was some news on Friday regarding the potential taking private. What can you tell investors today, where we are? Then I have a very quick follow-up. Thank you so much.
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Dan. Look, I appreciate the question, certainly understand the need to ask it. As you can imagine, we do not comment on market rumors or speculation, so I am not really going to be able to get into the reporting or any of the specifics around it. What I can tell you is the board, the management team, everyone at Global Payments is keenly focused on and committed to creating long-term value for our shareholders. With that in mind, we are very much focused on executing the strategy we laid out, integrating Worldpay, serving clients and partners very effectively, and delivering against the financial and operating commitments that we have made publicly. So, we feel really good about the business. We feel great about the progress we are making and the long-term value creation opportunity in front of us, and that is what we are focused on executing against.
Great. Fair enough. Then I had a quick follow-up, very exciting topic, which is the synergy, right? Target raised from $600 million - $650 million. I believe you talked about the target technology architectural model and how quickly you are moving to make it easier for clients to integrate for existing and new products, reaching markets faster and reducing complexity. Can you elaborate on that a little bit more? Thank you.
Yeah. I'll be happy to, Dan, and I'll ask Bob maybe to chime in a little bit as well. I think you outlined in your question a lot of the core underpinnings of our target technology architectural model and what we expect it to deliver for us as a strategic matter. But maybe if I step back and look at it at a macro level, I think the TAM and executing against the TAM is one of the single largest priorities we have that is a core underpinning of our strategy. Ultimately, we really designed our TAM with the simple idea to make it easier for our clients and partners to be able to integrate it with us and making the full breadth and depth of capabilities that we have more ubiquitously available to clients and partners around the globe.
At the front end, really that means creating a simple, easy orchestration layer with a unified API environment so clients and partners can integrate once and access the full breadth of capabilities that we can bring to bear. Then behind that, obviously, we're working very hard to simplify kind of the underlying technology estate, really wanting to focus investments on the platforms that we see having the greatest strategic value for the business long term, and ultimately positioning us to be able to retire sort of redundant capabilities that sit within the architecture estate that we're running today. So, as you, I think, correctly highlighted, strategically, that really does a few things for us. First, I think it increases our speed to market because it allows us to develop capabilities once and then distribute them more broadly across the entire estate. Then two, it certainly makes cross-selling easier.
As you've heard in my prepared remarks, value-added services and cross-selling value-added services into our existing base is a core underpinning of our strategy across each of our lines of business. So, making it easier to do that through a single integration point is a core underpinning of delivering the TAM. Then third, certainly consolidating the underlying estate of assets that we're managing reduces complexity, which should allow us to drive better efficiency in our business and create certainly operating leverage as we move forward. So, if you look at the TAM and our ability to deliver the TAM, it's clearly connected to the three key pillars of the strategy that I laid out in my commentary. Certainly, it allows for us to harness the scale and capabilities of Global Payments.
It allows us to deliver a differentiated experience to our clients, and it allows us to deliver new innovation and product capability to the market more quickly, ultimately, again, supporting what we're trying to accomplish across each of our lines of business. As we think about the synergy raise, certainly our ability to deliver the TAM and the opportunity that we see financially in delivering the TAM is part of where we see the incremental value coming from. It will be more backend loaded, obviously, as the TAM execution will take a period of time. But certainly, as we looked at the raise of synergy targets from an expense perspective from $600 million - $650 million, the opportunity that we think we can unlock through the TAM is a core driver of that incremental value that we think we can bring about through integration.
Great. Congrats again on fantastic results.
Thanks, Dan.
Thank you very much. Our next question comes through from the line of Bryan Keane from Citigroup. Please go ahead and ask your question.
Yeah. Hi, guys. Good morning, and congratulations on the solid execution.
Thanks, Bryan.
Thanks, Bryan.
Just had one question on the quarter and then one question on the guide. My first question, revenue in SMB normalized, upticked a little bit, and accelerated to 5%, but volume slowed a touch to 3%. That dynamic change and the yield increase, just curious on the drivers there, and then I have a follow-up on the guide.
Yeah. Thanks, Bryan. This is Josh. Look, as you think about SMB, you are right, revenue growth was 5%, volumes were 3%. What you are seeing there is the difference between just greater adoption of value-added services. We called this out in our prepared remark. We saw 60% year-over-year increase with Genius yields, so that is really driving the difference. The other thing I would say as you think about just SMB volumes more generally, in the decel that we saw from Q2- Q3, these were right in line with what the networks reported last week. Visa, I think, saw a step-down of about 140 basis points, and Mastercard, 50 basis points on a sequential basis. So, again, generally right in line with where the networks were. But the step function was primarily value-added services. Again, 60% year-over-year increase from Genius Yields.
Bryan, it's Cameron. The only thing I would add to that, just a bit more color, I would say as a volume matter, it's really on the margin. There's probably a little bit of rounding last quarter up, a little bit of rounding down this quarter. So I'd say it's probably marginal at best. I would say where we did see a little bit of volume softness sequentially, Q2 - Q3, was more in the international markets. Those yields tend to be a little bit lower than they are here in the U.S. market. So as you look at the revenue composition versus the volume growth composition, some of it is due to just mix. Ultimately, where we did see a little bit of volume softness, Europe and a touch more in Asia Pacific as well, those are slightly lower-yielding markets for us.
So that contributes to the kind of dynamic that you've called out.
Awesome. Just as a follow-up, thinking about the guidance and the acceleration of revenue growth or of organic revenue growth in the fourth quarter, just curious on some of the drivers of that acceleration. Then hoping you can just quantify the impact of the Middle East, and then when we anniversary the official headwind as we get into next year. Thanks so much, and congrats.
Yeah. Thanks, Bryan. That's a loaded question. So, just a couple points on Q4 and the exit rate. Look, so we continue to expect the second half revenue growth to be in that approximately 4.5% range. Overall, for the year, we expect FX to be broadly neutral. Some of the key drivers are what we've been talking about. It's the expansion and transformation of the sales force, a lot of the commercial go-to-market tools that we've put in place around tooling, training, and compensation. It's the continued Genius adoption and rollout and ramp. We continue to see very strong sequential trends there. In enterprise, we have clients that went live in Q3 that are now generating revenue. We have all these now live across both Europe and U.S. Point of sale rollout for Domino's in Canada is now fully complete.
Moving to platforms, we continue to see really strong expansion into international markets and continue to see really strong trends with embedded payments, which is growing double digits. Overall, we are seeing strong trends across those pieces of the business around bookings, cross-sell, and value-added services. Those have been really strong. I am pleased with those. For your third question, as it relates to the Middle East, in the third quarter, I would say the Middle East was generally in line with our expectations. The impact was less than 100 basis points. Travel in the Middle East obviously continues to be impacted by the conflict, and volumes are still very much below the pre-conflict levels. I would say the recovery has been very uneven and inconsistent. However, we have seen a modest improvement from Q2, but we continue to see really weakness in forward bookings.
Airline ticket sales remain depressed. There are fewer long-haul flights, commercial flights being purchased. One metric that we look at, Bryan, is paying passengers and miles traveled in the region, and those continue to be down significantly relative to pre-conflict levels. The capacity that has come back has been more of the shorter haul, lower yielding routes. Again, I think based on the latest developments, the uncertainty that we continue to see in the region, we think that the revision that we provided last quarter was the prudent thing to do.
Obviously, Bryan, just maybe to the very last part of your question, that all anniversary in the first quarter of next year, and obviously we remain hopeful that the situation in the Middle East kind of resolves itself sooner than that. Certainly as a financial matter, we will lap it as we get towards the end of the first quarter.
Great. Thanks so much.
Thanks, Bryan.
Thanks, Bryan.
Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Darrin Peller from Wolfe. Please go ahead and ask your question.
Hey, guys. Thanks for the time.
Darrin, you still there?
Yeah. You hear me now?
Yeah, we can. Sorry, we lost you for a second.
Okay. You hear me now? Yeah? Okay.
Yeah.
It was good to see the $7.5 billion capital return expected reiterated through the end of 2027. Maybe we could just touch a little bit and dive in a little more on the free cash levels and the expectation there. I know you guys have the gain on sale tax payments being made, but those really are one time in nature through the, I guess, this quarter and a couple of more. I think we have around almost $4 billion of adjusted free cash, and if our math is right, you are expecting to return and buy back about $4 billion in 2027. Can you just, A, walk us through the bridge on free cash, make sure we are on the same page, and then B, just make sure we understand the reiteration of the numbers that we have it right on the buyback?
Yeah, sure, Darrin. This is Josh. Let me go ahead and take that. If you think about, if you go back to September 2024, our Investor Day, we said we were going to return approximately $7.5 billion of capital to shareholders over a three-year period. By the end of 2026, we will have returned approximately $3 billion of capital, leaving approximately $4 billion for next year. Keep in mind that in 2026, as you rightly pointed out, we had elevated one-time costs. We had cash taxes on the gain of sale of Issuer, and those are not going to repeat next year. Simultaneously, we were able to go ahead and return $2 billion of capital, or we will return a total of $2 billion of capital this year. Additionally, we expect the one-time expenses to trend down as the integration progresses.
Based on this, we have a lot of confidence that we are on track to go ahead and return approximately $7.5 billion of capital next year and be able to get our leverage point back down to that 3x by 2027. So, that is how you get there.
All right, Josh. Thanks for that. Cameron, can I just follow up quickly on Genius? Obviously, really good numbers, although still a pretty small base, but the distribution channel continues to look like it is primed and getting ready to sell more into 2027. Specifically the FI channel, which I think was not really yet onboarded with Genius up until probably very recently. Can you just touch for a minute, I am sure you will get other questions on Genius, but for right now at least, just the go to market, how the channel is prepared, sales, direct sales, whether it is ISOs, direct sales, or now the FI channel, where you stand on that, and if that could be pretty incremental going into next year. Thank you.
Yeah. It is a really good question, Darrin, and thanks for asking it. Naturally, we are very proud of the progress that we have made with Genius. Just reflecting back that we just launched the capability and the platform a little over, not even a 1.5 year a go, in May of 2025, and where we have come over that period of time. Again, I think our team deserves enormous amount of credit for the effort, energy, and vision behind bringing Genius to life. With that preamble, our goal now is to really find more ways to get better penetration and saturation of Genius into market, and that comes down to lighting up the breadth and depth of distribution capabilities that we have here in the U.S. market, but also in markets outside of the U.S. around the globe.
Here in the U.S., our priority from day one, post-closing of the merger, was really to light up the Worldpay direct sales force, which is relatively small, to be able to sell Genius almost immediately in the market. We did that within weeks, I would say, of closing the merger with Worldpay. Our second focus then was really turning on the FI channel within Worldpay, roughly 6,000 branches across dozens of FI partners, and we really started that in earnest in Q3. We did a pilot with three FI partners, and then recently in October, we have opened it up to 30 FI partners in the U.S. market. To your point, as we get into 2027, opening up that new distribution channel, we expect to drive incremental momentum behind Genius in our ability to continue to grow and scale Genius.
From there, once we are successful, when we demonstrate we can scale within the FI channel, we are going to focus more deliberately on other wholesale partners. ISOs, agents, other indirect partners who want to be able to sell Genius into the marketplace, either as a dealer or ultimately have some sort of referral agreement with us to sell Genius. That is kind of the next opportunity from a distribution perspective. While in parallel, as I said before, we look to continue to bring it to new markets around the globe, and we are really trying to sequence those largely dependent upon where we see good, strong product market fit, where we see an opportunity to drive scale in a market, where we see maybe other externalities that are giving an opportunity for us to get better penetration.
I would say the fiscalization program in the Czech Republic is a good example of that. Ultimately, it is a, I would say, a dual-pronged strategy of tapping into all the distribution channels we have in the U.S. and targeted deployment to new markets outside the U.S., again, looking to continue to drive momentum around Genius more broadly.
All right. That is great. Thanks, Cameron. Thanks, guys.
Thanks, Darrin.
Thank you. Our next question comes through from the line of Andrew Schmidt from KeyBanc. Please go ahead and ask your question.
Thank you. Hey, Cameron and Josh. Good to see the steady progress here. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe just a question on the synergies. As you continue to realize these additional synergies, including the increase, how should we think about the balance between reinvestment and market flow-through? I know we have talked about reinvestment over time. You have that $1 billion marker out there. But maybe just talk about, as you sort of realize the additional synergies, just the biggest opportunities to kind of redeploy those savings to support longer-term growth. Thanks so much.
Yeah, it's a great question, Andrew. Maybe I'll start. I might ask Bob to chime in on this as well. Look, I think we're always focused on striking the right balance in terms of making sure that the value we're able to generate through operating leverage in the business, obviously through the realization of synergies from the Worldpay integration, the benefits that we've been able to derive through our transformation program over the last couple years. We're trying to strike the right balance between making sure that we're deploying the right amount of capital and investment in the business to drive sustainable, durable growth, while also meeting our capital return commitments that we've made, and obviously getting our leverage back to our targeted leverage ratio, as Josh called out earlier. I don't think that changes as we continue to move forward in time.
We'll continue to make sure that we're putting capital and putting investment behind bringing our strategy to life. I think we outlined that pretty clearly today, what our priorities are, how we think about delivering them across each of our lines of business. That'll be a key driver of capital investment. We need to continue to prioritize investing against our TAM, because as I said earlier, that's a core underpinning of our strategy and our ability to deliver on that strategy. Ultimately, again, we want to make sure we're using our capital efficiently in terms of returns for shareholders and meeting the commitments that we've already established. We work hard to strike that right balance. I think we have a very prudent, disciplined approach to capital allocation in the business.
Whether we're generating incremental synergies or not, I think that doesn't really change how we think about, again, making sure we're balancing investing in the business, but also returning capitals and driving a total shareholder return that we believe our shareholders will find attractive. Bob, I don't know if there's anything you would add just on the investment front.
Only one. Maybe I would double down on the point we've already made about the target architecture model. This isn't really just about integration or a technology modernization journey. This is ultimately business-led and an enabler for growth. So, to the extent that we can accelerate progress against the TAM initiatives, that drives incremental performance and opportunities for our three lines of business. So, I think, to Cameron's point about balanced capital allocation, that's certainly true, but in a world where we have the opportunity to accelerate our performance and deliver for our clients more quickly, we would certainly look to do that.
I appreciate that. Thank you, Cameron and Bob. That is a great segue into the next question. I wanted to ask about sort of transformation milestones over the next 12 months. Made a lot of progress integrating the organizations, advancing the product roadmap. Maybe just talk about, you talked about sort of accelerating the progress here, but maybe talk about what we should expect from milestones in the next 12 months, particularly around the technology platform consolidation. Then just looking externally, growth is obviously the North Star, but what should we look for externally to gauge progress? Thanks so much.
Yeah, another good question, Andrew, and I appreciate you borrowing language I have used in the past around growth being the North Star for our integration efforts with Worldpay. I am going to actually just maybe use your question as an opportunity to reflect on progress we have made, and I am going to ask Bob maybe to get to the heart of your question about what to expect as a go-forward matter, particularly around technology modernization as we execute against our target technology architectural model strategy. But look, we are 10, 11 months into, 10 months, yeah, into our merger with Worldpay, and I am enormously proud of the progress that our organization has been able to make. I really want to sort of anchor that commentary around the work we have done to ensure that we are building the right foundation for the future of Global Payments.
You only get one opportunity, I think, to build the strong foundation that we feel we need for the future, and trying to build the foundation after the fact is always hard. So, we put a lot of emphasis, and our highest priority, I think, has been focused on building the right foundation for the business. In this short period of time, we realigned all of our go-to-market activities around three customer segment-led channels, SMB platforms, and enterprise. We have established the combined leadership structure for the entire organization and aligned our entire company and all of our team members against that leadership structure. As part of that, we placed 2,400 leaders as part of a very deliberate best-of-both approach to how we establish the combined leadership team for the new Global Payments. We defined the target technology architectural model.
Which is critical to, I think, delivering on the opportunities that exist for our business in the future for all the reasons we talked about today. We have actually started to lay the groundwork for delivering on that target technology architectural model as well. Also, we have clear line of sight to every single dollar of synergies that we have targeted as part of this merger and very rigorous execution plans to make sure that we deliver on those. We have been able to obviously increase our target around expense synergies over that period of time. So, I think that speaks to the amount of effort and focus and execution discipline that has gone into getting us to today. With that, I will maybe transition over to Bob to let him talk about what to expect as we look towards 2027 and beyond.
Yeah. Thanks, Cameron. Andrew, great question. We could probably talk for the remainder of our time just about this one topic, but I'll try to be brief.
I think if you distill what Cameron just said about the target technology architectural model, the integration approach with Worldpay, then think about the comments in Cameron's prepared remarks about our modular kind of open ecosystem approach, curated open ecosystem approach to capabilities, that's where you're going to see the milestones over the next kind of 12-24 months, continuing to expand our single end capabilities to more customer demographics, whether those are geographies or customer archetypes, partners of various flavors, as well as our Enterprise and SMB clients, delivering all of those through a single experience, one portal, where you can not only consume value-added services, but you can also get AI-driven insights about your business, support the decision-making that needs to happen, and then continuing to make available the value-added services, whether those are payments-specific or parts of our embedded finance engine or things like that across the entire estate.
So, a couple of early proof points. I think we already talked about in prior quarters how quickly we were able to make Genius available through the Worldpay sales channels. That also meant Genius on kind of Heritage Global Payments processing platforms. We've done the same in reverse in bringing tools like FraudSight and Revenue Boost to merchants in the Global Payments ecosystem, and we'll continue to do that over the coming years so that more and more what clients experience from Global Payments is one entry into the ecosystem, the flexibility to construct a modular set of solutions that's tailor-made for their use cases, and one experience dealing with a company, its products and platforms, and the service experiences that matter to them.
Very helpful. Appreciate all the work. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Andrew.
Thank you. Our next question comes to us from David Koning from Baird & Co. Please unmute and ask your question.
Yeah. Thanks, guys. I just wanted to ask about agentic. It gets brought up on a lot of calls. For you, it's one thing if a human transaction is just replaced by an agentic transaction, but it's another thing if you get more transactions, maybe better yields, maybe more new VAS services. Just wondering what the economic impact and how you think that's going to play out?
Yeah, Dave, great question, and obviously very topical, given everything we see happening in the market around this exciting new, I'd say, channel for commerce as we go forward. Maybe I'll just start, and I'll ask Bob to get into a little more of the specifics as it relates to your question. I think it's helpful maybe to frame up how we think about agentic commerce and how we're trying to position ourselves around agentic commerce. I would say the positioning really starts with two things from our vantage point. One is, our approach really is centered around being a merchant advocate to ensure that the agentic protocols that develop in the marketplace are really developed in a way that aligns with the best interests of our clients. That's sort of anchor point number one for us.
Anchor point number two is for agentic commerce to really be able to scale and become a more meaningful driver of retail commerce going forward, there has to be trust in the ecosystem in terms of how these transactions are getting effectuated and how consumers are going to be protected, and to that extent, merchants are protected around this type of commerce activity. I would say at a very high level, our strategy is really anchored around building a platform-agnostic modular set of capabilities that allow our clients to participate in agentic commerce models regardless of the channel or agent or payment method. And we're very focused on making sure we're helping to develop the right standards in a way that, again, are really aligned with the best interests of our clients.
The other thing we're focused on doing at the SMB level is providing them the on-ramps to be able to access this new emerging channels. They actually, not surprisingly, they don't have the technology resources, the investment capacity to build their own infrastructure to be able to participate in agentic commerce, and I think part of our role is to help them to be able to access that opportunity without having to make a significant amount of investment on their part. But as it relates to more specifically what it means, I'll ask Bob to maybe chime in on what exactly we're doing and how we see the economics and flows kind of working as we go forward.
Yeah. Dave, I think the way that we think about it today is a lot like e-commerce when it emerged. There were questions about, is this incremental capacity in the economy, or is this a displacement of physical, in-person, face-to-face commerce? And I think the answer to both of those questions was yes. It's both of those things. And agentic looks a lot like that. There's a need for discovery. There's need for acceptance, tokens, fraud screening, authentication, dispute evidence. Certainly in the Agentic Commerce Report that we released recently, people are more open to transacting with agents, but 60%, give or take, still want to approve every purchase. So we see trust really as the gating factor. So to the extent that transaction volume is incremental, that would be a tailwind for us and a benefit.
But I also think, to your point, there is opportunity to add value-added services into this stack, and this trust component is one that continues to be at the center of scale and adoption for agentic, verifying the intent of the consumer, verifying the credentials used to complete the transaction, and then ensuring that all of the sort of consumer protections and merchant protections continue to be built into the ecosystem that already exists for card rails today. That's where we're focused in adding value, is not only just benefiting from these transactions crossing our rails like they do today, but also those incremental value-added services around identity, intent, fraud, and optimizing authentication performance for our particularly enterprise clients, but increasingly mid-market and SMB as well.
Yeah. Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
Thanks, Dave.
Our next question comes through from the line of Jason Kupferberg from Wells Fargo. Please go ahead and ask your question.
Hi, guys. Good morning. It is great to hear the reaffirmation of the capital return targets for this year and next year. I was hoping we could maybe talk early thoughts on the P&L for 2027 as well. It would seem like you are lapping Middle East, large, probably some incremental contribution from Genius, productivity from the newer sales force adds this year. Would that all add up to a little bit of top-line acceleration next year? Is that a reasonable thought process? Then just as we try and think about margin expansion in light of the upsized Worldpay synergies, any rough views there would be greatly appreciated too.
Yeah, Jason, it is Cameron. Look, I appreciate the question. It is a little premature for us to kind of start providing an outlook for 2027. We are still in our planning process, and ultimately, we will provide a full outlook as we get to our Q4 call. That said, I think as it relates to the things we can control, nothing we see today really changes the confidence that we have in the trajectory of the business, and certainly some of the things you called out would provide us a little bit of momentum, we think, as we get into 2027. I think we continue to expect to enter 2027 with good commercial momentum.
We kind of talked about that on today's call, where we are seeing progress across each of our lines of business as a commercial matter, whether it is Genius bookings, Genius yields, new partner signings for platforms, and the volume growth we continue to see across that segment. Certainly, the enterprise business has had a very strong commercial productivity year. I think their year-to-date bookings are up 23%, so very strong performance. From a commercial perspective, I think we have a lot of confidence sort of in the momentum that we are building heading into 2027. To your point, the ongoing integration of Worldpay and the incremental synergies we would expect to realize next year should provide some tailwind to margin as well.
As we look at the business heading into 2027, I think we feel good about how we are trying to position this business, which is, we want to drive durable, sustainable mid-single-digit growth in the business. We want to continue to deliver margin expansion, which will be a little bit upsized for the next couple of years as we continue to deliver on Worldpay integration, and we want to drive substantial free cash flow generation, which supports both our investment back into the business, our capital return plans to shareholders, and our ability to get back to our targeted leverage ratio of roughly 3x by the end of 2027.
And just for a quick follow-up, I mean, as you come up on this one-year anniversary of Worldpay, we have talked a lot about the integration success to date, but just the standalone top-line performance of Worldpay, how would you assess that so far versus your initial expectations? Obviously, putting aside the Middle East airline headwinds.
Yeah, I would say by and large, it is very consistent with what we would have expected. We have resegmented the business, so there is not a line of business that we have now that is a pure sort of standalone Heritage Global or standalone Worldpay, so it is a little hard to parse exactly what is one or the other since we have done the resegmentation of the business. But certainly, there is nothing I would see in the data outside of the impacts of the Middle East crisis that would cause me to think that Worldpay standalone performance, to the extent there is such a thing, is any different than what we would have anticipated going into the year.
Thank you.
Thanks, Jason.
Thank you. The last question we currently have time for is from the line of James Faucette from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead and unmute your line.
Hi, this is James. Can you hear me okay this morning?
Yes. Yeah. Morning, James.
Morning, morning. Appreciate all the color today. I wanted to follow up on a comment that was made around volumes on the enterprise side and some testing that was going on there. Can you help us think through, not necessarily just that work, but just where you're finding real traction with Worldpay and where you get the most benefit versus maybe things that you feel like you should be improving on?
Josh, you want to handle the first part of the question?
Yeah, sure.
Maybe I'll jump in on the second.
Yeah, sure, James. As we think about just the enterprise, that volume that we saw, that was just a temporarily shift in volume that we don't expect to see reoccur in Q4. It was about 200 basis points from an overall volume perspective. If you adjust for that, volume and revenue were pretty much right on top of each other for the quarter within enterprise.
Yeah. James, as it relates to the enterprise business more broadly, I would say we are enormously proud of that business. It is a world-class team. It is a world-class set of capabilities. We are very bullish, obviously, what we can do with the business as we move forward in time. I think the big areas of focus for us are largely aligned with the strategic priorities that I outlined earlier for enterprise. The battleground around enterprise is really around core performance. Whether it is winning existing wallet share with clients or it is winning net new logos, payment performance really sits at the heart of our ability to drive growth in the business as we move forward in time. We are investing heavily behind that to ensure we can deliver market-leading authorization rates, market-leading fraud protection for our clients, et cetera.
That core payment performance is critical, and that is a big area of focus for us. I would say second is continuing to drive penetration and value-added services. Roughly 50% of our revenue in our enterprise business today is driven by value-added services. So our opportunity to get better penetration across our existing base and to tap into new opportunities as we are selling into the market, attaching more VAS to core payment and acceptance services is a real critical focus for us. Then the work we are doing to kind of open up new geographies, new markets, new verticals within the enterprise channel is also key. Some of that comes from the ability to combine capabilities of Global Payments with Worldpay, particularly as it relates to delivering omnichannel solutions across more physical markets around the globe.
Certainly tapping into some of Global Payments' physical presence in markets where Worldpay historically has not had an opportunity to participate on a face-to-face basis, I think creates a lot of new incremental opportunity for the enterprise business. Again, proud of that business, have a lot of confidence and faith in the team and the execution that they are delivering, and think there is an enormous amount of potential for it as we go forward.
That is great. Appreciate the call, everybody. Goodbye.
Thank you, James.
Thank you. Unfortunately, we do not have any time for further questions this morning. This concludes our call. Thank you and have a good day.