Global Payments Inc (GPN) — Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning. Welcome to Global Payments First Quarter 2026 Conference Call. Joining us today are our CEO Cameron Bready, our CFO Josh Whipple, and our COO Bob Cortopassi. Some 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 this date, 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, and Cameron's comments will begin on Slide 4. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CEO. Cameron?

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. We are very pleased with our financial and operational performance in the first quarter. Overall, our results exceeded our expectations, reinforcing our confidence in the trajectory of the business and demonstrating strong integration progress following the closing of the Worldpay acquisition in January. I will begin today's call with an overview of our first quarter results in key areas of progress, including Worldpay integration activities, our go-to-market execution, the acceleration of our innovation agenda, particularly with our Genius platform and the increasing application of AI across our business to create new sources of revenue growth, accelerate product velocity and innovation, and improve productivity across the enterprise. I will then turn the call over to Josh to review our financial performance and outlook before I conclude our prepared remarks with a discussion of the key strategic initiatives we are executing to drive sustained long-term value creation. As the world's leading pure-play commerce solutions provider, our North Star remains driving sustainable growth through an unwavering focus on our clients, leveraging the strategic advantages that differentiate Global Payments and position us to win over the long term. In the first quarter, we delivered normalized adjusted net revenue growth of approximately 5.5% or approximately 4.5% on a constant currency basis. This reflected healthy underlying consumer spending trends throughout the quarter partially offset by the lower Middle East airline volumes and slightly lower IRS payment volumes attributable to tax reforms under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Profitability remained strong. Adjusted operating margins expanded 110 basis points on a normalized basis and adjusted earnings per share grew 10% on an as-reported and constant currency basis, which demonstrates the consistency of our operating model and our continued focus on execution discipline. Capital allocation remains key to our strategy. During the first quarter, we returned more than $600 million to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases, while achieving leverage of 3.5x exactly as anticipated. Robust free cash flow generation and capital returns are central pillars of our investment thesis. To that end, we continue to target $7.5 billion of capital returns for the period 2025 through 2027. In support of that commitment, we are entering into another accelerated share repurchase program to immediately repurchase $500 million of our shares. Following the completion of this ASR, we expect to resume open market share repurchases during the second quarter as well. Turning to operating performance and execution. I will begin with our most significant accomplishments this quarter, the early closing of Worldpay and the Issuer Solutions transactions. The strong early progress we're making on Worldpay integration is very encouraging. Our teams have moved quickly and with purpose, alignment has been excellent, and execution has reinforced our confidence in the strategic and financial rationale for the transaction. We are off to a strong start as we bring these two organizations together and begin unlocking the value we see ahead. As we advance our integration efforts, we are taking a deliberate best-of-both approach across talent, products and technology. The depth and quality of leadership and expertise we have brought together is exceptional, and we believe that the New Global Payments now has the strongest team in the industry. Importantly, the combined scale of Global Payments and Worldpay is already enabling outcomes that neither organization could have achieved on its own. We are seeing highly attractive commercial opportunities that further enhance our competitive positioning, and enable more differentiated outcomes for our clients. Partner networks and alternative payment method providers are increasingly eager to access the breadth and depth of our global distribution channels and to leverage the strength of our go-to-market positioning. Execution on the ground has been strong. Worldpay's U.S. direct sales force began selling Genius almost immediately following the close, effectively addressing a long-standing product gap. Further, we are seeing strong early interest in Genius from Worldpay's enterprise restaurant clients, relationships that are opening meaningful cross-sell opportunities we simply could not have accessed previously. Subway is a great example. Already a Worldpay client, Subway recently selected our Genius Kitchen management software deployment across approximately 2,500 locations. We are also seeing momentum in new partner acquisition. During the quarter, Worldpay's business development team signed two new partners that were specifically motivated by access to Genius, wins that are unlikely to have materialized absent the combined platform. As we shared last quarter, we moved quickly to integrate Worldpay's e-commerce solution in Global Payments SMB distribution channels. The results have been compelling with new sales increasing 25% sequentially and more than doubling year-over-year, clear evidence of the power of the combined distribution. Internally, our teams have established executable plans to achieve our synergy objectives. We have implemented our target operating model and go-to-market structure, integrated sales forces and are finalizing the design and implementation plans for our consolidated technology architecture model. Having only recently crossed the 100-day mark since the close of the transaction, our team has already made remarkable progress. Taken together, these early outcomes strengthen our confidence in the integration and our ability to achieve or exceed our revenue and expense synergy targets. Turning to go-to-market execution. Our global distribution footprint remains one of our most significant competitive advantages, and we are expanding that distribution, both geographically and across new channels to support sustained growth. We operate at scale in more international markets than most of our peers, with sales and service professionals in over 40 countries around the world. In addition, we can facilitate payments in 175 countries, creating a powerful platform for continued global expansion. On a combined company basis, bookings increased 8% year-over-year, an excellent start, particularly given that we are still finalizing our new go-to-market channels. Beginning with the enterprise channel, we delivered strong new sales performance, particularly across North America and Asia Pacific. We had several notable wins this quarter, starting with Abercrombie & Fitch & Company, where we signed a long-term agreement to serve as their acquirer for card-based payments in the U.S. Household brands like this continue to choose Global Payments for our differentiated service model, innovative solutions and consultative approach. Within Software and Information Services, we had meaningful wins with AutoBooks and a large multinational content-driven technology company. And we continue to be a leading provider in the grocery vertical. This quarter, Aldi Sud selected us across both North America and EMEA. Reflecting the strength of our service model, we expect Aldi to begin onboarding volumes as early as the second quarter, an impressive timeline for a retailer of their scale. In addition, Morrisons, a leading supermarket chain and recent signing in the U.K., is also ramping their volumes with us. And we expect to have their full migration live this quarter. Lastly, Brazilian cosmetics retailer Natura Cosméticos is another notable Q1 signing that we expect to have live before the end of Q2. Turning to the integrated and platforms channel. We continue to invest in geographic expansion. Integrated payments relationships are more commonplace in the U.S., but we are still developing in most other countries, and we are moving quickly to capture this opportunity. In fact, 20% of the new partners we signed in the first quarter are outside the U.S., demonstrating our ability to scale capabilities across new geographies. We recently expanded integrated and platforms into the U.K. where early results are exceeding expectations. Partner signings are nearly double our planned performance and feedback continues to validate a strong product-market fit. We're also integrating Worldpay's Australian business with our Oceania operations, two highly complementary businesses, each growing at attractive rates by winning share in this otherwise mature payments market. In the U.S., we recently renewed and expanded our partnership with Lightspeed DMS, a leading dealer management system provider in the recreational industry. Lightspeed will now use Payrix to deliver a fully embedded payment experience that enhances customer engagement and lifetime value. Finally, in our global SMB channel, we are continuing to invest across our footprint to increase capacity and improve productivity of our sales force. In North America, we are making progress building sales capacity, having now onboarded more than 300 of our planned 500 new sales professionals. We continue to be pleased with the quality of these hires with many coming directly from software businesses and POS competitors. They understand the industry, and they understand how compelling our new Genius platform is. They're selecting Global Payments because of our high-quality on-site service and support, which gives them confidence that clients will be properly installed and onboarded, particularly compared to the self-service models common elsewhere. With these hires, we are also establishing a direct new sales channel in Mexico, complementing our primarily FI-based distribution model. Mexico remains an important market for us in terms of future growth opportunities. On the partner front, we were recently selected by Peoples Bank, a Massachusetts-based financial institution, further expanding our North American reach and entered Croatia through our partnership with Erste Bank. In the U.K. and Ireland, we are expanding the size of our successful mid-market and small corporate sales teams and also successfully launched several new products to market. First, we introduced Genius Mobile, enabling on-the-go acceptance and expanding our addressable market. Early adoption has been encouraging, surpassing 500 locations in less than 60 days. Second, we launched a first-to-market enhancement to our PayByLink Plus solution in February that enables our clients to run sales campaigns across social media platforms directly from our merchant dashboard and supported by an AI content generation tool. Together, our investments drove several notable wins this quarter. In the Americas, CKE Restaurant Holdings, Inc. selected Genius as its exclusive U.S. point-of-sale software and also will use Global Payments as its in-store payments provider for its iconic Hardee's and Carl's Jr. brands, deploying our solutions across more than 2,400 corporate and franchise locations. Bojangles purchased our digital menu solutions for its corporate-owned stores, expanding our long-standing relationship. Across EMEA, we secured several major wins. In Spain, we won sporting goods retailer Decathlon, and grocery store chain Mercadona. In Poland, we signed electric vehicle charging station provider LSAV, EcoPower and parking solutions provider DG Park. In the Czech Republic, we signed home equipment retailer Tescoma; and lastly, in Greece, we won the large supermarket chain Sklavenitis. In Asia Pacific, we were pleased to be selected by KFC and Pizza Hut. We also continued our successful penetration of the hospitality vertical, extending our relationship with Marriott across the region, and we expanded our position in transportation with a leading ride-hailing company, further validating the strength and scalability of our global platform. Turning to Genius. We continue to see strong momentum as we expand footprint, deepen its capabilities and extend its relevance across an increasingly broad set of use cases and geographies. Genius bookings increased more than 25% sequentially and nearly doubled year-over-year. In addition to accelerating bookings growth, yields with new clients increased by more than 30% year-over-year reflecting the growing value new clients see in Genius and their willingness to pay for its differentiated capabilities. We are continuing to expand distribution behind Genius. For example, we introduced Genius Days to accelerate adoption with our financial institution partners with on-site hands-on demonstrations designed to deepen engagement and drive conversion. Looking ahead, extending Genius into Worldpay's financial institution partner channel is a key priority and a meaningful revenue synergy opportunity with initial contributions expected to begin in 2027. Internationally, we continue to scale Genius across multiple markets, such as Germany and Austria with additional international launches planned later this year and next. From a product perspective, we made meaningful progress advancing Genius as a scalable enterprise-grade commerce platform with advanced capabilities like kitchen management and digital menu solutions while preserving the simplicity and speed that matter most to small business owners. In addition, we continue to strengthen product-market fit through vertical-specific functionality that improves day-to-day operations and drives adoption in priority verticals. For example, in age-restricted retail, Genius now delivers an all-in-one point-of-sale solution supporting compliance, responsible selling, inventory management, vendor workflows and actionable sales insights. We also expanded Genius into the services vertical, delivering a unified operating system that brings together scheduling, invoicing, mobile enablement and built-in loyalty and marketing capabilities. Beyond product enhancements, we are also investing in building Genius brand awareness. We launched a brand campaign in North America during the first quarter, anchored by a national television spot and amplified across digital and out-of-home media. The campaign delivered more than 330 million impressions and reached over 6 million unique consumers supporting awareness and future sales velocity. These developments reflect a clear and consistent strategy: rapidly expand Genius' capabilities, distribution and brand awareness while extending enterprise-grade commerce functionality to SMBs globally. Genius remains a central pillar of our growth strategy, and we are highly confident in its ability to drive incremental revenue, deepen client relationships and create durable long-term value for Global Payments. Lastly, our work in Agentic Commerce and artificial intelligence continues to accelerate and recent developments across the AI ecosystem reinforced the critical role we play at the center of the next evolution in commerce. OpenAI's shift in focus toward AI-driven product discovery and traffic generation while intentionally leaving checkout, payments, risk and settlement with us plays directly to our strengths and strategy. It elevates the importance of our trusted scalable payments infrastructure and positions Global Payments as a central connected tissue between agents, merchants, networks and consumers. We are uniquely positioned to shape this emerging channel anchored in our decades of payments expertise and scaled data-driven insights. We are protocol agnostic and prioritized advocating on behalf of our clients. In fact, we are currently activating several enterprise merchants into Google's UCP protocol so that they can be among the first to provide a generative shopping experience for their customers. We are simultaneously creating end-to-end modular flows with multiple players across the ecosystem, including commerce platforms, checkout partners and middleware developers, to ensure that we can support our clients across any configuration as protocols and use cases evolve. Further, our own payments model context protocol is live and production ready. It enables agent-driven commerce flows with minimal incremental development effort. As agents increasingly initiate transactions autonomously, trust, identity and risk management become even more crucial. Through Ravelin, our AI-native fraud prevention platform, we are advancing generative risk capabilities that leverage enriched ecosystem signals based on our scale and diversity of data. These capabilities help ensure that agent-driven commerce scales securely and with trust at its core for both merchants and customers. Beyond Agentic Commerce, we are embedding AI directly into our products and client servicing experiences with enterprise-grade discipline, governance and scale. We are building scalable AI capabilities that generate measurable, repeatable impact across authorizations, fraud mitigation and revenue optimization. Products such as 3D Flex revenue boost, dynamic routing and fraud side are already delivering tangible results, improving approval rates, reducing fraud losses and lowering false declines often with no incremental integration required. Internally, we are also deploying AI to accelerate engineering, DevOps and quality assurance. Through our proprietary Fast Track studio platform, we are standardizing the path from experimentation to production ensuring security, observability, compliance and repeatability. We're also using agents as first-time responders for common tasks, freeing our teams to focus on higher-value initiatives. Our scale provides a clear advantage. We process trillions of dollars in payment volume and billions of transactions each year across geographies, channels and verticals. This depth and breadth of data creates a uniquely rich training environment, allowing our AI models to learn faster, generalize better and deliver superior outcomes, all while maintaining the highest standards for privacy, security and regulatory compliance. In short, our scale doesn't just make our AI smarter. It drives better results for our clients and reinforces our position at the center of the future of commerce. With that, I'll turn the call over to Josh.

Thanks, Cameron. We are pleased with our financial performance in the first quarter, which exceeded our expectations, thanks to the team's consistently strong execution. In the first quarter, we generated adjusted net revenue of $2.86 billion. Currency exchange rates provided a tailwind of approximately 100 basis points in the quarter, which was approximately 50 basis points lower than the outlook that we shared in February. On a normalized basis, adjusting for the stub period prior to transaction close, adjusted net revenue growth was approximately 5.5% or 4.5% on a constant currency basis. This is consistent with the presentation of our full year outlook for normalized adjusted net revenue growth of approximately 5% on a constant currency basis. During the quarter and through April, we continue to observe resilient consumer spending trends across our business. We continue to monitor sources of macroeconomic uncertainty including the evolving conflict in the Middle East and its potential impact on global travel and inflation. Having said that, we believe the combined company is now more diversified than ever before in terms of consumer spending categories and merchant sizes, enhancing the durability of our business model across a variety of economic scenarios. In our first quarter operating as a pure-play provider of commerce enablement solutions, we saw strong commercial activity in each of our three go-to-market channels. In our SMB channel, Genius continued to achieve greater awareness and win rates. New Genius locations were approximately 25% higher than in the prior year quarter. And Genius' payment attach rate improved more than 20% versus the prior year period as we continue to deliver more value to our merchants and expand our share of wallet. Our sales force transformation continues to drive greater commercial productivity and new sellers' time to first deal accelerated across all SMB channels. Additionally, our sales force enhancements and Genius' ease of implementation have reduced time to go live, which decreased by more than 50% for small business clients this quarter. Lastly, our sales force enhancements and early cross-selling success have kept the top of the funnel full. Marketing qualified leads for Genius retail and small restaurant opportunities increased 36% year-over-year. We also continue to focus on bringing Genius' enterprise-grade restaurant capabilities downstream to the mid-market segment where we've already built a pipeline of nearly 2,000 locations. We're also pleased with the performance of our enterprise go-to-market channel. Bookings this quarter were ahead of initial expectations and 9% higher than the prior year period. Additionally, major signed enterprise merchants expected to go live in the near term, including Subway, Morrisons and Natura Cosméticos, provide greater visibility for in-year realized revenue in 2026. Lastly, we've already had early success selling heritage Worldpay's value-line services into the Global Payments merchant base. Our enterprise e-commerce business saw double-digit transaction growth this quarter, reflecting the resilient consumer trends we noted. This overall strength in spending volumes was somewhat offset by impacts from the Middle East conflict on our travel portfolio and some softness in our link-to-go tax payments business. While we remain very well positioned competitively as the IRS preferred digital payments provider, projected record levels of refunds stemming from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act have lowered tax payment volumes this year. We also saw continued momentum in our integrated payments go-to-market channel, where we added 44 new ISV partners in the first quarter. Our managed payment facilitation and payfac offerings continue to drive exceptional growth with volume increasing more than 20% year-over-year. This underscores the distinctive suite of integrated capabilities that the combined company now brings to market and our ability to meet our software, marketplace and platform partners where they are and support any operating model. From an integration standpoint, we have risen well through the initial stages of our finance and accounting work to resegment our business consistent with our new go-to-market channels and expect to be able to share our new reportable segments with our second quarter earnings announcement. Moving down the P&L, we generated an adjusted operating margin of 39.9% in the first quarter, reflecting approximately 110 basis points of normalized year-over-year margin expansion, excluding the impact of dispositions, which was in line with our expectations. The net result was adjusted earnings per share of $2.96 in the first quarter, reflecting growth of 10% on a reported and constant currency basis. On an unannualized basis, adjusted earnings per share were $2.99, an increase of 11% from the prior year period on a reported and constant currency basis. For clarification, that figure includes $0.09 representing the pre-acquisition results of Worldpay and removes $0.06 associated with the results of Issuer Solutions which is consistent with the presentation of our full year outlook for normalized adjusted earnings per share between $13.80 and $14. Turning to free cash flow. We generated adjusted free cash flow of $544 million, representing a nearly 70% conversion rate of adjusted net income to adjusted free cash flow, consistent with our typical conversion rate in the first quarter. As a reminder, for both Global Payments and Worldpay, the conversion rate is generally lowest in the first quarter, increasing seasonally as the calendar year progresses. We invested $261 million in capital expenditures during the first quarter, and our balance sheet remains extremely healthy. As expected, our net leverage was 3.5x at the end of the first quarter. During the quarter, we issued $1 billion of senior notes on attractive terms to refinance a significant portion of our debt maturing in March. Our debt mix is now approximately 95% fixed with a weighted average cost of debt of 4%. We made significant progress against our commitment to return capital to shareholders in the quarter, repurchasing approximately 7.3 million shares through a $515 million accelerated share repurchase program; including dividends, we returned nearly $620 million of capital to shareholders year-to-date. Turning now to our 2026 outlook. We are reaffirming our full year outlook for the adjusted net revenue growth, adjusted operating margin expansion and adjusted earnings per share. Starting with the second quarter, we currently expect the potential impacts from the conflict in the Middle East and softer tax payment volumes to be up to a 100 basis point headwind to adjusted net revenue growth. We also expect currency impact to be roughly neutral for the second quarter. For the full year, we continue to expect normalized constant currency adjusted net revenue growth of approximately 5%. Our outlook assumes a stable macro environment with a continuation of similar spending trends that we observed in the first quarter, and that travel begins to normalize by the end of the second quarter. Given the recent strengthening of the U.S. dollar, we now expect currency exchange rates to be less than a 50 basis point tailwind to reported net revenue growth for the full year. We continue to expect our normalized adjusted operating margin to expand by approximately 150 basis points for the full year 2026, driven by additional operating efficiencies from our transformation and realized cost savings from the Worldpay integration, particularly in the second half of the year. Putting it all together, we continue to expect adjusted earnings per share in the range of $13.80 to $14 for the full year 2026. Regarding cash flow, we continue to expect the conversion rate of adjusted net income to adjusted free cash flow to exceed 90% for the full year 2026. Because of the one-time transaction costs to effectuate the Worldpay acquisition and issuer disposition that were reflected in the first quarter, we also expect that adjustments to free cash flow will moderate as 2026 progresses. Our capital allocation plans for 2026 and beyond remain unchanged. We continue to target capital expenditures of approximately $1 billion or 8% of adjusted net revenue for the full year 2026. Furthermore, we remain committed to preserving our investment-grade credit ratings and achieving our 3x net leverage target by the end of 2027. We continue to expect to return more than $2 billion to shareholders in 2026 through repurchases and dividends. With the closing of the Worldpay and Issuer Solutions transactions now behind us, I'm proud of the solid foundation the team has established for New Global Payments. While the business environment has evolved since February, we remain intensely focused on execution and delivering on our commitments to unlock the benefits of the ongoing initiatives and drive durable top line growth, robust free cash flow generation and ongoing return of capital to shareholders. And with that, I'll turn the call back over to Cameron.

Thanks, Josh. As you have heard, we are executing at a high level on all the initiatives within our control exactly as we had planned. We are continuing to monitor the conflict in the Middle East but expect its impact to be modest and transitory, underscoring the diversity of our revenue streams and the power of our scale. As anticipated, our pure-play focus is allowing us to move faster, deploy resources more effectively and serve customers and partners in a truly client-centric way. And with the addition of Worldpay, our combined scale is creating opportunities that neither organization could have accessed previously. The breadth and depth of our global distribution network is a powerful competitive advantage. We're uniquely positioned to help clients and partners expand into new markets around the world, supported by local expertise, deep client relationships and disciplined execution. We continue to differentiate through feature-rich products, distinctive service and support and a reputation for delivering outcomes that exceed expectations. From best-in-class enterprise payment solutions to platforms like Genius, Global Payments is at the forefront of modern commerce technology. And with approximately $1 billion in annual investment, we're also one of the few companies in our industry capable of innovating at this scale, anticipating and delivering solutions ahead of demand. At the same time, we remain focused on shareholder value creation and disciplined capital deployment. We are a proven compounder with substantial and durable free cash flow generation and remain committed to our capital return plans. We believe this combination of strategic focus, operational execution and capital discipline positions Global Payments to deliver attractive long-term value. With that, we will open the line for questions. Operator?

Congrats. This is really, really strong first quarter, and it looks like the year is shaping up really well. Congrats again. I wanted to ask you about Genius. I caught that you said that the yields were up 30%, if I remember that correctly. I mean that's a huge positive sign in our view. Just wanted to get a sense of the progress on Genius and the yields because it looks pretty good.

Yes, Dan, thanks for the comments, and thanks for the question. So look, as I take a big step back, we're obviously delighted with the progress that we're making with Genius. The metrics across the board continue to be very, very encouraging. And I would remind you, we're not even a year into Genius yet. The enormous amount of progress we've made over the last 12 months in expanding Genius across new verticals, new geographies, and different segments of the market where we think we can compete and win effectively has been substantial. Again, I'm very proud of the team and the work they've put into bringing Genius to life. We're also starting to see better brand recognition around Genius, which we think is a good forward sign for future sales velocity and the product overall. Regarding take rates, I'll provide a couple of comments and ask Bob to go a little deeper on those. I would call out three things in particular. One is, and this may feel obvious, Genius is a much more feature-rich platform than anything we've been selling historically. The capabilities we can bring to bear with Genius are superior to historical products we've brought to market, and we see that resonating with the market more broadly. Two, as we revamped our sales plan, we put a much greater emphasis on cross-selling and our ability to bundle other value-added services within the suite of solutions we're selling as part of Genius. We're seeing effectiveness there, which is resulting in slightly higher yields with net new front-book customers as we sell Genius into the market. And three, we're seeing better penetration of payments through our dealer channel. Historically, we made it a little hard for our dealers to sell payments. We're trying to ease the process by which our dealers can attach payments to Genius when they're selling the solution into market, and that's creating overall better yields with the portfolio of customers we sell through the dealer channel more broadly. Those are the three specific things I'd call out at a macro level. I'll ask Bob if he has any color he'd want to add.

I think Cameron really nailed it, Dan. There's a couple of things maybe I would add. Number one, Cameron talked about the more robust solution we're bringing to market and cross-selling. What I think that means is not just cross-sales in the traditional sense where we're bringing new value-added services to back book clients, but really the bundled selling of Genius that targets a robust set of core capabilities, and then also wraps additional value around both the software and the transaction processing. That's helping to drive material improvements in the value of each deal as clients recognize the incremental value we're bringing and are willing to pay for those capabilities. The other thing that I'll mention is really not product or technology related directly, but the sales transformation journey we've been on the last 1.5 years or so. We've talked about this in multiple calls in the past. But that's led to better sales talent with better training and better tooling and capabilities for our sales team. So this is both a product and technology improvement as well as an execution improvement of our sales organization.

Congrats on these results. I got two questions, I'll ask them upfront. Happy to see the accelerated repurchase plan of $500 million. So trying to get a sense of what that means for share buyback for the rest of this year and into 2027 as I know you're committed to the 3.0 net leverage by the end of '27. And then the second question, just a follow-up on Genius. What percentage of the market does Genius cover today and when the rollout is complete, how much of total SMB or total GPN sales will be coming from Genius because I know you're rolling out into the financial institutions and then Germany and Austria. So just trying to get a sense of where we are on coverage and where we're going to be and congrats.

Thanks, Brian. I'll take the first one. Look, we're obviously very focused on returning capital to shareholders. That's a big part of the overall narrative. And look, at these levels, there is no single better investment than in ourselves. And as we talked about in our prepared remarks, in Q1, we bought back $550 million worth of shares. We returned approximately $620 million of capital to shareholders. And today, we obviously announced another ASR for $500 million, and we have plenty of capacity in Q2 to continue to buy back shares in the open market, which we plan to do after executing the ASR. By the end of the second quarter, we expect to return more than 50% of what we committed to return in 2026. And look, I'd say, we're well on our path to go ahead and return approximately $7.5 billion to shareholders by the end of 2027. So we feel very good about that. And we also feel very good about getting back to our leverage point of 3x by the end of 2027.

On your second comment, Brian, I think it's a very interesting one. I might start at the macro level and ask Bob to go a little bit deeper. But as I step back and think about the long-term strategy of the business, as we think about restaurant and retail, the mode of competition is the point of sale. And obviously, Genius is a highly competitive solution that we think allows us to compete enormously effectively in restaurant and retail and all the subverticals under them with our capabilities to continue to win share in that market going forward. Over time, the rest of the market will continue to drive towards being more software enabled, which means more and more of our sales will come through our integrated channel for channels where we don't own our own software. And this is a very U.S.-centric comment, of course, but over time, I expect the rest of the world is going to move in a similar direction, which is restaurant and retail will largely attack through Genius. That is our competitive differentiation from a product and capability perspective to win in those channels. And then more and more of the rest of our business will migrate towards our integrated and platform businesses as we attack other vertical markets through the partnership relationships, the deep relationships we have in that channel. So that's kind of an overarching view of where I see the business trending over time. I'll let Bob maybe go a little deeper around some of the specifics of your question.

Yes, Brian, I think it's an interesting question as Cameron noted. Clearly, retail and restaurant is the most obvious direct application for Genius in the core verticals that we serve. But we've also announced releases around service-oriented businesses with scheduling and invoicing capabilities. We've also launched Genius Mobile, which is a version that is slightly slimmer in terms of both its device footprint and its feature functionality that's designed to be easier to use and more general purpose. The other thing I would consider is as you move outside of the largest markets in the world for software, the U.S. certainly being at the top of that. In international markets, merchant segments tend to be less hyper-verticalized than here, and there aren't quite as many software providers with niche solutions. And so we think Genius covers more of the horizontal approach to the market than maybe in the largest markets. So if you think about the composition of Global Payments merchant revenue today with something like roughly 50% being driven by the SMB channel, I think over a period of time, very close to 100% of that SMB base can be addressed by a version of Genius that isn't already served by our integrated and platforms business or by another core software offering customers use to operate their business. So in the U.S. today, it's largely retail, restaurant, age-restricted verticals and service-oriented. In our international markets, it's covering probably 75% to 80% of the MCC codes that we're serving across Europe and Latin America. So we're very bullish about its ability as a platform to scale from the smallest clients to the largest enterprise and to serve horizontally across multiple verticals without having to proliferate point software solutions.

All right. Great. You highlighted some notable wins, including Subway and Abercrombie, among others. So what do you see driving those wins? And then just focusing for a moment also on sales adds and the integration of your sales. I mean, it looks like you're well on your way, you're adding—I think you had 300-plus adds you said—just touch on the integration and how it's going with those sales, what type of impact do you expect to see post-onboarding and really some timing if you can, in terms of the follow-through from adding in terms of new revenue and new opportunities.

Thanks, Darrin. Great question. I'll start and then I'll ask Bob to add a little more color. As I step back and look at the commercial productivity of the business in the first quarter, I'd say it's very encouraging. As we called out on the call, we saw 8% overall bookings growth. We had 9% in enterprise and integrated and platforms. We added 44 new partners and obviously called out strong volume growth on both payfac and our traditional payment facilitation capabilities. Genius sales nearly doubled year-over-year, obviously being the flagship product in our SMB portfolio driving, obviously, the lion's share of the commercial activity we're seeing in that business, dovetailing with Bob's comments a moment ago. So I think from my vantage point, what I see is we're building a very strong commercial engine that we can continue to scale and drive as a go-forward matter. And then two, we have the product and capabilities to win competitively in the market. Our strategy at an overarching level is to continue to compete on product differentiation and capability. We want to lead with the solutions that we have that we think are differentiated. We want to lean into the feature functionality that we think really resonates with our clients, which is going to be slightly different across the three channels of the market that we go to market through, but we certainly feel like we have an ability to compete and win based on the strength of our product and capabilities across these three go-to-market channels. Secondly, I think service and support is increasingly becoming a point of differentiation and distinction in the market. We're seeing more and more that our clients are looking for a more intimate sales and service experience. They're looking for someone who can solution around their very specific needs. I think we have the DNA. We have the scale, and I think we have the expertise to be able to deliver that in much better ways than the vast majority of our competitors. And I think over time, that ability to bundle highly feature-rich product and capability with a service experience that feels unique and distinctive to Global Payments is a real competitive tailwind for us in the business as we go forward. On the sales force front, what I would say is, first, from an integration perspective, things are going very, very well. We've aligned the vast majority of our sellers against the new go-to-market channels that we're leveraging: enterprise, integrated and platform, and SMB. We're obviously working through some of the plumbing of that, which is aligning sales compensation plans, quotas, go-to-market channels, etc., across the different sales resources. But overall, the progress there is quite good, and I would expect by the end of this quarter we'll have the vast majority of that ironed out and the go-to-market motion will be pretty smooth across the combined business. To your point around the new sales heads we're adding, again, continuing to see very good quality of new sellers into our ecosystem. Many of those, as we called out in our prepared remarks, are coming from other software companies or point-of-sale competitors. I think they're attracted to the feature-rich platform that Genius offers as well as our ability to deploy, install and service relationships in a way that I feel is distinctive relative to many of our competitors. We're seeing metrics across those new sales professionals continue to improve just in terms of their productivity, in terms of their speed to first deal in our environment. It's also allowed us to expand distribution in places like Mexico that we think is important as it relates to long-term growth trajectories in that market. So overall, we feel very good about the commercial engine that we are building as a combined company. And I think the thing that is most important to me is we're winning at strong levels, which demonstrates the product capability and service offering that we bring to market is truly competitive and allows us to win share. Bob, do you want to add any other color around that?

Maybe just two quick things. One, I think that the sales transformation we've been undertaking has given us a lot of confidence in the plans that we've built and the execution results that those deliver. So as we bring the businesses together, rolling out the very best-of-breed of tools, systems, training and sales enablement across the combined organization gives us a lot of confidence that the early wins Cameron highlighted are durable and lead to long-term competitive advantage of front-book opportunities. The second thing, more macro, I would say, is in an environment where countries are experiencing a resurgence of nationalism, Global Payments is not a U.S. company with worldwide distribution. We're a true global company. We've said in the past that we bring global scale and local expertise. And I think that is a market differentiator for us outside of the U.S. borders, whether it's in Canada or in Germany or in Poland or the U.K. or Australia or a country in Asia, we're showing up with local teams embedded in the local community with local market knowledge and the ability to put feet on the ground and hands on keyboards to get business done, to help clients be successful and to grow as a part of the local economy. So it's maybe a little more abstract, but I think both of those concepts are leading to near-term wins and long-term durable scale and benefit.

I wanted to dovetail a little bit on Darrin's question on the revenue synergies. You guys have obviously disclosed a ton of data and color around this. But just to make sure we're getting the right message, specifically on cross-sell, when do you expect that to start contributing more meaningfully to revenue growth? Is that a 2026 expectation or more into 2027? And then also on AI, obviously, a big tool for cost reduction that you're leveraging, could you expand how you're leveraging it to drive product acceleration and future revenue growth? And are you using it to bring Genius up to scale more quickly as well?

All right. Thanks, Adam. It's Josh. Let me take the first question that you have. Look, as we talked about repeatedly, revenue synergies are really kind of the North Star and our big focus in 2026 is really laying the foundation and the groundwork to deliver the $200 million in revenue synergies that we've committed to. I'd say that the bigger opportunities around growth will really start to come in the 2027 time frame, but more so in 2028. And we would expect to realize approximately $100 million in revenue synergies in 2028 and then really exiting the year running at $200 million. We've talked about these before. Some of the big things that we're focused on, obviously, is enabling the direct sales force to go ahead and sell Genius. We've already started to roll that out with the heritage Worldpay direct sales force, selling e-commerce down market into our SMB channel; we have more than 5 million small and medium-sized merchants on the heritage Global Payments side. We obviously have a physical presence in 175 countries around the globe. And so again, taking their leading e-commerce capabilities and enabling more of an omnichannel solution in those markets is a big opportunity. The final point I'd say is it's really unlocking the full power of our distribution channels to sell Genius through the ISO channel and other indirect channels. Worldpay on the heritage side had roughly 6,000 bank branches, and so that's an area of focus of ours. We've talked about Genius Day in our prepared remarks and how we're facilitating that FI channel. So those are really some of the bigger rocks as it relates to revenue synergies.

I'll add just one point to that, Adam, and then I'll dovetail into the second part of your question. I think the way I view the revenue synergies is we have tactical plans today to achieve the $200 million of run-rate synergies we expect over the first three years post-closing of the transaction. The other thing we're leaning into is where the areas of investment are that we really want to focus on that I would characterize as bigger bets. These are opportunities to potentially drive more meaningful uplift for the business over a longer period of time. So these would be incremental opportunities outside of the more tactical opportunities that come from putting Global Payments and Worldpay together. Our teams are starting to give some light to where we think about investing in bigger bets that may have more meaningful opportunity long term for the business as we think about bringing the companies together and perhaps the things that we can uniquely unlock given the size, scale and scope of resources that we have worldwide. So that's more to come on that as we get further down that path. Very clear line of sight on the tactical plans that give rise to the numbers we've articulated. On the AI front, as I step back and look at it again at a macro level, we're really focused across three primary vectors for AI. The first is Agentic Commerce, and I provided a lot of commentary in my prepared remarks around our positioning there and how we see the market trending in a way that aligns completely well with our strategy and approach. We feel very good about how we're positioned to continue to help shape that evolving channel of commerce for the future. The second is embedding AI capabilities more broadly into our products and solutions. We called out a number of areas where we're already embedding AI capabilities to improve the feature richness of the products and solutions we bring to market. Genius is obviously an example of that. We have some announcements we'll be making at NRA in the next couple of weeks that fit nicely into how we can better leverage AI to enhance Genius and help grow and scale Genius more effectively going forward. And then the last area of AI is around productivity improvements that we see in the business. Given the merger and integration with Worldpay as we're building out the new organization going forward and aligning our functional areas across the two businesses, we're building new workflows and processes for the combined business. We're designing them in a way that we can integrate AI to enable those workflows, deliver services in a much more efficient and effective way. That is a unique opportunity that comes out of the integration process: the ability to redesign process workflows with an AI-centric mindset to build better efficiency, scalability and productivity into the operating environment of the company. The other thing we're doing, and I called this out in my prepared remarks as well, is we've created our own proprietary Fast Track studio platform. That allows us to massively accelerate product from experimentation to production. It improves not only the speed to market for new product and capability, it also improves overall product velocity and our ability to innovate at a much quicker pace going forward, which we think competitively positions us very well.

The only thing I might add, Adam, are some things we've talked about before, not just AI alone, but incremental investments we've made in the technology stack and the product and technology operating model that are accelerating the velocity of delivery and innovation. We talked a few quarters ago about orchestration capability that Global both acquired and was building in-house. We're using that orchestration capability heavily as part of the target architecture model and the integration of the two tech stacks. It's what's quickly enabling us to unlock the cross-sell of capabilities across the divergent platforms. It's also allowing us to collapse platforms and reduce our overall technology footprint to amplify the impact of the investment dollars we're putting behind CapEx and technology. The other thing is the organizational redesign that leads to this kind of in-a-box model where you have engineering leaders partnered up with product leaders partnered up with business and commercial leaders all operating as one team with a shared set of goals and OKRs. It democratizes decision-making a bit and distributes it lower in the organization. What that allows us to do is leverage technology that we've acquired and that we've built and then leverage our operating model to respond quickly, innovate at a faster pace and move more content into production more quickly. So we feel real good about how we're positioned to innovate at scale and at pace to continue to lead the market.

Good job on the steady results here. I hope I could drill down just on your comments on AI-related revenue. Obviously, there's a few sources. I don't want to preempt an announcement. It sounds like you have some interesting things rolling out. But if you could just talk about kind of the agent front, what you can do sort of capturing those flows and also what you can bring to merchants. And also, when we think about that, fraud is also a big topic recently, and you guys have an opportunity to bring that from a value-added services perspective. Just wondering to get some more comments on the related revenue piece. And then one more question just on the technology environment and harmonization. Can you give us an update on where you're at in the major milestones? It seems like you're already increasing product velocity, but when you get that work done, it seems like catalysts to further unlock product velocity. So any more details there in terms of the transformation would also be helpful.

Thanks for the questions, Andrew. On the revenue front, what we're seeing right now is predominantly related to existing products that we have in the market where we've been able to enrich their capabilities and enhance their effectiveness by applying more AI. Products such as 3D Flex, revenue boost, dynamic routing and fraud-side are already leveraging AI capabilities that are allowing us to drive differentiation and effectiveness in the market, which is allowing us to win more cross-sells with those value-added services, particularly within our enterprise base. And we're seeing better results for our clients, which improves our share of wallet and the stickiness of relationships. On the pure Agentic Commerce side, it's very nascent. Most of what you're seeing right now is AI-generated discovery with human-in-the-loop transactions, which really rely on traditional payment rails, checkout processes, etc., to effectuate what Agentic Commerce is today. At the same time, we're building the connected tissue that would allow for fully agentic commerce to move forward at scale. As I mentioned earlier, we're seeing the industry trend in a direction that we think is positive for us and our competitive and strategic positioning around generative commerce. It reinforces the critical role that we will continue to play around checkout, payment, risk and settlement within Agentic Commerce and allows us to be the connective tissue that enables our merchants to participate at scale across models and protocols. Regarding fraud, Ravelin is a best-in-class capability that leverages AI and the scale of data in our ecosystem, which I think is unique to Global Payments with trillions of dollars of payment volume and billions of transactions. Our internal data, coupled with third-party signals, allow us to grow and scale Ravelin as a fraud-related solution that can power many of our products and capabilities. That positioning is advantaged in an Agentic world and we're excited about the progress we're making. On the technology harmonization question, we are in the middle of developing our target architectural model. This is a very important part of the integration because we're making decisions across the heritage Worldpay business and the heritage Global Payments business around the platforms we want to support and grow as the combined company, as well as what platforms to sunset over time. This ensures the business is best positioned with the technology capability to compete effectively while minimizing the technology footprint we must manage, which allows for quicker product velocity. In the short term, Worldpay and Global Payments had a similar strategy: create orchestration layers that allow our clients to easily integrate into our environments to gain access to the full product suite and capabilities as a front-book matter. Both of us have made great strides in enabling easy integration and consolidated reporting. Our short-term strategy is to combine the orchestration layers in a way that allows the client to access the complete suite of capabilities that Global Payments and Worldpay can bring to bear. Over time, we'll simplify the behind-the-scenes plumbing to minimize our technology footprint and concentrate investment in our best go-forward platforms. I expect that technology architecture plan to be complete mid-year and we'll begin to work toward execution plans in the back half of '26 and into '27 and beyond.

It's good to hear about the early momentum you're seeing with Genius and Worldpay. I was hoping you could talk to us more about that. What are the boots on the ground saying about customer feedback? And can you talk to us more about the sales momentum as it relates to Genius? It seems like enterprise clients are showing good demand, which you called out in the prepared remarks. Which nets are you gaining greater confidence in with Genius? I'm trying to see if we can anticipate what we hear more about as the year progresses. And then lastly, clearly we're all focused on synergies, even though it's early days here, do you feel at all that the ceiling is being raised on the synergy targets as you think about the longer term because some of these early numbers look encouraging. I just wanted to ask for your fresh thoughts there now that you're 100 days in.

Good question, Jeff. I'll start with the first part of your question and let Bob provide a little more color. As a reminder, we enabled Worldpay direct sellers to sell Genius immediately post-closing. Worldpay direct sellers in the U.S. are not a huge population, but it was a good early win and added incremental momentum behind Genius. The bigger opportunity with Worldpay is unlocking their FI channel—roughly 6,000 branches in the U.S.—and selling into their existing ISO partner channels as we do in the heritage Global Payments portfolio. That is about pushing Genius through all the distribution channels we have and driving greater penetration and saturation of the market leveraging our combined distribution. The second area that's interesting from a Worldpay perspective is what we're seeing on the enterprise front. We specifically called out that Subway committed to purchasing some of our Genius technology. Subway is an existing payments relationship of Worldpay that we're able to tap into very early post-close to unlock the opportunity to sell our software solutions into existing Worldpay enterprise payments customers. We think there's more of that forthcoming as we continue to bring the businesses together and unlock opportunities as a combined company. The enterprise market more broadly is showing strong receptivity to the embedded suite of capabilities we can deliver across the Genius Enterprise solution—point-of-sale, kitchen management software, digital menu solutions, drive-thru technology. We have an array of capabilities we can bring to bear on the enterprise space and we're seeing strong receptivity and excitement around Genius from that perspective. As it relates to synergies, I don't want to get ahead of myself. We're delighted with the early progress and the integration work. The way the executive leadership team and the first layers of management have come together over the first roughly 120 days has been remarkable. We have a great deal of confidence in being able to deliver on the commitments we've established, and we continue to work every day to maximize the value proposition of putting the two businesses together. We'll continue to update you on our progress, but sitting here today I'm very encouraged by the progress we're making and have strong conviction we can deliver on our commitments. Bob, do you want to go deeper on customer feedback and where we're winning?

Sure. Jeff, back to the enterprise versus SMB part of your question, I think it's obvious that we call out some enterprise wins because they're recognizable names, but they're overshadowed by the vast number of smaller merchants—pizzerias, local bars, coffee shops—adopting Genius at an even more rapid clip than what we're seeing in the enterprise space. So we feel really bullish about both ends of the spectrum. In restaurant, particularly in the U.S., there are subverticals where we have historical strength and we've doubled down on that with incremental functionality around Genius. We're also beginning to win competitive takeaways at a pretty consistent clip. Our dealer network is going back to service clients they sold historically with a very high percentage of close ratios on upgrades to Genius technology, whether that's new hardware, new software or the value-added services we mentioned before. We're also having a lot of success around stadium and event venues and foodservice management—complicated environments that bring together the breadth of capabilities we have across device form factors and software technologies. On the retail side, we continue to have broad success. The Genius retail solution isn't just targeted at enterprise; in the small and mid-market retail shops, counter service, coffee shops and similar businesses, we're experiencing broad interest in the U.S., and even internationally we're finding large percentages of new opportunities interested in taking the Genius retail solution. So the excitement is broad across enterprise and SMB. We feel real good about our approach and our positioning in both retail and restaurant, while acknowledging in U.S. restaurant we have strong competition and work to do to continue to build functionality, distribution and brand recognition. The brand campaign we ran last quarter demonstrated our ability to move public perception and awareness, which we believe will lead to future top-of-funnel success and improved take rates.

On behalf of Global Payments, thank you very much for joining us today. We appreciate your interest in our company, and I hope everyone has a great day. Thank you very much.