With a combined revenue of $21 trillion and $2.1 trillion in profits, the 2026 Fortune 500 is the definitive list of America's largest companies.

Fortune 500

Almost $20 trillion in revenue—and a record-breaking $1.87 trillion in profits. Introducing the 2025 Fortune 500, the definitive list of the biggest companies in America.

Industries included in the sector are advertising, diversified outsourcing services, and financial data services.

Fortune Sector Leaders: Business Services

The Fortune 500, in its 70th year in 2024, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

The Fortune 500, in its 69th year in 2023, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 68th running of the list.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 67th running of the list.

The company provides payment technology and software services; in all, it facilitates transactions for more than 3 million businesses. Global Payments makes its debut on the <em>Fortune</em> 500 this year, buoyed by a stellar 2020 in which its revenue rose 51%, to $7.4 billion, as the pandemic encouraged more consumers to adopt cashless payment.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 64th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 63rd running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 62nd running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. Wal-Mart claims the top spot again. See who made the list.

Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

Key Financials (last Fiscal Year)

Revenues ($M)

Profits ($M)

Assets ($M)

Total Stockholder Equity ($M)

Profit Ratios

Profit as % of Revenues

Profits as % of Assets

Profits as % of Stockholder Equity

Earnings Per Share (last Fiscal Year)

Earnings Per Share ($)

EPS % Change (from prior fiscal year)

EPS % Change (5 year annual rate)

EPS % Change (10 year annual rate)

Total Return

Total Return to Investors (last year)

Total Return to Investors (5 year, annualized)

Total Return to Investors (10 year, annualized)

Global Payments provides payment technology for cards, checks, and digital-based payments across the Americas, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region. The company supports businesses with services such as payment authorization, settlement, customer support, and dispute management.

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Q1 2026

Q4 2025

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Q4 2024

Global Payments (GPN): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Global Payments

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Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Global Payments' First Quarter 2026 Earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will open the lines for questions and answers. As a reminder, today's conference will be recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to your host, Executive Lead Investor Relations, Nate Rozof. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Welcome to Global Payments' first 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 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.

The slide presentation that accompanies our prepared remarks is also available on our investor relations website, and Cameron's comments will begin on slide four. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CEO. Cameron?

Good morning, thank you for joining us today. We are very pleased with our financial and operation 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're 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're seeing highly attractive commercial opportunities that further enhance our competitive positioning and enable more differentiated outcomes for our clients. Partners, 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're 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 into 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 and 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. We continue to be a leading provider in the grocery vertical. This quarter, ALDI Süd 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, Goold 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've 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 are 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 PeoplesBank, 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 Pay by Link+ 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 Restaurants Holdings, Inc selected Genius as its exclusive U.S. point-of-sale software and will also 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 Lidl. In Poland, we signed electric vehicle charging station provider, ELZAB ECOPOWER, and parking solutions provider DG Parking. In the Czech Republic, we signed home equipment retailer Tescoma. 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.

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 its 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 they're willing 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-related 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 development reflects a clear and consistent strategy, rapidly expand Genius's 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 reinforce the critical role we play at the center of the next evolution in commerce. OpenAI's shift in focus towards 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 essential connective 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 prioritize 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 agentic shopping experiences 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 in-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 agentic risk capabilities that leverage enriched ecosystem signals based on our scale and diversity of data. These capabilities help ensure that as agent-driven commerce scales, it does so securely and with the 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're building scalable AI capabilities that generate measurable, repeatable impact across authorizations, fraud mitigation, and revenue optimization. Products such as 3DS Flex, Revenue Boost, Dynamic Routing, and FraudSight 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 continued 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 geographies, 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 ALDI Süd, Morrisons, and Goold Cosméticos, provide greater visibility for in-year realized revenue in 2026. Lastly, we've already had early success selling Heritage Worldpay's value-added 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 Link2Gov 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 Payrix 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 are progressing well through the initial stages of our finance and accounting work to re-segment 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 a normalized 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 $14.00. 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 indebtedness 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 to a $550 million accelerated share repurchase program. Including dividends, we've 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 100 basis point headwind to adjusted net revenue growth. We also expect currency impacts 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 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-$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 the one-time transaction cost to effectuate the Worldpay acquisition and Issuer disposition 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 the 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. 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. 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. 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're 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?

We will now begin our Q and A session. If you wish to ask a question, please use the raise hand button at the bottom of your screen. We will wait for a moment to assemble the queue. Our first question comes from Dan Dolev with Mizuho. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Hey, good morning. Congrats. This is really, really strong, first quarter, and looks like the year's shaping up really well. Congrats again. 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, you know, the progress on Genius and the yields, because it looks pretty good. Thank you.

Yeah, Dan, thanks for the comments and thanks for the question. 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. You know, the enormous amount of progress we've made over the last 12 months in expanding Genius across new verticals, expanding Genius across new geographies, expanding Genius across different segments of the market where we think we can compete and win effectively. You know, again, just very proud of the team and the amount of work that they put into bringing Genius to life.

We're also now starting to see a little bit better brand recognition around Genius, which we think is a good forward sign as it relates to future sales velocity, as it relates to the product overall. As it relates to the take rates, maybe I'll provide just a couple comments, and I'll ask Bob to go a little bit deeper on those. I would call out three things in particular. One is, and this may feel obvious, Genius is just a much more feature-rich platform than anything that we've been selling historically. The capabilities we're able to bring to bear with Genius are just far superior than historical products we have brought to market, and we certainly see that resonating with the market more broadly.

Two, Bob talked about this in the past, as we revamped our sales plan, we put a much more significant 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. Obviously, we're seeing some effectiveness there, which is resulting in, again, slightly higher yields with net new front-book customers as we're selling Genius into the market. The third thing I would say is we're seeing better penetration of payments through our dealer channel. Historically, if I'm being honest, we made it a little bit hard for our dealers to sell payments.

We're trying to ease the process by which our dealers are able to attach payments to Genius when they're selling the solution into market, and obviously, that's creating overall better yields with the portfolio of customers that we're selling through the dealer channel more broadly. Those are the three specific things I would kind of call out at a macro level. I'll ask Bob if he has any color that he would want to add to that.

I think Cameron really nailed it, Dan. There's a couple 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, but 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 year and a half 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. This is both a product and technology improvement as well as an execution improvement of our sales organization.

Our next question comes from Bryan Keane with Citigroup. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Hey, guys. Congrats on these results. I got two questions. I'll ask them upfront. Happy to see the accelerated repurchase plan of $500 million. 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 2027. The second question, just to follow up on Genius, you know, what percentage of the market does Genius cover today? When the rollout is complete, how much of total GPN SMB or total GPN sales will be coming from Genius? I know you're rolling out into the financial institutions and then Germany and Austria. Just trying to get a sense of where we are on coverage and where we're gonna be. Thanks so much. Congrats.

Yeah. Thanks, Bryan. I'll take and appreciate the questions. I'll take the first one. Look, you know, we're obviously, you know, very focused on returning capital to shareholders. You know, that's a big part of the overall narrative. Look, at these levels, there is no single better investment than in ourselves. You know, as we talked about in our prepared remarks, you know, in Q1 we bought back, you know, $550 million worth of shares. We returned, you know, approximately $620 million of capital to shareholders. Today we obviously announced another ASR for $500 million, and we have, you know, plenty of capacity, you know, in Q2 to continue to buy back shares in the open market which we plan to do after executing the ASR.

You know, look, by the end of the second quarter we expect to return more than 50% of what we committed to return in 2026. Look, I'd say, you know, we're well, you know, on our path to go ahead and return approximately $7.5 billion, you know, to shareholders by the end of 2027. We feel very good about that, and we also, you know, feel very good about getting back to our leverage point of 3x, you know, by the end of 2027.

On your second comment, Bryan, I think it's a very interesting one. I might start at the macro level and ask Bob to go a little bit deeper. 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. Obviously Genius is a highly competitive solution that we think allows us to compete enormously effectively in restaurant and retail, and all the sub-verticals they're under, you know, 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 sort of sales will come through our integrated channel for channels where we don't own our own software.

This is a very U.S.-centric comment, of course, but over time I expect the rest of the world to kind of move in a similar direction, which is restaurant and retail will largely attack through Genius. That is our competitive, obviously, differentiation from a product and capability perspective to win in those channels. 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. 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.

Yeah, Bryan, I think it's an interesting question, as Cameron noted. Clearly, retail and restaurant is the most obvious and direct application for Genius in kind of the core verticals that we serve. 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's not quite as many software providers with niche solutions.

We think Genius covers more of the horizontal approach to the market than maybe in the largest markets. If you think about the composition of Global Payments merchant revenue today with something like 50%-ish 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's not being served by our integrated and platforms business with another core software offering that's operating their business. 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% or 80% of the MCC codes that we're serving across Europe and Latin America.

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 kind of point software solutions.

Our next question comes from Darrin Peller with Wolfe.

All right. Great. Thanks. You know, you highlighted some notable wins, including Subway and Abercrombie, among others. What do you see driving those wins? 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+ adds you said. Just touch on the integration and how it's going with those sales, what type of impact you'd 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 again, guys.

Thanks, Darrin. Good, great question. I'll start, again, I'll ask Bob maybe to add a little bit more color to my answer. As I step back and look at sort of 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 platforms. We added 44 new partners and obviously called out strong volume growth on both Payrix and our traditional payment facilitation capabilities. Genius sales nearly doubled year-over-year, obviously being the flagship sort of product within our SMB portfolio, driving obviously the commercial activity, the lion's share of the commercial activity we're seeing in that business, you know, dovetailing with Bob's comments a moment ago.

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. Two, we have the product and capabilities to win competitively in the market. You know, our strategy at an overarching level is to continue to compete on product differentiation and capability. We wanna lead with the solutions that we have that we think are differentiated. We wanna lean into the feature functionality that we think really resonates with our clients, which is gonna be slightly different across the three channels of the market that we go to market through.

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, for lack of better term, 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.

I think over time, that ability to bundle, you know, highly feature-rich product and capability with the 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 all of our sellers against the new sort of go-to-market channels that we're leveraging, enterprise integrated and platform and SMB. We're obviously kind of working through some of the, what I would call the plumbing of that, which is aligning sales compensation plans, quotas, go-to-market channels, et cetera, across the different sales resources.

I would say 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 on 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, again, 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 once 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. Overall, we feel, I would say, 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, I don't know if you'd 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 built and the execution results that those deliver. 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, 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. it's maybe a little more abstract, but I think both of those concepts are leading to, like I said, near-term wins and long-term durable scale and benefit.

Good to hear. Thanks, Cameron. Thanks, Bob.

Our next question comes from Adam Frisch with Evercore ISI. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Hey, guys. Good morning, and thanks for taking the question and good results. 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? Also on AI, obviously a big tool for cost reduction that you're leveraging. Would also ask you to expand how you're leveraging it to drive product acceleration and future revenue growth, and if you're using it to bring Genius, you know, up to some of the up to scale more quickly as well. Thank you.

All right. Thanks, Adam. It's Josh. Let me, I'll take the first question that you have. Look, you know, as we talked about, you know, repeatedly, you know, revenue synergies is really kind of the North Star, and our big focus, you know, in 2026 is really, you know, laying the foundation and the groundwork to deliver the $200 million in revenue synergies that we've committed to. You know, I'd say that the bigger opportunities around growth will really, you know, start to come in the 2027, you know, timeframe, but more so in 2028. You know, we would expect to realize approximately $100 million in revenue synergies in 2028, and then really, you know, exiting the year run rating at $200 million. Look, we've talked about these before.

You know, some of the big things that we're focused on obviously is enabling the direct sales force to go ahead and sell Genius. You know, we've already started to go ahead and roll that out with the Heritage Worldpay direct sales force. You know, selling e-commerce, you know, down market into our SMB channel. You know, we have more than, you know, 5 million small to medium-sized merchants on the Heritage Global Payments side. We obviously have a physical presence in 175 countries around the globe. Again, taking their leading e-commerce capabilities and enabling more of an omni-channel solution in those markets, that's a big opportunity.

Really, you know, the final point I'd say is just really unlocking the full power of our distribution channels to sell Genius, you know, through the ISO channel, you know, other indirect channels. You know, obviously, you know, Worldpay, the Heritage Worldpay side had 6,000, you know, bank branches. You know, that's an area of a focus of ours, and we've talked about Genius Day in our prepared remarks, and how we're facilitating that FI channel. Those are really some of the bigger rocks as it relates to revenue synergies.

Yeah. I'll add just maybe 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 sort of run rate synergies we expect over the first three years post-closing of the transaction, to Josh's earlier comment. The other thing we're sort of leaning into is what are the areas of investment that we really want to focus on that I would characterize as bigger bets? You know, these are opportunities to maybe drive more meaningful sort of uplift for the business over a longer period of time. These would be kind of incremental opportunities outside of the more tactical, I think, opportunities that come from putting Global Payments and Worldpay together.

Our teams are starting to give some life to, you know, where do we think about investing in sort of bigger bets that may have more meaningful opportunity long term for the business as we think about, you know, bringing the companies together, and perhaps the things that we can uniquely unlock given the size, scale, scope of resources that we have worldwide. That's And 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. We're also looking at things that we think we can uniquely do because of our positioning in the market and the scale that we bring.

I think on the AI front, as I step back and look at it again at a macro level, we're really focused across three primary sort of vectors for AI. The first is agentic commerce. I provided a lot of commentary in my prepared remarks around our positioning there and how we see the market trending, quite frankly, in a way that aligns completely well with our strategy and approach. We feel very good about how we're positioned, again, to continue to help shape that evolving sort of channel of commerce for the future. The second is embedding AI capabilities more broadly into our products and solutions. We've 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 a great example of that, and I don't want to get ahead of myself, but we have some exciting announcements that we'll be making in the context of the NRA coming up here in the next couple of weeks that certainly I think fit very nicely in the category of sort of how we can better leverage AI to enhance the capabilities around Genius and help grow and scale Genius more effectively going forward. The last area of AI, of course, is around productivity improvements that we see in the business. I think we have kind of a very unique position around this given the merger and integration with Worldpay.

As we're building out the new organization going forward, as we're aligning all of our functional areas across the two business and we're building new workflows and processes for the combined business, obviously we're building them in a way that we believe we can integrate AI to enable those workflows, those processes, the delivery of services to the business in a much more efficient and effective way. I think that is a unique opportunity in many ways that comes out of the integration process, is the ability to redesign process workflow with an AI-centric mindset to build better efficiency, scalability, productivity into the operating environment of the company. The other thing we're doing, I called this out in my prepared remarks as well, is we've created our own proprietary fast-track studio platform, effectively that allows us to massively accelerate product from experimentation to production.

It improves not only kind of the speed to market for new product and capability, it also improves the overall product velocity and our ability to obviously innovate at a much quicker pace going forward, which again, we think competitively positions us very well, and something that, again, comes out of the massive scale and innovation budget that we're able to bring to bear as a combined company. Bob, I don't know if there's anything you would maybe touch on a little bit deeper.

The only things I might add, Adam, are really around some things we've talked about before. Not just AI alone, but some of the 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, I don't know, a few quarters ago about orchestration capability that Global 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 technology, et cetera.

The other thing is the organizational redesign that leads to this kind of N-in-a-box model.

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, objectives, OKRs. It really democratizes decision-making a little bit, and it distributes it lower in the organization. What that allows us to do is leverage AI, leverage technology that we've acquired and that we've built, and then leveraging our operating model to respond quickly, innovate at a faster pace, and move more content into production more quickly. We feel real good about how we're positioned to innovate at scale and at pace to continue to lead the market.

Our next question comes from Andrew Schmidt with KeyBanc.

Hey, Cameron, Bob, Josh, thanks for taking the question, and good job on the steady results here. Cameron, I was hoping I could drill down just on your comments on AI-related revenue. Obviously, there's, you know, a few sources here. I don't want to front-run any of the announcements. Sounds like you have some interesting things rolling out. If you could just talk about kind of the agentic front, you know, what you can do sort of capturing those flows and also what you can bring to merchants. Also, when we think about that, fraud is also a big topic obviously recently. You guys have an opportunity to bring that from value-added services perspective. Just wondering just to get some more comments on the AI-related revenue piece.

If we work in one more question just on the technology environment 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, you know, when you get that work done, it seems like a catalyst to further unlock product velocity. Any more details there in terms of the transformation would also be helpful. Thanks so much.

Yeah, thanks for the comments, Andrew, and great questions on both fronts. I'll, without repeating myself, I'll try to touch on some of the AI-centric sort of questions that were embedded in your overall narrative there. I would say, you know, first and foremost on the revenue front, what we're seeing right now is predominantly related to existing products that we have in market, where we've been able to enrich their capabilities and enhance their effectiveness by virtue of applying obviously more AI capabilities around them. Products such as 3DS Flex, Revenue Boost, Dynamic Routing, FraudSight are already leveraging AI capabilities that are allowing us, again, I think, to drive differentiation in their effectiveness in the market, which is allowing us to win more cross-sells with those value-added services, particularly within our enterprise base.

We're seeing better results for our clients, which obviously improves our share of wallet and improves the stickiness of relationships that we have on that front. I would say on the pure agentic commerce side, it's very nascent, right? Most of what you're seeing right now is AI-generated discovery with human-in-the-loop transactions, which really rely on traditional kind of payment rails, checkout processes, et cetera, to effectuate what is, quote-unquote, "agentic commerce" today. At the same time, we're obviously building all the connective tissue that would allow for fully agentic commerce to move forward at scale. As I mentioned earlier, and also commented on in my prepared remarks, we're seeing the industry really trend in a direction that we think is positive for us and our competitive positioning and strategic positioning around agentic commerce.

In particular, it just reinforces, I think, the critical role that we will continue to play around checkout, payments, risk, and settlement within agentic commerce that allows us, again, to be the connective tissue, that allows our merchants to be able to participate at scale in a very ubiquitous way across models and protocols, et cetera, to be able to take advantage of the promise that I think agentic commerce has, particularly in retail, going forward. Lastly, to your point around fraud, I think it's an excellent call-out. As I look at our capabilities, Ravelin is a best-in-class sort of market-leading capability that obviously is leveraging AI, and I would say the scale of data that we have within side of our ecosystem that I think is unique to Global Payments.

With $4 trillion of payment volume and over a hundred billion transactions a year, sort of our own internal data coupled with the data sources that we have available to us that I think are unique, allow us to continue to grow and scale Ravelin as a fraud-related solution that can power a number of our products and capabilities, that I think, again, allows us to competitively differentiate in the market around our ability to manage fraud, particularly in an agentic world. We're excited about the things that we're gonna be able to do on that front and the progress that we're making. I think, again, it puts us in a very strong position as this new channel continues to evolve over time.

I think on your second question, the way I would characterize it is we are in the middle of sort of developing what we would characterize as our target architectural model currently. 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 that we want to support, grow, and scale as a combined going forward, as well as what platforms do we want to demise, what technology assets do we want to sunset over a period of time, so we make sure that the business is best positioned with the right technology capabilities, solutions, and capability to continue to compete effectively in the market while minimizing the technology footprint that we're having to manage. That allowed for quicker product velocity as a go-to-market matter.

It allows us, I think, to better compete effectively in the market. It makes it easier to secure the environments that we're managing day to day. Has a lot of downstream benefits for our, for our company as well as for our clients as well. I would say in the short term, Worldpay and Global Payments had a very similar strategy, which is very client-centric in our approach. You know, we want to create orchestration layers that allow our clients to be able to easily integrate into our environments to gain access to the full product suite and capabilities we're able to bring to bear on the market as a front-book matter. I think we both have made great strides in allowing easy integration into our environments, as well as providing consolidated data settlement and reporting out of the back end.

Global Payments (GPN) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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