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)

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Earnings Per Share (last Fiscal Year)

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EPS % Change (from prior fiscal year)

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Total Return to Investors (last year)

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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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Q4 2024

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

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Global Payments

global payments

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to Global Payments Fourth Quarter and Full Year twenty twenty four Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. Later, we will open the lines for questions and answers. And as a reminder, today's conference will be recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to your host, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations, Winnie Smith.

Good morning, and welcome to Global Payments' fourth quarter and full year twenty twenty four conference call. Our earnings release and the slides that accompany this call can be found on the Investor Relations area of our website at www.globalpayments.com. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that some of the comments made by management during today's conference call contain forward looking statements about, among other matters, expected operating and financial results. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, including the impact of economic conditions on our future operations that could cause actual actual results to differ materially from expectations. Certain risk factors inherent in our business are set forth in filings with the SEC, including our most recent 10 K and subsequent filings.

We caution you not to place undue reliance on these statements. Forward looking statements during this call speak only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to update them. We will also be referring to several non GAAP financial measures, which we believe are more reflective of our ongoing performance. For a full reconciliation of the non GAAP financial measures discussed in this call to the most comparable GAAP measures in accordance with SEC regulations, please see our press release furnished as an exhibit to our Form eight K filed this morning and our supplemental material available on the Investor Relations section of our website. Joining me on the call is our CEO, Cameron Brady our President and COO, Bob Cortopassi and our CFO, Josh Whipple.

Thanks, Winnie, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. We are proud of all that we accomplished in 2024. It was a pivotal year for Global Payments as we launched our broad transformation agenda to set the future course for our business, while also delivering strong operational and financial performance. We started our transformation journey by reimagining our mission, vision and values to provide the organization with a clear view of our priorities and desired culture, setting the foundation for us to pursue our ambition to be the worldwide partner of choice for commerce solutions.

We then refreshed our strategy to focus our efforts and investments in the area of the business that will drive the most attractive opportunities for growth and where we are best positioned to compete and win. From there, we undertook a holistic review of our business to determine how to best position the organization to execute against our refocused strategy and deliver sustainable performance. We use the first principles approach to examining growth drivers, market positioning, go to market capabilities, product portfolios and the potential to optimize our assets. This review led to a realignment of our operating model and business structure as well as the operational transformation program that we described at our investor conference in September. We are continuing to execute against a significant number of initiatives that will create meaningful benefits and provide us with incremental capacity for reinvestment to drive growth and quite simply run a better business.

While executing on our transformation, we have continued to deliver strong financial performance. For the fourth quarter, we produced 6.5% constant currency growth, excluding dispositions, including over 7% in the merchant business and 3% in our issuer business, an acceleration sequentially from Q3 and consistent with the outlook we provided in October. And for the full year, we delivered 6% adjusted net revenue growth, record adjusted operating margins and double digit adjusted earnings per share growth, consistent with our initial outlook detailed at the beginning of twenty twenty four despite the incremental FX headwinds absorbed. We also generated roughly $3,000,000,000 of adjusted free cash flow and returned 1,800,000,000 to shareholders, including proceeds from the recent divestiture of our AdvancedMD business. Our consistent performance throughout the year highlights the durability of our model and the benefits of our sharpened focus as we execute on our strategic priorities.

In our Merchant segment, our POS and Software business continues to deliver strong results. Our POS solutions are robust and are winning in the restaurant and retail verticals as evidenced by the high teens new locations growth we achieved in 2024. Our POS growth benefited from the strong performance of our direct channel in North America, where notably we saw a roughly 25% increase in the annual recurring revenue opportunity with new customers. And we could not be more excited about the significant opportunity ahead as we consolidate our products and platforms under the Genius brand and extend them globally. Notably, we expanded our relationship with one of the largest multinational QSRs in the fourth quarter to include drive through solutions in addition to our existing kitchen management partnership that spans several thousand locations in North America.

We also expanded our long standing partnership as the primary technology partner for Whataburger, which now includes cloud POS, kiosks and menu boards. Additionally, we continue to have success in the stadium and events vertical and are excited to have reached an agreement with Kai Tak Sports Park, Hong Kong's new state of the art multipurpose sports and entertainment venue. We also renewed and expanded our POS partnership with a multinational entertainment company to support its major events in The UK and Ireland over a multi year period. Importantly, our relationship will now include our loyalty solutions, enabling reward offers and personalized experiences for event attendees. Other notable new stadium POS relationships achieved in 2024 include the Newcastle, Birmingham City and Nottingham Forest Football Clubs, as well as an expanded partnership with Blackpool, which now includes PayLink solutions, ticketing services, kiosks and QR code ordering in addition to POS and payments.

And of course, we executed a new partnership with Diamond Baseball Holdings to serve as the official commerce technology partner for its minor league baseball franchises in The United States and Canada earlier in 2024. We remain on track to be fully rolled out with our solutions in an additional 19 ballparks across Diamond Club's portfolio for a total of 32 before the 2025 season opens in April. In our education business, new sales with university customers increased more than 30% in 2024, including a number of new significant international wins across The UK and Ireland as well as in Canada. We also added 113 new K-twelve school districts this year, a roughly 20% increase from 2023. And with the addition of the Los Angeles Unified School District, we now have relationships with the three largest school districts in The United States.

In the real estate vertical, we signed more than 800 new property management customers during the year, while also expanding our partnerships with leading real estate software platform providers like MRI Software, Rent Manager and AppFolio, which will allow us to cross sell additional products and services to their customers. Turning to integrated embedded, new ISV partner signings increased 34% across our integrated payments offerings in 2024 compared to the prior year. Notably, we also added 165 international ISV partnerships across The UK, Asia, Australia and LatAm as we seek to better align our activities and capabilities globally. We also recently expanded our relationship with PayPal to simplify and accelerate the checkout experience by integrating its FastLane solution into our platform, furthering our efforts to deliver embedded commerce solutions. This collaboration extends the payment choices we can offer across The U.

S, allowing our customers to enhance their digital experiences for their consumers. Moving to core payments, our focus on forming deeper relationships with commerce enablement and outstanding service is driving significant opportunities with both new and existing partners globally. We continue to make strong progress with Commerce Bank in Germany and have already boarded over 2,000 merchants since the inception of our joint venture midyear. Additionally, we saw double digit growth in other key geographies including Central Europe, Poland and Greece in 2024, as well as in LatAm where we benefit from strong secular payment trends in Mexico. Shifting to Issuer Solutions, we were pleased with our operational execution throughout the year.

We successfully completed 17 customer implementations in 2024 and ended the year with record traditional accounts on file of eight eighty five million We continue to have a strong conversion pipeline of more than 70,000,000 accounts that extends well into 2026, as well as an additional six letters of intent with institutions worldwide. In 2024, we completed 17 multi year renewals in new customer partnerships. This includes contracts with KeyBanc, Grinn Financial and Vancity executed in the fourth quarter, in addition to significant agreements with Navy Federal Credit Union, Virgin Money, Citizens, NatWest and several other premier global clients that we announced earlier this year. And over the last few years, we've renewed 15 of our top 20 clients reflecting the strength of our partnerships and providing us good visibility and stability going forward. We also continue to make substantial progress with our technology modernization program.

Development of our client facing applications was completed in the fourth quarter consistent with our plan and we remain on track for full commercial launch in 2025. We have more than a dozen pilots in progress with existing customers and are on track to have 33 client pilots in production this year. We recently achieved certification of our cloud authorization platform with Visa and Mastercard. By the end of twenty twenty five, we will be exclusively selling cloud capabilities, paving the way for widespread adoption of these modernized solutions. Across the business, our ambitious transformation agenda will enable us to deliver our rich portfolio capabilities and solutions through all of our channels in a more frictionless way.

While still early days, we are already making great progress across three primary focus areas. First, as we discussed at our investor conference, we have identified meaningful opportunities to streamline and simplify the business. In December, we successfully closed on the sale of AdvancedMD we announced last quarter. Further, we are in the process of exiting several small markets in Asia Pacific this quarter, where we are subscale and see limited opportunity for expansion. With these actions, we have exited a little more than $300,000,000 of the $500,000,000 to $600,000,000 of adjusted net revenue we targeted through our portfolio review.

We are pleased with how these initiatives position us to better focus on where we are differentiated and have the right to win and are continuing to advance other targeted divestitures and and exits that will further streamline our business. We have also completed other initiatives designed to simplify our business structure. During the fourth quarter, we successfully acquired Kaisha Bank stake in our joint venture with Erste Group. This business has achieved exceptional growth over the past decade and we are excited about the opportunity to capture more of the economics going forward, while simplifying our pan European operations and governance. We also recently reached an agreement to purchase HSBC stake in our joint venture in Mexico.

This creates the opportunity to combine our two existing businesses in Mexico, allowing us to harmonize our go to market strategy, drive better scale, amplify investments and increase efficiencies. Second, we are working to fully unlock the growth potential of our best capabilities, while leveraging all of our distribution networks across the globe. To accomplish this, we have reoriented our business under a single unified operating model and have successfully consolidated our technology teams under common leadership, centralized our operating functions and have unified our merchant solutions business into a homogeneous worldwide organization. This better positions us to harmonize our best products and capabilities globally, including aligning our point of sale solutions under a common brand, Genius. We now have completed the full branding work for Genius and will launch our solutions for the restaurant and retail verticals in The U.

S. Beginning in the second quarter. Notably, we will go live with our Genius restaurant solutions for small to medium sized customers this May in tandem with the National Restaurant Association conference. Simultaneously, we will also launch our Genius retail solution for SMB businesses. In September, we will extend the retail offering to additional subverticals and introduce the Genius Enterprise Restaurant Solution at the Foodservice Technology Conference, which is attended by more than 100 of the leading QSR and restaurant chains.

We will begin rolling out Genius to international markets in the second half of the year, including in Canada, Mexico, The UK, Germany, Austria and The Czech Republic. In early twenty twenty six, we will bring Genius to additional markets, including Ireland and Spain, followed by Romania, Poland and Australia shortly thereafter. We're also making progress converging our technology capabilities across our POS platforms. And by the end of the year, solutions such as online ordering and delivery, accounting applications, marketing and loyalty, service vertical functionality and third party integrations will be ubiquitously available from a common platform across our Genius offerings. Additionally, we're already driving synergies by leveraging a number of common capabilities.

This includes aligning our hardware platforms, streamlining invoicing, consolidating support functions and reducing SKUs. As we converge our platforms over time, we have set the roadmap to migrate customers using legacy platforms to Genius with defined upgrade paths that will provide for a seamless transition to a best of breed cloud solution that will delight merchants and their customers, while also providing us with significant cross sell and up sell opportunities. We also intend to fully leverage our distribution channels to extend our Genius POS solutions globally. Our sales teams, dealers and FI and wholesale partners have already had extensive opportunities to preview Genius and the reception has been overwhelmingly positive with significant excitement about the upcoming launch. Another important initiative we are pursuing is our Salesforce of the Future program, which started with our direct sales teams in The U.

S. And will extend to international regions later this year. This includes upscaling and retooling our sales organization, aligning incentives to accelerate cross selling, reimagining our marketing and lead generation efforts, enhancing underwriting and onboarding processes, and improving our approach to provisioning and activating new merchants. As part of this, we have already rolled out and modernized and revamped compensation plan in our FI partner channel and to our POS sales organization. We are extending this plan to enablement solutions extends across our business.

As one example, in Issuer Solutions, we launched several key strategic partnerships in the fourth quarter, including with Engage People, Blackhawk Network and one of the largest global technology companies that will serve to advance our loyalty platform capabilities through enhanced distribution and extended point accumulation and redemption options. And third, we will leverage our technology leadership to be a more nimble and agile business while increasing our efficiency and effectiveness. As I previously noted, we have consolidated all of our technology organizations and teams under common leadership. Our technology development and operations were fragmented, resulting in duplication of effort and investments, a lack of standardized tools and practices and a somewhat inefficient operating environment. With this change, we're becoming a more nimble and agile organization with a customer and product centric mindset focused on speed and quality of product development.

To support these efforts, we recently completed a small transaction to acquire a modern real time processing and orchestration platform. This technology allows us to leverage and distribute products more easily across multiple platforms and geographies seamlessly, increasing our speed to market and accelerating progress towards our target architectural model. It also allows us to eliminate certain third party providers and streamline our technology operating environments globally. We are already leveraging the platform in Central Europe and Germany and will extend this technology architecture across all of our European markets over the next six to twelve months. Across the company, we are also focused on improving cycle times for new product development and enhancing productivity.

This evolution includes modernizing developer tools, including GenAI supported software development, as well as standardizing tooling and implementing processes changes to better identify customer needs and accelerate product launches. Early results have already shown double digit productivity improvements and developers leveraging our GenAI Code Assist tool and a nearly 10% reduction in code deployment time utilizing our modernized tool sets. We anticipate beginning to realize the benefits of these efforts in the second half of the year with the majority of process and technology enhancements in place by year end to support our identified priorities. Further, we are continuing to invest in driving differentiation through service. We have multiple programs underway that leverage GenAI to enhance support offerings for customers.

This includes an initiative to replace our global support center software solution to modernize call flows, expand omni channel and digital engagements, increase intelligent routing and incorporate AI powered knowledge management. This will allow our support center teams to improve response times and enhance customer experience by better leveraging automation. We expect to have the new platform fully implemented by the fourth quarter of twenty twenty five. Given the early milestones we've achieved and our ongoing progress, we are now expecting our operational transformation initiatives to unlock more than $600,000,000 of annual run rate operating income benefit by the first half of twenty twenty seven. This is an increase from our initial outlook of more than $500,000,000 I could not be more pleased with the performance of our team members, whose passion, ingenuity and relentless pursuit of excellence enabled our success over the last twelve months.

As we begin 2025, I remain confident we are doing all the right things to unify and streamline our business, invigorate our go to market activities, leverage our best products and capabilities and amplify our investments to unlock value and position our business for sustainable growth and success. Josh?

Thanks, Cameron. We are pleased with our financial performance in the fourth quarter and for the full year, which were consistent with our expectations. I'm particularly proud that we delivered these results while simultaneously executing on our transformation agenda. Starting with the full year 2024, we delivered adjusted net revenue of $9,150,000,000 an increase of 6% from the prior year, which includes slightly less than a point headwind from currency and the disposition of AdvancedMD. Adjusted operating margin for the full year improved 40 basis points to 45%.

The net result was adjusted earnings per share of $11.55 an increase of 11% compared to the full year 2023. For the fourth quarter, we delivered adjusted net revenue of $2,290,000,000 an increase of 5%. On a constant currency basis, excluding dispositions, adjusted net revenue increased approximately 6.5%. Adjusted operating margin for the quarter increased 40 basis points to 45.2%. The net result was adjusted earnings per share of $2.95 an increase of 11% or 12% on a constant currency basis.

Taking a closer look at performance by segment, Merchant Solutions achieved adjusted net revenue of $1,760,000,000 for the fourth quarter, reflecting growth of 6% or more than 7% on a constant currency basis, excluding dispositions. As Cameron noted, we closed our AdvancedMD disposition in December, which is roughly a point of impact in the quarter. This performance represents an acceleration compared to the third quarter, consistent with our expectations, driven by our POS and software and integrated and embedded businesses, both of which achieved high single digit growth during the period. Starting with POS and software, our new cloud POS solution from SMB customers that we launched mid year and are rebranding Genius drove a roughly 35% increase in new POS rooftops in the fourth quarter over the prior year period. This strong demand is being driven by the new software bundles, countertop hardware choices and embedded commerce enablement solutions available through the platform, which includes a leading new feature functionality such as our virtual terminal offering, cash discounting, surcharging solution, pay by text email link capabilities, order ahead and invoicing solutions to name a few.

Turning to the integrated embedded channel, our ISV business added 76 new ISV partners during the fourth quarter with 32 of these wins achieved in international regions. Several of the larger software partners we signed this quarter include BookBuy in the salon vertical, DRX in pharmacy management and ChamberNation, which provides member management, automation and digital media solutions. Our core payments business delivered mid single digit growth for the fourth quarter on a constant currency basis with several international businesses' notable bright spots. Specifically, Central Europe, Poland, Greece and LatAm achieved double digit growth as we continue to benefit from the strong secular payment trends in these markets. We delivered an adjusted operating margin of 48.3% in the merchant segment, an increase of 60 basis points compared to the prior year.

This performance reflects strong execution on our refocus strategy and ongoing synergy realization from the acquisition of EVO Payments. We've now executed our targeted expense synergies from EVO and are on track to achieve $135,000,000 in annual run rate expense synergies as anticipated. Our Issuer Solutions business produced adjusted net revenue of $542,000,000 for the fourth quarter, reflecting growth of 3% on a constant currency basis, largely driven by a 200 basis point sequential improvement and transaction volumes. This was led by strengthening consumer card transactions, consistent with the trends highlighted by several of our large FI partners this quarter. Commercial card volumes remain largely consistent with the trends that we saw in the third quarter as corporates continue to take a more cautious approach to spending.

Separately, we've seen more of a return to normalcy in terms of product and service investments by bank customers and continue to have a healthy implementation pipeline in 2025. We added a total of 26,000,000 traditional accounts on file this quarter, largely driven by the growth with the existing customers as our strategy of aligning with market share winners continues to drive benefits. And our near record implementation pipeline and the completion of our renewal cycle with many of our large customers gives us confidence in the growth outlook for the business going forward. Moving to our B2B portfolio. The core mid market segment for our AP Automation Solutions continues to generate solid bookings in the quarter, albeit at a slightly moderated pace from earlier in the year due to macro trends.

Additionally, in our PayCard business, we continue to see softer hiring trends in the segments of the market we serve, which again negatively impacted growth this quarter by nearly a point. Finally, Issuer Solutions delivered an adjusted operating margin of 46.9%. This improved sequentially from our third quarter performance, largely driven by better volumes, but represented a modest decline compared to the prior year period as we continue to lap strong margin expansion we realized in this business last year, while also investing in modernization. From a cash flow standpoint, we've reduced strong adjusted free cash flow for the quarter of approximately $814,000,000 representing roughly 110% conversion rate of adjusted net income to adjusted free cash flow. For the full year, adjusted free cash flow was 2,700,000,000 representing a roughly 95% conversion rate of adjusted net income to adjusted free cash flow, consistent with our guidance.

We invested $184,000,000 in capital expenditures during the quarter and $675,000,000 for the full year, equating to roughly 7% of revenue, which was in line with our guidance.

net leverage position decreased to 3.2 times at the end of the fourth quarter and is now consistent with our long term target as forecasted. In connection with the closing of the AdvanceMD transaction in December, we repaid $500,000,000 in senior notes that matured in the quarter and returned $650,000,000 to shareholders through our accelerated share repurchase plan and additional open market purchases. For the full year, we repurchased 12,700,000.0 shares to $1,500,000,000 or roughly 5% of our shares outstanding. Our balance sheet remained extremely healthy and we ended the period with $3,800,000,000 of available liquidity. Our total indebtedness is 100% fixed with a weighted average cost of debt of 3.36 percent.

Turning to the outlook for 2025, we are pleased with how our business is positioned as we execute against our refocus strategy and our expectations are consistent with the medium term outlook we provided at our investor conference in September. Specifically, we currently expect constant currency adjusted net revenue growth of 5% to 6% over 2024, excluding dispositions. We expect dispositions will impact reported adjusted net revenue by over 300 basis points. We are forecasting annual adjusted operating margin to expand approximately 50 basis points for 2025, excluding the effect of dispositions. To provide color at the segment level, we expect our Merchant Inc.

Business to deliver adjusted net revenue growth of roughly 6% on a constant currency basis, excluding dispositions for the full year. We expect roughly 50 basis points of adjusted operating margin expansion for the business excluding dispositions in 2025. Moving to Issuer Solutions. We're anticipating adjusted net revenue growth in roughly 4% range on a constant currency basis for the full year compared to 2024. We anticipate adjusted operating margin for the Issuer business to expand by approximately 50 basis points in 2025.

In terms of quarterly phasing, we expect modestly higher growth in the second half relative to the first half of the year as our transformation initiatives ramp and as we lap the renewal cycle with many of our large issuer customers and see increased benefits from conversion activity over the course of 2025. Moving to a couple of non operating items. We currently expect net interest expense to be roughly $500,000,000 this year and for our adjusted effective tax rate to be approximately 19%. We're also planning for our capital expenditures to be around $780,000,000 in 2025 or approximately 8% of revenue, which is consistent with the outlook we provided at our investor conference. We anticipate adjusted free cash flow conversion to be greater than 90% for the full year, which again is in line with the expectations we outlined in September.

Regarding capital allocation, we expect to return approximately $2,000,000,000 to shareholders during the year. To that end, we are entering into an accelerated share repurchase plan for $250,000,000 If we execute additional divestitures in 2025, the proceeds will be used to further enhance shareholder returns. We also plan to further reduce our indebtedness during the year. Putting it all together, we expect adjusted earnings per share growth for the full year to be in the range of 10% to 11% on a constant currency basis. We expect adjusted earnings per share growth to be consistent with the quarterly phasing dynamics I detailed in my earlier remarks.

This 2025 guidance is the same as the outlook we provided at our investor conference in September and reflects the strategic initiatives we are undertaking through our transformation in addition to a stable macro environment. With significant recent strengthening of the U. S. Dollar, we now expect currency to be a headwind of roughly 175 basis points to both adjusted net revenue and adjusted earnings per share. Finally, as you may recall at our investor conference, we mentioned we have been evaluating our reporting structure, including how to treat items like stock based compensation.

Beginning in the first quarter, we will include share based compensation expense and our adjusted results to better align our convention with our peers. We will update our reporting accordingly at that time. However, we do not expect any change to the growth outlook that we provided today. Additionally, we also plan to change the presentation of cash flows for settlement assets and obligations and certain funds held for customers, moving the changes in items from operating to financing cash flows similar to the convention recently adopted by certain of our peers. In summary, we are pleased with the progress we've made since beginning our transformation.

Our focus remains simplifying our operations, strengthening our core businesses and returning capital to shareholders. And we are confident that we have good forward momentum as we execute against our refocused strategy. And with that, I'll turn the call back over to Cameron.

Thanks, Josh. We accomplished a great deal over the past year and are very much on track with our ambitious transformation journey. In 2025, we will execute and complete much of our transformation agenda, positioning us to accelerate growth and deliver on the medium term financial goals we established in September. We are changing for the better, playing to our competitive strengths, leveraging what we already have and focusing our energy and investments on the most attractive opportunities where we can differentiate in the strongly believe we are poised to capture and unlock significant value with our renewed strategic focus and clarity. We have an end doable portfolio of assets delivering sustainable organic top line growth in a significant untapped TAM.

Our transformation is unleashing an already successful business to deliver all of our solutions to all of our channels in a more frictionless way and drive higher return on invested capital. And we are committed to shareholder value creation targeting returns of $7,500,000,000 over the next three years. We are exactly on track with where we want to be in our transformation and remain as enthusiastic as ever about the future of our business. Whitney?

Thanks, Cameron. Before we begin our question and answer session, I'd like to ask everyone to limit their questions to one with one follow-up to accommodate everyone in the queue. Thank you. Operator, we'll now go to questions.

Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Darren Peller with Wolfe Research. Please proceed with your question.

Guys, thanks for the help. Just maybe start off with your early evidence of the progress you're seeing on some of the initiatives you're making. I know you touched on the timeline you expect on Genius. That was really helpful. But maybe give us a sense of two things.

One is the initiatives you see some evidence of working already. I know it's only been about a quarter or so since the Investor Day, but any progress there? And then really more importantly, the cadence we can expect throughout the year, specifically in the merchant growth rate, so we can help understand where we can expect the trajectory, where there's a bottom and then where you start the acceleration?

I'll jump in and start. So it's a great question. Look, I would tell you from my perspective, I'm pretty pleased with some of the early evidence we're seeing in terms of the benefits that our transformation is driving in our business. I'll start with one of the most obvious areas, which is just the level of collaboration we've been able to drive across the organization. Certainly in our merchant business more particularly, we've been able to harmonize and create a more homogeneous operating model for the merchant solution segment.

We have teams that are now working together, collaborating together, engaging together to unlock, I think, vast opportunities around products and capabilities that exist in different parts of the business that frankly some of them didn't know that we had or weren't aware we could make available in different markets around the globe. So the level of collaboration and the commercial dialogue that that's driving and some of the opportunities that we've been able to already bring to conclusion as a result of that, I think, albeit small, are very encouraging. The second area is as we continue to harmonize operating environments and technology environments, I think the opportunity we see for operating income benefits is evidenced by the increase in the overall target we provided today is more meaningful probably than we initially anticipated as we started on this transformation journey. So as we work to bring our operating environments together, we're finding far more opportunity for efficiencies and scales and the ability to leverage capabilities across all aspects of our business, merchant and issuer in particular, to drive better outcomes for our clients in terms of the experience they're able to to have and obviously our ability to deliver that in an efficient and effective manner.

From a technology perspective, standardizing tools, harmonizing software development life cycles, how we think about product development and collaboration with the business, All of that is yielding what I think will be a more efficient, more effective and productive technology organization that are able to support the needs of the business, able to deliver new product and software capabilities more quickly, all of which ultimately will drive for, again, a better scaled environment and quicker speed to revenue around new product and software delivery in the business. So I'd say overall, the early evidence is incredibly positive around the things that we're doing. Obviously, it's hard work and I don't want to lose sight of that as we continue to progress through our transformation journey. We're making a lot of change in our organization. It is a little bit disruptive at times and it's a tremendous amount of efforts from the leadership team down through the organization to bring about the change that we're trying to drive.

But certainly, all evidence thus far would suggest we're on the right path and benefits in terms of how we run the business and the benefits economically we expected to achieve from this journey are certainly proving to be real and the early wins are encouraging.

Yes, go ahead on the timing or that's exactly right.

Yes, it's a good question on the timing of revenue. I think as I look at 2025, what we would expect is as we get to the back half of the year, we'll start to see some of the benefits materialize as a top line revenue matter from the initiatives that we're pursuing, particularly in the merchant segment. There's also likely to be a little bit in the issuer segment as well, you know, more in the back half of twenty twenty five as some of those opportunities start to ramp. In the front half, I would say we've accommodated for a little bit of modest B cell as it relates to just pushing all these changes through the organization.

We talked a little bit around the timing of our Genius POS release being second quarter, third quarter. We talked a little bit about the Salesforce of the Future program that we're rolling out, including changes to the comp model. Some of those we rolled out late in 2024. The rest we're rolling out in early twenty twenty five. So we're obviously accommodating for a little bit of disruption in the business as we work these changes through the ecosystem.

But that's largely in the first half of the year as we get to the back half of the year as we commented in our prepared remarks. The benefits of many of the transformation initiatives that we're pursuing will start to materialize a little bit more in revenue and the outcomes we're able to drive.

Very helpful, Cameron. Guys, thanks very much.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jason Kupferberg with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.

Good morning, guys. Thanks. I wanted to follow-up on merchant and just clarify the 6% guide for the year. I know it excludes currency and dispositions, but just on the acquisition front, I mean, I think take payments closed around the middle of last year. We're thinking it drives maybe 0.5 of inorganic to merchant this year.

And I know you mentioned a small orchestration platform you bought. So how much are you expecting from acquisitions in that 6%?

Yes. So, Jason, so Cake Payments had anniversaries in the second quarter and you're right about the 50 basis points of contribution. ZMS, that orchestration layer was that was de minimis. So there's very little that was a contribution to the overall growth in 2025.

Okay, understood. And then just on the EPS guide, just so we're all on the same page, how should we think about the actual dollar based EPS guide, I mean, especially with the absorption of the stock based comp that you're going to be introducing in Q1 just so we all get our models tuned up here right at the beginning of the year?

Yes. So look, we're guiding constant currency in the 10% to 11% range. Stock based comp this year is going to be about approximately $170,000,000 So you can go ahead and factor that into your models as you think about just the overall EPS growth and that tends to 11% range comps in currency.

Okay. And then 175 bps headwind you said, right, on the EPS line from the currency?

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ramsey El Assal with Barclays. Please proceed with your question.

Hi. Thanks for taking my question this morning. What is the macro backdrop What is the macro backdrop that you're contemplating in guidance? Are you baking in any conservatism or deterioration in the environment? Or are you just kind of baking in what we're seeing today?

Yes. I would say from an overall macro perspective, Ramsey, it's Cameron. I think we're continuing to forecast, I'd say, a fairly stable macro environment as we head into 2025, largely looking and mirroring kind of what we saw as we exited the year. I think if you look at the macro overall, we continue to see relatively stable labor trends. Inflation has come down obviously.

It's obviously not entirely tamed as evidenced by the report yesterday, but obviously it's down from peak levels that we've seen over the last, call it, eighteen months or so. And obviously wage growth continues to be reasonably good overall. So I would say the macro backdrop, particularly as it relates to the consumer, is relatively stable. Obviously, there's some level of uncertainty as it relates to what's happening in The U. S.

Post election and what economic policies the new administration will implement and how that may manifest itself in the overall macro environment more broadly. But I would say sitting here today, we're expecting a fairly stable trend for 2025 and early evidence in January would suggest that we're seeing largely a continuation of what we saw in the fourth quarter.

Got it. And a quick follow-up for me. Just at Investor Day, you called out winding down some enterprise customer contracts, I believe, in core. Has that process begun? Should we expect any noticeable impact from that in a given any particular quarter this year?

Or will it be somewhat less perceptible from the outside?

Yes. It's a good question. And we're absorbing that in the guide that we've provided to you today. So there is some of that that's already happened in the fourth quarter and there will be more of that that happens as we work through 2025. Some of that's going to be, I'd say, in a few areas.

One is wholesale in particular. We inherited a lot of wholesale relationships through EVO. Some of the economics of those relationships don't necessarily work for us, particularly as we think about the level of effort and support that we have around those relationships and what those resources could be otherwise doing in our business. So we either try to work those to terms that make sense for us, so we'll look to exit those. We talked a little bit around some of the multinational cross border commerce business that we used to pursue.

We're doing less of that. I think we're being far more selective as we think about going upmarket into enterprise and multinational opportunities. We were pursuing some, I would call it, more wholesaleindirect FI relationships globally. That's not a business that I want to spend a lot of time and effort on. I think it's subtracting for us.

So there are certainly likely to be some changes around how we think about that aspect of our business as we move forward in time. So short answer is yes, all that has started. We did exit some wholesale relationships in the fourth quarter. We have more activity that will likely exit in 2025. All that sort of reflected in the guide that we're providing today and we're absorbing those impacts in our outlook, which is part of the reason for some of the commentary around our medium term outlook that we provided back in September.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Tien Tsin Huang with JPMorgan. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks so much. Good to catch up with everyone. Just on the operational transformation of the $100,000,000 I'm curious, does that change also raise the or they maybe change the timing of savings recognitions in 'twenty five and 'twenty six, any update there?

Yes. So 'twenty five, I would say, is vastly the same and the majority of the benefits we're going to see in 'twenty six and beyond. So what we said before, Tien Tsin, is that we expect over little approximately $200,000,000 of OI benefit in 'twenty six. Now we expect that to be more in 'twenty six. And then we said approximately $400,000,000 of OI benefit in 'twenty seven and we expect that to be more in 'twenty seven with full run rate of $600,000,000 in 2028.

Got it. Thank you for that. And a quick follow-up, if you don't mind, Winnie, just on the buying out of the joint ventures here, can we assume that we will see more of this? And is the Asia wind down the inverse, meaning you will maybe get back some of the joint ventures to banks?

Yes. It's a good question, Tien Tsin, and I sort of put it in the category of trying to streamline and simplify our business. With the number of joint ventures that we have, particularly in Europe, the complication in governance around the business makes it a little more difficult to operate the business in the way that we want to from time to time. So certainly, the Caixa Bank exit of the Ursa JV simplifies that relationship fairly meaningfully. Obviously, exiting HSBC from our joint venture in Mexico allows us to bring together two businesses in Mexico that by and large were competing with each other given the nature of the relationships we had in that market into a single business.

Obviously, with good strong referral partners in Banamex and HSBC, but we're able to operate a much more homogeneous and single operating environment in Mexico now, which is certainly a benefit for us. In Asia, we really only have one JV and that's with Bank of the Philippine Islands in The Philippines. We're very committed to that relationship in that market. We have good scale in that market. We have good growth potential with a strong partner.

So that's obviously something that we want to continue with. The markets that we're seeking to exit in Asia are markets where we own 100% of the business, but there are markets that I would characterize as we're a subscale player today. We don't see a realistic path to being a scale player in a timeframe that makes sense for us and we'd rather commit our time, effort and resources to markets where we see better opportunities for us.

Got it. No, makes great sense. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Dave Koning with Baird. Please proceed with your question. Yes.

Hey, guys. Thank you. And great to see just the quality of earnings here getting better cash flow leverage, lower add backs, all that stuff. So congrats on all that.

Dave, are you still there? We lost you. We appreciate the compliment. But, operator, maybe we'll move to the next and see if we can get Dave back.

Yes. Our next question comes from the line of James Faucette with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Great. Good morning. And I'll get straight to my question. So wondering if we can get an update on Issuer segment and is the assumption for fiscal twenty twenty five continuation of softer trends in the commercial card and pay card that you called out and how should we think about the growth from the implementation of those 70,000,000 accounts in backlog?

Yes, sure. I'll go ahead and take that. So look, from for Issuer, we expect revenue to be relatively in line with where we exited the year in Q1. We do expect to see modest improvement throughout the year as we see increased benefit from conversion activity and lapping the renewal cycle with many of our large issuers. And what I would say is, as it relates to issuer, just for Q4, we continue to see strong trends in issuer.

We saw four conversions for the year. Cameron commented on 'seventeen conversions for the year. The pipeline stands at over 70,000,000 accounts on file. We saw strong sequential growth in accounts on file. And we also saw sequential improvement as it relates to transaction.

Global Payments (GPN) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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