Fidelity National Information Services, Inc. (FIS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

We'll go ahead and get started here. Thank you very much to all of you for joining us today at the Morgan Stanley Fintech conference. Before I get started with James Kehoe, CFO of what we call FIS or Fidelity National Information Services, as a quick introduction, I'm James Faucette, senior fintech analyst at Morgan Stanley. I have to read a quick disclosure. Please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. So James, thanks very much for joining us. We appreciate it.

Thank you.

So maybe just start with a basic progress update. You've spent nearly a year in the seat. And your team and the rest of the management team put together a great Investor Day last month with really pretty clear priorities and targets. Can you remind us the key actions that you and Stephanie have taken within the company so far to really improve the growth profile and margins? Kind of what did you do? What was the intention? And then what are the results you're seeing so far?

Yes. Okay. How long do you have?

33 minutes.

Okay. Good question. I think more of the credit goes to Stephanie, honestly. When she came in, I think she found a company that was -- had its problems. It had spread its talent and its capital far too thinly across the company. It was incapable of managing the combination of Worldpay plus traditional FIS and it stretched the management team too much. So her #1 priority was focus. And secondly, simplification of the company. And there were activists with some suggestions. But ultimately, the biggest single decision that was taken, and it was a tough one, was the sale of Worldpay. First, announcing the IPO but then going to sell to a private equity. It was a double benefit, and it kind of leads into where I spent a bunch of time, double benefit focus on what you're good at. And then the second part is it's simplified and made the capital allocation process much clearer. The company couldn't afford to do acquisitions in the past. Now it had -- it could set up a more balanced capital allocation framework. So I would have spent a fair amount of time on dividend policy, confirming the 35%, thinking through investor perception on that. How much M&A would the market allow us to do without pushing the company? And how much did we need to reinvigorate and accelerate revenue growth? So a lot of head scratching around that. Consulting with some investors on it as well. And I have a conviction that the rest of this goes back to shareholders. Full stop. No ambiguity. When Stephanie first announced the Worldpay deal, I think the share repurchase was $2.5 billion. By the time we exit this year, the share repurchase will be $4.5 billion. I spent a bunch of time on free cash flow conversion, how comfortable are we to -- with repatriating cash from international. And obviously, the closing out of the deal. The second big thing, Stephanie, first of all, had started was operational excellence. The company had executed spottily for against client needs. Number of tickets had gone up, implementation times of softwares have slowed. And she spent a bunch of time on actually getting back to basic, how do you run a business. And I think that's the big success that she pulled off, and that's going back more than -- it's like 12-plus months now. We're now in a situation where we've exceeded the goals that were set 5 quarters in a row, trying to rebuild or rebuilding investor confidence, which was important. The previous management team was not loved by the market. Stephanie was pretty new, her first CEO role, and I think she's done a spectacular job on executing against goals and getting the company back to basic operating excellence.

Right. So James, there are a few times you mentioned operations. You said that the talent had been maybe spread too thinly across the organization. And so you wanted to get it kind of back into the core operations. But then like I said is -- as you said a couple of times, this focus on running the business, running the business the way it should be done, et cetera. What are some of the things that you felt were probably missing previously that have been improved? Like any examples you can give?

Well, I think what was most effective was the prior team was very focused on taking out cost at any cost and a little bit forced a series of migrations of customers on to newer platforms that weren't exactly essential for the clients. Client satisfaction went down. Implementation time slowed. So the company had pursued too much. Stephanie came back in and basically, the #1 goal was customer centricity. And I think she was resetting the company on everything we do has to satisfy the customer. She slowed the -- I don't want to call it forced migration, migration from old to new platforms, and focused on implementing what we have. So an example is modern business platform. So instead of signing a bunch of new deals, she said, focus on implementing what we have with the customers where we have them. So it's getting back to this placing the customer at the center. And then you got to simplify and you got to take out costs and you got to grow revenue and all the rest. But you can take out costs and grow revenue. And fundamentally, you might not even have a satisfied customer. So I think she reset the focus of the company very, very quickly on what's important.

Yes. I think that characterization is interesting because it certainly fits with kind of our -- what has been our thesis around FIS, which -- and that is that a lot of times, we engage with investors and there's a lot of conversation about, well, FIS is -- doesn't have the most advanced platforms and so on and so forth, which -- true, not -- like I think that's easy to dispute. But I think that, that customer centricity is actually what matters most. It's that a lot of your customers aren't hungry or grasping at like the newest and greatest thing. They have other things that matter to them as businesses and where they're focused. And so they don't need and don't want like the most advanced thing. They deliver value elsewhere.

No, I'll push back a little bit.

Please do. That's my favorite [ out there ].

If you take a -- I'll take Capital Markets and then I'll go on to Banking. You take Capital Markets. We offer a suite of products. First of all, it's just unbeatable by it's -- how much we offer into asset managers, hedge funds, alternatives, corporates, insurance companies. And in general, the products are best in breed. And most of them are SaaS enabled. I would have said Capital Markets was not the issue. It's been growing at 6-plus percent over a multiyear period. Why? Because it was left alone, right? What happened was the Worldpay business was merged with Banking, and both of them did worse because the management was spread over and the investments were spread over a bigger universe. So in the end though, if you look at where we're positioned in the market, we have a 58% share of large financial institutions. Our IBS software is far superior to -- and I don't want to talk badly about competitors. We offer the only fully complete commercial banking suite that's in the market. So I would argue our high-end products are differentiated in the market, including the digital platform at the high end. Where the company slipped was on the digital offering at the lower, let's call it, smaller banks, community banks, that kind of thing, what we call one-to-many. Our digital platform there, we're investing, we've said it publicly, about $90 million of capital investments to get this back up to market competitivity. That's where I think some of the comments you hear our products may not be the best. I think at the highest end, they are the best. In that middle market, the -- we lost the battle on digital, and we're going to regain it very quickly. These investments will start rolling out in the coming months, and we will make potentially selective small acquisitions as tuck-ons. We will regain the ground on digital very, very quickly, just to be clear.

We'd like it. Thanks for that nuance and color because I think that's really important. So let's talk about demand environment. How would you characterize the pipeline and demand strength for FIS solutions right now across both the Banking and Capital Markets? I think the secular growth you've identified for both is around 3% and 5%, respectively. So what's driving the demand in your view? And how can FIS best take advantage of the opportunity set?

Yes. And when we go through meetings internally, we don't see any slowdown in demand particularly. We can see clients shifting their investments maybe into digital as opposed to core. But investments are pretty consistent over time. That's what we tried to do at Investor Day. We tried to set a low watermark for investors. Where does the core growth come from? Capital Markets is kind of easy. It is the TAM that we operate in. It's growing at 5%. It's actually 6% when you include all the new verticals. So you wake up in the morning and you have a market that you're operating and it's growing at 5% to 6%, so that's what you call the secular growth trend. And we can come back to that in a minute. But in Banking, we called out what we call more like a transaction growth measure. We said 40% of our business is in core banking. And generally, we track in line with the number of accounts under management, and that's growing remarkably similarly over the last 3 years, 2.5% to 3%. So that's core banking. And leave aside digital. The digital business, our digital business is probably growing at 10%, right? But core banking generally grows in line with accounts. Then on the rest of the Payments business, what they call money in motion, the #1 measure that we took was transactions. And over a 3-year period, growing 4.5% to 5%. That's how we came to the weighted average of 3%. And we kind of aligned it and said it's kind of like a same-store metric. As long as the clients, the banks are growing consistently over time and the transactions are growing at this, our business will be growing at 3%. And we were trying to set this core growth measure. If you actually look at the Banking TAM overall, it's about 4%. So we triangulated transactions to TAM growth levels. And we try to come up with measures that are not too sophisticated and are fairly easy to communicate.

So once again, for historical purposes and backward looking, if that was kind of the TAM growth, there was a period that particularly the Banking business slipped below that in previous years. And that was a big concern. And I think part of what's happened is that people have gone from hoping that you get back to 3% growth to now increased confidence that, that can make -- that, that number makes sense on a go-forward basis. But maybe for context, what happened in that period? Was it just that simply that the company, back to what you were saying before, was trying to press too hard in the wrong direction? And wasn't quite meeting the market where it needed to be? Or what do you think?

Well, I think a little bit. There was a period when the company was doing in Banking, 6% and 7%.

Yes. Previously.

And they did large deals with T. Rowe Price and others, which were hundreds of millions of dollars of deals. And it boosted revenue for a period of time, then they were lapping these. And those contracts, the growth on them was pretty moderate. And the company went into a cycle of lapping these mega contracts that were signed. And the strategy now has changed quite a bit. We're not focused on mega BPO-type contracts that are lower margin. So the company went -- was in a year of large contracts, lower margin. And we stepped back from that, and we're more focused on recurring software-type contracts with inherently much higher margins because what we want to get to is a higher terminal value for the company on revenue. So it did go through this phase, and there was a change in management in between here. But the company was on route to slower revenue growth with lower margin structure.

Got it. So -- and I wanted to make that clear because I think that teasing that out or making sure that investors are clear about that is really important, especially as we go into the next part of our conversation, which is, okay, so we've kind of identified the market growth. But you're targeting several points of additional growth above market rates and for both segments. So which products and services is the team seeing the most traction? And what do you think would be the key incremental drivers of growth? And are there new areas of the market that you're targeting that FIS historically has not addressed?

I think the story is very different, Capital Markets versus Banking. Banking, the simple version is if the transactions are at 3%, we're looking for another 150 basis points on top at the high end of the range. But we actually feel the guide could be -- it's -- I'm not saying it's conservative, but it's achievable. We actually called out M&A as 50 to 100 basis points in that, so the remaining organic lift is actually quite moderate. And I hate to give this as the explanation, but it is the company did not focus on the Payments business in the past, right? So there's the core banking, which is in digital, 40% of revenue. There's retirement-type business, which is 10%. [ 15% ] of the revenue in Banking is on what we call payments and money management. We have an incredible suite of assets. So we've got debit and credit, mostly debit processing. We have a nice network with accounts payable, receivable businesses, we have loyalty businesses. And we can offer a full suite of payments to everybody, like all banks. And our Payments One platform is very comprehensive and flexible. The issue was in the past, people were focused on driving Worldpay, and nobody was looking at the heritage Payments business in FIS. Management attention has completely shifted back over to payments. And we see it as a huge growth opportunity going forward. The second one is digital. We underinvested in the one-to-many, the one I mentioned before. And we're currently growing digital at 10%. So you've got kind of the core banking, call it, 3 payments business as a much faster-growing business because it's -- remember, I mentioned before, it's growing 5-plus. And then you got digital coming on top at 10%. So you can very quickly, with some incremental synergistic acquisitions, get up to the targeted growth rates. I think what surprised the market was the growth target for Capital Markets. I would point out though, the business has grown 6-ish percent over a multiyear period. The step-up a little bit is coming from M&A, 150, 200 basis points. But if you look at the TAM, if the TAM is growing at 5%, it's all coming from the alternative channels, what we call insurance companies, financing leasing companies. What's the other one? Leasing, we got the insurance company and corporates. Right now, they account for 30% of the Capital Markets business, and it's growing extremely quickly. And as we look at Capital Markets, the core business, which is, call it, asset management and trading, the TAM is growing at 5%. Treasury and risk is growing at mid-to-high single digit. And lending is growing at low double digits. So we're shifting the M&A focus into lending and treasury risk and regulatory. So it's -- we're very -- we're becoming much more targeted on the faster-growing sectors of the market.

Got it. So you've mentioned a couple of times like kind of moving more of the revenue, especially revenue growth, to more SaaS-type implementations and agreements. And so that leaves us a line of questioning around recurring versus nonrecurring revenue. The Banking segment is, I think, at last statistic, around 83% recurring, and Capital Markets is around 76%. Where can those rates of recurring revenue mix get to over time? And how do you get there? And then in the nonrecurring piece, how much variance should we be prepared for?

Yes. Okay. It's a long question. The first thing I'd say on Banking is if -- we put an exhibit in the first quarter earnings that showed that over the last 4 years, the recurring revenue in Banking has grown 4% on average. So it's actually very resilient. And a lot of the noise comes from this nonrecurring. It's like these big contracts that were put in place in the past episodic sales that you're cycling through. So I want to emphasize, the recurring business in Banking is very solid and consistent over time, call it, the 4%. The 83% is pretty high. I think it's going to go up 20 to 50 basis points a year on an ongoing basis as we deemphasize the nonrecurring. And it's not as if we've got bad sales. We're incenting the sales force differently. So first of all, last year, we combined the Banking and Capital Market sales forces to generate more cross-sell. Second thing we did, we're not -- we're incenting them to sell more recurring and license revenue as opposed to professional services or nonrecurring. And once you change incentives for a sales force, they very quickly shift to retention. So that's kind of the Banking story. So a gradual increase, but not dramatic. So it could be from 83%, maybe it goes to 84% or 84.5% in 3 years. Capital Markets, the actual starting point is 72%. It will probably go up 1 point a year. So you could think about by 2026, you're at 75%. And it's -- probably, the target is to more closely approximate to Banking over time, maybe get to an 80%.

Got it. It's a good time for me to take a quick breath. If anybody has any questions from the audience, please raise your hand, and we'll get you a microphone. I'll continue on. You mentioned Capital Markets cross-sell. You identified -- I think you were quoted as identifying about $300 million in cross-sell opportunity into the Capital Markets business. How do you really expect to realize more of that? And which services would FIS be selling? Like kind of what are you promoting or what's that cross-sell motion look like?

Yes, I think the opportunity is actually larger. I think cross-sell between the 2 business, we said, was about $400 million. Okay. About $300 million would fall into Banking and $100 million in Capital Markets. We didn't give any specificity on it. But I would actually go a step further and say there's actually a cross-sell within Banking and within Capital Markets that isn't even included in the $400 million number. So I'll give you a good example. 70% of our core banking customers take the payments products. Can we get that 70% up to 90%? And that's where a lot of our focus is going to be. Within Capital Markets, only 30% of the customers take more than one product. So it has an amazing -- there's -- it will never get as high as Banking because you get -- we sell a lot of products. You could sell a hedge fund back-office product just to a hedge fund. They'll never take 2 products. But there's still a huge opportunity within Capital Markets to cross-sell, within Banking to cross-sell. And then the cross-sell to uncommon customers between the 2.

Got it. Got it. Got it. And then let's talk about pricing. How has pricing trended historically for FIS? And I guess, I'm wondering how much of a -- you talked about like the market. You talked about the inorganic contribution. What about the pricing contribution to the growth algorithm? What does that look like historically versus now? I know at least Stephanie last year made some comments like -- she felt like there was some opportunity there, but give us an update on what's happened.

We get the question. It's probably the #1 question in individual meetings. It's on pricing. Looking back, the contribution in Banking is effectively 0 for pricing. So you get gross pricing or CPI escalators that are maybe worth 1 point to 1.5 point, depending on the year, and it ends up being almost fully offset by compression. Whether we like it or not, when a big contract comes up for renewal, the consultants are involved. There's an RFP process. There's a bidding process. And there is some compression. We've projected forward 0 contribution from pricing. Okay. So there's no risk in the plan. Many of us think there's an opportunity here. If you take a case study like if we believe that we have the best commercial banking offering in the market, in theory, we should have more pricing power. And Stephanie's point, I think, was a little bit more -- she thinks we could manage it better internally. And I think she's right. Last year, we moved pricing from the subdivisions up to the segment level. And we're only half -- I'd say, we're halfway through this. We are actually thinking, should it even be at the corporate level? But how do we introduce a different way of pricing, particularly in the Banking business? Because in theory, we should have more pricing power then we're actually able to realize. So the first step of what she did was take it up to segment level. And now we're talking about is that enough? And are we seeing the desired results or not?

Yes. Because I mean, certainly, if you're delivering a great solution, the customer and you're servicing the customer and you're customer-centric, that at least the opportunity would seem to be there to at least not be -- to have to give so much on the renewals, et cetera, right?

But bear in mind, we're coming out of a period maybe 12 months ago when customers were not that happy because there was -- operational excellence was not at the forefront. Now Stephanie is -- and the team have fixed a bunch of that. I think our image in the market is slowly changing, and maybe we can come back to that. But Capital Market's very different, 6,000 clients across 150 markets. We sell a lot of best-of-breed products to one product, one company, way more pricing power because of the -- the products are all modernized. They're generally very, very good. And we end up with about 200 -- history, 200 basis points of pricing, projecting forward 200 basis points. We didn't assume any improvement. In theory, we should. The better our product set becomes, the more we're distancing ourselves from the competition in the biddings. So Capital Market is very different than Banking, much less price pressure.

So I did -- so I appreciate that. So I want to go back to the thing that you promised to circle back on just now, which is impression in the market from your customers. Like how are you measuring that? Or what are you seeing from that perspective? And how should we think about that flowing through the P&L?

We've seen -- as I said, once you've reset and you've focused on customer centricity, we have seen a significant improvement in NPS scores over an extended period now and especially in Banking. Capital Markets has always been very strong on NPS. I personally went to -- we had our big Emerald conference where we had 3,000 customers there, 3,000 people from 800 customers. There's a right different vibe and Stephanie would say it herself. Last year, it felt like you're almost on the defense of renewals over there. And now they -- I participated in a meeting with the consultants. And it was, yes, we're hearing different things in the market now. Your customers are saying there is change, the speed of reactivity, tickets getting closed. And I do believe a lot of the investors have said as well after Investor Day, there's a different vibe on innovation. We've hired a new CTO, who is not focused on cost or optimization of the infrastructure. He's focused on the client. And then we hired Tarun, the leader of platforms, and we've launched this embedded finance platform. So the kind of feedback we got on Emerald was there's a big change ongoing. And we had a lot of -- a lot more interest in signing up for new stuff this year than there was last year. That's all I could say. But very, very productive, and we hope to really build on that even next year.

No, it sounds encouraging. So a few things I want to hit on in the last few minutes here. So Worldpay, obviously, you sold the stake in Worldpay, turned over operations and control to private equity, GTCR there. But it's still an important part of your EPS growth algorithm on a go-forward basis. So where are you staking your confidence in? Or how are you finding the confidence to guide to kind of that 7.5% to 9.5% earnings growth on the part of Worldpay? I think there's a lot of -- and you mentioned it yourself, question about, A, the market, but also just like the need for investment and improved operations over on that side.

Yes. No, we have relatively little concern. The -- there's almost complete information sharing. So we get monthly forecasts from Worldpay, and they share -- they're required by contract to share budgets and 3-year plans. So the first thing is it's complete transparency. Stephanie is on the Board. What they've said about investments is that GTCR has said they will commit additional $1 billion plus to select acquisitions to build out capabilities. And in payments, in general, you probably need to do that. The second one is they have incredible free cash flow generation. Incredible, right? So I don't think -- I think they can adequately...

Fund the investment.

Fund whatever investments. I would also say is they had a great start to the year. And I think if you think through private equity mentality, you're probably going to make select investments probably this year to set them up really well for the future. So they care less about the first year of the stub because you're not doing much with it. So we see that it could actually be -- my view is there could be even some opportunity to guide on Worldpay. I think we've -- they've put in place an excellent management team. Charles Drucker is back. He's an operator. They have the funds available. They set a fairly decent set of goals that should be eminently achievable.

Got it. Got it. So let's talk about tax rate. Part of your EPS growth target includes an assumption for a step down in the tax rate going forward. Just can you -- and just a quick moment or so here. Can you help us clarify how that's coming about and what the tax optimization efforts look like that are driving it?

I've never seen so many questions about taxes from investors in my whole life.

We're trying to model it close.

I almost regret giving the lower guidance. Yes, but the context was before Worldpay, this was a 14% tax rate, large international presence, then the ability to optimize tax structures. We lost the TRAs, a portion of them, with the deal. Tax rate goes up to 17.5%. I brought in a new tax leader who's very focused on strategic tax planning, and we have 3 initiatives being run that will create a sustainable tax rate of 12% to 13%. One part is how do we structure the Worldpay transaction. Another part is our treasuries, international treasury structures. Third one is where we place acquisitions or intellectual property longer term. They're all programs that have been done by multiple companies. They are low risk. They're very advanced. If they weren't, we wouldn't have called 14.5% from a 17% and then a further step down, 12% to 13%. I think that's the kind of rate. But bear in mind, it's not that crazy because the company was at 14% in the past, but it takes work to get it done. But it's -- we're very comfortable on the position. And just one final thing. That's cash. It's real money. That's real money.

That's what we care about for sure. So speaking of real money and using that real money, just in the last couple of minutes here, James. We started the conversation talking about capital allocation and some of the things that you've been able to drive and then how some of that, including M&A, factors into your top line. But when you think about the capital return targets that you've set in terms of both buybacks and dividend payouts, how are you thinking about the need to develop and grow product capabilities via M&A and investment versus that commitment for capital return? And really, what I care and focus on is should we expect there to be any variance to the expected $1 billion in capital going towards M&A? Or is that a pretty tight target that you think you can deliver on?

Realistically, there can always be variance against a target like that. What we tried to back into was what kind of ongoing investment do you need over a multiyear period. And our message to the market was we want to balance capital allocation. Some investors were saying, give it all back to investors. Our answer was no. To sustainably generate the right terminal value for investors, we're targeting accelerating revenue growth coming from M&A. We are dogmatic though. We're not going to go out and do a big deal. Well, we had the chance with Worldpay. We want to rebuild confidence with investors and do small, highly synergistic acquisitions. And I do want to emphasize that we bought one in Europe recently, and I was visiting and they said, oh, we love being part of FIS. And I said, why? And they said, we basically can double the revenue overnight. When we were called, and I don't want to give the name of the company is, nobody would answer our calls in the U.S. or in Asia because we were unknown. And now we've rebranded the company FIS, the sales leads have skyrocketed. It's one example that these acquisitions will be highly synergistic. Internal rates of return will be incredibly high. If we don't spend it in a year, we will give it back to investors. And our commitment is our 35% dividend payout is equivalent to a 2% yield. Our peers are not paying a 2% dividend yield. Full stop. And then 2% is what we said was -- the buyback is $800 million to $1.2 billion, but that will continue to increase. Because if you hold your M&A flat, right, you're actually going to get your EBITDA growth. You're going to get more leverage and you're going to give it back to shareholders. So you can just presume that the share repurchase program continues to increase over time as we return capital to shareholders.

That's great. That's a great place to end it, punctuation mark. Thank you very much, James. I appreciate you being here today.

Yes. Thanks for your time.