Fiserv, Inc. (FISV) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

I think we're ready to go. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining us. My name is Andrew Jeffrey. I'm fintech analyst covering Fiserv, along with Chris Kennedy, who's right there. Appreciate you joining us this afternoon. I have to read a quick disclosure. Sorry about that. So I'm required to inform you that a complete list of research disclosures or potential conflicts can be found on our website, williamblair.com. So with that, happy to introduce Bob Hau, Fiserv's CFO. And I understand that this is a generalist group, and so as a consequence, I think I'm going to ask Bob some questions that kind of -- overview questions that help the audience understand what Fiserv does, what its competitive advantages are, perhaps some of the more recent debates and discussions around the shares, and delve into some of the financial characteristics and maybe the competitive nature of your business. So I'll just say as an overview, this is -- we rate the stock outperform. We like it very much on the recent pullback, which I think we understand around concerns about the growth in the company's software integrated Clover volume, which decelerated about -- a bit in the first quarter. We think this is an interim disruption and think that this company remains one of the best positioned long-term growth names within fintech at what is now a very attractive valuation. I think it's, over the years, an extremely well-run business. And I think you have a new CEO who is very well equipped to take Fiserv to the next level. And with that, Bob, maybe we can just start by -- from a very high level. Let's talk about what the business is and what you do and maybe how the revenue -- what the revenue mix looks like.

Yes. So at its highest level, I guess, we did about $19 billion of revenue last year. Grew the company organically about 16%. That company -- that revenue is really made up of 2 large segments, both about 50% of the company, so a little over $9 billion of revenue, $9.5 billion of revenue each. And one of them, we refer to as Merchant Solutions, which is where we have our merchant acquiring point-of-sale capability. And that merchant acquiring capability runs the gamut of the smallest micro merchants all the way to the largest enterprises around the globe. But it is a global business. About 75% of the revenue is in North America with the balance outside the U.S. And that segment has 3 business lines: small business, enterprise and processing. And of those 3 small businesses, the largest makes up about 2/3 of the revenue of that segment. And that is where we have our large small business activity, which includes Clover or the majority of Clover. Clover actually reaches into the enterprise as well as in the processing segment or business lines, but most of it is in the small business. Clover is our small business operating system. So it is much more than a point-of-sale device. It is hardware, software. It is an operating system for small businesses where we have a significant amount of value-added services. So in addition to processing the payments and having a high-quality point-of-sale device on the countertop for a small business, we also provide a significant number of value-added services, which I'll talk more about. The second largest business line within that Merchant Solutions segment is the enterprise business. It's about 20%, 25% of the revenue. And this is, as you might suspect, it is the merchant acquiring capability for large enterprises, roughly $10 million or larger on a GPV basis, and again, runs the gamut of that $10 million all the way up to the largest retailers on the planet. Significant capability. We have a solution that we refer to as Commerce Hub that is the way our enterprise clients consume our capabilities. Again, lots of value-added solutions that our enterprise clients can use fraud, smart routing, lots of other capabilities. And again, they access that capability through Commerce Hub. And then the third business line inside of the Merchant Solutions business is our processing business line. This is the smallest of the 3, roughly 10%, 15% of the revenue of the segment. And this is where we do kind of the pure processing. This is where our large joint ventures revenue materializes, where we are processing for joint ventures, and it is kind of the basic processing. This business line, as I said, is about 10% to 12% of the segment, and is roughly flat in revenue. It's not a segment that's growing rapidly. We're obviously seeing much stronger growth in that enterprise and small business business lines where we're providing a much broader set of solutions than payment processing. The other large segment, Financial Solutions, the second of the 2 segments. Again, about $9.5 billion. Also has 3 business lines embedded in it. Financial Solutions is where we have the products and solutions for financial institutions, banks and credit unions around the globe. It is about 95% U.S. or North America, with about 5% international, so much smaller internationally. And if you think about financial institutions, financial institutions in the U.S. are much different than outside the U.S. So it's much more of a U.S. market for us, although we do see some nice opportunity, which I'll talk about in a minute, around international capabilities there. Within those -- that segment, we have 3 business lines. The first and largest one is what we refer to as digital payments. It is about 40% of the revenue of that segment. And this is where all of our payment capabilities are: account-to-account, person-to-person transfers. This is where our CheckFree bill pay solution is. It's where CashFlow Central, our brand-new product that we just rolled out in first quarter, will see its revenue. And this is payment capabilities that we offer to credit unions and financial institutions, from the smallest credit union all the way to some of the largest financial institutions in the globe. Our second largest business line within the Financial Solutions segment is our issuer business. This is about 30%, 35% of the segment. And this is where we have our credit issuing capability. We are the #1 provider of credit issuing capability across the globe. It is a global business. And we go to market with Optus here in the U.S. and with FirstVision outside the U.S. Industry-leading market share positions, both domestically and internationally, growing very nicely. In the last couple of investor conferences or investor days, we've had about the Financial Solutions or overall company, we've talked about significant number of wins. Back in December of '20, we talked about $120 million worth of new wins that was going to be implemented in this issuer business. Then in November of 2023, we talked about another $120 million worth of new wins. And all of those back from December '20 have long since been implemented. And we're actually still implementing some of those large wins from 2023. First quarter, we implemented Target. They moved their RedCard program over to Optus. We are in process of launching a solution for Verizon where they are offering point-of-sale loan capabilities. That will go live late this year. The other large one we talked about is Desjardins, which is the largest credit union consortium up in Canada, that will go live next year. So some nice wins in that space, continued growth in that space. And then the third business line of the 3 within the Financial Solutions segment is our banking business line. This is about 10%, 15% -- excuse me, about 25% of the company of that segment, and is where we have our core account processing. This is the general ledger of a financial institution. It is also where we see the revenue from our digital banking, mobile and online banking solutions, materialize in that segment. About 30%, 35%, 40% market share, depending on which core system you're looking at. Good capabilities across core for credit unions and for banks. And new product we call XD or Experience Digital, which is our new mobile and online banking solution that is in the process of being implemented, actually across hundreds of financial institutions that have signed up, and we're now implementing in that space. So great opportunities. One of the unique characteristics we think of Fiserv is we have a very strong, growing Financial Solutions segment, we have a very strong growing Merchant Solutions segment. In the intersection of those where banking meets commerce is unique to Fiserv. We think we're the only ones that have that capability. And we are finding that, that is becoming more and more important as banks look to do more payment capability and as businesses look to have more banking capability. It shows up as embedded finance. And we've talked recently, probably the last year or so, quite extensively about embedded finance. Last year, we won the business from DoorDash, obviously, creating embedded finance capabilities for them, essentially creating banking capabilities for their Dashers. We've got a couple of million Dashers that now have accounts. As you may or may not know, Dashers get paid instantly when they deliver. So each and every delivery, they're actually getting paid, and our system helps process all of that for DoorDash. And again, in November of '23 at our last investor conference, we talked about the embedded finance capability we have with Walmart. Walmart actually owns a bank, One Financial, and they bring a significant amount of embedded finance capability to both their employees and their clients -- their consumers. And so that intersection of commerce and banking continues to be an important space and one that we think we are uniquely positioned to be able to deliver on.

It's a great overview. I'd like to dig down into the platform characteristics of those 2 businesses in a minute, but I think it probably bears talking a couple minutes about just sort of the difference in the mix, especially in Merchant. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how much of the volume in Merchant is enterprise and what enterprise yield looks like, versus how much of the volume is SMB, and maybe talk about why that SMB space is so important for the long-term above-average organic revenue growth that Merchant has been able to put up versus the rest of the industry.

Yes. I think maybe I'll take a step back, 2 important elements. I talked about the revenue size, SMB, small business being about 2/3 of the revenue, our enterprise business being about 25% of the revenue of that segment. Two important different revenue characteristics. On the enterprise space, our revenue is largely driven by transactions. And in the small business space, it's driven by volume. So if you walk into a large enterprise and use your credit card to make a purchase, we're getting a revenue stream off of that, whether that's a $100 purchase or a $500 purchase. It's the transaction that drives that revenue for us on the enterprise space. On small business, it's driven by volume. That $500 transaction is more revenue to us than a $100 transaction. And in both cases, volume and/or transactions are important. It is an indication of the growth of the company. But it is one element, it is one KPI and is one revenue driver. In both cases, we run significant amounts of value-added service, additional capability beyond just that debit card or credit card swipe, and bringing lots of additional services to both the enterprise and small business clients. And so as we grow that capability, the specific transaction or volume numbers actually becomes a smaller piece of the overall revenue. Still important, no doubt about it. But as you've heard us talk about Clover, we've seen the value-added service penetration, the percent of Clover revenue that is driven by value-added services, grow pretty meaningfully. Last year -- excuse me, at the end of 2023, we were about 19%. Last year, we reached 22%. First quarter, we're at 24%, with the goal of being at 25% this year and 27% next year. So yes, those transactions or volumes matter. And the more clients we have, the more merchants we have, the more transactions we get, the more opportunity you have to sell value-added services. And we're continuing to focus on getting more volume, but also getting what we sometimes refer to as high-value volume, volume where we are able to bring additional capability beyond that payment capability to those small businesses or large enterprises.

Right. So we should probably think about that business, Merchant as being lots of volume for scale from enterprise merchants at low yield, less volume, but a much higher yield, hence, higher revenue contribution from smaller merchants. And then if we can drill down specifically into Clover, which is about 1/3 of your Merchant segment revenue today, can you describe sort of why this software integrated or operating system for small merchants is so important? Because I think in Merchant, merchant processing has evolved competitively quite a bit over the last decade such that those companies that have these capabilities for small businesses have a real advantage, whereas more sort of traditional, whether it's channel-based processing or simply just the sort of dumb terminal on the countertop, Verifone or Ingeneco terminal had really lost economic share. So I think if you just walk through sort of the -- amplify the importance of Clover to the sustainability of growth too within that Merchant business.

Yes. So I think there's a couple of key aspects of the merchant acquiring business for us. And it is that full operating system capability. If you rewind a decade ago, 12, 14 years ago, First Data, which we merged with back 6 years ago now, was a payment processor. And over the years, they've continued to work on building out additional capability. They invested, they acquired Clover 15 years ago and have been building that out since. The capability to bring that operating system, whether it's Clover, whether it's for a small business or whether it's Commerce Hub for the enterprise clients does a couple of things. One, it diversifies your revenue. It's not just about that transaction. It's also about bringing full capability to that business. That enables you to generate meaningfully more revenue than just the transaction. It also allows you to balance economic times a little bit more. If volume slows down a little bit, I still have lots of other value-added services that are being consumed because the small business or the enterprise is still running their business and they need our capability to run that business. It also reduces attrition or makes the product much stickier. You become a much bigger part of how that business is running. If you are merely providing a terminal on a counter in payment processing to swap that out is a much easier undertaking. If you've become a full operating system and embedded in how they are running their store, whether it's a nail salon that were providing appointments, whether it's a restaurant where you've got menu capability, back of office, back kitchen capabilities, et cetera, et cetera, it's a much more in-depth relationship and it makes it a stickier relationship and a better ARPU. Average revenue per unit or per client is something that we're constantly striving to increase in different products, different verticals within the Clover solution. Different value-added services allow you to increase that average revenue per merchant per client.

Yes. And we've seen Clover's yield go up very nicely as a consequence of rising value-added services attached. Just to level-set, you're still thinking that the company can generate $3.5 billion of Clover revenue this year, $4.5 billion of Clover revenue next year. Without getting too sort of deep in the weeds, maybe we can save some of that for the breakout, can you talk about sort of the algorithm for Clover revenue growth? It's been growing revenue very impressively in the high 20s. There was a little bit of a slowdown in volume in 1Q, no slowdown in revenue, you put up a 27% revenue growth number in 1Q. Can you just kind of talk about how we get to the $3.5 billion this year and $4.5 billion next year just from a volume versus revenue growth perspective?

Yes. So I think, one, we laid out back in March of 2022 an objective, a goal of forecast to deliver $3.5 billion of revenue for Clover. That was back when we were about $2 billion. Fast forward, we closed out last year 2024 at $2.7 billion, grew the company -- excuse me, grew Clover revenue about 29%, and we'll need to deliver another 29% to get to the $3.5 billion. And we're right on track. We did 27% in the second quarter -- excuse me, in the first quarter against a very difficult -- or a more difficult compare in first quarter of last year. You've talked about volume a couple of times. We reported 8% volume growth, and we've had a lot of questions around the spread between revenue growth and volume growth, 8 points of volume, 27% on revenue. That's the benefit of hardware, software, other value-added solutions, capital that we provide, and we'll continue to grow that. So as we continue to grow more value-added services, you'll see that spread continue to improve. And that's certainly one of the goals. That 8% is viewed, if you look on a reported basis, as a decel or a decline sequentially from fourth quarter from last year. And we've talked extensively about the gateway conversion that we did in 2024 -- late '23, early '24, that caused about a 2-point headwind on that 8 points. So that 8%, if you adjust for the gateway, low double digits, consistent with what we saw last year. And that gateway conversion really didn't bring much revenue. It was a strategy to eliminate one gateway that we had in the company, was a third-party gateway that we were white labeling that became quite costly and a bit problematic. And so we made the decision to move away from that gateway. And once you make that decision to leave a gateway, you've got to figure out where you're going to move those clients. Obviously, Clover is our go-forward gateway. And so we moved clients to the Clover. That drove some volume last year that ebbed in first quarter of this year. So again, if you adjust, we're at low double digits, right in line with what we expected and right in line with what we need to deliver the $3.5 billion for this year. And then, of course, to go to $4.5 billion in 2027, it's another high 20 -- excuse me, $4.5 billion in 2026, is another high 20% growth rate. That's continued good volume. It's continued value-added service capability. It's continuing to grow out our international presence. As you may have heard in the first quarter, we announced that we've added 5 new countries to the Clover portfolio. So we're now in 13 countries across the globe. We also launched a new restaurant capability called Clover Hospitality, that is a product solution, an operating system for a very large white tablecloth restaurants. And so we've seen a lot of new products being rolled out, whether it's vertical software specific to, in this case, large restaurants, whether it's horizontal software, whether it's our partnerships and distribution capability. We announced last -- late last year a partnership with ADP, where we are essentially cross-selling or referring each other's clients and selling each other's capabilities. So we have a lot of different items that will drive the growth that gives us confidence to deliver that $3.5 billion this year and $4.5 billion next year.

Before we move on to Financial Solutions, which I think in some ways gets short trip from investors considering it's more than half of your EBIT. I think I'd be remiss not to ask about the performance within your enterprise e-comm and international businesses in Merchant. Because I think those businesses have grown faster than I would have thought had you asked me 2 years ago. And that's a very competitive part of the market. So I wonder if you can just sort of touch a little bit on why you win in those areas.

Yes. And it's investment in new products and capabilities we're bringing to market. So in our enterprise space, I've mentioned a couple of times Commerce Hub, which is the API-driven solution that allows large enterprises to consume our capability. And as we bring new value-added services to market, as we make it more integrated and easier to consume, as we build out more solutions for those enterprise clients, we're able to sell more. We are a global enterprise capability. And when you look at large enterprises, they want to be able to operate globally. They don't want a solution in the U.S. and a different solution in Latin America and a different solution in Europe. And so as we add more and more capabilities, we're able to build out that solution. And we're seeing very good interest and good uptick in our enterprise clients evaluating and then signing up for Commerce Hub and then consuming products through that solution.

Okay. And to frame it all up, Merchant is a business that, in the medium term, should grow organic revenue 12% to 15%, right? Versus what Visa and Mastercard say is about 9% global card growth. So that's better than peers and better than the sort of benchmark performance in the industry, which is one of the reasons we like the stock so much.

That's right.

Turning to Financial Solutions. You described the 3 businesses nicely. I think one of the interesting things, and maybe it's changed in market perception, I feel it's changed at least in my perception, that business historically didn't grow very fast, right? I mean I know you've consolidated sort of the 2 reporting segments into one. But it appears, and you mentioned some wins, that the organic revenue growth in that business is accelerating. And I want to get to that and the ability to sell the SMB bundle with CashFlow Central. But that business, I think, increasingly is being appreciated is having a wider moat and a more defensive competitive position. Would you agree with that? And maybe talk a little bit about high switching costs and why you win and why that business, even if it doesn't grow as fast as Merchant, is a really attractive economics business.

Yes. So this is a business that we expect to grow 6% to 8% this year. We did 6% last year against the guide of 5% to 7% for 2024. That's against a business that was mid-single digits, if you were generous, in prior years, going back 3 or 4 years. And we would do 4%, 5% if we had a good quarter, a good year. And what's happened over the years is, number one, we continue to invest and bring new capabilities into that segment. And we've seen an expansion of the market for us. So if you rewind, I've been with Fiserv for a little more than 9 years, if you had talked to me 8, 9 years ago, I would have told you that the sweet spot of our banking, our Financial Solutions business, was kind of the $5 billion to $10 billion asset sized bank. And we had a very strong product offering for that sized bank. We could go below that most definitely, and we could go above it, but that was the sweet spot of the business. Fast forward to today, and we go much larger than that. We have clients that are $100 billion or larger. And that's with the core banking solution. And over the years, we see more and more opportunity to sell core, but also the surrounds around it. Core is essentially the general ledger of a financial institution. And then we build out additional capabilities or sell additional products and services to those financial institutions. If you think broad strokes, for every dollar that we get from a core client, from that general ledger client, we get about $3 of additional services. And again, rewind 8, 9 years ago, it was all about selling core, building the first relationship with a bank or a credit union by selling core and then, over the years, selling more and more services. Today we start relationships with financial institutions in a lot of different ways. It could be credit processing. It could be debit processing. It could be CashFlow Central, which is a new product we've just launched. And so we have different entree points that you might have a bank that we're doing debit processing and add core to it, which was kind of unheard of many years ago. And we continue to invest. CashFlow Central, a brand-new product, getting very significant interest across our client base. The fact that we have a large merchant business, one of our more significant distribution channels is financial institutions. And if you think about kind of one of the most important client bases of financial institution, is their small business client base. And so for them to be able to offer Merchant Solutions, something like Clover, to those small businesses, A, it's a revenue driver for them because they get a share of our revenue if they have a referral arrangement with us, and number two, it deepens that relationship with that small business. And so not only are we bringing more and more Financial Solutions capability to them, but we're also bringing a broader capability that deepens that relationship. So we've seen that sale -- excuse me, that revenue -- organic revenue growth accelerate a bit from 3% to 4% to 6% last year, and we expect to be 6% to 8% this year.

Okay. Yes. And CashFlow Central is a small business, bill pay and cash flow management business, which is...

AR/AP solution for small businesses.

Which is an extremely important capability. And I think you touched on it or alluded to it, it's converting what historically has probably been a cost center for banks in terms of bill pay, into a revenue generation capability, and bundled with Clover, that's, as you said, a really nice sell-through. And you got 1,000 bank partners, is that right?

That's correct. On the Merchant side, correct.

So we just have a couple more minutes. Maybe if you could just offer a high-level medium-term outlook for organic revenue growth, EBIT margin expansion, EPS growth. Mentioning this should be the 40th consecutive year of double-digit EPS growth, which is no small feat. I guess you get credit for about 1/4 of that. And maybe capital allocation.

Yes. So we talked a little bit, we expect the -- excuse me, the total company to grow 10% to 12% this year. This will be the fourth year in a row of 11% or better growth if we hit the midpoint of that. So we've been in double digits for the last several years. For the company, that's quite an acceleration. If you go back to the merger in mid-2019, we took about a $5.5 billion business that was growing 3%, 4% a year. Combined it with a $9 billion business that was growing 6%, 7% a year. And now have a business that's growing double digits. And we see some continued opportunity. We continue to invest. The number of products that we have launching last year to this year is higher than I've seen in my 9 years with the company, and so we have continued great opportunity. We have a long track record of margin expansion. I like to talk about the virtuous cycle of growth for Fiserv. We invest for organic growth. We bring new products and solutions to our client base. That allows us to bring incremental revenue in a very scaled business. So that revenue comes to the company at better than company average margin. We're able to take some of that the expanded margin, reinvest it back into the company to provide more growth, and let some of it drop to the bottom line and you see margin expansion. Since we merged in 2019, we've expanded margins almost 1,000 basis points, 970 basis points as of the end of last year. We have an outlook for 125 basis points, at least 125 basis points, margin expansion this year. And that is driven by, again, that virtuous cycle of growth and the way we operate the company and continue to reinvest for growth. And then from a quick capital deployment standpoint, we have a very long-standing, rigorous capital deployment. We reinvest for organic growth, number one priority. We do about $1.5 billion in capital. A lot of that is software capital. We expect to do that, we've done it the last couple of years, we expect that to be about the right level of investment. We look for inorganic opportunities and where we have the opportunity to bring value-accretive -- shareholder value-accretive solutions into the company through acquisitions, we'll absolutely do that. We have a long track record of great execution on acquisitions. We were relatively quiet for the last couple of years. We did 3 in the first half of -- the first quarter. All pretty small though. I think a total of, order of magnitude, $350 million of spend. And we like those smaller acquisitions that we can bring a capability into the company and push it through our scaled distribution model. And then we return cash back to shareholders. So organic investment, inorganic M&A and return cash back to shareholders. A long track record of share repurchase on a very consistent quarterly basis, and continue to do that.

Awesome. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

So we're going to Maher for our breakout session.