Fiserv, Inc. ($FISV)

Why don't we get the ball rolling here in the first session of the afternoon. First of all, again, thank you all for joining us on day 2 of the Wolfe FinTech Forum. Really happy to have everybody here. It's been a really intense -- an interesting couple of days so far, a lot of thematic discussions around not just idiosyncratic company dynamics, but obviously, a lot of top-down topics around banks and consolidation, obviously, AI and geopolitics. But we have a company here with Fiserv, and we're really happy to have you guys here that really covers almost all of fintech in many ways. And so we have a lot to talk about here. We have both the CEO, Mike Lyons; and the CFO, Paul Todd. Guys, I'm really happy to have you here. Thank you for joining us.

No, thank you for having us. First time for me.

Yes. So why don't we just take a step back, I mean, the company has gone through a meaningful reset over the past year. If you could just talk about, first, the confidence that the company has that you've really reviewed everything you feel you needed to review and you're on good footing structurally as far as the story goes long term?

Yes. I think if you go back, when we talked about it, what we did last -- late last summer and through the fall leading up to the announcement in the third quarter, which is a pretty extensive, rigorous review of the company. We covered everything, ops, tech, business strategy, business mix, risk management, talent, all parts of the company. We included a series of outside advisers to help us, and we brought our Board of Directors along for that full ride and the conclusions that came out of it. We learned a lot, obviously, about the company, especially being new. And then the conclusions that came out of it. First, while we identified some competitive and customer service gaps that we're now addressing. We found 2 incredible businesses, incredible platforms, leadership positions, incredible data, incredible scale, breadth, relationships that those are great businesses with incredible tech being developed around them, that was great at the core. And by and large, the strategy the company was in good shape, but we had some gaps to address there. Second big thing we found was we had to shift some of our priorities and focus to go to long-term sustainable client-driven revenues. Third, we saw an opportunity to enhance talent as we think about modern payments and modern financial solutions and redo our Board. Both of those are done. And then the final piece, obviously, is we saw that we had to reset our growth expectations taking into account the stuff I talked about and what was going on cyclically, we had a couple of years where we benefited from outside cyclical growth in some of our markets. And so we had to reset expectations there relative to where we were and make a clear commitment to explain when growth drivers come through in our business. We'll tell you what's cyclical and what's structural. And you get through that, 100% of our focus is now on execution against the One Fiserv action plan, which we call it, which has 5 pillars against it. We're making good progress on those. We haven't -- as we've progressed since late last fall, we haven't found any new surprises. Q4 was no new surprises and no new surprises so far in the first quarter. We know where the gaps are. We have a bunch of effort focused against the gaps, and there aren't any unknowns that we've identified so far. It doesn't mean our problems are behind us and the fact that you know them and address them, put capital against them and they're just gone, it means that we're putting capital resources, focus and a big sense of urgency around filling those. I think Paul always reminds me in true health of the business and whether it's not structural growth or not the underlying volumes remain the underlying volumes. All that's moved is the revenues against to weaker than we hoped in the core banking space, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But otherwise, volumes are healthy across the company. It's a good sign of it. And so the large part of it, I think I guess -- I get asked this question a lot of how do you know this is right and I remind the team and our clients a lot that you look back at the history of the 2 companies, you go back, First Data and Fiserv as independent companies, they grew for 20 years between 1% and 6% never higher than 6%, never below 1%. You get to 2020, the company grows 0, obviously, pretty impressive in light of where COVID is, 2021, company is 11%. The world takes the COVID average, if you will, of 2020 and 2021, you're at 5.5%, that fits in the range. We get some lingering U.S. inflation benefit in '22, and then you get -- we get this significant outsized growth from our business in Argentina, all good in '23 and '24. That dissipates in '25, mixing some episodic revenues in '25, we do 4%, which is in the 1% to 6% range. We guide to 1% to 3% for this year, and we said there's some comparability, especially in the first half of the year. So if you look at what we are today, it's the same thing that we were for a really long time, and we have all the elements still of being a constant compounder, and that's the investment case that we've presented to investors. So yes, do we have work to do? Of course, but there's a -- what's here is here and it's always been here.

So what do you -- what is your focus right now? And what do you want investors to measure you on from a milestone standpoint over the next 12 months, let's call it?

100% the focus on executing against the One Fiserv action plan. Not everybody knows that I do it every day, and we don't do anything in the company unless you can indicate which pillar of the 5 that you're doing something under. Just as a reminder, the first is to reset the company around the client-first mindset. That means great service. It means resilient, strong technology, means great value-added services to our customers. We've got tons of efforts going on around that. Second major thing is continued build-out of what we think is the best small business operating platform in Clover, which has tremendous potential. It's got a series of investments underlying. The third piece is to continue with the great innovation that the company has. There are a number of products that we had massive pipelines for that needed to be appropriately resourced and managed to get to market. We're on track with those plus a bunch of new technology innovations, whether it be our stablecoin platform, our Vision Next card platform or the acquisition that we just did in December with StoneCastle to create a cash optimization network that can bind 2 businesses. Fourth is Project Elevate. It's an efficiency plan, a simplicity plan. We're going after it aggressively right now. We're coming up on our first milestone. Paul's running that effort and we think there will be an easier company to do business -- with an easier company to do business inside of and we'll be more productive as a result. And the final piece is just around what we talked about with capital allocation. And in there, it's -- are we -- a big part of capital allocation for us isn't just, do you buy back stock or do what you do? It's do we appropriately allocate our free cash flow, which remains very strong in the budgeting process to what's most important to the company and some other stuff didn't get it, take some of the socialism aspects of spreading it out aspects out of there. Second is are we getting the right focus, pulling out stuff from our capital planning that's distracting and we've got some work ongoing there. And then the final piece is maintaining a very strong balance sheet, which we judge by the investment grade. We're going to highlight some of the -- on the metric front, that [indiscernible], we're going to highlight some key metrics when we do the Investor Day in May. But I wouldn't -- there's nothing that's going to be not intuitive, right? Are you -- are we resetting around the client. Is client satisfaction good? Is retention good? Are we doing the development on Clover? Is the front door wide open and the back door is closed? And so it would be very intuitive, are we hitting our milestones that we're supposed to hit on delivering the key projects we're delivering, are we more productive. So it will be very intuitive, no major surprises.

It sounds like you've reviewed the business. You feel pretty good about what you have found and really you've decided to invest in at this point?

With unbelievable franchise. Just we are going to -- we are focused on executing against and we've got to fill these gaps, but it's unbelievable franchise.

When we -- speaking of that, I mean, are there assets here that you don't think are necessary to be as part of the -- any divestitures we should think about potentially?

We've talked about on the last -- we talked about in October and we talked about it on the last call, there was a series of businesses. They're not significant. It's in the hundreds of millions. We talked about in revenue that when you take a really hard look at where you should allocate capital, they don't get allocated capital either because customers don't want them or they're not competitive and they don't fit within our franchise. So we are selling those assets, and we said we keep you updated as that goes. But it's not a major, it's a couple of hundred million in revenue.

So look, that's -- so those are relatively, like you said, a couple of hundred million in revenues. And I imagine some of those are throughout the financial side more than the payment side of the market.

So it's the mix, yes. Not biased one or the other.

Okay. Okay. But it begs the question on a bigger picture then of just keeping the business together. I mean it's incredible when you look back at some of the largest payments and fintech deals in the last 7, 8 years, really, Fiserv was the only 1 left that maintained First Data and Fiserv together, whereas obviously, GPN and TSYS are no longer back to the FIS and Worldpay. So just help me understand the thought process of whether it makes sense. Does it still make sense to keep them? Is there really synergies between the 2 assets? And it's more than 2 assets, but between 2 businesses, I guess?

Yes. I think back to your earlier question, we took a hard -- when we did the review in the fall, we took a hard look at every part of the company, including the structure of the company and the strategy of the company. And we've re-underwritten at many times since, and we answered this question a lot. But everything -- from everything that we can see, there's far more synergies, some real today and some where we have tremendous option value in both strategic and financial synergies of having the 2 businesses together than having them apart. And again, some of these synergies are absolutely real today. You think about distribution by natively embedding our Clover products and merchant products and small business payment products, CashFlow Central into bank -- into the bank's platforms, we gain a massive distribution partner that's unmatched in the industry. We help them position themselves and we deepen the relationship. And that's what the company had always talked about this virtuous cycle of -- by adding value to them. There's opportunities to go back to us so distribution's a huge one. Data is a huge one, and it's getting even more powerful with what the tools around AI can do and the agents are available to us. But forming a 360-view of an individual increases off rates, reduces fraud rates, allows CRM to come through better, cross-sell that comes through better for the banks. It's -- we can do new things we've never done before. But that data, having all that data from both the merchant and financial side, a huge asset to us. Pay by Bank, we think is a great opportunity going forward. The networks we sell to both merchants and banks, stablecoin, we think, is super interesting on that front. And then we love what we've done on the StoneCastle front, which is create a cash network, if you will, we have a whole bunch of merchants with [ idle ] Cash. We bought the technology and formed the technology that they can deposit that into our banks and an FDIC product seamlessly. These are all things that immediately come together through the businesses. All that said, we're not the architects of this. Everybody -- most of the leadership team is new. And if the synergies don't materialize, we'll obviously do the -- [ we'll figure out ].

Yes. I mean, it definitely sounds like there's a real cross-sell opportunity. We've always talked about go-to-market and distribution and your bank partnerships as a huge opportunity for SMB from the merchant or from the payment side. So where are -- I mean, in terms of actually maximizing that and cross-selling and delivering on that, are we still moving forward in that direction in the pace that you want to?

Yes. And just one final thought on the prior question was we talked about this in one of our meetings earlier. We don't -- we're not letting ourselves say that our business model has been tried and failed because no one has ever put banking, issuing large merchant and SMB merchant together. One peer tried banking and large merchant and another peer tried issuing a large merchant, but nobody's ever put it all together. So we're going to do a lot more work and a lot more testing and a lot more interaction with our clients before we say, okay, somebody else tried it and doesn't work for us. And amidst all those opportunities -- so I think all the things I talked about are real synergies today. They're working -- we have 1,000 bank partnerships. They're not all producing at the same level, our best ones are. So there's lots of opportunity to deepen further synergies around those. And then there are things that we're barely scratching the service of -- I think the single biggest synergy opportunity in our business, and the company has had this view for a long time is the embedded finance space, where we have a couple of customers today. But if more merchants, which we think is -- will play out, decide to provide more financial services products, people are defining this TAM in the $100 billion to $200 billion range with double digit -- strong double-digit growth. And nobody else has the assets in the world that we have to execute on it. And so why would you give up that option value at this page? And you see the pace and the change of how payments is evolving, and we've got a great position there. So we're going to run this out. We're going to do it. But again, if it doesn't work, these assets or -- if the answers is these assets are individually great and not greater together, then we'll address that as appropriate.

You guys have probably among the largest views of the consumer in the country and even more. Just we saw the index, the SMB, the Fiserv SMB and Next come out. I think it was up 1.2%. So it accelerated a bit from the 0.7% in January even despite weather actually. Just help us understand what you're seeing in terms of overall spend across retail, restaurant, enterprise. You see daily data, I believe, or at least weekly?

Yes and we give it to you monthly in the second day of the month and think of that gives a leading indicator to lots of other lagging data that you get out there, so we're proud of the index. Not all that different from what you're hearing about what we talk about -- some people talk about the K-economy, we talk about cautious but still strong consumer. They have a job. They're still spending, but we're seeing real changes in the spending habits, particularly if you exclude inflation and look at real discretionary spend has been down for 12 months in a row. And that's in -- you can get it all in the FSBI index and watch that inflation. It bounces around and you got to -- a central spend has been much more durable, much more reliable. And you continue to see behaviors in there where higher income customers appreciating assets, benefit a little bit on the inflation side versus less assets hurt by inflation on the K side of the -- on the lower side of the K-economy. So we call it a cautiously strong consumer. Obviously, employment is a big key to it.

All right. And again, from a subsegment standpoint, any variances in terms of what you're seeing from a sector?

No. I mean think discretionary weaker, essentials stronger, and you can bucket that appropriately in there.

With your 10% to 15% Clover volume guide, and this goes a little more specific to you guys now, what assumptions are embedded around macro and same-store sales when we think about coming off what we're seeing right now on the macro front?

Yes, you want to go?

Yes. Well, we said on the call that we expected a stable macro just to start off with. And so that embeds the macro picture that we assumed and then as it relates to same-store sales and what that looks like, we talked about on the call, both December and January and what we saw there from a growth standpoint. And the return to growth that we saw in that period. And that gives us a good launching point as it relates to where that double digit then looks because we're basically run rating at that coming into the year. And then obviously, we look at the book and go through all the analytics around what we anticipate and our run rate supports that basically growth outlook. So that's how we approached it.

No major changes, and the 10% to 15% excludes the gateway conversion we talked about and 10% is the number we said -- it's obviously been the number we've been growing at ex the gateway -- is the base, no major changes. And then the upper end of it is only if you could get -- we gave as a long-term view. That's only if you're able to start converting on Clover into Clover. It's not an organic growth rate at the top.

Okay. All right. That's helpful. When we think about guidance for a moment, Paul, 1% to 3% was where you guys called for the year in terms of overall growth. And from what you've explained, I know the low end is really just honestly, easier comps to some degree, right, that should get you there. So it's not a very high bar to reach the low end, but to achieve the higher end, I think you need a lot of -- some of the newer initiatives to really kick in, if I'm not mistaken, right? Commerce Hub, CashFlow Central which we've been excited about for some time to take hold in a bigger way. Maybe just touch on, again, the assumptions on your full year for a moment, the range of outcomes and then also the cadence because I know you talked a little more about the first half and the second half having some differences the way the trajectory works out for the year.

Yes. So a couple of things there. First, as we said on the call that we do expect the 1% to 3% for the full year. And that basically does assume on the lower side, that it's more business as usual or more run rate. I mean there's clearly execution to deliver that, but we certainly have that as a much more achievable goal. And on the top -- and as you said, Darrin, it requires us to have some good execution on the initiatives, many of which are already underway, but to have those deliver in a robust way. And I would just say, we set our guidance, the midpoint of the guidance, we expect to be for the full year. The cadence is more dramatic this year than it would be in normal years. We -- because of the comparative challenges that we have in the first half, we expect to be down in the low single digits, which we define as down 1% to 3% for the first half. And we have also said that we expect more pressure on the growth rate on the FS side versus the MS side just due to those comparative challenges. As Mike said earlier, it's not a volume picture difference. It's just really more of a math kind of comparative challenge there. And so that would be the differential between the bottom end and the top end and the cadence between the first half and the back half. I would just make one other comment as it relates to margin because we also have a first half, second half dynamic as it relates to margin because of our investments that we're making in the business, which are largely baked in, we still have a step change to make in the first quarter. The marginal change in the business is first quarter, which we called out on the call was we expect to be below 30%, right below 30% margin. First half, 31% to 32% is our expectation. And then the 35% to 36% being a much more run rate margin for us, which is what we expect in the back half, which blends to roughly the 34% that we talked about on the call.

Okay. That's really helpful.

So there's a lot of detail. And the story is we reset the strategy in the third quarter. So the third quarter will be the first comparable quarter, strategy to strategy. And in the midst of that, we're doing a lot of work on the franchise that we think makes sense to do for the long term. And I think did -- I want to get here this way, but this opportunity has given us, especially at the pace of change we're seeing and the level of client demand we're seeing around new technology and the like. It is a great opportunity for us to -- as we -- there was a bad reset, but revital -- where we try to use it in a revitalizing way. And first half of the year is a bit of a mess. And then we -- with a lot of noise...

Right, all those comps and dynamics there, yes.

Yes. But I think if you go back to the -- point I made is, and we hope to talk about this in the Investor Day and show the path to it is we still have all the underlying characteristics of a constant compounder that the companies have forever. It just -- you got to get rid of the noise to be able to see that come through in the back half of the year, but all those elements are there, cash flow conversion, natural organic leverage, ability to buy back stock and grow revenues in the mid-single digits and just Paul is telling you a path of how to get there.

Didn't you also back out those some of that noise -- speaking of backing of the noise, you guided to a level that you know is absolutely sustainable because you took out a lot of that noise. But realistically, whether it's...

Comping against the noise, it's the noise...

Right. But I'm saying you still have -- there's going to be data sales. There's going to be hardware sales, there's going to be data licensing -- or licensing sales at times. Some of that potential upside to the 1% to 3%? Or is that actually just in there and it's maybe counted on less?

Yes, I wouldn't count it as upside. I mean that is, as you say, Darrin, there's a part of our business that encompasses those things. But we factor that in when we build our guidance. And so I wouldn't call it necessarily upside.

Okay. Can we talk about the investments you're making because it was a $675 million number that was implied at least of incremental OpEx. It's a fairly sizable impact on margins, obviously, as you reset the margin and I think a lot of questions we get is, is this the new norm that you have to invest in to keep the story going or is this just more of a rebase or reset to get -- to invigorate the business?

Yes, it's a really good question there, and we do get this a lot is, is this just the beginning of more kind of incremental steps of investment. And the answer to that is no. We've made largely the investments that we need to make. And they're on the people side and they're on the technology side. It goes back to what Mike talked about on One Fiserv to support the initiatives of One Fiserv. We needed to make some additional OpEx expenses and -- with the exception of, as I said, this one more step that we need to make in the first quarter, as we get to the back half of the year, we're in a much more normalized expense growth picture in the back half of the year, certainly as the baseline to move forward into 2027. So there is another wave of additional OpEx that we'd be layering into the business to do what we need to do or CapEx for that matter.

Okay. When we shift back to Clover for a minute, obviously, it's such an important asset for you guys. And we think about the algorithm for growth for it, you're talking about this 10% to 15% range. How do we think about the components of it, whether it's same-store sales versus new merchants versus international? And then I also want to bring in the back book conversion. So just walk us through the bridge to get there.

Yes. The -- we haven't specifically gone into the front book -- not front book, but front door, back door numbers, we'll give some more color around that at Investor Day. I think it's -- we've talked about the growth vectors along horizontal investments. Those are -- are we helping our businesses do certain parts of inventory management, employee management, home-based partnership, vertical investments, we launched the health care vertical in the first quarter, launched professional services in the first quarter to complement retail and restaurants, international investments and launches, and we talked about Japan, we've got the TD partnership in Canada. You got [ stuff going ] on in Brazil. We've talked about a whole reimagination of the experience of Clover on the backside of it, and I'll come back to that in a second. And the final piece is continuing to invest across the distribution channels, build more banks, build more ISOs, build more direct sales. And all that is tracking well. As Paul said, there's a significant investment around that to get to the place where we get to. On some -- on the metrics you specifically mentioned, we obviously track them. We feel very good about the front door, and we think we have some opportunities to enhance net growth, GPV growth, by improving the experience, and that's that fourth part of that investment there. So we'll give you a same-store's fine, front door is good, and then we can do a better job. It's nothing bad on the back door, but it's -- by fixing certain parts of the experience, we think we can raise overall growth and support the numbers that we gave you. So that's the way to think about. Obviously, more U.S. than is international, but international is starting to be a real meaningful part of the story.

That's some great success in Canada.

Great success in Canada. We're just get going on TD and Brazil has been great. Australia has been fine. We're missing a great partner there. And then yes, we're excited about the partner we have -- 2 partners we have in Japan with Visa and SMCC, and that will go out later this year. So more U.S. than international, but one is growing much faster rate than the other, and we're getting good -- and we still have -- it was quieter, but we launched a partnership with UniCredit. It was a tremendous bank in Europe in Austria last year. We have a potential to expand that. And then we're taking a hard look at some of the partner -- AIB has always been a great partnership, but we think we have good upside in our partnerships with Deutsche and Lloyds. And so it's -- the international pieces feel good.

Okay. So our trends year-to-date, what you hope to see so far in terms of Clover's traction?

Yes. We have no -- nothing new to say on any of the trends from the fourth quarter, everything is exactly as we presented it.

Okay. Core banking, obviously, is an area that you've shown relatively flattish type results on the fintech banking side for a couple of quarters for a few quarters, right? And it's an area that we'd like to see grow a few percent, but I know you're going through a consolidation in cores to some degree, but help understand the strategy there, what you're really aiming to achieve and the timeline around it.

Yes. We are not going through a consolidation of cores. There was a consolidation of cores that began a number of years ago, that -- I'll step back broadly, we love our core business. We love the banking business broadly. Core is just a part of it. Banks do a lot of stuff with us and they're looking to do more and more stuff in the market. We're proud of the long tail of banks and credit unions that we support in the U.S. We're not happy with recent performance. How do we get here? We got here, we had a strategy to consolidate cores, which got mixed with a declining service experience that our customers reported back to us now and some mixed performance around resilience in some of our tools. Those are all known knowns and we're addressing all of them, if you go to Pillar 1 of the One Fiserv action plan and you go to some of the investments Paul talked about, we know exactly what these are. They're not related to the quality of our core technology. We only hear good things about that, where we have lost and -- suffered losses has been on the service side, on the smaller end. So we're fixing service hard and that some of that is just more day-to-day people on site with our banks and supporting them. It's better value-added services from the tools they bought us, so they're fully utilizing them. And then it's developing things like stablecoin and stablecoin closed-loop network that relieves the banks of the stress that the cash would leave the system with acquisitions like that. It's new products that we're launching like CashFlow Central. It's obviously getting merchant products to their customers. We're continuing all that, but that's all part of this delivery great service. We have as part of that and the experience they went through when that service was there and they were facing a potential consolidation that triggered a period where they said, "Well, I might as well go -- I don't love my service and I have this so I might as well go check what the market has to offer." We are addressing the service part hard. We'll get there. We're building on the technology piece to continue our position relative to that. And we stopped the core consolidation process. There is no core consolidation process. And we have not stopped the core modernization process including building out products like CoreAdvance and the continued proliferation of Finxact, which is doing great. So the customers, that was an experience that they wanted where they had it. So we -- our customers can stay on their core as long as they want to do it. We factor that into our financial position. And we're looking for the technology opportunities available to us around management of the cores are expanding at such a fast pace that there are ways to get to core modernization that may not force people to actually even go through a conversion.

Yes. I wanted to touch on that. So that's a key message. I mean you're not really consolidating?

We're not consolidating cores. We fight it every day because everybody else in the ecosystem prefers the other message. So it's good for everybody else for that message...

Even at competitive standpoint, that's important.

An important message to our clients is we're not consolidating cores.

So they could stay on as long as they want, whatever they want.

On cores they want. And we are going after them with a sense of urgency to fix the service issues and make it a great experience to be with us. And that includes stuff like buying back Smith Consulting, which is a bunch of SMEs that on our cores that were out there. It doesn't mean we bend the curve, and we've said the first half of the year, there's a long tail of this stuff. So pain that was laid, we'll realize now. We're trying to bend the curve going forward. And what we're not hearing, which is good, is that they don't like the technology. And they like the technology, they want to switch off of it. So we'll continue to invest in the technology and look for opportunities to modernize.

There's been obviously advancements from Anthropic around COBOL coding. And so lot of your systems still are at, do have the foundation on COBOL. And I'm curious, I mean, it's just going to help you with upgrading your systems faster? Or can it be a risk, could someone else utilize it to make a transition away from -- what it used to be. It's a very sticky business typically 99% retention.

Yes. No, I think the opportunities, and we'll talk more about it in May to the extent that we have full picture there. But what we see is the potential to do either a simultaneous operation and modernization without major conversions either through orchestration layers or build once modularity on the different cores. So people choose their cores because they like their cores, and we want them to stay with enjoy their cores, but can we modernize all the modulars below it while they're still operating on the core, either through -- so those are things that weren't possible and maybe the core consolidation was the exact right path a number of years ago, but now you have new technology and new opportunities. So we're going -- looking hard at that. As far as what the new technology is doing on our day-to-day stuff, everything we do, if we have to do a conversion, whether it's related to a win or to a merger or something, it's faster, implementations are smoother. The data is better and AI is making everything more adaptable, faster, it's shrinking the body of work and we think it's great. The actual core of the core, as you know, is a highly trusted complex system of record that's got tons of proprietary data, lots of regulatory expertise. We get paid off transaction volume, payments volume accounts on file. We think we're in the best position either on behalf of the world of agents or with our own agents to bring the agents to the point of the data. But the concept of opening up your core to agents is a very difficult one to imagine given PII, regulatory, you just can't let people. So we think about the opportunity for us is -- can we be the last mile for large language models, AI agents to deliver real benefits based on our clients' data and information and business, but to do that in a safe, responsible way that's still auditable, regulatable, legal and verifiable. So where every part of -- in addition to how we can be more efficient as a company, every part of what the new technology is offering us is exciting, and we'll keep building that out and tell you about it more in May.

Okay. We're almost out of time. So I want to ask a couple of more quick ones and maybe leave time for one from the audience. But just from a product standpoint and what you're most excited about, product acceleration, you have quite a bit on the agenda, whether it's digital banking or Commerce Hub, you mentioned CashFlow Central. Mike, what are you most excited about to see come into the company's run rate?

Well, I'd just say broadly, it's a great environment to work with right now. The banks -- I've been in and around banks and payments my whole life. They're more forward-looking right now than we've seen in a long time. They're in a good capital position. Profitability is good. Regulation's a tailwind. So it's a really good market to plan to. What they're telling us the long tail of -- other than 4 or 5 banks, the long tail of banks are saying, we want deposits. We want help winning the small business market, and we want help in further penetrating payments and we want to be more productive. So if you go through that. For us, obviously, Clover is a big part of what we do. The CashFlow Central huge value basis, if we could put those natively in the bank's platforms, a huge penetration and gets that cycle going for us. Vision Next is going to be a great card issuing platform, think of Finxact for the card core. We're excited about that. Obviously, Commerce Hub will be the enterprise -- our enterprise or really an omnichannel global gateway. So 3 or 4 products in their experience digital -- we're excited about it because 1,000 banks are in the pipeline and they've wanted it, and we haven't gotten it to them. So we're excited to finish that and get to them. So it's good. There hasn't been any slowdown on the innovation front, the new product development front. In fact, we've used some of the reinvestment we did in the business to try to address what the customers want to do in the market right now, which is a lot.

What do you want us to look forward to around the Investor Day in May? I mean -- and what would you hope to see as an outcome and investors walk away from it from?

Well, hopefully, all come. We look forward to having you there. I think it's been -- I recognize it's been a -- there's a lot that has gone on in the last 6 to 8 months, and we're looking forward. There's going to be -- there's no major strategy shifts or any. We're just looking for the opportunity to introduce what we think is a great management team, you've seen a lot of Paul and me, behind us are 2 great leaders of our businesses. We'd love you to understand that what we talked about early on that it's safe for you to underwrite a constant compound or investment thesis for us, and we'd love to give you some insight into how the business is running. We're afraid based on questions we get that there's a perception of disarray and confusion. The company is in great position. The balance sheet is in great shape. We've got a great leadership team. We have endless amounts of talent asking to come work with us, and we just want half of a day to show you what these businesses are about, but it's not -- I shouldn't go into it the expectation that there's going to be some dramatic show or something we laid out in October where we are. We identified the action plan, we're going to do on it. We're going to tell you a lot about our businesses, the progress we're making upon that actual plan to introduce our people and hopefully let you leave with some confidence and understanding of the business.

Thanks, Mike. Guys, maybe one question and then we'll wrap it up.

What are you seeing as kind of -- you kind of mentioned it earlier, but maybe digging deep into what are you seeing is like the biggest focus is for banks right now?

Yes. I would say just at a high level, both sides of the business are in a growth mode and both sides of the businesses. merchants and finance are at these major inflection points in both payments trends that impacts both of them and major inflection trends. And obviously, the technology world. And we go into these meetings, we don't leave a meeting without a long list of stuff to work on. So that's why I was saying it by its exciting time. On the bank side, we hear small business. We hear deposits, we hear payments. We hear integrated, embedded pieces in it, and we hear how do we take a full advantage, recognizing we have highly trusted high PII systems and lots of regulation, how do we take full advantage of the open technology world and how can we help them do that. So these are very constructive meetings as advanced thinking I've seen. I think it's the background, the sector is very bullish, and that's the sense of urgency in getting our service there, so we can get to the really fun stuff to do. And I think there is a big difference with what the long tail of banks want and what the top banks want. And we feel like we got the product mix to hit both of those. On the merchant side, it's just how things are being paid for the embedded nature of how payments are changing. They want to move product and they want to expose their product to agentic forums and shop rooms. So it's great opportunities, great conversations, the fun part of what we do every day.

Definitely, it sounds like there's demand out there.

Yes.

All right, guys, thank you very much. Appreciate it.