Global Payments Inc. (GPN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Great, everyone. Thanks for joining. My name is Tien-Tsin Huang. I follow the payments and IT services sector at JPMorgan. And I was telling Cameron, really grateful to cover a space and have learned a ton over the years, and there's been a lot of change and delighted to have Cameron Bready, who's the CEO of Global Payments, give us an update. We've had Worldpay on the stage here before Cameron. And of course, you're going through this transaction with them. And I gathered a lot of questions from the audience. So hopefully, we can just get through some of that, if that's right. But thank you for being here.

Yes, of course. Thank you so much for having us, and thanks for joining this morning.

Yes. So it's fitting from an all-source conference standpoint, just from a scale angle. Global is going to be quite large post the transaction next year. But before we get started and get into the fundamentals, Cameron, I just thought we'd start with a priority question just to kick it off because there's a lot going on with you closing the deal. Of course, you're executing your own agenda at Global Payments. You have the macro to deal with as well and satisfy a sales force. Give us an update on how you're prioritizing the day-to-day and meeting the short-term goals, but also getting ready for this transaction as well?

Yes. As you can imagine, we're spending a lot of time sort of balancing those priorities. Obviously, we have near-term objectives that we're trying to meet. The reality is we're a public company, and we have quarterly milestones that we need to be able to demonstrate that we're meeting to our investors. And we're also doing, I think, a tremendous amount of work to make sure the business is well positioned for the long term. So as I think about sort of where we are in our journey, about a year ago, we launched a fairly meaningful transformation effort inside of Global Payments. This is a business that has grown pretty dramatically over the course of the last decade. When I joined the company, it was probably a little over $1 billion of revenue. Today, we're close to $10 billion, and that's over an 11-year period of time. And a lot of that acquisition was fueled by M&A. When I took over as CEO a couple of years ago, I kind of stepped back to look at the business and think about how do we make sure we're well positioned for the next decade of growth. The playbook that got us from where we were to where we are now is probably not the one that's going to get us to where the company is going to be 5, 10, 15 years down the road. And as part of that transformation journey, we're really focusing on a couple of things. One is reorienting our business from a holding company, operating company structure to a single unified operating company model globally. I think that's the best way to position the business for long-term growth and success. I think it's the best way to position the business for healthy, sustainable rates of growth. And it's the best way to unleash, I think, the full potential of our business to be able to, I think, deliver all of our products and capabilities more ubiquitously to our clients in all the markets around the globe that we're serving them. And then secondly, of course, and you alluded to this before, we're acquiring Worldpay. And as part of that transaction, we're exiting our Issuer Solutions business. So as we step back to think about where we wanted to position the business for the long term, we really came to the conclusion that focusing all of our time, energy, investment and resources on Merchant Solutions was the right thing for the business. So we came as part of that exercise upon the unique opportunity to exit our Issuer Solutions business and acquire Worldpay, which I think certainly allows us to have that sole focus on Merchant and the combination of Global Payments and Worldpay, I think, creates a more sustainable growth engine for the future, one that's able to serve any type of merchant software platform partner in over 175 markets around the globe with immense scale, as you noted earlier, while at the same time, again, reorienting to that sole focus on Merchant, which I think is going to be incredibly powerful for the business for the long term. So we have a lot of things we're trying to accomplish as we think about, obviously, continue to execute day-to-day in the business, continuing to deliver on the growth outcomes we want to achieve, executing on our transformation and preparing our business to integrate Worldpay, but certainly tremendously excited about the direction of travel for the business, the momentum we're building and the long-term value creation that we think putting Global Payments and Worldpay together will bring for our shareholders.

Good. No, I think the focus has definitely come through, and I know you're passionate about that, Cameron. So we're excited to see how that comes together. Digging into some of the pieces. I think the most popular question, Cameron, I got from everyone for me to ask you is about Genius. So let's talk about Genius and I know you launched retail restaurant in the first half of the year. You've launched in the U.K. We're sitting here in London. Tell us more about what you've learned so far? Have you made any pivots? Are you double downing on any specific areas of Genius as you go out? And maybe just update everyone on what Genius is.

Yes, sure. Maybe I'll start there. That's probably a good way to jump into the question. So Genius is our effort, and I want to be very clear, Genius is not a rebranding exercise. Genius is really how we are reorienting the various sort of point-of-sale capabilities we have in our business today to a single unified platform to support restaurant and retail customers around the globe with point-of-sale software and payments to help them run and grow their businesses more effectively. As we think about the 2 largest consumer spend verticals around the globe, it's generally going to be restaurant and retail environments. The mode of competition for payments is really through the point of sale. And we've had strong point-of-sale capabilities historically, but they've been fragmented across way too many platforms. So as we launched our transformation exercise, we really are leaning heavily into creating a world-class point-of-sale solution that better positions our capabilities for the long term. And that involves unifying all the best feature functionality and capability onto the Genius platform. And then finally, for once, having a brand -- a more recognizable brand around our point-of-sale capabilities that we leverage around the globe in all the markets that we bring point-of-sale solutions. And Genius is that platform and brand that we will leverage as we move forward. So seeing great progress thus far with Genius, I'm happy to report we've met all the key milestones and deadlines that we established for ourselves in terms of launching Genius for restaurants in May, Genius for retail in the June, July time frame, and we just launched Genius for enterprise in the U.S. and of course, Genius for restaurants here in the U.K. just a couple of weeks ago. We have a fairly ambitious plan to continue to bring Genius to other markets, Canada and Mexico here in the short term, other international markets, some in Europe, some in Asia Pacific starting in 2026. And again, it will be our flagship point-of-sale brand and platform that we leverage in the different markets around the globe that we serve point-of-sale customers. I think our positioning around Genius is really to make sure that we are competitively positioned in restaurant and retail to continue to win market share. As we think about how we are trying to position ourselves competitively, it starts with the Genius platform itself. It's a highly feature-rich, highly configurable, flexible, easy-to-use and integrated platform that can scale up and down in the SMB to enterprise segment as necessary to support the needs of our clients. So we're really delighted with the product and the solution, the feature functionality and capabilities. And we think from a point-of-sale standpoint, it all starts with the features and solutions that you can bring to bear on those clients. It's a highly competitive space. We have great competitors that have good features and good products, and we need to be sort of competitive with them as a feature functionality perspective. But at the same time, we think we can differentiate our offerings through the level of service that we bring to our clients. I think our service infrastructure and capability at Global Payments has always been a hallmark of our business. I think we provide exceptional service to our clients, white glove, more personalized service experiences to them that I think is really distinctive in the marketplace, and it's an area that we can differentiate. And then, of course, again, harkening back to your earlier comment, we can bring a level of scale and competitive economics to the point-of-sale environment that many of our competitors can't match. And I think the combination of a highly feature-rich capable product, distinctive service and really competitive economic positioning with the scale we can bring obviously positions us extraordinarily well to continue to grow and gain share in the point-of-sale space as we move forward. Tremendously excited about the progress we've made. We got a lot of work in front of us to continue to grow and scale and get better market penetration and awareness of the Genius brand. But obviously, I think we're off to a terrific start.

Good. I know distribution is, of course, important in payments as well. So let's talk about that for Genius, but broadly across Global Payments. You're doing a pretty large transformation, updating a lot of the commission and the comp structures. Where are you with that? I think the retention was what, Cameron, like 90% is what you talked about last quarter.

It was. Yes.

Give us a little bit more on what you're trying to translate that into with -- on the performance side.

Yes. A big part of our transformation journey is also kind of leaning into the commercial side of the business to try to drive better outcomes from a sales execution standpoint. So there's a lot of initiatives that sort of underlie the sales force of the future model, which is kind of our nomenclature to capture a lot of the things that we're trying to do to improve that commercial go-to-market muscle and capability we have. A lot of it starts with, to your point, the underlying sales compensation structure that we leverage predominantly in the U.S. It's obviously our biggest market that our sellers have been utilizing now for many, many years. I'm a little embarrassed to say our sellers worked on a plan called the '94 Plan. Why was it called that? Because it was created in 1994. And I don't want to leave you with the impression it hasn't evolved a little bit over time, but the core underpinnings of that structure have been around a long time. And I think it had probably outworn its welcome and usefulness in the business. So we've reoriented the sales compensation program for our sellers to be one that's, I think, much more balanced in terms of trying to drive the right outcomes for the business, trying to incentivize our sellers in the right way to be able to be more productive, to produce better outcomes for the business. It ultimately results in a lower cost of selling for us. And more importantly, perhaps, it is a model that is far easier and better equipped to recruit new sellers into our ecosystem. So we put a lot of emphasis around converting our sales force from our old plan to this new plan. We've had 90% plus retention as we work to convert those sellers over, which we're really proud of. And while we're doing that, we're also making significant investments around all of our marketing investments, lead gen, demand gen, the CRM infrastructure that supports the business, making it easier for our sellers to cross-sell, making it easier for them to be more productive, to be able to manage leads, effectuate leads and drive to actual closed sales, putting a lot of investment around the customer experience side of things as well as you first interface with us as a sales matter, whether it's how you integrate into our environments to the onboarding and procurement experience of product and equipment to just the approval, trying to increase speed to revenue in the business. Significant investments going around sort of improving the commercialization aspects of the business. But really, again, delighted with the progress we've made. The biggest part of that is behind us in terms of converting our sellers. We're seeing the productivity benefits we expected to see, continuing to scale that in the business. But a big -- I think a big milestone for us is getting that work behind us around converting all those sellers and obviously now having them on the right plan, the right structure with the right incentives and the right capacity to be more productive to drive better outcomes for the business for the long term.

So new product, new branding, you've got to revamped sales and go-to-market, Cameron. So with all of these things together, I know competition is always a question. But what should we be tracking on performance? I mean, how quickly can we see a change in whether it be growth or retention or gross new sales, you tell us?

Yes. And I think we've laid out a pretty clear path for the business to accelerate growth outcome delivering on those. Obviously, Worldpay, the combination with Worldpay will help catalyze that to some degree as well. But if we look at our stand-alone Global Payments business before the acquisition of Worldpay, we laid out a pretty clear path by which we're going to accelerate growth over the next few years, largely driven by all the work that you described we're doing in our business. And look, I think thus far, we're a few quarters into this. We've really delivered on every milestone that we said we would deliver on. We're delivering on the growth while we're working through this transformation journey. We're delivering on the key milestones that we laid out around the transformation journey itself. We're providing, I think, quarterly metrics that give some insight into how things are progressing, particularly on the new sales front. And we're also providing, I think, a good amount of commentary around where we're seeing the productivity benefits and the key milestones and all the transformation work that we're doing. So I feel from an execution standpoint, yes, we have a lot of balls in the air and the team is working very hard to deliver day in and day out. But I'm really proud of what our organization has been able to do over the last several quarters, hitting all the major milestones, delivering on the outcomes we expected to deliver and building the right momentum in the business as we exit sort of '25 and head into 2026 to be able to accelerate growth and drive the overall outcomes that we committed to our investors we'd be able to deliver.

Okay. Great. I know you and Josh are working hard on all of that. So thanks for that update. So let's transition to Worldpay. A lot of investors want me to ask you about that. What's left to do in terms of getting the clearance to close the transaction? I know the competition committee and others are taking a look. What can you tell us about the performance of Worldpay that you're willing and able to share? And then I'll ask you a readiness question after that.

Yes, absolutely. So I'll start on the regulatory approval front, just given the nature of the business we operate in around the globe, it's a highly regulated industry. We have numerous sort of regulatory approvals we need to achieve to be able to close the transaction. I would say, thus far, we're making really good progress on that. We received HSR approval in the U.S. We're well through the antitrust approval here in the U.K. The CMA actually noted yesterday that they've officially begun their process, which is, I think, good news overall, and we're tracking well to be able to work through the approval process here in the U.K. and the EU more broadly. But as we sit here today, we very much remain on track to be able to close the transaction in the first half of 2026. As we committed when we announced the transaction back in April. And thus far, everything is tracking to be able to deliver on that outcome, and we feel good about the progress that we've made. So everything is kind of moving in the right direction on that front, which is really exciting. I would say as it relates to the underlying Worldpay business, we continue to be pleased by what we're seeing. They're delivering on certainly the expectations that they set with us and that we obviously spent a lot of time vetting through the diligence process. The business remains very much a solid mid-single-digit grower, also building good momentum in their own business around future trajectory for growth and continuing to deliver on the key milestones and I think the objectives that they have to continue to position the business for the long term and a good growth outcome for the long term. So thus far, we see everything we see kind of coming out of the business is very much what we expected and delivering on all the expectations that we had for the business as we went into the transaction. Naturally, we're very excited to get to close, highly focused on getting to close as soon as practical. And a lot of people inside of our organization are executing against that every day.

Yes. It's a long time to close, obviously. So I would imagine the readiness will be there once the deal is consummated officially. But the bigger question I have is just you'll be the #1 acquirer post Worldpay. So assuming the readiness is there and you can close this and get off the ground and push through the agenda that you've talked about publicly, Cameron, what's the plan or what should investors think about there? How do you leverage the scale you have to differentiate against maybe some of the pure plays that lead with technology? Tell us what the vision is with combined Worldpay?

Yes, I'd be happy to. Maybe I'll spend 2 seconds on readiness because I do think that's important. We are working very hard to make sure that we have the right foundation upon which to integrate Worldpay when we get to close. So I think much of our transformation work will be behind us by the time we get to the closing of the transaction. We're accelerating some of our transformation initiatives to make sure that we have the right foundation when we do get to closing. So there's a lot of effort internally right now, making sure that the business is well prepared to execute day 1, but more importantly, to execute an integration plan around Worldpay that's really centered around 2 -- well, 3 primary objectives. One is better positioning the combined business for growth outcomes for the long term. As we thought about the Worldpay transaction, we don't want to just be a larger version of who we are today. We want to be a business that can drive better rates of growth. Two, we think we have a unique opportunity combining the business to better position ourselves competitively, and I'll come back to that in a second because it really gets to the latter part of your question. And then third, we have a unique opportunity to combine and create, I think, the strongest team in the industry. Obviously, there's an immense amount of talent in the Global Payments organization. There's an immense amount of talent in the Worldpay organization. Combining those teams and really putting together, I think, what will be the industry's best team is certainly another outcome of this transaction that we want to make sure that we realize. So that sets us up well then for how do we then compete, position the business for the long term. And I think as I look at the combination of Worldpay and Global Payments, I think we really are uniquely positioned to be able to compete effectively and really create something that the industry has never seen before, which is a combination of a business at the size, scale and scope we are that can innovate and innovate with pace and agility and nimbleness, but also, at the same time, bring a level of scale, scale economics around the globe that I think will be difficult for other competitors to be able to match. So the combined business is nearly $13 billion in pro forma revenue, $6.5 billion of pro forma EBITDA. Perhaps more impressively, we'll process $4 trillion of payments annually operating in 175 countries, 40 of those physically. That reach, global scale, the capabilities and the complementary nature of the capabilities that come together from the Worldpay business and the Global Payments business, I think, is tremendously powerful. So you talked about some of the newer players and that lead with technology. I think we'll have a technology capability and ability to innovate products and features and solutions that compete favorably with everyone in the marketplace today. And we'll be able to do that in a way that I think brings sort of more differentiated service because of the scale that we have and scale economics, as I mentioned before, that, again, competitively, I think others are going to have a challenge in sort of being able to keep up with the things that we can do. And we'll have breadth of distribution, we'll have breadth of global reach that I think is going to be incredibly powerful to position the business for the long term. So I think it's difficult to overstate, I think, the benefits of putting these 2 businesses together. Their strengths are our weaknesses, our weakness -- our strengths are their weaknesses. The businesses are highly complementary as a product and capability and segment of the market that we serve today. The global reach and scale that we're going to have, it's -- look, if we can get all the execution right behind that, the power of the combined business, again, I think is really difficult to overstate.

No, I totally agree. The overlay is almost perfect, right, in terms of, like you said, offsetting weaknesses and amplifying strengths.

Well, there's a reason we've been trying to do it for a better part of the decade. So we finally got to a place where we could execute the transaction and we're tremendously excited about it because we've long coveted the combination of the 2 companies, just given how it's rare to find 2 businesses in the same industry that are as complementary as these 2 businesses are. .

Agreed. Yes. And I've been thinking about it for a couple of decades to get to this point. It's amazing to actually see it. But let me ask this. This was another popular question, right? Again, sitting in London, a lot of folks here know the Worldpay asset well. And it's been in, let's say, consolidation mode for some time, right? And we've heard about them even when they're public before, Vantiv going through a lot of exercises to consolidate systems and what have you. But the strength in the e-commerce or the root in e-commerce has always been there, and there's been strength in enterprise as well. What have you studied or learned from them during the diligence process to understand and get comfortable with the tech platform today and its competitiveness in e-comm and enterprise?

Yes. As you can imagine, that's an area that we've spent an immense amount of time in diligence. 50% of their business today is enterprise and digital native multinational e-commerce. Those are areas where Global Payments really doesn't play today. Most of our business is oriented towards SMBs around the globe in all the markets we operate in. So the core asset in Worldpay that we're most excited about is obviously the enterprise and e-com capabilities. And what I would tell you is they have, to some degree, maybe over-indexed on investing in building out their capabilities in the enterprise and e-commerce space over the last several years. It is the primary driver of growth in that business today. And they have a really highly competitive, highly attractive set of capabilities, products, value-added services and a technology platform that competes with the best in that space. And they are winning share every single day. They're delivering attractive growth rates in the enterprise and e-commerce space. And I think they're well positioned to continue to grow and scale with that business. And the combination of the 2 companies and market access that we can provide that they don't have today, capabilities to deliver omnichannel solutions for enterprise customers in all these different markets around the globe. There's an immense opportunity by putting the 2 businesses together to further catalyze growth, I think, in the enterprise and e-commerce space. But it all starts with a really attractive business that's built on a strong technology platform that was purpose-built to serve that enterprise and e-commerce segment of the market. I think they invested somewhere north of $1 billion in their platform to be able to serve that business well. A set of products and capabilities and value-added services that resonate with the client base, a risk and compliance infrastructure that allows them to serve the businesses really well and manage risk and fraud in highly competitive ways. Authorization rates that I think a lot of competition in the enterprise and e-commerce space is driven by your ability to authorize at a very high rate, and they do exceptionally well in that area. And importantly, vertical market expertise that really resonates with the client base that they're trying to serve across a variety of different enterprise and e-commerce verticals around the globe. And I think that's an area of distinction for them as well. Many of their other competitors sort of tend to focus on 1 or 2 verticals. They have much broader vertical reach and vertical expertise that I think positions that business really well for sustainable growth for the long term. So very excited about the enterprise and e-commerce asset inside of Worldpay. It's a big part of what we were hoping to get our arms around through the diligence process, felt very comfortable with the conclusions we reached and certainly excited to have those capabilities as part of the combined Global Payments Worldpay business going forward.

I know Worldpay stand-alone struggled in SMB. You mentioned they over-indexed enterprise and e-comm, they've got big brands there. We know that. On SMB, they've been challenged. Is Genius platonic to make that asset work again?

Yes. I think -- look, I think Genius is a big part of it. I think you're right. On the SMB side, they have had more challenges. Part of that is because they've been investing more heavily in enterprise and e-com. And part of it is really a lack of product and capability, I think, in the SMB space that has left them a little bit more exposed to competition over the last several years. And look, the one thing I don't worry about in the SMB space is product and capability on the Global Payments side. So I think our ability to bring product capability, whether it's Genius, other commerce enablement solutions or value-added services that we can bring to bear on the SMB market, there's immense opportunity for us to bring our product capability into that segment. In the SMB channel, they have really good distribution. They just need better product, better capability, and I think Global Payments brings that in spades. So we feel very good about being able to reaccelerate growth in the SMB channel, leveraging their distribution with our product and capability that's going to make that business far more attractive in the future.

And then just to close that SMB part of the equation out for Worldpay. I know the integrated embedded business -- they made a big bet with that with Mercury back in the day, which was a well-known asset in the U.S. You bought Payrix to have a more hybrid model to go after integrated embedded. So how does that piece work, integrated embedded that is relative to what you have with Genius. Do those things work in harmony? And how do you expect to expose that to Worldpay?

Yes, I do think they work in harmony. So just as a foundational matter, we've been in the integrated business for well over a decade, probably 12, 13 years now and probably have far more vertical diversification in our integrated business today. We tend to focus on more sophisticated ISV software partners who need a little more complex sort of solutioning, need a little more white glove service, need a little more tailored operating model to fit their needs. And that's really core to our integrated business, and we've been very successful with that strategy for a long period of time. . Worldpay, to your point, had a similar business, but more restaurant-oriented through Mercury. That business has faced more challenges over the course of time, largely with the evolution of competition for point-of-sale software in the restaurant vertical, and that has created, I think, some challenges for the Mercury legacy Mercury business. I think Genius can help alleviate some of those challenges, obviously, because we can bring those capabilities into that back book and provide, I think, some offerings there that will be helpful in terms of trying to protect that business for the long term. But I think more importantly, Worldpay has invested heavily in more of the PayFac and managed PayFac area of the integrated market. They acquired Payrix, which is a fantastic platform to serve that more managed PayFac or PayFac-as-a-service type offering. That complements very nicely the work that we do with more sophisticated ISV partners. So the combination of the 2 businesses in the integrated space, which is really important to where we're driving the business in the long term, our ability to serve all types of ISV partners, marketplaces, platform partners around the globe. The immense sort of capabilities that we bring together with Global Payments and Worldpay, us more on the sort of sophisticated, more traditional sort of integrated model, theirs with the Payrix asset. We can serve any type of software partner, platform partner, marketplace partner with an array of operating models, technology capabilities, platforms and solutions that really meet any need within the ISV space at scale in multiple markets around the globe. And I think that's really unique as we think about putting these 2 businesses together. So it's another good example, again, where our strengths have been a little bit of their weakness and their weaknesses or areas -- or their strengths, excuse me, are areas that we haven't invested heavily in, Payrix being a good example of that. And the opportunity to bring those things together, I think, has tremendously value-enhancing sort of prospects for the combined business.

Yes. No, thanks for going through all that. It's helpful for me. I hope it's helpful for everyone else. But it does -- just going through that for the last 10, 15 minutes, right, thinking about all the unlocks across the 2 businesses. It's exciting to think about what can come.

It's really exciting. And that's why as we think about integration of this business, it's a little bit unlike anything we've done in the past because there's so much more orientation around growth. In driving growth outcomes from putting these 2 businesses together and the opportunity to unlock revenue potential that neither one of us could really get at on our own. And a lot of our integration planning up until this point has really been focused on making sure that day 1, we have a well-articulated list of opportunities as a revenue and growth matter that we can start to invest against very early on to be able to unlock some of the potential that we see in putting the 2 businesses together. The expense synergies are kind of table stakes, and I don't want to take them for granted. We never do, but the reality is that's a well-formed muscle inside of Global Payments today, the ability to combine the businesses, get to the expense synergies. Our targets there are not heroic given the size and scale of the combined business, probably 18% of the underlying operating expense base. Relatively, I think, modest in the grand scheme of these large-scale type acquisitions. So I feel very confident in our ability to get to that, but we're orienting our entire integration approach around how do we make sure we really unlock this growth potential of the combined company? And how do we make sure that putting the 2 businesses together ends up with a combined organization that's more competitive in all the markets that we serve today than either one of us has been able to be standalone.

Yes. That's very clear. I think that is the unlock, and I think we'll see if that unlocks the value, right, for the stock. So that's going to be important for us to track on the outside. So let's -- thanks for going through all the Worldpay. Again, I thought it was important given where we sit. Let's pivot a little bit and talk about some big picture themes, alternative payment methods. You mentioned value-added services a few times earlier. There's been a lot of activity in the capital markets with buy now pay later, pay by bank, stablecoins as well. Can you discuss the implications there for Global Payments? How do you see it? What does it do for take rates? Is anything cannibalistic? Or do you view it as all net additive?

I think, by and large, it's net additive. I think as we look at the proliferation of different sort of payment methods at the point of sale, generally, it's good news for our business. To some degree, the more complexity there is at the point of sale, the more sort of we're solving that complexity for our clients and the more valuable, frankly, we are to our clients. What most of our clients care about around the globe are they want consumers to be able to pay for goods and services, however, their consumers want to pay. They don't care so much whether that's buy now pay later, traditional cards, debit, local debit schemes, QR code-based payment, account-to-account, whatever it is, they just want consumers to be able to transact with no friction. And that's largely the service that we provide to our customers. And what they care about on the back end is consolidated data, analytics, insights, settlements, flows, payouts in the way that they want to receive them. And again, that's the role we play in the ecosystem, and so we're supporting our Merchant customers. So as long as it's digital, I'd like to say it's good for our business. And yes, there may be a little bit of cannibalization of one digital mechanism to another over time, but more of the cannibalization has continued to be around cash in the ecosystem, what remains. And generally, those are good sort of tailwinds for our business. And look, on average take rates over time, it's generally going to be pretty consistent for us. So we're not overly worried about one payment mechanism over another as long as it's digital and as long as we're well positioned to be able to serve the needs of our clients in terms of simplifying that complexity, allowing them to get paid in the way that they want to get paid and providing the consolidated data reporting, insights, analytics, value-added services around that, that really enrich the experience that we bring to our client base. That's our focus as a business. And everything that's happening from a payment rail perspective is supportive, I think, of that overall business model.

How about on the stablecoin front, Cameron?

Yes. I think that's an interesting development to continue to watch. I certainly think the near- to medium-term sort of use cases are largely going to be driven around payouts, right? How clients, particularly larger multinational clients choose to receive settlement flows and funds. Obviously, some probably extension into B2B payments and particularly around cross-border payments. And that's something that I think we will continue to monitor and position ourselves around as well. There's not interoperability of stablecoins. I think there's still a lot of barriers to it becoming a more ubiquitous sort of mechanism by which commerce is effectuated every day. I think we're a long way away from consumers using stablecoins to pay for goods and services at the point of sale. But certainly, there are use cases that I think stablecoins can help solve, particularly around cross-border business-to-business payments, how settlements and payouts are made to different customers. That's an area that we're investing -- Worldpay is investing to make sure that we can deliver those capabilities for our customers and clients in the way that we think the market is going to evolve. So lots of near-term noise, I think, largely in the area of sort of payout and sort of cross-border B2B. But longer term, it's a trend that we need to continue to monitor. But I think we're obviously well positioned to be able to make sure that we're well equipped to be able to meet the needs of the market as it continues to evolve. But as it relates to day-to-day commerce, I think we're a long way away from it having any sort of impact on day-to-day commerce.

Just one more in terms of your own treasury and settlement and ability to reduce cost by leveraging stablecoin and some of the more volatile currencies. Is that something that could move the needle here?

I think there's real opportunity there. Whether it's a needle mover or not, I think, remains to be seen, probably candidly, more opportunity in the Worldpay business because they tend to support larger multinational digital native clients that probably have more FX, more cross-border money movement in their ecosystems than many of the SMB-oriented customers that we serve today. But certainly, I think there's a potential value unlock there that we'll be able to tap into as we bring the businesses together and as the stablecoin market continues to evolve.

Okay. Great. Let's quickly do the divestitures. You did divest the payroll asset, and I think that puts you on track to the number you said to in terms of revenue at Investor Day that you would divest, but you also said that you're still revaluating the portfolio given Worldpay. Can you remind us of where you are with that and what might be considered?

Yes, happy to. So just to rewind the clock a little bit, going into our investor conference last year, we talked about wanting to streamline and simplify the business. And as part of that, we've made the decision to look at exiting a few lines of businesses, geographies that we didn't think were strategic or core to where we wanted to drive the business long term. So year-to-date or sort of activity to date, we've divested about $550 million of revenue. We had targeted $500 million to $600 million, so kind of right in the target that we had established. From that, we've returned about $1.2 billion of capital to shareholders from those divestitures. But we made a lot of those decisions before we had the opportunity before we even knew that we'd have the opportunity to acquire Worldpay. So I think it behooves us to kind of circle back and revisit some of the decisions we made around specific assets kind of going into our investor conference last year and making sure as we think about the composition of the pro forma business, given that we're acquiring another $5 billion of revenue, we're going to be, as I said, nearly $13 billion of pro forma revenue after adjusting for the Issuer sale, do we still want to be in all those same businesses? And does it make sense? And I think the conclusion we'll likely reach is there may be a couple of other assets that we would look to exit. Same playbook going forward, assuming leverage neutrality and we address any tax consequences of exiting these assets, we'll return whatever proceeds remain to our shareholders that we've done with the prior divestitures. And we're in the process of evaluating those assets now. And obviously, we'll keep investors apprised of any future decisions we make around that.

And the capital you've raised from the divestitures, you've earmarked that towards buybacks?

Correct. Yes.

Given where the stock is and the flexibility that you have, just remind us how you balance the buybacks versus deleveraging?

Yes, it's a great question. So as we sit here today, we're targeting 3x leverage at the end of the year, and we're very much on track to be able to achieve that. We've committed to return over the 2025 to 2027 time frame, putting aside this conversation around asset divestitures, just from regular capital -- or cash flow in the business, we're going to return $7.5 billion of capital to shareholders. And that positions us over the '26 and '27 time frame, in particular, to return pretty significant amounts of capital to our shareholders. I think year-to-date, we've probably done $700-ish million, excluding, again, the capital associated with asset divestitures. That means over the next couple of years, we're going to return a pretty meaningful amount of capital to shareholders to get to that $7.5 billion target over the '25 to '27 time frame. . At the same time, we'll reduce our leverage from at close with the transaction will probably be around 3.5x. Over an 18- to 24-month time frame, we'll reduce that leverage ratio to 3x as well. And that's kind of our targeted leverage ratio for our business. So we think it's a good balance of obviously maintaining balance sheet strength, flexibility and financial capacity in the business, while at the same time, returning meaningful amounts of capital to shareholder, and we feel very good about the prospects for our business over the '25 to '27 time frame to get to that $7.5 billion. Plus maintaining, again, a leverage profile for the business that we think is appropriate and well sustainable for the future, again, targeting that 3x ratio within 18 to 24 months post closing of the transaction. I think what's maybe even more interesting then as you think about the '28 time frame, and I know it feels like a long way out, but in reality, it's right around the corner. This is a business that's going to generate leverage free cash flow of nearly $5 billion in 2028 with a 3x leverage. That's an immense amount of capacity given our current market cap and overall enterprise value, immense amount of capacity for us to think about ongoing shareholder returns and obviously putting that capital to use to drive incremental value for shareholders. So we talk about the scale of the business in terms of competitively, how it's going to position us and the things we can do from an innovation and investment perspective. But the amount of capital and cash that we're going to have available to return to shareholders to drive shareholder returns is enormous, particularly as you think about that 2028 level of $5 billion. And interestingly, that's 50% higher than it would have been had we not done the Worldpay and Issuer transaction. So if we looked at the stand-alone plan we had for 2028 in our pro forma plan with the transactions we're executing, exiting Issuer, acquiring Worldpay, that $5 billion is 50% higher than we would have been on a stand-alone basis. So enormous, I think, value creation potential, leveraging, obviously, the capital allocation we'll have available to us, the strategies we'll have available to us going forward.

Okay. Good. So we went through a lot here. I just wanted to zoom out and close out with a couple of chessboard questions, if you don't mind, Cameron, because we talked over the years, and I've always learned a lot from you and thinking about Global Payments back when it was NDC, I think you and I have talked about this. I've sort of long visioned or thought that like a lot of other tech sectors in payments, you might get to 2, 3 large-scale players, and then you have a lot of niche players that develop and similar to what you see across tech and even financial services, right, Visa, Mastercard or in payroll, you have 2 big players, and you can pick your software companies as well in different verticals. But Global is basically going to be 1 of those 2 or 3 large players. So thinking about the chessboard, how do you think the ecosystem here evolves? What do you look to across other -- whether it's tech or financial services to inform your decisions on what that next chessboard move will be in '26, '27, '28. I'm sure you're not going to stand still and do nothing in '28. So my question is that how do you see the ecosystem evolving in payments now that we've come to this place where we're close to 2 very large-scale players?

Yes. I think it's an interesting question. It's one we spend a lot of time on. I just think -- I think this is an industry naturally where scale matters. It always has, but it probably matters now more than ever for lots of different reasons. And I think a couple of those are just the pace of change and the ability to invest in innovation at the levels that you need to, to maintain your competitive positioning in the market. I think scale is hugely important to being able to do that. Given just the amount of technology and the implications of technology in the industry, some of the topics we talked about today, whether it's I can't believe AI hasn't come up, but whether it's AI, agentic commerce, stablecoins, innovation and the ability to invest against these things, scale is critically important to that. And it's a big part of the thought process that went into acquiring Worldpay. I think focus is incredibly important to that. As we thought about our business and wanting to exit Issuer, it was largely with an eye towards, look, our business is enormously complex, enormously competitive, having all pro forma 28,000, 29,000 team members around the globe, thinking about focused on Merchant Solutions every day, I think, is incredibly important. That focus in a highly competitive, highly dynamic business that's changing at the rate our industry is, I think being solely focused on it is critically important for us as well. And I think the reality is this is a business that is -- the regulatory intensity continues to increase in every market around the globe. And scale matters when you're trying to deal with just the regular complexity from a regulatory standpoint for the business. And scale matters, I think, to our large enterprise customers who care about compliance, who care about who they're working with and how compliant you are and are you meeting the regulatory standards and requirements in all of these markets, that really matters to them as well. So I think this is an industry where long term, again, scale matters more than it's ever mattered. And I think we've been through a very sort of aggressive expansionary cycle in our industry, a lot of new players, a lot of new fintech, a lot of capital being thrown at payments. I think inevitably, we're now looking at a consolidation sort of cycle in the space where you're going to see more consolidation. You're going to see businesses positioning for better scale so that they can invest, they can compete, they can maintain sort of their regulatory and compliance posture. I think those things are really important to how the business is evolving. And I think we're ahead of the game, quite frankly, on that front with a set of assets and capabilities and an amount of scale, again, that I think most of our competitors, irrespective of what moves they make, they're going to have a challenge sort of keeping up with that.

That's the supplier side. Let's close it out on the consumer side, right? Payments has been pretty slow, right, to change behavior of consumers. Do you see that changing? You mentioned agentic and whatnot, taking robots away or do you see the consumer side changing over the next 3 to 5 years or the pace of change?

I don't know that the pace of change is going to be all that dramatically different than what it's been in the past. I think the reality in our space and probably people underestimate how difficult it is to change consumer behavior. And I'm old, so I'm probably not the best use case. But certainly, there are younger consumers that are going to change probably more rapidly than older consumers. But the overall consumer space more broadly is very hard to change the consumer behavior. Will all these things have impact? Is there going to be agentic commerce? Will that have an impact? Absolutely. Is the level of impact in the short term as immense as people think? Probably not, at least in my opinion. Are the long-term implications what people think they will be? Probably. I think there's a certain segment of the population, younger generations are going to be more comfortable with agents making buying decisions on their behalf and those types of things. But I think in the short term, it's largely going to be oriented around the search experience and how people get to making a buying decision versus having agents actually making decisions on behalf of their consumer. And -- but all these things are going to drive immense change over time. I think in the payments ecosystem, I just think it's always a little slower than people anticipate because end of day, changing consumer behavior takes time.

Agree. Cameron, Josh, thank you both for being here and supporting the conference. I always enjoy the conversation.

Great to be here with you, and thanks, everybody, for spending a little bit of time with us today. Have a great rest of your day.

Thank you.