Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the First Quarter 2020 Deluxe Earnings conference call. [Operator Instructions] Please be about that today's conference call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker for today, Mr. Ed Merritt.

Thank you, and welcome to the Deluxe Corporation's First Quarter 2020 Earnings Call. I'm Ed Merritt, Vice President of Corporate Finance and Treasurer. And joining me on today's call is Barry McCarthy, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Keith Bush, our Chief Financial Officer. At the end of today's prepared remarks, Barry, Keith and I will take questions. I'd like to remind you that comments made today regarding management's intentions, projections, financial estimates or expectations about the future strategy or performance of the Company are forward-looking in nature as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These comments are subject to risks and uncertainties, including the risks related to COVID-19, which could cause our actual results to differ materially from projections. Additional information about factors that might cause our actual results to differ from projections is outlined in the press release today in the Company's Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019, and the Form 10-Q, which will be released in conjunction with our first quarter 2020 earnings as well as other SEC filings. Portions of the financial and statistical information that will be discussed during this call are addressed in more detail in today's press release, which is posted on our Investor Relations website at deluxe.com. This information was also furnished to the SEC on Form 8-K filed by the Company this afternoon. Any references to non-GAAP financial measures are reconciled to the comparable GAAP financial measures in the press release or as part of our presentation during this call. Now Barry, Keith and I are working remotely from different locations today as are over 3,000 of our fellow Deluxers, supporting our commitment to safety and social distancing. For the first time, we're not sitting together for this call. While we believe we have all of the logistics for this event well planned, please bear with us in case we experience any technical difficulties. Thanks in advance. And now I'll turn the call over to Barry.

Thanks, Ed, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm pleased to be with you today to share our first quarter 2020 results. Despite the unprecedented COVID-19 situation, we delivered a solid first quarter, and we've made meaningful progress implementing our One Deluxe strategy. Late in the first quarter, we saw a significant decline in revenue. We took immediate action to address revenue and related expenses. And as a result, we remain confident in our strategy, which we communicated previously. This afternoon we'll provide you with details of our first quarter operating performance, including the impressive 18% growth on our Payments business, an overview of how COVID-19 has impacted our business, the actions we've taken to mitigate related risks and how we're planning for future growth. The progress we've made on our historic transformation into a trusted business technology company with four segments; Payments, Cloud Solutions, Promotional Solutions and Checks; an update on our One Deluxe approach to become a sales-driven revenue growth company, no longer solely dependent upon acquisitions for growth. And I'll end today with my perspective of what we believe all of this means for Deluxe going forward. Throughout this call, we intend to provide plenty of perspectives. But given the uncertainty in the macro economy, we needed to stop short of providing a detailed outlook, either for the second quarter or full year, just as we announced on our press release on March 25, 2020. This is the first quarter that we operated and reported results in our 4 new segments, which is an exciting milestone in our transformation journey. During our Investor Day event in February, we shared with you the details of our new strategy. I'm pleased to report our strategy is not only protecting the Company in this time of uncertainty, but positioning us to deliver…

Thanks, Barry. Good afternoon, everyone. As Barry noted, in light of the current circumstances, we're very proud of how our teams have pulled together and rallied to help one another through the last few weeks. We delivered a solid performance in the first quarter, while simultaneously driving our business transformation forward. Total revenue in the first quarter was $486.4 million. Consistent with our Investor Day message, our business experienced sales-driven revenue growth in the first 2 months of the year for the first time in nearly a decade. However, as March unfolded, our business was significantly impacted by COVID-19, and we ended with revenue declining 2.5%. First quarter results by segment included Payments revenue of $77 million, growing over 18% or $12 million above last year. Cloud Solutions revenue was nearly $76 million and declined about $2 million from last year. Promotional Solutions revenue was approximately $143 million and declined about $13 million from last year. And Checks delivered nearly $191 million of revenue and declined about $9 million from last year. GAAP diluted loss per share for the first quarter was $1.45, including asset impairment charges of $90.3 million and restructuring, integration and other costs of $19.7 million associated with the Company's transformation. I'll discuss the impairment impacting Q1 earnings in a moment. Excluding after tax non-GAAP adjustments of $2.53 per share, adjusted diluted EPS and was $1.08 and compared to $1.54 in 2019. Reported EBITDA for the first quarter was a loss of $27.9 million. Excluding about $111 million of expense related to impairments, restructuring, integration and other non-GAAP adjustments, adjusted EBITDA was about $83.3 million compared to $113.7 million last year. Adjusted EBITDA margin ended at 17.1% in the quarter, down from 22.8% last year. COVID-19 negatively impacted the quarter by approximately $16 million of revenue and…

Thanks, Keith. So you've heard how our business was significantly impacted by COVID-19 in March. We immediately further strengthened our liquidity and began an intense focus on expenses to get them aligned to lower volumes. But I don't watch you to lose sight of some of the great accomplishments we had in the first quarter. We held our first ever company-wide sales kickoff meeting led by our strong new Chief Revenue Officer, Chris Thomas. He is bringing together our sales organization to strengthen our understanding of One Deluxe and further prepare our team for our new go-to-market strategy. We held the largest customer event in the history of Deluxe, bringing together hundreds of our key customers across our entire portfolio of businesses, not just 1 or 2 areas like we did in the past. We used the opportunity to introduce these customers to all the new Deluxe has to offer. We held our first Investor Day in over a decade, where we shared our strategy with investors and provided them with an opportunity to learn about our exciting new segments and to interact with each of the segment presidents. We had over 100 attendees at the event and the webcast have been viewed by hundreds more in the weeks since the event. Now I want to move on to the longer-term and how our strategy positions us well for the eventual economic recovery. Recall, we shifted to a sales-driven growth model, which differs significantly from the past, when virtually all growth came from acquisitions financed by increasing debt and leverage. In January and February, our new strategy delivered sales-driven revenue growth for the first time in nearly a decade. We won 3 of the top 10 deals of the last decade in Q4 and won the fourth deal in Q1.…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Charles Strauzer of CJS. Your line is open.

Hi, good evening. Can you hear me okay?

Hey, how you. We can. Sure.

Good, thanks. Sorry, the question is a little bit spotty here, but working from stay best sometimes. Just I appreciate all the color you gave in terms of the kind of the bridged outlook, if you will. But I wanted to just kind of get a sense from you when you talk to, particularly your small business customers and some of the banking customers what's the kind of the general sentiment about time line of eventual recovery and some of the kind of the programs on the banking side and the fintech side that you think might come back first?

Charlie, I don't know that I can I have a crystal ball. I wish I did, but we believe that based on all the data we have and what we see in these very early days in February. So we think the likely shape of the recovery is most likely to I've heard it described as something like a Nike Swoosh, down and then back gradually over some period of time. Just how long that time is, I know is what you're asking, and I don't have a crystal ball to be able to tell you that. But we believe as the economy reopens, obviously, small businesses reopened, et cetera. We don't know how many businesses are closed. We suspect in, permanently. We think and expect that a large number of businesses are simply in hibernation, and we're hopeful that they will restart their business. And then as we get through this, we're also hopeful and optimistic that there'll be new business starts, and we're particularly well positioned to help new businesses incorporate and get alive as they go forward. So I don't have a clear answer for you because I don't have a crystal ball, but we think that it will be something that comes back steadily over a period of time.

That's definitely fair, and I appreciate that, Barry. And when you look at some of the, over the years, your ability to take cost out of the business, and it seems like it's continuing today, are the additional levers you think you can pull on the cost side to kind of help kind of ride through this storm more so than you've already kind of laid out?

Absolutely. So one of the hallmarks of our company is the ability to manage production facilities with great efficiency. That's one of the things the Company has been great at for a long time. So we certainly exercised that at the end of Q3 and going in, sorry, at the end of Q1 going into Q2, and of course, we'll do that through Q3 and Q4. I think one of the more interesting things here is I think just talks about the responsibility of our company and our management team. As soon as we saw that the market was likely to have this type of a challenge, we acted immediately. And we know that we moved earlier, we were one of the first businesses to move as aggressively as we did to control our costs. And we expect to do that going forward. Now specifically, are there other places we can go? I've told you, as long as I've been with the Company, which is since the, about 16 or 17 months, we are continuing to look at the structural efficiencies that we can get out of our organization. We think there's opportunity for savings in real estate. You know we've made big investments in our technology, and we think that can give us a boost. And then, of course, all the things we're doing on the process side of our business, the Company, for a long time, was operated as a company of companies with a series of silos. And this is the first quarter when we're operating in our new segment with a unified go-to-market strategy, which is about One Deluxe. So we think that there continue to be structural savings that can be had as well as all the great things that are already in place and the levers we can pull that our volume depend on.

Our next question comes from Chris McGinnis with Sidoti.

And a nice quarter, and I hope you guys are all safe and your families are as well. To kind of continue, just to continue on that vein, I think the expectation was margin pressure in the beginning of the year because of the investments to support the growth, and a nice job on that. I'm just wondering, I think the expectation was that those will come down a little bit as we went through the remainder of the year. Is that still expected given the difficulties on the challenges from COVID-19?

Let me answer the first part of this, and then I'll let Keith jump in and give you more color. We are still very optimistic about the long-term opportunities at our company to deliver margin expansion. We've said this for a long time that we are pointing the Company to be a mid- single-digit grower with margins in the low to mid-20s. We still believe that is our target and an achievable target for our company. Obviously, COVID is going to have some impacts on us in the near-term. So we don't think that, that is going to prevent us from getting to our intermediate term targets there being in the 20s. Now is that going to impact Q2? I think, absolutely, it will, but it does not impact our ability [indiscernible] to drill profits over the longer term. I will let Keith add something on that for more perspective.

Thanks, Barry. So when you're looking at the information that we provided you, we've given you some insight as to what we're seeing. We don't have a perfect visibility on how that's going to translate into the rest of the year. But as you're looking, Chris, at the back end of March, when we indicated that there was about $16 million impact on the revenue, that was about, that translates to about 120 basis points impact to EBITDA margin on the quarter. So if you extrapolate that out, that's a pretty good indication about what the impact is on our profit in the near-term. That, obviously is, obviously, that's coming out at a bit less than what our gross profit is, and that takes into account all that Barry had just described of very aggressive actions that we've taken to take costs out of our SG&A functions as well. So we're properly scaling the business above the line in our cost of goods as well as in our SG&A.

Great. No, I appreciate that. And thanks for that info. Maybe just touching on any top line and some of the categories. Barry, one of the things you mentioned is as we get into the year on the Payments side, I think the later in the year, you maybe said, you talked about growth may be slowing a little bit. I don't know if that was the correct term, but what would temper the expectations since they're so strong right now in the economy to slow those trends?

Well, to be clear, we expect, and what I had said was that we expect the Payments business to materially outpace what's happening in the broader economy. And the reason for that is several folds. First of all, we have new products that I described, that are helping bring us into new markets and digitizing existing pathways. And we can do it a far more efficient way. And that's what the MPX program is all about, digitizing health care payments. So we also are winning, just saying, a very large number of customers in our Lockbox Integrated Treasury Management Solution. And the reason for that is, A, we're really good at it. And B, our financial stability is very attractive to large billers and financial institutions that are looking for a partner for the long term. And so it's a great example of the fact that our company is so strong that our balance sheet and the strength of our products and solution help us win new business. So we continue to see opportunities for new products. We see opportunities for growth in our existing products. We've sold a number of deals that we expect to continue to come on over the course of the year. But it's difficult to say exactly what that number is going to be, except that we're very, remain very optimistic about that growth for the rest of the year.

Okay. Fair enough. And then just on the Cloud side, the number looks pretty strong up until it seemingly up until March. Was that growing? Or was that seeing organic growth as well up until COVID?

The Cloud business has many different elements and they all were performing differently. They were performing well within our expectation that we've talked about at Investor Day. And we are pleased with where the Cloud businesses were collectively going into COVID. Obviously, those businesses were impacted as a result. So we're particularly optimistic about the recovery in the data businesses. We're already, as I said financial institutions about their recovery marketing program and we see financial institutions planning to be aggressive in going to market as the crisis saved. And I think that, that will be very good for our data business as we come out of this. And then we think other businesses there will recover more naturally with the recovery in the economy process.

Sure. Okay. And then I guess just cover has been here for a little bit. I know it's still early in terms of hitting the economy. But how have you changed maybe some go-to-market strategy to kind of you talked about you got a strong balance sheet, maybe stronger than some other competitors. How are you contacting kind of new customers at this point to maybe take some more share that given kind of disruption in the marketplace?

So we have good news on two sides there. One is really for the first time our company has a fully integrated go-to-market strategy, where we can talk to a customer about the range of solutions that Deluxe can deliver to our customers. So instead of having a few sales people that are very deep on one particular product, we have hundreds of salespeople that can go can go to customers and talk about the range. Not the need to go longer on something more specifically, we have specialists that can do that. But Chris Thomas as our new CRO, and we think it's the first time this company has had a CRO in at least 10 years, that's as far back as we can see, is pulling together the entirety of the sales organization so that they can have that view. One of the comments I made earlier was that we had our first ever sales kickoff meeting back in January. So we had all of the sales leadership and all of the salespeople together in one place hearing the entirety of our story. And people left that session really inspired to go power whole store. People were learning about the Deluxe Solutions that we've had for years, but they never knew even existed. So we're taking our story to the marketplace in a holistic way. So we're just having much broader conversations existing customers than we ever had before. Now the other side of this is we're also in a good position that we're getting inbound calls from some of our competitors' customers that are concerned about the financial stabilities. And to look at our balance sheet. You can see it our income statements, and you understand the history of our company is being financially sound for its…

Great, Barry. Thanks. That would be helpful. And if you could, on Slide 17, I just want to be clear that the total COVID-related noncash asset impairment charges totaled $85.3 million in the quarter, and that did include $63.3 million as a partial impairment of goodwill in the Promotional Solutions segment. And for the Cloud Solutions, we're really talking about web hosting. That reporting unit was fully impaired by $4.3 million with certain intangible assets, totaling $17.7 million. And then, Ed, if you could, on Slide 18, the point we're trying to make here is that while we drew down our credit facility, and net debt did increase about $20 million in the quarter. But we are currently holding a strong cash position in the $300 million area. And so net debt remains largely unchanged from the end of March. And that really was the highlight of our focus here. Thanks, Ed.

You know what? So why don't I take this back, and that's probably a great place for me to start the conclusion. I say thank you for joining us. But I want to leave you with five key takeaways. And Keith was making one of them there. First, we're financially strong. We've taken the necessary steps to secure our future. Second, we delivered a solid first quarter despite COVID impacts. Third, our strategy is working. During both January, February, pre-COVID, we delivered sales-driven growth for the first time in a decade. And I say it again, we delivered sales-driven growth for the first time in a decade. Our Payments business grew an impressive 18%. We think this is clear evidence our strategy is working. Fourth, while we're experiencing material revenue declines in the first part of Q2, we're confident that the business will recover and grow over time. And importantly, we have the financial wherewithal to sustain our business and get to the other side of this temporary downturn. Finally, over our proud 105 year history, our company has led through multiple crises, [indiscernible] of the Great Suppression, 2 World Wars and more. Through every one of these crises, our company has grown stronger and better. And this time is no different. Yes, we have a strong balance sheet and ample cash reserves. So what makes Deluxe so special as the character of my fellow Deluxers, finding a way to meet the customers' needs in good times and bad, that's our Deluxe character and winning attitude shining through that's lighting our pathway to even greater future success. Now I'll turn the call back to Ed for some final comments.

Thanks, Barry. Before we conclude the call today, I'd just like to remind the following conferences in the second quarter where management will be participating. On May 20, we'll be participating in the virtual Needham Technology and Media Conference. And on June 3 and 4th will be at the Baird 2020 Global Consumer, Technology & Services conferences. These conferences will be virtual from what I'm told. If there are any other questions or if an investor has some questions they want to talk to me, Barry, Keith, please call, please email. I know without travel schedules right now, it's tough to get a hold of this maybe, but we will absolutely make as much time as possible to speak with you on any topics you want to talk about. That's it. Thanks for joining us. And that concludes the Deluxe first quarter 2020 earnings call. Thank you all. Bye.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect.