Gary A. Norcross
Analyst · Stephens
Thanks, Frank, and thanks to everyone for being with us today. My presentation begins on Slide 9. I'll begin with an update on the global sales climate, followed by a summary of business highlights for the quarter. Although the regulatory environment has created challenges for financial institutions, they are moving forward, developing and executing new revenue strategies. We are encouraged by the renewed focus on growth and investing for the future. Ongoing initiatives to improve efficiencies continue to favor outsourcing over in-house solutions. While we anticipate that 2012 will continue to be a time of transition for the financial industry, we believe that the outlook for the banking sector and the economy as a whole is improving. If you would turn to Slide 10, I will cover some of the business highlights for the quarter beginning with North America. As Frank mentioned, we hosted the first of 4 annual client conferences last week. The conference was very successful, with more than 1,000 clients in attendance, which is a significant increase compared to last year. Activity surrounding the more than 100 FIS products and services being demoed was high, as was participation in the 130 breakout sessions which included topics ranging from merchant-funded rewards, to chip-based technology, to mobile solutions. In addition to being a great opportunity for our entire team to interact face-to-face with clients, the annual conferences provide valuable insight into how we can best allocate our investment dollars to generate additional cross-selling opportunities. For example, 2 product acquisitions that we discussed earlier this year at Investor Day, GIFTS and Compliance Coach, and the ongoing enhancements we are making to integrate them with the core are great examples of how our investments are filling product gaps for our clients and driving incremental growth for our company. GIFTS, which is an integrated wire transfer and money management solution, has grown more than 30% through cross-sales to new and existing clients. Compliance Coach, which is a regulatory training and compliance tool, has grown by more than 50% since we acquired the company. We are also seeing good growth in professional services, Channel Solutions and our Global Commercial business. We are very pleased with the solid results in our Payments business, which grew 4.2%, excluding the check-related businesses. We continued to analyze transaction trends, including the impact of the Durbin Amendment, now that the 3 major milestones are behind us. These milestones and results are: First, volumes have held up well since the end of priority routing, which was effective October 1, 2011. Second, transactions have remained consistent post April 1, 2012, which is when the restrictions on network exclusivity went into effect. And third, we're closely monitoring volumes to assess the potential impact on the pricing changes that were implemented by VISA on April 14, 2012. Next, I will provide an update on our International business on Slide 11. International continues to be a growth driver for our company. While organic growth of 7% in the first quarter is below our full year target, we expect double-digit growth in 2012. Brazil remains a great market for us with strong growth in card volumes and back office services. Growth in Europe is being driven primarily by the Capco Consulting business. However, we are also seeing ongoing demand for discretionary professional services, including the enterprise core platform upgrade for ING that we discussed at Investor Day. The Asia-Pacific region also continues to provide growth opportunities for our company. As we have discussed on prior calls, a number of banks in Asia utilize FIS as their core processing partner. We are seeing increased demand for our comprehensive integrated branch channel solutions and we were very excited to announce our first TouchPoint deal in Thailand earlier this week. We are also very pleased with the success we are having with our Payment Solutions throughout the region. Moving to Slide 12. Organic growth of 5.3% in the first quarter improved sequentially compared to the fourth quarter of 2011, and was driven by solid performance across each of our operating segments. Growth in the higher margin businesses, including Payments, coupled with an ongoing focus on managing cost, contributed to the 150 basis points improvement in the margin. Our shift in strategy from large transformative acquisitions, is allowing us to focus on driving organic growth and optimizing performance across our company. As we discussed at our Annual Investor Day, we are targeting 3 areas to drive improvement, including revenue growth, focusing resources on high growth businesses and strong cost management. And we are executing on that strategy. Turning to Slide 13. Similar to the GIFTS and Compliance Coach deals that I discussed earlier, ongoing investment in targeted product acquisitions are key components of our plan to sell more solutions across our extensive client network. This past Monday, we announced 2 product-focused acquisitions that support our strategy to provide end-to-end fraud, risk and compliance solutions to our clients. The first acquisition, ICS Risk Advisors, provides outsourced risk management and regulatory compliance programs to community institutions, as well as several top-tier banks. The second, Memento, provides enterprise fraud solutions to global financial institutions including 7 of the top 25 banks in the U.S. These products, which complement our earlier Compliance Coach acquisition, are great examples of investments we are making to help our clients address some of their most pressing challenges, including managing through an increasingly more complex regulatory environment. Next, if you will turn to Slide 14, I'll provide an update on the investments we are making to improve information security across FIS. As you recall, FIS experienced a cyber attack on our Sunrise platform in the first quarter of 2011. The financial impact related to the breach was borne solely by FIS, as previously reported. At that time, we took immediate steps to notify the affected clients and to remediate the problem. We also hired 2 third-party firms to conduct an independent review of our information security. Our executive management team and our Board of Directors have been actively engaged in the company's information security and risk management functions before, during and after the Sunrise event. Based on the nature of our business, FIS is periodically reviewed by the regulatory agencies that govern financial institutions. Upon completion of an interim review in late 2011, the regulators issued a confidential examination report to FIS related to information security and risk management. We responded to this report and described the actions that we have taken, and will take, to address the requested enhancements. The regulatory agencies distributed a letter to our clients in March of 2012, describing the requested improvements, along with acknowledging FIS's commitment to make the improvements. We are working closely with our customers to respond to their questions and update them on our progress. Our conversations have been very productive, and importantly, we did not see any significant impact on results in the first quarter. Overall, we believe the steps we have already taken to improve information security, together with the additional investments that we are making in 2012, will result in FIS being an even better, stronger company. In closing, I'd like to leave you with the following key takeaways, which are outlined on Slide 15. We are very pleased with our strong first quarter performance and the progress we are making to improve organic growth and drive margin expansion. We are delivering on our product-focused M&A strategy. Information security remains a top priority at FIS and we have made substantial progress against our planned enhancements. We remain focused on serving our clients and executing our business strategy. Again, thank you for joining us this morning. I'll now turn it over to Mike for the financial report.