Gary Norcross
Analyst · Stephens Inc. Please go ahead
Thank you Pete and good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us on today's call. Turning to slide six, 2014 proved to be another very strong year. We drove consistent execution, continued to deliver on our financial commitments to our shareholders and achieved our full year growth outlook. We finished the year with record revenue of $6.4 billion reflecting 6% year-over-year growth. We drove adjusted EBITDA of $1.9 billion and adjusted earnings per share of $3.10, growing our earnings per share by 10% year-over-year. We generated free cash flow of $864 million. In the fourth quarter our results are equally as strong; revenue increased 7%, EBITDA increased 9%, margins expanded 30 basis points and adjusted earnings per share increased 16% over the prior year period. We finished the year on a strong footing with continued sales success across all markets, a robust pipeline and good visibility heading into 2015. Turning to slide seven, consistent with our growth strategy, we are using our significant cash flow to drive value for our clients and our shareholders. First, we continue to invest for growth in our operations that target global financial institutions, as well as strategic solution oriented acquisitions including Clear2Pay, Reliance Trust and CMSI, all of which strengthen our payments well and lending capabilities respectively. Second, we maintained our strong balance sheet ending the year with leverage of 2.6 times debt to EBITDA, which reflects complete deleveraging of our investment and Clear2Pay during the fourth quarter. Our continued financial discipline was recognized by upgrades from both Fitch and Standard & Poor’s during 2014. Third, we continue to deliver strong value to our investors returning $750 million to our shareholders in 2014 through $475 million of stock repurchases and $275 million in dividends. We also recently announced an 8% increase in the quarterly dividend. Overall our strong fourth quarter and full year results demonstrate the continued successful execution of our business strategy and our ability to consistently enhance shareholder returns. Turning now to the markets on slide eight. We continue to capitalize on the increasing market demand for scalable outsourced solutions and transformational services by leveraging our comprehensive suite of end to end technology assets, consulting services and outsource managed delivery capabilities. We saw increased demand in the quarter and year-over-year for our suite of integrated financial solutions. This was especially true in North America where we saw a number of key competitive core baking wins in the quarter and for the full year. For the fourth quarter we signed 14 new core deals and for the year we saw a 54% increase in total new core wins compared to the prior year. Digital channels continue to be a key driver as consumer adoption rates grow, creating strong opportunities for our broad based mobile platforms. These opportunities have translated into strong double-digit revenue growth in our mobile business, supported by our strong performance in new mobile deals last year and a user base approaching $30 million. We continue to be one of the leaders in integrated digital channels and mobile platforms and are delivering key innovations that are chaining the way people bank. As you would expect with the increasing regulatory burdens, our enterprise governance risk and compliance business continues to experience double-digit growth. We see intuitions of all sizes looked at by us to more effectively address the increasing regulatory requirements, enforcement actions and cyber security threats. In fact, last week we hosted over 300 clients in San Diego for our 11th Annual Enterprise Governance, Risk & Compliance Summit. This event brings together key stakeholders from banks and non-banks to federal and state regulatory agencies to discuss emerging risk and explore new best practices for handling these risks. These events are not only information sharing events, but create significant sales opportunities for our teams over the following months. These successes coupled with others within our North American businesses have created strong momentum and pipeline for 2015. Outside North America macro economic trends around the globe continue to cause headwinds in Brazil and some slippage of deals in Europe. Foreign currency exchange rates were a headwind in Q4 and will continue in 2015. However due to our broad geographic business and extensive asset portfolio, we produced strong double-digit growth overall for the year and have confidence in similar double-digit organic growth in 2015. This confidence is due to our success in 2014 delivering several key client wins, as well as continued progress on our large implementation projects. For example, in Q4 Bandhan Financial Services Ltd., India’s largest micro finance institution with over 2,000 locations and 6 million customers will be offering retail baking services to its customers utilizing our core baking capability on an outsourced basis. The proposed Bandhan bank plans to launch between 400 to 600 branch locations beginning in Q2, 2015. In addition Muthoot Financial Partners also delivered another strong growth opportunity in Q4 by selecting us to fully manage its ATM services and switching solutions across India. Finally new startup banks in the U.K. proved to be a solid area of opportunity with FIS signing several startup bank clients in the quarter. To capitalize on the large IP spend and our success in selling to the top global financial institutions, throughout 2014 we added new global client partners, sales and client implementation support teams along with client centered marketing through our operations. As a result of these additions, we are building on our 2014 success and have a strong pipeline for large transformational outsourcing deals and are seeing results as cost containment, regulatory pressures and front to back office transformation projects continue to dominate our clients agendas. Additionally, we have seen significant increase in demand for our Clear2Pay solutions among these institutions. Our integration of Clear2Pay is on track and early sales results are inline with our investment case. We continue to see the benefit of FIS’s global sales force adds to these strategic acquisitions by increasing access to our broad client base. Before I turn it over to Woody for the financial report, I’d like to review the key pillars of our multi year strategy that provide us a strong foundation for success in 2015. Turning to slide nine. The breadth and depth of FIS’s solution portfolio combined with our large sales and global reach enables us to drive change within our organization to deliver on our growth commitments. From this we are able to deliver on our financial commitments to our shareholders, while continuing to drive profitable growth consistently year-over-year. Strengthen our balance sheet by maintaining improving our investment grade ratings and meeting our total debt to EBITDA target. Continue to return cash to our shareholders in the form of share buybacks and quarterly dividends; leverage our scale and cost effectively manage our operations through continuous expense management discipline; and then act on strategic acquisitions in an environment of increasingly rapid and aggressive global competition. This increasingly rapid change is driven by disruptive innovators entrench competitors expanding their services and global players who are to scale with a wider breadth of solution and services is growing an importance to clients. This strategic focus provides us confidence in our ability to drive continued growth and strong financial performance. Woody will now provide details around our Q4 and full year performance. Woody?