Cameron Bready
Analyst · Baird
Thanks, Nate. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. As I'm sure you've seen by now, we successfully completed the acquisition of Worldpay in January, alongside the simultaneous divestiture of our Issuer Solutions business, marking an important milestone in the strategic transformation we've been executing over the past 18 months. I want to take a moment to extend my sincere appreciation and best wishes to our Issuer Solutions colleagues and to warmly welcome the talented team members of the Worldpay to the Global Payments family. Their expertise, passion and commitment have strengthened our organization from day 1. Our combination with Worldpay is not about creating a larger version of our 2 companies. It is about creating a better Global Payments, one with the enhanced scale capabilities and the focus necessary to compete and win as the worldwide partner of choice for commerce solutions. And we have greater conviction today than ever that this transaction will allow us to do just that. We have a lot to cover today, so let me briefly outline the agenda. I will begin with Global Payments standalone results for the fourth quarter and full year. Next, I will introduce the new Global Payments and highlight the key strategic initiatives we are focused on executing in 2026. I will then turn the call over to Josh to share more detail on our financial performance and outlook. We are very pleased with how we ended the year, delivering exactly as expected and fully aligned with the outlook we provided last February. For the fourth quarter, we reported 6% constant currency adjusted net revenue growth, excluding dispositions, 80 basis points of adjusted operating margin expansion and 12% adjusted EPS growth. Our Merchant Solutions business maintained strong momentum with adjusted net revenue growth accelerating to slightly above 6%. For the full year, we executed on all of our key objectives. We accelerated adjusted net revenue growth from 5% in the first half to 6% in the second expanded adjusted operating margins by 100 basis points, well ahead of our expectation of 50-plus basis points and delivered 11% adjusted EPS growth at the high end of our expectations. Importantly, we generated strong free cash flow in 2025 with over 100% adjusted free cash flow conversion. This provides us with the flexibility to return $1 billion to shareholders in 2025, while simultaneously reducing leverage in preparation for the closing of the Worldpay transaction. In addition, our portfolio divestitures have enabled us to return an incremental $1.2 billion to shareholders. Robust free cash flow generation and returning capital to shareholders remains central pillars of our investment thesis. With our major transactions now closed, we are resuming our share repurchase programs as we execute on our $7.5 billion capital return target for 2025 to 2027. At current valuation levels, we see buybacks as a highly compelling opportunity to drive shareholder value, given the clear dislocation between our share price and the fundamental performance and outlook for the business. To that end, our Board of Directors recently approved a $2.5 billion share repurchase authorization, and we are entering into an accelerated share repurchase agreement to immediately repurchase $550 million of our shares. We expect to return capital through a combination of open market purchases and accelerated share repurchases in addition to maintaining our stable dividend. Beyond our financial results, we also made substantial progress on our transformation program this year. We successfully transitioned from a holding company structure to a unified operating model globally, eliminating silos, increasing accountability and improving organizational performance, speed and efficiency. As part of this program, we continue to modernize and simplify our global technology stack, improving reliability, accelerating innovation cycles and enhancing ease of use and the overall experience for our merchants, partners and team members. Further, we are investing in the adoption of our new AI-enabled development tools and enhanced product operating model, allowing for increased productivity and quicker speed to market for new functionality. 2025 also marked the successful rollout of Genius, which is performing exceptionally well and remains in the early innings of what we see as a meaningful long-term growth opportunity. Finally, we continue to invest in our sales transformation. We have deployed a new technology platform with embedded AI capabilities to better manage lead flow and improve our performance. And we've already onboarded 200 of the 500 new sales professionals we announced on our third quarter call. As we enter 2026, we are well positioned to be the world's leading pure-play commerce solutions provider, and our North Star remains consistent, driving sustainable growth in M&A from an unrelented focus on our clients, leveraging our strategic advantages. Our advantage starts with our worldwide omnichannel reach, serving over 6 million merchant locations across online, in-store and in-app experiences in more than 175 countries. This breadth provides meaningful diversification and exposure to the full Global Payments TAM that is unmatched by any single competitor. Our advantage also extends from our go-to-market approach. We compete on product differentiation, service, reliability and fit to customer need, supported by a direct sales force of more than 5,500 professionals worldwide including approximately 1,500 experienced sellers from Worldpay. Alongside our direct channel, we operate a vibrant partner ecosystem with more than 1,700 financial institutions and thousands of software and platform partners, complemented by a robust dealer network that in solves Genius and supports customers end to end. For merchants preferring self-service, we offer that as well for streamlined install reporting upgrades and enhancements, all without human interaction. And with approximately $4 trillion in annual payments volume, our scale enables us to serve the largest global enterprises to small merchants alike and everything in between and to be highly price competitive, where we choose while still leading on capability and service. While these embedded advantages are significant, we are not standing still. We plan to invest approximately $1 billion annually in commerce technology to help our customers grow, expanding omnichannel offerings, advancing our AI-enabled product road map and accelerating innovation across Genius and our platforms. With our newly combined profile, we have taken the opportunity to evaluate the fundamental elements of our identity. Our aspiration is clear, to be the worldwide partner of choice for commerce solutions. And the value proposition that is reflected in our vision comes down to 2 simple things: igniting business growth in enriching lives around the world. We are not just a company that provides payments and software solutions. We are a company built to fuel the growth of businesses of all sizes with innovative payment and commerce solutions. And when we enable seamless, frictionless payments and delightful experiences we enrich people's lives through commerce. That brings us to our mission, which is to make every day commerce better. When our clients think about Global Payments, we want that statement to define who we are and the value we deliver. We will bring our aspiration vision and mission to life by leveraging our competitive advantages across 4 strategic pillars. First, our pure-play focus. Being exclusively focused on commerce solutions allows us to move faster, allocate resources with greater precision and amplify the impact of every dollar we invest to ensure that we have the best products and solutions in the markets in which we choose to compete. While some competitors are spread across a broad set of competing priorities, we are narrowing our focus, enabling us to execute more quickly and more effectively for our clients and partners. Second, our truly client-centric approach. This is a meaningful point of differentiation. Many competitors organize around their product lines, be it point-of-sale systems, payment gateways, embedded finance platforms, et cetera. Each team optimizes for their feature set. Then the client has to stitch together to make it work for their business. We organize around client segments. Our teams understand the full end-to-end requirements of large enterprises, SMBs and software platforms. And we build solutions that actually align with how they run their businesses. We provide dedicated relationship managers who architect the right combination of capabilities. We do not just simply sell what is on the shelf. This is a fundamental structural advantage, and we have the scale to deliver across every client segment we serve. Third, our enhanced capabilities and continued investment in innovation. From best-in-class enterprise payment tools to the feature-rich Genius platform, the breadth and depth of our capabilities are unmatched, and we will continue to invest to drive innovation and differentiation. Fourth, our global reach with local expertise. Our extensive geographic footprint enables us to help clients expand into new markets and unlock new sources of growth. And because we pair that reach with deep local knowledge, understanding domestic payment methods, customs and regulations we are uniquely equipped to help them succeed in every market they enter. These 4 pillars, pure-play focus, client centricity, innovation and global reach work together to multiply what's possible for our clients and partners. In 2026, we are focused on 4 initiatives to drive near- and long-term success for Global Payments, seamlessly integrating Worldpay, accelerating our go-to-market strategy and activities rapidly expanding Genius and boldly leveraging AI to create new revenue streams and drive productivity across the business. Beginning with Worldpay integration, our synergy initiatives are already well underway, and we remain confident in our ability to achieve $200 million in annualized revenue and $600 million in expense synergies over the next 3 years. Thanks to more than 8 months of preclosing preparation, we are already off to a great start with integration execution. Worldpay's U.S. direct sales force is already enabled to sell Genius. They have boarded their first cohort of new clients and the pipeline continues to build. This quick success demonstrates that Genius has a very short sales cycle and time to go live that is measured in days, not weeks. We are also progressing our next key priority to integrate Worldpay's e-commerce capabilities into our SMB offerings, an important driver of revenue synergies, and we're already having early success in the U.K. where we were able to quickly bring Worldpay's SMB e-com offerings to Global Payments sales channels. As we advance our integration program, we are taking a best of both approach across our teams, products and technologies. Further, we have made substantial progress with establishing our new leadership structure, having announced our new executive leadership team and all the senior leaders reporting to them. Consistent with our goal to unite is one global team. Our leadership team is now roughly evenly split between heritage Global Payments and Worldpay executives. And we are currently executing a comprehensive organizational design effort across the rest of the company, identifying top talent, eliminating duplication and maximizing efficiency as we bring the organizations together. Turning to our go-to-market strategy. We have organized our combined business around 3 channels: enterprise, integrated and platforms and SMB. Ultimately, these channels will enhance our value proposition and align with our unified client-focused operating model. Gabriel de Montessus, leads enterprise, which serves merchants with over $50 million in annual payments volume online and in-store. Gabriel joins us from Worldpay, where he's led this business for the past 5 years. Within Enterprise, we are uniquely positioned to continue winning share because of the breadth and depth of our capabilities. And with the combination, we can now unlock growth in markets where Global Payments has operated historically, but lacked the full suite of enterprise-grade solutions necessary to serve more sophisticated global clients. In addition to delivering highly reliable and scalable payment acceptance in this channel, we help our clients to generate incremental revenue by continuously bringing new innovative products to market that enhance authorization rates and avoid abandoned shopping carts. Recent innovations include our new 3DS Flex solution, which utilizes AI to achieve best-in-class authentication rates compared to peers, including over 7% higher authentication success rates in key markets like the U.K. and our revenue boost solution delivered more than $2 billion in measured approval rate uplift for merchants in 2025, igniting their growth. We simultaneously help our clients to save money by leveraging our scale, investments in data. For example, our Disputes Defender product uses AI to automate charge-back responses utilizing more than 500 data points. It protected over 40,000 merchants last year, increasing chargeback win rates by an average of 15%. Our dynamic routing solution also consistently delivered savings. In 2025, we optimized nearly 8 billion debit transactions, saving our customers over $200 million, an increase of more than 10% year-over-year. The strength of our competitive position led to several noticeable successes in 2025, including new wins with Domino's Canada and TaxSlayer. Key new e-commerce wins include Pfizer, global sports streaming network DAZN, European rideshare app, Bolt and a notable omnichannel cross-sell with Polish Airlines. The team also executed multiyear renewals with over 50 of our largest clients in 2025, representing over $1 trillion in annual payments volume, including numerous leading enterprises. Turning to integrated and platforms. Matt Downs leads this business serving ISVs, PayFac, platforms and marketplaces across more than 100 verticals. And Matt also joins us from Worldpay, where he led the Platforms business. Matt is a veteran of integrated payments businesses with deep knowledge and experience in the sector, including leadership roles in SaaS businesses. In this channel, we are uniquely positioned to support partners across the full operating model spectrum from traditional ISV referral and managed PayFac as a Service to full PayFac in every configuration in between. The combined business gives us purpose-built flexibility to match how each software platform partner wants to monetize payments and control the experience, whether they need low code referral simplicity, a curated a la carte stack or end-to-end PayFac capabilities. Critically, we can tail our operating models for the most sophisticated platforms and still deliver them at scale with attractive margins, leveraging our unified APIs, onboarding risk and managed services to keep partners agile as they grow. We've seen this come to life through recent wins with leading software providers, including ABC Fitness, LightSpeed and Vital Edge as well as recent multiyear renewal with one of our largest PayFac clients. And by combining with Worldpay, we will be able to further accelerate our global expansion of this channel. Lastly, our global SMB channel supports businesses with less than $50 million in annual payment volume and is led by David Rumph, a 14-year veteran of Global Payments. Our SMB business may stand to benefit most from our combination with Worldpay. Together, the breadth and depth of our distribution positions us very well competitively. We have the unique ability to sell new products and commerce solutions through direct and partner channels and markets around the world and we can cross-sell and upsell our innovative capabilities across our base of 6 million merchant locations. We also bring enterprise-grade capabilities to SMBs, such as our machine learning-based payments optimization tools, and integrating Worldpay's e-commerce capabilities will create a more powerful omnichannel solution. Our SMB team is executing with urgency, expanding distribution, rapidly enhancing Genius and making adoptions simpler and faster for customers. Turning to Genius. We continue to see substantial growth opportunities for this platform, and it remains a central pillar of our strategy. We have strong conviction in the product, and we'll continue to enhance its feature set to make it even better. In November, we hosted our first Genius users conference at Truist Park, a great stage to showcase the pace of innovation and hear directly from our clients. One highlight of the conference was the introduction of Genius Drive-thru, our multilane solution that pairs a seamless order flow with our patented camera vision system, so each vehicle is automatically matched to the right order. The outcome is simple, faster lines, fewer errors, happier guests. We also announced Uber Eats as our preferred delivery partner in the U.S. and Canada. Restaurants can self onboard in minutes, and orders updates and cancellations sync instantly between Uber Eats and Genius, reducing workload at the counter and allowing clients to unlock incremental demand faster. As we continue to invest in Genius, we are widening where Genius can win. We launched Genius for services and extended support into higher education and age-related verticals. Further, we expanded distribution to our wholesale channel, successfully piloted Genius in Germany and introduced mobile payment capabilities for on-the-go businesses in the U.K. And we unveiled the industry's first modular point-of-sale hardware that combines a contemporary aesthetic, which functionalities that most systems cannot match. By modular, we mean that each of the components is interchangeable, allowing our customers to configure the point of sale to meet their specific use case. The screen, stand, CPU and connection hub can be easily swapped out, which future-proofs the solution by allowing clients to upgrade individual components without needing to replace any of the rest of the device. Earlier, I described our vision to ignite business growth in enrich lives around the world. In Genius is doing exactly that for 7 Brew drive-through coffee, which is one of the fastest-growing coffee chains in the U.S. 7 Brew chose Genius to preserve what makes their brand special, personal, high energy service, while streamlining order flow and back of house operations. We implemented Genius at more than 500 locations in just 65 days, and they have kept growing at roughly 10 new rooftops a week, which underscores Genius' scalability. We also added Braum's Ice Cream with 320 locations in Love's Travel Stops. Further, SeaWorld deployed nearly 100 Genius kiosks across 5 theme parks and Diamond Baseball Holdings brought Genius into an additional 6 of its minor league stadium. Even with all this progress, we are not slowing down. We recently launched a comprehensive marketing campaign across 4 key U.S. markets, TV, radio, digital signage and more, to put Genius in front of more prospects more often. And for 2026, we plan to continue investing in feature functionality to meet the needs of several professional services verticals that will further expand distribution through Worldpay's channels including their 50 largest referral banks and more than 6,300 branches. Internationally, we will scale in Germany and expand into Ireland and the Czech Republic and we will roll out our new mobile form factor, including tap to pay on phone into additional markets worldwide. Finally, our fourth important initiative for 2026 is expanding our investment in AI and agentic commerce. AI is rapidly advancing and has become a foundational initiative permeating all aspects of our organization to both strengthen our top line and accelerate our efforts on cost efficiency. We are leveraging AI across 3 strategic paradigms, agentic commerce, AI embedded within our products to improve client outcomes and AI-enabled productivity and operational efficiency. First and foremost, agentic commerce is the next evolution of the retail experience, where AI can research, select and even complete transactions on behalf of consumers. With our leading scale and sophisticated e-commerce capabilities, we are differentiated by our ability to act as a universal connector across genic platforms and protocols for merchants of any size anywhere in the world, operating in any vertical. To position Global Payments at the center of the shift, we've been a founding member of every major protocol announced, including Google's Universal Commerce protocol and OpenAI agentic commerce protocol. In fact, we've just completed our implementation of the latter, so our merchants can accept payments originating from ChatGPT as well as Google's AI chat interfaces. We also launched our own model context protocol or MCP in November, which makes it easier for AI agents to initiate in query payments in automated operational workflows. Our stand-alone acquirer-agnostic token vault and credential management systems are world-class and a crucial capability for an agent world where tokens underpin secure handling of credentials between agents, merchants and other entities. We were also in partnership discussions with several leading ecosystem players to support our merchants with additional value-added services that become increasingly relevant in the world of AI-led commerce, including product lead optimization, know your agent functionality, agentic fraud prevention and disputes management and many others. As for embedding AI into our products and capabilities, we are already seeing results in our business. Across our global e-commerce business, we are using deep transaction insights and intelligent routing to help merchants capture more revenue with less friction. Our AI-powered authentication optimization service goes far beyond legacy rules-based systems by dynamically choosing the path with the highest probability of issuer approval or regulatory compliance. In 2025, it delivered a 4-point uplift in approval rates for pilot merchants by deciding when to invoke or bypass 3D Secure based on issuer behavior and risk signals. This is a great example of how our scale and data convert declines into approvals, reduce friction and protect revenue that otherwise would be lost at checkout. Within Genius, we are leveraging AI to solve real problems for small businesses. For example, we can automatically gather customer reviews from multiple social platforms and use generative AI to drive personalized on-brand responses on behalf of our merchants. And we are launching a natural language agent assistant within Genius that will provide insights to business owners. And lastly, we continue to embrace AI to drive productivity and operational efficiency throughout our business. Our engineering teams have adopted AI-assisted coding tools, which accelerates requirements gathering and development cycles by nearly 20%, while also improving code quality. Productivity and output quality have continued to increase as adoption has scaled. And as we integrate Worldpay, AI will play a central role in automating repeatable processes, driving greater efficiency and helping us capture the expense synergies we have outlined. By embedding AI into core operational workflows, everything for merchant onboarding and risk reviews to service ticket routing, settlement reconciliation and partner support we can dramatically reduce manual effort in cycle times, allowing teams to focus on higher-value work, improve accuracy and consistency across shared processes and enabling us to scale the combined organization far more efficiently. Likewise, we are leveraging AI to further accelerate our technology consolidation efforts across the combined enterprise. Enhanced data-driven visibility into our application and infrastructure landscape will help us rationalize platforms reduce redundancy, expedite migrations and facilitate the retirement of duplicative systems. These initiatives will allow us to continue to simplify our technology stack, improve capital efficiency and enable us to concentrate investment on the scalable future-ready platforms, strengthening our operational agility. Lastly, our scale gives us a distinct advantage as we deploy AI. Every year, we process trillions of dollars in payments volume and billions in individual transactions across geographies, channels and verticals. This breadth and diversity of data creates uniquely rich training environments for our AI models. Because we see such a wide cross-section of global commerce in real time, our models learn faster, generalize better and detect patterns and ways unique to our scale. That allows us to improve authorization rates, reduce fraud, enhance risk scoring and deliver more personalized insights for our customers. Importantly, we also do this with strict adherence to privacy, security and regulatory requirements. In short, the scale of our data does not make our AI better. It drives better results for our customers. With a clear focus on these 4 key initiatives, we are well positioned to deliver on our targeted outcomes and advance our priorities for 2026. Specifically, we expect to achieve the following this year. First, we will firmly establish the new Global Payments. We're building on work already in motion to fully leverage our new business profile, bringing together capability, systems and brands while executing disciplined integration plans to support future growth. To further accelerate this progress, we are advancing our technology and innovation strategy, including aligning orchestration capabilities to continue to deliver a modern experience and single integration point for clients as well as exposing the full breadth of our capabilities globally. Secondly, we will unite as one global team. Bringing together the full strength of our team members, talent and payments expertise is essential. When we operate as one team, we move faster and make better decisions and unlock the full potential of our combined organization. Third, we will deliver exceptional value and experiences for our clients and partners. This includes client-focused product innovation, expanding Genius across high-growth verticals and geographies, broadening our omnichannel capabilities globally and scaling our marketplace solution. We want Global Payments to be synonymous with exceptional value and experience. That is a key priority for 2026. Finally, these initiatives will drive sustainable growth and long-term value creation. We are a proven compounder. We grow through all phases of the economic cycle. In 2026, our priority is squarely on building durable top line performance by building strong sales momentum, expanding distribution for innovative commerce solutions and beginning to execute on our revenue synergy opportunities across every clients' segment. With that, I'll turn it over to Josh.