Okay, we are back from lunch. I think more people are making their way back into the room. In the meantime, we're going to kick off the afternoon here, and we're very happy to have the management team of FIS. We have James Kehoe, CFO, we have George Mihalos, who runs Investor Relations. Thank you guys both for being here. We appreciate it. A lot of ground to cover. Some pretty interesting stuff happening at the company right now. I actually wanted to start on the Banking segment. Obviously, it's 75% of your revenue and where most of the focus tends to be. The past two quarters, I mean, the performance there is, you know, unequivocally been better than you guided to, better than the street expected, and pretty strong in a historical context. You know, I'm really talking about an underlying organic basis. What, I guess, would you call out have been like the sources of upside? I think it's two things we're really excited about. One is the state of the industry, so the end market. It's really buoyant. Banks are doing well. They're spending, and the regulatory environment is much more beneficial to their investment profile. We're seeing they're spending more on M&A and spending a lot more on technology, especially on AI, and they're embracing AI at a pace that was unheard of in the past. We're very excited by the position of the industry. Our position, because as you said, yeah, last year, especially in the second half of the year, the Banking business, you can see over the last number of years, the fundamentals have dramatically improved. You're looking at a solid, you know, the organic, you mentioned organic, it's 4.5% last year. With the total result about 5.5%. That's well ahead of Investor Day guide. Like, well ahead. We're above the high end of the guide, and the question is, you know, why? It's the biggest number one is commercial focus. I think there's two pieces. Actually, I think the building blocks put in place before was on improving the product and improving the interface with the client. At the beginning of last year, we transformed the model to a functional model. We have it for the first time in history, a Chief Client Officer who's held accountable for building the relationship with clients, not selling, building the relationship, what products do they want. When did that start? Beginning of 2025. Okay. That was one key step. Is it? Are we serving our clients better, and do they feel like we're serving them better? The other one is commercial excellence. Again, new leadership was put in. End of the first quarter of 2025, the previous leader of the Capital Markets business took over as Chief Commercial Officer. Okay. It's not, you know, the change. Don't underestimate it. There's been a big shift away from selling to building quality pipeline. That has been the big change in Banking. Last year, we actually changed the commissions to focus the sales away from professional services and to pivot to recurring. During the course of the year, salespeople do exactly what you pay them to do. PS went down in terms of ACV and recurring went up significantly. You saw that in our prepared materials on the last call. Our recurring revenue ACV growth in Q4 was 20%. The full year is pretty similar to that number. Yeah. The standout was the quality of the recurring ACV. We're selling way more payments. The Payments business in the entire year grew ACV 70%. Digital was up 60%. In the Capital Markets business, the Lending business, I think, was up 70%. Why is that important? Those three categories have margins well in excess of the company average. They're our most profitable segments. Think of this as the commercial excellence. One is a shift to recurring, and the secondary shift is a way for call it, away from Commercial and BPAS and to the Payments sector, to the Digital sector. These ACV numbers that have been delivered last year, they flow into the P&L into 2026, and especially in 2027. Right. The strategy, we even fine-tuned the commercial commission rates at the beginning of this year as well. We're continuing to fine-tune the focus to sales on what's strategically important for the company. Previously, they could sell PS and recurring and get compensated the same way. Now the compensation is completely different. Right. They get far less for selling professional services and far more for a new recurring sale. They follow the dollars. Yeah. That's how it works. Yeah. It'll be more of the same. This is why we're incredibly confident on the banking guide for 2026. We went out and said 5%-5.5%. If you take the midpoint, the organic is, I think it's a 4.7%. Even the organic is accelerating. Within that, the TSYS business is like we're expecting more of what they did in last year, like a 4.5% growth rate. Mm-hmm. There's the standouts in terms of ACV will continue to be quite similar. It's not that we're de-emphasizing core, it's that we're super emphasizing the Payments business. Yeah. You know, that is the jewel of the crown in terms of potential that wasn't tapped. Back at Investor Day, we talked about $hundreds of millions of cross-sell opportunity. Most of that cross-sell was debit, the what? We didn't have the debit, but we had the core. Yeah. Or- Yeah. You know, we had the debit, but we didn't have something else. Yeah. This cross-selling is now where we're massively focused. It's on building our position with the growing banks. I really wanna go back to that for a minute. Yeah. As we are only focused on financial institutions. Yeah. This is what banks like. We're not focused on merchant acquiring. We're not focused on neobanks. I think Fiserv serves more, far more banks than we do. Mm-hmm. Why? Because they go down market, and we stay up market. Our share, we are the number one share in banks above $10 billion in assets, and that's where we play, and that's what we're very good at. Why? Because our products are generally best in breed. They do facilitate commercial banks. That's much more complex than serving a retail bank. Finally, everything we do, we can do at scale. There's many people who can process, you know, a core ledger for a small bank. The more you go up and the complexities increase, the more you get into commercial banking, the more you get into large credit card portfolios. Running a client with 100 million credit cards is far different than running a client with 2 million credit cards. Yeah. Our advantage is scale and consistency, and that's why we have a number one position with large financial institutions. It sounds like, I mean, these changes that you've made, they're durable, they're structural, right? Yeah. It wasn't like, "Oh, we got a one-time bump from this or that." I mean, this commercial excellence is permeating the organization. Yeah. You've changed the sales force incentive comp model. It sounds like this trend of kind of outperforming, you know, calling it your medium-term guide, but we're kind of coming to the end of that period already, right? No, no, it's very deliberate, and I'll give you an example again on the sales commissions. Yeah. The steering comm for sales commission is led by the Chief Commercial Officer. Okay. I sit on it, and so does Stephanie. The final decision doesn't get approved without her coming to the final meetings. Right. I'm all of the steering comm meetings on deciding the changes. Finance is there. The business presidents, the product presidents are there, but it's predominantly a company decision on the commissions. Okay. It's completely linked to strategy. Right. It's not linked to selling. It's linked to strategy. Well, that's the big change, right? That's the big change. That's happened here. That's the big change. Okay. Yeah. Okay. We're asking all the companies that have come today just, you know, any comments about, you know, how the quarter's going. Obviously, we've had the war broke out a couple of weeks ago. I mean, I don't think you have much, you know, direct exposure or, you know, operations on the ground in the Middle East, but if you can just address that and any other call-out. Yeah. We do have some locations with, but I think we're in the neighborhood of 30 people. Okay. Our primary concern was protecting individuals. Our business exposure is minimal. In general as well, you know, oil prices have gone up. In a recession, we are inclined to do slightly better because our Debit business, that's a little different now. We have a credit and debit processing of scale. Right. Debit is inclined to grow faster in a recession. I'm not saying we're recession proof in any way. Sure. We're seeing no impacts. We have no business exposure. In general, our revenue is not exposed to consumer dynamics. Right. Just in general. Right. Okay. On the quarter, we can't say anything about the quarter. Sure. It's literally full speed ahead. We've seen nothing in the first two months that would change any perspective on the full year. We gave out a guide, and it's an eminently achievable guide. Okay. Okay, good to hear. Just, I guess you're not seeing any slowdown in bank decision-making or anything like that, just as the macro has arguably become a little bit more uncertain. No, we would say. I would say in general, the one thing I would comment on, the build of pipeline is as strong as we would need it. What's the best way to put it? Banking is incredibly strong in pipeline generation. We've kind of moved into a different era now on building pipeline. A lot of our pipeline mining is much stronger than it was 12 months ago. It's AI-generated, so much of the lead generation and the identification is being facilitated by AI. The pipelines are substantially higher than they were entering the prior year. Which is always a good sign, right? Yeah. Because, then you have to convert that pipeline into ACV, and then the ACV gets converted into recurring. We're intensely focused on building quality pipeline and converting the pipeline to ACV this year. Right. Okay. Yeah, we're definitely gonna come back to AI 'cause Yeah I hear it's gonna be big. That's what everyone says. Yeah. We'll get your perspective on that in a little bit. Let's just one more kind of on, well now kind of the true kind of core banking part of the Banking segment. Just talk to us about, you touched on this a little bit in terms of like how you're differentiated in terms of your positioning, but as you look at what's happened with some other players in the space. Like, do you see opportunity to move further down market to take more share? What are some of those dynamics that we should be monitoring? Dynamics, you know, there's, everyone knows, decisions on consolidation of platforms do open up opportunities for the competitors. Yeah. One is, I don't think we obviously will try and take advantage of it, but that's not the biggest driver in our business. Right. We're not counting on significant wins from competitors. Why? I kind of said it earlier. We're focused on maximizing our growth, which means the number of products we sell to the biggest banks. We're not going down market to sub $10 million banks. Will we still compete in that area? Yes. Is it strategic? It's not as strategic, right? You know, we wanna sell our debit and credit into the banks where we have the core. We do wanna get big core wins. If you look at our most recent quarter, we had an impressive set of banner wins, including takeaways from some of the key competitors. Synovus was a large win, which adds a really large number of accounts. Our focus is on the number of accounts in core, number of accounts in debit- Right. Number of accounts in credit. Now you're- You know, at some stage we will think about should we give KPIs on these. We're driving the number of accounts. Why is that important? The number of banks with assets more than $10 billion over the last 10 years increased by 50%. It's a pretty elitist group. It's not a large number. Yeah. It's not thousands of banks. Right. It's like 150 banks. Right. That's where we're focused. Why? They are growing their accounts because they are the net acquirers. When a bank is acquired, if we're one of the two banks, we typically win the business. Right. Especially if one of the two banks is a commercial bank. This is not being arrogant, it's just factual. It is we are the number one in large banks, and typically we will win more when there's merger activity. Yeah. I would just add there, just very quickly again to James's point, we don't focus on stick count. We focus on the account growth. Yeah. If you kinda think about, in many instances, one of these deals alone is 10, 15 bank deals rolled up into one. Right. That's kind of the focus for us. Yeah. Just the other point I'd just make is, you know, or have we seen success sub $10 billion? Yes, we have, and we talked about that at length in 2024. That's not a market we're retreating from in any. Right. In any capacity. We've done a lot better there with the HORIZON product. Obviously we see a lot more opportunity as these banks get bigger and bigger, given the M&A that we're seeing in the space. Yeah. It's just a matter of relative focus, right? 'Cause you see that opportunity up. We've got products oriented for each of the groupings. Yep. you know, we do have a product that works in credit unions. As I said, our strategic focus is on the larger banks and mid-size banks. I wanted to come back to TSYS, and now you have massive credit processing. Capabilities and then basically two primary players. You're one of them now. What does the kind of cross-sell motion look like? I mean, on paper that seems like a great opportunity because presumably a lot of these $10 billion-plus asset size banks, they have credit card programs, right? How often are they insourcing? Do you have to get competitive takeaways? You know, is that something that you could start seeing some cross-sell traction with this year, or does it take longer? Yeah. The guide we had for revenue synergies, which is a good proxy for- Yeah. Cross-sell- Yeah. If you like, was in the P&L $45 million by 2028. Right. We did say the goal was $125 million midterm. Yeah. This was just to express the fact that contracts don't come up for renewal. Some of them can be locked for five years. Yeah. There is clear potential on the $125, and you should presume we have a list of ideas that add up to a number that is higher than $125. But within that, there are big blocks of opportunity. One is loyalty, so a cross-sell of loyalty between the two. Okay. Two is obviously where we have a core and we don't have credit processing, we now have incredibly stronger assets for win and processing. One of the biggest opportunities is International. They added about $1 billion of sales to our International business. Now I think International is about a $4 billion business for us, and it's given us a stronger right to win. Yeah. In Europe and Latin America. Why? They have this platform called Prime, which is their international credit processing platform. It's a $200 million business growing at 15%. They have a massive pipeline. The interesting thing we found out is that they were under-investing in international because Global was a little bit using them as a cash cow. They couldn't invest in sales, implementation teams in international. Okay. Some of this is. I'm not saying it's super easy. It's easier to unlock. We're probably going to add sales resources and add implementation resources to their International business, and that will drive considerable opportunity in international. We've already taken an action here. We've taken their sales quotas for 2026- Added them to our sales quotas. Our sales force internationally is far, far bigger than TSYS' was. Far, far bigger because of our capital markets footprint. They're carrying a dual quota already, including the credit issuing business. Okay. Our sales force has already started selling their products leveraging the existing pipeline which is incredibly strong. We're very bullish on the cross-sell. Just coming back to the synergies. I mean, you laid them out on the revenue, on the cost side over the next three years. Just as you draw on your experience, like when FIS bought Worldpay, you know, are there certain kind of risk mitigation strategies to make sure that you do achieve or perhaps even can overachieve both the revenue- Yeah The cost synergies? That's a good question. Lessons learned there or. Yeah, we got that when we did announce the deal, and there's two fundamental differences. Okay. One is the Worldpay acquisition was quite different than this one for two reasons. One is Worldpay was not the sweet spot of FIS. It was merchant acquiring, it wasn't core financial, core financials. Right. The management team was extended. They didn't have as much experience. Second thing they did was they exited most of the Worldpay team. What are we doing differently this time? The credit issuer acquisition is a business we already operate in, right? It's very close to core banking. It's all LFI business, which is what we are very focused on. It's a sweet spot we already operate in. Yeah. We're retaining the entire management team. Right. You can assume they're all on incentives for an extended duration to retain them in the business. It's a double risk protection, if you like. I wanted to go back to that 20% growth in the recurring ACV because I. Yeah I almost feel like that got a little overlooked in the print. Yeah. That was a pretty strong number. I mean, is that sustainable in 2026? I guess beyond what you've already talked about, are there any other drivers that, you know, really supported that number? Yeah. Well in 2025? I'm not gonna start guiding to ACV recurring because. Right. It'll just put us in another cycle of guidance. I think what we mentioned before, will the vectors be the same vectors? The answer is yes, right? Yeah. You're gonna see probably high growth rates on Digital Payments business. Bear in mind, digital grew 100% last year. The number of accounts on file on digital, they grew massively. Yep. The vectors are the same, and we're selling into our existing base, into the TSYS base. Why is it sustainable? We're continually making our products core agnostic, which means that our digital products, we can sell it to not just our core- Right ...into a Fiserv core. More and more on payments, we're displacing competition even when we don't have the core. We are getting more, call it agnostic, and we don't want to have to sell also the core. Exactly. We're going in and targeting specifically our competition on the Payments business. Bear in mind, the Payments business is now our biggest business. You know, if you look at the Right In the financials we filed, the Banking business is about $4 billion. Yeah. Payments is 5.5%. Right. Capital Markets, 3%-ish, right? Yep. So- Yeah Payments is the biggest. I'll touch on that for a minute, why it's important and why we're focusing the sales force on it. The recurring growth rate in the Payments business by virtue of the products it sells is a faster growth rate than core Banking, right? It's gonna grow recurring faster with a higher margin profile. Because businesses like network are incredibly profitable. Right. You know, adding on an incremental transaction. Yeah, yeah Is at a very high gross margin. Yeah. The margins in our Payments business are higher, and the recurring growth rate is higher. Doesn't mean the banking is a bad business. It still has really attractive margins. Sure it's growing, you know, mid-single-digit. The difference is it does have a processing business in there. Yeah This Commercial and BPAS business, it can be debit card production, it can be statement printing, that kind of thing. That has got a lower overall margin. Generally, our core Banking business has high margins as well, and Digital has high margin. Okay. Understood. Let's come back to AI. I mean, I think on the earnings call, you guys did an excellent job of kind of framing why AI should actually be a tailwind to your business, not a headwind. Maybe just take a minute and talk to us about that through the lens of both the Banking segment. Sure ...as well as the Capital Markets segment, and then also just from, like, a revenue and a cost perspective in the P&L of FIS. Yeah. We could go on for days. Yeah, I know. I know. We had a couple of statements. One is, why do we think we have a competitive moat? We said because of that moat and our investments, we believe that AI is a strategic accelerant, not an issue for the company. I think that was the essential communication. Why do we have a moat? We have systems of record. Yeah. Systems of record are deterministic. They're not probabilistic. You can't use AI to do a guess at what the interest could be. That's a probabilistic calculation. It's actually deterministic. The systems are highly regulated, and the reporting is extremely detailed. One is it's a system of record. Two is the data we've accumulated over decades is essentially the secret sauce of the company. We've got core accounts, debit, now we've credit. Over 1 billion accounts, 73 billion transactions a year. This data has intense value for anybody who wants to apply AI to it. That includes our banks. It can include third parties who want to partner with us. We have systems of record, which are the structure of the data that everybody needs to use, decades of data. I would also go and say decades of operating bank infrastructure and software at enterprise-grade levels of security, cyber resiliency. Not easy to replicate. Like a small company come in and can't do this. Yeah. They really can't. There is a bit of an analog to this, and the analog is an interesting one. Go back five years when Temenos and all of the modern banking platforms were coming in, and you were probably writing reports saying that this is a big threat for FIS. We're now five to seven years later, and we never see them in the U.S. in a competitive bidding. Yeah. Nor have they won considerable business. Why? Because they can't scale. Right. They have great products, but they can't scale, and they can't scale the same way we can. The complexity of the products when you go up to a bigger bank. Right Is much, much more complex. The stickiness is. The stickiness is high. Yeah. Why is it high? Commercial banking is not the same as retail. People generalize. Yeah. The proof point is it's an entirely defendable against call it innovative players who come in, AI-enabled or not. Two is we're not standing still. We have, I think it's like 17,000 people in technology, and you can assume that a large proportion of those people know how to use AI. We've rolled out Copilot across all 45,000 people in the company at cost. Yeah. Everybody. We're actually tracking our people using AI every day. Oh, really? We're actually ensuring that people are forced to use AI to drive. This is in finance, everybody. Okay. We're tracking everybody in the company. We've invested heavily, and we wanna see a return. Personal productivity- Yeah Back office productivity. More importantly, our AI, our engineering teams are using GitHub. Not only are they making stage one is make your process and coding simpler. Then stage two is now we're embedding AI within our products. You will see, over the course of the coming months, an increasing drumbeat of, call it agentic AI enablement in our core banking platforms over the course of the coming months, probably culminating in some announcements around our Emerald conference. Why? You ask what's the upside on AI. Yeah. We have clear revenue opportunity. One is you gotta do defensive measures. We have TreasuryGPT because Kyriba will compete with us, and they have AI enablement. Some of it is to defend your turf in treasury. The next step is to build AI and agents into your software to make banks more efficient. Right. Right? The big banks like JP Morgan, they do it themselves. The medium banks and maybe regionals, they're more than happy to take. If we can develop agents that reduce their back office sizing, it's a benefit for them. The other piece is we're now working with some banks on pilots on our datasets. We're building out. Do you monetize that or? Yeah, that's what we're actually actively doing right now. Okay. Yeah. The first step has been we're investing about $100 million of capital in the current year, and probably there's another $20 million or $30 million of OpEx on top of that. What are we doing? We're enabling AI within our, call it, systems of record. We're building out a huge, what we call an EDAI. It's basically an enterprise data and AI engine. Think of it as that all of the data we have on every client and every consumer within that client, whether it be the core banking, debit, credit, wealth. We have wealth data because we have retirement data. Yep. Capital Market data. Yeah. All that data is in one dataset. There's a pilot ongoing at the moment with a large regional, and they were doing their credit assessments using just credit card data. We've put all the data in one bucket, and they have a 360 view. The bank can now take a decision. They can see the paycheck coming into the bank account. They can see their debit, credit movements. Right. They can see if they have a wealth position. Right. They've actually raised the credit limits to many of their customers, generating higher transaction fees and income for the bank. What I mean is, now the revenue models are all being developed, right? Yeah. Some of it is defensive, some is helping the bank be more efficient in the back office, and a lot of it, the future of this is a data and AI enablement business, call it a Platform business, that drives revenue value for the banks. That's the job. Okay. It is an immense amount of data, and we're one of the few companies in the U.S. who has that amount of data. I wanted to talk about your EPS guidance for this year. We better let George talk at some stage because he gets upset if we don't. Yeah. Well, exactly. Yeah. Like I said, I'm gonna save the hard ones for him. Oh, geez. 8%-10% growth in EPS this year is the guide. I mean, just as you think on a normalized basis beyond this year. I mean, is that a decent proxy for ongoing EPS growth? Or, you know, can it actually be a little higher once the buybacks resume or how should we look at that? Yeah, I think. What's your synergy? I kind of confirm what you say. Once you get back to significant buybacks in 2028 and 2029. Yeah There is obviously gonna be more contribution from buybacks than there is in the current year. Yeah. We're not buying back any shares. Yeah. I'm not confirming any long-term guides here. Right. All I would say is look at our 2026 guide and the components of it. Okay. How many of those are better than what we said at Investor Day. All of them actually. High confidence in revenue. Yeah Being at the high end of the total company guidance led by Banking. Yep. Too, margins. It's 100 basis points on a pro forma basis. We kind of insinuated long-term 60-80 basis points. Yep. We're already saying 100. There's no reason for a slowdown in that 100 momentum. Call it revenue tick, margins tick. Yeah. I think where we've made a much different pivot is on cash flow. Yeah. On cash flow, we're saying actually it's not 8%-10%, it's 30% in 2026. Right. Over the three years, it's gonna be 25%. We're saying we will grow cash flow per share even though you're not allowed to quote that. What I mean is it's not an SEC measure. Yeah, yeah. We would've liked to have emphasized cash flow per share because it's gonna grow at 2x the amount of. The earnings adjusted earnings. Yeah, yeah. That's an all-in GAAP measure. I wanted to spend a second on cash flow because you're talking about a little bit over $2 billion this year. Yeah. Right. I think the only item that excludes is the tax bill, right? Yeah. The cash taxes on the Worldpay sale. How big is that piece? That's $700 million. When we did the deal originally, we thought it would be $900 million. Okay. Yeah. Okay. It'll be $700 million- Yeah versus the $2 billion that excludes that. Okay. If we look at the 2028 guide for real GAAP free cash flow, you're talking about I think $3 billion plus, correct? Yeah. Yep. Obviously a lot of like the integration and acquisition costs related to TSYS will be leading off. I guess is that you kind of hinted at this a little bit, but that's the year when buybacks in theory kick back in and Yeah in size. Is that Well, I think what you're gonna see. base case? We got to add. I'm trying to simplify these things. We're gonna add $1 billion of cash flow in 2027 and 2028. Where is it gonna come from? We got plenty of opportunity on working capital, but that's not one of the biggest drivers. The biggest one is you're gonna grow your EBITDA, right? Yep. You just tax affect EBITDA, and you'll get to a very sizable number. The other one is one-time transformation and integration expenses. In the current year, they're estimated at $800 million. Yeah. The number will decrease by at least 50% by 2028. We're not waiting all the way till 2028. There'll be a step down, 800 down to a smaller number in 2027 and probably below $400 million when you get to 2028. You'll say, "Well, how do you reduce it so much?" Well, the current spend in the current year estimated to integrate the credit issuer business is roughly $250 million. Okay. By the time you get to 2028, it's probably below 50. Yeah. Right? You pick up $200 million there. $200 million alone comes from I cycled through the M&A. Right now and somewhat into 2027, we're at a very high level of one-time transformation on the base business. A lot of it is severance costs, and a lot of it is coming from AI. Like this is one thing we haven't contemplated at Investor Day, the level of opportunity coming from really embracing AI and driving it across the company in terms of headcount efficiency. You can see it play out in two ways. We do have fairly high one-time expense 'cause it's severance driven. Yeah. The margins are higher than the expectations we set at Investor Day. Right. You're The game has changed a bit. Yeah in terms of the composition of how we get the margins. Are you seeing material headcount reductions because of AI or is it just enabling you to kind of, you know, flatline your employee base while you continue to grow revenue? Yeah. The 10-K is out there. We had 51,000 people at the end of 2024. At the end of 2025, we had 44,000. Right. 7,000 reduction. Right. What's that? 12%-13%. Right. Obviously that's before you closed TSYS. Yeah. It's not a projection. No, no. Yeah, yeah. I'm saying that there are multiple actions we took in that. Yeah. You should assume a large piece came out of AI. Interesting. We were very advanced in engineering on driving GitHub in the engineering group. Did headcount come down? Yes. Yeah. Is our engineering function smaller than it was 12 months ago? Yes. Yeah. Will there continue? Productivity is probably higher. ... to be productivity and efficiency going forward? The answer is yes. Across every function. Yeah. We have 20,000 people in the client office. Right. Right. That's a lot of people managing the interface with our customers. Exactly. It doesn't need to be that large. Yeah. All right. Well, we are out of time. Yeah. This was great. Always appreciate the discussion. Thank you for being here. Thanks. Thank you, Jason. Thank you. Thanks a lot.