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Text: Certain risk factors inherent in our business are set forth in filings with the SEC, including our most recent 10-K and subsequent filings.
We caution you not to place undue reliance on these statements.
Some of the comments may refer to non-GAAP financial measures, such as adjusted net revenue, adjusted operating margin and adjusted earnings per share, which we believe are more reflective of our ongoing performance.
Joining me on the call are Jeff Sloan, CEO; Cameron Bready, president and COO; and Paul Todd, senior executive vice president and CFO.
We entered 2020 with our business as healthy as it has ever been during my tenure at Global Payments.
And our performance in the first quarter prior to the impact of COVID-19 reflected that strength, the soundness of our strategy and the consistency of our execution.
We believe that these underlying trends will position Global Payments to resume its track record of market-leading growth when the worldwide economy inevitably returns.
The company's results in January, February and through the first two weeks of March exceeded our internal expectations, excluding the impact from COVID-19 in our Asia Pacific region.
However, starting in mid-March, the virus began to impact the company's results significantly in North America and Europe as governments took actions to encourage social distancing and implement shelter-in-place directives.
The deterioration accelerated toward the end of March as the number of countries and localities adopting restrictive measures meaningfully increased.
Notwithstanding the impact of the virus, we were successful in winning meaningful new business in the first quarter.
These competitive takeaways highlight that the underlying strength of our pure-play payments model is being recognized by some of the most complex and sophisticated customers.
They also provide us with continued confidence in further sustained share gains as the partner of choice at scale for cutting-edge companies.
First, we are delighted to announce that Truist Financial Corporation has selected Global Payments to be its provider of issuer processing services for its combined businesses.
Truist is the sixth largest commercial bank in the United States serving approximately 12 million consumer households and a full range of business clients with leading market share in many of the most attractive high-growth markets in the country.
Importantly, Truist has a bold vision to meaningfully increase investment in innovative technology and to create distinctive client experiences.
Truist's strategy to transform its payments businesses via technology aligns perfectly with our TSYS issuer business and provides further validation of our market-leading technologies, product services and the quality and competitiveness of our team members.
Our issuer business has a strong track record of innovation to the benefit of our customers.
Contactless is a great example, and we have seen near 30% year-on-year growth in recent periods.
We also are partnering with the card brands and digital wallet providers to further accelerate contactless growth in light of the virus.
In addition, TSYS will be the first issuer technology partner to offer Visa's new installment solution at the point of sale as an enhancement to our existing capabilities.
Second, we are very pleased to announce that Synovus Financial Corp.
has selected Global Payments to be its new exclusive merchant acquiring partner.
Synovus is a leading regional commercial bank with 299 branches in the southeast region of the United States.
Our new partnership with Synovus confirms the wisdom of the Global Payments and TSYS merger.
We do not believe that either company individually would have been positioned to win this business.
We already launched our partnership with Synovus on April 1.
Third, we continue to notch significant sales wins in our technology-enabled businesses during the quarter.
Our partner software business, which we recently rebranded as Global Payments Integrated, launched 30 new partners in the first few months of 2020.
We are tracking well ahead of where we were at this time in 2019, which was a year that marked a record for new partner production.
Cameron will provide more detail shortly.
We also saw significant new business successes across our own software portfolio.
For example, we are delighted to announce new wins with Inspire Brands and Focus Brands, including Auntie Anne's, CKE Restaurants and Arby's.
In addition, we continue to make meaningful progress with the rollout of our Xenial QSR cloud-based SaaS point-of-sale solution to new and existing customers, such as Long John Silver's and Dutch Bros.
We have also begun testing this solution for a potential placement throughout the restaurant brands international family of more than 26,000 global restaurants.
These wins contribute to Xenial achieving record new bookings for its QSR business this quarter.
It is worth highlighting that Xenial provides enterprise QSR customers with cutting-edge software, digital wallets, drive-through technologies, mobile-ordering capabilities and integrations with leading delivery partners through our omni product.
In fact, for the first quarter, the number of omni mobile and online orders processed for Xenial customers increased over 50% sequentially as QSRs shifted toward online fulfillment.
Fourth and finally, we continue to make progress with our e-commerce and omnichannel businesses, which generated impressive new sales wins, including a large multinational telecommunications carrier for markets outside the United States, one of the largest multinational package delivery companies in Asia and a leading worldwide food services delivery business.
These businesses produced the best financial result for us in the quarter, highlighting our leading position in worldwide e-commerce and omnichannel acceptance.
And that trend has continued into April with absolute growth year over year in a number of virtual markets.
During this challenging time, our top priority remains the health and safety of our team members, customers, partners and the communities in which we live and work.
It has allowed our business and operations to continue to perform normally.
While these are difficult times, we are well-positioned given the strength of our business model and the dedication and focus of our employees.
I am especially proud of our Netspend business, which is facilitating the rapid distribution of much needed funds under the CARES Act.
We believe that Netspend was one of the first companies to provide stimulus funds to customers ahead of both financial technology peers and financial institutions.
Those critical funds were made available on average four days before most of the other providers in the market and ahead of its normal two days faster operating model for typical paychecks because Netspend has the end-to-end infrastructure already in place to process government ACH files upon receipt.
During April, we processed over 0.5 million deposits accounting for over $1.2 billion in stimulus payments to American consumers dispersed by the IRS.
In the coming weeks, we expect additional governmental programs to fund, and a number of our partners will assist consumers who receive paper checks by enabling deposits into existing or new Netspend accounts to our mobile app or directly onto their phones virtually via our Samsung partnership.
As just one example, together with Mastercard, we have helped facilitate 7-Eleven's new Transact prepaid product to enable under and unbanked individuals and families to receive much needed funds faster than a paper check through 7-Eleven stores.
Our powerful combination with TSYS provides us with multiple levers to mitigate headwinds that we may face from the pandemic.
We made significant strides on our integration this quarter, and we continue to anticipate delivering at least $125 million in annual run rate revenue synergies and at least $350 million in annual run rate expense synergies within three years of the merger close.
In addition to the merger synergies, we have now implemented additional cost initiatives to help address the anticipated impact of COVID-19 on our business.
We expect these actions to deliver at least an incremental $400 million in annualized savings over the next 12 months.
These amounts represent a more than doubling of the three-year annualized merger expense synergy benefit in just one year.
We have already initiated these expense actions in a series of ways beginning early in the second quarter.
As you will hear from Paul, our liquidity, free cash flow and balance sheet are healthy.
These efforts are intended to best position Global Payments to weather near-term disruptions and emerge from the crisis in the same strong position with which we entered it.
And we continue to invest in our businesses despite the impact of the virus on the worldwide economy.
Our long-term plans to grow our technology-enabled businesses, expand our omnichannel efforts and target the most attractive markets have not changed.
The uniqueness of our business mix, which is dramatically different today than it was during the last recession, has been a source of strength during the current crisis.
I would also like to express my sincere appreciation to all of our team members who have provided exemplary support to our customers during this challenging time.
As Jeff mentioned, even with the vast majority of our nearly 24,000 team members worldwide working from home since mid-March, our business has continued to operate seamlessly.
For the relatively few team members whose job function requires them to be in one of our offices, we have implemented appropriate social distancing practices, made antibacterial hand sanitizers, masks widely available and increased the frequency of cleaning of key areas.
Throughout this crisis, we have continued to put the health and well-being of our team members first while also supporting our customers and safeguarding our business.
Over the past several years, we have made significant investments in modernizing the operating environments and technology that support day-to-day execution in our business.
The largely cloud-based systems and collaboration tools we use globally facilitated a smooth transition of our operations to business continuity mode with significant utilization of work-from-home arrangements.
This has allowed us to sustain outstanding service to our customers while also enabling continued strong execution of our pure-play payment strategy as evidenced by the significant new wins in the quarter.
In our merchant solutions business, Global Payments Integrated is off to a record start to the year in terms of new partner wins and is already seeing benefits of our merger with TSYS.
We recently signed a new partnership agreement with a large multinational software provider based on our ability to deliver the Genius POS solution together with our best-in-class ecosystem while also enabling its customers to support electronic tips by the Netspend card -- PayCard product.
Global Payments was uniquely positioned to provide this comprehensive solution, which reflects the powerful combination of highly complementary capabilities brought together by our merger with TSYS.
Our strategy of delivering the full value stack in key vertical markets continues to produce deeper, richer and more value-added relationships with our customers.
In addition to the Xenial highlights that Jeff already provided, our higher education business had its strongest ever bookings performance in March, and AdvancedMD saw bookings increased 35% year on year for the first quarter largely due to our ability to deliver cloud-based technology solutions, including telemedicine capabilities to physician practices throughout the U.S. In our Heartland business, we delivered outstanding growth of over 30% in online payments during the first quarter as we continued to see strong customer demand for our omnichannel solutions.
Notably, this growth accelerated in March as we installed three times as many new e-commerce merchants as anticipated largely due to significant demand for online ordering capabilities.
We also began deploying vital POS through our Heartland distribution channel in early March, exactly as we said we would, and we remain confident in our ability to execute on our sales plan for this distinctive solution.
Further, we now plan to deliver vital POS to Canada later this quarter, an acceleration from our original target of a third-quarter launch.
In Canada, our new partnership with Desjardins is off to a terrific start.
Merchant migration and lead referrals from all branches commenced at the beginning of March, and we received nearly 1,500 referrals before the current disruption.
Our early successes reinforce our confidence in this new partnership that combines Global Payments' differentiated technologies and payments capabilities with Desjardins' market-leading position in Québec.
In Europe, we successfully launched our social commerce solution in key markets, enabling our customers to accept payments through social networks.
In the last few weeks, we launched this product with a new leading national veterinary chain and a high-end restaurant group in the U.K. and also signed Hyundai, which is currently deploying the solution to all of its dealerships in the region.
by enabling a leading building society with call center payment solutions for work-from-home environments.
We successfully executed a new acquiring contract with this customer and distributed software to its call center staff and mortgage brokers from start to finish in less than three days.
And in Asia, we saw strong new sales performance, particularly in our e-commerce business despite COVID-19 gripping that region for the majority of the quarter.
We have enabled several of our large retail customers to accelerate their shift to e-commerce and signed new e-commerce partnerships with two large multinational health and wellness companies.
Turning to our issuer business, in addition to the Truist win, we finalized an agreement with Scotiabank to convert its Canadian consumer credit card and loan accounts.
And we have executed a multiyear renewal agreement for its North American consumer and commercial credit card business.
Additionally, we successfully signed a new multiyear processing and managed services agreement with U.K.-based Yaya, encompassing their recently acquired credit card portfolios and extended several other existing client agreements, including with Barclaycard and Bank of Montreal.
We also converted over 300,000 accounts during the period and have a robust pipeline with implementation stage throughout the year and into 2021.
Delivering superior support to our customers is a key pillar of our business model, and we have continued to do so in this unprecedented environment without exception.
Throughout this pandemic, we remain focused on supporting customers across all of our businesses, including our small to medium-sized merchant customers in the markets most impacted by the virus.
We have worked tirelessly to assist these customers by enabling new capabilities to support their business operations, including rapidly equipping merchants who did not previously sell online with a full omni solution, particularly in the restaurant vertical market.
In fact, in North America alone, we have added over 1,800 new restaurants to our online ordering platform since mid-March.
Likewise, we have been facilitating social distancing and no-contact commerce by enabling mobile pay and contactless and mobile wallet acceptance at merchants who had not previously accepted these form factors.
As a worldwide leader in NFC deployment, we rapidly enabled contactless acceptance for our merchant customers, which also positions us well for the future as we expect the secular shift from cash to electronic forms of payments to accelerate post the pandemic.
We have also provided customers and markets worldwide with virtual terminals to allow them to accept orders over the phone.
For healthcare customers at AdvancedMD, we've enabled nearly 1,500 practices with telemedicine capabilities, delivering the technology for more than 80,000 virtual visits in the last two weeks of March alone.
In addition to these efforts, we are providing economic relief in a variety of forms to our customers, including waiving certain fees such as SaaS and POS payments, as well as online ordering fees.
We have also granted free trial or reduced fees for newly enabled services and established a charitable program targeted at our most vulnerable merchant customers that provides preloaded pay cards that can be used to support their staff at no cost.
Further, we are waiving setup fees in the first 90 days of subscription fees for our virtual card add-on solution to brick-and-mortar gift card customers and have extended free trial period of our analytics and customer engagement platform that we are deploying in our Heartland business.
to facilitate payroll protection program loans for customers across our distribution platforms.
To date, our lending partner has placed thousands of PPP loans for our customers.
Our issuer business has also maintained strong operational stability in its call centers as we work to support our issuer clients during a period of very high call volumes.
Additionally, we are working with issuers to enable cardholder and small business relief programs, including supporting the delivery of a range of payment options as consumers and businesses seek predictable ways to manage budgets and expenses during this challenging time.
While we continue to manage through this situation with a difficult relentless focus on execution you have come to expect from Global Payments, we also have an eye on the future and are working to ensure the business is well-positioned for the inevitable recovery.
We are revamping sales and marketing strategies to align with our expectations for market reopenings around the globe and to emphasize those solutions most in demand.
In the U.S., we are also aggressively recruiting and onboarding new sales professionals into our Heartland channel, which we can do in a cost-effective manner given our model.
And while we are reducing expenses where appropriate, we continue to invest in products and capabilities that will further differentiate Global Payments in the future.
There is no question the competitive environment will look different on the other side of this crisis, and we are poised to benefit in the long term due to the distinctiveness of our technology-enabled pure-play payment strategy.
I want to reiterate how pleased we are with the way in which our team members have responded during this crucial time to ensure business continuity, deliver the highest standard of support and execution for our customers and allow for us to achieve strong financial performance.
For the first quarter, total company adjusted net revenue was $1.73 billion, reflecting growth of 108% over 2019 and ahead of our preliminary expectations on April 6.
On a combined basis, our revenue increased slightly from the prior year, including a roughly 50-basis-point headwind from the impact of negative foreign currency exchange rates.
Adjusted operating margins expanded an impressive 300 basis points to 39% for the quarter and well above the 250 basis point annual expansion target we mentioned on our last call.
As a result, we were able to deliver strong adjusted earnings-per-share growth of 18% to $1.58, which also includes a roughly 100-basis-point impact from adverse foreign currency exchange rate movements.
This first-quarter bottom-line performance was better than anticipated when we previewed our first quarter on April 6.
Notably, from the start of the quarter through the first two weeks of March, our performance was exceeding our growth expectations compared to last year, excluding the impact of the virus we were already experiencing in the Asia Pacific region.
Our merchant solutions business drove the outperformance while results for our issuer and business consumer segments were tracking relatively in line with our expectations through that period.
However, in the second half of March, the spread of COVID-19 began to impact our results meaningfully in North America and Europe in addition to Asia Pacific.
As Jeff and Cameron both mentioned, it was a dynamic quarter for all of our businesses, and I want to provide some color on each segment.
First, adjusted net revenue in merchant solutions increased 2% on a combined basis to $1.1 billion for the first quarter, which includes nearly a 100-basis-point headwind from currency while adjusted operating margin improved 180 basis points to 45.4%.
Before the spread of COVID-19, we were experiencing low double-digit adjusted net revenue growth in this segment, excluding the impact of COVID-19 in Asia Pacific, which negatively impacted results consistent with the $15 million drag we had previously disclosed.
This strength was largely attributable to our technology-enabled businesses, including Global Payments Integrated, which was tracking toward mid-teens growth for the lion's share of the quarter.
This business continues to benefit from record new wins, strong same-store sales and low attrition rates driven by our ability to provide a truly integrated ecosystem across more vertical markets and more geographies than our peers.
We also maintained our consistent track record of strong growth in our vertical market software portfolio ahead of the COVID-19 impact.
As Jeff and Cameron indicated, booking trends across the portfolio remained strong with record achievements at several of our businesses during the period.
Our relationship-led businesses were also seeing good momentum outside of Asia Pacific before the spread of COVID-19.
Notably, in North America, adjusted net revenue was tracking up low double digits ahead of our expectations, and our European businesses were delivering high single-digit growth.
For the full quarter, as in-store volumes came under pressure, our e-commerce and omnichannel businesses served as a partial hedge.
As Cameron noted, we delivered strong growth in online sales at Heartland during the quarter while in Europe, we saw high single-digit growth in the U.K. and roughly 20% growth in Spain as more spending moved online.
E-comm omni revenue was also up double digits in APAC during the first quarter.
Moving to issuer solutions, we delivered a record $442 million in adjusted net revenue for the first quarter, representing growth of 150 basis points on a constant-currency basis.
As I mentioned previously, this business was tracking in line with our expectations through early March for roughly 3% growth with underlying trends to that point remaining consistent with our long-term outlook for mid-single-digit growth.
Adjusted segment operating margin expanded a very strong 430 basis points to 39.5% as we continue to drive efficiencies and make the pivot toward the cloud in this business.
We also added over 13 million accounts on file this quarter, producing yet another record.
Transaction growth was in the mid-single digits.
We experienced strong volumes in managed services as cardholders ramped up the frequency of their interactions with trusted financial institutions in the quarter.
Finally, our business and consumer solutions segment delivered adjusted net revenue of $204 million, down nearly 7% from the prior year, primarily due to headwinds from the CFPB prepaid rule and seasonal tax impacts.
Absent that, adjusted net revenue was roughly flat for the quarter, marking a continuation of the underlying trends from the fourth quarter of 2019.
Adjusted operating margin for the quarter for this segment was 25.7% and was again better than our expectation.
We continue to be pleased by the performance of our DDA products with account growth of over 30% from the prior-year period.
As Jeff mentioned, we saw a substantial benefit in early April from the processing of stimulus payments in this segment.
In sum, we delivered solid operating performance across all our segments through outstanding execution, and we also benefited from the early and rapid cost actions we took to position our company given the current environment and for the eventual recovery.
As it relates to cost actions, as Jeff highlighted, we have already implemented expense initiatives that will translate to roughly $100 million per quarter in incremental cost benefits for the balance of 2020.
Our focus has been to streamline discretionary spend that includes cuts to G&E and marketing budgets, reductions in executive pay and other salary initiatives and additional targeted actions across the organization.
We have also been intentional about these measures to allow our strong growth momentum to continue when a more normalized operating environment resumes.
From a cash flow standpoint for the quarter, we generated adjusted free cash flow of approximately $400 million, which was in line with our expectation.
We also exited Q1 with roughly $1.3 billion of available cash, including $640 million in excess of our operating cash needs.
This excess cash increased approximately $300 million from year-end.
We have adjusted our capital spending outlook for the year from the high $500 million to low $600 million range we talked about on our last call and now expect to be in the $400 million to $500 million range or roughly $100 million less for the year.
We invested $105 million of cash in the first quarter that was focused on new products and technologies to ensure we continue to build upon our leading portfolio of pure-play payment solutions, which is consistent with our newly revised estimate.
Earlier in the quarter, we finished the buyback activity started in the fourth quarter, purchasing 2.1 million of our shares for approximately $400 million.
We did, however, suspend repurchases in early March.
We ended the quarter with a leverage position of roughly 2.45 times on a net-debt basis or roughly 2.75 times on a gross basis consistent with year-end.
Our strong investment-grade balance sheet, in combination with our stable free cash flow generation, provides us with ample capital and financial flexibility to navigate through this challenging time.
With $2.9 billion of liquidity, including our available cash and undrawn revolver and no significant required debt repayments until our maturity in April 2021, we are truly in a position of financial strength.
We will continue to monitor and leverage market opportunities to maintain that strong position over the long term.
Although trends are dynamic, we have seen some stabilization and improvement in late April from the lower levels we have seen several weeks ago.
Specifically, volume trends in our merchant business have held fairly steady and begun to recover modestly, led by our technology-enabled businesses.
In addition, markets that have recently reopened, such as China and in Central Europe, have seen similar stabilization and improvement trends in domestic volumes.
Our issuer solutions business remains resilient as bundled pricing and managed services volumes are helping to mitigate the impact of transaction level declines.
Our international issuing business also remains a bright spot with absolute growth in the low single digits despite the macroeconomic environment.
These trends have been offset in part by what we are seeing in our commercial card area due to limited travel spending by corporations and governments.
Similar to our experience in merchants, issuing trends have stabilized and recovered somewhat in selected verticals over the last several weeks.
Finally, business and consumer solutions has benefited from processing substantial stimulus funds, and we do expect to recapture some of the lost revenue from last quarter related to the extended tax deadline over the next several months.
Additionally, April is the first month where we do not have CFPB headwinds for comparison.
And while we are not providing guidance at this time, I think it's worth parsing our business in light of the current environment.
First, we have several businesses that have been relatively more resilient through this period.
This includes both our issuer and business consumer segments, which combined account for roughly 35% of our adjusted net revenue.
Additionally, roughly half of merchant solutions adjusted net revenue has been generally less economically sensitive.
This includes our omnichannel business, Global Payments Integrated and certain vertical market solutions like Xenial, AMD and our university business.
So two-thirds of our businesses have been somewhat insulated from fluctuating consumer spending trends.
With that said, it is difficult to predict when and how the current environment will change.
However, we are confident we will emerge stronger due to the significant cost initiatives being implemented to protect our earnings, cash flows and investment-grade balance sheet.
All in all, we are pleased with how we are positioned given the unprecedented times we are operating in as a company.
Our recent significant wins highlight the wisdom of our partnership with TSYS and the strength of our combined business.
We have already taken and will continue to take actions to best position our company for success as the worldwide economy returns to growth.
In the interim, we are fortunate to be confronting this crisis from a position of strength.
The competitive landscape will no doubt change as a result of this crisis, and we believe that we will capitalize on those changes and continue to gain share organically and through further consolidation.
We believe that the virus will continue to accelerate the ongoing shift toward further digitization of payments and the movement toward online commerce globally.
We are also grateful for our market-leading position in software across multiple vertical markets, highlighting the diversity of our business banks.
We believe that we will continue to be the beneficiary of trends that will be further catalyzed by COVID-19.
While we are not immune to the current economic climate, we are as well-positioned as we have ever been with a balanced portfolio in payments and vertical market software at scale.
We expect our strategy of leading with software owned and partner with an emphasis on premier omnichannel solutions in the most attractive markets will serve us well into the future.
[Operator instructions] Operator, we will now go to questions.

user
compname reports q1 adj. earnings per share of $1.58.
q1 adjusted earnings per share $1.58.
implemented cost initiatives that co expects to deliver at least an incremental $400 million of savings over next 12 months.
truist financial has selected global payments to be its provider of issuer processing services for its combined business.
remain on track to achieve at least $125 million in annual run-rate revenue synergies from tsys merger.
remain on track to achieve at least $350 million in annual run-rate expense synergies from tsys merger.

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