Global Payments at JPMorgan Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Wednesday, 17 September 2025, Global Payments Inc. (NYSE:GPN) took center stage at the JPMorgan U.S. All Stars Conference. CEO Cameron Bready outlined the company’s strategic priorities, focusing on the transformative acquisition of Worldpay and its efforts to enhance merchant solutions. While the company is poised for growth, it faces challenges such as regulatory approvals and evolving consumer behaviors.

Key Takeaways

• Global Payments is acquiring Worldpay to enhance its market position, aiming for $13 billion in pro forma revenue.
• The company plans to return $7.5 billion to shareholders between 2025 and 2027.
• Transformation efforts include the launch of the Genius platform and a revamped sales structure.
• Regulatory approvals for the Worldpay acquisition are progressing well.
• Global Payments projects nearly $5 billion in leverage-free cash flow by 2028.

Financial Results

• Global Payments aims to drive growth through transformation and the Worldpay acquisition.
• The combined entity is expected to generate $13 billion in revenue and $6.5 billion in EBITDA.
• The company targets maintaining a leverage ratio of three times EBITDA.
• Plans to return $7.5 billion to shareholders by 2027, with $1 billion already returned from divestitures.

Operational Updates

• Transitioning from a holding company to a unified operating model globally.
• Launched the Genius platform to enhance point-of-sale solutions for restaurant and retail sectors.
• Revamped sales compensation to boost productivity and reduce selling costs.
• Investments in marketing, lead generation, and CRM infrastructure are underway.
• Worldpay is delivering mid-single-digit growth, aligning with expectations.

Future Outlook

• The Worldpay acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2026, with regulatory approvals on track.
• Integration efforts focus on growth, competitive positioning, and team synergy.
• Global Payments is exploring new payment methods, including stablecoins, and anticipates industry consolidation.
• The company is evaluating potential divestitures to streamline operations and enhance shareholder value.

Q&A Highlights

• Integration of Worldpay aims to unlock growth and improve competitive positioning.
• Focus on enhancing e-commerce capabilities and SMB strengths.
• Capital allocation includes shareholder buybacks and a targeted $7.5 billion return by 2027.
• The payments ecosystem is evolving, with scale and compliance becoming increasingly important.

Global Payments is navigating a complex landscape with strategic initiatives aimed at sustainable growth. For a detailed discussion, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - JPMorgan U.S. All Stars Conference:

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: Thanks for joining. My name is Tien-Tsin Huang. I follow the payments and IT services sector at JP Morgan. I was telling Cameron, really grateful to cover a space and have learned a ton over the years. There’s been a lot of change. I’m delighted to have Cameron Bready, who’s the CEO of Global Payments, give us an update. We’ve had Worldpay on the stage here before, Cameron. Of course, you’re going through the transaction with them. I gathered a lot of questions from the audience. Hopefully, we can just get through some of that, if that’s all right. Thank you for being here.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Of course. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you for joining us this morning.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: Yeah, so it’s fitting from an all-stars conference standpoint, just from a scale angle. Global Payments is going to be quite large post the transaction next year. Before we get started and get into the fundamentals, Cameron, I just thought we’d start with a priority question just to kick it off because there’s a lot going on with you closing the deal. Of course, you’re executing your own agenda at Global Payments. You have the macro to deal with as well and satisfy a sales force. Give us an update on how you’re prioritizing the day-to-day and meeting the short-term goals, but also getting ready for this transaction as well.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Yeah, as you can imagine, we’re spending a lot of time sort of balancing those priorities. Obviously, we have near-term objectives that we’re trying to meet. The reality is we’re a public company, and we have quarterly milestones that we need to be able to demonstrate that we’re meeting to our investors. We’re also doing, I think, a tremendous amount of work to make sure the business is well positioned for the long term. As I think about sort of where we are in our journey, about a year ago, we launched a fairly meaningful transformation effort inside of Global Payments. This is a business that has grown pretty dramatically over the course of the last decade. When I joined the company, it was probably a little over $1 billion of revenue. Today, we’re close to $10 billion, and that’s over an 11-year period of time.

A lot of that acquisition was fueled by M&A. When I took over as CEO a couple of years ago, I kind of stepped back to look at the business to think about how do we make sure we’re well positioned for the next decade of growth. The playbook that got us from where we were to where we are now is probably not the one that’s going to get us to where the company is going to be 5, 10, 15 years down the road. As part of that transformation journey, we’re really focusing on a couple of things. One is reorienting our business from a holding company operating company structure to a single unified operating company model globally. I think that’s the best way to position the business for long-term growth and success.

I think it’s the best way to position the business for healthy, sustainable rates of growth. It’s the best way to unleash, I think, the full potential of our business to be able to, I think, deliver all of our products and capabilities more ubiquitously to our clients in all the markets around the globe that we’re serving them. Secondly, of course, and you alluded to this before, we’re acquiring Worldpay. As part of that transaction, we’re exiting our issuer solutions business. As we step back to think about where we wanted to position the business for the long term, we really came to the conclusion that focusing all of our time, energy, investment, and resources on merchant solutions was the right thing for the business.

As part of that exercise, we came upon the unique opportunity to exit our issuer solutions business and acquire Worldpay, which I think certainly allows us to have that sole focus on merchant. The combination of Global Payments and Worldpay, I think, creates a more sustainable growth engine for the future, one that’s able to serve any type of merchant, software, platform partner in over 175 markets around the globe with immense scale, as you noted earlier, while at the same time, again, reorienting to that sole focus on merchant, which I think is going to be incredibly powerful for the business for the long term. We have a lot of things we’re trying to accomplish as we think about, obviously, continue to execute day-to-day in the business, continuing to deliver on the growth outcomes we want to achieve, executing on our transformation, and preparing our business to integrate Worldpay.

Certainly, tremendously excited about the direction of travel for the business, the momentum we’re building, and the long-term value creation that we think putting Global Payments and Worldpay together will bring for our shareholders.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: Good. No, I think the focus has definitely come through. I know you’re passionate about that, Cameron. We’re excited to see how that comes together. Digging into some of the pieces, I think the most popular question, Cameron, I got from everyone for me to ask you is about Genius. Let’s talk about Genius. I know you launched a retail restaurant in the first half of the year. You’ve launched in the UK. We’re sitting here in London. Tell us more about what you’ve learned so far. Have you made any pivots? Are you doubling down on any specific areas of Genius as you go out? Maybe just update everyone on what Genius is.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Yeah, sure. Maybe I’ll start there. That’s probably a good way to jump into the question. Genius is our effort. I want to be very clear. Genius is not a rebranding exercise. Genius is really how we are reorienting the various sort of point-of-sale capabilities we have in our business today to a single unified platform to support restaurant and retail customers around the globe with point-of-sale software and payments to help them run and grow their businesses more effectively. As we think about the two largest consumer spend verticals around the globe, it’s generally going to be restaurant and retail environments. The mode of competition for payments is really through the point of sale. We’ve had strong point-of-sale capabilities historically, but they’ve been fragmented across way too many platforms.

As we launched our transformation exercise, we really are leaning heavily into creating a world-class point-of-sale solution that better positions our capabilities for the long term. That involved unifying all the best feature, functionality, and capability onto the Genius platform. Finally, for once, having a brand, a more recognizable brand around our point-of-sale capabilities that we leverage around the globe in all the markets that we bring point-of-sale solutions. Genius is that platform and brand that we will leverage as we move forward. Seeing great progress thus far with Genius, I’m happy to report we’ve met all the key milestones and deadlines that we established for ourselves in terms of launching Genius for Restaurants in May, Genius for Retail in the June-July time frame. We just launched Genius for Enterprise in the U.S. and, of course, Genius for Restaurants here in the U.K. just a couple of weeks ago.

We have a fairly ambitious plan to continue to bring Genius to other markets, Canada and Mexico here in the short term, other international markets, some in Europe, some in Asia-Pacific starting in 2026. Again, it’ll be our flagship point-of-sale brand and platform that we leverage in the different markets around the globe that we serve point-of-sale customers. I think our positioning around Genius is really to make sure that we are competitively positioned in restaurant and retail to continue to win market share. As we think about how we are trying to position ourselves competitively, it starts with the Genius platform itself. It’s a highly feature-rich, highly configurable, flexible, easy-to-use and integrate platform that can scale up and down in the SMB to enterprise segment as necessary to support the needs of our clients. We’re really delighted with the product and the solution, the feature, functionality, and capabilities.

We think from a point-of-sale standpoint, it all starts with the features and solutions that you can bring to bear on those clients. It’s a highly competitive space. We have great competitors that have good features and good products. We need to be sort of competitive with them as a feature functionality perspective. At the same time, we think we can differentiate our offerings through the level of service that we bring to our clients. I think our service infrastructure and capability at Global Payments has always been a hallmark of our business. I think we provide exceptional service to our clients, white glove, more personalized service experiences to them that I think is really distinctive in the marketplace. It’s an area that we can differentiate.

Of course, again, hearkening back to your earlier comment, we can bring a level of scale and competitive economics to the point-of-sale environment that many of our competitors can’t match. I think the combination of a highly feature-rich, capable product, distinctive service, and really competitive economic positioning with the scale we can bring obviously positions us extraordinarily well to continue to grow and gain share in the point-of-sale space as we move forward. Tremendously excited about the progress we’ve made. We got a lot of work in front of us to continue to grow and scale and get better market penetration and awareness of the Genius brand. Obviously, I think we’re off to a terrific start.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: Good. I know distribution is, of course, important in payments as well. Let’s talk about that for Genius, but broadly across Global Payments. You’re doing a pretty large transformation, updating a lot of the commission and the comp structures. Where are you with that? I think the retention was what, Cameron, like 90% is what you talked about last quarter?

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: It was, yeah.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: Give us a little bit more on what you’re trying to translate that into on the performance side.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Yeah, a big part of our transformation journey is also kind of leaning into the commercial side of the business to try to drive better outcomes from a sales execution standpoint. There are a lot of initiatives that underlie the sales force of the future model, which is kind of our nomenclature to capture a lot of the things that we’re trying to do to improve that commercial go-to-market muscle and capability we have. A lot of it starts with, to your point, this underlying sales compensation structure that we leverage predominantly in the U.S. It’s obviously our biggest market that our sellers have been utilizing now for many, many years. I’m a little embarrassed to say our sellers worked on a plan called the ’94 plan. Why was it called that? Because it was created in 1994.

I don’t want to leave you with the impression it hasn’t evolved a little bit over time. The core underpinnings of that structure have been around a long time. I think it had probably outworn its welcome and usefulness in the business. We have reoriented the sales compensation program for our sellers to be one that’s, I think, much more balanced in terms of trying to drive the right outcomes for the business, trying to incentivize our sellers in the right way to be able to be more productive to produce better outcomes for the business. It ultimately results in a lower cost of selling for us. More importantly, perhaps, it is a model that is far easier and better equipped to recruit new sellers into our ecosystem. We put a lot of emphasis around converting our sales force from our old plan to this new plan.

We’ve had 90%+ retention as we’ve worked to convert those sellers over, which we’re really proud of. While we’re doing that, we’re also making significant investments around all of our marketing investments, lead gen, demand gen, the CRM infrastructure that supports the business, making it easier for our sellers to cross-sell, making it easier for them to be more productive, to be able to manage leads, effectuate leads, and drive to actual closed sales. We’re putting a lot of investment around the customer experience side of things as well as you first interface with us as a sales matter, whether it’s how you integrate into our environments to the onboarding and procurement experience of product and equipment to just the approval, trying to increase speed to revenue in the business. Significant investments are going around sort of improving the commercialization aspects of the business.

Really, again, delighted with the progress we’ve made. The biggest part of that is behind us in terms of converting our sellers. We’re seeing the productivity benefits we expected to see, continuing to scale that in the business. A big milestone for us is getting that work behind us around converting all those sellers and obviously now having them on the right plan, the right structure with the right incentives, and the right capacity to be more productive to drive better outcomes for the business for the long term.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: New product, new branding, you’ve got revamped sales and go-to-market, Cameron. With all these things together, I know competition is always a question.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Sure.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: What should we be tracking on performance? I mean, how quickly can we see a change in whether it be growth or retention or gross new sales? You tell us.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Yeah, and I think we’ve laid out a pretty clear path for the business to accelerate growth outcomes delivering on those. Obviously, Worldpay, the combination with Worldpay will help catalyze that to some degree as well. If we look at our standalone Global Payments business before the acquisition of Worldpay, we’ve laid out a pretty clear path by which we’re going to accelerate growth over the next few years, largely driven by all the work that you described we’re doing in our business. I think thus far, we’re a few quarters into this. We’ve really delivered on every milestone that we said we would deliver on. We’re delivering on the growth while we’re working through this transformation journey. We’re delivering on the key milestones that we laid out around the transformation journey itself.

We’re providing, I think, quarterly metrics that give some insight into how things are progressing, particularly on the new sales front. We’re also providing, I think, a good amount of commentary around where we’re seeing the productivity benefits and the key milestones and all the transformation work that we’re doing. I feel from an execution standpoint, yes, we have a lot of balls in the air. The team’s working very hard to deliver day in and day out. I’m really proud of what our organization’s been able to do over the last several quarters, hitting all the major milestones, delivering on the outcomes we expected to deliver, and building the right momentum in the business as we exit sort of 2025 and head into 2026 to be able to accelerate growth and drive the overall outcomes that we committed to our investors we’d be able to deliver.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: OK, great. I know you and Josh are working hard on all that. Thanks for that update. Let’s transition to Worldpay. A lot of investors wanted me to ask you about that. What’s left to do in terms of getting the clearance to close the transaction? I know the competition committee and others are taking a look. What can you tell us about the performance of Worldpay that you’re willing and able to share? I’ll ask you a readiness question after that.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll start on the regulatory approval front. Just given the nature of the business we operate in around the globe, it’s a highly regulated industry. We have numerous regulatory approvals we need to achieve to be able to close the transaction. I would say thus far, we’re making really good progress on that. We received HSR approval in the U.S. We’re well through the antitrust approval here in the UK. The CMA actually noted yesterday that they’ve officially begun their process, which is, I think, good news overall. We’re tracking well to be able to work through the approval process here in the UK and the EU more broadly. As we sit here today, we very much remain on track to be able to close the transaction in the first half of 2026, as we committed when we announced the transaction back in April.

Thus far, everything is tracking to be able to deliver on that outcome. We feel good about the progress that we’ve made. Everything’s moving in the right direction on that front, which is really exciting. As it relates to the underlying Worldpay business, we continue to be pleased by what we’re seeing. They’re delivering on the expectations that they set with us and that we obviously spent a lot of time vetting through the diligence process. The business remains very much a solid mid-single-digit grower, also building good momentum in their own business around future trajectory for growth and continuing to deliver on the key milestones and, I think, the objectives that they have to continue to position the business for the long term and a good growth outcome for the long term.

Thus far, everything we see coming out of the business is very much what we expected and delivering on all the expectations that we had for the business as we went into the transaction. Naturally, we’re very excited to get to close, highly focused on getting to close as soon as practical. A lot of people inside of our organization are executing against that every day.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: Yeah, it’s a long time to close, obviously. I would imagine the readiness will be there once the deal is consummated officially. The bigger question I have is you’ll be the number one acquirer post Worldpay. Assuming the readiness is there and you can close this and get off the ground and push through the agenda that you’ve talked about publicly, Cameron, what’s the plan or what should investors think about there? How do you leverage the scale you have to differentiate against maybe some of the pure plays that lead with technology? Tell us what the vision is with combined Worldpay.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Yeah, I’d be happy to. Maybe I’ll spend two seconds on readiness because I do think that’s important. We are working very hard to make sure that we have the right foundation upon which to integrate Worldpay when we get to close. I think much of our transformation work will be behind us by the time we get to the closing of the transaction. We’re accelerating some of our transformation initiatives to make sure that we have the right foundation when we do get to closing. There’s a lot of effort internally right now making sure that the business is well prepared to execute day one, but more importantly, to execute an integration plan around Worldpay that’s really centered around two, well, three primary objectives. One is better positioning the combined business for growth outcomes for the long term.

As we thought about the Worldpay transaction, we don’t want to just be a larger version of who we are today. We want to be a business that can drive better rates of growth. Two, we think we have a unique opportunity combining the business to better position ourselves competitively. I’ll come back to that in a second because it really gets to the latter part of your question. Third, we have a unique opportunity to combine and create, I think, the strongest team in the industry. Obviously, there’s an immense amount of talent in the Global Payments organization. There’s an immense amount of talent in the Worldpay organization. Combining those teams and really putting together, I think, what would be the industry’s best team is certainly another outcome of this transaction that we want to make sure that we realize.

That sets us up well then for how do we then compete, position the business for the long term. I think as I look at the combination of Worldpay and Global Payments, I think we really are uniquely positioned to be able to compete effectively and really create something that the industry has never seen before, which is a combination of a business at the size, scale, and scope we are that can innovate and innovate with pace and agility and nimbleness, but also at the same time bring a level of scale, scale economics around the globe that I think will be difficult for other competitors to be able to match. The combined business is nearly $13 billion in pro forma revenue, $6.5 billion of pro forma EBITDA. Perhaps more impressively, we’ll process $4 trillion of payments annually, operating in 175 countries, 40 of those physically.

That reach, global scale, the capabilities, and the complementary nature of the capabilities that come together from the Worldpay business and the Global Payments business, I think, is tremendously powerful. You talked about some of the newer players that lead with technology. I think we’ll have a technology capability and ability to innovate products and features and solutions that compete favorably with everyone in the marketplace today. We’ll be able to do that in a way that I think brings sort of more differentiated service because of the scale that we have and scale economics, as I mentioned before, that again, competitively, I think others are going to have a challenge in sort of being able to keep up with the things that we can do. We’ll have breadth of distribution.

We’ll have breadth of global reach that I think is going to be incredibly powerful to position the business for the long term. I think it’s difficult to overstate, I think, the benefits of putting these two businesses together. Their strengths are our weaknesses. Our strengths are their weaknesses. The businesses are highly complementary as a product and capability and segment of the market that we serve today. The global reach and scale that we’re going to have, it’s look, if we can get all the execution right behind that, the power of the combined business, again, I think is really difficult to overstate.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: No, totally agree. The overlay is almost perfect, right, in terms of, like you said, offsetting weaknesses and amplifying strengths.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: There is a reason we’ve been trying to do it for a better part of a decade. We finally got to a place where we could execute the transaction, and we’re tremendously excited about it because we’ve long coveted the combination of the two companies, just given how it’s rare to find two businesses in the same industry that are as complementary as these two businesses are.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: Agreed. Yeah. You know, been thinking about it for a couple of decades to get to this point. It’s amazing to actually see it. Let me ask this. This was another popular question, right? Again, sitting in London, a lot of folks here know the Worldpay asset well. It’s been in, let’s say, consolidation mode for some time, right? We’ve heard about them even when they were public before, Vantiv going through a lot of exercises to consolidate systems and what have you. The strength in e-commerce or the root in e-commerce has always been there. There’s been strength in enterprise as well. What have you studied or learned from them during the diligence process to understand and get comfortable with the tech platform today and its competitiveness in e-com and enterprise?

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Yeah, as you can imagine, that’s an area that we spent an immense amount of time in diligence. 50% of their business today is enterprise and digital native multinational e-commerce. Those are areas where Global Payments really doesn’t play today. Most of our business is oriented towards SMBs around the globe and all the markets we operate in. The core asset in Worldpay that we were most excited about is obviously the enterprise and e-com capabilities. What I would tell you is they have, to some degree, maybe over-indexed on investing in building out their capabilities in the enterprise and e-commerce space over the last several years. It is the primary driver of growth in that business today. They have a really highly competitive, highly attractive set of capabilities, products, value-added services, and a technology platform that competes with the best in that space.

They are winning share every single day. They’re delivering attractive growth rates in the enterprise and e-commerce space. I think they’re well positioned to continue to grow and scale with that business. The combination of the two companies and market access that we can provide that they don’t have today, capabilities to deliver omnichannel solutions for enterprise customers in all these different markets around the globe, there’s an immense opportunity by putting the two businesses together to further catalyze growth, I think, in the enterprise and e-commerce space. It all starts with a really attractive business that’s built on a strong technology platform that was purpose-built to serve that enterprise and e-commerce segment of the market. I think they invested somewhere north of $1 billion in their platform to be able to serve that business well.

A set of products and capabilities and value-added services that resonate with the client base. A risk and compliance infrastructure that allows them to serve the businesses really well and manage risk and fraud in highly competitive ways. Authorization rates that I think a lot of competition in the enterprise and e-commerce space is driven by your ability to authorize at a very high rate. They do exceptionally well in that area. Importantly, vertical market expertise that really resonates with the client base that they’re trying to serve across a variety of different enterprise and e-commerce verticals around the globe. I think that’s an area of distinction for them as well. Many of their other competitors sort of tend to focus on one or two verticals. They have much broader vertical reach and vertical expertise that I think position that business really well for sustainable growth for the long term.

Very excited about the enterprise and e-commerce asset inside of Worldpay. It’s a big part of what we were hoping to get our arms around through the diligence process. Felt very comfortable with the conclusions we reached and certainly excited to have those capabilities as part of the combined Global Payments Worldpay business going forward.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: Now, I know Worldpay standalone struggled in SMB. You mentioned the over-indexed enterprise and e-com.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Yeah.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: They’ve got big brands there. We know that. On SMB, they’ve been challenged. Is Genius the tonic to make that asset work again?

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: I think Genius is a big part of it. I think you’re right. On the SMB side, they have had more challenges. Part of that is because they’ve been investing more heavily in enterprise and e-com. Part of it is really a lack of product and capability, I think, in the SMB space that has left them a little bit more exposed to competition over the last several years. The one thing I don’t worry about in the SMB space is product and capability on the Global Payments side. I think our ability to bring product capability, whether it’s Genius, other commerce enablement solutions, or value-added services that we can bring to bear on the SMB market, there’s an immense opportunity for us to bring our product and capability into that segment. In the SMB channel, they have really good distribution. They just need better product, better capability.

I think Global Payments brings that in spades. We feel very good about being able to re-accelerate growth in the SMB channel, leveraging their distribution with our product and capability that’s going to make that business far more attractive in the future.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: To close that SMB part of the equation out for Worldpay, I know the integrated embedded business, they made a big bet with that with Mercury back in the day, which was a well-known asset in the U.S. You’ve bought Payrix to have a more hybrid model to go after integrated embedded. How does that piece work, integrated embedded, that is, relative to what you have with Genius? Do those things work in harmony? How do you expect to expose that to Worldpay?

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Yeah, I do think they work in harmony. Just as a foundational matter, we’ve been in the integrated business for well over a decade, probably 12, 13 years now, and probably have far more vertical diversification in our integrated business today. We tend to focus on more sophisticated ISV software partners who need a little more complex sort of solutioning, need a little more white glove service, need a little more tailored operating model to fit their needs. That’s really core to our integrated business. We’ve been very successful with that strategy for a long period of time. Worldpay, to your point, had a similar business, but more restaurant-oriented through Mercury. That business has faced more challenges over the course of time, largely with the evolution of competition for point-of-sale software in the restaurant vertical. That has created, I think, some challenges for the legacy Mercury business.

I think Genius can help alleviate some of those challenges, obviously, because we can bring those capabilities into that backbook and provide, I think, some offerings there that will be helpful in terms of trying to protect that business for the long term. More importantly, Worldpay has invested heavily in more of the payback and managed payback area of the integrated market. They acquired Payrix, which is a fantastic platform to serve that more managed payback or payback as a service type offering that complements very nicely the work that we do with more sophisticated ISV partners.

The combination of the two businesses in the integrated space, which is really important to where we’re driving the business in the long term, our ability to serve all types of ISV partners, marketplaces, platform partners around the globe, the immense sort of capabilities that we bring together with Global Payments and Worldpay, us more on the sort of sophisticated, more traditional sort of integrated model, theirs with the Payrix asset. We can serve any type of software partner, platform partner, marketplace partner with an array of operating models, technology capabilities, platforms, and solutions that really meet any need within the ISV space at scale in multiple markets around the globe. I think that’s really unique as we think about putting these two businesses together. It’s another good example, again, where our strengths have been a little bit of their weakness.

Their strengths, excuse me, are areas that we haven’t invested heavily in, Payrix being a good example of that. The opportunity to bring those things together, I think, has tremendously value-enhancing sort of prospects for the combined business.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: Yeah. No, thanks for going through all that. It’s helpful for me. I hope it’s helpful for everyone else. Just going through that for the last 10 or 15 minutes, right, thinking about all the unlocks across the two businesses, it’s exciting to think about what can come.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: It’s really exciting. That’s why as we think about integration of this business, it’s a little bit unlike anything we’ve done in the past because there’s so much more orientation around growth and driving growth outcomes from putting these two businesses together and the opportunity to unlock revenue potential that neither one of us could really get at on our own. A lot of our integration planning up until this point has really been focused on making sure that day one, we have a well-articulated list of opportunities as a revenue and growth matter that we can start to invest against very early on to be able to unlock some of the potential that we see in putting the two businesses together. The expense synergies are kind of table stakes. I don’t want to take them for granted. We never do.

The reality is that’s a well-formed muscle inside of Global Payments today, the ability to combine the businesses, get to the expense synergies. Our targets there are not heroic given the size and scale of the combined business, probably 18% of the underlying operating expense base, relatively, I think, modest in the grand scheme of these large-scale type acquisitions. I feel very confident in our ability to get to that. We’re orienting our entire integration approach around how do we make sure we really unlock this growth potential of the combined company? How do we make sure that putting the two businesses together ends up with a combined organization that’s more competitive in all the markets that we serve today than either one of us has been able to be standalone?

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: Yeah, that’s very clear. I think that is the unlock. I think we’ll see if that unlocks the value right for the stocks. That’s going to be important for us to track on the outside. Thanks for going through all the Worldpay. I thought it was important given where we sit. Let’s pivot a little bit, talk about some big-picture themes, alternative payment methods.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Yeah.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: You mentioned value-added services a few times earlier. There’s been a lot of activity in the capital markets with Buy Now, Pay Later, but pay by bank, stablecoins as well. Can you discuss the implications there for Global Payments? How do you see it? What does it do for take rates? Is anything cannibalistic? Or do you view it as all net additive?

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: I think by and large, it’s net additive. I think as we look at the proliferation of different sort of payment methods at the point of sale, generally, it’s good news for our business. To some degree, the more complexity there is at the point of sale, the more we’re solving that complexity for our clients and the more valuable, frankly, we are to our clients. What most of our clients care about around the globe is, they want consumers to be able to pay for goods and services however their consumers want to pay. They don’t care so much whether that’s Buy Now, Pay Later, traditional cards, debit, local debit schemes, QR code-based payment, account to account, whatever it is. They just want consumers to be able to transact with no friction. That’s largely the service that we provide to our customers.

What they care about on the back end is consolidated data, analytics, insights, settlements, flows, payouts, and the way that they want to receive them. That’s the role we play in the ecosystem in supporting our merchant customers. As long as it’s digital, I like to say it’s good for our business. There may be a little bit of cannibalization of one digital mechanism to another over time. More of the cannibalization has continued to be around cash in the ecosystem, what remains. Generally, those are good tailwinds for our business. On average take rates over time, it’s generally going to be pretty consistent for us.

We’re not overly worried about one payment mechanism over another as long as it’s digital and as long as we’re well positioned to be able to serve the needs of our clients in terms of simplifying that complexity, allowing them to get paid in the way that they want to get paid, and providing the consolidated data reporting, insights, analytics, value-added services around that that really enrich the experience that we bring to our client base. That’s our focus as a business. Everything that’s happening from a payment rail perspective is supportive, I think, of that overall business model.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: How about on the stablecoin front, Cameron?

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting development to continue to watch. I certainly think the near to medium term sort of use cases are largely going to be driven around payouts, right? How clients, particularly larger multinational clients, choose to receive settlement flows and funds. Obviously, some probably extension into B2B payments and particularly around cross-border payments. That’s something that I think we will continue to monitor and position ourselves around as well. There’s not interoperability of stablecoins. I think there’s still a lot of barriers to it becoming a more ubiquitous sort of mechanism by which commerce is effectuated every day. I think we’re a long way away from consumers using stablecoins to pay for goods and services at the point of sale. Certainly, there are use cases that I think stablecoins can help solve, particularly around cross-border, business-to-business payments, how settlements and payouts are made to different customers.

That’s an area that we’re investing, Worldpay’s investing to make sure that we can deliver those capabilities for our customers and clients in the way that we think the market’s going to evolve. Lots of near-term noise, I think, largely in the area of sort of payout and sort of cross-border B2B. Longer term, it’s a trend that we need to continue to monitor. I think we’re obviously well positioned to be able to make sure that we’re well equipped to be able to meet the needs of the market as it continues to evolve. As it relates to day-to-day commerce, I think we’re a long way away from it having any sort of impact on day-to-day commerce.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: Just one more in terms of your own treasury and settlement and ability to reduce costs by leveraging stablecoins and some of the more volatile currencies. Is that something that could move the needle?

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Yeah, I think there’s real opportunity there. Whether it’s a needle mover or not, I think remains to be seen. Probably, candidly, more opportunity in the Worldpay business because they tend to support larger multinational digital native clients that probably have more FX, more cross-border money movement in their ecosystems than many of the SMB-oriented customers that we serve today. Certainly, I think there’s a potential value unlock there that we’ll be able to tap into as we bring the businesses together and as the stablecoin market continues to evolve.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: OK, great. Let’s quickly do the divestitures. You did divest the payroll asset. I think that put you on track to the number you set in terms of revenue at Investor Day that you would divest. You also said that you’re still reevaluating the portfolio given Worldpay. Can you remind us of where you are with that and what might be considered?

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Yeah, happy to. Just to rewind the clock a little bit, going into our investor conference last year, we talked about wanting to streamline and simplify the business. As part of that, we’ve made the decision to look at exiting a few lines of businesses, geographies that we didn’t think were strategic or core to where we wanted to drive the business long term. Year to date or sort of activity to date, we’ve divested about $550 million of revenue. We had targeted $500 million to $600 million, so kind of right in the target that we had established. From that, we’ve returned about $1 billion of capital to shareholders from those divestitures. We made a lot of those decisions before we had the opportunity, before we even knew that we’d have the opportunity to acquire Worldpay.

I think it behooves us to kind of circle back and revisit some of the decisions we made around specific assets, going into our investor conference last year and making sure as we think about the composition of the pro forma business, given that we’re acquiring another $5 billion of revenue, we’re going to be, as I said, nearly $13 billion of pro forma revenue after adjusting for the issuer sale. Do we still want to be in all those same businesses? Does it make sense? I think the conclusion we’ll likely reach is there may be a couple of other assets that we would look to exit. Same playbook going forward, assuming leverage neutrality and we address any tax consequences of exiting these assets. We’ll return whatever proceeds remain to our shareholders as we’ve done with the prior divestitures. We’re in the process of evaluating those assets now.

Obviously, we’ll keep investors apprised of any future decisions we make around that.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: The capital you’ve raised from the divestitures, you’ve earmarked that towards buybacks of course.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Correct.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: Given where the stock is and the flexibility that you have, just remind us how you balance the buybacks versus deleveraging.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Yeah, it’s a great question. As we sit here today, we’re targeting three times leverage at the end of the year, and we’re very much on track to be able to achieve that. We’ve committed to return over the 2025 to 2027 time frame, putting aside this conversation around asset divestitures, just from regular capital cash flow in the business. We’re going to return $7.5 billion of capital to shareholders. That positions us over the 2026 and 2027 time frame in particular to return pretty significant amounts of capital to our shareholders. I think year to date, we’ve probably done $700-ish million, excluding again the capital associated with asset divestitures. That means over the next couple of years, we’re going to return a pretty meaningful amount of capital to shareholders to get to that $7.5 billion target over the 2025 to 2027 time frame.

At the same time, we’ll reduce our leverage from at close with the transaction. We’ll probably be around 3.5 times. Over an 18 to 24-month time frame, we’ll reduce that leverage ratio to three times as well. That’s kind of our targeted leverage ratio for our business. We think it’s a good balance of obviously maintaining balance sheet strength, flexibility, and financial capacity in the business while at the same time returning meaningful amounts of capital to shareholders. We feel very good about the prospects for our business over the 2025 to 2027 time frame to get to that $7.5 billion, plus maintaining again a leverage profile for the business that we think is appropriate and well sustainable for the future, again, targeting that three times ratio within 18 to 24 months post-closing of the transaction.

I think what’s maybe even more interesting then is you think about the 2028 time frame.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: Yeah.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: I know it feels like a long way out. In reality, it’s right around the corner. This is a business that’s going to generate leverage-free cash flow of nearly $5 billion in 2028. With a three times leverage, that’s an immense amount of capacity given our current market cap and overall enterprise value, an immense amount of capacity for us to think about ongoing shareholder returns and obviously putting that capital to use to drive incremental value for shareholders. We talk about the scale of the business in terms of competitively how it’s going to position us and the things we can do from an innovation and investment perspective. The amount of capital and cash that we’re going to have available to return to shareholders to drive shareholder returns is enormous, particularly as you think about that 2028 level of $5 billion.

Interestingly, that’s 50% higher than it would have been had we not done the Worldpay and issuer transaction. If we looked at the standalone plan we had for 2028 and our pro forma plan with the transactions we’re executing, exiting issuer, acquiring Worldpay, that $5 billion is 50% higher than we would have been on a standalone basis. Enormous, I think, value creation potential leveraging, obviously, the capital allocation we’ll have available to us, the strategies we’ll have available to us going forward.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: OK, good. We went through a lot here. I just wanted to zoom out and close out with a couple of chessboard questions, if you don’t mind, Cameron, because we’ve talked over the years. I’ve always learned a lot from you. Thinking about Global Payments back when it was NDC, I think you and I have talked about this. I’ve sort of long visioned or thought that, like a lot of other tech sectors and payments, you might get to two or three large scale players. Then you have a lot of niche players that develop, similar to what you see across tech and even financial services, right, Visa and MasterCard or in payroll, you have two big players. You can pick your software companies as well in different verticals. Global is basically going to be one of those two or three large players.

Thinking about the chessboard, how do you think the ecosystem here evolves? What do you look to across other, whether it’s tech or financial services, to inform your decisions on what that next chessboard move will be in 2026, 2027, 2028? I’m sure you’re not going to stand still and do nothing in 2028.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: No.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: How do you see the ecosystem evolving in payments now that we’ve come to this place where we’re close to two very large scale players?

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Yeah, I think it’s an interesting question. It’s one we spend a lot of time on. I think this is an industry naturally where scale matters. It always has. It probably matters now more than ever for lots of different reasons. I think a couple of those are just the pace of change and the ability to invest in innovation at the levels that you need to to maintain your competitive positioning in the market. I think scale is hugely important to being able to do that, given just the amount of technology and the implications of technology in the industry, some of the topics we talked about today, whether it’s, I can’t believe AI hasn’t come up.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: Yeah.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Whether it’s AI, agentic commerce, stablecoins, innovation, and the ability to invest against these things, scale is critically important to that. It’s a big part of the thought process that went into acquiring Worldpay. I think focus is incredibly important to that. As we thought about our business and wanting to exit issuer, it was largely with an eye towards, look, our business is enormously complex, enormously competitive. Having all pro forma 28,000, 29,000 team members around the globe thinking about, focused on merchant solutions every day, I think is incredibly important. That focus in a highly competitive, highly dynamic business that’s changing at the rate our industry is, I think being solely focused on it is critically important for us as well. The reality is this is a business that the regulatory intensity continues to increase in every market around the globe.

Scale matters when you’re trying to deal with just the regular complexity from a regulatory standpoint for the business. Scale matters to our large enterprise customers who care about compliance, who care about who they’re working with and how compliant you are. Are you meeting the regulatory standards and requirements in all of these markets? That really matters to them as well. This is an industry where long term, again, scale matters more than it’s ever mattered. We’ve been through a very sort of aggressive expansionary cycle in our industry, a lot of new players, a lot of new fintech, a lot of capital being thrown at payments. Inevitably, we’re now looking at a consolidation sort of cycle in the space where you’re going to see more consolidation.

You’re going to see businesses positioning for better scale so that they can invest, they can compete, they can maintain sort of their regulatory and compliance posture. Those things are really important to how the business is evolving. I think we’re ahead of the game, quite frankly, on that front with a set of assets and capabilities and an amount of scale, again, that I think most of our competitors, irrespective of what moves they make, they’re going to have a challenge sort of keeping up with that.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: That’s the supplier side. Let’s close it out on the consumer side. Payments has been pretty slow to change behavior of consumers.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Yeah.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: Do you see that changing? You mentioned agentic and whatnot, taking robots away. Do you see the consumer side changing over the next three to five years with the pace of change?

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: I don’t know that the pace of change is going to be all that dramatically different than what it’s been in the past. I think the reality in our space, and probably people underestimate how difficult it is to change consumer behavior. I’m old, so I’m probably not the best use case. Certainly, there are younger consumers that are going to change probably more rapidly than older consumers. The overall consumer space more broadly is very hard to change a consumer behavior. Will all these things have impact? Is there going to be agentic commerce? Will that have an impact? Absolutely. Is the level of impact in the short term as immense as people think? Probably not, at least in my opinion. Are the long-term implications what people think they will be? Probably.

I think there’s a certain segment of the population, younger generations, are going to be more comfortable with agents making buying decisions on their behalf and those types of things. I think in the short term, it’s largely going to be oriented around the search experience and how people get to making a buying decision versus having agents actually making decisions on behalf of their consumer. All these things are going to drive immense change over time, I think, in the payments ecosystem. I just think it’s always a little slower than people anticipate because end of day changing consumer behavior takes time.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: Agreed. Cameron, Josh, thank you both for being here and supporting the conference. Always enjoy the conversation.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Great to be here with you. Thanks, everybody, for spending a little bit of time with us today. Have a great rest of your day.

Tien-Tsin Huang, Analyst, JP Morgan: Thank you.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments: Thank you.

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