Fidelity National Information Services, Inc. (NYSE:FIS) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 6, 2024
Fidelity National Information Services, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $1.33, expectations were $0.963. FIS isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Good day. Thank you for standing by and welcome to the FIS First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. Please note there will be no Q&A following the speakers’ prepared remarks. I would now like to hand the call over to George Mihalos, Senior Vice President and Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
George Mihalos: Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for the FIS first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. This call is being webcasted. Today’s news release, corresponding presentation and webcast are all available on our website at fisglobal.com. On the call with me today are Stephanie Ferris, our CEO and President; and James Kehoe, our CFO. Stephanie will begin the call with a strategic and operational update, followed by James, who will review our financials. Turning to Slide 3. Today’s remarks will contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties as described in the press release and other filings with the SEC. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.
Please refer to the safe harbor language. Also, throughout this conference call, we will be presenting non-GAAP information, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net earnings, adjusted net earnings per share and free cash flow. These are important financial performance measures for the Company, but are not financial measures as defined by GAAP. Reconciliation of our non-GAAP information to the GAAP financial information is presented in our earnings release. And with that, I’ll turn it over to Stephanie.
Stephanie Ferris: Thank you, George, and thank you, everyone for joining us this afternoon. I’m pleased to report that 2024 is off to a very strong start. We are outperforming on our financial commitments to shareholders, experiencing solid new sales momentum and leveraging our strong capital position to aggressively return capital to shareholders while also investing for growth. The decisive actions we took in 2023 through our Future Forward strategy are resonating across the enterprise and improving operational and financial outcomes. This is the fifth consecutive quarter where we’ve exceeded our financial outlook with broad-based outperformance across revenue, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS. While still early, we are confident in achieving our 2024 outlook for revenue and adjusted EBITDA, and we are meaningfully raising our EPS outlook to reflect a sustainable lower tax rate and a higher EMI contribution from our Worldpay stake.
Momentum is building across our new sales pipeline, as our solutions continue to resonate with clients. We saw strong new sales growth in the first quarter with good demand across digital banking, payments and risk compliance solutions. We expect the strong new sales activity to continue over the remainder of the year. Moving on to capital allocation. We are once again increasing our share repurchase target for the year by $500 million. We now expect to repurchase a total of $4 billion in 2024. During the quarter, we returned $1.6 billion to shareholders, including $1.4 billion through repurchases, and we [indiscernible] highly synergistic tuck-in M&A opportunities to [further strengthen] our business. Before turning it over for an in-depth discussion on our first quarter financial performance and updated 2024 outlook, I’d like to remind everyone that tomorrow we will be hosting an Investor Day, where we will be showcasing our corporate strategy, providing segment deep dives and introducing medium term financial targets.
See also 11 Best EV Charging Stocks To Invest In and Jim Cramer is Recommending These 10 Stocks Heading Into May 2024.
To continue reading the Q&A session, please click here.