On Tuesday, Fiserv (NASDAQ:FISV) discussed first-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below.
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Summary
Fiserv reported Q1 adjusted revenue of $4.68 billion, down 2.4% year-over-year, aligning with guidance.
Merchant Solutions saw stable growth with Clover GPV, but faced revenue headwinds in Argentina due to lower inflation and interest rates.
Financial Solutions experienced solid volume growth, but was impacted by higher-than-normal core banking attrition.
The company remains focused on executing its ONE Fiserv Action Plan, investing in talent and technology to enhance client services and product offerings.
Guidance for 2026 includes 1-3% organic revenue growth, with Merchant Solutions growing mid-single digits and Financial Solutions flat to slightly down.
Notable strategic moves include expanding Clover in healthcare and professional services, and launching AI-driven initiatives across the organization.
Management remains confident in achieving mid-single digit adjusted revenue and double-digit EPS growth by 2027.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Welcome to the FISER first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen only mode until the question and answer session begins following the presentation. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded at this time. I will turn the call over to Walter Prichard, Senior Vice President and Head of Investor Relations at Fiserv.
Walter Prichard (Senior Vice President and Head of Investor Relations)
Thank you and good morning. With me on the call today are Mike Lyons, our Chief Executive Officer and Paul Todd, our Chief Financial Officer. Our earnings release and supplemental materials for the quarter are available on the Investor relations section of Fiserv.com please refer to these materials for an explanation of the non-Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) financial measures discussed in this call along with the reconciliation of those measures to the nearest applicable Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) measures. Unless otherwise noted, performance references are year over year comparisons. Our remarks today will include forward looking statements about, among other matters, expected operating and financial results and strategic initiatives. Forward looking statements may differ materially from actual results and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. You should refer to our earnings release for a discussion of these risk factors. And now we'll turn the call over to Mike.
Mike Lyons (Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you Walter and good morning everyone. As we began the year, we were firmly in execution mode and our first quarter results were in line with the expectations we shared with you in February. Our teams continued to be laser focused on executing against the ONE fiserv Action Plan and while there is still significant work to do, we are taking the right actions with the right sense of urgency and feel really good about the progress to date. We are confident in our strategy and the unprecedented pace of change in banking and payments is creating an extraordinary opportunity for us. As our clients and prospects want a trusted partner to deliver sophisticated technology and value added solutions, we are uniquely positioned to do exactly that. To drive these efforts, we continue to add outstanding talent across the organization, including new heads of operations for both Merchant Solutions and Financial Solutions, new Chief Revenue Officers for Clover and Enterprise Merchant, and a new Head of Product for Financial Solutions. With respect to business performance, I'll start with Merchant Solutions where we saw solid growth in Clover gpv, supported by good execution against our strategic initiatives and a stable macro. Clover vast revenue represented 27% of clover revenue in Q1, growing 18% from a year ago, driven by software and Clover Capital. We also saw steady growth in enterprise transactions while anticipation lending volumes in Argentina remained strong. Lower inflation and interest rates in Argentina were a revenue headwind to merchant in Q1. I would note that this revenue softness was largely offset by lower interest expense below the line. Our preliminary April Merchant volume growth including Clover Gross Payment Volume (GPV) remained solid around Q1 levels going forward. In merchant, we're watching the impact of various environmental factors including higher gas prices from the conflict in the Middle east which if sustained can impact the mix of consumer spending. We saw some of this dynamic in the most recent Fiserv Small Business index data. In Q1 we signed 27 new banks as merchant referral partners. We also announced our largest agent bank partnership in our history with Western alliance bank which has more than $90 billion in assets and expands our reach with merchants across the Western U.S. we also hit important milestones in the quarter, going live with Commerce Hub Omni-channel capability across a number of our largest petro customers. We also went live on Commerce Hub with built rewards in Neighborhood Hospitality and Via Americas in Cross border remittance. Our broadening global releases and customer go lives are driving Commerce Hub transaction growth which was up nearly 200% in Q1. Other key enterprise merchant wins in Q1 included a retail energy provider, Blue Shield of California, a leading tax compliance platform and a large telecom provider who added on fraud capabilities. In financial solutions, we saw solid underlying business volume growth, particularly in Finzact and our payments businesses, excluding bill pay. New business sales showed continued momentum, we hit important product delivery milestones and we saw an improvement in key client service metrics. While core bank account and revenue attrition remain above our long term trend, we've seen early signs that our client service initiatives have been well received. We're also getting positive client feedback on our decision to continue supporting all of our cores and we are signing and renewing customers across all cores. Also contributing to an enhanced client experience is the value we are delivering from our Recent acquisitions of StoneCastle and Smith Consulting where both our strategic and financial results are in line with our business cases. Key new business wins in financial solutions included Ocean first bank, which is a $14.5 billion Northeast Regional bank that is growing rapidly through its announced acquisition of Flushing Bank. It extended its Premier Core and surrounds agreement with us, adding digital payments and committing to deploy Core Advance. Nicolet National Bank, a $16 billion Wisconsin based bank, is adopting our Premier core with its Midwest One acquisition. Trulian Federal Credit Union, a $5 billion plus North Carolina based institution, chose to move to our debit processing platform. We expanded our long standing digital money movement relationship with PNC bank to include cash flow, central AP and AR services for their small businesses and we had embedded finance wins with a large payroll provider and a large retailer to bring new capabilities to their payroll members and customers. In these wins we will leverage new integrated capabilities across ONE Fiserv including Finzact for Ledger, Payfair for banking applications and program management and VisionNext as a cardholder platform. Finzact was named Best SaaS for Fintech at the 2026 Fintech Awards recognizing the combination of its market leading innovation and scaled customer deployments. Finzact continued to grow strongly in Q1 with accounts and positions up over 70% as clients find value in its ability to provide financial infrastructure to enable any asset class in any domain at scale under a common platform and business model. So our execution is improving across both businesses. But as expected, that progress is not yet visible in our reported financial results as we are still lapping a higher mix of non recurring revenue, feeling the lingering impacts from prior client service challenges and absorbing the incremental expense from investments that will drive long term client focused growth, all necessary and important elements of our transition year in 2026. We look forward to the second half of the year and 2027 when we expect our operating performance will be more fully visible in our financial results. I'll now provide an update on our execution against the one fiserv Action Plan. Of course, we will cover all aspects of the plan in greater detail at the May 14 investor day. Under our client first pillar, we continued to make targeted investments to raise the bar for client coverage, relationship management, service delivery and product resilience. The number of client facing personnel we have is up significantly, meeting a key demand from clients and importantly we are seeing better day to day execution. Our time to resolve client inquiries is down 27% year on year. While we still have significant work to do, high impact client incidents are down nearly 60% year on year and we launched important AI initiatives to enhance the performance of our primary client portal and call centers in financial solutions. Turning to Clover, our second pillar, we continue to make progress towards establishing it as the preeminent small business operating platform. We launched two new verticals in March with Practice Pay in the healthcare space and our professional services offering. We are seeing promising early results with annualized GPV per health care outlet running at double digit levels above our existing Clover Healthcare merchants and a 20% plus increase in new professional services outlets that attached our paid SAS offering in the month. Internationally our momentum continued with Brazil Clover outlets up over 30% sequentially and we had another strong Clover quarter in Canada where we remain on track to enable TD Merchant Solutions to provide Clover's product offering processing and servicing to its clients in the second half of the year. After launching in Q4, we continued to expand our digital merchant activation capability and now have 22 of our top bank partners signed. We will also add this capability to our Clover.com online merchant referral partners through integration with Stone Castle. We remain on track to launch Clover Savings program, our merchant cash management program before the end of Q2. Through a number of important partnerships, we continue to build agentic commerce capabilities for our Clover merchants and will showcase some of these at Investor Day. And finally, we are excited to share that Clover is slated to support 30 World cup games this summer in the US and Mexico next. On the innovation front, we continue to hit critical milestones on key strategic products including Experience, Digital Cash Flow, Central VisionNext, Optus (a fictional name) and Commerce Hub. As I mentioned earlier, in our enterprise merchant business we delivered a new developer portal supporting agentic commerce commerce. Our teams have further ramped up their usage of AI tooling in the software development process with early results showing a significant reduction across key steps in new feature development and delivery time with mainframe modernization. And finally, we are on track to launch our previously announced stablecoin pilot this summer to facilitate interbank money movement. Fourth, we are in full swing with Project Elevate with AI at the center of this program. We are very encouraged by the early results. The teams have identified hundreds of opportunities to drive revenue uplift, reduce expenses, increase simplicity and improve productivity and we're moving with urgency to operationalize them. Paul will outline our financial targets for Elevate at Investor Day. Beyond Elevate, we took several important actions in Q1 to drive efficiency, including closing two subscale offices, exiting underperforming merchant businesses in India, reducing management layers and implementing more aggressive performance management. And just last week we completed the migration of all customer activities from a significant data center as we continue our modernization activity. Last but certainly not least on one Fiserv is our commitment to highly disciplined capital allocation. We continue to sharpen our focus on the businesses and assets that best align to our Go Forward strategy, including evaluating potential dispositions. I'll conclude by saying we look forward to seeing you at Investor Day where, among other topics, we will further highlight our strategic priorities, describe how our businesses are converging further to unlock more synergies, and share how we're using AI to transform systems of record into systems of collaboration, create new tams and increase efficiency. Together, these actions will support the mid single digit adjusted revenue and double digit EPS growth that we've discussed since last fall. This will position Fiserv to return to its roots and create significant shareholder value as a constant compounder. I want to thank our employees for their hard work and dedication and our clients for their continued trust. With that, I will turn it over to Paul to cover the details of Q1 and our guidance.
Paul Todd (Chief Financial Officer)
Thank you Mike and good morning everyone. I will cover details on total company and segment performance in the first quarter and reiterate our guidance for 2026. Beginning on Slide 6, total company Q1 adjusted revenue was $4.68 billion, a decrease of 2.4% compared to the prior year period and was in line with our guidance as we lapped higher non recurring revenue from a year ago. Q1 adjusted operating income earnings was $1.4 billion resulting in adjusted operating margin of 29.7%, also in line with the just below 30% view I provided on our last call. Total company organic revenue was down 3.6% in Q1 with a differential in organic to adjusted revenue of just over 1% in line with the approximately 1% delta we communicated in February first quarter adjusted earnings per share was $1.79. Our Q1 results reflect an adjusted effective tax rate of 11% driven by the release of a tax valuation allowance in the first quarter relative to our expected annual adjusted tax rate of between 19 and 19.5%. This lower tax rate resulted in a 17 cent positive impact to adjusted earnings per share in Q1. This 11% rate in Q1 is strictly a timing related impact. Our full year adjusted tax rate guidance of 19 to 19.5% remains unchanged and we expect higher quarterly effective tax rates through the balance of the year as an offset. Free cash flow for the quarter was $259 million and in line with our expectations we noted in February and reflects typical seasonality where Q1 is our lowest free cash flow quarter of the year. Now I will turn to the performance by segment for Q1 starting on Slide 7 for Merchant Solutions. Merchant Solutions organic revenue declined 1% for the quarter while adjusted revenue was flat, which is largely in line with our expectations as we fully anniversary the CCV transaction. As Mike mentioned, lower inflation and interest rates in Argentina did have a negative impact on adjusted revenue in our merchant business. Small business revenue declined 1% on an organic basis in Q1 and grew 1% on an adjusted basis. Small business volume grew 7% in the quarter. Clover revenue grew 6% in Q1. However, excluding higher non recurring revenue from the first quarter of 2025, Clover revenue growth would have been in the mid teens. Clover revenue from payment processing grew 10% more in line with volume trends. As we noted in February, we expect similar trends for clover in Q2 with this period representing the peak in non recurring impacts and also expect that Clover Processing revenue will grow in line with Clover Gross Payment Volume (GPV). Clover volume grew over 9% on a reported basis and was in line with our expectations as we saw stable growth both in the US and in key international markets. Clover volume excluding the previously discussed gateway conversion grew 12%. As the previously discussed Gateway conversion continues to run off the delta between Clover reported and ex Gateway growth will converge. We continue to expect Clover revenue growth in the low double digits for 2026 and GPV growth of 10 to 15% X the gateway conversion. The lower end represents the core growth rate while the higher end assumes more significant conversion of non Clover merchants. Value Added services revenue contributed 27% of clover revenue in Q1 growing 18% from a year ago driven by software attach and lending including Clover Capital. Moving on to Enterprise, our revenue grew 3% on an organic basis in Q1 and grew 2% on an adjusted basis. Enterprise transactions grew 8% and finally in Processing, organic revenue declined 14% while adjusted revenue declined 9%. First quarter adjusted operating income for Merchant Solutions segment was $626 million down 23% with adjusted operating margin of 26.4%. Now I will cover Financial Solutions starting on Slide 8 for the quarter, organic revenue declined by 6% in Financial Solutions while adjusted revenue declined by 5% relative to our expectations of adjusted revenue decline at the high end of mid single digits that I mentioned on our last call. In digital payments, both organic and adjusted revenue declined by 5%. Our underlying account and volume growth in Financial solutions was in line with what we expected and our recent history. This included low single digit growth in debit processing and low double digit debit network volume growth. Zelle transactions grew 18% in the quarter in line with recent trends we have seen. While we saw bill pay transactions down high single digits, also we saw further ramp in cash flow. Central revenue in the quarter in issuing revenue declined by 6% on an organic basis and 5% on an adjusted basis while global accounts on file grew in the low single digits. Revenue comparables were impacted by Nonrecurring revenue in Q1 last year, a trend we expect to be more pronounced in Q2. Finally, in banking, revenue decreased 6% on an organic basis and was down 4% on an adjusted basis. As we continue to be impacted by certain actions taken over the last several years as well as higher non recurring revenue in the year ago period as well as attrition that remains above our long term target, we saw core counts decline 2% year over year while overall accounts and positions, including Finzact, grew 6% first quarter adjusted operating income for the Financial solutions segment declined 24% to $877 million and adjusted operating margin was 38.1% versus 47.5% in the prior year period. From a leverage standpoint, we finished the quarter with a debt to adjusted ebitda ratio below 3.2 times. Measured on a gross basis, we expect to finish the year at approximately 3 times. Turning to Slide 9, we repurchased 3.3 million shares during the quarter for approximately $200 million. As we noted in February, we are focused on managing our leverage ratio and remain committed to returning capital to shareholders. Now with Slide 10, I'll move on to our 2026 guidance. First, on revenue, we continue to expect 2026 organic revenue growth in the range of 1 to 3% with merchant solutions revenue growth in the mid single digits and Financial Solutions flat to slightly down. Consistent with February, we expect adjusted revenue growth in the range of 1 to 3%. All of this continues to assume a stable macro environment. As we told you in February, we expect the second quarter to be the trough in terms of our year on year revenue decline and we expect our Financial Solutions business to decline at the high end of mid single digits. In Q2, we expect our weighted average share count to be approximately 530 million, resulting in adjusted EPS of $8.00 to $8.30. Consistent with our prior guidance, we continue to expect adjusted operating margin of approximately 34% for the year in line with our commentary in February, we expect first half adjusted operating margin of approximately 31 to 32% in the second half of the year. We continue to expect adjusted operating margin of 35 to 36% with Q4 representing the high point in the year. We continue to expect capital expenditures to remain Approximately flat with 2025 levels. We continue to expect free cash flow conversion of approximately 90% of adjusted net income for the year in line with historical levels and our February guidance. And with that, I will turn the call back to the operator to start the Q and A session.
OPERATOR
Thank you. We would now like to open the phone lines for questions. As a reminder for today's call, please limit yourself to one question to ensure ample time to answer as many questions as possible. If you would like to ask a question, you may press Star one on your phone. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star two. Our first question comes from Tinjin Wong from JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Tinjin Wong (Equity Analyst at JPMorgan)
Thanks for going through all of that. I wanted to ask just on maybe visibility on the banking side and retention, given some of the bank conversions that you're doing, just any surprise there. I know that the trough comments were made, but I'd love to hear a little bit more detail on attrition and retention, that kind of thing. Good morning Tinjin, I think broadly on banking, we continue to be obviously very proud of the leading market share position we have in the business and all the support across almost 3,000 banks and credit unions. On the core side, as we've said and we've said again today, core attrition's been above where we want it to be in getting that back to normal is a significant focus for us. That attrition, as you know, is the result of actions taken over the last several years, especially around the client service front and we're confident we have the right fixes and addresses. The way we're addressing it is the right thing to do. And while there's significant work to do, as I said today, we feel like we're bending that curve in a positive way and contributing to that is we've significantly increased our client coverage efforts, which was an ask of our they came directly from the clients. From that has come better service and we're seeing that show up in both our surveys and anecdotal evidence. And then we've really leveraged a number of different forms of AI to help call centers, enhancing our client portal experience, accelerating our tech modernization and reducing the books of work we have then obviously the decision to support all of our cores was an important one for our clients and has taken a significant amount of pressure, perceived pressure that they had on themselves to switch and obviously pressure on us. So little things or less highlighted things. The Stone Castle acquisition has been a great value added, positive supporting our clients and one of depository clients and one of their biggest needs which is continued deposit growth and then our approach to embracing the consultant community and even acquiring Smith Consulting to really drive value add services to our depository partners. Again as another piece, finally we've taken an advanced approach, again using AI to measure what we call a client health index across all their experiences with us in terms of pace of change, resolution, inquiries, client touch and the like. And it's given us a much better view and perspective of where these clients stand, which allows us to play much more, much more on the offensive side to getting to them.
Mike Lyons (Chief Executive Officer)
So a lot of stuff listed but it's a complete package of behavioral changes, technology changes, service changes, alignment changes, meant enhancements. We talked about continued enhancement in the quality of our leadership team bringing in new executives to combine with the executives here. So I wish it was more visible in the results, but when you go through the underlying KPIs that we have, we feel really good about the progress we're making and our ability to get core revenue related attrition back down to more normal levels. Ideally we'd like to have none, but of course you've got Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) and stuff and we've had some over history but getting it back to those historical levels, we feel like we're doing all the right stuff and are on the path to do it just takes time and work. Good. It's important stuff. Thank you for going through it.
OPERATOR
Next we'll go to the line of Andrew Schmidt from KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Andrew Schmidt (Equity Analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets)
Hey Mike. Hey Paul. Thanks for taking the question this morning. I wanted to ask just on SMB back book, if you could talk about the performance there exclover and then I know there's a swing factor in terms of conversion of non Clover merchants. If you did any testing there, it'd be interesting to just understand how that testing is performed and how that might influence the go forward emphasis on converting those non clover merchants to Clover. Thanks so much.
Paul Todd (Chief Financial Officer)
Yes, Andrew, thanks for the question. And yes, first of all, I wouldn't call out anything unique as it relates to the back book conversion in the first quarter and certainly for the year we don't have any different expectations around what that back book conversion looks like. You know, we've commented for some time now we're being very mindful about how we approach any of the non Clover to Clover transition to make sure that we're doing it in a very mindful customer centric way and we've had some good tests around that, around the receptivity of those moves when there's a good product fit, but there isn't anything incremental. You know we talked about in the overall Clover GPV guide for the year. You know, the low side of the guide assumes very minimal back book conversion and the higher side assumes a more meaningful back book conversion. But right now everything's on plan as it relates to how we're looking at that. And we're going to talk a lot about this yesterday. Doc is just going to be going through just the overall Clover strategy, the overall merchant strategy. You'll see all the pieces kind of fit together related to this topic at Investor Day, but right now nothing has changed. Mike, do you have anything to add?
Mike Lyons (Chief Executive Officer)
I'd just add that we've said in the past that our ability and willingness to pursue conversions of fiserv customers from one platform onto Clover would obviously very much like to do that given the robust set of VAs we have on the Clover side. But that depends on us doing certain actions and we're proud this quarter to launch two new verticals, as I mentioned in the prepared comments, in healthcare and professional services. And each time we build unique capabilities to address a certain vertical that allows us a greater opportunity to go in and address the back book with compelling offers. We don't want to just go in and and try to move that to Clover without a strong rationale and mutual benefit for the customer. And as Paul said, our efforts to date have been very modest. Takis will talk you through that.
Mike Lyons (Chief Executive Officer)
Study, learn, test and then when we have the right capabilities and the right understanding of it, you can pick up the pace of it.
Andrew Schmidt (Equity Analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets)
Perfect. Thanks so much. Forward to hearing more at the Analyst day.
OPERATOR
Next we'll go to Dan Dola from Mizuho. Please go ahead.
Dan Dola (Equity Analyst at Mizuho)
Hey guys, great progress here. Quick question on AI. I think your competitor made an announcement yesterday on AI with regards to banking bank processing. Can you maybe elaborate on some of the initiatives and how you add value with AI to your banking plans? Thank you. Yeah, thanks for the question. And you know, as we keep progressing with it for our businesses, we get more and more excited about what AI is allowing us to do and we've seen incredible results today, recognizing it's still early in the development of it, but we're really intensely focused on four areas which is taking those great systems of record we have into systems of greater value and systems of collaboration, generating new revenue sources in tams, which goes a little bit to your question, enhancing client service where I just mentioned, and then increasing our own productivity and efficiency across the company. With respect specifically to leveraging AI on the revenue side and for the benefit of our clients. Agentic is clearly the next important phase on both the merchant side and the banking side and we have a number of extremely exciting developments going on there, including new agentic commerce capabilities which we've been talking about in merchant and rolling out through important partnerships. And Takis will go through that in detail next week. But we see a great opportunity, especially with the Clover customer base and enabling them to access an agentic world without building all the back end systems needed. And on the banking side at IR Day, Divya will introduce a new governed AI operating layer that will importantly allow FIs to access and fully capture the power and benefit of all agents across many functions including front, middle and back office and using any LLM. So we're already live with pilot agents with two financial institutions around this today and then have a number of of others lined up with different use cases. Think about loan originations, compliance and call centers. So not to steal too much thunder for next week, but Divya will formally introduce the product and you'll be able to actually see some demos of it. So again, whether it's internally or externally, merchant or financial, we're seeing great opportunities both to drive value for ourselves and help our clients access the agentia capabilities available to them. Thank you, very insightful, appreciate it.
Mike Lyons (Chief Executive Officer)
Next we'll go to Vasu Goville from kbw. Please go ahead. Hi, thanks for taking my question. I just had a couple of quick ones on Clover. I guess the first one just on the non recurring revenue that you called out Paul from last year, was that mostly hardware revenue or something else? And then more broadly, Mike, on Clover Capital, you've highlighted in prior calls how the penetration is still relatively low in your installed base. So maybe if you could just talk a little bit about what has constrained adoption so far and as you look to scale that business, how should we think about the long term penetration potential and sort of the mix between on balance sheet, off balance sheet to support that growth?
OPERATOR
Yeah, so Basu, maybe I'll take two parts of those and then Mike, if you want to add anything as it relates to the non recurring revenue on the Clover side, yes, hardware is a big piece of that. There are some other things from a non recurring standpoint in that comparative. We highlighted that out. That's why the Clover revenue growth is in the mid teens, the reported growth of 6. But if you take the comparative dynamics of the non recurring not repeating in the first quarter of this year, that puts you to the mid teens or roughly 15%. And hardware is the biggest or one of the biggest pieces there on the Clover Capital side. We will talk more about this at Investor Day. And just our strategy around Clover Capital, you're right, we are under penetrated relative to the opportunity set and we're going to kind of lay out a much broader strategy around how we're going to be approaching the marketplace both from a balance sheet standpoint as well as just an overall growth standpoint at Investor Day. So I'd rather kind of give a more wholesome view of that on a go forward basis. But we did see good Clover Capital growth in the quarter. So very pleased with the underlying volume growth that we saw. And we don't see any change in that growth trajectory as we look at the forecast for the remaining part of the year. But we'll give you more color at Investor day. Mike, anything else?
Paul Todd (Chief Financial Officer)
No, I think you highlighted perfectly that the opportunity is significant in front of us. We're a couple quarters into building our enhancing what we had as core capabilities and going after that and it's domestic and international opportunity.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Next we'll go to Brian Bergin from TD Cowan. Please go ahead.
Brian Bergin (Equity Analyst at TD Cowan)
I wanted to ask on financial solutions, can you just give us a sense on the non recurring revenue headwinds where relevant across the subsegments and I'm thinking particularly in issuing and banking and then the relative potential size of those headwinds in two Qs just so we can unpack the recurring performance with an overall performance. Yeah. So specifically in the issuing area, the biggest single driver I'd point out to is the output solutions area where we had some significantly sized output solutions business that is not recurring this year, that is in the first half and specifically in the second quarter. You'll recall we had that team's growth rate on the issuing business in the first half or in the second quarter of last year. And so that's providing a meaningful comparative headwind on the issuing side. There are other nonrecurring across the digital channel as well as in banking but as it relates to general sizing we kind of gave you when we talked about the high mid single digit and the second quarter being the trough relative sizing of what we expect the impact to be. I would say we are pleased with the fundamental growth across the financial solutions segment of each of the underlying growths across digital. Our issuing business. Mike commented on the banking so we're seeing consistent so the volume picture that we see in the first quarter and the second quarter and really for the back half of the year is very stable. It's just these comparative dynamics that we have in the first half and more acutely in the second quarter of the first half as is what we're needing to grow through and then we're going to be to a much more visible normalized growth picture in the back half of the year. We do have some natural tailwinds in the back half of the year as it relates to growth. We have a comparative tailwind in the back half on financial solutions due to some of the strategic things we did in the digital space in the third quarter of last year. So that's a natural tailwind. And then we have some contracted revenue from some of the client wins that we talked about. That also will be additive in the back half of the year. Mike, anything else to add?
Paul Todd (Chief Financial Officer)
No, I think same comments we made last quarter. It's hard to go through every single recurring revenue item and broadly we think, and we'll talk about Investor Day, that we're a mid single digit growth company with FS being a low single digit growth company, probably operating flattish today on a clean basis and Merchant being a mid to high single digit company today operating a mid single digit basis. And our plan is to obviously make. We're anxious to get it so it's more visible in the financial results. But to Paul's point, you look at the underlying volumes, they track very much against what we're talking about from a high level and maintaining and growing that volume stuff, the revenue will come behind it and start to match.
Brian Bergin (Equity Analyst at TD Cowan)
Okay, that's clear. Thank you.
OPERATOR
Next we'll go to Will Nance from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Will Nance (Equity Analyst at Goldman Sachs)
Hey, thank you for taking the question. Mike, if I could just follow up on the comment you made. I think you've been pretty clear in sort of telegraphing what you think the right growth rate is for this business and the message you expect to deliver at the Investor Day coming up. I'm wondering to the comment that maybe the underlying growth in FS is more or less flat right now and obviously the investments that you're making that are weighing on margins right now as you look out into next year, you've talked about seeing the benefits of some of the improved execution coming through the numbers. So is it your expectation that the company can actually get to that level of performance sort of exiting the year and into 2027 or are there lingering kind of performance and attrition issues in FS or investments you want to make on the margin front that could delay that?
Mike Lyons (Chief Executive Officer)
I'd say that go back to the one Pfizer comments. We are confident we're taking the right actions. We obviously have to execute against those and complete them. And we are the team has rallied around those. We're laser focused on them. We know the fundamentals that we have to get in the right place to be a mid single digit grower. And those the efforts we need to get there are fully funded and fully resourced. And I believe that we brought in some great talent to complement the talent we have here. So feel good about all the execution. We have to go do it. And we've said as you exit 26 you start to look there's still comparables obviously with some of the actions we did across the business in Q3 and Q4, some going the other way, being beneficial, comps to us as you get into Q4 and then 27, we sort of see is the first full year where you can see really vivid, clear, visible growth. But again, we're trying to give you, and we'll give you more at investor Day, the underlying volume drivers that we're seeing that support our belief that we've got a great business. We've got two great tams in merchant and banking, both in a very strong position today, both in an investment mode. Probably the best meetings we've had in a long time here. Whether it's an enterprise merchant or. And fi, you leave with a lot of stuff to work on. So the environmental support's there, the fundamentals underlying our volumes are there. And we got to put ourselves in a position where the execution, resilience and service is much crisper than it's been. And that's the path we're on. But I'm very confident we're taking the right actions to get to where we need to get to to put the business in a position to do it. We have to execute.
Will Nance (Equity Analyst at Goldman Sachs)
Got it. That's clear. Appreciate it. Look forward to the investor day next week. Yep.
OPERATOR
Next we'll go to the line of Jason Kupferberg from Wells Fargo. Please go ahead. Hey, thanks for taking the question. This is Melissa Chen on for Jason. I wanted to ask about the launch of Clover Practice Pay. It sounds like the initial reception there has been good, but can you talk a little bit about how big the addressable market is in healthcare positive and who you're mainly competing with in that space?
Melissa Chen
Yeah, we were thrilled.
Mike Lyons (Chief Executive Officer)
This has been in. We've been previewing this for some time now. We're thrilled to get it launched this quarter. Very optimistic about our growth in that area. It's a massive tam and this was the number one area from our bank partners, which is a major distribution channel for us where they need help. And we heard it loudly from our ISO partners also. The specific tam, as you know, is massive. We're going think about more of the local doctor practice and our penetration there is low and our growth rate relative to the FSBI over time, if you measure us against a proctor using the FSDI as a proxy for the industry, we've been below that. So this is the key component that we were missing and it's a key component that will allow us to go after some of the backbone conversion. Got a great partner in developing with Rectangle and we're pleased you know we launched this month, so it's still early. But we're very pleased with the progress we're making and we'll continue to remain very focused on execution here.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Next we'll go to Jamie Friedman from Susquehanna. Please go ahead.
Jamie Friedman (Equity Analyst at Susquehanna)
Hi, good morning. I was wondering at a high level if you could share your perspective on the competitive dynamic of financial solutions, specifically in issuing and banking. Because it does seem like the landscape is changing somewhat. Investors are potentially anxious about it. Thank you.
Paul Todd (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, I think Mike, I made a lot of comments on core banking earlier specifically. Obviously we got great competitors across banking, digital and issuing I think, and all of them are. We enjoy competing against every day and innovation and competition fuels growth for the industry. As I said, the backdrop of the industry is very, very supportive of solutions from all of us and we're focused. All the stuff we're doing in one fiserv is to put us in a position to compete very, very effectively against any of the competitors. I think a lot of the questions we hear is around the modern core space changing competitive dynamics. We are thrilled, as we said in the prepared comments with Finzak, which is far and away the largest with the most accounts being served on the modern core platform, cloud agnostic, asset agnostic through modern core, truly modern core digital ledger. So we're thrilled with our competitive position there. We continue to. That continues to be the hallmark and both Divya and Takis will address that at investor day around our embedded, growing embedded finance space. So I think no major changes in the competitive landscape as we see it. We've got great competitors, they're innovating, competing as always. And our focus is to make sure that our underlying fundamentals around service, product delivery, value added solutions and speed to market are at the highest level to allow us to compete and maintain all the leadership positions we have across the FI business.
Jamie Friedman (Equity Analyst at Susquehanna)
Thank you.
OPERATOR
Next we'll go to the line of Timothy Chioda from ubs. Please go ahead.
Paul Todd (Chief Financial Officer)
Thank you for taking the question. I was hoping we could spend a few minutes on non culver SMB. So it's roughly 20% of total company revenue, roughly 40% of the merchant segment. I know there's a lot of moving parts there in terms of some of the, the Argentina changes, some of the clover migration. But I was hoping you could talk about the organic growth on an adjusted basis for that business this past quarter, but also over the past few and then what is implied in the guidance and maybe a little bit bigger picture. I understand this might be more of an investor day topic but to the extent that you could decompose some of the portions that are us that are international, how large the ISV or partner business might be in there, et cetera, any additional color and again I appreciate that last part might be more suited for the investor day. Thanks. Yeah Tim, so yeah, that's exactly what I'd say on that last piece is we are going to go over this in good detail at investor day so you'll get a lot of that clarity around some of the componentry there. We're going to provide additive disclosure of Clover, just in general of the components of Clover as well as the non Clover and you'll also understand maybe some of the strategic things around the non Clover side, particularly in ISB and some of the international expansion there as it relates to the organic growth. And we do have comparative dynamics here. We have the Argentinian kind of noise, but as I said on our last call, we're expecting our non Clover S and D business to have slight growth this year. We were down low single digits in the first quarter, so organically we were down in the low single digits for the first quarter and we would expect similar kind of performance if everything kind of holds in the second quarter as it relates to the back half kind of what changes there is we do have incremental ISV growth that's coming in there and specifically some of the international growth is we're seeing good ramping particularly in Brazil and so there's a few international dynamics that are playing through throughout the year that help that. But generally speaking we talked about that non SMB, non Clover SNB not being a a growth business for us, but relative to the overall picture, we're managing it in a more systemic way than we have in the past. Being very mindful about how we approach that of moving over that business to Clover over time in the right sort of way. That's the end goal is to move as much of that business to Clover where the product and the feature functionality of Clover fits with those merchants and Tocques and team will cover that in more detail. Mike, anything to add? No, I think all great topics for next week and all in our materials to be addressed.
Timothy Chioda (Equity Analyst at UBS)
Excellent, thanks a lot.
OPERATOR
Next we'll go to James Fossett from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
James Fossett
Thank you very much. Appreciate all the commentary and apologies if I missed something because it's been bouncing between calls but would like to ask quickly when you talk about moving volumes and taking advantage of Clover strength, how are you thinking about kind of the moving targets and Competitive environment, especially as we see more companies looking to add incremental functionality for Omni Channel, et cetera, even for SMB. And how do we think about that and its implications for Clover's product roadmap? Thanks.
Mike Lyons (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah. Again, we'll do a deep dive next week on Clover, but high level, we think we've got the best small business operating system in the business. We're continuing to invest heavily across horizontal features. Vertical features. We talked about practice, pay and professional services coming in this quarter, seeing great growth and opportunities on. On the international side, Toxins team are digging deep on the experience piece of Clover where as well as we've done, we have room for improvement there. And then we think we've got the best distribution channel by a significant margin, combining not only a direct sales force, but 1,000 plus banking partners, thousands of ISOs, as Paul mentioned and was in the previous question, an unbelievable ISV business that's growing at a very attractive rate and then other great partners, whether it's an ADP or some of the big food distribution businesses. So the opportunity there, the focus, the investment around the product is strong. And when you look across retail and restaurant, which we are characterized even that we have small market share and then you go into some of these other verticals and Clover market share is still single digits. So we see a ton of room for growth. There's always a great competitive landscape. As I said to the earlier question on the banking side, that's part of a natural part of any business with great growth opportunities. But we think we got a great platform here and everything is about investing focusing and driving Clover growth here and abroad.
James Fossett
Thanks so much. Look forward to next week.
OPERATOR
Next we'll go to Ramsey Ellisal from Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead. Thanks for taking your question today. You called out some senior hires in Merchant Solutions. Could you comment more broadly on the work? So both in terms of whether you have all the pieces in place to execute on the plan and also. Ramsey, we're having a hard time hearing you. Yeah, we picked up that there were maybe some senior hires. Could you maybe repeat the question? Maybe we'll be able to hear it clearer.
Ryan
Hi, can you hear me now?
OPERATOR
Yeah, much better, thanks.
Mike Lyons (Chief Executive Officer)
Sorry about that. This is Ryan on Foramse. Thanks again for taking our question. You called out some senior hires on Merchant Solutions. I was hoping you could comment more broadly on the org chart in terms of whether you have all the pieces in place to execute on the plan and also if there's more opportunities to streamline headcount by way of AI. Thank you. Yeah, first part of the question, we mentioned in the prepared comments that we've been thrilled, actually blown away by the interest of talented senior people from outside of fiserv wanting to come join fiserv. And we've added a number of incredibly talented people on both the merchant side and the FS side who are additive to an already strong team here. So we feel very, very good about where we are in terms of critical hires remaining to have the go forward team. It's down to very few. So yes, we've got the right team in place. An outstanding team. I look forward to. We'll have a series of demos at the IR day next week. So in addition to Divya, Paul and Takis, you'll have a chance to meet a lot of these leaders and see some of the products they're working on. But we love the team and we love the combination of some external talent we brought in along with the great institutional knowledge that's been built here at fiserv on AI allowing for efficiencies. Couple thoughts there. First of all, we're going pillar four of the one fiserv plan, Project Elevate. We are deep into the process of Project Elevate. We're very pleased with the portions we've gone through so far, which is really the origination of ideas and sourcing of ideas. As part of that. There are no sacred cows. Everything's on the table. All people from around the company are involved. There's a couple hundred people very focused, almost fully dedicated to this. We put all of them around. Paul on the CFO floor is very formal and dedicated effort and we think there's great opportunities that are going to come out of that. I think if you look at our headcount over the last four or five years, we're down double digits in headcounts. We've already, and largely by leveraging early stages of automation, we've already taken significant gains there. So maybe we're a little bit different from where other peers have come from over the last several years. But from here we continue to see, whether in Project Elevate or outside of Project Elevate, significant opportunity to become more productive and more efficient through AI and it's even incremental generations of AI. For example, we've streamlined our call center services over the last four or five years using sort of quote unquote old AI. And now modern solutions show a significant opportunity to make that experience even better for the customers and more efficient for us. So yes, we see great opportunities especially in and around the areas you expect in operations and call center services, app development and the like. So generally very excited about the potential for AI across all aspects of the business and we're leaning in hard to it.
Ryan
Thanks. Looking forward to hearing more at the Investor day.
OPERATOR
Thank you. And our final question comes from Dave Koning from Baird. Please go ahead.
Dave Koning (Equity Analyst at Baird)
Yeah. Hey guys. Thank you. In the acceptance segment, it seems like you're implying high single digit growth in the back half and it seems like the first half is probably close to mid single digits and I'm just wondering source of acceleration? You answered Tim's question.
Paul Todd (Chief Financial Officer)
There's going to be some in SMB non Clover and. But will Clover accelerate From the normalized 15% and will enterprise accelerate to the high single digits and maybe how will those things happen? Yeah, Dave, so we do obviously expect that Clover on a certainly reported basis will accelerate from the 6% because we're expecting low double digit revenue growth for Clover for the year. So if you just kind of do the math, you're going to see acceleration. I would point to two kind of favorable dynamics in the back half of the year for the Clover acceleration. One is, you'll recall in the fourth quarter we had some pricing rollbacks on Clover specifically that provide a nice tailwind in the fourth quarter from a comparative standpoint that fuels just some of the additional growth on a reported basis from the fundamental growth that you would otherwise expect just relative to static volume growth. And then the other nice comparative tailwind that we get on the Clover side is in the fourth quarter we did have some weakness, particularly in November on the volume side. So we actually have a volume positive compare as well, in addition to all the other things of Clover Capital and all the other growth that you would otherwise see as we progress along the year. So from a Clover standpoint, if you look right now fundamentally we're at a mid teens growth rate from the Clover side and would expect to see a fundamental growth rate in line with being able to deliver the low double digit Clover revenue growth on the non Clover side. You heard me comment earlier, we are right now at a decline of low single digit overall and there's comparative dynamics in there as well. But given some of the growth that I talked about on the ISV side, given some of the international expansion that will come through there, as I said, we expect that to improve and largely expect that to be a very small contributor to growth, but net positive for the overall year. So that's the way the shaping, nothing's changed in our volume assumptions. We're very pleased with the the volume growth we saw in the first quarter, the shaping of the year. We still expect to be intact and so that gives you kind of, from a clover standpoint, the more moving parts. But overall we're still expecting the same kind of growth rates for Clover and non Clover that we did at the start of the year.
Dave Koning (Equity Analyst at Baird)
Thank you.
OPERATOR
Thanks everyone for joining today. We look forward to seeing you next week at the IR day. Thank you all for participating in the FISER first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. That concludes today's call. Please disconnect at this time and have a great rest of your day.
Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.
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