Global Payments (GPN) Q3 2026 Earnings Call: Worldpay-Synergieziel auf 650 Millionen US-Dollar angehoben

Wichtigste Erkenntnisse

• Global Payments meldete für das 3. Quartal 2026 einen bereinigten Nettoumsatz von 3,18 Milliarden US-Dollar, ein Plus von mehr als 4 % ohne Veräußerungen; das bereinigte Ergebnis je Aktie stieg um 10 % auf 3,58 US-Dollar.
• Die bereinigte operative Marge erreichte 42,5 % und verbesserte sich um 220 Basispunkte ohne Veräußerungen, da die Einsparungen aus der Worldpay- Integration stiegen.
• Das Management erhöhte sein annualisiertes Kostensynergieziel für Worldpay von 600 Millionen auf 650 Millionen US-Dollar bis Ende 2028.
• Alle drei operativen Segmente erzielten ein normalisiertes Umsatzwachstum: SMB 5 %, Enterprise 8 % und Platforms 8 %.
• Das Unternehmen bekräftigte seinen Ausblick für 2026 auf ein normalisiertes, währungsbereinigtes Wachstum des bereinigten Nettoumsatzes von rund 4 % bis 5 %, ein bereinigtes Ergebnis je Aktie von 13,60 bis 13,80 US-Dollar sowie eine Ausweitung der bereinigten operativen Marge um rund 150 Basispunkte.
• Global Payments erwartet weiterhin eine Kapitalrückführung von mehr als 2 Milliarden US-Dollar an die Aktionäre im Jahr 2026 sowie rund 7,5 Milliarden US-Dollar kumuliert von 2025 bis 2027.

Wichtigste Finanzdaten

Geschäftliche und operative Entwicklung

SMB

Der bereinigte Nettoumsatz im SMB-Segment lag bei 1,55 Milliarden US-Dollar, was einem normalisierten Wachstum von 5 % ohne Veräußerungen entspricht. Das bereinigte operative Ergebnis lag bei 928 Millionen US-Dollar, bei einer Deckungsbeitragsmarge von 60 %.

Genius blieb der wichtigste Wachstumstreiber. Die Genius-Buchungen haben sich im Jahresvergleich mehr als verdoppelt, die Zahl der verkauften Standorte stieg um rund 65 %, und die Erträge aus Neubuchungen stiegen um nahezu 60 %. Die Zahl der Standorte bei größeren Restaurantkunden mit mehreren Filialen stieg um mehr als 10 % im Quartalsvergleich.

Global Payments begann mit dem Rollout von Genius über mehr als 30 strategische Worldpay-Bankpartner im Oktober, nachdem das Produkt mit drei Partner-Finanzinstituten pilotiert worden war. Das Management erwartet, dass dieser erweiterte Vertriebskanal die weitere Verbreitung im Jahr 2027 unterstützen wird.

Das Volumenwachstum im SMB-Segment lag bei 3 %. Das Management führte die Differenz zwischen Volumen- und Umsatzwachstum vor allem auf die stärkere Nutzung von Mehrwertdiensten und den geografischen Mix zurück, bei einer gewissen sequenziellen Volumenschwäche in ertragsschwächeren europäischen und asiatisch-pazifischen Märkten.

Enterprise

Der bereinigte Nettoumsatz im Enterprise-Segment erreichte 836 Millionen US-Dollar, ein Plus von 8 % auf normalisierter Basis. Das bereinigte operative Ergebnis lag bei 658 Millionen US-Dollar, entsprechend einer Deckungsbeitragsmarge von 79 %.

Das Enterprise-Volumen stieg um 10 %, einschließlich eines rund 200 Basispunkte umfassenden vorübergehenden Vorteils aus Testaktivitäten eines Großkunden. Das Management rechnet nicht damit, dass sich dieser Vorteil im vierten Quartal wiederholt. Der Card-not-Present-Umsatz, der vor allem den weltweiten E-Commerce widerspiegelt, stieg um 8 % auf normalisierter Basis.

Die Buchungen stiegen um 23 % im Jahresvergleich bis zum dritten Quartal, während das Cross-Selling an bestehende Kunden zulegte, und zwar um 29 % seit Jahresbeginn. Das Management hob modulare Mehrwertdienste, insbesondere in EMEA, als wichtigen Treiber hervor. Rund die Hälfte des Enterprise-Umsatzes stammt derzeit aus Mehrwertdiensten.

Platforms

Platforms erzielte einen bereinigten Nettoumsatz von 625 Millionen US-Dollar, ein Plus von 8 % auf normalisierter Basis. Das Volumen stieg um 11 %; das bereinigte operative Ergebnis belief sich dabei auf 279 Millionen US-Dollar, was eine Deckungsbeitragsmarge von 45 % ergab.

Das Segment gewann 52 neue Softwarepartner im Laufe des Quartals. Der Umsatz mit Mehrwertdiensten wuchs um 22 %, und das Volumen im Bereich Embedded Payments, einschließlich der Managed-PayFac-Angebote von PayFac und Payrix, stieg um 16 %.

Die durchschnittliche Zeit bis zur Umsatzgenerierung bei neuen Partnern ist im Vergleich zu 2025 um rund ein Drittel gesunken. Das Management erklärte zudem, dass KI-Automatisierung die Einrichtungszeit für neue Partner von Wochen auf Minuten verkürzt habe.

Worldpay-Integration und Technologie

Global Payments erhöhte sein Ziel für annualisierte Run-Rate-Kostensynergien auf 650 Millionen US-Dollar bis Ende 2028, nach zuvor 600 Millionen US-Dollar. Zu den Fortschritten zählten die Konsolidierung von Unternehmensanwendungen, die Standardisierung von HR- und Finanzprozessen, der Abbau von Managementebenen, die Nachverhandlung von Lieferantenverträgen sowie die Zusammenlegung von Standorten.

Das Zielarchitekturmodell des Unternehmens soll eine einheitliche API- und Orchestrierungsschicht schaffen, sodass Kunden sich nur einmal integrieren müssen, um auf eine breitere Produktpalette zuzugreifen. Das Management geht davon aus, dass die Plattformkonsolidierung die Markteinführungszeiten verkürzt, das Cross-Selling erleichtert, Komplexität abbaut und operativen Hebel schafft. Die mit diesen Technologiearbeiten verbundenen Vorteile dürften voraussichtlich eher zeitlich nachgelagert zum Tragen kommen.

KI und Agentic Commerce

Das Management beschrieb KI eher als operativen und produktbezogenen Enabler denn als eigenständige Strategie. Zu den aktuellen Anwendungen gehören die Optimierung von Genehmigungsquoten, Churn-Prognosen, die Priorisierung von Vertriebs-Leads, Liquiditätsprognosen, die Bearbeitung von Rückbuchungen sowie das Underwriting. Ein KI-gestütztes Underwriting-Tool reduzierte die Prüfzeiten von rund einer Stunde auf etwa 10 Minuten.

Transaktionen über ChatGPT sind auf der Plattform des Unternehmens in den USA für einen Großkunden bereits live. Global Payments entwickelt zudem plattformunabhängige Funktionen für Agentic Commerce mit Fokus auf Identität, Konsumentenabsichten, Betrugsprävention, Authentifizierung und Streitfallmanagement.

Ausblick des Managements

Global Payments bestätigte seinen Ausblick für das Gesamtjahr 2026:

Der Ausblick setzt ein stabiles makroökonomisches Umfeld, robuste Konsumausgaben und anhaltende Beeinträchtigungen des Enterprise-Reiseportfolios durch den Nahostkonflikt für das restliche Jahr 2026 voraus.

Das Management erklärte, es rechne im zweiten Halbjahr mit einem Umsatzwachstum von rund 4,5 %, getragen von der Einführung von Genius, Rollouts bei Enterprise-Kunden, der internationalen Expansion bei Platforms, dem Wachstum im Bereich Embedded Payments, Cross-Selling sowie Mehrwertdiensten.

Das Unternehmen bekennt sich weiterhin zu Ratings im Investment-Grade-Bereich und einem Nettoverschuldungsziel von 3x bis Ende 2027. Das Management gab zwar keine formelle Prognose für 2027 ab, betonte jedoch, dass die geschäftliche Dynamik und zusätzliche Worldpay-Synergien das Unternehmen beim Eintritt in das nächste Jahr stützen sollten.

Risiken und wichtige Beobachtungspunkte

• Der Nahostkonflikt schmälerte das Wachstum im dritten Quartal um weniger als 100 Basispunkte infolge der Schwäche im Enterprise-Reiseportfolio. Das Management geht davon aus, dass der Basiseffekt gegen Ende des ersten Quartals 2027 vollständig aus der Vergleichsbasis herausfällt.
• Die Reiseaktivität in der Region bleibt weiterhin unter dem Niveau von vor dem Konflikt; Schwächen zeigen sich bei Vorausbuchungen, Langstreckenflügen und Passagiermeilen. Die Erholung verläuft uneinheitlich.
• Der Ausblick für 2026 hängt von weiterhin robusten Konsumausgaben und einem stabilen makroökonomischen Umfeld ab.
• Ein temporärer Volumenvorteil im Enterprise-Segment von rund 200 Basispunkten dürfte sich im vierten Quartal voraussichtlich nicht wiederholen.
• Einige zusätzliche technologiebezogene Synergien hängen von der Umsetzung des Zielarchitekturmodells ab und werden erst zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt des Integrationszeitraums erwartet.

Highlights der Analysten-Fragerunde

• Berichte über einen potenziellen Börsenrückzug: CEO Cameron Bready lehnte eine Stellungnahme zu Marktgerüchten oder Spekulationen ab. Er betonte, dass sich Verwaltungsrat und Management weiterhin auf die Unternehmensstrategie, die Worldpay-Integration, den Kundenservice und die öffentlich abgegebenen Zusagen konzentrieren.
• Erhöhung der Synergien: Das Management führte einen Teil des zusätzlichen Kostensynergieziels von 50 Millionen US-Dollar auf das Zielarchitekturmodell zurück, einschließlich der Plattformvereinfachung, einer einheitlichen Integrationsschicht und der Stilllegung redundanter Technologien.
• Kapitalrückführungen für 2027: Das Management bekräftigte den Plan zur Rückführung von rund 7,5 Milliarden US-Dollar kumuliert im Zeitraum 2025 bis 2027. Rund 3 Milliarden US-Dollar sollen voraussichtlich bis Ende 2026 zurückgeführt sein, sodass für 2027 etwa 4 Milliarden US-Dollar verbleiben.
• Vertrieb von Genius: Das Unternehmen hat den Direktvertrieb von Worldpay aktiviert und mit dem Rollout von Genius über seinen Kanal für Finanzinstitute begonnen. ISOs, Vertriebsagenten und weitere Wholesale-Partner stellen die nächste potenzielle Vertriebsphase dar.
• Ergebnisrahmen für 2027: Das Management erklärte, es sei noch zu früh, eine formelle Prognose abzugeben. Gleichwohl verwies es auf starke Buchungseingänge, das Wachstum bei Genius, die Expansion bei Platforms sowie zusätzliche Worldpay-Synergien als Quellen für die weitere Dynamik.
• Ökonomie des Agentic Commerce: Das Management geht davon aus, dass dieser Kanal sowohl bestehenden Handel verdrängen als auch zusätzliche Transaktionen generieren könnte. Zudem sieht es Chancen auf Mehrwerterlöse aus Dienstleistungen in den Bereichen Identität, Authentifizierung, Betrugsprävention, Absichtsüberprüfung und Streitbeilegung.

Vollständiges Transkript der Ergebniskonferenz

Vollständiges Transkript der Telefonkonferenz

Ausführungen des Managements

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to Global Payments Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's conference call will be recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to your host, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations, Mr. Nate Rozof. Please go ahead.

Nathan Rozof

Good morning. Welcome to Global Payments Third Quarter 2026 Conference Call. Joining us today is our CEO, Cameron Bready; CFO, Josh Whipple; and COO, Bob Cortopassi. Some of the comments made during today's conference call will contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied, and we caution you not to place undue reliance upon them. They speak only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to update them.

In addition, we will be referring to several non-GAAP financial measures. For a full reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measure, please see our press release furnished as an exhibit to our Form 8-K filed this morning and the supplemental material available on our Investor Relations website. [indiscernible] Finally, the slide presentation that accompanies our prepared remarks is also available on our Investor Relations website. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CEO. Cameron?

Cameron Bready

Thank you, Nate, and good morning, everyone. We are pleased with our third quarter performance, which was consistent with our expectation and reflects the continued disciplined execution of our team members worldwide. Adjusted net revenue accelerated sequentially to more than 4% on a constant currency basis, excluding dispositions. Adjusted operating margins expanded 220 basis points, excluding dispositions, and reflecting ongoing integration execution and synergy realization and adjusted earnings per share increased 10%. Capital allocation remains a central pillar of our investment thesis. We returned over $200 million to shareholders through buybacks and dividends during the third quarter and continue to expect to return more than $2 billion to shareholders in 2026, keeping us on track to return approximately $7.5 billion cumulatively over the 2025 to 2027 time frame.

Our integration of Worldpay continues to track ahead of our plans and given the strong progress we've made, we are raising our run rate expense synergy target from $600 million to $650 million by the end of 2028. With the foundation elements of the combined company now firmly in place, we are focused on the strategy that will shape the next chapter of Global Payments. I will use my time this morning to outline that strategy and highlight the execution already underway across our business. Global Payments is fundamentally a different company than it was a year ago. with our combination with Worldpay and the exit of our issuer business, we are now solely focused on providing commerce solutions around the world. That gives us much greater clarity of focus and it brings together tremendous scale, reach and capabilities that create significant potential for our company.

Our opportunity is to mobilize our scale and capabilities in ways that create greater value for our clients and partners and position us to compete and win in a rapidly changing market. Our ambition is clear: to become the worldwide partner of choice for commerce solutions. Our strategy provides the path to get there, and it is anchored in 3 pillars: the first is delivering differentiated products and solutions. We will compete on the value and capabilities we bring to the market, not simply on price. Through software, embedded financial services, data and insights, fraud and optimization capabilities and AI-enabled solutions and experiences that help our clients run and grow their businesses more effectively.

Second is providing a distinctive client and partner experience. We are making global payments simpler and easier to buy from, integrate with, grow with and stay with combining strong digital capabilities with expertise and high-touch engagement where it matters most. And third is harnessing our men scale and reach. We are making better use of our global distribution, relationships, data and investment capacity to accelerate innovation, expand adoption and bring our best capabilities to more clients and partners worldwide. These pillars reinforce each other. Better products create better outcomes for our clients, better experiences deepen our relationships and our scale and distribution allow us to extend those advantages more broadly.

Many of the investments that underpin this strategy are already well underway. What the strategy provides is greater clarity and alignment around where we will focus our resources and how we will win in the marketplace. Importantly, we have already established the foundation needed to execute this strategy. Our new organizational structure is now in place across our entire team. We employed a best-of-both approach to select the strongest leaders and team members from both heritage organizations, providing us with a wealth of expertise that is unmatched in the industry. We are also now fully organized around our 3 go-to-market segments, SMB, enterprise and platforms, supported by shared capabilities across product, technology and operations with clear accountability for faster decision-making.

In addition, building on the Target technology architecture model we defined last quarter, we are rapidly advancing our plans to move to our future state architecture. This work will make it easier to integrate with us, allow us to expose existing and new products to market faster and scale them across our segments and geographies while reducing complexity and cost over time. Our strategy also reflects a deliberate choice about how we serve our clients. Some providers in our industry have built single stack models. -- in which clients realize the full value of their tools only when they consolidate all of their processing onto 1 platform. In effect, they walk dark. We are taking a different approach.

We are designing our products and value-added services to be modular, in many cases, acquire agnostic, so clients can use them regardless of who processes their payments. Through our curated open ecosystem, we combine our own differentiated capabilities with best-of-breed partner solutions to build tailored offerings that meet each client's specific needs rather than asking clients to adapt to a one-size-fits-all model. Although we have an overarching company strategy, each of our lines of business has a distinct role in bringing it to life to their customer segments with the key priorities they are pursuing. In SMB, our priorities are to grow beyond payments with Genius as our platform to deliver software, payments and value-added services to accelerate our distribution advantage and to excel at customer experience.

In August, we hosted our inaugural Genius World Conference, bringing together approximately 1,000 attendees. The agenda showcased our full suite of Genius capabilities, our innovation road map and our vision for the future of Genius. Genius is no longer a new initiative for us. Rather, it is now the flagship offering for our SMB business. Genius World was a great opportunity to demonstrate to clients, partners and prospects how far Genius has come since its launch in May of last year. Genius now serves clients across restaurants, retail, emphasis, age-restricted verticals, professional services and field services in a growing number of markets across North America and Europe. Genius bookings more than doubled year-over-year during the quarter. Along the way, Genius has won marquee brands such as Subway, Carl's Jr., Hardee's, and the New Jersey Devils as well as iconic venues and university campuses like the Prudential Center and the University of Illinois.

We also recently secured new payments appointments with Compass Group in the Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium at the University of Memphis. Genius continues to win across the spectrum of customers from SMBs to large multiunit operators as well. During the quarter, Genius expanded to more than 100 additional 7 Brew locations. Pollo Tropical deployed Genius kiosks for all of its locations and Jeremy's Italian Ice rolled Genius out across 90 additional locations. We also completed the Genius deployment across CKEs approximately 300 corporate locations and its franchisee rollout will begin in the first quarter of 2027. And our distribution advantage continues to expand, following a successful pilot with 3 Worldpay's financial institution partners, we began rolling out Genius across Worldpay's financial institution channel in October, extending Genius to more than 30 strategic bank partners.

During the quarter, we also entered the convenience store market, enhanced our appointments and vendor management modules, introduced a new loyalty solution for restaurants and expanded our dual pricing, surcharging and cash discounting capabilities. Further, we completed the integration of Genius with our TouchNet higher education commerce platform, opening meaningful new opportunities in this vertical. Now housing University is an early win that is using Genius to create a more connected campus commerce experience. Internationally, we recently launched Genius in the Czech Republic to help clients prepare for new tax reporting requirements. We were launching Genius Mobile Pay in the Philippines and across several European markets over the next few quarters.

In Mexico, we are expanding Genius with the launch of our small business offering this quarter through both our direct sales force and our financial institution partners. Turning to our Enterprise segment. Our strategic priorities are to deliver superior core payment performance, expand acquire agnostic value-added services and enable emerging verticals, business models and technologies. Our modular approach resonates with both existing and new clients. We recently signed Air Serbia for all of its international traffic, leveraging our configurable offering, including payments and a suite of value-added services. We also recently went live with our credential management solution from 1 of the world's largest consumer technology companies on a stand-alone basis, expanded our payments relationship with another hyperscaler client to include additional value-added services and deepen our relationship with Abletics by cross-selling additional solutions.

This quarter, NASCAR named us as its official merchant services provider supporting ticketing and merchant services as 12 owned and operated brave tracks across the United States, including the Daytona International Speedway, Phoenix Raceway and Tala Vegas Super Speedway. As a leading payments infrastructure provider, we also won several emerging payments platforms, including Cato in Brazil, South Korean cross-border payment service provider, ExMPay, U.K. and Australia-based omnichannel payments provider, WATPAY, U.S.-based international money transfer provider, Shokaxpress, Asia-based global payment and monetization platform, WAFO and Norway-based B2B payments provider ZTL payment solution.

We are continuing to enable new business models and markets in this segment. We went live with an eye, the UAE's account-to-account payments method and completed our first point-of-sale pilot of Alipay Plus at the labor Cup in London. In Asia Pacific, we received regulatory approval from the Bank of Thailand, clearing our way for new client go-lives in the Thai market, including Sentara Hotels and Resorts. -- our payout platform is now ready to pilot payments to PayPal in U.S. DC stable coin wallets. At the same time, we are extending our lead in payment performance. The AI-powered intelligent decisioning within our revenue solution is now delivering a significant incremental uplift in approval rates and it is ready for broader deployment across Europe and Asia Pacific following a North American pilot that began in October.

Within platforms, our priorities are to aggressively pursue high potential software partners with our embedded solutions to drive adoption of new products and value-added services and to accelerate our growth in international markets. During the third quarter, we signed 52 new software partners ahead of our plan, including strong momentum in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand. We are also expanding the value-added services we deliver through our partners. Real-time payments is now generally available on dynamic payouts, enabling our partners to offer instant funding to their customers, and we are extending capabilities such as fraud prevention, debit routing and account updater across more of our partner base. And we are making it easier for partners to work with us.

We have reduced average time to revenue for new partners by about 1/3 compared to 2025, and AI automation has cut the setup time for a new partner from weeks to minutes. Zero Touch underwriting is also now generally available for our Parex partners, simplifying onboarding and accelerating activation for their customers. Across our business, AI is not a corporate strategy. It is an enabler of everything that we do, from how we differentiate our products and improve the experiences we deliver to how we operate and prepare for emerging areas of commerce. We continue to enhance our platform-agnostic modular set of capabilities that allow our clients to participate in new agentic commerce models, regardless of channel, agent or payment method, and we are helping to shape the standards for this channel. As an inaugural member of the Payments Tech Council for Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, we are helping to define the payments road map across authentication, fraud, authorization and disputes.

Our clients are also beginning to move from pilots into production. Transactions through chat GPT are now live on our platform in the U.S. from 1 of our largest clients. with more on the way with ingenious AI is at the center of our product innovation. Genius AI is an agent assistant that allows clients to ask questions in their own words and get instant answers from their own business data. In May, we unveiled our AI-first genius handheld designed to run AI directly on the device. So service can have natural conversations with our customers while the order is built in the background. We are now piloting AI-powered drive-through vision and order routing with several large QSR restaurant clients to increase the throughput and improve the visibility across multiline drive-throughs. And we are adding additional capabilities to Genius AI with upcoming releases moving beyond insights to help clients run their businesses from smart menu and pricing updates to simplified AI-powered configuration and set up for large multiunit operators.

We're also increasingly leveraging AI to improve how we operate, making our business more efficient and effective while enabling our teams to execute with greater speed and precision. In Treasury, AI is helping us improve cash forecasting, anticipate currency exposures and identify interchange savings opportunities. Across our commercial organization, AI models are identifying cross-sell opportunities, predicting churn risk and prioritizing the highest potential leads for our sales teams. We're also automating the ingestion and processing of chargeback information and disputes. While in underwriting, we have deployed an AI-enabled solution designed to reduce review times from roughly an hour to just 10 minutes, allowing us to significantly increase capacity without adding headcount. As we scale these capabilities across the organization, we expect AI to become an increasingly important driver of productivity, allowing us to operate with greater agility, scale more efficiently and create additional structural opportunity for margin expansion over time.

Overall, our results this quarter and the progress each of our businesses is making against our strategy, reinforce our confidence in the long-term opportunity ahead of us. With that, I'll turn the call over to Josh to discuss our financial performance and outlook.

Joshua Whipple

Thanks, Cameron. In the third quarter, we generated adjusted net revenue of $3.18 billion, representing growth of over 4%, excluding dispositions. This performance reflects resilient consumer spending trends across our business, partially offset by the ongoing headwind to our travel customers from the conflict in the Middle East. Currency exchange rates had no impact on growth in the quarter. Adjusted operating margin was 42.5% in the third quarter, representing an expansion of 220 basis points, excluding dispositions. As we anticipated, margin expansion accelerated in the third quarter as we realized additional Worldpay integration cost synergies. The net result was adjusted earnings per share of $3.58, representing an increase of 10%.

In the third quarter, we continue to make substantial progress on the Worldpay integration. Among other accomplishments, we consolidated corporate applications and standardized our HR, finance, procurement and expense management processes across the combined company. Additionally, we further reduced management layers, renegotiating major technology and marketing vendor contracts to leverage our combined purchasing scale and continue to consolidate overlapping facilities. As a result of this progress, we are increasing our total cost synergy expectation from $600 million to $650 million on an annualized run rate basis by the end of 2028.

Turning to our segment results. We saw a solid performance across each in the quarter, which reflects our execution against the priorities Cameron outlined. As a reminder, we report SMB, enterprise and platforms on a contribution margin basis. with overhead costs reported in Corporate and Other. In the third quarter, SMB accelerated sequentially, generating adjusted net revenue of $1.55 billion representing normalized growth of 5%, excluding dispositions. We delivered $928 million of adjusted operating income in the SMB segment, representing a contribution margin of 60%. Genius continued to build momentum during the quarter. The number of locations sold increased approximately 65% year-over-year. Among our larger multiunit restaurant clients, total Genius locations grew more than 10% sequentially.

Yields on new genius bookings expanded nearly 60% year-over-year again demonstrating that our clients recognize the value of the solution. Enterprise generated adjusted net revenue of $836 million, representing normalized growth of 8%. And Enterprise volumes grew 10%, which included an approximately 200 basis point short-term benefit associated with low testing for 1 of our largest clients, while the revenue impact was immaterial. We do not expect this to reoccur in the fourth quarter. Card-not-present revenue, which primarily represents global e-commerce, grew 8% on a normalized basis. We delivered $658 million of adjusted operating income in the Enterprise segment, representing a contribution margin of 79%. Commercial momentum in enterprise remained strong.

Bookings increased 23% year-over-year through the third quarter with cross-sells to existing clients, a key driver, up 29% year-to-date, led by our modular value-added services, particularly in the EMEA region. Our pipelines are robust, and we continue to convert signed, not live business into revenue. Platforms generated adjusted net revenue of $625 million, representing normalized growth of 8% and segment volume grew 11%. We delivered $279 million of adjusted operating income in the Platform segment, representing a contribution margin of 45%. As Cameron noted, we saw strong new partner signings in the quarter, including in our international markets. Value-added services revenue and platforms grew 22% on a normalized basis. and volume in our embedded payments business, which includes our PayFac and Payrock managed PayFac offerings grew 16%.

We generated adjusted free cash flow of $870 million in the third quarter, representing a conversion rate of adjusted net income to adjusted free cash flow of approximately 92%. We invested $232 million in capital expenditures in the quarter, representing approximately 7% of adjusted net revenue. In addition, we returned more than $200 million to shareholders during the quarter, including buybacks and dividends, bringing our year-to-date capital returns to more than $1.4 billion. Our balance sheet remains healthy. We ended the third quarter with approximately $6.3 billion of available liquidity and 3.4x net leverage. Our indebtedness is more than 90% fixed rate with a weighted average cost of approximately 4%. With our third quarter results in line with our expectations, we are reaffirming our full year outlook.

We continue to expect normalized constant currency adjusted net revenue growth of approximately 4% to 5% and normalized adjusted operating margin expansion of approximately 150 basis points for full year 2026. We continue to expect adjusted earnings per share of $13.60 to $13.80, representing 11% to 13% growth, and we continue to expect currency exchange rates to have roughly no impact on reported growth for the full year. Our outlook assumes a stable macro environment and a continuation of resilient consumer spending trends. As we discussed on our second quarter call, our outlook further assumes that the impact of the conflict in the Middle East on our Enterprise segment's travel portfolio continues through the remainder of 2026. Travel in the region remains below pre-conflict levels. and we continue to believe this is the most prudent planning assumption.

Regarding cash flow, we expect the conversion rate of adjusted net income to adjusted free cash flow to be approximately 90% for the full year 2026. Our capital allocation plans for 2026 and beyond remain unchanged. We continue to expect to return more than $2 billion to shareholders in 2026 through share repurchases and dividends while investing approximately $1 billion in the business or approximately 8% of adjusted net revenue. Furthermore, we remain committed to preserving our investment-grade credit ratings and achieving our 3x net leverage target by the end of 2027.

To conclude, our third quarter results demonstrate the durability of our business model and the progress we are making as we execute our strategy. The team's focus continues to be on commercial excellence, across all our go-to-market channels and disciplined execution of our integration with Worldpay. We remain confident in our prospects for sustainable growth, cash flow generation and return of capital to shareholders. And with that, I'll turn the call back over to Cameron.

Cameron Bready

Thanks, Josh. As you heard this morning, we have taken important steps over the past year to strengthen and reposition Global Payments. And we have established a clear strategy to fully leverage the scale and capabilities of the combined company. Our ambition is to become the worldwide partner of choice for Commerce Solutions, and we will achieve that by delivering differentiated products and solutions, creating a distinctive experience for our clients and partners and leveraging our immense scale and distribution. We are already seeing our strategy come to life across our businesses. Genius is growing rapidly and reaching more clients through new channels, markets and verticals.

Our enterprise business is winning with modular capabilities tailored to each client's needs. And our platforms business is making it easier for software partners to launch, grow and monetize payments and other value-added services. And with approximately $1 billion in annual investment, we are among the few companies in our industry with the resources to innovate at this scale, anticipating and delivering solutions ahead of demand. At the same time, we remain focused on disciplined capital deployment and maximizing total shareholder return. We are a proven earnings compounder with durable and diversified revenue streams and substantial free cash flow generation. Overall, our clear strategy, integration execution, innovation investments and disciplined capital deployment position Global Payments to deliver compelling long-term shareholder value. Operator, please open the line for questions.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Dan Dolev from Mizuho.

Fragen und Antworten

Dan Dolev

Can you hear me?

Cameron Bready

Yes.

Dan Dolev

Congratulations on fantastic Q3 results. And Karen, I just had 2 questions and 1 question and 1 follow-up, please. So obviously, there was some news on Friday regarding the potential taking private. What can you tell investors today where we are? And then I have a very quick follow-up. .

Cameron Bready

Yes, sure. Thanks, Dan. Look, I appreciate the question, certainly understanding the need to ask it. But as you can imagine, we don't comment on market rumors or speculations. So I'm not really going to be able to get into the reporting or any of the specifics around it. What I can tell you is the Board, the management team, everyone at Global Payments is keenly focused on and committed to creating long-term value for our shareholders. And with that in mind, we're very much focused on executing the strategy we laid out, integrating Worldpay, serving clients and partners very effectively and delivering against the financial and operating commitments that we've made publicly. So -- we feel really good about the business. We feel great about the progress we're making and the long-term value creation opportunity in front of us, and that's what we're focused on executing against.

Dan Dolev

Great. Fair enough. And then I had a quick follow-up. -- very exciting topic, which is the synergy target raise from $600 million to $650 million, I believe you talked about the target technology architecture model and how quickly it's moving to make it easier for clients to integrate for existing and new products, reaching markets faster and reducing complexity. Can you elaborate on that a little bit more? .

Cameron Bready

Yes. I'll be happy to, Dan, and I'll ask Bob maybe to chime in a little bit as well. I think you outlined in your question, a lot of the 4 underpinnings of our technology architecture model and what we expect it to deliver from us for us as a strategic matter. But maybe if I step back and look at the macro level, I think the TAM and executing against the TAM is 1 of the single largest priorities we have, that is a core underpinning of our strategy. Ultimately, we've really designed our TAM with the simple idea to make it easier for our clients and partners to be able to integrate it with us and making the full breadth and depth of capabilities that we have more ubiquitously available to clients and partners around the globe. .

At the front end, really, that means creating a simple, easy orchestration layer with the unified API environment. So clients and partners can integrate once and access the full breadth of capabilities that we can bring to bear. And then behind that, obviously, we're working very hard to simplify kind of the underlying technology estate really wanting to focus investments on the platforms that we see having the greatest strategic value for the business long term. and ultimately positioning us to be able to retire sort of redundant capabilities that sit within the architecture estate that we're running today.

So as you, I think, correctly highlighted, strategically, that really does a few things for us. First, I think it increases our speed to market because it allows us to develop capabilities once and then distribute them more broadly across the entire estate. And then two, it certainly makes cross-selling easier. As you've heard in my prepared remarks, value-added services and cross-selling value-added services into our existing base is a core underpinning of our strategy across each of our lines of business. So making it easier to do that through a single integration point is a core underpinning of delivering the TAM.

And then third, certainly, consolidating the underlying state of assets that we're managing reduces complexity, which should allow us to drive better efficiency in our business and create certainly operating leverage as we move forward. So you look at the TAM and our ability to deliver the TAM, it's clearly connected sort of the 3 key pillars of the strategy that I laid out in my commentary. Certainly, it allows for us to harness the scale and capabilities of global payments, it allows us to deliver a differentiated experience to our clients, and it allows us to deliver new innovation and product capability to the market more quickly. ultimately, again, supporting what we're trying to accomplish across each of our lines of business. And as we think about the synergy raise, certainly, our ability to deliver the TAM and the opportunity that we see financially in delivering the TAM is part of where we see the incremental value coming from.

It will be more back-end loaded. Obviously, as a TAM execution will take a period of time. But certainly, as we looked at the raise of synergy targets from an expense perspective from $600 million to $650 million, the opportunity that we think we can unlock through the TAM is a core driver of that incremental value that we think we can bring about through integration.

Dan Dolev

Great. Congrats again on fantastic results.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Bryan Keane from Citigroup. .

Bryan Keane

Yes. Congratulations on the solid execution.

Cameron Bready

Thanks, Bryan.

Bryan Keane

Just had 1 question on the quarter and then 1 question on the guide. I guess my first question, revenue in SMB normalized upticked a little bit in accelerated to 5%, but volume slowed a touch to 3%. So that dynamic change and the yield increase. Just curious on the drivers there. And then I have a follow-up on the gun.

Joshua Whipple

Yes. Thanks, Bryan. This is Josh. So look, as you think about SMB, you're right, revenue growth was 5%. Volumes were 3%. And -- and what you're seeing there is the difference between just greater adoption of value-added services. And we called this out in our prepared remarks, we saw a 60% year-over-year increase with Genius yield. So that's really driving the difference. The other thing I would say as you think about just SMB volumes more generally in the decel that we saw from Q2 to Q3, these are right in line with what the networks reported last week. Visa, I think, saw a step down of about 140 basis points in MasterCard, 50 basis points on a sequential basis. So again, generally right in line with where the networks were. But the step function was primarily value-added services, again, 60% year-over-year increase from Genius yields.

Cameron Bready

And Bryan, it's Cameron. The only thing I would add to that, just a bit more color. I would say as a volume matter, it's really on the margin. There's probably a little bit of rounding last quarter, up a little bit rounding down this quarter. So I'd say it's probably marginal at best. I would say where we did see a little bit of volume sort of softness sequentially kind of Q2 to Q3 was more in the international markets. And those yields tend to be a little bit lower than they are here in the U.S. market. So as you look at the revenue composition versus the volume growth composition, some of it is due to just mix and ultimately, where we did see a little bit of volume softness, Europe and a touch more in Asia Pacific as well, those are slightly lower yielding markets for us. So that contributes to the kind of dynamic that you've called out. .

Bryan Keane

Awesome. And then just as a follow-up, thinking about the guidance and the acceleration of revenue growth of organic revenue growth in the fourth quarter. Just curious on some of the drivers of that acceleration and then hoping you can just quantify the impact of the Middle East and then when we anniversary the official headwind as we get into next year.

Joshua Whipple

Thanks, Bryan. That's a loaded question. So just a couple of points on Q4 and the exit rate. Look, so we continue to expect the second half revenue growth to be in that approximately 4.5% range. Overall, for the year, where we expect FX to be broadly neutral. And some of the key drivers are what we've been talking about. It's the expansion and transformation of the sales force A lot of the commercial go-to-market tools that we put in place around tooling training and compensation. It's a continued genius adoption and rollout and ramp. We continue to see very strong sequential trends there. And in enterprise, we have clients that went live in Q3 that are now generating revenue. We have all these now live across both Europe and in U.S. point-of-sale rollout for Domino's in Canada is now fully complete.

And then moving to platforms. We continue to go ahead and see really strong expansion into international markets and continue to see really strong trends with embedded payments, which is growing double digits. So overall, we're really -- we're seeing strong trends across those pieces of the business around bookings cross-sell and value-added services. So those have been really, really strong and pleased with those. For your third question, as it relates to the Middle East, in the third quarter, I would say the Middle East was generally in line with our expectations. The impact was less than 100 basis points. Travel in the Middle East obviously continues to be impacted by the conflict and volumes are still very much below the pre-conflict levels. And I'd say the recovery has been very uneven and inconsistent.

However, we have seen a modest improvement from Q2, but we continue to see really weakness in forward bookings, airline ticket sales to press, there's fewer long-haul flights, commercial flights being purchased. And 1 metric that we look at, Bryan, is paying passengers and miles traveled in the region, and those continue to be down significantly relative to pre-conflict levels. And the capacity that has come back, has been more of the shorter haul, lower-yielding routes. So again, I think based on the latest developments, the uncertainty that we continue to see in the region, we think that the erosion that we provided last quarter was the prudent thing to do.

Cameron Bready

And obviously, Bryan, just maybe to the very last part of your question, that will all anniversary in the first quarter of next year. And obviously, we remain hopeful that the situation in the Middle East kind of resolves itself sooner than that. But certainly, as a financial matter, we'll lap it as we get into -- we get towards the end of the first quarter. .

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Darrin Peller from Wolfe.

Darrin Peller

You hear me now? .

Cameron Bready

I'm sorry, we lost you for a second.

Darrin Peller

Okay. You hear me now, yes. Okay. It was good to see the $7.5 billion capital return expected reiterated through the end -- maybe we could just touch a little bit and dive in a little more on the free cash levels and the expectation there. I know you guys have the gain on sale tax payments being made, but those really are onetime in nature through the, I guess, this quarter and a couple more I think we have around almost $4 billion of adjusted free cash. And if our math is right, you're expecting to return and buy back about $4 billion in 2027. So can you just walk us through the bridge on free cash, make sure we're on the same page? And then b, just to make sure we understand the reiteration of the numbers that we have right on the buyback.

Joshua Whipple

Yes. Sure, Darrin. This is Josh. Let me go ahead and take that. So look, if you think about -- if you go back to September 2024 at Investor Day, we said we were going to return approximately $7.5 billion of capital to shareholders over the 3-year period. And -- and look, by the end of 2026, we will have returned approximately $3 billion of capital, leaving approximately $4 billion for next year. And keep in mind that in 2026, as you rightly pointed out, we had elevated onetime costs. We had cash taxes on the gain of sale of issuer. And those aren't going to repeat next year. And so -- and simultaneously, we were able to go ahead and return $2 billion of capital, or we will return a total of $2 billion of capital this year. So additionally, we expect the onetime expenses to trend down as the integration progresses. So based on this, we have a lot of confidence in that we're on track to go ahead and return approximately $7.5 billion of capital next year and be able to get our leverage point back down to that 3x by 2027. So that's how you get there.

Darrin Peller

All right. Can I just follow up quickly on Genius. Obviously, really good numbers, although still a pretty small base, but the distribution channel continues to look like it's primed and getting ready to sell more into '27. Specifically, the FI channel, which I think wasn't really yet onboarded with Genius up until probably very recently. So can you just touch for a minute. I'm sure you'll get other questions on Genius. But for right now, at least just the go-to-market how the channels prepared sales, direct sales, whether it's ISO direct sales or now the FI channel, where you stand on that? And if that could be pretty incremental going into next year. .

Cameron Bready

Yes. It's a really good question, Darrin, and thanks for asking it. Naturally, we're very proud of the progress that we've made with Genius. Just reflecting back that we just launched the capability in the platform, Mobilier not even 1.5 years ago, in May of 2025 and sort of where we've come over that period of time. Again, I think our team deserves enormous amount of credit for the effort, energy and vision behind bringing Genius to life. So with that preamble, our goal now is to really find more ways to get better penetration and saturation and genius into market. And that comes down to lighting up the breadth and depth of distribution capabilities that we have here in the U.S. market, but also in markets outside of the U.S. around the globe. .

Here in the U.S., our priority from day 1 post closing of the merger was really to light up the Worldpay direct sales force, which is relatively small to be able to sell Genius almost immediately in the market, and we did that within weeks, I would say, of closing the merger with Worldpay. Our second focus then was really turning on the FI channel within Worldpay, roughly 6,000 branches across dozens of FI partners and we really started that in earnest in Q3. We did a pilot with 3 FI partners. And then recently, in October, we've opened it up to 30 FI partners in the U.S. market.

So to your point, as we get into opening up that new distribution channel, we expect to drive incremental momentum behind Genius in our ability to continue to grow and scale genius. From there, once we're successful and we demonstrate we can scale within the Fine, we're going to focus more deliberately on other wholesale partners. So ISOs, agents, other indirect partners who want to be able to sell Genius into the marketplace either as a dealer or ultimately have some sort of referral agreement with us to sell genius. That's kind of the next opportunity from a distribution perspective. While in parallel, as I said before, we look to continue to bring it to new markets around the globe. And we're really trying to sequence those largely dependent upon where we see good strong product market fit, where we see an opportunity to drive scale in a market where we see maybe other externalities that are giving an opportunity for us to get better penetration.

I would say the fiscalization program in the Czech Republic is a good example of that. So ultimately, it's, I'd say, a dual-pronged strategy, tapping into all the distribution channels we have in the U.S. and targeted deployment to new markets outside the U.S., again, looking to continue to drive momentum around Genius more broadly.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Schmidt from KeyBanc.

Andrew Schmidt

To see the steady progress here. Maybe just a question on the synergies. Just as you continue to realize these additional synergies including the increase. How should we think about the balance between reinvestment and market flow through? And I know we've talked about reinvestment over time. You have that $1 billion marker out there. But maybe just talk about as you sort of realize the additionals introduced, just the biggest opportunities to kind of redeploy those savings to support longer-term growth.

Cameron Bready

Yes, it's a great question, Andrew. Maybe I'll start. I might ask Bob to chime in on this as well. Look, I think we're always focused on striking the right balance in terms of making sure that the value we're able to generate through operating leverage in the business, obviously, through the realization of synergies from the Worldpay integration, the benefits that we've been able to drive through our transformation program over the last couple of years, we're trying to strike the right balance between making sure that we're deploying the right amount of capital and investment in the business to drive sustainable, durable growth, while also meeting our capital return commitments that we've made, and obviously, getting our leverage back to our targeted leverage ratio, as Josh called out earlier.

So I don't think that changes as we continue to move forward in time. We'll continue to make sure that we're putting capital and putting investment behind bringing our strategy to life. I think we outlined that pretty clearly today. What our priorities are, how we think about delivering them across each of our lines of business. That will be a key driver of capital investment. We need to continue to prioritize investing against our TAM because as I said earlier, that's a core underpinning of our strategy and our ability to deliver on that strategy. And ultimately, again, we want to make sure we're using our capital efficiently in terms of returns for shareholders and meeting the commitments that we've already established. So -- we work hard to strike that right balance. I think we have a very prudent disciplined approach to capital allocation in the business. And whether we're generating incremental synergies or not, I think that doesn't really change how we think about, again, making sure we're balancing, investing in the business but also returning capital and driving a total shareholder return that we believe our shareholders will find attractive. Bob, I don't know if there's anything you would add just on the investment front.

Robert Cortopassi

Only one, maybe I would double down on the point we've already made about the target architecture model. This isn't really just about integration or a technology modernization journey. This is ultimately business-led and an enabler for growth. So to the extent that we can accelerate progress against the TAM initiatives, that drives incremental performance and opportunities for our 3 lines of business. So I think to Cameron's point, about balanced capital allocation, that's certainly true. But in a world where we have the opportunity to accelerate our performance and deliver for our clients more quickly, we would certainly look to do that.

Andrew Schmidt

I appreciate that. Thank you, Cameron. And Bob, that's a great segue into the next question. I wanted to ask about sort of transformation milestones over the next 12 months, made a lot of progress. integrating the organization, advancing the product road map. Maybe just talk about -- you talked about sort of accelerating the progress here. But maybe talk about what we should expect from Allison or the next 12 months. particularly around the technology platform consolidation. And then just looking externally, growth is obviously the North Star, but what should we look for externally to gauge progress?

Cameron Bready

Yes. Another good question, Andrew. And I appreciate your borrowing language I've used in the past around growth being the North Star for our integration efforts with Worldpay. I'm going to actually just maybe use your question as an opportunity to reflect on progress we've made. And I'm going to ask Bob maybe to get to the heart of your question about what to expect as a go-forward matter, particularly around technology modernization as we execute against our TAM strategy. But we're 10, 11 months into -- 10 months, yes, into our merger with Worldpay, and I'm enormously proud of the progress that our organization has been able to make. And I really want to sort of anchor that commentary around the work we've done to ensure that we're building the right foundation for the future of Global Payments.

I only get 1 opportunity, I think, to build the strong foundation that we feel we need for the future. And trying to build the foundation after the fact is always hard. So we've put a lot of emphasis and our highest priority, I think, has been it's been focused on building the right foundation for the business. In this short period of time, we realigned all of our go-to-market activities around 3 customer segment led channels, SMB platforms and enterprise. We've established the combined leadership structure for the entire organization. and aligned our entire company and all of our team members against that leadership structure. And as part of that, we placed 2,400 leaders as part of a very deliberate best of both approach to how we establish the combined leadership team for the new Global Payments. And we define the TAM which is critical to, I think, delivering on the opportunities that exist for our business in the future for all the reasons we've talked about today. And we've actually started to lay the groundwork for delivering on that TAM as well.

And also, we have clear line of sight to every single dollar of synergies that targeted as part of this merger and very rigorous execution plans to make sure that we deliver on those and we've been able to obviously increase our target around synergies over that period of time. So I think that speaks to the amount of effort and focus and execution discipline that's gone into getting us to today. And -- with that, I'll maybe transition over to Bob to let him talk about what to expect as we look towards '27 and beyond.

Robert Cortopassi

Yes. Thanks, Cameron. Andrew, great question. We could probably talk for the remainder of our time just about this 1 topic, but I'll try to be brief. I think -- if you distill what Cameron just said about the target architecture model, the integration approach with Worldpay and then think about the comments in Cameron's prepared remarks about our modular kind of open ecosystem approach curated open ecosystem approach to capabilities. That's where you're going to see the milestones over the next kind of 12 to 24 months, continuing to expand our single end capabilities to more customer demographics, whether those are geographies or customer archetypes, partners of various flavors as well as our enterprise and SMB clients, delivering all of those through a single experience, 1 portal where you can not only consume value-added services, but you can also get AI-driven insights about your business, support the decision-making that needs to happen. And then continuing to make available the value-added services whether those are payments specific or parts of our embedded finance engine or things like that across the entire estate. .

So a couple of early proof points. I think we already talked about in prior quarters, how quickly we were able to make Genius available through the Worldpay sales channels. That also meant met Genius on kind of heritage Worldpay processing platforms. We've done the same in reverse in bringing tools like fraud side and revenue boost to merchants in the global payments ecosystem, and we'll continue to do that over the coming years, so that more and more of what clients experience from Global Payments is 1 entry into the ecosystem, the flexibility to construct a modular set of solutions that's tailor-made for their use cases and 1 experience dealing with a company its products and platforms and the service experiences that matter to them.

Operator

Our next question comes from David Koning from Baird & Co.

David Koning

I just wanted to ask about Agentic. It gets brought up on a lot of calls. And for you, it's 1 thing if a human transaction is just replaced by an agent transaction, -- but it's another thing if you get more transactions, maybe better yields, maybe more new BaaS services. So just wondering what the economic impact and how you think that's going to play out. .

Cameron Bready

Yes, Dave, great question and obviously, very topical given everything we see happening in the market around this exciting new, I'd say, channel for commerce as we go forward. Maybe I'll just start, and I'll ask Bob to get into a little more of the specifics as it relates to your question. I think it's helpful maybe to frame up how we think about Agentic Commerce and how we're trying to position ourselves around the Agentic commerce. And I would say the positioning really starts with 2 things from our vantage point. One is our approach really is centered around being a merchant advocate to ensure that the agentic protocols that develop in the marketplace are really developed in a way that aligns with the best interest of our clients.

That's sort of anchor point #1 for us. Anchor Point #2 is for identic commerce to really be able to scale and become a more meaningful driver of retail commerce going forward, there has to be trust in the ecosystem in terms of how these transactions are getting effectuated and how consumers are going to be protected and to that extent, merchants are protected around this type of commerce activity. So I would say at a very high level, our strategy is really anchored around building a platform-agnostic modular set of capabilities that allow our clients to participate in agent-commerce models. -- regardless of the channel or agent or payment method. And we're very focused on making sure we're helping to develop the right standards in a way that, again, are really aligned with the best interest of our clients.

The other thing we're focused on doing at the SMB level is providing them the on-ramps to be able to access this new emerging channels. They actually -- not surprisingly, they don't have the technology resources the investment capacity to build their own infrastructure to be able to participate in Agent commerce. And I think part of our role is to help them to be able to access that opportunity without having to make a significant amount of investment on their part. But as it relates to more specifically what it means, I'll ask Bob to maybe chime in on what exactly we're doing and how we see the economics and flows kind of working as we go forward.

Robert Cortopassi

Yes. Dave, I think the way that we think about it today is a lot like e-commerce when it emerged. There were questions about is this incremental capacity in the economy? Or is this a displacement of physical in-person face-to-face commerce. And I think the answer to both of those questions was yes. It's both of those things. And agentic looks a lot like that. There's need for discovery, there's need for acceptance, tokens, fraud screening, authentication, dispute evidence Certainly, in the Agenda Commerce report that we released recently, people are more open to transacting with agents, but 60%, give or take, still want to approve every purchase, so we see trust really is the gating factor. So to the extent that transaction volume is incremental, that would be a tailwind for us and a benefit, but I also think, to your point, there is opportunity to add value-added services into the stack. And this trust component is 1 that continues to be at the center of scale and adoption for Agentic, verifying the intent of the consumer, verifying the credentials used to complete the transaction and then ensuring that all of the sort of consumer protections and merchant protections continue to be built into the ecosystem that already exists for card rails today.

That's where we're focused in adding value is not only just benefiting from these transactions crossing our rails like they do today, but also those incremental value-added services around identity, intent, fraud and optimizing authentication performance for our -- particularly enterprise clients but increasingly mid-market and SMB as well.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Jason Kupferberg from Wells Fargo.

Jason Kupferberg

It's great to hear the reaffirmation of the capital return targets for this year a year. And I was hoping we could maybe talk early thoughts on the P&L for 2027 as well? It would seem like you're lapping Middle East, large, probably some incremental contribution from Genius, productivity from the newer or adds this year. So that all add up to a little bit of top line acceleration next year. Is that a reasonable thought process? And then just as we try and think about margin expansion in light of the upsized Worldpay synergies? Any rough views there would be greatly appreciated, too.

Cameron Bready

Yes, Jason, it's Cameron. Look, I appreciate the question. It's a little premature for us to kind of start providing an outlook for 2027. We're still in our planning process. And ultimately, we'll provide a full outlook as we get to our Q4 call. That said, I think as it relates to the things we can control, nothing we see today really changes the confidence that we have in the trajectory of the business. And certainly, some of the things you called out would provide us a little bit of momentum, we think, as we get into 2027. I think we continue to expect to enter 2027 with good commercial momentum. We kind of talked about that on today's call, where we're seeing progress across each of our lines of business as a commercial matter, whether it's genius bookings, genius yields, new partner signings for platforms and the volume growth we continue to see across that segment. And certainly, the enterprise business has had a very strong commercial productivity year. I think their year-to-date bookings are up 23%. So very strong performance.

So from a commercial perspective, I think we have a lot of confidence sort of in the momentum that we're building heading into 2027. And to your point, the ongoing integration of Worldpay and the incremental synergies we would expect to realize next year should provide some tailwind to margin as well. So as we look at the business heading into 2027, I think we feel good about how we're trying to position this business, which is we want to drive durable, sustainable mid-single-digit growth in the business. We want to continue to deliver margin expansion, which will be a little bit upsized for the next couple of years as we continue to deliver on Worldpay integration, and we want to drive substantial free cash flow generation, which supports both our investment back into the business, our capital return plans to shareholders and our ability to get back to our targeted leverage ratio of roughly 3x by the end of 2027.

Jason Kupferberg

And just for a quick follow-up, I mean as you come up on this 1-year anniversary of Worldpay, we've talked a lot about the integration success to date. But just the stand-alone top line performance of Worldpay, -- how would you assess that so far versus your initial expectations, obviously, putting aside the Middle East airlines.

Cameron Bready

Yes. I would say, by and large, it's very consistent with what we would have expected. We have resegmented the business. So there's not a line of business that we have now that is a pure sort of stand-alone Heritage Global or stand Worldpay. So it's a little hard to parse kind of exactly what is 1 or the other since we've done the resegmentation of the business. But certainly, there's nothing I would see in the data outside of kind of the impacts of the Middle East crisis that would cause me to think that Worldpay stand-alone performance to the extent there is such a thing is any different than what we would have anticipated going into the year. .

Operator

The last question we currently have time for is from the line of James Faucette from Morgan Stanley.

James Faucette

This is James. Can you hear me this morning?

Cameron Bready

Yes.

James Faucette

Appreciate all the color today. I wanted to follow up on a comment that was made around volumes on the enterprise side and some testing that was going on there. Can you help us think through not necessarily just that work, but just where you're finding real traction with Worldpay and where you get the most benefit versus maybe things that you feel like you should be improving on.

Cameron Bready

Josh, do you want to handle the first part of the question I'll jump in on the second.

Joshua Whipple

Yes, sure, James. So as we think about just the enterprise, so that volume that we saw that was just a temporarily shift in volume that we don't expect to see reoccur in Q4. It was about 200 basis points from an overall volume perspective. So if you adjust for that, where volume and revenue were pretty much right on top of each other for the quarter within Enterprise.

Cameron Bready

Yes. And James, as it relates to the enterprise business more broadly, I would say, look, we're enormously proud of that business. It is a world-class team that is a world-class set of capabilities. And we're very bullish, obviously, what we can do with the business as we move forward in time. I think the big areas of focus for us are largely aligned with the strategic priorities that I outlined earlier for Enterprise. The battleground around Enterprise is really around for performance, whether it's winning existing wallet share with clients or it's winning net new logos, payment performance really sits at the heart of our ability to drive growth in the business. as we move forward in time, and we're investing heavily behind that to ensure we can deliver market-leading authorization rates, market-leading fraud protection for our clients, et cetera. that for payment performance is critical, and that's a big area of focus for us.

I would say second is continuing to drive penetration of value-added services. roughly 50% of our revenue in our enterprise business today is driven by value-added services. So our opportunity to get better penetration across our existing base. and to tap into new opportunities as we're selling into the market, attaching more bad to sort of core payment and acceptance services is a real critical focus for us. And then the work we're doing to kind of open up new geographies, new markets, new verticals within the enterprise channel is also key. Some of that comes from the ability to combine capabilities of Global Payments with Worldpay, particularly as it relates to delivering omnichannel solutions across more physical markets around the globe. -- and certainly tapping into some of Global Payments physical presence in markets where Worldpay historically has not had an opportunity to participate on a face-to-face basis, I think creates a lot of new incremental opportunity for the enterprise business. So again, proud of that business, have a lot of confidence and faith in the team and the execution that they're delivering and I think there is an enormous amount of potential for it as we go forward.

Operator

Unfortunately, we don't have any time for further questions this morning. This concludes our call. Thank you, and have a good day.