Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Deluxe First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. And today's call is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to your host, Vice President of Strategy and Investor Relations, Brian Anderson. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and welcome to the Deluxe First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. Joining me on today's call are Barry McCarthy, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Chip Zint, our Chief Financial Officer. At the end of today's prepared remarks, we will take questions. Before we begin and as seen on the current slide, I'd like to remind everyone that comments made today regarding management's intentions, projections, financial estimates and expectations about the company's future strategy or performance are forward-looking in nature as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Additional information about factors that may cause actual results to differ from projections is set forth in the press release we furnished today, in our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, and in other company SEC filings. On the call today, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, including comparable adjusted revenue, adjusted and comparable adjusted EBITDA and EBITDA margin, adjusted and comparable adjusted EPS and free cash flow. All comparable adjusted metrics reflect the removal of impacts from business exits, including prior year adjustments to reflect removal of the Safeguard business effective with the closing of that divestiture as of March 1, 2026. In our press release, today's presentation and our filings with the SEC, you will find additional disclosures regarding non-GAAP measures, including reconciliation of these measures to the most comparable measures under U.S. GAAP. Within the materials, we are also providing reconciliations of GAAP EPS to adjusted EPS, which may assist with your modeling. And with that, I'll hand it over to Barry.

Thanks, Brian, and good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to report our strong start to 2026. We continued our positive momentum, particularly in driving sustainable growth in our payments and data businesses. During the first quarter, enterprise results once again reflected organic growth across all key metrics, including revenue, adjusted EBITDA, EPS and free cash flow. We're now in our fourth consecutive year, driving consistent growth across our core earnings metrics. We're also proud to report that we reached two significant strategic milestones during the quarter. First, we achieved our long-term 3x leverage ratio target, three quarters earlier than promised at our December 2023 Investor Day. And second, combined, our payments and data businesses now account for more than 50% of total revenue, a major inflection point in our transformation into a payments and data company. Our Q1 results highlight our team's consistent, sustained execution ability, and signal clarity in the company's future as a payments and data company. Financial highlights for the quarter included: revenue growth across combined Payments and Data segments of 12.5%, nearly 20% growth of comparable adjusted EBITDA versus the prior year as our margins expanded by more than 300 basis points. Over 45% expansion of our comparable adjusted EPS and continued double-digit growth in our free cash flow, enabling further optimization of our balance sheet. We remain well positioned to deliver solid full year performance given our strong start. You'll recall earlier in the year, we announced the pending divestiture of Safeguard, a component of the print business. The divestiture closed on the 1st of March. As we mentioned, post-closing, we've updated our full year guidance ranges for the year to specifically reflect the divestiture of Safeguard. Importantly, our free cash flow estimate remains unchanged, while the remainder of the guided metrics reflect the same, if not improved, comparable adjusted growth rates. Chip will share additional details on the divestiture and our updated guidance. As a reminder, our core business strategy is to leverage the brand, trust, relationships and cash flow generated by our legacy paper-based payments business, checks, to invest and grow into a digital payments and data company. We're focused on three ongoing strategic planks: one, shifting revenue mix towards payments and data to deliver ongoing profitable organic growth; two, driving operating leverage and efficiency across the enterprise; and three, increasing adjusted EBITDA and cash flow to lower overall debt and improve our net leverage ratio. We continue to consistently deliver on all three priorities simultaneously. On our first priority, mix shift, during the first quarter, we reached an important milestone as combined Payments and Data segments became our largest set of businesses, surpassing the Print segment to reach 51% of total revenue. This marks the first time in the company's nearly 112-year history that the print businesses represented less than 50% of overall revenues. As I noted in my opening comments, this improving mix was amplified by continued double-digit growth across combined Payments and Data segment revenues. This performance was led by strong top line growth in the Data Solutions and Merchant Services segments and ongoing improvement in B2B. This inflection of our revenue mix is also expected to continue over the balance of the year as quarterly print results will reflect the Safeguard divestiture. Beyond reaching this improved revenue mix, we also saw strong execution on our second strategic plank, delivering efficiencies to drive consistent operating leverage. We continue to reduce overall SG&A expenses, improved by just over 7% versus the prior year, including efficiencies across our corporate operations. Overall revenue growth, alongside these continued cost improvements, drove our 13th consecutive quarter of year-over-year comparable adjusted EBITDA expansion. These efforts enabled us to deliver robust operating leverage across the business as our margins expanded and earnings growth outpaced the rate of revenue. Finally, we also achieved a very notable milestone on our third strategic focus area during the first quarter. We deployed our expanded earnings and cash flows to further reduce our overall debt level, reaching our 3x net leverage ratio goal in just over two years, ahead of the pace we signaled at our 2023 Investor Day. As Chip will detail further during his comments, our 12% year-over-year growth of free cash flow enabled us to reach this important goal. Total debt was reduced by more than $30 million from year-end levels, giving us more flexibility to consider future growth investment opportunities. We are consistently executing on our capital allocation priorities with discipline, and we will maintain this discipline going forward. Now on to business unit performance. As noted in my prior comments, Payments and Data segments expanded year-over-year by a blended 12.5% rate, led by another very strong growth quarter from the Data segment. Data segment revenue continued its robust year-over-year expansion trend, growing just over 26% on sustaining strong demand from financial institutions and emerging adjacent market client campaign activity. The Data business continues to leverage what we believe is one of the largest super-aggregated consumer and small business marketing data lakes in the industry. We overlay this data with evolving Gen AI-enabled tools to deliver campaigns targeted toward high lifetime value customers, driving outstanding ROI for our clients' marketing spend. Moving now to our Payments segment. We saw mid-single-digit or greater revenue growth across both our Merchant Services and B2B Payments segments during the quarter as well. Within Merchant Services, continued wins across our pipeline, strong ongoing merchant retention and stable consumer spending trends across our diversified verticals contributed to revenue growth of just over 7% for the period. In addition to solid baseline merchant business trends, we also continue to add new business partnerships, which will contribute to our go-forward growth trajectory. For example, we were pleased to sign a new strategic merchant partnership with Washington Trust Bank, a full-service commercial bank with more than $10 billion in assets serving the Pacific Northwest. The bank now offers the full suite of Deluxe merchant services to its clients. We also made important progress in Q1, growing our integrated software vendor or ISV relationships just as we forecasted on earlier calls. This segment of the payments market features both high growth and strong customer retention. Last week, we announced our new merchant partnership with a major ISV, MRI Software, a leading provider of real estate and rent payment solutions serving more than 45,000 clients. Partnering with an ISV of this scale is evidence that our internal investment in merchant technology and product enhancements is working and positioning us for further growth. The MRI partnership also highlights the ongoing effectiveness of our One Deluxe cross-selling model. MRI was an existing B2B payments customer already utilizing our lockbox services. Shifting to the B2B business. We saw growth sequentially improve across the segment as well, with revenues expanding by just under 5% versus Q1 of 2025. Our efficiency focus in B2B drove more than 400 basis points of margin improvement versus the prior year quarter. Finally, across Print, we also saw continued comparable adjusted EBITDA margin expansion, with year-over-year margins improving 70 basis points from the prior year to finish the quarter at just under 33%. This strong margin trajectory remains consistent with our focus on operational efficiencies across our print manufacturing footprint as well as our continuing prioritization of stronger margin in-sourced offerings. To summarize, each of these highlights contributed to robust growth across our key financial metrics during the quarter, and set the stage for continued execution focus across the balance of the year. During the quarter, number one, we continue to leverage growth of our free cash flow to pay down debt, reaching our long-term 3x net leverage target. Number two, we shifted revenue mix to our combined Payments and Data segment, which now represent a majority of total revenue; and number three, we expanded operating income, comparable adjusted EBITDA and EPS at rates above the growth of our revenues, driving margin expansion and strong operating leverage. These results speak to our sustained, disciplined execution and focus on our value creation algorithm introduced at our Investor Day in 2023. Before transitioning to Chip, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge a couple of recent developments across the Deluxe corporate governance structure as well. As we shared last month, Paul Garcia was elected as our new independent Board chair, succeeding Cheryl Mayberry McKissack, who announced her retirement earlier this year. Paul's deep payments operating experience as the former Chairman and CEO of Global Payments, along with his extensive Board service across a diversified set of industries, will continue to strengthen our position as a trusted payments and data company. Cheryl's leadership and contributions to the Board over her tenure, including the past seven years as Chair, have been critical to our transformation into a payments and data company. I'm grateful for her steady Board leadership both as Chair in times of extraordinary change and over her 25 years of Board service. Job well done. Finally, as always, I want to acknowledge and thank all my fellow Deluxers who have made this performance and remarkable transformation possible by delivering for our investors and customers each and every day. Thank you. With that, I'll turn it over to Chip.

Thank you, Barry, and good morning, everyone. As Barry mentioned, we are very pleased with our first quarter results, particularly our continuing strong comparable adjusted EBITDA and EPS expansion, sustained growth of cash flow and the fact that we reached our 3x leverage ratio target during the period. As noted during the introductory comments, our 2026 comparable adjusted reporting and related commentary will move all prior year impacts from the sale of the Safeguard business to exited businesses effective with the March 1 closing. Like prior portfolio exits, this adjustment will allow for clean operating segment comparisons across the respective periods. I will detail our updated full year 2026 guidance, inclusive of these adjustments later during my comments. Now I'll begin, as always, by reviewing some of the consolidated highlights for the quarter before moving on to operating segment results, our balance sheet and cash flow progress and updates to our full year outlook. For the quarter, we reported total revenue of $538.1 million, increasing 0.3% against prior year reported results, while growing 2.7% on a comparable adjusted basis. We reported GAAP net income of $35.8 million or $0.77 per share, improving from $14 million or $0.31 per share in first quarter of 2025. This increase was driven by improved operating results, including lower restructuring and overall SG&A expense, lower interest expense and a gain from our business exit during the period, net of a slightly higher tax provision. Adjusted EBITDA was $117.9 million, increasing 19.7% on a comparable adjusted basis versus the first quarter of last year. Adjusted EBITDA margins were 21.9%, improving 310 basis points on a comparable adjusted basis. Q1 adjusted diluted EPS came in at $1.05, improving from $0.72 on a comparable adjusted basis, driven primarily by our improved operating income and lower year-over-year interest expense. Turning now to our operating segment details, beginning with the Merchant Services business. The Merchant business grew first quarter revenue by 7.3% year-over-year to $104.9 million, continuing the sequential growth improvement trend we saw in 2025. This growth rate reflected ongoing stable base processing volumes and aligned with our expectation for mid-single-digit full year revenue expansion. Segment adjusted EBITDA finished at $26.8 million, expanding by 25.2% on the improving revenue growth, channel mix and our year-end 2025 purchase of residual commission rights from a large ISO partner. Margins finished at 25.5%, expanding by 360 basis points versus prior year levels. You'll recall that last quarter, we indicated this residual buyout was expected to expand year-to-year merchant margins by between 200 and 300 basis points. As Barry noted, the merchant portfolio remains well positioned across our multichannel direct and partner go-to-market approach. We continue to expect full year mid-single-digit revenue growth for merchant within our outlook with a mid-20% adjusted EBITDA margin profile. We also assume stable ongoing macroeconomic conditions and related discretionary consumer spending levels across our broader guidance ranges. Turning to B2B payments. For the first quarter, B2B segment revenues finished at $73.5 million, increasing 4.7% versus Q1 of 2025 on largely stable lockbox volumes and continued migration of treasury management offerings to support increasingly digital payment flows. We were pleased to see this level of overall revenue growth, continuing our momentum from the fourth quarter 2025 exit rate. Adjusted EBITDA for B2B came in at $17.2 million, reflecting an overall 23.4% margin. This represented a very strong 29.3% expansion of adjusted EBITDA from the prior year results with overall margin rate in line with our full year guidance expectations. EBITDA growth for the period was driven by continued realized operating efficiencies across our lockbox footprint, and ongoing migration of the B2B business model toward more recurring revenue offerings. Within our B2B outlook, we continue to anticipate low single-digit revenue growth for the full year as the business laps sequentially improving revenue across the prior year quarters. Overall EBITDA margins are expected to remain in the low to mid-20% range over the period. Moving on to Data Solutions. This segment extended its very strong year-over-year growth trajectory from ongoing campaign demand. Revenues finished at $97.5 million, driving overall growth of 26.3% versus Q1 of 2025. First quarter adjusted EBITDA finished at $22.8 million, expanding by 15.7% year-over-year, while the margin rate finished at 23.4%, sequentially in line with the prior quarter rate, returning towards our signaled longer-term low to mid-20s expectation for the segment. Our full year 2026 guidance ranges continue to reflect mid- to high single-digit segment growth expectation for the full year. Importantly, we continue to expect to see moderation of recent growth trends over the back half of the year as we lap prior year results and see some customer pull forward of marketing spend into earlier quarters. Turning finally to our print businesses. Print segment first quarter revenue finished at $262.2 million, a decline of 5.9% year-over-year on a comparable adjusted basis, factoring for the impact of the March 1 Safeguard sale. Legacy Check revenues declined 4.4% on a comparable adjusted basis, while the balance of the segment declined by 8.4% to drive the overall blended result. We continue to see legacy promo comparable adjusted decline rates moderate slightly versus the rates of decline during 2025 due in part to the removal of Safeguard-related promo revenues effective on the 1st of March. Overall, adjusted EBITDA for Print finished the period at $85.7 million. The 3.8% rate of comparable adjusted EBITDA decline across Print continues to align favorably to the low- to mid-single-digit blended rate of revenue decline, maintaining a stable margin rate in the low 30s. Comparable adjusted EBITDA margins for Print improved 70 basis points year-over-year to 32.7%. This result was reflective of continued operating expense discipline, driving efficiency across our print operations. Consistent with our prior quarter outlook and updated for the exit of the Safeguard business over the balance of 2026, we continue to expect to see low to mid-single-digit comparable adjusted revenue declines across the Print segment, with adjusted EBITDA margins remaining in the low to mid-30s. Turning now to our balance sheet and cash flow. We ended the period with a net debt level of $1.37 billion down $22.6 million from $1.39 billion at the end of 2025, consistent with our ongoing commitment to debt reduction as a top capital allocation priority over the multiyear horizon, as Barry noted. Our net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio reached 3x at the end of the period, improving versus our 3.6x ratio a year ago. We were particularly pleased to reach this milestone in the first half of the year, further demonstrating our commitment to the optimization of our balance sheet via disciplined execution and our focus aligned to our value-creation algorithm. Our continuing expansion of cash generation and balance sheet improvement provides us more flexibility to operate the company and invest for continued growth, always within our disciplined approach to capital allocation, as Barry noted earlier. Free cash flow, defined as cash provided by operating activities less capital expenditures, finished at $27.3 million for the quarter, improving $3 million from the first quarter of 2025. This continuing expansion of cash flow was reflective of improved operating results, including lower year-to-year restructuring spend, cash taxes and overall SG&A expense, along with largely stable working capital efficiency and CapEx investment, net of increased year-over-year cash incentive payments during the Q1 period. Continuation of our strong operating cash flow generation remains a top focus area for 2026 even as we have reached our 3x leverage target. This is consistent with our full year guidance for free cash flow expansion, which we have maintained as part of our guidance outlook, inclusive of the impact of the Safeguard divestiture. We continue to be positioned well from both a liquidity and go-forward balance sheet position, reflecting $381 million of available revolver capacity as of quarter end. All material debt maturities remain aligned with the 2029 horizon, following our late 2024 refinancing of the debt capital structure. Consistent with past quarters, our Board approved a regular quarterly dividend of $0.30 per share on all outstanding shares. The dividend will be payable on June 2, 2026, to all shareholders of record as of market closing on May 19, 2026. As Barry noted in his opening commentary, we are maintaining or improving the comparable adjusted growth trajectories expected across our full year guidance outlook this morning, while updating revenue, adjusted EBITDA and EPS figures to specifically reflect the anticipated impacts from the March 1 Safeguard divestiture. Our updated full year ranges are as follows: revenue of $1.985 billion to $2.05 billion, reflecting negative 1% to positive 2% comparable adjusted growth versus 2025, adjusted EBITDA of $430 million to $455 million, reflecting between 4% and 10% comparable adjusted growth, adjusted EPS of $3.60 to $4, reflecting between 9% to 21% comparable adjusted growth and unchanged free cash flow of approximately $200 million, reflecting 14% growth versus our 2025 results. To reiterate, each of these guidance ranges reflect an unchanged to improving rate of comparable adjusted growth versus the prior year. They have simply been updated to reflect the anticipated impact of the divestiture closed during the first quarter. Finally, to assist with your modeling, our guidance assumes the following: interest expense of approximately $110 million; an adjusted tax rate of 26%; depreciation and amortization of approximately $135 million, of which acquisition amortization is approximately $40 million; an average outstanding share count of approximately 46.5 million shares; and capital expenditures between $90 million and $100 million. This guidance remains subject to, among other things, prevailing macroeconomic conditions, including interest rates, labor supply issues, inflation and the impact of any additional portfolio additions or exits. To summarize, we had a strong start to the year with meaningful organic growth across our key metrics. Our updated guidance, reflecting the impact of the Safeguard divestiture shows our continued solid full year performance expectations with the expansion of key earnings and cash flow metrics. The value creation framework we introduced at our 2023 Investor Day laid out our core business strategy to leverage the brand, trust, relationships and cash flow generated by our legacy paper-based payments business to invest and grow into a digital payments and data company. The strategy is simple and the progress is clear. Operator, we are now ready to take questions.

And we'll go first to Kartik Mehta with Northcoast Research.

Barry, maybe just first, just a bigger picture question. Almost every company I cover, the question becomes AI and the impact of AI. And I'm wondering if you could talk about maybe how AI is impacting your businesses and your ability to serve your customers. Just your perspective on how that is trending?

Well, first of all, Kartik, I appreciate the question. For our business, we see AI as a net positive because we look at AI as a set of tools that help us improve the operation of the company. I'll give you a couple of examples. In our Data business, we use Gen AI to improve the models that we use to create marketing campaigns for our customers. Through Gen AI, every one of those campaigns makes the system and the model smarter. So we get smarter, faster. As a comparison, we believe the largest financial institution in the country that's running campaigns inside their organization is doing a couple of hundred campaigns a year. On behalf of all of our clients, we are processing and running thousands of campaigns a year. So not only do we have more at-bats because we're using Gen AI, our tools and our models get smarter, faster, giving us a really nice moat around our data-driven marketing business. That's one place. The second place, which is really simple to understand, is in our B2B business, where we're processing payments through lockbox. A customer mails in a payment, and we receive that payment on behalf of the biller. There are literally billions of those payments that we process annually. Some of those payments require manual intervention because there are fragments of what's required to post that information appropriately on the balance sheet of the biller. We are applying AI to radically reduce the amount of manual intervention. We've achieved about a two-thirds reduction in manual intervention by applying AI to our business. You can see it flow right through our business in margin expansion for that business; that's certainly one of the reasons we're applying technology to improve our business overall. So we see AI as a great enabler for us, and we're applying it across our business to deliver performance-improving results.

And just a follow-up, Chip. In changing the guidance, obviously, for the divestiture, you didn't change your free cash flow guidance. And I'm wondering if that's just the underlying strength of all the other businesses or the divestiture would just not generate that much free cash flow, and that was the reason.

Yes, I'd say it's a bit of a mixture of both. Obviously, we've been executing really well, Kartik, on our free cash flow conversion and expansion of those metrics over the last two or so years. Coming into the year with a guidance range of approximately $200 million, the fact is that the Safeguard business was relatively lower margin. Once you adjust for taxes and other cash items, the adjustment was immaterial, and I felt confident in the progress of the business to hold the guidance range as is, which I think is a very strong signal to the execution and focus we've had in that space.

We'll go next to Charlie Strauzer with CJS.

So seeing good organic growth in various segments. What are the common themes that you're seeing from clients that are helping to propel those business lines?

In our Payments and Data businesses, Charlie, we think all three of those businesses are delivering a very quality value proposition for our customers. I talked for a minute just a moment ago about our data-driven marketing business, which is the fastest-growing business. Because of the quality of our tools, we deliver an outstanding marketing dollar ROI for our customers. When a customer invests using our tools, they get the best return that we're aware of among their marketing options. We've seen existing customers expand their spend with us, moving dollars from one marketing program to ours because of the effectiveness and the quality of our delivery. That's why that business has been growing as well. In the Merchant business, you heard us talk about our success in attracting new customers. We had two significant wins that we talked about, one with Washington Trust Bank and a second with MRI Software, and in both of those cases, we were able to go to those customers and show them the value that we can create for them, which was not really just about price. It was about the value we can create, the right product, the right service level, the right set of tools, including APIs, and that's allowed us to win those businesses and keep that business. We have a good retention rate in our Merchant business. We are winning new customers in our target market verticals and that allows that business to grow. In B2B, we expect it to have some nice quality wins and improved operating efficiency. I discussed earlier our use of AI to help us there; that is helping us win customers and improve our operating efficiency. So each one of those businesses has a compelling value proposition for existing customers to stay with us and for new customers to join us. You can see that combination reflected in our performance.

Looking at the promotional businesses that you have, are you seeing any disruption there from the global conflicts that are going on, kind of disrupting travel, things like that on that business?

Charlie, I don't know that we're really directly seeing impacts from all the global uncertainty today. Of course, we're aware of it. But specifically to your question on promo, the promo business in general continues to be a bit soft, like it has been for some period of time, reflecting, we think, greater market trends. We can't point that specifically to global impacts happening today.

We'll go next to Marc Riddick with Sidoti.

So I wanted to first congratulate you guys on reaching these goals. Certainly, you guys have been working on this for quite some time. These are key milestone goals to reach, and I remember the Investor Day a few years back. I wanted to touch a little on some of the expense reductions you've seen in SG&A, as SG&A as a percentage of revenue in the quarter was, I believe, below 40%. Maybe you could talk a little about some of those. And maybe you've already kind of touched on this with the efficiency commentary, Barry, but maybe you could touch a bit on some of those efforts. It certainly seems as though you're just getting more bang for your buck there.

Yes, I appreciate the question, Marc. There's no real secret to what we've done here. We've been very clear over the horizon in the last years about the work we were doing specifically to SG&A. Over a period of time, we had to invest in restructuring-related spend to drive efficiency, optimize the spend base of the company and really pivot us forward, and you saw that through our multiyear North Star journey. We said about this time a year ago that 2025 would be less about a year of cost out on the corporate operations and more about improvements in margin expansion in the segments, but we knew coming into 2026 that would be a year where the final efforts of North Star and all the work we did to drive efficiency would come through the P&L. You're really seeing those two things come together in these results. Number one, we're out of the period of heavy restructuring spend. You've seen that spend come down pretty methodically over the last few years. We're now out of those days and overall restructuring spend is fairly low. In fact, it's mostly related to the Safeguard divestiture this quarter, the amounts we do have. And then second, the ongoing cumulative effect of those cost improvements we've done and the way the team has focused on driving efficiency and changing how work gets done is evident in the numbers. Combine those two figures together, and that's what's driving this overall 7% plus reduction in SG&A in the period.

Great. And then shifting gears, I wanted to talk a little bit about maybe if you could talk if you're seeing any particular industry verticals that stood out either relative to your expectations or just generally, if there are any particular pockets, whether that's industry vertical or regional strength that you saw during the quarter that stand out?

Marc, one of the things that we particularly appreciate about our portfolio of businesses is that they are diversified across multiple market verticals. We can deliver this kind of performance in most environments. We continue to have great strength in the financial institution channel across multiple businesses, and you see us moving aggressively into the ISV space, which we said we would do for some time within our Merchant space. The Data business continues to expand beyond financial institutions to get new logos and new market verticals. We're pleased that the business is performing well overall and that the market verticals where we compete seem to be durable and sturdy, and that's helping deliver this consistent performance. We're very proud that it's our 13th consecutive quarter of profitable growth. We think that's a testament to the mix of our verticals, the mix of our business and the improving mix of our business, which we hit that significant milestone of our Payments and Data businesses becoming our largest businesses in this period, something we've been working toward for some time.

At this time, there are no further questions. I will now turn the call back to Brian for any additional or closing comments.

Thanks, Jennifer. Before we conclude, I'd like to share that management will be participating at the Needham Technology Media and Consumer Conference on May 13 and the Truist Securities Financial Services Conference on May 19, both in New York during the quarter. Thank you again for joining us today, and we look forward to speaking with you all again in late July as we share our second quarter results.

This does conclude today's conference. We thank you for your participation.