FIS delivered a strong Q1 2026 beat across all metrics, with revenue, margins, and free cash flow all beating expectations. Management highlighted significant commercial momentum from ACV growth, strategic AI partnerships (specifically with Anthropic), and new digital asset initiatives, expressing high confidence in its full-year outlook. FIS reported Q1 FY2026 revenue growth of 6.5% (pro forma), exceeding expectations, with 87bps of margin expansion and a 111% increase in free cash flow.
FIS delivered a strong Q1 2026 beat across all metrics, with revenue, margins, and free cash flow all beating expectations. Management highlighted significant commercial momentum from ACV growth, strategic AI partnerships (specifically with Anthropic), and new digital asset initiatives, expressing high confidence in its full-year outlook. FIS reported Q1 FY2026 revenue growth of 6.5% (pro forma), exceeding expectations, with 87bps of margin expansion and a 111% increase in free cash flow.
Management discussed a landmark partnership with Anthropic to co-build AI agents for financial crimes and beyond, emphasizing FIS's ownership of agents, regulated infrastructure, and distribution. They see AI as a key growth vector, with agents expected to launch in late 2026…
Management discussed a landmark partnership with Anthropic to co-build AI agents for financial crimes and beyond, emphasizing FIS's ownership of agents, regulated infrastructure, and distribution. They see AI as a key growth vector, with agents expected to launch in late 2026…
Management expressed strong confidence in the business trajectory, citing robust commercial momentum, strategic partnerships, and a clear path to long-term growth, while acknowledging some transitory softness in lending but framing it as manageable.
Recurring ACV growth up 24% signals accelerating future revenue. Management expressed strong confidence in the business trajectory, citing robust commercial momentum, strategic partnerships, and a clear path to long-term growth, while acknowledging some transitory softness in…
Management discussed a landmark partnership with Anthropic to co-build AI agents for financial crimes and beyond, emphasizing FIS's ownership of agents, regulated infrastructure, and distribution. They see AI as a key growth vector, with agents expected to launch in late 2026 and revenue materializing in 2027, but no revenue is included in 2026 guidance. They also highlighted that AI investments a
Recurring ACV growth up 24% signals accelerating future revenue. Management expressed strong confidence in the business trajectory, citing robust commercial momentum, strategic partnerships, and a clear path to long-term growth, while acknowledging some transitory softness in lending but framing it as manageable.
Management did not provide specific quantitative capex guidance, but mentioned 'disciplined management of working capital and capital expenditures' as a driver of strong free cash flow. They also noted a reduction in one-time integration and transformation expenses as a building block for future cash flow growth. No explicit capex direction was discussed.
Management expressed strong confidence in the business trajectory, citing robust commercial momentum, strategic partnerships, and a clear path to long-term growth, while acknowledging some transitory softness in lending but framing it as manageable.
“This is a deeply collaborative model with Anthropix forward deployed engineers embedded alongside ours to design and build this agent from the ground up ... FIS owns the agent and the regulated infrastructure, everything that is deployed t…”
“Nothing is contemplated in our guide in 2026. we would expect to see revenue come forward as we deploy those agents into the market in 26, but we'd expect to see revenue really take shape in 2027.”
“it's in the loan syndication part of the market. ... we are seeing people shy away from the lending activity that they would normally be doing in the public markets. ... debt issuances are down.”
“we are starting to activate partnerships where we're activating resellers to be able to sell our products. ... you saw us have a pretty big non-recurring revenue number there, I do think it'll create a grow over for next year.”
“we've already used AI to make the conversion from one core to another go faster. So I would say that's one place that actual, you know, once you've decided to change your core, I do think the ability to move cores, we can go faster, which…”
| Metric | Period | Range | Midpoint | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EPS | FY2026 | 8%–10% | 9% | MAINTAINED |
| Free cash flow | FY2026 | $2.1B | $2.1B | MAINTAINED |
| Op margin | FY2026 | 95%–110% | 102.5% | MAINTAINED |
| Revenue | FY2026 | 5.1%–5.7% | 5.4% | MAINTAINED |
| RevenueBANKING | FY2026 | 5%–5.5% | 5.25% | MAINTAINED |
| RevenueCAPITAL_MARKETS | FY2026 | 5.5%–6.5% | 6% | MAINTAINED |
BMO is a design partner for FIS's new AI-powered financial crimes agent, indicating early adoption and co-development of the new product.
“BMO and Amalgamated Bank are our design partners for this first agent.”
… remains fully owned and protected by us. Our strategy reflects a shared recognition that scaling across financial services requires deep regulatory expertise and bank-grade infrastructure alongside advanced AI models. Our first agent focuses on financial crimes. one of the most urgent and costly challenges for banks today, with an estimated $2 trillion in illicit funds moving through the global financial system, creating a $35 to $40 billion spend across the industry. BMO and Amalgamated Bank are our design partners for this first agent. The co-built agent will automate the evidence gathering and analysis, reducing investigation time from days to minutes. Our goals are to significantly reduce cost per case and decrease low-value manual work. Investigators remain in control with the agent, enhancing decision-making rather than replacing it. This human-in-the-loop design is essential to trust in regulated banking environments. This is the beginning of a broader roadmap of purpose-built agents across the banking lifecycle, spanning credit decisioning, deposit retention, customer onboarding, and fraud prevention available to our clients through a single, governed data and AI …
FIS is actively using AI to accelerate the conversion process for banks switching cores, leveraging this as a tool to win new business. — This agility could give FIS a competitive edge in capturing market share from competitors when banks decide to modernize or during M&A activity, potentially accelerating its growth.
“We are actively in conversations in terms of the value of not just debiting credit together, but also core. And in fact, one of the key use cases we've launched with the first bank of Puerto Rico that we talked about is a commercial or”
If you could just touch on the latest on the synergies and cross-sell potential and really how it's going in terms of seeing opportunities with your customers for thesis and issuer processing more broadly between what you already have on the debit side and the credit opportunities you could bring. So just an update there would be great, and really what's embedded in the Outlook now in terms of synergies to remind us again.
Yep. So maybe I'll take the customer side, and I'll let James remind everybody on where we are on synergies in the Outlook. As we talked about when we closed this transaction, I think everybody, including all of our customers, felt like it was a really good fit. Yeah. thesis being inside, you know, merchant acquired didn't make much sense for them. And so they're very happy for it to be underneath our umbrella. And we are actively in conversations in terms of the value of not just debiting credit together, but also core. And in fact, one of the key use cases we've launched with the first bank of Puerto Rico that we talked about is a commercial or consumer credit card line increase where what's uniquely different is we can now take their thesis data plus their core data put it together and create a very rich experience where they can actively increase credit line increases to customers which drives a lot more revenue for them which they couldn't do before so we're getting a lot of interest and people are very excited and That being said, as you know, these are very large banks and sales cycles here take a bit of time. And so we are actively engaged with all of them. And we look forward to reporting on revenue synergies in the future. I think we had always said we thought it would be in 27 and 28 as those take hold. These are just very large customers with long contract cycles. I'll turn it over to James in terms of what we have in the outlook with respect to cost synergies.
FIS announced a strategic partnership with Anthropic, where Anthropic's forward-deployed engineers will co-build AI agents with FIS, but FIS will retain ownership of the agents and client distribution.
FIS expects its new AI agents (financial crimes, etc.) to be in the market in the back half of 2026, but revenue is only expected to materialize in 2027.
Yeah, no, thank you for clarifying it loud and clear. So my second question, Stephanie, is, is there any revenue contribution from the engagement contemplated in your outlook? And when do you expect that to start happening? you know, would you expect the agent to be in the market? Thanks again and congrats.
Thank you. Thank you. Yep. So as we said in my prepared remarks, we would expect this agent and then other agents to be in the market in the back half of 2026. As you can imagine, this is a really, really complicated space and has to be tested quite deeply so that it gets the exact answers correct from a compliance and regulatory standpoint. So nothing is contemplated in our guide in 2026. we would expect to see revenue come forward as we deploy those agents into the market in 26, but we'd expect to see revenue really take shape in 2027. So nothing in the guide currently.
The slowdown in Capital Markets recurring revenue in Q1 2026 is attributed to macro volatility impacting loan syndication and debt issuance, but ACV in lending is up 60%.
FIS signed new distribution agreements with two leading technology partners, generating significant non-recurring license revenue in Q1, but expects this to create a grow-over difficulty next fiscal year.