Kay Sharpton - VP, Investor Relations Morgan Schuessler - President and CEO Peter Smith - Executive Vice President and CFO.

George Mihalos - Cowen & Company John Davis - Stifel Nicolaus David Ridley-Lane - Bank of America Merrill Lynch Chris Kennedy - William Blair.

Good afternoon and welcome to the EVERTEC Incorporated Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2016 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen only mode. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Kay Sharpton, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead..

Thanks. Welcome to the EVERTEC fourth quarter 2016 earnings call. With me today are Mac Schuessler, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Peter Smith, our Chief Financial Officer. A replay of this call will be available until Wednesday, March 1.

Access information for the replay is listed in today’s financial release, which is available on our website under the Investor Relations tab. As a reminder, this call may neither be recorded nor otherwise reproduced without EVERTEC’s prior written consent. For those listening to the replay this call was held on February 22.

Please note, there is a presentation that accompanies this conference call, and it is accessible in the IR section of the website, as well as via the link provided in the earnings release earlier today.

Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that this call may contain forward-looking statements as defined under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements about our expectations for future performance are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties.

EVERTEC cautions that these statements are not guarantees of future performance. All forward-looking statements made today reflect our current expectations only, and we undertake no obligation to update any statements to reflect the events that occur after this call.

Please refer to the company’s most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K filed on May 26, 2016 with the Securities and Exchange Commission for factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements.

During today's call, management will provide certain information that will constitute non-GAAP financial measures under SEC rules, such as adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income, and adjusted earnings per share.

Reconciliations to GAAP measures and certain additional information are also included in today's earnings release and related supplemental slides. I’ll now turn the call over to Mac..

Thanks, Kay and good afternoon everyone. Thanks for joining us on today's call. We are pleased with our results for 2016 as we delivered on our financial goals and made solid progress on our strategic growth plans. I’ll cover some of the year’s highlights, provide you with an update on recent developments, and briefly comment on 2017.

Beginning on Slide4, we have a summary of our 2016 results. Total revenue was almost $390 million, an increase of 4% compared to 2015, which was slightly above our most recent guidance. We generated adjusted diluted earnings per share of $1.67, an increase of 5%, and also at the top of our guidance range.

We generated significant cash flow and returned approximately $70 million to our shareholders this year, drew almost $40 million in stock buybacks and $30 million in dividends. Now I'd like to give you some more specific updates on Q4 as well as on Puerto Rico. On Slide 5 is an update on our results for the quarter.

First, we were pleased with the strong revenue in the quarter surpassing $100 million of quarterly revenue for the first time in the company's history. Peter will give more specifics on the quarter in a moment but we benefitted from transaction growth and the completion of certain of our key projects.

In Puerto Rico, overall revenue grew approximately 3% and we continued to experience resilient transaction growth. Transactions grew 8% but this growth was partially offset by average ticket declines as well as merchant mix shifts.

The transaction growth was primarily driven by increased government payments and general payments growth from the continued cash to card conversion on the island. Even with these solid results, we continued to be negatively impacted by the project delay that we discussed last quarter.

However, I am pleased to announce that we made progress in the quarter. We worked with our client to clarify the project scope, extend the project deliverable dates and amend the contract for our mutual benefit. Peter will provide more details on the financial impact.

In Latin America, revenue growth was significant with the ongoing benefit from the Processa acquisition. On a comparable basis, excluding Processa, we are now beginning to see the initial impact of client migrations and generated mid single digit revenue growth as a result. Now I’ll give you an update regarding Promesa and Puerto Rico on Slide 6.

The new governor received authorization from the Federal Oversight Board for a one month extension of the deadline to submit a long term fiscal plan to February 28, as well as a two-month extension to the stay on litigation to May 1.

Additionally, the Puerto Rican government passed the Puerto Rico financial emergency and fiscal responsibility law in late January, which extends the moratorium period on debt payments to May 1 and allows the government to continue to pay for essential services as a priority over principal debt service.

At this time we have very little visibility into the measures that will be taken to address the government situation. The new administration's fiscal plan is being prepared and it ultimately requires the Promesa board’s approval. Once the plan is approved and the details of the action plans are public, we should have better perspective.

That said, we anticipate austerity measures that will negatively impact the economy in the short term and this is reflected in our 2017 outlook as Peter will cover in more detail. Ultimately private sector investment is the key to a healthy economy and long term growth.

We believe that meaningful progress on growth initiatives are required to encourage investment on the island. We continue to believe that EVERTEC is well positioned to assist the government to improve the IT infrastructure. Reflecting on 2016 and our accomplishments, Slide 7 is a summary of the areas I’d like to comment on.

Our focus during the past two years has been to transform this company. While there have been challenges and there's still work to be done, and I'm pleased with the significant progress we have made. We have a renewed commitment to our customers.

We have upgraded our systems and reorganized our delivery and support needs to provide dedicated personnel to improve service and create a more collaborative team approach to our top customer Banco Popular.

Additionally, we are pleased with the performance of our expanded merchant acquiring relationship with FirstBank and the continuation of our relationship with Oriental. We also boarded new merchants and experienced 6% growth in transactions for the year in Puerto Rico.

We have continued to strengthen the ATH network through innovation such as ATH Movil and increased the participation of local banks in the network. In Latin America, we found we had more work than we originally anticipated. We made significant progress but have more work to do to meet our expectations.

As we discussed last quarter, the improvements made during the year allowed the team to retain certain clients that had previously notified us that they would leave. And while our new sales in the year didn't meet our goals, we were able to land some minor clients. We're better positioned now for successful selling due to the team’s hard work in 2016.

Next, I want to highlight the capital investment that we have made in the business. In addition to our acquisitions, we have invested approximately $80 million in the business over the last two years. These investments are important to sustaining our current customer base as well as growing our future business.

Over the past two years we’ve upgraded or moved [ph] hundreds of servers, improved numerous applications and databases and improved overall infrastructure and security. Additionally, we have paved for the deployment of many POS terminals to comply with industry and regulatory specifications.

As a consequence of these investments and ongoing initiatives, we have experienced declines in incidents over the past two years. We have a more stable and improved infrastructure, increased capacity, improved redundancy and higher availability for our customers.

We will continue to invest in our infrastructure to protect our systems and to ensure we provide efficient and high performing service. As for corporate development, we closed on both Processa and Accuprint during the year. Accuprint is a company engaged in data processing and printing, primarily for banks and insurance companies.

The transaction is accretive to 2017 earnings and will leverage our existing capacity on the island and contribute to our business solution segment. The process that we established to source and assess deals is effective and I'm pleased to announce that we have an agreement on another deal that is pending regulatory approval.

More details on this transaction are on the Slide 8. We have entered into an agreement to buy a 100% of PayGroup which is headquartered in Santiago, Chile. It is a payment processing and software company serving primarily financial institutions throughout Latin America.

This acquisition will expand our geographic footprint into additional countries and strengthen our position in several other existing markets. As a reminder, we are regulated by the Bank Holding Company Act and we are working with Banco Popular to obtain federal bank regulatory approval.

We are excited about this transaction and continue to look for combinations that will fit our strategy to deliver payment technologies across LatAm. In summary, although we anticipate headwinds in 2017, we are driving the business forward, investing in core assets to continuously improve the customer experience and grow market share in the region.

With that, I will now turn the call over to Peter. .

First, a lower revenue mix contribution resulting from the loss of high margin processing revenue, that is only partially offset by new business and the Accuprint acquisition; second, increased investment expense in Latin America to improve our product set and delivery capabilities; third, increased compliance and information security related expenses; fourth, increased interest and operating depreciation expenses.

Additionally, in 2017 as I mentioned earlier we will continue to be negatively impacted by the termination of the maintenance expense reimbursements provided for in the Popular merger agreement throughout the first half of this year. We expect these expense increases to be only partially offset by cost and productivity actions in our plan.

All of these items are considered in our guidance and combined we believe will generate adjusted EBITDA margins in a range of 46% to 47% or approximately a 100 to 200 basis point decrease in our adjusted EBITDA margin.

Our operating depreciation is also anticipated to increase approximately $4 million to $32 million primarily reflecting increased point of sale terminal purchases which are depreciated over a shorter time period. As I referenced, our cash interest expense is anticipated to increase in 2017 by approximately $4 million.

Approximately $2.5 million is related to our existing swap that went into effect in January and the impact of our recent refinancing. Also, we have planned for a further $1.5 million increase based on consensus LIBOR projections.

Our projected stock compensation expense is $9 million to $10 million and reflects a third year of our restricted stock program and thus the first full year of vested related expense. Our effective tax rate is anticipated to be between 9.5% to 10.5% and this guidance does not reflect additional share repurchases.

Weighted average diluted shares are estimated to be approximately 73.5 million shares for the year. Our capital expenditures for 2017 are anticipated to be in a range of $35 million to $45 million and this includes continued investment in our infrastructure.

For further clarification in our guidance we have not included any estimates for the PayGroup transaction. In summary, we remain focused on our growth initiatives and improving our business on a sustained basis.

We do anticipate some headwinds in the year as Promesa related austerity measures are implemented and look forward to competing for potential 2017 government led IT and payment initiatives in Puerto Rico as they arise. We look forward to updating you on our progress and outlook as the year unfolds. We will now open the call for questions.

Operator, please go ahead and open the line. .

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from George Mihalos with Cowen..

Great, thanks guys. I guess first question, just on the guidance and the outlook for the year.

Should we assume that the first half results will be somewhat -- somewhat stronger than the back half on an organic basis based on your guide and I guess some of the austerity measures and the roll-off of some of the payment processing contracts?.

Hi George, this is Peter. I'll provide, I think, a bit of guidance on our segments which will help you with your question.

First, with respect to the merchant segment we expect to have a bit of headwind as we have about 6% that is applicable to Oriental in terms of a headwind for the first half of the year and then after that that anniversaries and we are projecting volumes to tail off in the second half of the year as you thought.

With respect to the payment segment, we have continued growth for first couple of months from Processa which is expected to anniversary after the first couple of months and then we will benefit for the first half from the Oriental contract change that I mentioned and we expect the attrition in Latin America to occur gradually throughout the year.

So the impact will be more significant in the second half of the year as again you have pointed to, and that will be partially offset by organic growth and new business.

And then finally with the business solutions segment, we’re going to benefit for the full year from the Accuprint and the CPI impact, together that’s around 5% and as I indicated we have the government contracts that will be renewing around mid-year and we anticipate a slight decline in discretionary government work throughout the year and the normal decline that we have in our paper based business.

So overall the general profile is going to closely resemble actually last year there were ‘16 [ph] but those are the puts and takes, so hopefully that helps address your question..

And just as a follow-up question. You guys talked about retaining some of the business that was slated to roll off on the payment processing side.

Can you talk a little bit about your efforts front -- on the new sales front and maybe some of the challenges you're seeing and how you’re addressing those?.

Hey George, this is Mac. So we talked a little bit on the last call that we've been able to retain a few of the accounts that were leaving. That said, it hasn’t changed. We still have a few that were able to retain. We won some additional small accounts in the quarter. We continue to pursue opportunities across the region.

We do believe that the Chile acquisition by expanding our roll-out of a breath of products will help in that effort as well, and that will continue to be a focus for ‘17..

The next question comes from John Davis with Stifel..

Hey good afternoon guys. Maybe just want to drill down on the merchant acquiring growth in the quarter for a second. With my math, FirstBank and Oriental kind of should have offset for the fourth quarter.

So maybe just talk about the core trends in the acquiring business and kind of what the outlook is on a core basis going into 2017?.

In the quarter, fourth quarter, the puts and takes are as follows. So the Oriental impact again is 6% growth, that was offset by approximately 3% for FirstBank and then we incurred other growth in the quarter of approximately 2%, so that’s how we get to the negative one for the quarter.

What we're seeing just in terms of the volume, the transaction volume has been strong, or resilient I should say at 8%. We are continuing to see a low average ticket impact and that shaves off approximately 3% and then with the other merchant mix shifts that’s how we arrived at sort of that 2% for the quarter.

In terms of what our outlook is we expect that to continue for the first half of the year and then have some drop-off in the volume as we anticipate the impacts of the austerity will affect the volume..

And then maybe just briefly the puts and takes on the margin outlook next year, I know you said down on 100 to 200 basis points. Just maybe walk through some of the puts and takes there for 2017..

Sure. As we indicated in the script there, the mix is going to impact us as the volume that we anticipate losing in Latin America in particular is very high margin card processing volume, and the volume that we're bringing on for Accuprint won't be able to -- we don't project will be able to offset that.

In terms of our expenses, we've highlighted that we’re going to be investing more in Latin America, in particular in our product set and that will impact the expenses.

We have other unavoidable expenses that we have for compliance and information security, that we have to commit to and then we're partially offsetting that with cost actions and predict -- productivity plans that we have in place for the year but unfortunately we can’t offset the majority of that expense. .

That’s helpful. And then last one from me, Mac, any color on PayGroup, are you willing to give us any type of revenue, EBITDA run rate, is it reasonable to assume a ten times multiple, so you’re looking at 3 million to 4 million, maybe any color there would be helpful. .

We’re not giving any color on sort of those attributes of the business right now, though. The one thing we will say is we’re incredibly excited about the opportunity. Like I said it's going to increase our role [ph] throughout the region, they've got some marquee banks throughout South America.

It will continue to expand our product portfolio so that we have more to offer to our customers and really strengthen our LatAm management team. It’s a team that's been in place for quite some time. But we'll give more details after we close the transaction.

As you know we have to go through the regulatory process with our bank partner but we will give more details after we close. .

And last one, or maybe just a quick follow up on that. Any reason why the quick turnaround, obviously the bank approval wasn't as easy maybe as you had thought for Processa, and it seems like January -- or sorry June 12 is coming up shortly.

Any reason why that date or do you think you’re going to have any issues hitting that?.

No, look, we’ve submitted a couple of deals to the Feds now and we were able to get both of those approved, if you looked at Processa, took a little longer than we had hoped, but the Accuprint deal was a little bit faster. So we hope we can get it done within that timeframe and that's a date that we felt was reasonable.

But again we’ve still got to go through the hurdles, go through the process but we anticipate that it will close..

The next question comes from David Ridley-Lane with Bank of America. .

Sure.

So can you update us on the total LatAm revenue losses that you expect in 2017? I believe you're talking about 7 million to 10 million spread evenly through the years, is that still a good number?.

Hi David, yes. That hasn't materially changed since we informed you guys last quarter. .

And does the Accuprint acquisition have higher or lower margins versus the Business Solutions segment?.

It approximates the Business Solutions segment, so I think it's a good proxy for the margins on that business. .

And then I know the guidance excludes any future share purchase but more theoretically, does the size of the PayGroup acquisition and the potential cash outflow there change your pace of share repurchases or how you're thinking about that?.

Well, we don't comment on the specifics of our share repurchase activity but with respect to the acquisition we plan to fund that approximately 50% from cash on hand, leveraging off short cash that we have as well as our revolving facility.

And just with respect to our overall capital allocation methodology it remains the same where we're investing for growth, we're committed to returning balanced returns -- with respect to our dividend and we also are our deleveraging a normal course and comfortable with our leverage and to the extent we have excess cash we’re committed to returning that through our share repurchase program.

Obviously the funding is significant for the Chile acquisition as you pointed out and we are also mindful that we have to pay down our term loan A in April 18 of $30 million. And so that's also factored into our planning. And we're generally just a bit cautious in this year as we look into the Puerto Rico macro situation.

So all of those are taken into consideration and that's how we're going to follow through the year..

And last one for me, and sort of the guidance, are you assuming the Puerto Rican transaction are slightly negative in the second half? Did I hear that right?.

We’ve not planned for negative, we expect it to go down anywhere from 3% to 6%. .

[Operator Instructions] The next question is from Chris Kennedy with William Blair. .

Hey guys thanks for taking the question. Mac, you alluded to your new sales activity in 2016 didn't meet your goals.

Can you give a little bit more color on that, how far below your goals was it, and what you're doing to change that?.

Yeah we didn't get financial goals. What we said at the beginning of the year is that we had hoped to announce some significant wins and throughout the year we found that we had more to do to improve the account servicing.

So this year we've really, as we talked about on previous calls, improved account servicing and management, we made some investments in products. So we did -- towards the end of the year we were beginning to win some small accounts again.

But ‘17, we'll continue to focus on continuing to build the pipeline, to continue to try and grow the business faster organically. .

And then PayGroup, can you talk a little bit more of kind of where you sourced that deal?.

Sure. So PayGroup, we sourced that ourselves and it was an inclusive process. We've been working on it for about a year now. And like I said I think it's a testament to our corporate development function that we've built..

And then one last one on the government renewals, can you just talk about historically when the renewal happens, is there a pricing cut or just how that process goes?.

Yeah, so annually a lot of these contracts renew, so this is a normal process. And with respect to pricing there it depends, I think some of the contracts have sort of an annual renewal feature but the pricing is in place for a longer period.

And each one has an individual negotiation, the way we look at our overall business as we've indicated is that we're providing essential services to the government, we think we compete in public processes for these contracts.

And as we've indicated before we believe as an essential service that those will continue and that has been articulated by the government with respect to essential services generally, right, not necessarily specific to ours but just as a general priority about us. .

And then government is -- did you say 7% of revenue or 9%?.

7%, it used to be 9%, it's come down a bit via even logo [ph] contracts that we had and just through the overall growth of our total revenue. End of Q&A.

This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mac Schuessler for any closing remarks..

As always we want to thank you for joining today's call. We look forward to updating you throughout the year. Thanks again..

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect..