Frank J. Bisignano
President and Chief Executive Officer at Fiserv
Thank you, Shub, and thank you all for listening in as we share our results for the quarter and highlight the progress against our growth agenda. As you know, we serve as the operating system for commerce and money movement across our client base of the banks, fintechs and businesses, ranging from SMBs to mid-market to large enterprises. We help our clients grow by extending our platform to capture new services and new money flows. We are also seeing real benefits from the ongoing economic recovery, especially here in the US. We remain optimistic and continue to invest in growth.
Turning to our performance. We had a strong third quarter with total Company adjusted revenue up 10%. Adjusted operating margin expanded a 130 basis points to 34.2%. Adjusted EPS grew 23% to $1.47. We attained our highest quarter of actioned revenue synergies of $95 million. To date, we have achieved $420 million of actioned revenue synergies, 70% of the increase commitment of $600 million for the five-year period following the merger.
As we invested to accelerate growth, free cash flow came in at $572 million for the quarter and $2.3 billion year-to-date. Free cash flow was driven by a combination of the following: first, increased capital expenditure in the areas of technology, innovation hubs and the integration of newly acquired capabilities; second, the working capital increase driven by revenue growth; and finally, reduced benefit of our net operating loss carry-forwards.
On the back of our results and the strength of our investments, we are tightening our outlook for organic revenue growth and raising the lower end of our outlook for adjusted EPS. We now expect organic, constant currency growth of 11% for the full-year and adjusted earnings per share between $5.55 and $5.60. This raises the lower end of our prior adjusted earnings per share outlook by $0.05, a growth of 26% to 27% over last year.
Turning to the business segments, let me start with Merchant Acceptance. We continue to grow beyond the buy button by investing in world-class omnichannel capabilities, solutioning around vertical and horizontal business needs and capturing new flows. We achieved all of this through our three growth platforms. Clover for small business, Clover Connect for ISV and Carat for enterprises. Driving into our performance, Merchant Acceptance led the quarter, posting organic revenue growth of 18% year-over-year with North America and international largely in line with the segment average for the quarter.
Our global merchant locations have been growing at a healthy clip, up 10% in the quarter on a year-over-year basis, driven by positive net new merchants across all regions. The quarter was driven by growth in global volume and transactions of 15% and 12%, respectively. North America volume and transactions grew 14% and 9%, respectively, led by strength in travel, restaurants and petro. Excluding the impact of the loss of a large processing client through one of our JVs, North America volume and transaction growth in the quarter would have been 19% and 14%, respectively.
Next, let's go deeper by platform, starting with Clover. GPV grew 47% year-over-year or 39% CAGR since 2019 to $196 billion on an annualized basis. In the SMB space, we remain focused in building vertical-specific solutions, offering an integrated suite of products that help merchants to generate revenue and run their business. As part of our vertical strategy, we entered into an agreement to acquire BentoBox, a digital marketing e-commerce platform, focused on driving growth in engagement for restaurants. This transaction will expand our Clover Dining Solutions and industry-leading commerce and business management capabilities, which already enable nearly 200,000 restaurants of all sizes to deliver unique and differentiating dining experience from quick and casual, to fine dining. We expect the acquisition to close in the fourth quarter, subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions. Additionally, we continue to focus on building value-added services for the Clover platform, including Clover Capital, Clover Dining, Clover Order Ahead and Clover Inventory, as well as our unique Clover app marketplace.
On the enterprise side, Carat, our enterprise omnichannel platform continued its strong momentum in the third quarter with new wins, product innovation and a gradual recovery in cross-border commerce. Global e-commerce volume grew unabated in the quarter, driven by cross-border and international growth of 25% on a year-over-year basis, as volumes recovered from the pandemic lows with secular tailwinds expected to sustain future momentum. Omnichannel transactions such as Order Ahead and buy online pickup in store grew 35% in the quarter.
We had notable e-commerce wins in the quarter, including Johnson & Johnson and Caesars Entertainment. We also expanded our existing global acquiring relationship with Microsoft to be their provider for network tokens. In the quarter, we added PayPal and Venmo as digital wallet payout options to our global [Indecipherable] platform, cementing Carat as a leader in digital payouts with over 10 billion processed year-to-date, an increase of 230% on a year-over-year basis. Additionally, we are building a new partnership with Bakkt, a leading crypto and consumer wallet solution provider. Bakkt will utilize Fiserv's industry-leading funds in funds out solution and together, Fiserv and Bakkt, will develop new crypto use cases from both merchant and FI clients.
Moving to Clover Connect, the strength of our ISV-focused offering show that through the third quarter with ISV volume of 71% year-over-year. Clover Connect allows us to bring together two strong Fiserv assets. The world-class hardware and software platform of Clover, along with the best-in-class partner management and operational tool of CoPilot, which gives ISVs a unique view into all of the merchants activities ranging from merchant application processing to support. Our commitment to being the best partner for ISVs is resonating. We signed 47 new ISVs in the third quarter, bringing our total wins to 142 year-to-date. We continue signing up ISVs that are new to payments and winning against the competition. This quarter, more than half of our wins were competitive takeaways.
Before I address our international progress, I'd like to highlight another focus area in our merchant business, point of sale lending. We are leveraging our position as the operating platform for businesses, small, medium and large to offer a range of buy now pay later options. We are expanding our referral relationships while simplifying the merchant experience through integrations with our platforms like Clover. We currently have referral agreements with Zip, Citizens Pay and Bread. We're also working with our FI clients to bring their BNPL offerings to market. For example, we are partnering with Synchrony to offer buy now pay later solutions on our card processing platform Optis. Synchrony also recently announced acceptance of private label cards through Clover.
On our Investor Day, we talked to you about our Merchant Acceptance growth strategy for international. We remain focused on growing our global market presence with world-class bank partners and through our direct channels, all while leveraging the strength of common platforms and connections. The global expansion of Clover platform into APAC, Latin America and EMEA are all currently in play. We are on track to roll out Clover in India by the third quarter of 2022, a tremendous opportunity, given the size and growth potential of the market. Clover is already in market in Argentina, as expected to launch in Brazil next year, thereby, covering the two largest markets in Latin America. In EMEA, Clover is in market across the UK, Germany and Netherlands and Ireland with a further boost expected with the rollout of the Deutsche Bank JV that we announced last quarter. Among the key APAC deals completed in the quarter is an omnichannel merchant acquirer processing mandate from Bank of China with their fast-growing Macau market.
Moving to EMEA, Fiserv partnered with PostFinance, one of the largest financial institutions in Switzerland to provide credit card acquiring services to their Swiss merchant clients. We are starting with an initial 4,000 merchants that accept the PostFinance card today with plans to expand to the entire merchant base of 60,000 over time. Fiserv is also supporting restaurant brands, owner of iconic brands, including Burger King and Popeyes, as the company expands its footprint across Europe through an [Phonetic] omnichannel approach. Fiserv will provide acquiring services for Burger King in the UK and the Nordics and Popeyes in the UK.
To close on the Merchant segment, as you may recall, in April, we won a 20-year deal to become the exclusive provider of merchant acquiring services for Caixa Economica Federal, one of the largest Brazilian banks. We are pleased to report that the implementation of this mandate started at the beginning of August and is going extremely well with 65,000 merchants onboarded as of last week.
Moving to the Payments and Network segment, organic revenue grew 6% in the quarter, resulting in year-to-date growth of 5%. Our Payments segment consists of three businesses: global Credit Processing and Output Solutions, which we call Issuer Solutions, which is 40% of the segment; Debit Processing and Debit Networks, which we call -- refer to as Card Services, also one-third of the segment; and the third business is comprised of digital solutions bill pay and our prepaid business. Our Issuer Solutions business, which grew just below the overall Payments segment average is seeing the benefit of a continued credit recovery with general purpose credit gross active accounts up in the high-single digits. Note, that our credit issuer solutions revenue is driven by number of accounts not credit volume. However, as credit volumes recover, the number of accounts will follow. Looking ahead, we expect growth in the business to be driven by the continued ramp of last year's notable wins, including three of the top 25 issuer wins, which we announced last year. We also recently completed PNC's conversion of BBVA's card portfolios to our platform. Our retail private label portfolio also continues to recover from its COVID loans, although at a slower pace than we anticipated at the beginning of the year.
Within card services, which grew organic revenue a couple of points faster than the overall Payments segment average, we saw a strong growth in debit transactions driving our issuance and network businesses. Looking ahead, we expect to sustain growth for this business by broadening our total addressable market. For instance, in the quarter, our STAR debit network signed an agreement with leading US consumer fintech, Chime, to become its preferred unaffiliated network for debit. We believe that aligning with one of the largest fintech issuers is a testimony to the scale and technical capabilities of the STAR network and positions the network well for future growth. This was also one of our notable action synergy revenues in the quarter.
During our Investor Day, we discussed the opportunity to offer a fully managed by Fiserv of credit card issuing option to community FIs and share that we were actively exploring this market. We are pleased to announce that we are currently piloting our agent-credit program offerings branded Credit Choice, and we'll launch in Q1 2022. Credit Choice is a fully managed credit card issuing-as-a-service solution that allows our community FIs to offer their customers and FI-branded credit card experience that is fully integrated into their debit solution, but without the operational burden of running their own credit card portfolio. Credit Choice leverages our scale distribution and world-class card issuing surround solutions such as Ondot and SpendLabs to expand into a sizable new addressable market for Fiserv where the economics per card are considerably richer than in processing. We have already seen strong early interest from clients with hundreds of prospects in the pipeline.
On the Q2 call, we spoke to you about our rich mobile-first consumer and business offerings, powered by recent acquisitions Ondot and SpendLabs. The early results of the launch has been very encouraging. We completed the integration of the Card Hub platform into our credit and debit processing platforms into our Mobiliti mobile banking platform. We are seeing tremendous demand for this integrated solution from both new prospects, as well as existing CardValet clients whom we expect to fully migrate to the integrated Card Hub solutions by the end of 2022. In addition, we expect to expand the platform to add loyalty, instalment payment and dispute management, thereby, establishing Card Hub as a key differentiator to drive new sales and client retention. For our financial institution clients, this solution is a game changer. It enhances consumer engagement with their digital banking platform, creates more fee income through greater card usage and catapults the FIs overall digital experience into the leagues of some of the world's top banks and neobanks.
In the third business, results are mixed. We had good growth in our digital payments activity led by Zelle transaction growth of 75% in the quarter and the number of clients live now reaching just under 750. Prepaid growth was driven by new client wins within our solutions business. We expect growth to continue driven by new use cases. Our bill pay business, which encompasses both the direct biller and bill pay through our financial institutions continues to grow slower than expected. However, we are extending our bill pay capabilities beyond the financial institution channel going live later this month as an enabler of PayPal's bill payment functionality within PayPal's new app. Additionally, we expanded our relationship with a large telecom provider to enable commercial card payments with our BillMatrix solution.
Moving to the Financial Technology segment, the quarter was in line with our expectations, posting organic revenue growth of 4%, resulting in 4% growth year-to-date. We added 14 new core account processing clients in the quarter, including seven competitive takeaways and two de novo wins. Our DNE platform is seeing great success, including with larger financial institutions as evidenced in the Valley National Bank and Dollar Bank wins with assets over $40 billion and $10 billion, respectively.
Abiliti, our modern cloud-based API-driven digital banking platform is seeing great momentum with a 150 incremental sales in the quarter. 138 of these sales were to existing clients, which would drive our client's digital transformation and deepen the penetration of our fully integrated digital surrounds, such as Card Hub, Zelle and SpendLabs. The remaining 12 were new logo sales with half being core competitive takeaways. We also continue to enrich our open banking and fintech ecosystem. Again, in line with the goals laid out in last year's Investor Conference.
We launched our new Developer portal, which we call the Fiserv Developer Studio towards the end of the third quarter. The Developer Studio provides rich and expansive API integrations to support banks, fintechs, merchants and enterprise clients with developer tools needed to accelerate innovation, integrations across the entire Fiserv ecosystem. Additionally, we also announced partnerships with exciting news fintechs, FutureFuel.io and Streetshares, and that [Phonetic] creating new whitespace opportunities in digital for both retail consumer and small business lending, respectively. We believe that we're extremely well positioned to continue to drive revenue in a segment higher by delivering new innovation, such as Abiliti, strategically acquiring and integrating attractive surround solutions like Ondot and SpendLabs and leveraging the power of the developer community through our Developer Studio API portal or dedicated go-to-market integrations like FutureFuel.io and Streetshares.
Now, let me pass the discussion to Bob for more detail on our financial results.