Frank Bisignano
President, 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 banks, credit, unions 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 for others. Our relentless pursuit of innovation for our clients has placed us on the list of the world's most innovative companies by Fast Company for the second consecutive year.
We've entered 2022 its strong momentum we delivered 11% total company organic revenue growth in the first quarter. We expanded adjusted operating margin by 60 basis points to 32%. We also achieved 20% adjusted EPS growth to $1.40. We attained $40 million of actioned revenue synergies in the quarter, reaching $520 million since the merger 87% of the increase commitment of $600 million for the 5-year period following the merger and now expect to hit that goal by the end of this year. As we shared with you on our year-end 2021 earnings call, we concluded our cost synergy program having actioned the promised $1.2 billion of synergies since the closing of the merger.
As we invested to accelerate growth, free cash flow came in at $603 million. The outperformance on the top and bottom line versus our full year guidance ranges, puts us in a good position to meet or exceed our full year outlook. As we evaluate the year ahead, we believe it is prudent to you with our 2022 guidance unchanged, given the uncertain macroeconomic backdrop with high inflation rising interest rates and geopolitical issues. Accordingly, we are maintaining our 2022 outlook for organic revenue growth of 7% to 9% and adjusted earnings per share in a range of $6.40 to $6.50, representing growth of 15% to 17% for 2022.
Now turning to our business strategy. Fiserv solutions are geared towards merchants and financial institutions, including fintechs. Starting with merchants. We are transforming from selling merchants individual point solutions to offering operating systems. Clover for small to medium-sized merchants and Carat for large enterprises. This is operating systems approach expands the size of our total addressable market and makes us more valuable to our customers. We grow and create value in three ways. First, attracting more merchants through our operating systems. Second, expanding the relationship we have with our merchants by encouraging adoption of more software and services modules, and third, benefiting from their organic growth of our existing customer base.
Turning to our financial institution clients, we remain steadfast in our commitment to continuously innovate for our clients and broadening our total addressable market. In early April, we closed the acquisition of fintech, a leading developer of cloud native banking solutions. We have already seen a tremendous amount of interest in the platform from existing and new clients. We believe, this acquisition will augment our ability to enrich and accelerate the delivery of digital solutions to existing clients, as well as broaden our client base to include large financial institutions and fintechs through banking as a service and embedded finance opportunities.
We advanced our strategic focus on data and analytics. This quarter, we announced partnerships with Equifax, Finicity and MX which will utilize our vast and highly valuable real-time data to create insights to strengthen and create new offerings across fraud, risk and market. While early in the journey, we expect data and analytics to be a new growth driver for us. Next, diving deeper into our performance in the quarter by Business segment, let me start with Merchant Acceptance. We posted a very strong organic revenue growth of 20% year-over-year. Global merchant volume and transactions grew 11% and 8% respectively.
Our global active merchant accounts grew 6% year-over-year to the first quarter continuing the positive trend since the start of 2021. Results were strong across all regions. North America was led by strength in SMBs, particularly within the restaurant vertical, as well as strength in enterprise verticals such as travel and petro.
Spending across MA is strong in the quarter as restrictions were lifted in the UK and the Netherlands in early January, followed by Ireland, Poland and Germany later in the quarter. Travel is particularly strong followed by restaurants and hospitality. Our merchant business in LATAM was also very strong in the quarter. We made significant progress in on-boarding merchants to exclusive Merchant Acquiring mandate from Caixa in Brazil with a 140,000 merchants currently on-boarded. In just one year, since I agreement we are also expanding our presence rapidly in Mexico and Colombia.
Spending trends in APAC were very strong, as key markets such as India and Australia continue to resume normalcy. Fueling discretionary spend in verticals such as travel, retail and restaurants. In addition to the cyclical rebound the region has continued to win and implement new business. Moving to our merchant operating systems, Clover and Carat continue to gain significant traction with clients. Clover global revenue grew 39% in the quarter, driven by volume growth of 39% as well as close to 200 basis points of sequential growth in software and services penetration of revenue to 15%.
We continue to make progress on our vertical focus. Starting with restaurants the integration of BentoBox into Clover is well underway. And the early proof points in both lease conversion rate and ARPU are all very positive. Within the services and retail verticals we are offering merchants leading solutions to address key business functions through a combination of pre-installed apps and tailored vertical SaaS offerings. Carat our omni-commerce operating system for enterprise clients grew revenue 20% we saw broad-based growth across verticals including travel, government, technology and quick-serve restaurants. In the quarter we had some impressive wins across omni and e-com acquiring included a card-not-present acquiring mandate, to the leading fantasy sports, players DraftKings an extension of our long-standing omnichannel partnership with Checkpoint a mandate for fast food brand choosing my subs.
With the new payment flows tariffs leadership and digital payouts contingents with a doubling of disbursement volume processed in the quarter. During the quarter, we extended our contract with Coinbase to support their launch of an AFT marketplace. We are making rapid inroads into the high growth markets such as payment facilitators and platforms. The November acquisition of NetPay gives us a differentiated solution in the market, including fully managed onboarding risk and funding services to support these high growth platform businesses.
We have seen rapid growth in this end market with new clients signing nearly doubling transactions in the past year. Finally, before closing out the Merchant segment, an update on the progress of our point of sale lending offering. Our strategy all along has been to leverage our position as the operating platform for businesses, small, medium and large to offer a range of buy now pay later options. We are simplifying the merchant experience through an integration into the Carat operating system for large enterprises and enabling the NPL app downloads through the Clover app market for small and mid-size businesses. By enabling our clients to easily connect to BNPL providers of their choice. We are making it possible for them to offer their customers in demand payment options and in easy to manage cost effective way.
Moving to the Payments and Network segment, organic revenue grew 5% in the quarter. This growth was enabled by a variety of drivers across our business lines. Our North American credit active accounts on file grew 10% versus Q1 of last year. This growth was driven by new business onboarding and our favorable credit environment. We fully Genesis Financial onto our platform in the quarter, which, along with the onboarding of Atlanticus last year. Marci, onboarding of two of the three major credit processing mandates we announced in 2020.
We had solid growth in our debit networks Star and Excel and debit processing businesses driven by new wins despite the stimulus induced tough growth comparisons in the year ago. We've seen impressive growth in engagement metrics across OFIs driven by our market leading digital solutions like CardHub SpendTrack our loyalty platform and our AI-based fraud system. These surrounds not only greatly enhance the competitiveness of our credit and debit card processing offering, but also serve to drive more cars into our debit network and more opportunities for Fiserv to offer a risk and fraud digital banking and account processing solutions demonstrating an attractive flywheel effect.
We continue to see growth in digital payments, driven by Zelle which posted transaction growth of a strong 40% in the quarter. Finally, while we still see softness in our bill payments business sequential growth rates continue to improve, as we create new use cases like bill pay for fintechs including crypto digital wallets and enter long term renewals with large clients notably US. Bank and Regions Bank. Additionally this summer, we will launch a revamp bill pay interface to elevate the customer experience.
Looking ahead, our sales and product pipeline gives us confidence in our ability to grow the Payments segment in the 5% to 8% medium-term organic revenue range. Our client wins in the quarter support this momentum. We signed a long term renewal with a highly valued clients synchronous spanning across issuer processing bank services and Merchant Acquiring reinforcing our commitment to providing best-in-class solutions to our clients. We continue to win credit processing mandates globally. In the first quarter, we signed new instalment loan provider West Citi Financial in Canada. The debit wins in the quarter included a processing win extending our relationship with KeyBank, and in integrated debit processing network and digital surround solutions win with Heritage Federal Credit Union, a $900 million asset size client.
These wins showcase the breadth and reach of our debit processing capabilities spanning from smaller credit unions to some of the nation's largest financial institutions. We also continue to show the power of our enterprise offering, and our competitive advantage when working with fintechs. This quarter, we signed an enterprise agreement with a new digital financial services company across bank services, credit and debit processing and output services. We will also fully onboard Bread Financial, previously known as Alliance Data for a card processing in the second quarter of this year. The tailwinds from our large grade implementation recent debit wins like KeyBanc this quarter Chime in Great Southern over the last couple of quarters and the investments in our digital surround solutions gives us confidence to continued growth in Payments and Network segment.
Moving to Financial Technology segment, we posted strong organic revenue growth of 6% in the quarter. We had 12 core wins in the quarter, including 4 competitive takeaways. Sales of digital surround solutions continue to grow at a healthy clip, driven by the increased digital focus about financial institution clients and the success of ability our modern online and mobile banking platform. Sales to existing clients, help us deepen the penetration of our fully integrated digital surrounds such as CardHub, Zelle and SpendTrack thereby creating stickier clients. The competitive landscape continues to evolve quickly and we believe that our fintech strategy combined with fintech's modern core capabilities positions us uniquely to offer a full stack of offerings aimed at expanding the addressable market for embedded finance and banking as a service.
The wind spin of our strategy is our open finance initiative. In the third quarter of 2021, we launched our new developer boilm The Developer Studio a platform for exposing our micro service APIs for the developer community with the goal of becoming a destination of choice for the embedded finance ecosystem including card-issuing and processing, merchant and core banking integrations. Our banking as a service capability enables financial institutions to expose modern fintech solutions to their client base to increase engagement and relevance while extending their reach in the new market segments. Our banking as a service capability is also a turnkey solution for fintechs and merchants wanting to offer banking and payment services.
We believe we are best positioned to power the ongoing revolution banking as a service and embedded finance due to our footprint of community financial institutions and breadth of banking and payment capabilities. Now, let me pass the discussion to Bob for more detail on our financial results.