Deluxe Corporation (NYSE:DLX) Q2 2024 Earnings Conference Call July 31, 2024 5:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Brian Anderson - VP, Strategy & IR
Barry McCarthy - President & CEO
Chip Zint - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Lance Vitanza - TD Cowen
Kartik Mehta - Northcoast Research
Charlie Strauzer - CJS Securities
Marc Riddick - Sidoti

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Deluxe Quarterly Earnings Conference Call. All participants are currently in a listen-only mode and today's call is being recorded.

At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to your host, Vice President of Strategy and Investor Relations, Brian Anderson. Please go ahead.

Brian Anderson

Thank you, operator, and welcome to the Deluxe second quarter 2024 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 this afternoon, in our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023, and 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.

In our press release, today's presentation, and our filings with the SEC, you'll find additional disclosures regarding the 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 comparable adjusted EPS, which may assist with your modeling.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Barry.

Barry McCarthy

Thanks, Brian, and good evening, everyone.

I'm pleased to report our second quarter results, reflecting sustained earnings momentum across the enterprise, including continued year-over-year improvement to both comparable adjusted EBITDA dollars and rate, which improved 80 basis points to 19% during the period.

We also continued to deliver strong operating cash flows, reflecting expected sequential growth versus our first quarter results, and a very robust year-to-date improvement versus the first half of 2023. These results are reflective of our continuing strong execution across core capital allocation priorities and initiatives of our North Star operating plan. These efforts are accelerating the growth of these key profitability metrics and further demonstrate our ability to consistently expand earnings faster than revenue.