Deluxe Corporation (NYSE:DLX) Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call November 6, 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
Charlie Strauzer - CJS
Will Brunemann - Northcoast Research
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'd 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 Third 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 of the company's future performance or strategy 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 release we furnished this afternoon, in our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023, and in 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 release, today's presentation and our filings with the SEC, you'll find additional disclosures regarding the non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations 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 strong third quarter results, including sustained growth across our core comparable adjusted earnings metrics, continued expansion of free cash flows and a reduced level of net debt for the enterprise.

During the quarter, we drove nearly 7% year-over-year growth in comparable adjusted EBITDA, accompanying a margin expansion of 140 basis points. Our free cash flow also grew 9.5% for the period. As we outlined at our Investor Day last December, the North Star program was designed systematically to accelerate these key profitability metrics, and our third quarter results further demonstrate our ability to consistently expand earnings faster than revenue.