Jeff Sloan
Chief Executive Officer at Global Payments
Thanks, Winnie. We delivered record results in the third quarter, consistent with the higher end of our September 2021 cycle guidance on a constant currency basis and excluding dispositions, highlighting the resiliency of our business model, and our consistency of execution across market cycles. Importantly, our merchant business again delivered double-digit revenue growth, and our core issuer business continued to produce sequential improvement consistent with our expectations each on a foreign exchange neutral basis.
Internal metrics thus far into October suggests continuing solid performance for the fourth quarter, much as September did versus August and August versus July. It's certainly possible that things could change for the worse, given ongoing macroeconomic concerns, but that would require an adverse change that we do not broadly see in the current environment. Notably, we are achieving these results while making substantial progress on our strategic and financing initiatives.
We received Hart-Scott-Rodino clearance in the United States for our acquisition of EVO Payments, and divestiture of NetSpend's consumer business. And we have now made regulatory filings in all jurisdictions, foreign and domestic, contemplated by the transactions. We took steps to finance the EVO transaction with a successful $2.5 billion fixed income offering in early August at attractive rates, and we undertook a concurrent long-term extension and enhancement of our revolving credit facility. We also completed our $1.5 billion strategic investment with Silver Lake and associated transactions. We are proud of the company that we keep, and we welcome senior partner, Joe Osnoss from Silver Lake to our Board of Directors.
Our issuer business remains on track for continued core growth acceleration into year-end following an acceleration into the third quarter after a robust Q2. Our relationships with many of the most complex and sophisticated institutions globally speak to our competitiveness well into the remainder of this decade. Our issuer conversion pipeline now stands at a record post-merger of 75 million accounts, providing further confidence of our growth trajectory well into the future. What better example than our recent go-live with one of the top 10 commercial banks in the United States, which was a competitive takeaway early after the announcement of our merger. We are delighted that earlier this month, we began onboarding and servicing the bank's new consumer and small business commercial accounts on TS2. We expect this partner to be prepared for the conversion of its existing consumer and commercial accounts early next year.
This quarter, we also converted the consumer and commercial portfolios for another large US-based bank as a new customer as well as a large retail portfolio acquired by an existing financial institution partner, both of which were competitive takeaways. And we continue to make great progress with AWS, our preferred issuer technology solutions partner, for unique distribution and cutting-edge technologies. We are pleased to announce that we have reached an LOI with a leading global travel technology company who chose TSYS as an issuer solutions partner for its platform across the UK and EU after an extensive RFP process. Once live, this will be our first fintech customer on Prime in the AWS cloud in Europe.
We currently have seven letters of intent with institutions worldwide, nearly all of which were achieved through a competitive RFP process and a competitive takeaway. Another seven of our recent LOIs, including five competitive takeaways, have gone to contract since the beginning of 2022 providing further future growth opportunities. Traditional accounts on file increased by $14 million sequentially this quarter, driven by account growth with existing customers as our strategy of aligning with market share winners continues to pay dividends. And transaction volumes grew double digits in Q3, led by commercial card transactions, which increased 25%, highlighting ongoing recovery trends in cross-border corporate travel and the strength of our long-lasting partnerships.
At our investor conference last September, we announced B2B as the fourth and newest pillar of our strategy, meaningfully expanding our target addressable markets. As of this quarter, we are now managing Netspend's B2B assets as a part of our issuer business after successfully aligning MineralTree's capabilities with this segment earlier this year. We are delighted with the momentum we are seeing across our B2B portfolio, which includes technology centered on virtual card solutions, a vast commercial card footprint, massive distribution partnerships with the world's leading financial institutions, data and analytics, market-leading payroll technologies and access globally to nonbank card rails.
Recent B2B highlights include providing virtual commercial account services to banks and fintechs in partnership with Xtend, reaching a letter of intent with specialty fintech even bolt to enable commercial expense management and integrated payable solutions and signing a multiyear commercial card agreement with Santander in the United States as a competitive takeaway. We are also pleased to have signed new virtual card services and AP services in wins with two leading US financial institutions.
Additionally, MineralTree achieved a number of milestones, including signing a marquee deal with Grupo Bimbo in the US and Canada, one of our largest B2B bookings to date; generating record-breaking virtual card spend in the month of September and executing a referral agreement with fintech ramp to cross-sell expense management and card on file capabilities. We're also pleased to have recently enhanced our relationship with Visa to support their branded cards in the payables space. And this is all, of course, before augmenting our B2B capabilities with EVO's leading accounts receivable automation software solutions, including its extensive proprietary integrations to some of the most widely used ERP environments in the market through its paid fabric platform, including SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, Acumatica and Sage.
Moving to Merchant Solutions, we are pleased to announce in partnership with Google that we have partnered with Genuine Parts Company to deliver innovative cloud-based payment solutions for the extensive NAPA Auto Parts domestic distribution network. Leveraging the combined power of Global Payments and Google Cloud, NAPA will streamline Commerce operations for its B2B transactions across the United States. We continue to expand our acquiring relationship with Google in North America following the success of our initial launch in Asia Pacific late last year. Volumes are now building in the US market with Google as a customer, and we expect the ramp to continue throughout this quarter. We also anticipate bringing our partnership with Google to Europe next year. Additionally, we remain on track to launch Phase 2 of Google Run and Grow My Business to help our merchants grow faster by connecting additional Google services to our digital platform this quarter.
We yet again delivered solid growth in our e-comm and omni-channel business for the third quarter, well ahead of the markets as we have done all year. We continue to benefit from our unique ability to seamlessly blend the physical and virtual worlds in more markets than our peers. And of course, the pending acquisition of EVO and entry into new geographies like Poland and Germany will enhance our target addressable markets. We are excited to have recently reached an agreement to expand our e-commerce partnership with Gucci, a division of French multinational corporate carrying for acceptance services beyond Europe and into Asia Pacific, where we will deliver a uniform solution and seamless experience virtually for one of the most sophisticated luxury retail brands.
Our partnership with Citi via UCP recently went live in Spain, France and Italy, and we continue to expect to go live in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden prior to year-end. Together, we are currently targeting Citi's largest treasury and trade solutions customers, and are excited to announce Citi recently signed one of the world's top social media platforms and one of the world's top e-commerce markets platforms. In our vertical markets portfolio, we saw a significant return of growth in School Solutions as expected, and this business delivered substantial improvement in the quarter with the lapsing of pandemic areas [Phonetic] subsidies on school lunches.
Also, our Xenial business continues to post solid wins in the sports and entertainment areas, with new signings with the Carolina Panthers and the Winnipeg Jets. And our pipeline in this channel remains robust. Lastly, we continue to see strong double-digit growth in our real estate vertical market business, Zego, with our new flexible payments product driving significant demand for our digital solutions. Lastly, I'm delighted to announce that we have launched our merchant referral relationship with Virgin Money in the United Kingdom this quarter and are already realizing strong lead flow and new signings from this partnership. We also remain on track to launch Virgin Money's new pay proposition early next year.
We did exactly what we said we would do in the third quarter of 2022. Our core businesses continued their track record of extraordinary growth and are well positioned heading into year-end. Our strategic investments are tracking the plan and our new partnerships are right in line with our expectations. We are very fortunate to be in the position that we are in heading into the final quarter of the year. Josh?