First, we are delighted to announce that Truist Financial Corporation has selected Global Payments to be its provider of issuer processing services for its combined businesses.
Truist is the sixth largest commercial bank in the United States serving approximately 12 million consumer households and a full range of business clients with leading market share in many of the most attractive high-growth markets in the country.
Contactless is a great example, and we have seen near 30% year-on-year growth in recent periods.
Synovus is a leading regional commercial bank with 299 branches in the southeast region of the United States.
Our partner software business, which we recently rebranded as Global Payments Integrated, launched 30 new partners in the first few months of 2020.
We have also begun testing this solution for a potential placement throughout the restaurant brands international family of more than 26,000 global restaurants.
In fact, for the first quarter, the number of omni mobile and online orders processed for Xenial customers increased over 50% sequentially as QSRs shifted toward online fulfillment.
During April, we processed over 0.5 million deposits accounting for over $1.2 billion in stimulus payments to American consumers dispersed by the IRS.
We made significant strides on our integration this quarter, and we continue to anticipate delivering at least $125 million in annual run rate revenue synergies and at least $350 million in annual run rate expense synergies within three years of the merger close.
We expect these actions to deliver at least an incremental $400 million in annualized savings over the next 12 months.
As Jeff mentioned, even with the vast majority of our nearly 24,000 team members worldwide working from home since mid-March, our business has continued to operate seamlessly.
In addition to the Xenial highlights that Jeff already provided, our higher education business had its strongest ever bookings performance in March, and AdvancedMD saw bookings increased 35% year on year for the first quarter largely due to our ability to deliver cloud-based technology solutions, including telemedicine capabilities to physician practices throughout the U.S. In our Heartland business, we delivered outstanding growth of over 30% in online payments during the first quarter as we continued to see strong customer demand for our omnichannel solutions.
Merchant migration and lead referrals from all branches commenced at the beginning of March, and we received nearly 1,500 referrals before the current disruption.
We also converted over 300,000 accounts during the period and have a robust pipeline with implementation stage throughout the year and into 2021.
In fact, in North America alone, we have added over 1,800 new restaurants to our online ordering platform since mid-March.
For healthcare customers at AdvancedMD, we've enabled nearly 1,500 practices with telemedicine capabilities, delivering the technology for more than 80,000 virtual visits in the last two weeks of March alone.
Further, we are waiving setup fees in the first 90 days of subscription fees for our virtual card add-on solution to brick-and-mortar gift card customers and have extended free trial period of our analytics and customer engagement platform that we are deploying in our Heartland business.
For the first quarter, total company adjusted net revenue was $1.73 billion, reflecting growth of 108% over 2019 and ahead of our preliminary expectations on April 6.
Adjusted operating margins expanded an impressive 300 basis points to 39% for the quarter and well above the 250 basis point annual expansion target we mentioned on our last call.
As a result, we were able to deliver strong adjusted earnings-per-share growth of 18% to $1.58, which also includes a roughly 100-basis-point impact from adverse foreign currency exchange rate movements.
First, adjusted net revenue in merchant solutions increased 2% on a combined basis to $1.1 billion for the first quarter, which includes nearly a 100-basis-point headwind from currency while adjusted operating margin improved 180 basis points to 45.4%.
Before the spread of COVID-19, we were experiencing low double-digit adjusted net revenue growth in this segment, excluding the impact of COVID-19 in Asia Pacific, which negatively impacted results consistent with the $15 million drag we had previously disclosed.
As Cameron noted, we delivered strong growth in online sales at Heartland during the quarter while in Europe, we saw high single-digit growth in the U.K. and roughly 20% growth in Spain as more spending moved online.
Moving to issuer solutions, we delivered a record $442 million in adjusted net revenue for the first quarter, representing growth of 150 basis points on a constant-currency basis.
As I mentioned previously, this business was tracking in line with our expectations through early March for roughly 3% growth with underlying trends to that point remaining consistent with our long-term outlook for mid-single-digit growth.
Adjusted segment operating margin expanded a very strong 430 basis points to 39.5% as we continue to drive efficiencies and make the pivot toward the cloud in this business.
We also added over 13 million accounts on file this quarter, producing yet another record.
Finally, our business and consumer solutions segment delivered adjusted net revenue of $204 million, down nearly 7% from the prior year, primarily due to headwinds from the CFPB prepaid rule and seasonal tax impacts.
Adjusted operating margin for the quarter for this segment was 25.7% and was again better than our expectation.
We continue to be pleased by the performance of our DDA products with account growth of over 30% from the prior-year period.
As it relates to cost actions, as Jeff highlighted, we have already implemented expense initiatives that will translate to roughly $100 million per quarter in incremental cost benefits for the balance of 2020.
From a cash flow standpoint for the quarter, we generated adjusted free cash flow of approximately $400 million, which was in line with our expectation.
We also exited Q1 with roughly $1.3 billion of available cash, including $640 million in excess of our operating cash needs.
This excess cash increased approximately $300 million from year-end.
We have adjusted our capital spending outlook for the year from the high $500 million to low $600 million range we talked about on our last call and now expect to be in the $400 million to $500 million range or roughly $100 million less for the year.
We invested $105 million of cash in the first quarter that was focused on new products and technologies to ensure we continue to build upon our leading portfolio of pure-play payment solutions, which is consistent with our newly revised estimate.
Earlier in the quarter, we finished the buyback activity started in the fourth quarter, purchasing 2.1 million of our shares for approximately $400 million.
We ended the quarter with a leverage position of roughly 2.45 times on a net-debt basis or roughly 2.75 times on a gross basis consistent with year-end.
With $2.9 billion of liquidity, including our available cash and undrawn revolver and no significant required debt repayments until our maturity in April 2021, we are truly in a position of financial strength.
This includes both our issuer and business consumer segments, which combined account for roughly 35% of our adjusted net revenue.

Summary:
First, we are delighted to announce that Truist Financial Corporation has selected Global Payments to be its provider of issuer processing services for its combined businesses.
We made significant strides on our integration this quarter, and we continue to anticipate delivering at least $125 million in annual run rate revenue synergies and at least $350 million in annual run rate expense synergies within three years of the merger close.
We expect these actions to deliver at least an incremental $400 million in annualized savings over the next 12 months.
As a result, we were able to deliver strong adjusted earnings-per-share growth of 18% to $1.58, which also includes a roughly 100-basis-point impact from adverse foreign currency exchange rate movements.