We are pleased today to announce two strategic acquisitions for approximately $1 billion in total that further are software-driven technology enabled strategy and deepen our presence in the most attractive markets globally we expect to continue to gain market share and extend our lead.
In combination with the roughly $1 billion in share repurchases we've affected since returning to our capital allocation strategy at the end of last year, we continue to balance appropriately reinvestment in the future growth of our business with efficient return of capital.
Real estate is the contestants of the type of market that we seek, sizable, global in scope, fragmented and right for further software digital commerce and payments penetration, and COVID-19 has accelerated the underlying changes that make this $6.5 billion target addressable market so attractive.
Zego is a leading software and payments technology company with significant scale delivering a comprehensive real estate technology platform to 7300 customers representing more than 11 million residential units in the United States.
Through its integrated payments offering, legal processes approximately $30 billion in payments annually in a market with a volume opportunity that exceeds $1 trillion, the company delivers its full value stock through cloud native SaaS platform to enable seamless digital property management and best-in-class resident engagement and omni-channel experiences.
We intend to leverage Global Payments scale and digital expertise to further payments penetration into Zego's base, generate incremental property and software partner referrals to more than 3500 sales and sales support professionals expanded footprint outside the United States and generate meaningful cross-selling opportunities into its vertical market including innovative products we already deliver into our merchant business like payroll, data and analytics and replication management.
Second, we are excited to have reached an agreement to our Erste joint venture to purchase Worldline's PAYONE business in Austria consisting of roughly 8,000 primarily SMB merchant customers in Erste banks home market.
We entered Austria through organic market expansion of our Continental European joint venture roughly 18 months ago.
Today, we have 12 letters of intent with financial institutions worldwide, six of which are competitive takeaways.
Since late December 2020, we have processed more than 2 million deposits accounting for over $3.5 billion in stimulus payments disbursed by the IRS to American consumers, and this was done days in advance of many of our traditional financial institution and financial technology peers.
In combination with the 2020 stimulus payments, we have disbursed more than $5 billion in aid to customers through the first quarter of 2020.
For example, we are seeing rapid adoption of our tips solution and we've reached a new agreement with Flynn Restaurant Group for its Pizza Huts and Wendy's franchise locations, which will drive additional PayCard and potential tips opportunities across our combined footprint in more than 1000 restaurants.
Specifically, we delivered adjusted net revenue of $1.81 billion representing 5% growth compared to the prior year and marking an 800 basis point improvement relative to the performance we reported in the fourth quarter of 2020.
Adjusted operating margin for the first quarter was 40.6%, a 160 basis point improvement from the prior year that was achieved despite the return of certain cost we temporarily reduced at the onset of the pandemic.
On a comparable basis, underlying margin trends would have improved approximately 300 basis points.
Adjusted earnings per share were $1.82 for the quarter, an increase of 15% compared to the prior year period and was especially impressive in light of the difficult year-on-year comparison due to COVID-19.
The pandemic did not begin to impact our business meaningfully until the second half of March of last year and that as a reminder, we delivered 18% adjusted earnings-per-share growth in the first quarter of 2020.
Taking a closer look at our performance by segment, Merchant Solutions achieved adjusted net revenue of $1.15 billion for the first quarter and 4.4% improvement from the prior year which marked a nearly 900 basis point improvement from the fourth quarter.
We delivered an adjusted operating margin of 463% in this segment, an increase of 90 basis points from the same period in 2020 as we continue to benefit from our improving technology enabled business mix.
Global Payments Integrated produced a stellar quarter generating in excess of 20% adjusted net revenue improvement, which is ahead of the levels of growth this business was delivering pre-pandemic.
Additionally, our worldwide e-commerce and omni-channel businesses excluding T&E delivered roughly 20% growth as our value proposition that seamlessly spans both the physical and virtual worlds continues to resonate with customers.
Moving to Issuer Solutions, we delivered $439 million in adjusted net revenue for the first quarter, which was roughly flat versus the prior year period and exceeded our expectations given traditional fourth quarter to first quarter sequential trends.
Notably, our Issuer business achieved record first quarter adjusted operating income and adjusted segment operating margin expanded 370 basis points from the prior year also reaching a new first quarter record of 43.2% as we continue to benefit from our efforts to drive efficiencies in the business.
Finally, our Business and Consumer Solutions segment delivered record adjusted net revenue of $244 million, representing growth of nearly 20% from the prior year.
Gross dollar volume increased 26% or $2.5 billion as we benefited from the stimulus we disbursed to our customers.
Trends within our DDA products were also very strong helped by the stimulus and we realized an acceleration in active account growth of more than 45% compared to the prior year.
Adjusted operating margin for this segment improved an impressive 750 basis points to a record 33.2% as the benefits of the stimulus and long-term cost initiatives post-merger took effect.
We are also pleased that our integration continues to progress well and we remain on track to achieve our increased goals from the TSYS merger of annual run rate expense synergy of at least $400 million and annual run rate eevenue synergies of at least $150 million within three years.
From a cash flow standpoint, we generated adjusted first quarter free cash flow of roughly $583 million after reinvesting $86 million in capital expenditures.
We expect adjusted free cash flow of more than $2 billion and capital expenditures to be in the $500 million to $600 million range for the full year.
In mid-February, we successfully issued $1.1 billion in senior unsecured notes maturing in 2026 at an attractive interest rate of 1.2%.
The transaction was credit neutral with the proceeds used to redeem $750 million of notes outstanding with a rate of 3.8% due in April 2021.
We are pleased to have repurchased roughly 4 million of our shares for approximately $783 million during the first quarter, which includes the execution of the $500 million accelerated share repurchase program we announced last quarter.
We ended the quarter with roughly $3 billion of liquidity and a leverage position of roughly 2.6 times on a net debt basis, and we are excited to announce that we have reached agreements to make additional investments in our technology enabled strategy and market expansion.
As Jeff highlighted, we executed a definitive agreement to acquire Zego and Worldline's PAYONE business in Austria for an aggregate of approximately $1 billion.
Based on our current expectations for continued recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, we have increased our guidance for adjusted net revenue to now be in a range of $7.55 billion to $7.625 billion reflecting growth of 12% to 13% over 2020.
We expect adjusted operating margin expansion of up to 250 basis points compared to 2020 levels.
This outlook is consistent with an adjusted operating margin expansion of up to 450 basis points on a normalized basis given the operating leverage in our business and expense synergy actions related to the TSYS merger.
Regarding segment margins, we expect the up to 250 basis points of adjusted operating margin improvement for the total company to be driven largely by Merchant Solutions while we expect Issuer and Business and Consumer to deliver normalized margin expansion consistent with the underlying profiles of these businesses.
This follows the 500 and 400 basis points of adjusted operating margin expansion delivered by Issuer and Business and Consumer respectively in 2020.
Putting it all together, we now have increased our expected adjusted earnings per share for the full year to a range of $7.87 to $8.07 reflecting growth of 23% to 26% over 2020.
As a result of our team members terrific efforts, 20 bookings have begun to translate into 2021 outside revenue gains.

Summary:
Adjusted earnings per share were $1.82 for the quarter, an increase of 15% compared to the prior year period and was especially impressive in light of the difficult year-on-year comparison due to COVID-19.
Based on our current expectations for continued recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, we have increased our guidance for adjusted net revenue to now be in a range of $7.55 billion to $7.625 billion reflecting growth of 12% to 13% over 2020.
Putting it all together, we now have increased our expected adjusted earnings per share for the full year to a range of $7.87 to $8.07 reflecting growth of 23% to 26% over 2020.