Aci Worldwide, Inc. Q1 FY2024 Earnings Call

Thank you for standing by. My name is Eric, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the ACI Worldwide Inc First Quarter 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to John Kraft. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. On today's call, we will discuss the company's first quarter 2024 results and financial outlook for the rest of the year. We will then take your questions at the end. The slides accompanying this call and webcast can be found at aciworldwide.com under the Investor Relations tab and will remain available after the call. Today's call is subject to safe harbor and forward-looking statements like all of our events. You can find the full text of both statements in our presentation deck and earnings release, both of which are available on our website and with the SEC. On this morning's call is Tom Warsop, our President and CEO; and Scott Behrens, our CFO. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom.

Thanks, John, and good morning, everyone. I appreciate you joining our first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. As usual, I'll start this morning with some brief comments on the quarter, then I'll hand it over to Scott to discuss the detailed financials and the outlook for the remainder of 2024, and then we'll open the line for questions. Q1 results were ahead of our expectations. Total revenue was $316 million, which was up 9% year-over-year. We were able to sign some expected contracts a little earlier than we forecast, and some ramp-ups in our biller business tracked slightly better than we expected. I'd characterize these contracts as expansionary, project-specific deals with existing customers, and we also had opportunities that were in the pipeline and expected to sign a little bit later this year. We've also signed over $20 million in high-margin license contracts that will show up on our income statement later in the year. As we've discussed, U.S. GAAP requires we recognize revenue for contract renewals on the first day of the renewal term, regardless of when we sign them. All of these items that I mentioned help derisk our full year forecast, and it's allowing us to raise the upper end of our guidance range for both revenue and adjusted EBITDA. Moving on to our segments. We signed some notable deals in the bank segment, including a renewal for a large U.S. regional bank and new and expansion deals with customers around the world. As we discussed at our recent Analyst Day, the bank segment is a key area of focus for ACI going forward. Segment revenue for banking grew 20% in the quarter. And as I indicated, the strength was broad. As you may recall, we have three main solution sets we sell into the segment: issuing and acquiring, which includes our retail payments and Base 24 solutions. That part of the business grew 17% in the quarter. Fraud Management, which grew 23%, and real-time payment products, which grew 28%. Bank segment adjusted EBITDA grew 69% versus Q1 2023, and that reflects the very high fall-through from revenue to EBITDA for our software businesses. As we discussed in depth at our recent Analyst Day, we've continued to invest in modernizing our solutions and making public cloud delivery options available. We're seeing accelerating SaaS demand, not only with some of our traditional, long-term customers, but also with new banking customers. Some of these may be somewhat smaller than our historic focused areas, which have historically been mega banks or Tier 1 banks. These institutions, the slightly smaller ones, are seeking the highest levels of scalability and reliability that APIs are so well known for, and they're often more interested in taking advantage of SaaS delivery models. This is an incremental market for us, and it's an exciting opportunity we continue to allocate resources to. Merchant segment revenue grew 3%, and EBITDA grew 63%. We continue to expect growth to improve throughout the year, and the confidence we have is coming from in-progress and scheduled implementation and, of course, our new sales pipeline. Moving on to Biller. Revenue grew 5%, and segment EBITDA grew 4% in Q1 2024. We continue to see the ramp-ups of prior sales and the positive impact of our interchange improvement plans. We're particularly pleased with the onboarding of our largest customers as volumes are coming in above expectations. Furthermore, we've been able to successfully remove interchange risk from most of those large contracts. While they can have a little bit lower margin in some cases, those contracts avoid downside risk. Our biller retention rates are improving, and our qualified new bookings pipeline is growing. The work on our payments hub, which we discussed at length at Analyst Day, is progressing well. We continue to see substantial productivity improvements driven by the application of AI-powered tools and methodologies. We're also starting to apply these enhancements across the company. I want to make one more point on AI, which we also touched on at Analyst Day. Our fraud detection and prevention businesses continue to gain traction. As I've mentioned previously, these solutions are all AI-powered, and we believe they're best-in-class. We've pulled all our fraud businesses together under a very capable leader, and we're receiving positive feedback from all our stakeholder groups. I will talk more about this as we get further into the year. Overall, we're executing well. We're delivering on our promises to the investment community, and I remain confident in the team and our ability to achieve our goals. Now I'm going to turn it over to Scott to discuss financials and our guidance.

Thanks, Tom, and good morning, everyone. I first plan to review our financial results for Q1 and then provide our outlook for the rest of 2024. We'll then open the line for questions. Revenue in the quarter was $316 million, up 9% compared to Q1 2023, and adjusted EBITDA was $48 million, nearly double Q1 2023. As Tom mentioned, we saw particular strength in the bank segment with revenue of $105 million, up 20% compared to Q1 last year, and adjusted EBITDA of $42 million, up nearly 70% compared to Q1 last year. Our issuing and acquiring solutions grew 17%. Our anti-fraud solutions grew 23%, and our real-time payment solution grew 28%. We saw a pretty solid quarter in the banking segment across the board. Our merchant segment revenue was $36 million, up 3% compared to Q1 last year, and adjusted EBITDA was $11 million, up 63% compared to Q1 last year. Our Biller segment revenue was $175 million, up 5% compared to Q1 last year, and adjusted EBITDA was $31 million, up 4% compared to Q1 last year. Cash flow from operations was $123 million, an increase of roughly three times compared to Q1 last year. We ended the quarter with $183 million in cash on hand, which is up $19 million in the quarter. Our debt balance of $1 billion is down $34 million in the quarter, and our net debt leverage ratio of two times is down from 2.3 times when we started the year and represents our lowest leverage in more than 10 years. Finally, we repurchased approximately two million shares in Q1 for $63 million in capital and ended the quarter with $110 million remaining on our share repurchase authorization. So far here in April, we have repurchased an additional one million shares to date in Q2. Turning next to our outlook for the rest of 2024. With our strong start to the year, we are raising the high end of our guidance range for revenue and adjusted EBITDA. We now expect revenue to be in a range of $1.547 billion to $1.581 billion, up from a range of $1.547 billion to $1.576 billion. We now expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $418 million to $433 million, up from a range of $418 million to $428 million. As we look here into Q2 2024, we expect revenue to be in a range of $345 million to $355 million, and adjusted EBITDA of $60 million to $70 million. Overall, a strong start to the year, and we see that strength continuing here in Q2. With that, I'll pass it back to Tom for some closing remarks.

Thanks, Scott. In summary, we are pleased to continue delivering results in line with or above expectations. Looking forward, our pipeline is strong, and we're focused and optimistic regarding both our growth and our ability to deliver significant shareholder value. One last comment. You may have seen the announcement of our recently released prime time for real-time report, which gives great insight into the global real-time payments ecosystem trend and expectations for the future. I recommend giving it a read. There's some really interesting stuff there. I look forward to following up with you in the very near future about the quarter and our expectations for the future. I'm very excited about what's going on here at ACI. Operator, we can now take questions.

Your first question comes from the line of Pete Heckmann with D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.

On the payment, Tom, can you talk a little bit about when you'll be able to start marketing it and when you will feel confident that you have a solid product or general availability? Do you think that could still be later this calendar year?

Pete, this is Tom. Yes, we do expect to have something that we are actively marketing by the end of the year. I want to be very conservative about the answer to this question because it's very important to me that we show our customers and prospective customers something they can really touch and feel and understand what the benefits are. So we are having conversations with customers today, and we're showing them — the right customers with the right relationships. They have a clear understanding that we're letting them participate as we publish our overall plan. So we're having those conversations now. I would expect some of those customers to be early buyers. But I think you're really asking about super active marketing. That will probably be late this year, would be my expectation.

And then in terms of thinking about just merchant. I assume it's just a bidding of revenue mix. But just such significant EBITDA year-over-year growth there. I can't remember if there was an easy comparison or if it is just mix to software license?

The EBITDA growth is coming from a bit of scale. It's driving the higher revenue growth through that relatively fixed cost base, and then also some cost initiatives, but it's primarily the scale of the business that's enhancing profitability.

Next question comes from the line of Jeff Cantwell with Seaport Research Partners. Please go ahead.

I was hoping you could drill down in the banking segment. Can you talk about the growth you're seeing right now at real-time payments? It was 28%. Which markets are you seeing the most demand? Maybe tell us a bit more about that? And then how sustainable do you think growth in real-time payment could be for you guys, I'd say, above 20%? I just want to get a feel for sustainability of that strong growth as you look ahead?

I'll take that. And Tom, maybe you can add to it. I mean, real-time payments in the banking segment have been one of our fastest-growing areas for years. Most of that growth is coming from outside the U.S. where we have regulatory mandates that require the implementation of real-time systems. That's a situation where regulation actually helps us, but I would expect that level of growth to be sustained, predominantly driven by outside the U.S. We do have the Fed Now live in the U.S., but at the end, we're not really projecting when we're going to see real critical mass on the U.S. side. So again, double-digit growth will continue, mostly from the international markets.

Yes. Jeff, I'll just add. I mentioned the prime time for real-time report. We had a press release go out this morning, so you can easily get access to that. Just a couple of numbers from there that lead us to believe this is highly sustainable. In fact, the headlines from the press release indicate that the growth in real-time payments is sustainable. In 2023, there were 266 billion real-time payment transactions globally. Our forecast is that by 2028, it will reach 575 billion. That's a compound annual growth rate of about 16.7%. That's with pretty conservative estimates of what happens in the U.S. because it's unclear how quickly that will happen. So there is significant growth in real-time payments around the world.

Great. And then on your guidance, the full-year guidance, can you walk us through the raise? Is it fair to say that the increased expectations for the revenue line are coming from the banking segment, or how should we be thinking about your guidance for revenue?

Yes. I would say the higher expectations are coming in part from banks, but we're also seeing pretty strong growth in our Biller business. We look at the outperformance in Q1, and a bit of it came from new license sales in the quarter and services, which are predominantly in banks. But part of that can be timing in the year where we outperformed our own expectations, particularly in our SaaS transaction-based part of the business. That really gives us comfort that part of that recurring base of revenue will carry into Q2. And so coming in at the high end of our guidance for the quarter reflects that we're starting the year better than we expected, both top line and bottom line, and that's why we are comfortable raising the guidance at this point.

Your next question comes from the line of George Sutton with Craig-Hallum Capital. Please go ahead.

I thought the particularly high growth number came from issuing and acquiring this quarter. I just wanted to make sure I understood that, that this growth is more driven by some of the licenses, just to be clear, and we're not certain that — that's a more mature segment for you. To see that kind of growth was very impressive. I wanted to understand the sustainability of that.

Yes. Part of that on the license side is dependent upon the timing of renewals year-over-year. Even over and above that, we did overachieve on the bank licensing side, and that would have been on new sales and services. A lot of the overachievement in terms of where we ended up the quarter versus where we thought we would be has really come from that SaaS transaction-based side of the business. That's both banks and billers.

So Tom, you obviously pointed out the strength in the smaller to mid-market sized banks. And that's on the SaaS side of the business. That's also effectively your target customer for the payment hub. Just curious if you can kind of walk through how you're delivering the SaaS side of this while also showing them the potential of the payment hub. I'm intrigued to sort of understand that movement.

Yes, sure. So that's exactly what's happening. We saw overperformance from our expectations on the SaaS side across the board, and that's creating a nice environment for conversations about the payment hub. Customers are taking advantage of the services we're providing, and we're doing a good job for them. So that's creating a strong willingness to discuss what's coming in the future, as they're looking to ensure they can leverage the scalability and reliability that we've provided to the larger banks for a long time. So they're feeding into each other nicely.

Your next question comes from the line of Trevor Williams with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

I wanted to ask on banking and just the recurring revenue piece. There was a deceleration this quarter after you had a big step-up in Q4. Just curious what, if any, call-outs there. Clearly, you guys still feel good about the full year with where the outlook is moving up. Just wondering kind of what the moving pieces were on the recurring line?

Yes. 2023 was a pretty big year generally speaking, with a lot of CPI uplift in that. I wouldn't read anything into that in terms of this quarter's expectations around the bank for the full year. The bank delivered our highest growth in the quarter and likely will contribute the most this year from the three segments. So I wouldn't read anything into the recurring revenue for banks this quarter.

And then just on the move further down market within the banking segment, that being more of a SaaS delivery. Over time, how do you guys see that potentially playing out in terms of changing the mix of revenue type if you think it could significantly alter the mix of nonrecurring versus recurring revenue? Obviously, the big banks are mostly on the licensing model. I am just curious if you see a potential revenue model evolution playing out over time?

I think in the mid-market, yes. Obviously, it depends on how quickly we get traction there, but the likelihood is that come into SaaS. In Q1, we were mid-80s in terms of percent of our total revenue that was SaaS. We would expect that mid-market to be predominantly SaaS revenue, and the more success we have there, the higher percentage of our overall total revenue will shift to SaaS.

Yes. Just Trevor, on the banking in particular, we will continue to see a shift to more SaaS. The thing that we look at is such a large percentage of our bank revenue is licensed. It's going to take a while, but we will continue to see an increasing percentage moving towards SaaS.

Your next question comes from the line of Charles Nabhan with Stephens. Please go ahead.

I wanted to drill into the Biller segment a little bit. One of the topics at the Analyst Day was the consolidation of some of your legacy platforms. I wanted to get an update on that. And then secondly, I apologize if I missed this earlier, but you had mentioned that Biller was tracking a little ahead of expectations in the first quarter. I wanted to get a little more color around that in terms of what drove that strength from a segment standpoint or any color you could provide.

Sure. So Scott, feel free to jump in too. On the consolidation point, we're continuing to make very strong progress on the consolidation of the platforms. We did not expect and do not expect that to be complete for a few months now, but we expect later in the year that all new customers will go onto the consolidated platform. That's still what we expect and we think we're on track for that. This is really good for several reasons, predominantly the speed of implementation benefit we get by having one platform. Over time, there will be a cost benefit to not having to maintain several platforms. We’re continuing to see ourselves on track as we discussed at Analyst Day. Regarding the overperformance of our expectations in Q1, I think it was relatively broad-based. The biggest driver was a couple of our large customers that we signed over the last year or two; we saw their ramp-up go a little faster than we expected. That's great news because, as Scott has said a couple of different ways this morning, that recurring revenue and that acceleration will be the gift that keeps on giving.

Yes. Chuck, the only thing I'd add to that is just if we look at Q1, where comp is broad-based, even within the Biller business, we're seeing it across verticals. In Q1, we saw higher transactions and revenue in our consumer finance and utilities vertical than we were expecting. Thus far in Q2, being one of the largest providers of both IRS and state taxes, we're seeing higher transaction volume in the government vertical in April that we were not anticipating. Even across Biller, we're seeing it across verticals.

And just as a quick follow-up, and again, I apologize if I missed this earlier. You had mentioned $20 million in high-margin license contracts that are going to show up in the income statement later in the year. My question is, is that in line — was that expected from a magnitude and timing standpoint?

I'd say it's a little bit better than we expected. It's not unusual that we signed some of the contracts a bit earlier, so a month or so. We signed one deal that doesn't renew until the end of the third quarter, and we've already signed it. We signed that ahead of schedule. So probably a little ahead, but it's not unusual for us to sign deals early.

Well, thanks, everybody, for joining the call this morning. We look forward to catching up in the coming days and weeks. Have a great day. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining, and you may now disconnect.