Aci Worldwide, Inc. Q1 FY2026 Earnings Call

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to ACI Worldwide, Inc. Reports Final Results Call. Operator provided instructions. I will now hand the conference over to John Kraft. You may begin.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. On today's call, we will discuss ACI Worldwide's first quarter 2026 results as well as our updated financial outlook for the remainder of the year. The slides accompanying this webcast can be found at aciworldwide.com under the Investor Relations tab and will remain available after the call. We will then open the line for your questions. As always, today's call includes forward-looking statements and is subject to the safe harbor provisions. You can find the full text of these statements in our earnings press release and in our filings with the SEC. These documents describe important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in any forward-looking statements. Joining me today are Tom Warsop, our President and CEO; and Bobby Leibrock, our Chief Financial Officer. Tom will begin with an overview of our Q1 performance, strategic highlights and the progress we're making against our long-term plan, and Bobby will then review our financial results in more detail, including segment performance, cash flow and updated outlook for 2026. We'll then open the line for questions. Before we begin, I'd like to let everybody know that we will be attending several upcoming investor conferences, including JPMorgan's 2026 Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference on May 18 in Boston, Baird's 2026 Global Consumer Technology and Services Conference on June 4 in New York City; and D.A. Davidson's 2026 Technology Conference in Nashville on June 11. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom.

Thanks, John, and good morning, everyone. As always, I appreciate you joining us for our first quarter 2026 earnings call. We're pleased with the start to 2026, and that's building on the strong performance we delivered throughout 2025. We're executing well. We're delivering on our promises, and we're staying focused on our strategic priorities. We're in a strong competitive position, and we're increasingly optimistic about the outlook for our business. If I look at the first quarter, we delivered 6% organic revenue growth in constant currency, and that growth compares against the strongest first quarter in the company's history last year. That is the strongest quarter until this quarter since we grew on top of that. So I'm particularly happy with this performance. Our focus on operational efficiency, combined with the operating leverage in our model drove over 160 basis points of FX-adjusted net adjusted EBITDA margin expansion and 8% adjusted EBITDA growth. The combination of this overall strong operating performance and our continued share repurchases, I'll detail that a little bit later, translated to double-digit growth in adjusted EPS. Bobby is going to cover the quarter in more detail in a few moments. But for my part, I'd like to step back and provide an update on our strategic initiatives and what we're seeing in our markets. Our business momentum stems from continuing sustained focus on our multiyear value creation strategy. As we regularly discuss, our strategy emphasizes growth within our core vertical markets, disciplined operational execution and a return-driven approach to capital allocation. We expect our strategy to enable us to deliver at least high single-digit organic revenue growth, strong cash flow conversion and the allocation of capital to drive incremental value, all with a focus on maximizing shareholder returns. Our growth strategy is built on expanding within our existing customer base in addition to winning new logos and of course, accelerating innovation all along the way. Within our Payment Software segment, we took a major step forward in 2025 when we unified our bank and merchant businesses into what we now call payment software. The goal is to increase efficiency, to accelerate innovation and to simplify our operating structure. We're seeing the benefits of this strategy and the payment software business had a very solid first quarter, growing 6%, 2% on a constant currency basis. Now again, as you recall, Q1 last year was particularly strong in this area, driven by our largest competitive issuing and acquiring takeaway ever in the Asia Pacific region. Our issuing and acquiring solutions remain leading edge and strongly in demand. We've been at it for 50 years, and our latest versions of these proven tools utilize leading technology as we continue to innovate and deliver market-leading customer value. And these solutions are, to put it very simply, mission critical. They're so critical, in fact, that we actually have one Middle East customer push itself to not let an upgrade go-live date slip even with the Iran conflict raging all around them. Together, we successfully delivered on time, and that's just another reminder of the resilience of our customers, the dedication of our employees and the mission-critical nature of the solutions we provide. They just wouldn't let it slip. We also saw strength in real-time payments. That part of the business grew revenue by over 20% as increasing real-time payment volumes drive larger total contract values at renewal. Transaction volumes, as most of you know, are one of the key levers we use at ACI to expand our relationships with existing customers. I'd like to share a specific example from Q1 of how this sometimes works as it relates to real-time account-to-account solutions. We had a renewal of a base 24 customer in the first quarter. It happened to be in Asia. And this is a customer that's seeing very significant growth in real-time payment transaction volumes. We were able to construct a deal which drove mid-single-digit growth in the pricing for their renewing portion of their transactions and 25% plus growth in pricing related to the net new real-time transactions. And those transactions are generating new business, incremental business for the customer. Overall, when you put all that together, this led to a healthy overall increase in total contract value from this customer. And as RTP volumes continue to grow, we expect similar opportunities across our portfolio. This is a demonstration of the power of having many different payment solutions our customers can use as the market evolves. They see ACI as a partner across payments, not just in a particular payment area. I gave you an example of RTP and its impact in Asia. Much of our business and the growth we're seeing right now is international, but the U.S. adoption of real-time payments is also starting to pick up. FedNow and RTP adoption is increasing. This is obviously a huge opportunity for us, and we remain optimistic about future volume growth here domestically. So the volumes are still small in the U.S., but we're definitely seeing them start to expand. We also continue to make progress advancing ACI Kinetic and that, of course, is critical to our long-term platform and modernization strategy. In the quarter, we expanded Kinetic's scope and momentum. We extended the platform to modernize card payments to unify multi-rail U.S. clearing connectivity and to embed advanced fraud and verification capabilities directly into the payment flow. These advancements reinforce Kinetic's role as a single cloud-native foundation that helps customers reduce complexity, manage risk and modernize across payment types at their own pace. Kinetic's capabilities, combined with ACI's proven reliability and future-ready road map remain and are, in fact, growing as meaningful differentiators between us and our competitors. And I want to share something about the broader Kinetic's strategy that may not be quite as clear to some people and may require a little more explanation. So let me try to put it this way. Simply investing in Kinetic, and of course, that's the name of our next-generation payments technology, just investing in that is providing confidence in our customer base that our longer-term technology road map is aligned with where most people in the industry want to go. I want to use a sports analogy here. We're skating to where the puck will be, not where it is today. As we compete for work under RFPs and during renewals, we're consistently asked about our multiyear road map and how we're going to help customers modernize without introducing undue risk. And Kinetic is that road map. It's resonating. Even when a customer isn't ready to migrate immediately, they're not ready internally. Aligning our strategy with theirs builds confidence and supports expansions and longer duration commitments. We've had several customers signed significant contracts with us for our core solutions because of Kinetic, even when they're not quite ready to go all the way down the Kinetic path. So to illustrate this dynamic, I want to use another specific example from the first quarter. We had a renewal with a major North American bank, and I personally engaged to finalize the renewal terms. And the entire conversation was not about the renewal itself, the products they use today, it was about Kinetic. And even though the bank is not ready to embark on the modernization journey Kinetic enables, they know they need it in the future. The bank's CTO told me he wants Kinetic. He wants to begin the preparation for it during the next few years, and that's during the renewal period, this renewal period, and that he wants us to be ready to hit the ground running at the time of the next renewal. And when I say us, I mean the bank and ACI. In the meantime, they've asked for our help to get the bank to a place where they can make the progress they need internally from a business process, a personnel perspective and a technology perspective. They want our help, and of course, we're thrilled to support that. This is an example of Kinetic supporting expansion of a renewal deal and positioning us as the long-term partner for our customers. Now I want to turn to Biller, where we continue to see strong results, and that's building on the momentum we saw in 2025. A key area of focus is advancing our market-leading Speedpay One platform, and that's driving core electronic bill payment transaction growth and new customer relationships. We signed significant new contracts in the quarter, and our total new ARR bookings grew 39% for the company, a majority of which was attributable to Biller. We signed several new logos, and we saw some nice expansionary up sells with existing customers in our utility and insurance verticals in particular. One renewal that I'd like to highlight provided us an opportunity to improve pricing substantially while offsetting interchange increases, and that shows the strength of the relationship and leadership position we hold in the utility sector. Another large client was able to work with us to significantly improve its customer experience while also dramatically lowering operating costs by shifting transaction volume from calls to self-service. And when they do that, that reduces the operating cost from about $20 per inbound call to about $1 for a self-service interaction. That client was also able to consolidate 4 platforms into 1 while significantly improving the overall experience and adding new payment options at the same time. Another deal in the quarter involved an existing customer in the insurance industry, and that also happens to be my personal insurer. In the first quarter, this customer nearly doubled their relationship with us, and I can personally attest that the experience is straightforward, quick and convenient. These are the types of significant outcomes we're able to achieve within our Biller business that benefit both ACI and our customers and their customers. ACI is gaining share in the Biller market as more billers are consolidating on to modern outsourced digital bill payment platforms, ACI Speedpay One. They're meeting customers where they are with mobile-first digital payment experiences that enable them to tailor payments to their preferences. This is a highly fragmented market, and the immediate opportunity is converting the significant portion of the market that is using legacy or outdated platforms to ACI. Increasingly, we are the partner of choice, and we're excited by the opportunities for our biller business through modern, scalable, resilient platform, Speedpay One. So I want to talk a little bit about operational execution across ACI. Our model remains highly scalable. As we grow, we have a clear opportunity to continue expanding margins through operational discipline and continued productivity improvements, while we still continue to invest in the initiatives that support our long-term road map. We saw that in the first quarter with about 200 basis points, nearly 200 basis points of margin expansion. And while near-term investments have a little bit of ebb and flow and they can modestly dampen operating leverage in any given quarter, we expect the underlying scalability of our business to become increasingly evident over time. We're also very focused on our disciplined approach to capital allocation. We benefit from a strong business that has limited capital requirements and generates strong cash flow, and that gives us the flexibility to execute on our strategy. Our capital allocation strategy prioritizes investments in organic growth, strategic M&A, capital return and maintaining financial strength, of course. As we've discussed, a key area of recent focus has been returning capital through our share repurchase program. Last quarter, we committed to allocating at least 50% to 60% of our cash from operations to share repurchases in 2026, and that reflects our strong financial position, our confidence in the long-term outlook and our belief that current valuations are particularly attractive. During the first quarter of 2026, we repurchased 1.5 million shares, and that brings the total repurchase since the start of 2025 to over 5% of the shares that were outstanding at the beginning of last year. We remain in a very strong financial position with leverage well below our targeted range of 2x EBITDA, and we remain committed to our capital allocation framework. To sum all that up, I'm excited about our recent financial performance, and I'm very encouraged by our path ahead. I'm proud of what we've accomplished, and we have a lot of work ahead, and I mean that in a really good way. We'll continue to invest in our key growth initiatives, and that includes our cloud-native Kinetic platform and Speedpay One. In addition, as I discussed last quarter, we're investing in our AI-first road map. We view generative AI as a significant opportunity, not a threat. We're already deploying many tools across the enterprise, and this is accelerating our process. ACI is able to combine the power of these tools with our 50-plus years of engineering and architecture expertise and substantial volumes of proprietary data. When we put all that together, we can provide enormous customer value. Further, we provide certifications with hundreds of networks and payment schemes around the globe, and all of those regularly require updates. We are really good at that. AI simply cannot deliver these aspects of what we do. As I emphasized on our last earnings call, we see generative AI as a big opportunity, and we're well down the path to taking advantage of it. Before I close, I want to briefly address the macro environment. The conflict in the Middle East and the resulting energy shock have introduced real uncertainty into the broader economic outlook. And of course, no organization is entirely insulated from macroeconomic pressures, but our business at ACI is purpose-built for moments like this. Payments infrastructure doesn't take a pause during geopolitical disruption. If anything, the resilience of our customers and the criticality of what we provide becomes even more apparent. The example I shared earlier from the Middle East is not an exception. It's indicative of who our customers are, the role they play in the world's economy and what our solutions mean to them. I want to thank all of our employees across the organization for their hard work and dedication. We're excited about the opportunities ahead as we continue our shareholder value creation journey. I'll hand over to Bobby to talk more about our financial results and our updated outlook for 2026. Bobby?

Thank you, Tom, and thank you all for joining us today. I'll begin with a brief review of our first quarter financial performance, followed by an update on our balance sheet, liquidity and cash flows. I'll close with an update on our guidance and capital allocation priorities for 2026. As Tom said, we had a solid start to the year, driven by our progress on our growth initiatives, strong operating discipline and focused execution following the move to a two-segment operating model last year. That translated into margin improvement and continued progress against our capital allocation priorities. Total revenue in the quarter was $426 million, up 8% year-over-year on a reported basis and up 6% in constant currency. Recurring revenue was $313 million, up 10% as reported and up 8% in constant currency. The continued growth in recurring revenue reflects strong momentum and increasing demand from our software-led offerings across both payment software and biller. We delivered first quarter adjusted EBITDA of $105 million, an increase of 12% year-over-year or 8% in constant currency, driven by solid organic growth and improved operating performance. As a result, adjusted EBITDA margin was 38%, up from 36% last year, reflecting continued disciplined execution and the operating leverage inherent in our software model. We also took certain one-time cost reduction actions in G&A during the quarter, which are excluded from our adjusted EBITDA. Net new ARR bookings increased 39% to $12 million, while new license and services bookings were $50 million, flat against a notably strong prior year comparison. Turning to our segment results. In Payment Software, revenue increased 2% in constant currency to $214 million. We continue to see increasing demand for cloud-based offerings with SaaS revenue growing 11% in Q1, excluding FX. Segment recurring revenue, representing SaaS and maintenance, grew 9% year-over-year as reported or 6% in constant currency. From a product perspective, we saw particular strength in real-time payments and merchant, which grew 22% and 21% in constant currency, respectively, driven by transaction-based volume growth within our customer base. Fraud management was essentially flat as issuing and acquiring maintained the strong revenue levels achieved in the first quarter last year. Payment Software EBITDA was $113 million in the first quarter, up 2% year-over-year in constant currency. EBITDA margin was 53%, flat versus last year as operating leverage was offset by continued investment in growth initiatives, including ACI Kinetic. Turning to Biller. Revenue increased 10% to $212 million, driven by higher transaction volumes and new customer wins. Revenue net of interchange increased 5% year-over-year. We continue to see strong new business momentum across utilities, government and consumer finance as billers increasingly consolidate onto modern digital platforms. We also continue to advance Speedpay One, our next-generation biller platform, supporting the long-term modernization of the segment. Building on Tom's comments, I want to highlight the diversity of our top 10 ARR contributions this quarter. Three were consumer finance, three were utilities, two in insurance and two in government and higher education. That breadth across verticals is exactly what we want to see. Equally important is the balance between new and expansion. Three of the ten were new logos and seven were existing customers expanding the relationship with us. That mix is a healthy indicator of the durability of our growth. Biller adjusted EBITDA grew 10% to $34 million. EBITDA margin net of interchange was 51%, up more than 200 basis points from last year, reflecting operating leverage from new implementations and incremental volume from existing customers. Turning to cash flow and the balance sheet. Cash flow from operating activities was $64 million in the first quarter compared to $78 million last year. Strong underlying performance continued to translate into solid cash generation with the year-over-year change driven by timing in working capital, including a higher concentration of billings late in March. We are not seeing changes in billing discipline or collection patterns, and we expect this timing to normalize in the second quarter. We ended the quarter with $162 million of cash on hand and total debt of $812 million, resulting in net leverage of 1.3x adjusted EBITDA, below our targeted leverage range of 2x. With total liquidity of $560 million, including revolver availability, our balance sheet remains a strategic asset and provides flexibility to invest in growth while returning capital to shareholders. Capital allocation remains a core component of our value creation framework. As Tom discussed, during the first quarter, we repurchased 1.5 million shares for approximately $65 million. Since the start of 2025, we have repurchased roughly 5.7 million shares, representing more than 5% of shares outstanding. We remain well on track to allocate 50% to 60% of operating cash flow to share repurchases in 2026, and we ended the quarter with $391 million remaining under our current authorization. Turning to our outlook for 2026. Based on the strong start to the year, we are raising our financial guidance. This increase is driven by operational performance with minimal impact from currency movements relative to our February guidance. For the full year, we now expect revenue growth of 7% to 9% or $1.89 billion to $1.92 billion, up from our prior forecast. Both Payment Software and Biller are expected to deliver upper single-digit growth. For the second quarter, we expect revenue of $420 million to $440 million, representing approximately 7% growth at the midpoint. Payment Software is expected to deliver double-digit growth, while Biller is expected to grow at mid-single digits against a strong prior year comparison. Looking to the second half, we see a strong pipeline of implementations and renewals with a heavier contribution weighted towards the fourth quarter. We expect an approximate 40-60 revenue split between Q3 and Q4, consistent with historical patterns. Payment Software licenses are the primary driver of the SKU with Biller expected to accelerate in the second half. For the full year, we are raising adjusted EBITDA guidance to a range of $540 million to $555 million, up from $530 million to $550 million, representing growth of 7% to 10%. This outlook reflects continued cost discipline while reinvesting in high-return initiatives and maintaining flexibility to support our long-term roadmap. For the second quarter, we expect adjusted EBITDA in the range of $85 million to $95 million. Looking ahead to the remainder of 2026 and beyond, we remain confident in our strategy and execution. Our strong balance sheet and a highly cash-generative business give us the flexibility to return capital to shareholders while continuing to invest in innovation and long-term growth. With that, Tom and I would be happy to take your questions.

Operator provided instructions. Your first question comes from the line of George Sutton.

Great job, guys. So I think you buried the lead a little bit with the 39% bookings growth. I just wondered if we could kind of talk about that in the context of the full year. What kind of growth does your pipeline support? Was there anything super unusual in that first quarter bookings?

George, this is Bobby. Thanks for the question and I agree that was one of the most encouraging aspects of our ARR recurring businesses. To provide some context, we delivered $12 million of new ARR bookings, a 39% increase, that span both segments. Tom talked about the strong performance in our Biller business, our Speedpay platform, and the SaaS payment software offerings that serve both our banking and merchant customers. We are very encouraged. Looking at the pipeline for the year, it is strong and the team got off to a great, focused start. That means two things: one, healthy demand in the market for our products and platforms; and two, we are moving quickly to implement these SaaS offerings and get them live for our customers. I tried to expand earlier when I discussed the profile of these deals within the Biller business. When I looked across the top 10 wins in Biller, I was referring to new logos and, equally encouraging, the number of new customers that are increasing their revenue and commitments to platforms like Speedpay. Tom mentioned a large insurance business, which was one of our top three wins. The team has been maniacally focused on reliability and new innovation, and we are seeing strong demand from that work. You can see that reflected in the higher guidance we have set for the year.

Yes. I think, George, just to add, I want to reiterate the point Bobby is making about the spread of wins, and we saw it specifically in builder and across all the verticals. That is precisely what he described and what we want to see, and we are seeing it. The team got off to an amazing start, and we are pushing them to continue to deliver at a very high level.

I wondered if we could just talk about Kinetic and the target market. Originally, when you're building Kinetic, it was really driven towards more of a midsized institution and it sounds like it's creating confidence across even your larger markets in terms of sizes of customers. Are you kind of redesigning the target market or rethinking the target market for Kinetic as you build this out?

No, I wouldn't say it that way, but I'll give you the two most encouraging things from my perspective about Kinetic. First, the new net customers interested in Kinetic are, for the most part, the mid-tier institutions we discussed at Investor Day two years ago. That's still the target for net new customers. What's especially encouraging is that larger customers, while not yet ready as I mentioned in my prepared remarks—mainly because of inertia and the substantial investments they've already made—are showing clear interest. It's hard to turn a battleship, so they need more time, but Kinetic has had a very clear impact on our ability to cross-sell and expand with those big customers. We always expected they would want Kinetic; we knew it would take longer for them to be prepared for the institutional transformation required to take full advantage of it. The great news is this is a massive selling point for us. Bobby highlighted that we've increased our investment in Kinetic, and that's absolutely true. Larger current customers and even new ones are excited about Kinetic, and it's a key reason they're buying or expanding. For example, the large Asia Pacific deal from last year would not have happened without Kinetic and our ability to explain the roadmap and show them where we're going. They were so excited about Kinetic's future that they said, "I have to have that. I'm not ready now; can you install the current software and then phase us in over the next few years?" Of course we agreed. That deal alone would fund our entire Kinetic development budget. That's the power of Kinetic with big customers, and at the same time we have new customers coming and a growing pipeline. We're really excited. That said, these are very complex transactions. They represent big changes for financial institutions, whether midsized or extremely large. They're complicated deals and they take time, but I couldn't be happier with how our investment in Kinetic is driving the pipeline and expansion with existing customers.

Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Cantwell with Seaport.

Can you elaborate a little more on Kinetic in terms of how sales are going right now? I'm curious if maybe you could talk a little bit about the announcement you had with the 8 major U.S. payment networks and give us some details on why that's important? And then more broadly, how is everything tracking with Kinetic versus your expectations at the beginning of the year? And when should we expect to see these announcements impact your P&L over time?

Yes. I'll jump in first, Jeff. I appreciate the focus there. I was going to bring up the expansion we saw because what we were just talking about was one way Kinetic expands the addressable market from top-tier banks into a longer tail within the mid-tier, as Tom described. There are two other important dimensions. One is that it touches the payment software portfolio very holistically. It covers both issuing and acquiring, the card side, and account-to-account real-time payments. We put out an announcement two weeks ago showing the breadth of that across eight different payment types. The core value proposition of Kinetic is intelligent payment orchestration. Orchestration is key given the number of payment types customers must manage today. The intelligence side is the AI capabilities we are infusing in Kinetic across those payment types, and customers are already seeing the excitement and value around that. So, to summarize, the second dimension after expanding the addressable market is that Kinetic covers our portfolio and embeds AI across it, with orchestration that spans account-to-account capabilities, issuing, acquiring and cards. The third important dimension is geographic. One impressive stat I've highlighted over the last year is how internationally diverse our payment software business is: 75% of ACI's payment software business comes from outside the U.S. We have customers across Europe operating in many different economies, spanning the U.K. and the euro area. We've invested early there, and you can see the public wins we've announced in Europe. This year is a big year for the U.S., and our pipeline is starting to reflect that. You saw the announcement; we'll have a rolling set of capabilities on the U.S. roadmap that customers are excited about. As for where the money is and when it will show up, how does the pipeline look? The pipeline is healthy across the two markets where we have availability: a little more than half is in Europe and the rest in the U.S. As Tom said, that doesn't prevent customers in APAC or LATAM from asking about it during renewals. In many of my face-to-face meetings across Latin America, half the conversation is still about the Kinetic roadmap, and they're eager to localize it for their markets. Put in context for this year, we don't have a dependency on Kinetic revenue, and I'll tell you why. It's not because of a lack of customer confidence or a weak pipeline. It's because we're providing availability in a hybrid fashion: customers can consume Kinetic as a managed service or manage it themselves. It's a fully cloud-native offering that runs on Kubernetes. If customers run it themselves, that's a different licensing revenue model than the as-a-service model. So as we look at the pipeline, it's split across those consumption models, which will result in either ratable revenue or more traditional upfront licensing. We're encouraged by the pipeline, and this year we'll continue to provide the visibility and transparency we've offered.

Just to add a couple of things: the early wins have been primarily, actually exclusively, SaaS. The revenue recognition, as Bobby was just saying, happens as transactions flow, and the first go-live is coming up in the next few months. We will start to see revenue come in this year, but we're not dependent on it. It's not a large amount this year, and it's not really factored into our guidance at all. It's great pipeline growth — we're seeing real excitement about the platform. As I was saying a moment ago, it is driving expansion with existing customers as well as new customers. It's been a fantastic journey so far, and we're keeping the pedal to the metal, Jeff.

Okay. Great. I appreciate all the color on that. And then my other one was, could you maybe just clarify for Q1, was there any pull forward of revenue from Q2? I seem to remember that happened last year. And I'm curious if there's anything to be aware of on that front. And then when we think about Q2, what are the biggest drivers for payment software delivering double-digit growth? Can you maybe unpack that for us in terms of what's driving the step-up in growth there?

Yes, I'll jump in. We provided visibility on the first-half SKU and reaffirmed that with our second-quarter guide. Regarding the roughly $15 million to $16 million revenue beat in Q1, that was a great way to start the year, particularly on top of the roughly 25% growth we saw in Q1 last year; this year we posted 6% constant currency. Underneath that, Jeff, there was minimal pull forward, which is why we're able to reaffirm the Q2 guidance. What we saw was that the deals we had forecasted—both renewals and some new-logo opportunities—exceeded expectations on upselling and cross-selling into those accounts. We came in at the high end of those ranges, which is encouraging given the retention on renewals and the adoption and commitment on the new-logo side. As we roll that forward through the year, we carried the bulk of that beat into the full year. We have maintained a disciplined approach to guidance and want to provide numbers we have high confidence in achieving. For Q2, we're pleased with the profile: at the midpoint of the range, revenue is growing 7% and adjusted EBITDA is growing 11%, showing strong operating leverage, and I think you're asking about the durability underneath that. Hopefully you see this year a more transparent approach and greater visibility into the quarterly dynamics. I talked about the second half as well and provided not just adjusted EBITDA but all the componentry to think about the earnings power of the business. For the full year, we've guided an EBITDA range growing 7% to 10%. When you look at what that translates to on an adjusted earnings-per-share basis, you can see we almost double that growth range at the midpoint. We're excited about the year, the position of strength, and the team's focus.

Your next question comes from the line of Alex Neumann with Stephens.

Just wanted to ask, are you facing any headwind from lower tax payments from the IRS this year from higher refunds? And then if you could quantify that impact, if so? And then just secondly, assumptions for FX benefiting the '26 guide?

Yes. I'll jump in on them. On the IRS side, you're right to point out we do have some seasonal benefits that started last year as we saw the ramping of this business. The IRS and our federal business maintain strong volumes and good resiliency. There is some spreading of that throughout the year as tax payments are made multiple times. We don't see declines there; we see growth continuing in that segment. I did try to provide transparent commentary, Alex, within Q2. As we lap some of that growth, the 10% biller growth we had in Q1 is going to be more like mid-single-digit growth, and then we see that reaccelerating in the second half based on the compare we saw in Q2. As you heard, I did try to provide segment-level commentary on the full year in line with our model, and we see both segments growing high single digits.

Yes. Alex, we don't see a meaningful impact from what you were describing, specifically more refunds leading to potentially fewer tax payments. We're not seeing that. I think what Bobby was highlighting is that it will be a tougher compare because we had a very strong year last year, and that IRS business, in particular, grew a lot over the previous year. But we don't see anything material there.

And the second part of your question, Alex, was around currency impacts. I made the comment earlier that compared to 90 days ago or 60 days ago, roughly when we guided in February, we didn't see a real change in the U.S. dollar strengthening or weakening against that guidance level. But we did see two points of tailwind from a weaker U.S. dollar versus last year in Q1. On a full-year basis, the rest of the quarters are more neutral and nominal when you look at our reported delta. I'm not forecasting where the U.S. dollar goes, but versus current positioning, we don't see that two-point benefit carrying forward in the remaining quarters. And that's how it plays out in terms of the modeling on the top line.

We have reached the end of the Q&A session. I will now turn the call back over to the company management for closing remarks.

Well, thank you very much for the questions and of course, for the support that you give us all the time. We really appreciate it. I want to just summarize, we're pleased with the start to 2026. We're pleased with the momentum we're seeing in our business. Of course, there's a lot of noise in the industry. There's a lot of geopolitical unrest, all kinds of things happening in the world, but we remain absolutely focused on continuing to execute on our strategy, and we're very confident that we remain well positioned to continue winning. The platforms we're operating are mission-critical, highly reliable and deeply embedded in our customers' critical workflows, and we sit at the center of payment flows that are global, highly regulated and increasingly complex. We have a clear strategy, a resilient portfolio. We're seeing accelerating growth. We have significant financial flexibility, and we're very well positioned to continue delivering our long-term value for shareholders. So we feel great about where we are, great start, and we're going to keep doing our best to deliver very high-quality results and shareholder value. Thank you very much.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.