ACI Worldwide, Inc. (ACIW) Q4 2019 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the ACI Q4 Earnings Announcement Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today Mr. John Kraft. Thank you. Sir you may go ahead.

Thank you Sara and thank you all for joining our earnings call for the quarter and full year ending December 31, 2019. I'm joined this morning by Craig Saks, our Interim President and CEO and Scott Behrens, our CFO. Before we begin please take note of the forward-looking statement disclaimer included in our press release issued earlier today and filed with the SEC. We will make forward-looking statements on today's call including about 2020 guidance. Forward-looking statements inherently involved risks and uncertainties and reflect our view as of today and we are under no obligation to update this information. With that I'll turn it over to Craig.

Thank you John. Good morning everyone. I trust you are all well this week's market noise aside. Nonetheless, thank you so much for joining us for our 2019 fourth quarter and full year earnings conference call. Before we discuss our results, I would first like to take a few minutes to talk about the leadership announcement we made last week. Since Phil Heasley announced his intention to retire back in November, the board has continued working on a succession planning process which included working with executive search firm Russell Reynolds to identify potential candidates to be his successor. As you saw following a comprehensive process ACI has appointed Odilon Almeida as President and Chief Executive Officer effective March 9, 2020. He will also serve as a member of ACI's board of directors. Odilon joins ACI from Advent International where he was most recently an operating partner supporting business development at the fund’s portfolio companies, with a particular focus on growth initiatives that supported the higher sales and earnings. Prior to his time at Advent, Odilon had a distinguished 17-year career with Western Union culminating in his role as president of Western Union's global money transfer business. Odilon is a seasoned executive with leadership experience spanning multiple industries and countries, two decades of payments experience and a strong track record of growth acceleration and value creation. He has a deep understanding of ACI's markets and customer segments and as proven expertise leading companies that are navigating digital transformation. I look forward to getting to know him better and working with him in my new role as chief strategy and transformation officer. ACI has tremendous prospects for growth and long-term shareholder value creation and we're all excited to have Odilon help us achieve our goals. With that I'll now turn to our results. As we announced in our January call, ACI's 2019 revenue and adjusted EBITDA were negatively impacted principally by a large customer expansion contractors that did not sign as expected in December. As a result of this contract not signing as expected as well as other deals have slipped into 2020 our new bookings also did not meet expectations. I am however, pleased to announce that we have made progress on the delayed 2019 contract. Recently this customer signed an amendment to our contract which renews the current relationship and secures our long-term commitment to ACI. While this contract renewal does not deliver incremental revenue at this time, it includes a framework for future increases in capacity and enables us to focus on growing our relationship. As a mutual affirmation of our partnership as well as the next step towards a future expansion I view this very positively as a win-win. Now that we have closed our 2019 financials, I would like to put the fully into context and share some customer highlights and momentum that position us very well for 2020 and beyond. Scott will follow with some additional details on our financials in a few minutes. 2019 was a positive year for ACI's on many levels. We continue to advance and grow our business amid the M&A activity that transform parts of our industry. We believe we have a unique value proposition serving the Real-Time any-to-any payment needs of banks, intermediaries, billers and merchants. We continue to secure strategic wins that validate ACI's strength and leadership across the Real-Time, retail pavements merchants and e-commerce payments, board payments and payment intelligence areas. Our pipelines are strong. Our solutions continue to be industry leaders. Our recurring revenue streams are a large and growing part of our business and we are confident about our outlook. In terms of growth ACI's revenue increased 25% over 2018 with a speed per acquisition making an important contribution to both revenue and EBITDA. The acquisition board substantial scale and profitability to our ACI and demand business which now represents more than half of consolidated revenues and contributes to our more than 70% recurring revenue. On an organic basis in 2019, ACI also grew revenues in key solution areas in particular e-commerce and Real-Time payments which represent two of the fastest growing transaction areas globally. Strong growth in these areas validates our strategy and positioning efforts. With an unmatched number of payment endpoints and global reach ACI is very well positioned to season even greater share of these opportunities in 2020 and beyond. Now I'd like to turn to our core customer segments highlighting representative customer wins and momentum. Starting with our biller customer segment. The additional speed paid places ACI as the number one direct bill pay provider in the U.S. We see further opportunities to accelerate revenue growth in this business via the additional functionality including the fast growing areas of Real-Time payments and subscription billing. Our roadmap is advancing as we bring together the Speedpay front end with the ACI back-end integrate best-in-class biller platform capable of tremendous scale and continued improved operating margins. We continue to see strong retention and cross-sell opportunities among our biller base. In particular, we are very pleased with our early success in adding our patented mobile digital wallet solution to our existing base of customers. In Q4 we signed both new and expanded electronic bill payment deals in key verticals including utilities, insurance, consumer finance and government. Let me highlight a few examples. One of these was a multi year renewal with one of the largest utilities in the U.S. which represented one of the largest ACI contracts ever signed. Another utility we signed in Q4 was Clay Electric, one of the largest electric co-ops in the U.S. which will utilize ACI's speed paid to enhance its customer experience. Also in Q4, we signed Grange Mutual, a leading property and casualty insurance provider and in the government segment a large mid-Atlantic states signed the deal to utilize our bill payment solution to support permit payments. Shifting to our merchant customer segment. Our e-commerce platform supported a stellar holiday season. We processed 50% more transactions across the globe in Q4, 2019 than we did in 2018, ACI continues to be successful in winning new business and supporting the growing payment needs of some of the world's largest brands for a range of Omni-Channel e-commerce and fraud prevention needs. In 2019 we secured leading retailers with our merchants and e-commerce solutions. We also had a very strong renewal and expansion activity in Q4 representative merchant deals in Q4 included a leading fuel retailer which expanded its use of ACI solutions to better serve customers at thousands of convenience stores across North America. We also signed one of the world's largest furniture stores to expand its use of ACI as it grows its e-commerce footprint. A global sportswear giant selected ACI technology to simplify its payments globally. Also in retail we find one of the largest auto care companies in the U.S. extending its relationship with ACI to improve transaction processes. And we signed large supermarkets including a U.S. based super market giant and ICA one of Sweden's biggest retailers who use ACI solutions to better serve their many thousands of customers. For banks and intermediaries ACI continues to be the payment provider of choice supporting digital transformation as these organizations seek to modernize the infrastructures, enable open APIs and embrace Real-Time payments and the public cloud. Our leading Real-Time payments, retail payments, digital payments and payment intelligence solution are solving the complex needs of financial institutions they enter new markets, scale to address higher payment volumes and meet customer needs. In Q4 we launched a global strategic collaboration of Microsoft to support payments in the cloud and in 2019 three banks selected ACI’s retail payment solution running on Microsoft Azure to power their global payments platforms. Two of the three both of which are top -- global top 30 banks signed in Q4. Our investment in Mind Gate solutions in India is allowing us to seize the very exciting Real-Time payment opportunity in that market and other growth market and other growth markets. In particular our Real-Time solutions continue to see success both with new logos as well as selling into our retail payment space. I'm very proud to say that in an unaided global server of payment decision makers ACI was again the top recognized and preferred brand for Real-Time payments for a second year in a row. This is a very strong validation of our strategy. Some Q4 highlights in the banking intermediary segment included BB&T and SunTrust which recently merged to form trust the sixth largest bank in the U.S. extended its commitment to ACI's UP Real-Time payment solution. BNP Paribas, one of the world's largest banks is consolidating several high-value payment systems into a single ACI UP Real-Time payment solution. BNPP is currently live in seven countries and will add another eight countries during 2020. In the quarter we also signed ING, a leading multinational banking and financial services corporation and long-term ACI customer who expanded its use of UP retail payments to keep up with increasing transaction volumes. In Indonesia one of the three largest banks is utilizing both UP retail payments and UP Real-Time payments as a single payment hub to ready itself for the country's upcoming rollout of immediate payments. And in Mexico one of the largest banks Banorte, expanded its use of UP retail payments for its open banking and systems consolidation strategy. Finally, Network International the largest payment process in the Middle East and the first independent vendor certified by both Visa and MasterCard for payments in the region has expanded its use of UP retail payments as it enters new geographies. All in all these deals and many of the exciting deals we are working on at the moment underpin our confidence in ACI's growth prospects in the payments industry. Our 2020 pipeline is strong and we expect solid revenue growth. We have also implemented several initiatives aimed at both reducing costs and reallocating resources towards our fastest growing solutions. On the sales side we continue to adjust our sales processes to better target our evolving marketplace. Our sales teams are fully staffed and have already hit the ground running in Q1. Our go-to-market approach is our customer segment focus with dedicated sales, solution consulting and customer success teams who are tightly aligned to the needs of banks, intermediaries, merchants and billers. This transformation of our sales practices provides a solid foundation for future sales performance improvement and is already demonstrating positive results. In addition, our customers are also responding well to this approach by renewing and expanding their relationships with us. In our most recent annual survey at the end of 2019 our customer experience scores increased significantly in all categories including in the very important areas of customer satisfaction and likelihood to continue, recommend and expand the relationship with ACI. I'd like to compliment the whole ACI team for the ongoing efforts in these areas. In summary, our fundamentals are sound. We're off to a good start in 2020 and we have a lot of growth opportunities to be optimistic about in the years ahead. And with that I'll now turn over the call to Scott to provide some additional financial highlights. Thank you very much.

Well, thanks Craig and good morning everyone. I first plan to go through the highlights of 2019 and then provide our outlook for 2020. I'll be starting my comments on slide 6 with key takeaways from the year. Our overall bookings were down from 2018 with higher term extensions offset by lower new bookings. As Craig mentioned this was partially resolved a large expansion contract that did not sign as expected as well as other deals that slip into 2020. And going forward we're evaluating the use of this metric and considering adjusting future reporting to be more applicable to our evolving business which is shifted from being traditional software license base to now more than half of our revenue coming from our on-demand solutions. We saw strong backlog growth with 12 month and 60 month backlog up $18 million and $144 million respectively with most of that growth coming in the fourth quarter. Full-year revenue was $1.3 billion up 25 % over last year and excluding the impact of Speedpay and foreign currency revenue for the year was up 3% organically. Recurring revenue grew to 71% of total revenue, up from 65% in 2018. Adjusted EBITDA for the year was $308 million, up 23% from last year. EBITDA margins expanded by 300 basis points year-over-year driven by the contribution from Speedpay as well as the improving margin in our AOD business as we focus on profitability growth. Turning next to our operating segments. Our on-demand segment grew 57 % driven primarily by the Speedpay contribution and continues to deliver solid margin improvement with our net adjusted EBITDA margins hitting 19% this year compared to 5% last year. And specifically our fourth quarter net adjusted EBITDA margin was 30% which represents the highest quarterly margin contribution ever for our on-demand business and shows solid progress towards our Rule of 40 targets. This margin expansion will continue to improve with scale as we grow into the infrastructure we've built out over the last few years and we expect 2020 to take another step higher. Our On Premise segment grew slightly from 2018 and delivered adjusted EBITDA margins of 55%. Adjusted operating free cash flow is $108 million versus $148 million 2018. We ended the year with $121 million in cash and $1.4 billion in debt bringing us to a pro-forma net leverage ratio of 3.75 times. During the year we purchased 1.2 million shares for $36 million or $29 per share and we have 141 million remaining on our share repurchase authorization. Turning next to slide 7, with our outlook for 2020 as previously provided on our January call for 2020 we expect total revenue to be between $1.48 billion and $1.51 billion which represents approximately 18% to 20 % growth over 2019. Recall that Speedpay was acquired on May 9, 2019 and so 2019 results include only a partial year of Speedpay. So part of the growth we expect in 2020 will come from having a full-year contribution from Speedpay. We expect 2020 adjusted EBITDA to be in a range of $425 million to $450 million which represents approximately 38 % to 44 % growth over 2019 and similar to our revenue targets our EBITDA growth will also benefit from having a full year of Speedpay contribution 2020 versus just a partial contribution in 2019. in addition, our commitment to achieving our long-term profitability goals include continually assessing our operating efficiencies in 2020 we expect to realize approximately $20 million of cost reductions from these initiatives and those are assumed in our guidance. This guidance excludes between 5 million and 10 million of continued integration related expenses from Speedpay and approximately $10 million of one-time charges to implement the cost reduction initiatives and as it relates to the large renewal Craig mentioned earlier we have secured the long-term commitment from this customer from this renewal but we don't expect any incremental impact to 2020 at this time. Also on slide 7, we did provide additional guidance information to help you build out your financial models and finally we expect Q1 revenue to be between $285 million and $295 million which is an increase of 38% to 43 % over Q1, 2019 and though we're not providing full yearning bookings outlook at this time as I mentioned earlier as we assess more applicable industry standard metric for our SaaS and PaaS business we do expect Q1 new bookings to be a solid double-digit grower over Q1, 2019 on a consistent reporting basis. So in closing, we expect to deliver solid revenue and profitability growth in 2020. So that concludes my prepared remarks. Operator we're ready to open the line for questions at this time.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Peter Heckmann from Davidson. You may ask your question.

Good morning gentlemen and congratulations on getting that slip deal closed and maintaining some discipline around those deals. I'm curious so, while it certainly sounds like it will help front-load bookings for the year. How is the contract structured so that we don't, we shouldn't expect a initial license fee related to that contract expansion in 2020?

Yes. I think to clarify what this is, they've renewed for the long term on what they already have. So that secures the long term commitment of this customer on our products. This is not the expansion deal if we were talking about at the end of last year. So I would say at this time there's no incremental revenue just from the pure renewal but that has committed them to the long term but I bet generally speaking it provides a framework for future expansion.

Yes. Let me elaborate slightly on that. I think it's a very important point. The big question in the market was does ACI have long term relevance in the post M&A era. Well, this continues to validate our importance to the very biggest players and our aptness to the very biggest and globalized players and the parties have reaffirmed our mutual commitment to each other and growing up businesses as together. So that's correct and within that construct of the renewal which gives us that long-term certainty, we've established a framework where we will work together to grow the relationship as their business grows and so I think it's a very constructive outcome. It takes a big strategic question off the table and helps us focus on mutual growth in the coming years.

Great Craig. That's helpful. And just a follow-up then, I guess my understanding of the five-year term license contracts with volume components, was that if a customer did make a major acquisition then they really had to complete that contract expansion before they could do their own internal platform consolidation and so is there a time where the remaining three large companies going through mergers have to complete those contract expansions?

So as and when they run out of capacity which is a function of a number of different things, their own growth rates and some of them are growing really nicely in some of their markets as we understand it or when they win new add-on business all of whom as part of the rationale of the consolidation is that they want to target new add-on business. So either of those events typically would drive a conversation with us as the round expanding the amount of capacity they need to buy and of course when they come in buy capacity over and above the run rate of the current arrangement for example the one we've just renewed then obviously its add-on business and new revenue.

Your next question comes from the line of George Sutton from Craig-Hallum. You may ask question.

Thank you. A big focus that your analyst day was around the concept of the scale that you can now really achieve given where you stand. The organic growth in 2019 was low single digits. I'm curious as we look out to 2020 and beyond particularly with a new CEO coming in extensively with some growth focus, what are the governor's to that organic growth and what are the real opportunities?

So the opportunities let me start there. So as we said in the call I think there are myriad of opportunities. Let me highlight three just off the top of my head. Real-Time really does continue to become to be a very important trend in the marketplace. Our brand leadership I think is a fantastic affirmation of our ability to participate in that as quite frankly our product leadership in that realm. So we're excited about Real-Time. We continue to see opportunities evolve. So that's the first thing but beyond Real-Time as a standalone opportunity we are seeing significant opportunity with Real-Time in conjunction with other solutions. Two examples would be the addition of Real-Time tubular. It's only a matter of time before Real-Time and expedited bill pay becomes an important part of the biller direct equation in the U.S. and so we're excited about that and we are rolling out Real-Time payments as part of a biller solution through this year and expect good results from that. The other place that Indonesian Bank, I mentioned for me is a great example of what's happening quite often. Banks are sitting with a large card franchises which are historically powered by ACI and they are wrestling with how do we convert that to an account to account or a multi payment rail kind of environment to a multi payment type hub and just about every one of our large card customers is talking to us about the addition of Real-Time payments to the existing ACI footprints. And so that not only expands those relationships but quite frankly protects those franchises for the long term as volumes may start to transition from one realm to the other. And in the third area that continues to excite us is all things online. E-commerce is good. You could probably regard some of our bill payments as being in a form of e-commerce and the growth rates and the macro forces in the industry remain solid. So there are a whole bunch of or fundamentals around the world that continue to be interesting to our business and represent future opportunities. I think impediments to that quite frankly or in our own four walls, it's our ability to execute on those sale, it's our ability to deploy those ones quickly and we continue to really double down our efforts on being a better sales organization, a more consistent sales organization and to operate, optimize, our operating processes in terms of getting customers live. So, that's driven your this flow quickly.

Yes. I think the only thing I want to add is -- yes, the only thing I got to add to that, George, is when it comes to the scale. I mentioned we're looking at operational efficiencies, we're looking at -- we're actually looking at the head in producing costs in certain areas of our business and reinvesting costs into some of those high growth areas. And also if you look at our Q4 exit rate on our On Demand business had the highest EBITDA margins ever. So, that scale is going to layer on top of a relatively fixed cost base or also where we'd continue to drive improved efficiencies. But to be able to drive a pretty high dollar revenue to EBITDA conversion. So, that gets back another scale as we start to see accelerated growth, we're also going to see a high conversion to EBITDA.

A couple of things, you did not mention Craig, and we've talked about them a lot in the past would be the Azure partnership and I think the ability to continue grow through that. And then also Linux as a hardware component that lowers the ultimate cost of a changeover or what are those doing for your pipeline of opportunities?

The public cloud is a strong driver of opportunity and discussion. And I mentioned that Azure once we had last year. We continue to build and grow that relationship with Microsoft. In fact, on the in Redmond next week to continue those discussions and to further the go-to market plan. So, I feel very good about the opportunity that the public cloud gives us as our customer base more-and-more think about the impact of you know the public cloud on their deployment option. We also quite frankly see it is going to open up some new opportunity. It makes it easier for existing customers to expand into new markets. It also makes it easy for new entrance. And so, we're finding that we have some new opportunities that are coming out of the woodwork just because it takes the barriers of entry from an infrastructure prospect of a way as people think about growing the global payment businesses.

Your next question comes from the line of Joseph Vafi from Canaccord. You may ask your question.

Hi gentlemen, good morning. I was wondering just kind of circling back to the first question and the outlook here for this year. Just with M&A back to our perhaps kind of dying down now a little bit. Do you see that relative to the guidance reducing potential lumpiness in large deals and the ability to -- I'm sorry, and less lumpiness for the guidance given the competitor or the M&A landscape are perhaps settling down?

While may -- and our licensed software business I think is always going to have an element of lumpiness to it just because of the nature of recognizing all the license fee at signing. And so, and a lot of our sales happen in the second half of the year. A lot of our renewals happen under Anniversary dates. That’s where we get another lumpiness in the inflow of license fees. Those are typically going to be in the third and fourth quarter. So, I think with on the licensed software side of the business, we're still going to see that lumpiness. On but our On Demand business is now become an over 50% of our overall business. That is inherently our recurring revenue a much more predictable recurring quarter-over-quarter on a sequential basis. And with this Speedpay acquisition last year, so it not only did bring a lot of recurring revenue to our business, brought a lot of recurring profitability. And so, that also is going to level out the quarterly variability. But so I'd say as our On Demand business gets bigger, it'll produce the lumpiness, the software license software side of the business will still have that degree of lumpiness just due to the timing of sales and the timing of renewals.

Sure, that's helpful. And then just on the Real-Time side of things, it sounds like a lot of banks a lot of financial institutions, a lot of merchants or billers are eager to perhaps get this going at a bigger level especially in the U.S. do you see there being a kind of a catalyst or larger adoption here across the payments landscape and at least in the U.S. to real-time. It seems like we need to have something of a network effect in place with enough players involved in and been able to provide it that you can kind of really light it up and make it kind of a capability that is kind of more pervasive in the market place. Thanks.

Yes. And you were talking right. The dynamic that drives adoption and then the rate of adoption varies by market and they extend to which the regulators are involved. Then in the U.S. I've seen a little bit of an increased urgency after the FedNow announcement. So, I've seen normal activity of people deploying and trying to activate the core infrastructures we already have with The Clearing House and with Zelle. Just this last week or so announcement from one of the large core providers where they had activated 100s of banks. So, on the Zelle network, and if that's your point, the metric effect is building up to a critical mass. And we pretty close I believe to the tipping point in terms of banks in the broader ecosystem that are all connected with the big core players participating more-and-more with the big banks that are already out there. So, that's the first thing. And then, then the second thing is as that critical mass from connected consumers and the accounts build that you're going to start to see the applications. That's one of the reasons why I'm actually quite excited about bill pay. In our position in the market place and the relevance of bill pay is going to support the real-time story is actually going to greatly supported by the tipping point that we're getting to in terms of critical mass of connected participant. So, I would argue that in the next few years you're going to see very aggressive growth in the use and adoption of real-time in the U.S. as the metric effects kick in and reach maturity.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Brett Huff from Stephens. You may ask your question.

Good morning, guys. Thanks for the time today.

Hi, Brett.

Question on just the numbers. I want to make sure that I understood the implied organic growth for '20. You gave us a range on the '20 outlook. And you hopefully which is kind of 1.495 billion mid-point'ish. But then you also gave us I think a $228 million what I think is the stub or the partial year in organic revenue contribution from Speedpay. And if I remove that from the 1495 or so mid-point, that gets me kind of just slightly positive organic revenue growth. Is that the right way to think about those numbers or am I getting that a little long?

Yes, the range on the organic side and you're right we didn’t break out the Speedpay from the organic. But it would be low-to-mid single digits.

Okay. That's helpful. And then, the sales process Craig that I think that you talked about, what was the driver for that, is this just sort of a normal must take a look at the sales process. Was it driven by something specific, I mean these larger deals was is there a what may be a way to take care of these larger renewals or opportunities better or kind of give us a sense of the driver of it. And then, if you could just sort of kind of rearticulate the two or three key changes that have been made or will be made. Thanks, guys.

Yes. So, the -- and look we've been at this for a few years and then quite frankly it was driven by a desire to grow our business through more new business win. And we got fantastic products and the fantastic global footprints and we've not been enthralled by the rate of growth that we managed to get through new business developments. So, it really is a desire to make sure that we get our fair share and more. And so, we've been reengineering ourselves organization for the last while and particularly doubled on last year. As we look forward at the opportunity we saw. And we definitely did not see ourselves as this being trapped in the cash car kind of spaces. We see ourselves being in a more to with growth opportunity. And so, this is a sharp end of that spear. So, that's what really motivated it. In terms of things we've done, there's a huge list there and number of activities that we reengineered the sales process into in I would call out refreshed and reengineered pipeline management and forecasting processes. I would talk to a doubling done on the sale of leadership that we have in place and the alignment of that sales leadership to our key customer segment. I think that's really important. We've got 10 points in your team that leadership and in-depth knowledge and alignment with the customers is really going to help. And then the last thing is it's not just about the sales organization, we've really doubled down the organization. Sales is a one ACI team sport. And so, we've reengineered and integrated the product side of the house with the operating side of the house, with the sales side of the house with the marketing side of the house and with the customer success side of the house to make sure that the entire ACI engine is aligned around the task of sales and winning new business. And we've made great strides over the last six to 12 months of having a far more aligned organization that is far more committed to selling. If you sat in on our executive meetings the last few months compared to many years ago, I can tell you now we spend much more if not the majority of our meeting time talking about sales and winning in the market than we've ever done in the past. And for me, that's part of the positive trend towards becoming very sales centric on our day-to-day thinking as a company.

There are no further question at this time. Presenters, you may continue.

Well, thanks everybody for dialing in. we look forward to catching up in the coming weeks. Have a great day.

Bye-bye.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you, for your participating. You may now disconnect.