Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Kat, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the ACI Worldwide Inc. Fourth Quarter and Full Year Ended 2023 Financial Results. All lines have been placed in mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to John Kraft. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. On today's call, we will discuss the company's fourth quarter and full year 2023 results. We will also discuss our financial outlook for the rest of 2024, and we'll 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 press 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. Before we begin, we wanted to make sure that everyone was aware of our upcoming Analyst Day, which will be held in New York City on March 12. Please reach out if you haven't received an invitation. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom.

Good morning, and thank you for joining our call. I'm going to start with some high-level thoughts on my first year as CEO, and I'll provide some comments about our 2023 performance. I'll finish by reiterating my confidence in our ability to take advantage of strong market opportunities in 2024 and beyond. As then as usual, I'll hand it over to Scott, and he'll discuss financial results in more detail and our outlook for 2024 and we'll open the line for questions after that. As you probably know, I've been the CEO first on an interim basis, and then since June of last year, on a longer-term basis. And during that time, I've made it a point to personally visit as many customers, partners and fellow ACI team members as possible. In that year, I've met in person more than 70% of our employees and all of our top 10 customers in more than 15 countries across five continents. And following those visits, I'm even more convinced that ACI is a company with world-class solutions, talented employees and a customer base unmatched in the industry. Our market position, combined with the substantial opportunities for expansion and growth in industry with a near continual change puts us in a position to accelerate our growth and help customers achieve and exceed their strategic objectives. More on the future in a moment. I'm going to start with 2023. We had a solid performance. We exited the year strong, and that has set us up to accelerate our growth this year. We delivered results in line with or above our expectations and with the guidance we provided to you this time last year. We saw strength in our Biller segment with revenue growth of 9% and EBITDA growth of 32% in 2023. We went…

Thanks, Tom, and good morning, everyone. I first plan to go over our financial results for 2023. I'll then provide our outlook for 2024. We'll then open the line for questions. I'll be starting my comments on Slide 4 with key takeaways from the fourth quarter. Q4 2023 revenue was $477 million, up 5% from Q4 2022. And we continue to see solid growth in our underlying recurring revenue, which was up 7% compared to Q4 2022. Adjusted EBITDA was $210 million, up 8% from Q4 2022. Our EBITDA growth contributed to strong cash flow growth in Q4 2023 with cash flow from operating activities of $86 million, more than double Q4 2022. As we look at the segment results, our Bank segment revenue increased 3% and Bank segment adjusted EBITDA was up 1% compared to Q4 2022. Our Merchant segment revenue increased 4% and segment adjusted EBITDA increased 2% versus Q4 2022. And during the year, we saw improvement in the segment as expected with revenue growth accelerating as we exited the year. Our Biller segment saw the biggest improvement year-over-year with revenue increasing 9% and segment adjusted EBITDA increasing 60% versus Q4 2022. The growth in revenue and profitability in this segment is driven by both new customer go-lives as well as notable progress with our interchange improvement program. Turning next to Slide 5 with key takeaways for the full year 2023. Revenue for the full year was $1.45 billion, up 5% from 2022, adjusted EBITDA was $395 million, up 10% from 2022 and cash flow from operating activities was $169 million, up 19% from 2022. We ended 2023 with $164 million in cash on hand and total debt outstanding of approximately $1 billion. Our net debt leverage ratio was 2.2 times, that is down from 2.6 times…

[Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from the line of Peter Heckmann with D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I wanted to see if you could give a little bit more color or interpretation on your bookings numbers. You see getting both ARR and licenses and services bookings. And when we look at those, certainly down year-over-year on the ARR side, following a relatively stronger year in 2022, how should we interpret the ARR bookings and now the license and service bookings in terms of incorporating that in the model? I mean, historically, with this -- that and total bookings, directionally that had some value. The ARR bookings, having a harder time, kind of extrapolating that into when do those start to have an impact? And how concerned should we be with the down bookings for the year?

Yeah. Thanks, Pete. This is Scott. Yeah, we've talked about this now for a number of quarters. The one aspect of the ARR metric is it doesn't really capture the booking success that we have in the bank business, which is predominantly on-premise. And so we've been talking about our license and service sales. We put that into the bookings table this quarter. That is up, whether you're looking at the quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year is up in the 16% to 17% range. And that's really where we've been seeing our success. So it's more of a function of which segment we're seeing success in bookings in 2023, and that's coming from banks. Really, if you look at banks over the last three years in terms of revenue growth, it's been coming out of COVID, but if you exclude Dragonfly, our digital banking sale, revenue of the banks has been really our strongest segment. It's been up 8% to 9% on a constant currency basis. And so we're continuing to see that strong bookings growth in the bank segment in license and services in '23. The only other thing I'd point out is if you recall in 2022 on the ARR side, we did have our largest Biller deal that we've ever sold was in the 2022 comps. So it's -- and that sort of deal size did not recur in 2023.

Yeah. I think that was the only point I would have -- I'll just reiterate the point Scott just made. So 2022 is a little bit of an anomaly in that way. And you mentioned that, Pete. When you signed two of the largest deals we've ever had in the history of that business, and those showed up in the 2022 ARR numbers, we did not expect to repeat that in 2023. And of course, we didn't. But total bookings were very strong, and we're very confident in the guidance that Scott just presented to you.

Great. That's good to hear. I appreciate that. And then in terms of interchange, you had said in the press release that you do expect net adjusted EBITDA margins for the year to expand a bit. So would that imply that interchange is maybe going to grow at about the same rate or maybe even a little bit faster than total revenue?

I wouldn't necessarily -- I would say, generally in line with. I think we still have some room for improvement there. Obviously, we had a big improvement between '22 and '23 in terms of all the initiatives that we've put in place, but there's still more to go. So I would say it's in line with or less than the total rate of revenue growth in that Biller segment.

Yeah. I mean I think it's fair to say though, we -- as Scott said, we had a big improvement in 2023. We don't have enough room to repeat that, but we do expect to see continued improvement and expansion of margin.

Okay. That’s fair. I’ll get back in the queue. Thanks.

Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jeff Cantwell with Seaport Research. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks guys. Can you talk about the guidance you gave for 2024 and your revenue growth of 7% to 9%, which looks pretty good? And maybe explain how you're thinking about revenue growth by segment? Can you break that out for us? And then specifically on your banking segment, what opportunities are you seeing there right now with clients? Maybe you could give us some flavor for what we should expect to see there in 2024? And maybe tell us about your pipeline. Thanks.

Yeah. On the 2024 relating, I think if you look at relative to 2023, the Biller segment grew 9% in 2023, but that growth really was a function of, call it, three things. One is just your same-store sales growth. Second is the go-live and ramping of net new client business. And the third piece was some of the repricing elements of dealing with the interchanges we had in 2022. So you go to 2024, two of those three elements are still going to be there. There may be some repricing elements left. But Billers should fall back into, call it, that within the 7% to 9% growth rate that we're talking about in terms of total company. The bank business, which has -- in the last three-year CAGR has been about 8-plus-percent. 2024 will kind of look like it would be back to kind of mean reversion. This year was only a couple, 2% or 3%. But next year, we'll be back within that kind of three-year average. And then merchant, which was a drag essentially on growth in 2023, as we talked about, exited the year stronger and that exit rate will carry into next year, would expect the merchant business really to be at the high end of our consolidated growth rate. So they all line up pretty much within that 7% to 9% growth, but a little bit different dynamics by each of the segments.

Yeah. And then on the -- I think your question was about banks, the bank segment and opportunities in pipeline. So we're seeing a number of different types of opportunities, and it depends on which region of the world you're in, but I'll give you kind of a flavor for it. So in -- we continue to see price increases as we renew with our existing customers. So -- and those are based on -- primarily on two things, volumes, so they need to buy more capacity from us than they did the last time, and then price increases related to the inflation that has happened between the last renewal and this one. So that's one driver. But -- and that's in our more developed markets. And then we look at places like Latin America and Asia, and we see new opportunities with financial institutions. And those are -- many of those are driven by what I mentioned in my comments earlier, the understanding that real-time payments volumes are coming. And it depends on which country you're in whether you -- these financial institutions have seen those volumes ramp yet or not. But everyone knows they're coming and they're thinking about how do I make sure that my payments infrastructure can handle that increase of volume because these are, to a large extent, those real-time payments are cannibalizing cash transactions. And so those -- a bank in Latin America doesn't -- not a lot they have to do with the cash transaction, but as it moves to real-time payments, that changes, and they need to make sure they're ready for the for the volume, and they're making sure that they are. They're trying to make sure they are. And that's when that opportunity comes for us to talk to them. They want to continue to take advantage of our proven scalability, reliability. And then -- so if they don't have it, they're looking to talk to us about it. If they do already have some of our software, they're asking for our help to make sure the rest of their infrastructure can handle that increased volume. So those are some flavors of it. The pipeline is very strong. It's growing and that dynamic about being ready for the ramp in volume that they know is coming eventually, that's one of the key drivers.

Okay. That's great. And my follow-up on that, on real-time payments is, one of the biggest questions we'll be getting inbound about your opportunity is there's so much focus on FedNow, but my understanding is for your footprint, it's much broader than that globally. So would you mind -- I don't want to preempt your Analyst Day too much here, but today, but would you mind mapping out where you see the most significant opportunities for real-time payments? Is it Europe, is it Asia, LatAm, et cetera? How would you characterize that?

Well, I don't -- I'm not trying to be flipping on this, but it's all of the above because -- and we're -- I think you probably know this, but just so we're all on the same page, largest real-time payment markets today in the world are India, that's the largest by far, Brazil and China. Those are the three largest real-time payment markets in the world. And the rest of the world is, to some extent, playing catch-up, but the European Central Bank has mandated the availability and support of real-time payments across the Eurozone. So you've got -- I mean you have real-time payments in Europe, of course, but that is -- it's getting a lot more attention. And then Latin America is an up and comer, outside of Brazil, it's still a relatively small volumes with real-time payments, but that's changing. And I mentioned, we signed the Central Bank of Colombia in terms of supporting the -- their real-time payments central infrastructure. That's just one example in Latin America, but I think that you will continue to see significant growth in the focus on and volumes of real-time payments in Latin America, also in Asia, and certainly in Europe. So lots of opportunity. You mentioned FedNow. I mean, FedNow is still a new thing. It's only a few months in. And the Fed has not published specific volumes yet. But we expected them to be pretty small at the beginning, and they are. But we're getting new institutions signing on at an increasing rate. And I don't have the exact number from the Fed in front of me, but the number of institutions has grown a lot since that started. And what's really interesting, too is The Clearing House’s real-time payments transactions have benefited from all the marketing that the Fed has done around FedNow. So we are starting to see increased volumes. I think it's going to take -- continue to take a while before the volumes are extremely large. But again, to me, the most interesting thing is the discussions that the anticipation of real-time payment volume increase is generating for us. And that's really good for us. It puts us in a position to help our customers deal with one of the biggest issues they're wrestling with right now.

Yeah. The only other thing I'd add to that is, just in terms of a metric, our real-time payments solution, our revenue growth in 2023 was 23% over 2022 and very little -- I mean, very little of that, if any, right now is coming from FedNow. So there's really no -- there's not a real contingency on our 2024 outlook or even our longer-term outlook on or where we're predicting a tipping point on FedNow specifically, really a lot of our growth historically in the near term is coming from international markets.

Okay. Great. Appreciate all the color. Thank you.

And our next question comes from the line of Charles Nabhan with Stephens Inc. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hi, good morning guys and thank you for taking my question. As we think through the model for banking in '24, I was hoping you could comment on the renewal schedule. I think you said in the past that it was -- it would be a little more evenly distributed relative to '23. And I know third quarter was a big quarter for -- you had the big renewal there. But anything you could say around the cadence as we think through the model for banking would be helpful.

Yeah, Chuck, I would look at just -- I would phase the bank revenue in your modeling for '24 pretty consistent with 2023. We're always going to have kind of that second half and predominantly fourth quarter renewal timing. So if you model it consistent with 2023, that should set you up well for 2024 timing.

Got it. And as a follow-up, I wanted to drill into the Biller segment a little bit and get a sense for, what verticals specifically are driving the growth from both the new bookings and a same-store standpoint?

Yeah. I don't know that there's a single vertical that drove it. I think the biggest growth because of the new sales that we've mentioned were the utilities and telecommunications segments. But we've seen good growth across the verticals that we support, but those would be the two largest.

Got it. And if I could sneak one more in on capital allocation. You're in a pretty good spot from a balance sheet standpoint. You had mentioned that your -- the priority is buybacks. However, you do have that flexibility. So I was wondering if you could comment on M&A and if your appetite towards potential targets that would potentially accelerate your go-to-market in certain areas across your businesses? Anything you could say there would be helpful.

Well, I mean, I think we would always be opportunistic. But obviously, the -- it's been a number of years since we have done an acquisition. We did make the divestiture of our digital banking business in 2022. I would say just -- I would look at 2024 at this point, very similar to '23 and that the balanced approach of both share buybacks and de-levering is really the target capital allocation. I would just say, I think we'd always be opportunistic if there was something accretive, but the balance this year is targeted to share buyback and de-levering.

Got it. Appreciate all the color.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Joe Vafi with Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Good morning. This is Pallav Saini on for Joe. Thanks for taking our questions. First off, Tom, you touched on GenAI and large language models in your remarks. Can you give us some examples of how you're using GenAI currently? And what are some near-term opportunities for you there? And I have a follow-up.

Sure. Three primary use cases for us with GenAI and LLMs. So first of all, it's fraud detection and prevention, which I've mentioned before. I'm sure you've heard a lot about it. We've been using AI for over a decade in our fraud detection and prevention solutions. And we have patents and proprietary methods of creating algorithms and training models. And we have excellent products there and part of the reason is the use of AI and the continued use of AI. So that's use case number one. Use case number two is customer service. And so as an example, we have -- we haven't completed this for all products, but for some of our products, we have loaded into Copilot. We use Microsoft's Copilot for a secure environment. But we've loaded every piece of documentation we have for several of our products, our solutions. And that includes FAQs, Wikis, inquiries from customers and the answers, all of it. And we've then trained the model, and we are now able to get very good productivity from our customer service representatives, the people that handle inquiries about our software products, people that deal with outages or issues that our customers are having. We're able to get them productive in a fraction of the time that it used to take us with longer-term training. And ultimately, we're going to make that same kind of knowledge base with the AI on top of it available directly to our customers, so that they can get answers to questions faster and it improves the productivity of our team. So that's number two, customer service. Number three, probably predictably for a software company is software development. And we have employed generative AI with our developers. And what we've been able to do -- so I'll just…

That's great color. Thanks, Tom. And my follow-up is on digital assets. Are you providing any products and services on the crypto side right now? And how are you thinking about this space if you -- and if you see any opportunities given some of the recent developments like the spot bitcoin ETFs? Thank you.

Yeah. Thanks. I was -- just before I walked in here, I was watching the founder of one of those ETFs talking about the explosion that we've seen. But to answer your question, so many of our products are perfectly happy to facilitate a transaction in Bitcoin. It doesn't really matter very much to us, what the medium is, whether it's dollars or pounds or bitcoin or central bank digital currency, and it doesn't really matter to our applications. And we have absolutely built in the ability to use crypto where it makes sense. So we're fine with all of that. I don't -- I wish I was smart enough to tell you what all the impacts of the Bitcoin ETFs are. I might not be here right now. I might be on the beach somewhere. But I don't know. But we're going to obviously continue. We're a very important player in the payments ecosystem. Digital commerce, to a large extent, relies on ACI, we're going to make sure that our products can support whatever medium and mechanisms, consumers and commercial customers want to use.

Great. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of George Sutton with Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. This is James on for George. Nice results. So the recurring revenue growth in the bank segment over the last couple of quarters have been pretty encouraging. Could you talk about what's driving the strength there? And then last quarter, you also mentioned moving down market. Could we sort of get an update on those efforts? And then lastly, would you be able to sort of quantify what you think is a sustainable growth rate for the real-time payment solutions over the next couple of years?

Yeah. I think on the -- what's driving on the bank side, recurring revenues, it's really just -- it's the maintenance on the license software. And so that is -- that's both a function of price. It's -- those have built-in CPI inflationary mechanisms and then just the go-lives of new customers. So that's on the maintenance side. But probably the bigger growth year-over-year in bank recurring revenues come from the SaaS business. So that's go-lives and ramping of customers that we've sold in bank SaaS. And bank SaaS, it's not a significant component of the overall bank business, but had nice growth in 2023.

Yeah. And then you asked about mid-tier and -- we have -- we've been primarily focused on pipeline development for the mid-tier. We've got a lot of conversations going, but that isn't -- it hasn't really shown up much yet. That's a future opportunity. And those conversations I was mentioning earlier about modernization, many of those are with this mid-tier. And just to reiterate and remind everybody, when we talk about mid-tier, we're talking about $50 billion to $250 billion in assets. So these are still very large financial institutions. But historically, our sort of sweet spot has been $250 billion and up, the mega banks. And this -- so we're -- we call it mid-tier, not everybody might call that mid-tier, but it's a little bit smaller, and that's where they are -- they tend to be more interested in SaaS and/or cloud models than the mega banks, and that's why that -- the development of those infrastructures and capabilities, Scott just referenced the growth that we've seen there. That's why that is so important. And it's generating great conversation, great pipeline expansion, and we have signed several of those customers, and that's what's driving that growth Scott was just mentioning.

Yeah. And I would say if I look at the -- our expectation going forward in terms of what real-time growth is going to be, it should be a healthy double-digit growth, very similar to our fraud detection software capabilities. I mean, we have -- those are natural cross-sells to the existing customer base. And as you know, we have blue-chip bank customer base that has been with us for a long time and the natural cross-sell of new products to that same customer base is typically going to be in real-time payments and fraud detection. So both those areas should have healthy double-digit growth in the future.

Yeah. And just a final point on that. Scott mentioned the natural cross-sell, absolutely right. And real-time payments and fraud are -- I mean those things go together extraordinarily well. So we often package the two together. So it's a great, great offering, great couple of offerings.

Great. Last one for me. Can you just touch on the competitive landscape in Biller and Merchant? And any changes you've seen there sort of just given the momentum seen in adding net new logos?

Sure. So I wouldn't say that I've seen a lot of change in that. We tend to see some of the same competitors. I think we've -- so if I -- let me start with Biller, very strong year, obviously, last year in Biller and some of the wins that we've talked about before. One of the reasons that I think we've seen the success is if you think back a couple of years, we were still digesting the Speedpay acquisition from Western Union, and we finished that, I don't know, end of '21-ish. And so we were able to turn our full attention to running the business and growing it, and that's definitely worked well, and we expect that to continue to work well. So I think that's the primary driver in Biller. On the Merchant side, again, kind of the same thing. I wouldn't say there's a big change I think we did have a bit of a slow start, as we mentioned, in '23, finished the year pretty strong, and we're seeing very good signs that that's going to continue into '24. And so we should see better growth this year. And that has primarily to do with the business that's already been sold and is ramping up. So very good visibility in that business. And our sweet spot there tends to be the really large -- a little bit like the banking example I gave, they tend to be very large global retailers that are looking for consistent experience, very predictable, very positive experience for their consumer, whether it's in the store, online, whatever channel the consumer wants to use. And the reason it tends to be global is they don't want a bundled solution from an acquirer typically because they can't -- there is no acquirer that can handle them everywhere. And so they want that consistent experience and we can do that because we are able to work with any acquirer and make that experience at the till or online, very positive and consistent across the board. So that is our sweet spot target market. We're very good at it, and we're continuing to see success there.

And there are no further questions at this time. Mr. John Kraft, I turn the call over to you.

Well, thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We appreciate your time and look forward to catching up in the coming weeks as well as at our Analyst Day. Have a great day.

Thanks, everybody.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference. You may now disconnect.