ACI Worldwide, Inc (NASDAQ:ACIW) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call November 2, 2023 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

John Kraft - SVP of Finance and Strategy

Tom Warsop - President and CEO

Scott Behrens - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Alli Heckmann - D.A. Davidson

Pallav Saini - Canaccord Genuity

Charles Nabhan - Stephens

George Sutton - Craig-Hallum

Operator

Morning. My name is Mark, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the ACI Worldwide Inc. Third Quarter 2023 Financial Results. All lines have been placed in mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remark there will be a question and answer session. [Operator Instructions]. Also one question and one follow-up per person only. Thank you.

Mr. John Kraft, you may begin your conference.

John Kraft

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. On today's call, we will discuss the company's third quarter 2023 results and financial outlook for the rest of the year. We will take your questions at the end. The slides accompanying this call and webcast can be found in 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.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom.

Tom Warsop

Good morning, and thank you all for joining our third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. I'll start this morning with some brief comments on the quarter, and then I'll hand it over to Scott to discuss the detailed financials and outlook for the remainder of 2023.

He's also going to discuss revenue growth expectations for full year 2024, including a little more color on the building blocks of how we generate next year's forecasts. Of course, then, as usual, we'll open the line for questions.

Our results in Q3 were strong ahead of our expectations. Total revenue was $363 million. That was up 21% year-over-year, and recurring revenue was $263 million, up 10% when we adjust for foreign exchange impact and the divestiture of the corporate online banking business.

As we previously discussed, the quarterly timing of our renewals is weighted towards the second half this year, relative to how the quarter stays last year. But good news, we saw those renewals come in Q3 as expected, and we were also able to sign a few new deals in our pipeline earlier than we expected, which helped us come in above our guidance range, which certainly helps de-risk hitting our full year guidance.

New ARR bookings for the quarter were $21 million, and new ARR bookings for the trailing 12 months were $85 million. We faced some pretty tough comparisons in ARR bookings, but total bookings were up 20% in the quarter, and our new non-recurring bookings, such as new term licenses signed in the quarter, were $54 million, and that was up 50% from last year's Q3. This was driven by continued strength in the banking sector, with several international banks purchasing additional capacity to support their growing transaction volume.

In addition to continued strength in banking, we're also continuing to see encouraging recurring revenue growth in the banking segment, which grew 13% year-over-year. I would point to a couple of drivers here. Newer SaaS contracts are ramping their volumes, and we have, as you know, inflationary price increases written into our licensed contracts, which we've executed.

Staying on the topic of banking segment demand, as we continue to invest in modernizing our core solutions and to make public cloud delivery options available, we're seeing accelerating SaaS demand, not only with some of our traditional and long-time customers, but also with new banking customers that may be somewhat smaller than our historic focus area, and that tends to be mega banks or tier one banks.

These institutions are seeking the highest levels of scalability and reliability that ACI is so well known for, and they're often more interested in taking advantage of SaaS delivery options.

To be clear, I'm talking about a newer and incremental market for us, with a segment of financial institutions aspiring to challenge the largest banks with next-generation intelligence payments orchestration and real-time payments hubs. There's an exciting opportunity for us, and we continue to allocate resources to it.

Moving on to Biller, I was particularly pleased to see continued acceleration in the results. Gross revenue grew 11% in the quarter, net revenue grew 24%, EBITDA grew 48%.

This strength was driven by the onboarding of newly signed customers in utility and customer finance vertical, including the customer we've previously mentioned that is expected to be our largest Biller client when it's fully onboarded.

We also benefited from the interchange improvement efforts that I've talked about before, and those have clearly taken hold. These interchange pricing adjustments will have lasting impacts on our profitability. Merchant segment revenue in EBITDA were flat. The segment has stabilized, and we continue to expect to see growth in Q4 and into 2024.

It's notable that our anti-fraud solutions continue to perform well. We saw 12% growth in that portion of the business during the quarter. The AI-enhanced fraud prevention solution that I mentioned on the last call is something we continue to be very excited about, and that is gaining traction in the market.

Overall, we're executing well. We're delivering on our promises to the investment community. We're keeping our eye on the ball operationally, and we're seeing strong, even increasing demand for our solutions. We're working to position the company to take an even greater share of opportunities in our space, including real-time payments and cloud-based technologies.

I'm also happy to say that we've hired a new CTO, Abe Kuruvilla. Abe has an established track record in spearheading transformational technology initiatives, and he's going to be invaluable as we focus on advancing our leadership in real-time payments, SaaS-enabled delivery, and intelligent payments orchestration solutions. I'm confident in the team and in our ability to continue to achieve our goals.

I'm now going to turn it over to Scott to discuss financials and our guidance. Scott?

Scott Behrens

Thanks, Tom, and good morning, everyone. I first plan to review our financial results for Q3 and then provide our outlook for the rest of 2023. Revenue in the quarter was $363 million, up 21% compared to Q3 last year, and that is after adjusting for the effects of foreign currency in the corporate online banking divestiture we made in September of last year.

The revenue growth was driven by strong growth in license fee revenue. We've been saying the license renewals would be more second half-weighted this year, so that's part of it. But we also saw higher new license revenue in the bank segment than we were expecting. And we continue to see solid growth in our recurring revenue, which was up 10% compared to Q3 last year.

So overall, a number of contributing factors that are leading to the strength in revenue growth compared to Q3 last year. We saw strong growth in adjusted EBITDA, which was $103 million, and more than double what we generated in Q3 last year.

Again, here, the higher license fee revenue, which has little incremental fulfillment cost, has very high flow through EBITDA, but also layering on higher recurring revenue on top of a relatively fixed cost base, also contributing to the EBITDA growth.

Turning to our segment results, bank segment revenue was $156 million, up 42% and adjusted EBITDA that was $91 million, up 100% compared to Q3 last year. The bank segment is predominantly on-premise license software, so this will be the most impacted by this year's timing of the renewal license fees.

But we also saw a strong growth in recurring revenue in the bank segment, which was up 13% driven by higher maintenance and SaaS revenue. Merchant segment revenue and EBITDA were essentially flat with Q3 last year, and we expect that to flip to growth in Q4 as we exit the year and contribute further growth next year as new business begins to come online and ramp.

And finally, our Biller segment revenue was $171 million, up 11% compared to Q3 last year, and adjusted EBITDA $39 million, up 48% compared to Q3 last year. The growth in revenue and profitability in this segment is driven by both new customer go-lives and notable progress with our interchange improvement program.

We entered the quarter with $140 million in cash on hand, a debt balance of just over $1 billion, and a net debt leverage ratio of 2.4 times, which is down from 2.9 times at the end of Q2.

Notably, we're now down below our target leverage of 2.5 times, so I would expect a more balanced capital allocation going forward between debt reduction and share repurchases. And we do have $200 million remaining on our share repurchase authorization.

Turning next to our outlook, we are reiterating our full year guidance with revenue in the range of $1.436 to $1.466 billion, and we continue to expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $380 to $395 million with net adjusted EBITDA margin expansion.

So in summary, we saw strong results here in Q3. We're tracking on a year as expected. And as we exit this year and look into 2024, and I think in particular, the strength we're seeing in the underlying recurring revenue base for business, which is up 10% in Q3 and up 8% year-to-date, provides us with that stable, reliable base of revenue as we go into next year.

And that, combined with the visibility and predictability of the licensed renewals next year and the maturity of the sales and implementation pipeline, sets us up well to deliver our 7% to 9% growth in 2024.

So with that, I'll pass it back to Tom for some closing remarks. Tom?

Tom Warsop

Thanks, Scott. Just to sum up, we continue to deliver results in line or above expectation, and we continue to have significant opportunity in the marketplace. We're focused on delivering shareholder value, including working on ways to fine-tune our investments to further accelerate our growth, as well as working on ways to better tell our investment story.

We're focusing our attention, resources, and investments on the areas of the business that generate the greatest value to our customers and the best growth opportunities for our shareholders. This focus is yielding results already, and I look forward to sharing more about this during our next Analyst Day in New York City on March 12, 2024.

Again, thank you for joining us today, and we'll now open it up for Q&A.

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Pete Heckmann from D.A. Davidson. Pete, your line is now open.

Alli Heckmann

Good morning. This is Alli speaking for Pete. Thanks for taking on our question. First question, can you point more to some of the dynamics that give you confidence in the revenues to 9% growth in 2024, given that there have been little bit relatively soft ARR bookings due to date?

Scott Behrens

Yes, I would turn back to the comments I made in my prepared remarks. Really, if you look at the underlying recurring revenue business, that's going to be the base layer of next year's revenue. That is up 8% year-to-date, getting stronger here in the second half, 10% in Q3. So that's really the base rate of revenue growth we'd have going into next year. And then just the overall visibility, especially on the bank side, the renewal book for next year, and then the third layer would be net new business. So what's the maturity of the pipeline?

So, on the bank side, in a part of the merchant business, it's really less about the ARR bookings and more about the license and services sales. So - but again, it's the install base, the recurring revenue growth that we're seeing that really carries us and gives us confidence in next year.

Tom Warsop

I'll just add one thing, Alli, and Scott alluded to it, but the ARR bookings that we've had over the last 12 to 18 months is what is going to drive the increase in revenue next year. And in those, we have very good visibility to the ramp pattern and the implementations for those.

Alli Heckmann

Great. Thank you for giving me some more color on that. And then one follow-up. We saw a big step up in the biller's revenue that have interchange this quarter. Are there any dynamics in the period that you might consider one time, or do you view this level of growth as sustainable in the near-term future?

Tom Warsop

Yes. I think especially if you look at the comp, last year Q3 was the quarter where we really saw the issues with the interchange impacted by some of the inflation in the utility segment jumped to this year and we've gone through about 12 plus months of improvement programs, various initiatives, whether it's repricing or the overall cost to get the interchange down. I think what you're seeing in that revenue growing faster than gross revenue and Biller is a function of all those initiatives that we've had. And so, we continue to have more initiatives. We continue to monitor that, but I think what that's showing in the actual results is the success of what we've done here over the last 12 months.

Alli Heckmann

Okay. Great. Thank you very much.

Tom Warsop

Thank you, Alli.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Joseph Vafi from Canaccord Genuity. Joseph, your line is now open.

Pallav Saini

Good morning. This is Pallav Saini on for Joe. Thanks for taking our questions. First off, Tom, you touched on the incremental market in the bank segment that you're going after. Maybe touch on some of the more immediate opportunities there. What are some of the areas of investment and when can we expect to see the impact on the P&L? And then I have a follow-up.

Tom Warsop

Yes, sure. So, I was talking about the - we tend to call it the mid-tier financial institutions and that's probably not quite the right terminology, because historically, ACI had tremendous success and we enjoy a strong market presence in the mega banks, the very, very, very large banks, over US$250 billion in assets around the world. And we continue to have that. We continue to grow there. But what I was talking about is just slightly smaller. So, I'm not talking about small financial institutions by any means. I'm talking about the tier that goes from roughly $50 billion to $250 billion. So, these are still massive institutions.

But what we're seeing is that those institutions are equally interested in what we can provide. They want the very high reliability. They want the proven capabilities, the ability that scale. They want all that. But those institutions tend to be more open to or interested in a SaaS delivery model and/or a cloud delivery model. And so, that's where we're seeing even more demand that we believe we can do an even better job of fulfilling over the coming years. And so, it's the same types of offerings. We've already made a lot of investments there. We can deliver virtually all of our products using cloud tools and technologies and infrastructures today.

And we continue to make investments to make them work even better and to make them work a little bit better for that next year down. But we're going to continue to do that. Its part of the modernization journey that we've talked about for a long time. But we're just seeing - the point I was trying to make was that those investments, they're already yielding results, because that is one of the places that the recurring revenue strength is coming from. Is that tier we've already sold business. It's ramping up and it's performing.

Pallav Saini

That's very helpful. Thank you. And any comment on the performance of your real-time payment business in Q3 and anything to add on the outlook for next year there? Thank you.

Tom Warsop

Sure. I mean, we're continuing to see growth in every region in real-time payments. Its volumes are strong. I think, I know that a lot of people are interested and I'm interested, frankly, in FedNow volumes, because, obviously, there's been a lot of marketing done at the recent Sibos conference in Toronto, there was tons of discussion that was shortly after the launch of FedNow. The Fed has done an excellent job of marketing. But as expected, and I think I said this in the last call, as expected volumes in FedNow are very low. And that is not a surprise. No one expected them to ramp real quickly. So, no surprise at all. But what we are seeing is a significant pipeline of financial institutions that are coming on board to be ready to handle FedNow transactions.

So we have over 100 financial institutions that already are able to participate in FedNow through using our tools. And there are hundreds more that are in the pipeline directly with us and with partners that use our technology. So that's the U.S. side volumes on FedNow relatively low. We have seen an increase in the clearinghouse RTP utilizations. And I think that's largely due to the attention that's been drawn to real-time payments generally because of the Fed marketing. And that's great, but still relatively small volumes in the U.S. But other parts of the world are seeing much more significant growth and we expect that to continue.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Charles Nabhan from Stephens. Charles, your line is now open.

Charles Nabhan

Hi. Good morning and thank you for taking my question. As we think about the go-forward run rate for Biller, could you talk about the degree to which the outperformance relative to the 7% and 9% target this quarter was driven by easier comps versus the layering on of new deals and incremental recurring revenue? And if maybe an accelerated pace of onboarding could lead to either outperformance or performance towards the higher end of 79% target going forward?

Scott Behrens

I don't think when I referred to the comps on the earlier question, it really wasn't about the top line growth of the Biller business that came in at 11% in the quarter. It was more around the interchange improvement. So if you look at a net of interchange, it accelerated and that was off of a tough comp last week. We had a lot higher interchange impact. So I would say it's not as the business is going to continue to grow at an 11% rate. I would look at it more in the upper single digits going forward.

So we did have a large customer go-live here in 2023, but that customer is not fully ramped. That's just fully ramped in early 2024. So that's really when we look at 2024, that's a part of our comfort in the 7% and 9% total is business that we've already sold and it's either live and ramping or will go live in relatively short order. So when we look at the - and that's not just Biller, it's across the whole business, it's really business that's already sold and live or business that's sold and ramping. So very little reliance next year on business that has to be kind of sold in year and converted in year. So that's where we're getting our comfort in the 7% and 9% for next year.

Charles Nabhan

Got it. And just as a follow up, you had alluded to some investments you're making in order to pursue some new revenue initiatives. Could you maybe double click on that a little bit and provide specifics on areas where you are investing as well as any potential impact on the P&L?

Scott Behrens

Yes, I would say that maybe as the second question first is we are, it's not what I call incremental to our run rate of spend. It's a reprioritization of what we are spending and it's going to be targeted predominantly towards the bank segment, kind of the tier that Tom's talking about and developing payment hub capabilities where we're seeing a lot of demand, not just in that next tier of banks, but also our global install base is looking for hub capabilities. And so it's going to be predominantly in the bank segment hub capabilities and it's not, you're not going to see a significant increase in expense versus our current run rate. It's going to be a reprioritization of what we're spending today on R&D.

Tom Warsop

Yes. We call that, Charles, we call that intelligent payments orchestration. You probably heard me say those words a couple of times. And the industry tends to talk about it as a payments hub and how do we help our clients manage all varieties of payments and ensure that they are handled with scalability, reliability, that they have the ability to route them correctly, process them very efficiently, offer new services, and ACIs of course extremely well-positioned to take advantage of that across the industry because of the install base we have, the reputation that we have, and the absolutely proven nature of our software product.

So we're clearly well-positioned, but that is by our estimation the fastest growing portion of the banking business, banking payments software business worldwide, and so that's true across all, all size segments of the market and all geographies. But then when you layer on the opportunity with that next tier down of banks, what you find is that's the fastest growing segment from a size perspective. So that's why we're, we're so excited about the opportunity and focused there. And as Scott said, I mean, we are making investments there for sure, but it is not, we're not talking about net new investment, we're just making sure we're investing where the opportunities are the rightest, so to speak.

Charles Nabhan

Thanks, Tom.

Tom Warsop

Mark, are there any other questions?

Operator

Your next question comes from the line from George Sutton from Craig-Hallum. George, your line is now open.

George Sutton

Thank you. Tom, now that you've had a more detailed peek under the tent, I'm curious from an allocation of capital perspective. When you look across the segments, I think we all agree banking has done relatively well. Biller has really improved. Merchant has struggled. Where do you think of these incremental growth opportunities at one point? Is, is merchant something you're not putting more focus on? I'm just curious how you're thinking across the segments?

Tom Warsop

Sure. Now we continue to, we continue to believe in the opportunity in all three segments. And Merchant been obviously a little bit of a laggard from a performance perspective this year, but we still feel great business. As Scott said, we expect that to flip the growth beginning in the fourth quarter. So we're continuing to invest there. There's no - there's, don't take anything that we're saying as it's not, it's not important. But I think there is a very large growth opportunity in the banking space, which I was just talking about. And we, we intend to focus significant resources and a higher portion of our investment on taking advantage of that opportunity in the short run. But we will continue to invest and Merchant. We'll continue to invest in Biller and obviously Biller is performing very well.

So I don't - there's no, there's no fundamental change in our investment allocation strategy, but it will be in the short and medium term a little more heavily weighted towards banking. Now, I don't - you may also have wondered about the capital allocation strategy from a - what do we do with our cash and that hasn't changed. Scott was saying that that hasn't changed. We focused for the last couple of quarters on delevering a little bit given where the market is and the higher relative cost of debt. So we're now below, below our target and feel great about that. And we'll continue with our, with our long standing capital allocation strategy of shared buybacks, delevering and investment in the business.

George Sutton

Just one follow-up on Biller, our third party work has continued to suggest. You are seeing competitive takeaways there with what you've done with the newer platform. And I'm just curious if you can give us a sense of, is that a growing pipeline that you're seeing? And then also on the real-time payment side, when do we start to see the benefits of real-time payments in the Biller business?

Tom Warsop

Yes. On the pipeline question, we were very, very pleased with the pipeline as it continues to mature. It takes a while for ramp a new sale. So as Scott was saying before, as we look into next year, most of that business already sold in the Biller business, but we are seeing the pipeline continue to improve. We've made some leadership changes, which are really, really positive for us. And that is also having an impact and driving more pipeline and performance.

On the, on the real-time payment side, it - we never expected that impact to happen quickly because of - partly because of what I said before about the - it's just, there aren't that many transactions at this point. But as we see more transactions, we do expect that to be a very viable option for Billers. And we started to, and we've been doing this for a while, but we've painted a number of use case pictures for Billers and they're very excited about them. We're working with the Biller to figure out the best way to bring that into the equation, give their customers the option to use real-time payments.

So it's - there's a lot of pieces. It's, it's a very big opportunity. We've talked a little bit about that before. And it has benefits for all the participants in the Biller ecosystem, but it does require adoption. And that is going to take, I don't know exactly, but it's going to be a multi-year journey to get that really meaningful.

Operator

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

John Kraft

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

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.