ACI Worldwide Inc. (NASDAQ:ACIW) Q1 2024 Results Conference Call April 30, 2024 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

John Kraft - Head of Strategy & Finance
Tom Warsop - CEO, President & Director
Scott Behrens - Executive VP, CFO & Chief Accounting Officer

Conference Call Participants

Pete Heckmann - D.A. Davidson
Jeff Cantwell - Seaport Research Partners
George Sutton - Craig-Hallum Capital
Trevor Williams - Jefferies
Charles Nabhan - Stephens

Operator

Thank you for standing by. My name is Eric, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the ACI Worldwide Inc First Quarter 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers remarks there will be question and answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you.

I would now like to turn the call over to John Kraft. Please go ahead.

John Kraft

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. On today's call, we will discuss the company's first quarter 2024 results and financial outlook for the rest of the year. We will then take your questions at the end. The slides accompanying this call and webcast can be found at aciworldwide.com under the Investor Relations tab and will remain available after the call.

Today's call is subject to safe harbor and forward-looking statements like all of our events. You can find the full text of both statements in our presentation deck and earnings release, both of which are available on our website and with the SEC.

On this morning's call is Tom Warsop our President and CEO; and Scott Behrens, our CFO.

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

Tom Warsop

Thanks, John, and good morning, everyone. I appreciate you joining our first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. As usual, I'll start this morning with some brief comments on the quarter, then I'll hand it over to Scott to discuss the detailed financials and the outlook for the remainder of 2024, and then we'll open the line for questions.

Q1 results were ahead of our expectations. Total revenue was $316 million that was up 9% year-over-year. We were able to sign some expected contracts a little earlier than we forecast and some ramp-ups in our biller business tracked slightly better than we expected. I'd characterize these contracts as expansionary project specific deals with existing customers and then we also had opportunities that were in the pipeline and expected to sign a little bit later this year.

We've also signed over $20 million in high-margin license contracts that will show up on our income statement later in the year. As we've discussed, U.S. GAAP requires we recognize revenue for contract renewals on the first day of the renewal term, regardless of when we sign them. All of these items that I mentioned help derisk our full year forecast and it's allowing us to raise the upper end of our guidance range for both revenue and adjusted EBITDA.

Moving on to our segments. We signed some notable deals in the bank segment, including a renewal for a large U.S. regional bank and new and expansion deals with customers around the world. As we discussed at our recent Analyst Day, the bank segment is a key area of focus for ACI going forward. Segment revenue for banking grew 20% in the quarter. And as I indicated, the strength was broad.

As you may recall, we have 3 main solution sets we sell into the segment. Issuing an inquiry and that includes our retail payments and Base 24 solutions. That part of the business grew 17% in the quarter. Fraud Management, which grew 23% and real-time payment products, which grew 28%. Bank segment adjusted EBITDA grew 69% versus Q1 2023, and that reflects the very high fall-through from revenue to EBITDA for our software businesses.

As we discussed in depth at our recent Analyst Day, we've continued to invest in modernizing our solutions and making public cloud delivery options available. We're seeing accelerating SaaS demand, not only with some of our traditional and long-term customers, but also with new banking customers. And some of these may be somewhat smaller than our historic focused areas, which has historically been mega banks or Tier 1 banks. These institutions, the slightly smaller ones, are seeking the highest levels of scalability and reliability that API is so well known for, and they're often more interested in taking advantage of SaaS delivery models. This is an incremental market for us, and it's an exciting opportunity we continue to allocate resources to.

Merchant segment revenue grew 3% and EBITDA grew 63%. We continue to expect growth to improve throughout the year and the confidence we have is coming from in progress and scheduled implementation and, of course, our new sales pipeline.

Moving on to Biller. Revenue grew 5% and segment EBITDA grew 4% in Q1 2024. We continue to see the ramp-ups of prior sales and the positive impact of our interchange improvement plans. We're particularly pleased with the onboarding of our largest customers as volumes are coming in above expectations. Furthermore, we've been able to successfully remove interchange risk from most of those large contracts while they can have a little bit lower margin in some cases, those contracts avoid downside risk. Our biller retention rates are improving and our qualified new bookings pipeline is growing.

The work on our payments hub, which we discussed at length at Analyst Day, is progressing well. We continue to see substantial productivity improvements driven by the application of AI-powered tools and methodologies. We're also starting to apply these enhancements across the company. I want to make one more point on AI, which we also touched on at Analyst Day, our fraud detection and prevention businesses continue to gain traction. As I've mentioned previously, these solutions are all AI-powered and we believe, best-in-class. We've pulled all our fraud businesses together on a very capable leader, and we're receiving positive feedback from all our stakeholder groups.

I will talk more about this as we get further into the year. Overall, we're executing well. We're delivering on our promises to the investment community and I remain confident in the team and our ability to achieve our goals.

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

Scott Behrens

Thanks, Tom, and good morning, everyone. I first plan to review our financial results for Q1 and then provide our outlook for the rest of 2024. We'll then open the line for questions. Revenue in the quarter was $316 million, up 9% compared to Q1 2023 and adjusted EBITDA was $48 million, nearly double Q1 2023. As Tom mentioned, we saw particular strength in the bank segment with revenue of $105 million, up 20% compared to Q1 last year and adjusted EBITDA of $42 million, up nearly 70% compared to Q1 last year.

Our issuing and acquiring solutions grew 17%. Our anti-fraud solutions grew 23%, and our real-time payment solution grew 28%. We saw a pretty solid quarter in the banking segment across the board. Our merchant segment revenue was $36 million, up 3% compared to Q1 last year and adjusted EBITDA was $11 million, up 63% compared to Q1 last year. And our Biller segment revenue was $175 million, up 5% compared to Q1 last year and adjusted EBITDA was $31 million, up 4% compared to Q1 last year.

Cash flow from operations was $123 million, an increase of roughly 3x compared to Q1 last year. We ended the quarter with $183 million in cash on hand, which is up $19 million in the quarter. Our debt balance of $1 billion is down $34 million in the quarter and our net debt leverage ratio of 2 times is down from 2.3 times when we started the year and represents our lowest leverage in more than 10 years.

And finally, we repurchased approximately 2 million shares in Q1 for $63 million in capital and ended the quarter with $110 million remaining on our share repurchase authorization. And so far here in April, we have repurchased an additional 1 million shares to date in Q2.

Turning next to our outlook for the rest of 2024. With our strong start to the year, we are raising the high end of our guidance range for revenue and adjusted EBITDA. We now expect revenue to be in a range of $1.547 billion to $1.581 billion, up from a range of $1.547 billion to $1.576 billion.

We now expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $418 million to $433 million, up from a range of $418 million to $428 million. And as we look here into Q2 2024, we expect revenue to be in a range of $345 million to $355 million and adjusted EBITDA of $60 million to $70 million. So overall, a strong start to the year and we see that strength continuing here in Q2.

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

Tom Warsop

Thanks, Scott. In summary, we are pleased to continue delivering results in line or above expectations. Looking forward, our pipeline is strong, and we're focused and optimistic regarding both our growth and our ability to deliver significant shareholder value. One last comment. You may have seen the announcement of our recently released prime time for real-time report, and that gives some great insight into the global real-time payments ecosystem trend and expectations for the future.

I recommend giving a read. There's some really interesting stuff there. I look forward to following up with you in the very near future about the quarter, about our expectations for the future. I'm very excited about what's going on here at ACI.

Operator, we can now take questions.

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

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

Pete Heckmann

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

Tom Warsop

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

Pete Heckmann

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

Tom Warsop

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

Operator

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

Jeff Cantwell

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

Scott Behrens

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

Tom Warsop

Yes. Jeff, I'll just add. I mentioned the prime time for real-time report. We had a press release go out this morning. So you can get access to that easily. Just a couple of -- couple of numbers from there that lead us to believe this is a highly sustainable. In fact, the headlines from the press release is that the growth in [indiscernible] payments is sustainable. That is the headline. And if you look at what happened in 2023, there were 266 billion real-time payment transactions around the globe. And our forecast is that by 2028, there'll be $575 billion. So that's a compound annual growth rate of about 16.7%. And that's with pretty conservative estimates of what happens in the U.S. because we're just -- it's pretty unclear how quickly that's going to happen. So there is a lot of growth pick up in real-time payments around the world.

Jeff Cantwell

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

Scott Behrens

Yes. I would say the higher expectations are coming in part from banks, but we're also seeing pretty strong growth in our Biller business. And so we look at the outperformance in Q1, a little of it came from new license sales in the quarter and services, which are predominantly banks. But part of that can be a timing in year where we really outperformed our own expectations was in our SaaS transaction-based part of the business. And that really is what gives us comfort that a part of that recurring base of revenue that is carried into Q2 and some of the license and service can be time at the SaaS transaction base is where we saw higher growth in Q1 and expect that to continue here in Q2.

And so coming in at the high end of our guidance for the quarter, really, I think our raise is kind of an acknowledgment that we're starting year better than we expected, both top line and bottom line, and that's why we are comfortable raising the guidance at this point.

Operator

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

George Sutton

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

Scott Behrens

Yes. Part of that, George, on the license side is dependent upon the timing of renewals year-over-year. But that's what I'm saying, even over and above that, we did overachieve on the bank license side, we -- and that would have been on new sales overachieved on the services side. And again, both of those can be a bit of timing. But a lot of the overachievement in terms of where we ended up the quarter versus where we thought we were going to be and where we thought we'd be at this point in the year is really coming from that SaaS transaction-based side of the business. And so that's both -- I would say that's both banks and billers.

George Sutton

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

Tom Warsop

Yes, sure. So that's exactly what's happening. So we are seeing SaaS -- as Scott just mentioned, we saw overperformance from our expectations on the SaaS side across the board really and obviously, in banking as well. And that's actually creating a pretty nice environment for these conversations about the payment hub because the customers are -- they're taking advantage of the services that we're providing, and we're doing a good job for them. And so that's creating a real, probably an even stronger willingness than that I was expecting to talk about what's coming in the future because as they're growing, they're looking to make sure that they can take advantage of the scalability and reliability that we provided there the big banks for a very long time. So they're kind of feeding each other right away. This growth that we're seeing is underlining the need to think about the future and even more scalability, and that's creating a real receptivity to talk about where we're headed with the payments up.

Operator

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

Trevor Williams

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

Scott Behrens

Yes. 2023 was a pretty big year, generally speaking, had a lot of CPI uplift in that. And so I wouldn't read anything into that in terms of the quarter and the expectations around the bank for the full year. Obviously, the bank delivered our highest growth in the quarter and likely will contribute to the highest of the 3 segments this year. So I wouldn't read anything into the recurring revenue for banks for the quarter.

Trevor Williams

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

Scott Behrens

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

Tom Warsop

Yes. Just Trevor, on the banking in particular, we will continue to see a shift to more SaaS. The thing that we look at is such a large percentage of our bank revenue is licensed. It's going to take a while I don't know exactly, but it's not going to be a quick transition to the bulk of the revenue being SaaS, but we will continue to see an increasing percentage.

Operator

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

Charles Nabhan

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

Tom Warsop

Sure. So Scott, feel free to jump in too. So on the consolidation point, we're continuing to make very, very strong progress on the consolidation of the platforms. We did not expect and do not expect that to be complete for a few months now, but we -- we do expect later in the year that all new customers will go onto the consolidated platform. So that's what we expected when we talked about it at the Analyst Day. It's still what we expect and we still think we're on track for that. So -- and that's really good for several reasons. But predominantly, there is a speed of implementation benefit that we get by having one platform. And then obviously, over time, there will be a cost benefit to that to not having to maintain several platforms. So that's why it's so important to us. We continue to see ourselves on track as we discussed at Analyst Day.

And then you -- your second question was about the overperformance of our expectations in Q1. And I think it was relatively broad-based, but I think it was -- I think the biggest driver was a couple of our large customers that we signed over the last year or 2, we saw their ramp-up go a little faster than we expected. So -- and that's great news because Scott has said a couple of different ways this morning. That recurring revenue and that acceleration, that's going to be the gift that keeps on giving.

Scott Behrens

Yes. Chuck, the only thing I'd add to that is just if we look at Q1, where comp is broad-based, even within the Biller business, we're seeing it across verticals. So Q1 we saw higher transactions, higher revenue in our consumer finance and utilities vertical than we are expecting. And then so far here in Q2, obviously being one of the largest providers of the both IRS and state taxes. We're seeing higher transaction volume in the government vertical here in April that we were anticipating. So I think even across -- even within Biller or we're seeing it across verticals.

Charles Nabhan

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

Scott Behrens

I'd say it's a little bit better than we expected. So it's not unusual that we signed some of the contracts a bit earlier, so a month or so. We actually signed one deal I can think of, right, sitting here right now that this doesn't renew until the end of the third quarter, and we've already signed it and we signed that [indiscernible] turf. So probably a little bit ahead, but it's not unusual for us to sign deals early.

Operator

I will now turn the call back over to John Kraft for closing remarks. Please go ahead.

John Kraft

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

Operator

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