ACI Worldwide Q2 2026 Earnings Report

ACI Worldwide EPS Results

• Actual EPS: N/A
• Consensus EPS: $0.30
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• One Year Ago EPS: $0.35

ACI Worldwide Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: N/A
• Expected Revenue: $430.60 million
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• YoY Revenue Growth: N/A

ACI Worldwide Announcement Details

• Quarter: Q2 2026
• Date: 8/6/2026
• Time: Before Market Opens
• Conference Call Date: Thursday, August 6, 2026
• Conference Call Time: 8:30AM ET

ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ:ACIW) (NASDAQ:ACIW) is a global software company that provides electronic payment and banking solutions to financial institutions, merchants and billers. The company’s platforms enable real-time processing of credit, debit, ACH, bill payments, faster payments and money transfers, as well as integrated fraud prevention services. Headquartered in Naples, Florida, ACI serves clients across banking, payments and commerce sectors worldwide.

ACI’s modular suite of applications can be deployed on-premise, in the cloud or in hybrid environments to meet diverse operational needs. Key offerings include ACI Universal Payments, which supports end-to-end transaction processing; ACI UP Commerce for merchant acquiring and point-of-sale integration; and ACI UP Real-Time Payments to facilitate instant funds movement. The company’s fraud management solutions leverage machine learning and data analytics to help clients detect, prevent and respond to payment risk.

Founded in 1975 as Transaction Systems Architects, the business rebranded as ACI Worldwide in 2001 and began trading publicly later that year. Over the decades, ACI has expanded both organically and through strategic acquisitions, broadening its product portfolio and industry reach. Today, it maintains a network of offices and delivery centers across the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific, underscoring its position as a key enabler of global payment ecosystems.

Since July 2017, Philip Heasley has served as President and Chief Executive Officer, guiding ACI’s emphasis on innovation, cloud migration and partnership with industry stakeholders. Its diverse client base—ranging from global and regional banks to processors, networks, merchants and billers—relies on ACI’s technology to process millions of transactions in real time every day.

ACI Worldwide Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Positive Sentiment: ACI Worldwide raised its 2026 outlook, increasing revenue guidance to $1.895–$1.925 billion and adjusted EBITDA guidance to $545–$560 million, supported by strong first-half performance and pipeline visibility.
• Positive Sentiment: Second-quarter results showed solid operating momentum, with revenue up 7%, adjusted EBITDA up 12%, adjusted diluted EPS up 54%, and adjusted EBITDA margin expanding to 34% despite a 17% increase in R&D spending.
• Positive Sentiment: ACI signed its first two U.S. ACI Connetic customers, including an existing customer converting to the cloud-native platform, while management said Connetic has the company’s fastest-growing pipeline and could strengthen ACI’s positioning in payments modernization.
• Neutral Sentiment: Payment Software revenue rose 9%, led by a 37% increase in issuing and acquiring, while Biller revenue grew 5% amid difficult comparisons, prior-year credits, and a one-time terminated-partnership charge; management nevertheless maintained expectations for upper-single-digit full-year Biller growth.
• Positive Sentiment: The company repurchased approximately $41 million of shares in the quarter and $107 million year to date, while maintaining a target of allocating 50%–60% of 2026 operating cash flow to buybacks and retaining flexibility for cloud-focused acquisitions.

Presentation

[Operator]

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the second quarter 2026 ACI Worldwide Earnings Conference Call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I will now hand the conference over to John Kraft. Please go ahead.

[John Kraft, Head of Strategy and Finance at ACI Worldwide]

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. On today's call, we will discuss ACI Worldwide's second quarter 2026 results, as well as our updated financial outlook for the remainder of the year. We will then open the line for your questions. Slides and press release accompanying this webcast can be found at aciworldwide.com under the investor relations tab and will remain available after the call. As always, today's call is subject to safe harbor and forward-looking statements. You can find the full text of these statements in our earnings materials and SEC filings. Joining me this morning are Thomas Warsop, our President and CEO, and Robert Leibrock, our Chief Financial Officer. Before I turn it over to Tom, I'd like to highlight several upcoming conferences where members of management will be participating.

[John Kraft, Head of Strategy and Finance at ACI Worldwide]

The KeyBanc Technology Leadership Forum on August 11, the Seaport Research Partners Annual Summer Investor Conference on August 18, and the FT Partners Fintech Conference on September 15. We look forward to meeting many of you at these events. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom. Tom?

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

Thanks, John. Good morning, everyone. As always, I appreciate you joining us for our earnings call. Today, we'll talk about our second quarter 2026. Let me start by saying financial performance was strong, and the quarter was fulfilling in many ways, in addition to those strong financial results. I want to share a few examples of the things we at ACI are proud of as we continue to deliver on our promises and transform for the future. Let me start with the headline financial results. Then I'll discuss the operational progress driving the momentum we're seeing across the business. Today, we reported 7% revenue growth, 12% Adjusted EBITDA growth, and 54% adjusted diluted EPS growth. We're again raising our full year guidance. Perhaps even more importantly, we continued to make progress on our key strategic initiatives, the things we believe drive long-term growth and shareholder value creation.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

We signed our first U.S.-based ACI Connetic customer in the quarter, and we've already signed another in Q3. The traction with ACI Connetic is a result of our ongoing strategic growth investments and the privileged position we have in the payments ecosystem around the world. We remain well-positioned to benefit from the ongoing need for payments modernization. I'm going to discuss this in more detail shortly. Our margin expansion is a result of disciplined expense management while continuing to invest in innovation and returning capital to shareholders. Before I discuss our business segments, I'll spend a few minutes on what's happening in the payments industry. Across financial services, payment ecosystems are becoming significantly more complex. Financial institutions are managing more payment types, more payment rails, increasing real-time payments adoption, rising fraud threats, evolving regulatory requirements, and continually increasing expectations from consumers and businesses.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

At the same time, many organizations are operating on infrastructure that was designed for a very different payments environment. As a result, modernization has become one of the most important strategic priorities for customers around the world. Increasingly, the discussion is no longer whether institutions will modernize, but how they will modernize and who they will partner with to help them get there. That trend continues to create meaningful opportunities for us at ACI. As I mentioned, one of the most significant accomplishments during the quarter was the signing of our first U.S.-based ACI Connetic customers. We signed one customer during Q2 and a second customer shortly after the quarter ended. We view these wins as further validation of the ACI Connetic strategy.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

Customers are increasingly looking to simplify complex payments environments through a modern cloud-native platform that provides connectivity across payment types while positioning them for the next generation of payment intelligence and orchestration. Our ACI Connetic pipeline continues to expand faster than any other solution set. In the Biller business, our ACI Speedpay ONE platform continues to advance with new customers being implemented on this cloud-native leading-edge solution. We now have more than 100 customers live on this platform, and our continuing investments are improving performance and flexibility. Our ACI Connetic solution and our ACI Speedpay ONE Biller solution are broadly AI-enabled, meaning we're building AI-powered capabilities directly into the solution from day one. I've previously mentioned a little bit about how ACI is taking advantage of the potential of AI.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

I want to give you a little bit more flavor in terms of how AI is really impacting us and our customers. We're already seeing tangible benefits from these efforts. Here's a few examples. In terms of test automation, our AI mandate analyzer is reducing the time required to interpret payment scheme mandates from two to three weeks to minutes or hours. That's shifting roughly two weeks of effort earlier in each cycle across schemes and products and creating an incremental person year of engineering capacity over time. That's just the beginning. In our Biller business, AI-supported re-architecture work on one of our common products has reduced the effort by about 50%, and that's already saved over 6,000 hours of engineering time. In customer support, we built a retrofit agent team.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

That's a team of agents doing retrofitting work, and that will automate up to 85% of a previously completely manual process, saving approximately 10 hours per week per user, with additional benefits in related root cause workflows. That work has already been piloted with a large customer in our European business with broader rollout coming soon. We've integrated AI-powered functionality into products across our portfolio, and this is accelerating. Just a couple of examples. In ACI Connetic, we've implemented a dynamic context-dependent intelligent routing and scoring capability. This enables very fast adjustments to fraud and routing algorithms based upon up-to-the-second information. That is only possible with generative AI and related tools. On ACI Speedpay ONE in our Biller business, we've deployed tools to simplify and accelerate our customers' ability to deploy our standard APIs and to accelerate the customer implementation journey.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

These are only two of the many solution capabilities we've implemented which are powered by AI. I do want to comment briefly on each of our operating segments. Obviously, Bobby will cover more detail, but let me start with Payment Software. Payment Software continued to perform well during this quarter. The segment delivered 9% revenue growth driven by strength in issuing and acquiring, where revenue increased 37%. Encouragingly, we're seeing customers move beyond evaluating modernization initiatives and increasingly begin executing against them. As transaction volumes continue to grow and payment environments become more complex, customers increasingly view ACI as a strategic technology partner rather than simply a software provider. Our merchant and anti-fraud solutions both grew in the mid-single digits, and both solutions are well-positioned to benefit from some interesting new AI, which is driving new technology opportunities and tools.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

That includes a new collaboration with some of our merchant clients, where we have created an agentic commerce solution that can be used both by consumers making a purchase and by our customers' agents who are assisting consumers. We're playing both sides of that opportunity. In our Biller segment, revenue increased 5% during the quarter. While year-over-year comparisons in Q2 were challenging, following unusually strong volumes last year, as well as some unique margin benefits that did not recur, the underlying health of the business is strong. We continue to see growing adoption of our ACI Speedpay ONE platform through expansions across our installed base and success with new customer wins. We remain confident in our expectation for upper single-digit growth in Biller for the full year. We're also continuing to execute our balanced capital allocation strategy.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

We deployed approximately $41 million of capital to share repurchases in Q2, and that brings our year-to-date repurchases to approximately $107 million. As we previously communicated, we expect to allocate between 50% and 60% of operating cash flow to share repurchases during 2026. At this level, we will maintain flexibility for further organic growth investments and potential strategic acquisitions, particularly focusing on those that accelerate our cloud-based payments modernization offerings. As we've said before, driving a superior return on capital deployed is a core tenet of our leadership team and a strategic imperative for our business. We take this capital stewardship seriously. As a part of this disciplined effort, our corporate development team regularly evaluates inorganic opportunities across a full spectrum of strategic actions, including opportunistic acquisitions, divestitures, and partnerships.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

There are some interesting technologies in the marketplace that could help accelerate our growth. The valuations are more attractive than they've been in the recent past. Evaluation of those opportunities occurs in the normal course of business for us. I'm sure you understand that I will not comment directly on any recent speculation about us in the news. To be clear, our business is operating from a place of financial and competitive strength, positioning us to further establish ACI as a platform for profitable growth over time consistent with our proven track record as a value compounder. I'm pleased with our execution in the first half of the year, and I remain encouraged by the strength of our pipeline, which gives us confidence we are on track for a strong finish to the year.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

Our recurring revenue profile, strong customer relationships, ongoing technology investments, and disciplined cost management have us well positioned to continue delivering profitable growth. This strategic framework, combined with our shareholder focus, returns-based capital deployment strategy, positions us well to continue to create long-term shareholder value. I want to thank our employees around the world for what they do every day. Their dedication to our customers and their commitment to operational excellence are what makes our success possible. I also want to thank our customers for their partnership. Our shareholders for their continued trust and support as we execute on our long-term value creation strategy. With that, I'll turn it over to Bobby.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

Thank you, Tom, and good morning, everyone. I'll begin with a review of our second quarter financial results, then discuss our first half performance, capital allocation activities, and outlook for the remainder of 2026. Overall, we delivered another quarter of solid financial performance characterized by revenue growth, margin expansion, earnings growth, and strong cash generation. Second quarter revenue was $430 million, up 7% on a reported basis and up 6% in constant currency. Net income was $32 million, compared to $12 million a year ago. Adjusted diluted earnings per share was $0.54, up 54% from the prior year, reflecting strong operational performance and the benefits of our share repurchase program. Adjusted EBITDA was $91 million, up 12% on a reported basis and up 9% in constant currency.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

Net Adjusted EBITDA margin expanded to 34% from 32% last year, even as we increased R&D spending by 17% to support innovation and future growth. This margin expansion was driven by strong operating leverage and reflects disciplined expense management. Year-to-date revenue was $956 million, up 8% on a reported basis and up 6% in constant currency. Year-to-date Adjusted EBITDA was $196 million, up 12% on a reported basis and up 8% in constant currency. While net Adjusted EBITDA margin for that period expanded approximately 200 basis points to 36%. In the Payment Software segment, second quarter revenue was $196 million, up 9% on a reported basis and up 7% in constant currency. The segment benefited from notable strength in issuing and acquiring, which grew 33% in constant currency versus the prior year period, driven by large expansions with renewing customers. Merchant and fraud management revenue also delivered year-over-year growth.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

Real-time payments revenue declined versus the prior year period. While the number of renewal and expansion opportunities was lower than a year ago, retention and expansion performance remained strong, underscoring the healthy demand environment we continue to see in real-time payments. We continue to expect real-time payments to contribute to growth in 2026 and remain encouraged by customer demand and the strength of our pipeline. Segment Adjusted EBITDA for Payment Software was $94 million, up 12% on a reported basis and up 9% in constant currency, resulting in a net Adjusted EBITDA margin of 48%. The margin expansion reflects the inherent leverage of a highly recurring software model. In Biller, revenue was $234 million, up 5% on both a reported and constant currency basis.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

As we noted last quarter, second quarter revenue net of interchange and Adjusted EBITDA were impacted by mix and difficult comparisons against unusually strong volume activity in the prior year, which also included certain credits that did not occur. Despite those near-term comparisons, underlying customer demand remains healthy. We continue to expect upper single-digit revenue growth for the Biller segment for the full year. While Adjusted EBITDA declined year-over-year, the pressure was primarily driven by prior year comparison items rather than any change in the underlying health of the business. Results in the current quarter were also impacted by a one-time charge related to a partnership that has since been terminated and is not expected to reoccur. The business continues to benefit from healthy transaction growth, strong customer retention, new customer additions, and continued adoption of Speedpay ONE.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

We also expect net revenue growth to trend more closely with gross revenue growth over the balance of the year. Net new ARR bookings were $18 million during the quarter, while new license and services bookings were $59 million. ARR bookings were compared against a particularly strong prior year period that benefited from several large Payment Software contract signings. This year, strong Biller performance partially offset lower Payment Software bookings with a greater concentration of expected signings weighted towards the second half of the year. New license and services bookings reflect similar timing of anticipated Payment Software deals. While quarterly results can fluctuate based on the timing of large transactions, we remain encouraged by the strength of our pipeline. We continue to expect both net new ARR bookings and new license and services bookings to grow for the full year.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

On the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $167 million in cash and a net leverage ratio of 1.2x Adjusted EBITDA. Year-to-date operating cash flow was $135 million, reflecting the strength of the business and disciplined execution across the organization. As Tom mentioned, we continue to take a balanced and disciplined approach to capital allocation, investing in initiatives that support long-term growth while returning capital to shareholders. During the second quarter, we repurchased approximately 948,000 shares for $41 million. Year to date, we have repurchased approximately 2.5 million shares for $107 million and ended the quarter with approximately $349 million remaining under our authorization. Turning to guidance, based on the first half performance and the strength of our pipeline, we're increasing our full year 2026 outlook. We now expect revenue in the range of $1.895 billion-$1.925 billion, up from our prior range of $1.89 billion-$1.92 billion.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

We expect Adjusted EBITDA in the range of $545 million-$560 million, up from $540 million-$555 million. For the second half of 2026, as we discussed last quarter, we continue and expect an approximately 40% and 60% revenue weighting between the third and fourth quarters respectively, driven by the timing of high-margin Payment Software license renewals. This implies third quarter revenue of $417 million-$427 million, and Adjusted EBITDA in Q3 '26 is expected to be $90 million-$95 million. Additional income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow guidance assumptions are available on the guidance slide in our earnings presentation. Our outlook continues to be supported by a strong recurring revenue base, healthy customer demand, and a robust pipeline across both Payment Software and Biller. The increase in our guidance reflects both our strong first half performance and our confidence in the opportunities we see ahead.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

We remain committed to investing in innovation and our strategic growth priorities while maintaining a disciplined approach to profitability and cash generation. As we look to the balance of 2026, we remain focused on executing our strategy, investing in innovation, maintaining operational discipline, and generating strong cash flow. As customers continue to modernize their payment infrastructure, the needs for intelligent payment orchestration continues to grow. We believe ACI's unique combination of software, data, industry expertise positions us well to capitalize on that opportunity while continuing to deliver long-term shareholder value. With that, Tom and I will be happy to take your questions.

[Operator]

We will now begin the question and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. The first question comes from the line of Jeff Cantwell with Seaport Research. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

Hey, Jeff.

[Jeff Cantwell, Analyst at Seaport Research Partners]

Hey, thanks guys. Good morning. Can you talk more about the Q3 and Q4 guidance? Why is there a 40/60 cadence this year? What are the major call-outs? I hear you on the timing. Can you go through this in a little more detail, if you don't mind? Can you confirm whether that was expected? We're getting questions on that this morning. Thanks.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

Hey, Jeff. I'll jump in. This is Bobby. I think it'd be helpful for Tom to expand on some of the strength we're seeing for the year that supports the confidence we have in the raise of the overall guide. As you get into Q3 and Q4, we've been trying to be very transparent with the guidance we've provided. One. The recurring nature of our business, we provide the recurring revenue that happens every quarter. I like to think 95% of ACI's revenue is recurring, but on a five-year contract basis for the Payment Software license renewals. That gives me and Tom a lot of visibility as we enter the year to know when we're going to have the best opportunity to renew those customers as well as expand on them.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

Last quarter, 90 days ago, I gave headlights into the Q3, Q4 guide as being more of a 40/60 split, versus the last couple of years, it's been 50/50. You go back and you compare, call it three, four, five years ago, you'll see that same 40/60 split, which is indicative of the types of customers and the concentration we see in Q4 this year. We feel good about that. As you look underneath it's all Payment Software driven. That's our high margin business. The EBITDA even has a bit more of a skew towards fourth quarter. As shown in the confidence of raising both revenue and EBITDA on the full year, we feel good about that. Payment Software had a good Q2. They're coming out of the first half very strong.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

Yeah, Jeff, we have very good visibility into the second half, given what Bobby just described. The driver for that 40/60 versus what we saw the last couple of years, more closer to 50/50, it's all due to renewal dates. As you know, by U.S. GAAP, we have to book the revenue on the renewal dates. We can't change that. We have excellent visibility to that and we have strong pipelines. Business is performing very well. Last quarter, Bobby talked about the 40/60 split. That's still what we see.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

As he just said, the business, the higher skew to fourth quarter on revenue drives an even higher skew towards EBITDA because of that high-margin software business.

[Jeff Cantwell, Analyst at Seaport Research Partners]

Okay, thanks for that. Can you tell us about the ACI Connetic signing in the U.S., how that came about, and anything that you can give us in terms of was it an existing customer that converted? Was it a new customer? Is this a sizable asset base? What does the pipeline look like for ACI Connetic right now? I'd just love to hear an update on that as well. Thank you.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

Sure. The one we signed in the quarter, it is an existing customer, and that's great news actually, because we're attacking opportunities across all types of customers. Net new, existing customers that will convert, and then a little bit hybrid. We've got a very strong pipeline, growing pipeline across all of those types of customers. This particular one that we signed in the quarter is an existing customer and will convert in the next few months from an existing solution to ACI Connetic. That's great and we're excited about it. That's specifically to your question. The pipeline that is the fastest-growing, I think I mentioned this previously, that is ACI Connetic is the fastest-growing solution set in terms of our pipeline. It has been for a couple of quarters now, and we expect that to continue. Very pleased with the progress on ACI Connetic.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

We also announced a couple of months ago, I think, that we have enabled ACI Connetic across eight different sets of payment rails in the U.S. we can handle just about anything that gets thrown at ACI Connetic in terms of payment types and payment rails.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

Yeah. I think the thing I would add, Jeff, on the ACI Connetic part would be, one, we talked about the guidance this year really doesn't depend on ACI Connetic revenue, but as Tom's showing, almost every sales discussion with our customers starts with a ACI Connetic level of excitement on how they can modernize. As you get under that, all the ACI Connetic signings to date have been SaaS, which is exciting because it's proving the cloud-native platform that we've built there, the customers, it really resonates with them. The other thing that's exciting is Solaris, who we mentioned last year. The team's made great progress with them leaning in both on their side and ours. We're excited to start to get them live here in the second half of the year, which will be a good instantiation of the platform.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

Absolutely.

[Jeff Cantwell, Analyst at Seaport Research Partners]

Okay. That's a great update. Maybe if I could just squeeze one more in. There were some articles out there about Biller, which obviously you're not going to comment on rumors. Could you maybe talk to everyone who's listening about your approach to M&A, and maybe just give us an update? Because it's been a while since we've had to consider a potential sale of Biller. How would you frame that for us? Thanks.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

Yeah, as I said in the prepared remarks, this is sort of normal course of business. We evaluate constantly what's the best way to drive shareholder value, and we look at potential acquisitions, potential divestitures, different kinds of investments. We do that all the time. There's nothing unusual about that. We obviously don't comment on specific rumors in the marketplace. I think it's fair to say we have great businesses and there's a lot of people that would probably love to own all the businesses that we have. That's just what we do.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

I think, Jeff, I'll take the opportunity to talk mostly about the strength we see in Payment Software and ACI Connetic. We do have, as Tom mentioned, a very healthy Speedpay business with our Biller segment. I talked a bit in my earlier comments around the bookings health we see. I just want to, similar to what I did last quarter, put a little more detail on that. Year to date, we're doing great in terms of the ARR bookings in that business. In Q1, I mentioned we had three new logos and about 70% of our top wins actually were within our expansion customers where we're seeing really good return on the customer success account management focus that the team's driving there.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

In Q2, we signed two nice new logos there. Across those bookings, 80% of them were really healthy expansions, customers doubling, tripling their relationships with us. I'm excited on the health of that business, and we see it growing high single digits for the year and really accelerating in the second half.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

Great.

[Jeff Cantwell, Analyst at Seaport Research Partners]

Okay. Appreciate all that. Thanks for that. I'll jump back into queue. I have some other questions, but I'll jump back in the queue. Thanks.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

Thanks, Jeff.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Peter Heckmann with D.A. Davidson. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

Hey, Pete.

[Peter Heckmann, Analyst at D.A. Davidson]

Hey, good morning, everybody. Good to see the good results and the raise in the annual guidance. Also good to see the two new ACI Connetic wins. Can you talk a little bit about how the perception of ACI might be changing? For a long time, I think people who used ACI and people who were deep in the industry understood how important ACI was to certain processes within financial or electronic payments. Maybe the company was viewed as maybe having some older technology or as not being as innovative. I guess with ACI Connetic, how is this changing your perception with customers? Clearly it appears that there's been some good early acceptance of the platform.

[Peter Heckmann, Analyst at D.A. Davidson]

I guess what I'm thinking is, do you think the fact that you have this roadmap towards this modern payment hub can actually cause some non-customers to think differently about ACI and potentially adopt other solutions that you have?

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

Yeah, great question, Pete. Yes, the short answer to your question is yes. We are having very different dialogues with customers and prospects now as we lead with ACI Connetic. I think one of the biggest drivers of that is that our vision of the future of payments, the payments industry, is that you'd have a very consistent set of technologies, platforms that can handle essentially any type of payment. That will allow financial institutions and merchants to get maximum leverage out of the investments they make in payments and provide even better service to their customers. That is our vision, and ACI Connetic was built very specifically to support that vision. What's happening now is in the old days, so maybe a couple of years ago, Pete, we would go in and we were perceived as trying to sell a piece of software.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

Of course we want to sell software. Now what tends to happen is we'll sit down with a customer or a prospect and we'll talk about how can we help them change the way they do business? How can we help the bank or the merchant provide a better customer experience, get better results, reduce the cost of handling payments inside of their organization, and ultimately modernize their infrastructure? Not just the payments side, but every, especially financial institutions, they're all thinking about how do I modernize my infrastructure? They look increasingly to ACI to help them think that through. How do I modernize specifically? How can I take advantage of this new way of approaching the technology around payments? That's what ACI Connetic gives us.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

It's created a different kind of dialogue and it's definitely started, we got more to go, Pete, but it's started to change the perception that we have in the industries where much more often people are thinking of us as a current innovator instead of, Well, they've got software that they've been running for a long time. It's really good, but it's not all that innovative. Now we're much more likely to be seen as an innovator.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

Pete, I'll just add to Tom's comments. This idea of the momentum we have, the perception, it is very contagious across multiple elements of the business. Everything from how do you attract talent, the sense of urgency in the company, how fast we show up to customer requests, demands. The thing I'd also add is you talked about ACI Connetic. I think the focus that ACI has and the two-segment model, GM model that Tom's put in place over the last few years has definitely unlocked that as well. A lot of the comments there around ACI Connetic, I would say you're seeing it show up in the ACI Speedpay Biller business as well. One of the stats I put out there is our customers this past year have given us a 15-point increase in their Net Promoter Score for ACI Speedpay.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

I think that's a bit of how we're showing up, as you described, in the ACI Speedpay business as well. The focus we have on not managing as a mixing our Biller customers with our banking customers and intermediary customers, our merchants, that focus has helped a lot in how the company's showing up, we're seeing it across both segments in a really healthy way.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

Yeah, actually, that's a great point. I think the other thing about that is it's allowed us to get a lot more focus internally on the two segments. Not only are we showing up differently to customers and prospects, but also internally we have, it's very clear now. Somebody would say, I'm on the Speedpay team. My job is to make Speedpay perform incredibly well, or, I'm on the Payment Software team. I'm going to make sure that business performs super well. We struggled with that when we had a functional model and this change to a general manager model, which we did a year and a half or two years ago, has made a big difference inside and outside the company.

[Peter Heckmann, Analyst at D.A. Davidson]

All right. That's very helpful. Just the one-time item, I believe that was in Biller to terminate a partnership. Just want to confirm that was included in the add backs to Adjusted EBITDA.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

That flowed through to EBITDA. It was an operational item. It was not a one-time item. It's within our Adjusted EBITDA.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

It was not in the-

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

It was not an add back.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

Yeah.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

It was not excluded.

[Peter Heckmann, Analyst at D.A. Davidson]

Okay. Could you put a rough bracket around the dollar value of that one-time item?

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

Yeah. As you look at the contraction you saw there in our EBITDA, it was less than half of that. I gave you the other buckets, which were some of the seasonality we saw in revenue as well as some of the last year items. Those are the three buckets, and they're not exactly perfect, but it's more like a third. It's not more than half.

[Peter Heckmann, Analyst at D.A. Davidson]

All right. Well, we'll just keep that in mind as we think about modeling for the second quarter last year. Thanks. I'll get back in the queue.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

Thanks, Pete.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

Thank you, Pete.

[Operator]

The next question comes from George Sutton with Craig-Hallum. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

Hey, George.

[George Sutton, Analyst at Craig-Hallum]

Thank you. Hey, guys. I wondered if you could go into a little more detail on the strength in issuing and acquiring. Surprisingly strong. You mentioned large expansions. Can you give us a little more of a picture of what's happening there?

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

I'll jump in, and I think as you look across the expansions, I like to think about it in the solution areas that we see within Payment Software. Really, we've got a great install base around our issuing and acquiring products. Over the last year since I've joined, George, I've really tried to instill this idea of what's the retention rates, the NRR, is underneath of those. That business, it's very durable. Mid-single retention rates, nice and stable there. Where we get a lot of the lift when you get into the retention rates, and this could be distorted on a quarterly basis when you look at the year-to-year on different renewal cohorts, but where we're getting really good lift is going to be in the real-time payment area where we're seeing a lot more demand for that on a multi-year basis and how that is growing.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

I think that's the, as I've kind of learned here in ACI, that's a bit of the beauty of our strategy. We're agnostic on your payment type. We're independent on whether you're choosing a card type, a debit type, a real-time payment scheme, and we can help you orchestrate across all those. From a growth standpoint, it really is very defendable. That is, payments go from a card to a different real-time payment or even to a digital asset. We can help you orchestrate across that, but we're also going to be protected from a revenue standpoint as well.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

I'd just add to that the issuing and acquiring strength, it was quite broad based, and we increased in all of the areas that drive our revenue in that space, in the software space. We had volume growth, which is great. One of the really great things about being in the payment business, of course, is that payment volumes grow, and they tend to continue to grow. We have that. We have good pricing power, and we exercise that on renewals. Then we had some nice new product launch, so value-add services, more cross-sell. It was strong across all of those areas, and we're very pleased with the performance in that particular part of the business.

[George Sutton, Analyst at Craig-Hallum]

Fabulous. I wondered if you could address the ACI Connetic use cases in the U.S. I know your initial win was going to be a fairly focused use case. Can you talk about how broad these U.S. wins might be?

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

Yeah. The initial use cases in the U.S. are largely concentrated around account-to-account payments. What that means is everything from a-- As we've said, ACI Connetic enables most types of payments today. In the U.S., there's a lot of interest around real-time payments, being ready for real-time payments when consumers ramp up their adoption, and then also high-value payments. Wire transfers, for example, SWIFT payments. Those are some of the use cases that are of the greatest interest right now. We are seeing broad-based interest, including cards as well, going forward. The initial ones are largely focused around account-to-account.

[George Sutton, Analyst at Craig-Hallum]

Perfect. Okay. Thanks, guys.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

Thank you, George.

[Operator]

We have now reached the end of our Q&A session. I would now like to turn the call back to ACI Worldwide for closing remarks.

[Thomas Warsop, President and CEO at ACI Worldwide]

Thank you very much, and we appreciate you all joining us this morning. We're very pleased with the work that our teams are doing. I'm really proud of our team around the world. We're very thankful for the customers that are helping make sure that we continue to drive growth. Of course, we're very thankful for our shareholders, and we've said it many times, but our job is to drive extraordinary shareholder value. That's what we're trying to do, and we expect to continue to do that. We have a great start to the year in the first half, and as we've said this morning, the outlook is strong for the remainder of the year. That's what gave us the confidence to, once again, raise our guidance in terms of both revenue and EBITDA. We're excited about the future, and thank you all for your support.

[Robert Leibrock, CFO at ACI Worldwide]

Thanks, everyone.

[Operator]

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

Participants

Executives

• John Kraft, Head of Strategy and Finance
• Thomas Warsop, President and CEO
• Robert Leibrock, CFO

Analysts

• Jeff Cantwell, Analyst at Seaport Research Partners
• Peter Heckmann, Analyst at D.A. Davidson
• George Sutton, Analyst at Craig-Hallum