Thank you for standing by. My name is Jose, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the ACI Worldwide, Incorporated Third Quarter 2024 Financial Results. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to John Kraft. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. On today's call, we will discuss the company's third quarter 2024 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 at aciworldwide.com under the Investor Relations tab and will remain available after the call. Today's call is subject to both 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.

Thanks, John, and good morning, everyone. I appreciate you joining our third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. I'm going to start this morning with some comments on the quarter and then I’m going to hand it over to Scott to discuss detailed financial results and our increased expectations for the remainder of 2024. Then we will open the line for questions. Q3 results were ahead of expectations and of the guidance we provided, with total revenue up 24% year-over-year. As we've discussed on recent calls, we are making a conscious effort to accelerate the signing of contracts, both renewal and new, and bring those in earlier in the year. As you know, revenue from a renewal contract cannot be recognized earlier than the renewal date. But getting those renewals out of the way allows us to focus on new customer wins. And net new contracts are recognized as they're signed. I had very high expectations of the team with respect to this initiative, and they have significantly exceeded those expectations. And that continues to allow us to outperform our guidance. Further, signing these new contracts earlier in the year helps reduce the heavy seasonality we've historically seen, and it simply derisks attaining our full year financial guidance. I'm pleased to let you know we have more than 99% of our full year 2024 revenue forecast either already signed and contracted or covered by a fourth quarter renewal that is well into the final approval process on the customer side. Our pipeline momentum is notably higher than we typically recorded by November, and that allows us to raise our outlook for 2024 again. Probably most important to me, that allows us to turn our attention to 2025 and beyond. Speaking of 2025, the large sales pipeline and momentum we have as…

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 2024. We'll then open the line for questions. Revenue in the quarter was $452 million, up 24% compared to Q3 2023, and adjusted EBITDA was $167 million, up 61% from Q3 2023. As Tom mentioned, we had particular strength in the bank segment and more specifically with real-time payments, which was up 72% from last year. In the Bank segment, revenue of $222 million was up 43% compared to Q3 last year. Bank segment adjusted EBITDA of $154 million was up 69% compared to Q3 last year. And Bank SaaS, while a smaller portion of the total, grew 15% in the quarter. Our Merchant segment revenue was $50 million, up 38% compared to Q3 last year. And adjusted EBITDA was $27 million, up 159% compared to Q3 last year. While we did benefit from license-based customer renewals in the quarter, our recurring revenue in the segment has continued to steadily improve throughout this year. Lastly, our Biller segment revenue was $180 million, up 5% compared to Q3 last year. Adjusted EBITDA was $31 million, down compared to Q3 last year, due to a particularly strong quarter last year, which included certain one-time non-recurring margin benefits that did not recur here in Q3 2024. And we continue to see strong cash flow generation with cash flow from operations of $54 million, more than double Q3 last year. We ended the quarter with $178 million in cash on hand, a debt balance of $1 billion, and a net debt leverage ratio of 1.6x and approximately $650 million in liquidity. With our strong cash flow growth and our lowest leverage in well over a decade, combined with our…

Thanks, Scott. In summary, we are pleased to continue delivering results that are in line with 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. We look forward to catching up with you in the coming weeks. Thank you for joining our call. Operator, we can now take questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Trevor Williams with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Hey Trevor.

Hey Trevor.

Hey guys. Good morning. Thanks. Yes, I wanted to ask a bigger picture question on the medium-term outlook for growth in banks. Tom, maybe if you could maybe help us distill down the main drivers behind this segment staying as a, think of an upper single-digit grower over the medium-term, what's structurally changed here over the last few years, whether that's product set, changes to go-to-market, end-market health, any more detail there on kind of what underpins your confidence in the medium-term outlook for banks would be great. Thanks.

Yes, sure, Trevor. So, lots of things, as you can imagine, but I think you mentioned market strength. There's -- we're definitely having different types of conversations with our customers, and I'm going to come at that from two angles. One is, our customers are thinking about their business is healthy, they're investing quite heavily in new products and they're looking for help. They're looking for a partner that can help them figure out how do they apply technology to make the entire business more efficient and faster to market. And ACI, given our history and the long relationships we have with most of these financial institutions, we're a natural choice. I think historically, we have probably spent most of the time with our customers on renewals. Talking about, hey, 5 years from now, we need to talk about a renewal. Well, now we're talking to them consistently throughout the year, throughout the 5-year period of the license, and we're talking about the future. And as we've begun to ramp up discussions around the payments hub, that's even building on this. And so now, I mean, I heard from a very, very large Asia Pacific customer, I was in Asia, as I mentioned earlier, I was in Asia recently, and I was talking to this customer, and they said, ACI is showing up differently. We're having these conversations about how you can help us achieve our objectives. Your products are critical to what we do. That's always been the case. It continues to be the case, but they feel like we are much more of a partner. So that's a lot of words, Trevor, but I think we have a really important role with these customers. We are continuing to exercise some pricing power that we have, we've always had. But I think most importantly, we are being perceived as a partner and we're talking about how we help them achieve their objectives and they're much more -- I'm not going to say they're happy about paying more and about continuing to do more business with us, but they are comfortable with that because they see us as part of the solution to their future.

Okay. No, I appreciate all that. Thanks. And then the -- just when you guys are talking about having the, almost all of this year's renewals either contracted or signed, and then you're shifting focus to 2025, aside from just giving us better visibility into what revenue looks like over the next year or two, is there anything else strategically that that enables when you get more of the renewal activity done earlier in the year, whether that's freeing up more sales focus for cross-sell and upsell, just how we should think about that, that kind of strategic impact and how that can have an impact on the [indiscernible] for banks. Thanks.

Yes, so I'll make a comment and then Scott may have a thought on this too. But I think there are two main benefits. One is, and you just said it. We have almost no discussion, in fact, I don't expect Scott and myself to have a single conversation about a renewal for the remainder of this year. We're talking about how do we help our sales and account management team structure new business in 2025 and beyond. That's all we're talking about now. So, whereas normally we spend quite a bit of time thinking about, how do we answer customer questions? How do we get these renewals signed up? We don't have to do that at all. So we're focused on the pipeline and setting up Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 of next year. So that's probably the biggest thing. The second thing, though, is I mentioned the payments hub, and we've made great progress on that. We're very close to having a solution that we can start to actually demonstrate to our customers. And now, what I'm spending most of my time on right now is sitting down with customers and potential customers and giving them much more insight into what that payments hub looks like, what the benefits they're going to get will be, and I think I was -- I tried to be a little bit funny. Our beta client, we have so many customers asking to be early adopters, you obviously can't have them all. You have to narrow the list. So on the one hand, it's allowed us really to focus on next year, which we are, and on the other hand, it's allowed me in particular, but our sales team as a whole, to focus on helping customers understand where we're going and how they can leverage the investments that we're making.

Yes, Trevor, the only thing I'd add to that, I've been around a long time, and ACI has a history of, well, first of all, the bank, especially on the bank side, it's a long sales cycle. And we had a history of that sales cycle coming to fruition in the fourth quarter, and late in the fourth quarter. And I think what you see here is two things. One is we have substantially completed this year's new business really at the end of September. I mean, it's not now in November. It was really earlier in the year. And that allows us to turn the focus to accelerate that pipeline. Again, a pipeline that otherwise may have, you know, came to fruition the fourth quarter of next year is now maybe pushed to the third quarter of next year and potentially earlier. So what it really frees us up to do, like Tom said, is listen, we can accelerate it, spend time accelerating next year's pipeline. And what that allows us to do, not just for '25 and '26, that allows us to continue on the path towards our long-term stated growth goals.

Perfect. All right. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.

Thanks, Trevor.

Our next question comes from the line of Peter Heckmann with D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my question.

Hey, Pete.

And I -- hey, good morning. I apologize, I missed the beginning of the call. I had some trouble getting online. But can you repeat your comments on 2025? I mean, that was going to be kind of my leading question after a year where it looks like software licensees could be up 20% on the year, it does seem to present a pretty tough comparison to continue strong overall growth rates, at least in certain quarters next year. So, I was just wondering, if you could repeat that real quick.

Yes. I think that Pete just follows up on the last question, is what we're able to do now is really focus on pulling that pipeline forward. So, what we're looking at is probably a strong of a pipeline for '25 exiting this year as probably we've had at this point in time going into any new year. So Tom's comments on the introductory report were that even -- even though we are outperforming this year. Our pipeline for next year, as it even sits today, is healthy enough to keep us on our road trajectory.

Yes, and I mean, specifically, we didn't give any specific numbers, Pete, but what I said was that we are well-positioned to continue to see strength in 2025 and beyond, even with the outperformance.

Okay, got it. That's helpful. And then -- and again, I apologize if I missed it, it had some just connection problems, but I heard you say that the payments hub is on track and you hope to have a product you can show customers by year-end, but when do you think you might start the pilots and then have the hub go into general availability?

Yes, I would expect to see the initial pilot implementations probably the beginning of second quarter next year. And then I don't know exactly when the full scale general availability will be. We want to be very, very thoughtful about making sure that it's working exactly as we want and get those initial pilots really solid. So I won't make a -- put a stake in the ground on that, but we feel really good about it. And it's not something that's -- we don't require very much of that for our next year expectations.

Okay, good, good. All right, I'll get back in the queue. I appreciate it.

Thanks, Pete.

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

Hi, Jeff.

Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Hi, good morning. Thank you. I want to ask you post-election, can you talk about the current administration change here in the U.S. and give us some of your early thoughts in terms of how you think that might impact your business as far as next year, the following year? When you provided the medium-term guidance back in March, that was under different leadership here in the U.S. Maybe tell us what some of your initial reactions are here. It seems like perhaps regulation, taxation, other things could potentially be shifting a little more positively, and many of us saw the banking sector was up a lot in the market yesterday, shifting many of the larger GSIBs, and clearly, that's an important customer segment for you guys. So could you help frame this perhaps to might increase the pipeline or could see more transaction growth, things like that? We'd love to get your initial thoughts in areas where there could potentially be some impact down the road? Thanks.

Jeff, you mentioned an election. Was there an election? No, sorry. Just trying to be funny. But yes, I mean, look, I don't have a solid view on it, but I think there's definitely potential good news as the market thinks given what happened yesterday with the banking segment. We certainly hope that there's maybe a little bit less regulation in the U.S. Hopefully we see a little more transaction growth, as you said. That's all -- that would all be upside for us, but we haven't obviously built any of that into our forecast because it's so new and we just don't have a handle on it yet. But I do want to just make sure that I say, we're obviously a global company. And so the U.S is a big part of our business. It's not the majority of our business. So even though we probably see a little bit easier, if that's even the right word, regulatory environment in the U.S., I don't really see much change in the rest of the world. I think it'll continue the way we were expecting. Europe is usually at the vanguard of regulation on many things and there are things that have to be done there and that's not changing given the U.S election. But I'm cautiously optimistic, but I don't have a lot to tell you quantitatively.

Yes, Jeff, and I think the only thing I'd add to that is, but I mean, obviously, if you look at the results last few years, banks have really opened up the wall and have been spenders and buyers of technology, buyers of -- they're going through modernization efforts. I think if you look at recent developments, I think it's really that banks have a lot of tailwinds right now, and whether it's regulatory, economic, the overall marketplace. So we would just expect that to contribute to more spending on the [indiscernible] banks. So pretty encouraged by what opportunities we have at that customer base.

Got it. Okay, great. And then just to follow-up on an earlier question, I want to [indiscernible] implied to you that I also joined a little bit, and could you talk about as you think about the guidance that you provided for the medium term? Has there been any change under the hood as far as the segments themselves? You might just walk us through, it seems like banks is performing very strongly and so forth. So I'm curious if you can help us understand in terms of the revenue outlook for each segment where expectations might be shifting. Thank you.

Yes, On banks, banks has been strong. Banks, the expectation is going to continue to be strong. Billers, it has some seasonality in that business. If you recall from the second quarter, we had a strong tax order in terms of the tax transactions. We got a favorable award in terms of the go-forward business that we have with the IRS going forward. That should begin to contribute here next year. The exit rate for the Biller business should accelerate a bit on a sequential basis quarter-over-quarter. And then the Merchant business has been, if you recall, last year early part of the year we are seeing a bit of decline in that business. It flipped positive in the second half, and we've been incrementally more positive each quarter this year. So I think going back to our comments, without providing 2025 outlook by segment, I think all will nicely contribute to growth next year.

Yes, and you were asking about if there's anything under the hood that's changed. I really don't think so. I think the businesses are performing generally in line with where we thought. Banks has been extremely strong and that's been one of the primary drivers of our overall performance this year and we expect it to continue to be strong.

Okay, great. Thanks so much.

Thanks, Jeff.

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

Hey, George.

Good morning, guys. Good morning. This is actually Logan on for George. Thanks for taking the question.

Hey, Logan.

First of all, I wanted to kind of stay on the topic of the banks there. You guys have talked about those mid-sized banks being kind of an incremental opportunity for you guys. I'm just wondering if you can give us any more color on sort of how much are those now, if any, contributing to the segment, and where do you think that could go in the future?

Yes, I mean, we have specifically not been driving far into the sales process with the payments hub, which is where that opportunity primarily comes from, and I've talked about that a lot. I do not want us to get ahead. I do not want to be selling PowerPoint, which companies do, and probably ACI has done in the past. So we're not doing that. We're talking about -- here's where we're going, these are the advantages that will be there, here's the schedule that we're on, we'll show it to you when it's ready to be shown. We've got lots of interest, but in terms of what that segment is contributing, it's small -- it's very small. We have some business with mid-tier banks, but in terms of our flagship products, not very much. We tend to focus those through Fintech partners, historically. So not a whole lot of contribution directly from that segment at this point, but a lot of interest.

Yes, and I think, Logan, this is Scott. I think -- so yes, I would say that the bank strength we're seeing today is not a result of us going downstream into that. I mean, that's really coming from our four large bank segment. And I think even when we get into the mid-tier, it's really going to manifest itself more on the SaaS side than on the license software side. So that market will be more served via our SaaS market. So really what you're seeing in the strength in banks is really them buying technology on premise, license software, and that's really still the big banks. But the tier should start to kick in next year and most likely from a SaaS delivery moment.

Got it. Thank you. And then just one follow-up. Can you maybe just touch a little bit on sort of the competitive environment you see in the real-time payment space? I mean, is more of that business coming from kind of upselling with current customers, or are you looking at new customers, and then maybe kind of with those new customers, are you seeing any change in the competition out there for winning those?

Yes, so that's -- most of the new business we're getting, it's not usually expansion in that particular area if we're talking about real-time payments. So I mentioned earlier we have another central infrastructure. When we say central infrastructure, what we mean is our software is actually powering the entire country's instant payments or real-time payment scheme. And we signed another one in Mexico in the third quarter. So we're up to 11 central infrastructures. And those are all net new. I mean, they're not just new to us, those are brand new period. So there was no central infrastructure in many of these places. And we are helping, typically the central bank, but sometimes an agent of the central bank. We're helping them set the program up when we do a central infrastructure deal, and again, we have 11 of those around the world. And then the other side of real-time payments is when we help the individual's payment schemes. So, each country has one or sometimes more than one of these payment schemes, and so our software often powers those schemes. So we've got the central infrastructure, we've got the real-time payment schemes in an individual country, and then we have the work that we do for banks and ultimately for merchants to connect into those real-time payment schemes. So we kind of have three angles on this. All of them are performing well. The vast majority of that business is new to us. It is not expansion. Sometimes we have an existing relationship with the bank and we'll add on real-time payments. So that's cross-sell. But most of that business is net new. Now, there are other things other than real-time payments, instant payments in our real-time numbers, for example, wire transfers, and sometimes we do expand those. So there's a variety of things, but when we're talking about instant payments, in the U.S it's FedNow and the TCH rails. When we're talking about those, that's almost all net new.

Yes, I think the only thing I'd add to that is that, really, from a competitive environment standpoint, nothing's really changed. And I think if you look at the results of the real-time segment, even in Q3, up 70% plus over last year. Big part of that, there's just tremendous growth there. There's a lot of land grab. We've got the technology, we have the relationships. So it's definitely delivering results. And again, the competitive environment really hasn't changed much.

And -- sorry, I did forgot to answer that part of your question. Thank you, Scott. There was an example recently, I think it was actually in the fourth quarter that it was announced, but MasterCard actually made an announcement in South Africa around real-time payments and MasterCard driving adoption of real-time payments, and they're using our software to do that, and they acknowledged the partnership that we have. So even sometimes when it looks like there's a new competitor or there's a -- maybe we didn't win something, oftentimes we're part of that solution anyway, and that's a great example of that. And that's a great partnership we have with MasterCard in various places around the world.

Got it. Thanks for all the color.

Yes, thanks, Logan.

Thanks, Logan.

This question comes from the line of Peter Heckmann with D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.

Okay. I just had a follow-up on that last one. It reminded me, Tom, you were talking about kind of the current seat at the table that kind of gives you a right to bid on these payment hubs opportunities. But it's something that we talk a lot about with ACI, but can you remind us, I think, on like wires, I think ACI powers some high percentage, 25% to 30% of wires, and then also attachments to SWIFT systems. Can you talk a little bit about those systems and how you talk about, many of these institutions that you already have a relationship with, you either do that through real-time or through the core around [indiscernible] ATM switch.

Yes, sure, Pete. So, we -- just let me give you just a couple of figures just to set a little context. So our wires system, our wires platform, banks around the world use that to process trillions of dollars, that's trillions with a T, every day. So -- and it's highly reliable, incredibly scalable, and it is, we often, I often talk about ACI is powering the world's payments ecosystem. There's a big part of it. Similarly, our issuing and acquiring platforms handle also trillions of dollars of payments every single day. And we do business with all of the 20 largest banks in the world, and the majority of -- the significant majority of, the largest 100, and you could even go down to 200, largest banks in the world. So our platforms have very important places in the payments infrastructure of the largest financial institutions in the world. And that's where my comment comes from. I met with one of the largest banks in the world, I met with their CEO about a month ago, and we had a fantastic conversation. The conversation was about the future, how does ACI help them, just like I was talking about earlier. But he made a fascinating comment to me, he said, we haven't talked in like 9 months, and he said, that's a really good thing. And I kind of looked at him and I said, well, wait, I don't know if that's a good thing. He said, no, no, no, trust me, that's a good thing, because if we were talking more often, that means something was wrong. He said, I really enjoyed this conversation about the future, and I want to have more of those, but I don't have to think about ACI. Your products just work. And I'm not losing any sleep, my team isn't losing any sleep. So that's, the fact that we have these long relationships, that our platforms are so important to their infrastructure, and that they don't worry about us. They know our stuff is going to work. That -- all that together is why we have the -- we are one of the usual suspects when they need help and when they're thinking about the future and how they deal with things that are changing in their environment. So that's where I'm coming from on that. You mentioned real-time payment. That's another one that tends to be relatively new, not the wires part, but the instant payments pieces. Those are relatively new, but I think the fact that we keep winning these deals is further evidence of that, they look to us, even though that's a new thing, they say, well, I rely on ACI so much for my payments in other areas, obviously, they're a great partner or potential partner on real-time payments.

Okay. And that's what really, I think, makes the thought -- the thinking about developing a payment sub-platform a little bit easier to get to because ACI already has systems that are doing wires, cross-border, real-time, debit, ETH. And so you're really just having to add maybe a couple other payment modalities and you really have a whole package.

That's exactly right, Pete. And on the payment hub, that's why these conversations are so straightforward for me, because no customer or respected customer ever has said to me or even hinted to me that it doesn't make sense to have the conversation with ACI. It's obviously we should have that conversation, given our history and our presence in the market.

Great. I appreciate it.

You bet. Thanks, Pete.

Thanks, Pete.

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