ACI Worldwide, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the ACI Worldwide Second Quarter 2022 Conference Call. All lines have been placed on a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for your questions or comments following the presentation. If you should require assistance throughout the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad to reach a live operator. At this time, it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, John Kraft, Head of Strategy and Finance. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. On today's call, we will discuss the company's second quarter 2022 results and ACI's 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 safe harbor and forward-looking statements like all of our events. You can find the full text of both statements on the first and final pages of our presentation deck, a copy of which is available on our website and with the SEC. On this morning's call is Ocalan Almeida, our president and CEO, and Scott Behrens, our CFO. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Ocalan.

Thank you, John. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining our second quarter 2022 earnings conference call. We are pleased to deliver another quarter of results in line with guidance and consensus. These results underscore the predictability, resilience, and momentum of our growth. It proves that our three-pillar strategy, Fit for Growth, Focus on Growth, and Step Change Value Creation is working. and that our continued focus and disciplined execution of this strategy is gaining traction. Our real-time payment solutions continue to make headway across the globe, just as our merchant omnicommerce solution enters new markets and expands with innovative offerings. Our boots-on-the-ground approach continues to deliver significant wins across international markets. Work is underway on our next-generation real-time payments cloud platform, and we expect the release of the minimum viable product in the first quarter of 2023. We expect the divestiture of our corporate online banking solutions to close in the third quarter of 2022, and our continuous, rigorous review of divestitures and acquisitions opportunities to maximize shareholder value remains unchanged. We reported organic growth of 13% or 14% on a constant currency basis and EBITDA growth of 10% or 11% on a constant currency basis. Our new AR bookings growth was 3% compared to the second quarter of 2021, and AR year-to-date is up 43%. We continue to cement our annual mid-single-digit organic revenue growth while positioning the company to grow by 7% to 9% by 2024. I'm pleased with the consistency of our performance and our significant financial flexibility, which support short and long-term profitable growth. We bought 2 million shares through June 30 and have $154 million remaining on our share repurchase authorization. Now, let me turn to some latest trends and wins. Central government mandates continue to be the difference maker for faster adoption of real-time payments around the globe. Within this landscape, ACI remains at the forefront of real-time payments across the globe by leading national payment schemes for central banks and connecting national banks to national systems. The Middle East is taking strides towards real-time payments as national governments prioritize infrastructure modernization. Oman's central bank will use ACI's real-time central infrastructure software to drive immediate payments as the country modernized toward a cashless society. Japan Car Network, Japan's central domestic payments network, has selected ACI as its digital platform partner to modernize its payments infrastructure. South Korea's Lot Card Co., a leading credit card conglomerate with the largest distribution and service network nationwide, has appointed ACI to build the core foundation of its credit card business. India's largest white label ATM service provider with more than 11,000 ATMs has signed AACI's enterprise payments platform solution to support its expansion. In our merchant business, we continue to ramp up innovative solutions to allow merchants to offer more payment methods for customers. We see the results of these investments as we enter new markets and cross-sell to existing customers. We recently launched ACI Smart Engage, a mobile engagement platform. It lets merchants offer goods and services directly to consumers' smartphones using location, voice, and image recognition technology. A large Japanese global IT service provider, we use the ACI Secure eCommerce solution for its Italian merchant business, servicing multiple sectors from fashion and food to utilities. Deutsche Payment Secure E-commerce, an established provider of innovative e-commerce payment solutions. We use the ACI secure e-commerce solution. Redman, Colombia's largest POS network and the top processor, has expanded to include ACI Proactive Risk Manager in across Zeldium. Blue Sky Technology Service, a US technology consulting firm offering payments worldwide. We use ACI secure e-commerce. I am pleased with the significant wins in the second quarter. And now I will turn it over to Scott to discuss financials and forward guidance. Scott?

Thanks, Ocalan, and good morning, everyone. I first plan to review our financial results for Q2 and then provide our outlook for the rest of the year. We will then open the line for questions. Revenue for the quarter was $340 million, up 13% or 14% on a constant currency basis from Q2 last year. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $66 million, up 10% or 11% on a constant currency basis from Q2 last year. And net new ARR bookings in Q2 were $18 million, up 3% from Q2 last year, and up 43% year-to-date. These results continue a string of quarters in line with our financial guidance. Turning to our segment results, bank segment revenue grew 24% or 27% on a constant currency basis, and segment adjusted EBITDA increased 29% on both the reported and a constant currency basis versus Q2 last year. Merchant segment revenue decreased 2% on a reported basis, but increased 2% on a constant currency basis, while merchant segment adjusted EBITDA was down 41% or down 32% on a constant currency basis versus Q2 last year. And finally, our biller segment revenue grew 8% on a reported and constant currency basis, while adjusted EBITDA decreased 18% or 19% on a constant currency basis versus Q2 last year. We ended the quarter with $119 million in cash on hand, a debt balance of $1.1 billion, and a net debt leverage ratio of 2.4 times, which is just below our 2.5 times target. We repurchased a little more than 900,000 shares for $25 million during the quarter and have repurchased approximately 2 million shares for $63 million year to date. And we have $154 million remaining on our current repurchase authorization as of the end of June. And finally, turning to our outlook for the rest of 2022, we are reiterating our full year guidance. We expect revenue growth to be in the mid single digits on a constant currency basis or in the range of 1.415 to 1.435 billion. And we expect full year adjusted EBITDA of 400 to 415 million. For Q3, we expect revenue to be in a range of 310 to 325 million and adjusted EBITDA to be in a range of 50 to 65 million. In terms of capital allocation, we continue to expect to use approximately 50% of our cash flow for share repurchases over the remainder of the year. And again, we will update our outlook for the impact of the sale of our corporate online banking business once it closes, which is expected to be before the end of the third quarter.

With that, I will pass it back to Ocalan for some closing comments. Thank you, Scott. In summary,

we delivered another strong quarter in line with guidance and consensus. Our year-to-date results demonstrated the predictability, resilience, and growth momentum of HCI worldwide. The steady cadence of significant business wins validates our three-pillar strategy. It also reinforces the mission-critical role of our software and technology in leading the future of real-time payments worldwide. We continue to cement our mid-single-digit organic growth while positioning the company to grow by 7% to 9% by 2024. Our strong balance sheet and cash flow give us resilience and financial flexibility. I thank our ACI employees for their dedication and our partners and customers for their trust.

Thank you all for joining us today, and now we will open for Q&A.

If you have a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad at this time. If at any time your question has been answered, you can remove yourself from the queue by pressing 1. Again, ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question or comment, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad at this time. One moment while we pull for questions. And we do not have any questions at this time. Oh, we do have questions coming in. Okay. Our first question is from George Sutton of Craig Hallam. Please go ahead, George.

Thank you, guys. Nice results. So I wondered if we could go into a little bit more segment detail. It looks like the bank business has been superb, and I guess we can thank Jerome Powell for some of that. but the merchant piece of the business has been slowing and the recurring revenue slowing. And I just wanted to make sure we understood sort of what is causing that to occur.

Yeah, maybe I'll take that and what you want, you can add. Yeah. I mean the bank strength and we, you know, we kind of said this coming out of the fourth quarter last year, a strong exit to 2021 continued to see that strength here in the first half of the year. If you peel that back even further on the bank side, really a lot of that's being powered by our real-time payments, which through the first half of the year is up almost 50% over last year. So a lot of strength there. If you look at bill pay, up 8% over last year. And then on the merchant segment, Constant currency, yeah, it's 2% for the quarter, but it's up 6% year-to-date. And so, you know, the timing of some of the license fee can make a difference in that business, albeit a small portion of the business. It can have a year-over-year impact, but up 6% constant currency year-to-date.

Yeah, I would say, yeah, just to compliment George, I think we look at the merchant business, and we had a very strong quarter in recurring revenue. last year that was the recovery of the pandemic. And there was the anniversary of that, but I can tell you that we're still estimating a very strong year for merchants in the year to go.

I understand. Okay. The next-gen RTP that you're talking about, can you just give us a sense of what will be enhanced when that comes out?

You're talking about the next generation RTP orchestration, right? At the cloud. Right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. No, definitely. Yes. Yes. Basically, basically it's like a rewrite of the whole, the code. So you can think about the next generation of our base 24 or switch or issuing or acquiring our RTP. So it is like the last technology that will available, which will give our clients a much more speed to go to the market, much easier to make changes, to adapt the product, and then so forth. The idea is to have the minimal viable product by Q1 next year, and then we're going to start to roll it out around the globe in the coming two years.

Perfect. Lastly, you mentioned some compelling wins in Japan. Korea, India, just for my benefit and those on the call, when do we start to get revenues in from those new opportunities?

Yeah, there are some of them that we talked about, which is license, right, that we got the revenue right away. Some of them are AR for banks and intermediaries. That takes around six to 12 months to launch most of the time. on a subscription basis, and then you have merchants that takes around also three to six months to launch. So I would tell you that part of that revenue we can expect this year, but the bulk of the revenue will be next year.

Perfect. Thanks, guys.

Yeah, just to complement, I think it's important to reinforce our very strong ARR growth. So when we talk about AR, we are talking about the first year expected revenue after we launch that client. And we have a growth of more than 40% this year. And we are projecting very strong growth for this year. The bulk of it is all about next year. So the point is, we are not only projecting this year to be strong, solid, and predictable, but also we are coming with a very strong not only pipeline, but finance. to guarantee that we have also a bright year next year.

Our next question is from Charles Nathan of Stevens. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for taking my question. I wanted to drill into bill pay a little bit. This is clearly one of the stronger results post-speed pay acquisition, and I wanted to get a little color in terms of What was driving that growth, perhaps from a vertical standpoint or from a geographical standpoint?

Yeah, well, I'll take the latter first. As a geographical standpoint, our bill or direct bill pay business is entirely U.S.-based, so there's nothing outside of the U.S. in that business. From a vertical standpoint, we saw really strong growth in government tax payments year over year. And so I would say of all the segments we had, that had the strongest year-over-year growth.

Got it. And, you know, as a follow-up, I wanted to get some color on a high level on what you're seeing in terms of bank spending and how much of a priority payments is given the current macro backdrop. and what you're hearing from your conversations with your bank clients.

I can tell you about that because I've been like traveling around the globe and have heard a little about every geography. I can tell you that the payments infrastructure continued to be mission critical for the banks. And there is a revolution coming, right? Real-time payments. And they understand that. And they understand that they need to modernize that part. And that part is, again, the center of the systems of banks. So I would say stop of mine for banks around the globe. If you're asking me about, you know, recession, I mean, what's happening with the economy, I think my line on that is it depends on how deep it is, how large it will go. If you look at COVID, we were impacted in some way because they delayed the projects. We are not hearing that at this moment. So I've not heard anything from banks in the Middle East or in Europe or even in Europe, right, or in Asia or Latin America or United States about delaying investments at this point.

Got it. I appreciate the caller. Thank you. Sure.

There are no other questions at this time.

Well, thanks, everybody, for joining us. We look forward to catching up in the coming weeks. Have a great day.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference. We thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a great day.