ACI Worldwide, Inc.

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 Incorporated First Quarter 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press start followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, Press star 1 again. 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 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 Warsup, 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 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 track 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 de-risk our full-year forecasts, 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 three main solution sets we sell into the segment. Issuing and acquiring, 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 Ambulance 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 one banks. These institutions, the slightly smaller ones, are seeking the highest levels of scalability and reliability that ACI is so well known for. And they're often more interested in taking advantage of SaaS delivery 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 impacts 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 in 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. 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?