ACI Worldwide, Inc.

Hello and welcome to ATI Worldwide Inc. Report's financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2025. 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 star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. And please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. And please note that this call is being recorded. I'd like to turn the call over to John Kraff. You may begin.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. On today's call, we will discuss the company's first quarter 2025 results, as well as our 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 in our presentation deck and earnings press 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. But before I turn it over, I wanted to make you aware that ACI will be participating in several conferences in Q2. the 20th annual Needham Technology Media and Consumer Conference on May 12th, Barclays' 15th annual Emerging Payments and FinTech Forum in New York City on May 20th, the annual CPORT Growth Discovery Conference on May 15th, CompassPoint's virtual bus tour on June 2nd, the Baird 2025 Global Consumer Technology and Services Conference in New York City on June 5, and D.A. Davidson's Consumer and Technology Conference in Nashville on June 11. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom.

Thanks, John, and good morning, everyone. As always, I appreciate you joining our earnings conference call this morning. I'll start with some comments about the quarter, and then I'm going to hand it over to Scott, and he'll discuss detailed financial results as well as expectations for the rest of 2025. And then we'll open it up for questions. To begin, Q1 was a very strong start for us. We grew revenue 25% and EBITDA 95%. You probably recall I've said several times that we have been pushing our teams to sign both renewals and new business earlier in the year to both de-risk accomplishment of our full-year targets and to allow us to more quickly focus on longer-term, more strategic opportunities. I'm happy to report this pressure continues to yield results. In fact, we were able to sign more revenue in Q1 than even I expected. As a reminder, renewal contracts yield revenue on the date of their renewal, and that doesn't matter how early we sign them. So, I think it's probably clear that the incremental revenue this quarter comes from net new business and better than expected transaction volumes, not renewals. Some of the new business we signed was originally expected in Q2, but I'm sure you agree, you agree with me, that we'd rather have it earlier. Scott's gonna walk you through the guidance a bit later, but this strong start positions us very well to achieve first half and full year results in line with our previous indications. So we won't be able to sustain a 25% revenue growth rate throughout the year, but I'm very pleased we delivered so much revenue growth so early. On our last earnings call, I mentioned the organizational improvement we made in combining the bank segment and the merchant segment into a single new business unit called Payments Software. As I said, the combination is synergistic and it simplifies our operations in many respects. further the software, the code, if you will, that we use to serve banks and merchants is very similar. That move has already generated some positives, including generating some new pipeline opportunities and allowing us to more efficiently cover certain geographies where we have customers in both pieces of that segment. So if I turn to the segments, let me start with payment software. Revenue grew 42%, adjusted EBITDA more than doubled compared to Q1 of last year. As we mentioned previously, we signed the largest new logo and competitive takeaway we have ever had in our Asia-Pacific region. And in addition, we signed another significant new logo in the segment, this one in our Latin America region in South America, in fact. We're proud to have signed two completely new bank logos in a single quarter. Both of these wins are using our issuing and acquiring solutions. Before moving on from payment software to biller, I want to provide you an update on our next generation payments hub solution, and we've now officially named that Kinetic. That's C-O-N-N-E-T-I-C. I often joke that you have to make up a word in order to get a name through the IP lawyers, and that's what we did here, but I think it's a nice one. The solution, to remind you, cloud-native. It provides a lot of enhanced capabilities, such as automated decisioning, straight-through processing, declined transaction reduction, and AI-driven analytics. It simply improves the experience of a bank and its customers. The solution also expands our addressable market beyond our traditional large banks to include midsize and smaller institutions, as well as non-bank financial institutions and payments technology firms, and ultimately even global retailers. Kinetic complements our existing solutions, and it's very helpful as our customers plan to migrate to the cloud. Kinetic will help customers manage a lower-risk modernization journey. I was speaking to the CIO of a very large Middle Eastern bank last week when I was in the Middle East, And when I finished my description of Kinetic, his response to me was, and I'm quoting, I want to be part of this journey. How quickly can you come back to show me how this works? And that's a pretty common reaction to our story. So I remain extremely excited about the possibilities. Just discussing this solution and our technology roadmaps has already contributed to expanding relationships with existing customers. It also helped us to win that competitive takeaway in Asia Pacific that I just mentioned. So stay tuned for details regarding an official Kinetic launch celebration, which we're going to do in conjunction with our 50th birthday celebration later this year. Now I'll turn to Biller. Our Q1 revenue was up 11%. We signed several new logos in the Biller segment as well. New logos may not be as rare in the payments as they are in the payment software segment, but they're equally nice, of course. Our bookings momentum continued in Q1, and our new ARR bookings were up about 40% over last year's Q1. Overall, we're very happy with our progress and our positioning for the future. While the world seems fixated on the tariff and trade discussions, our customers are healthy. Our strong start to the year has boosted our confidence in achieving our full-year targets, and we haven't seen any material impacts from the geopolitical uncertainty that we're all seeing at this point. I'll anticipate a question tell you that while we do business with several Chinese banks, our financial exposure to China is not material. So in this case, that's good news. We remain focused on our broader strategy, our sales execution, and the development of our next-generation kinetic platform. We started the year very strong, and we're confident in our full-year financial forecast. Overall, we're optimistic regarding our long-term profitable growth and our ability to continue to deliver significant shareholder value. I'll turn it over to Scott to discuss financials and our guidance. Scott?

Thanks, Tom, and good morning, everyone. I first plan to review our financial results for the quarter and then provide our outlook for the rest of 2025. We'll then open the line for questions. Q1 2025 revenue was $395 million, up 25% from Q1 2024, and total adjusted EBITDA was $94 million, up 95% from Q1 2024. Looking at the results by segment, Our payment software segment revenue increased 42%, and adjusted EBITDA more than doubled versus Q1 2024. And our biller segment revenue increased 11%, while adjusted EBITDA increased 1% from Q1 2024. We continued to see strong cash flow growth in Q1, with cash flow from operating activities of $78 million. We ended the quarter with strong liquidity, including $230 million in cash on hand and approximately $853 million of total debt outstanding. This represents a net debt leverage ratio of 1.2 times, which is below our stated target of two times that we discussed previously. As of today, we have repurchased approximately 1 million shares of our stock year to date for $52 million and have the $320 million remaining on our share purchase authorization. Also in a quarter, we sold our non-controlling interest in India-based MindGate to PayU India. The gain on sale is included in other income and expense on the income statement. And even though we'll no longer have a minority investment in MindGate, we will continue our strategic partnership with them in the region. As we look at our outlook for the rest of the year, obviously there's been a lot of volatility in the capital markets in recent weeks, but we're comfortable that we are fairly insulated from a lot of the macroeconomic events. Meaning on the payment software side of the business, as you know, these are mission-critical payment systems, and most of the revenue for the year is either under long-term contracts or subject to renewal. And on the biller side, the verticals we serve are really non-discretionary bill payment. And as a software company, we really don't see a lot of impacts from tariffs on the supply chain. We're really not exposed to China. And with our low leverage and strong cash flow, we are in a tremendously flexible financial position if interest rates stay higher for longer. We'll actually see a slight benefit from the moves in the U.S. dollar that we've seen so far this year, Remember that 75% to 80% of our payment software business is outside the U.S., and a good portion of that revenue is contracted in local currencies. We're naturally hedged, having expenses also in local currencies, so FX rate moves have more of a top-line impact than a margin impact. So, with a strong start to the year and the impact of changes in FX rates, we are raising our guidance for full-year revenue. We now expect revenue to be in the range of $1.69 billion to $1.72 billion, and we continue to expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $480 million to $495 million. For Q2, we expect revenue to be in a range of $375 to $385 million, and adjusted EBITDA to be in a range of $55 to $65 million. With this guidance, we still expect approximately 46% of our full-year revenue for 2025 in the first half of the year versus the 43% weight of the first half we saw in 2024. And this is really due to the continued efforts, as Tom mentioned, to sign our new contracts earlier in the year. So, in summary, in Q1, we saw strong revenue growth contributing to strong EBITDA growth and margin expansion. And we continue to see strong cash flow contributing to our ability to both delever and deploy capital to our share repurchase program. And we are raising our full-year revenue guidance. But before I hand it back to Tom, I want to switch now to a personal note. As we look ahead, I've begun to plan for my retirement. I've been with ACI now for almost 18 years. During that time, we've grown the company from 370 million of revenue and 30 million of EBITDA to our current 2025 projections of 1.7 billion of revenue and nearly 500 million of EBITDA. I'm extremely proud of what we've achieved, including building a world-class finance organization. To ensure an orderly and well-planned transition, I'm announcing today that it is my plan to retire in the near future. during which time I will work with Tom and the board to accomplish a smooth transition in the financial leadership of the company. And I told Tom and the board that I'll be here as long as they need me. So with that, I will now hand it back to Tom for some closing remarks. Tom?

Thank you very much, Scott. Before I conclude my remarks about the quarter and the year, let me pause to offer my sincere personal thanks to Scott for all of his contributions to ACI. Scott has been working at ACI for nearly two decades, and he's been a true partner to me. His leadership and individual contributions have been a key part of our success throughout that time. Scott's transparent approach to his decision to retire gives us the opportunity to execute the robust succession plan we already had in place and have had in place for a long time. I've already begun working on it, and Scott is committed to supporting us throughout the transition. I'm really pleased for Scott and his family as they enter this next phase. I'll keep you informed about our progress in filling these very big shoes. As I conclude, It's an exciting time for global electronic payments. Change is constant and ACI is at the heart of all that excitement. We power the world's payments ecosystem and that's exactly where we want to be. Our leadership team is intensely focused on delivering for our customers, for our people, and for you, our investors. We understand very clearly that delivering strong shareholder value is our job, and we intend to continue doing just that. Thank you for joining our call this morning and for the faith you show through your ownership and support of ACI shares. Operator, we can now take questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. And please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. And your first question comes from the line of Trevor Williams, whichever is. Trevor, please go ahead.

Great. Thanks. Hey, guys. Good morning. And Scott, congrats on the retirement. Well-deserved. Maybe if I could just ask the first one on the current environment. And Tom, you kind of alluded to this in your prepared remarks. It sounds like you guys aren't seeing anything yet, at least in terms of the way that your customers are are behaving, but maybe just based on your discussions and over the last month or two, Tom, with your customers, I mean, is there any kind of wavering that you're seeing just in terms of decision-making timelines, willingness to take on kind of more investment in modernization and just kind of how you guys are thinking about that potentially playing out over the rest of the year, just given the macro uncertainty? Thanks.

Yeah. So thanks, Trevor. And no, it's been short answers. It's interesting. I was telling Scott and John, I just returned from the Middle East and spoke with many customers. And the way those conversations went, it was almost identically in each instance. First, small talk introductions. Second, what's going on with these tariffs and the president and all the changes and how's that impacting your business? And so we had a good conversation. Of course, I took the opportunity to turn that question around and say, well, how are you thinking about it? And is it going to change the way you think about your business as a whole? And then, of course, selfishly, is it going to have an impact on the way we think about expanding our relationship? And in each instance, absolutely unanimously, the answer was no, it has no impact on what we're doing. In fact, they didn't say it this way because they wouldn't, of course. But the feeling I get is it may create a little bit more opportunity for us, especially on the modernization front. That was specifically, you mentioned that. And that's a good call out because the way that we're thinking about modernization and kinetics, it has so many positive impacts for the customers and their customers. that I think most of the people I'm talking to see it as an opportunity to get better faster. And so I don't know exactly how big that opportunity will be and exactly when it will come, but we're not seeing a negative at this point at all. And we're seeing a little bit of positive momentum. So I feel great about that. And then the last point I'll make on this is, You know, I said and Scott said, and we've talked about this a lot, that we've been pushing to get deals closed earlier. And that that absolutely happened in Q1. Some of some of those deals we expected in Q2, we were able to get signed in Q1. And one of the I think one very small driver to that was customers saying, let's get this done now so that we can start to get some benefits given all the uncertainty, let's push to get it done faster, which is great. So that's kind of what I'm alluding to. That's what we're seeing at the moment is a little bit of positive and really haven't seen negative at this point.

Okay. That's great. For my follow-up, I wanted to ask on stablecoins. It's something that we're starting to hear a lot more about, especially as it relates to more cross-border B2B money movement. First, can you just remind us within the bank's business what exposure you have to cross-border, if at all? And then secondarily, is this something that's coming up at all in your discussion with your bank's customers, their willingness to look at stablecoins as kind of an alternative rail for money movement and just where ACI could potentially fit in that discussion? Thanks.

Yeah, sure. So just on cross-border, we have a lot of business that facilitates our software in many, many ways, facilitates cross-border payments. I mean, just one example is Swift. So Swift payments, we handle, I think, at least trillions of dollars a day in those cross-border, very large payments. So we do a lot with it. I think the next phase, and I've probably talked about this several times, but I think it's very important. The real-time payments ecosystem in the world at the moment is almost all inside of a country, a little bit regionally in a couple of places around the world, but some super interesting use cases get facilitated once you start you start allowing, and I'll come back to why I used the word specifically, allowing cross-border real-time payments. So our technology already is ready for cross-border real-time. That's not the issue. The issue is the regulators have to agree on what the rules are. And we've seen a little bit of that start to happen. In particular, just one example, Singapore and UPI in India. So in Singapore, there are some limited examples where you can use UPI, which is the Indian real-time payment scheme, to make payments while you're traveling in Singapore for an Indian national. So that's just one example, but we're going to start to see more of those, and that'll get really interesting. Now, you asked about Sablecoin. I get lots of questions, and we have lots of discussion around Sablecoin. It's an interesting It's very interesting. There's certainly potential there. But at this point, certainly the bank customers, it's mostly a, hey, what do we think might happen with stablecoin? Is it going to be a big deal or not? I don't know how big and how fast, but I think there's a place for stablecoin now. It's not exactly responsive to your question, Trevor, but our software, we have allowed and facilitated uh crypto payments for a long time volumes are very very very small but uh it's no problem for us from a technology perspective so um we're you know we're we're carefully and interestedly uh thinking about what's coming and what what might be possible i think for us it's more about making sure We are working with our customers to take advantage of opportunity in the future. We're not concerned about being able to handle it and facilitate it. It's more about where does the market go.

And so we're keeping our eye on that.

Okay. I appreciate all that. Thanks again, guys.

Yeah. Thanks, Kevin.

And your next question comes from the line of Jeff Caldwell with Seaport Research. Jeff, please go ahead.

Hey, thank you very much. First of all, congrats, Scott. I'm job well done. I want to wish you the best in your retirement. Thanks, Jeff. Can you talk more to us about payment software? That was over $200 million in the quarter. That was up 42%. So if you think about the overall revenue, how are you thinking about that segment over the course of the remainder of the year? Can you explain some of the puts and takes as far as revenue and growth expectations for that line and how we should be thinking about modeling that? Thanks.

Sure. So I'll let Scott comment. I mean, big picture, we're pretty much in the same spot we were when we gave guidance in Q1 for the full year. What really happened was, and again, I think this is a really good thing, but what really happened is we were able to assign quite a bit more of that net new in Q1 than we originally thought we would. And so if you look at the first half, the guidance we provide is basically right on where we were we expected to be and so what happened is we were able to shift uh those those net new signs into q1 which is a great thing from my perspective i hope you see it that way too um we did sign some of the renewals early also but that didn't affect anything because of the way the accounting does work so um directly responding your question we we have we have the same

expectations essentially for the full year as we did at the beginning of the year uh but great news we're able to shift some of it forward so it's got to be relevant yeah the only other thing i have to add yeah so we're still trying to call that seven to nine percent constant currency revenue growth and that in in total the payments off plus billers if you look at q1 year-over-year revenue growth yeah that's the recurring base of the business that was up eight percent in Q1, so that was right in that range. Q2 is lining up to look very similar. So that kind of solid, predictable, reliable base of recurring revenue is lining up in that 8% range. And then where you're going to have some variability is on some of these bank license deals. So got a lot more done in Q1. Q2 will be a little lighter in terms of those license deals. Q4. But if you look at it, if you're modeling, you know, that underlying base recurring revenue, you know, about that 8% mark, and then the variability in a given quarter is going to come from the timing of license fees. So it'll hit back up again in Q3, but overall, we're still tracking that 79% constant currency growth for the year.

Okay, great. Thank you. And then as a follow-up, During the quarter, you announced a partnership with Ingo Payments and SpeedPay. That was around digital disbursements. Can you maybe talk about that, frame that for us, help us understand what you're doing strategically, and then how we might see certain areas like billers slash SpeedPay evolve as we think about yourselves doing partnerships with Ingo and maybe even some others. So also, what's the right way to be thinking about billers growth from here? You should remind us about that segment, given all the changes in macro. I wanted to ask what your thoughts are there for the segment. Thanks.

yeah so a couple of thoughts um let me start with the second question first so uh biller we feel uh we feel just as good actually made a little bit better about biller uh now than we did in the year we we've talked about the the irs moving from three providers to two us being one of the two So the numbers aren't fully in yet from the tax season, but we're cautiously optimistic there. And just as a reminder, most of the bill payment that we facilitate, a significant majority of that, is non-discretionary. So it's your car payment, your tuition bill, your electric bill, et cetera, et cetera. You got to pay those bills. And so we're not expecting big, certainly not expecting big negative impact from some of this uncertainty. You know, there'll be puts and takes, but we're not seeing negative impacts. And again, cautiously optimistic on the IRS and tax in general. So we're feeling good about it. No change in our view for the full year and going forward. So that's that piece. And then you asked about annual payments in particular. And let me, instead of just talking about that, let me talk about disbursements. Hopefully it's clear we're really good at the bill payment part, so collecting the money on behalf of our customers. The next big opportunity is disbursements. And I'll give you one quite interesting use case. For several years, I ran workers' compensation and or health care third-party administrators. And the biggest headache that I had was how to efficiently and effectively disburse claim payments to health care providers. So this is only one use case. But that was really hard to do. It was expensive. It was painful. And so by partnering to allow the dispersion side, the opposite of the bill pay side, and that can take many floors, not just healthcare, but that is sort of the other piece of the puzzle. So as we As we get better at that, as we expand that business, now it's a money movement business instead of a bill payment business. And that has a lot of incremental opportunity. It's much more interesting. The value propositions are much more robust. So that's why we're doing this. It's small. The business is small, honestly, just starting. But over time, we expect that to grow and we expect it will get better and better in that area.

Thanks very much. We have some results. Thank you, Jeff.

And your next question comes from the line of Peter Heckman with DA Davidson. Peter, please go ahead.

Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to have a few questions. But on the recent merger divestiture within merchant acquiring and issuer business of global payments and FIS. How do you think ACI shakes out there? Is it something where customers on both sides don't envision a change, or could there be something that changes there based on the change of ownership of those two businesses?

Yeah, I mean, it's obviously early days in that. We don't have any special insight into how they're thinking about that business going forward, but, um, you're both, they're both very good customers of ours and, um, we have a strong relationship with both of them. So I think, uh, and you know, again, too early to say, but, um, we're actually excited. I'm personally excited about as they figured out, um, us trying, you know, we're going to try and be a partner to them. We are, how do they, how can we help them bring the pieces together and, TAB, Mark McIntyre:" facilitate faster growth, I don't you know I don't have anything specific for you at the moment, because we literally haven't spoken to them about it. TAB, Mark McIntyre:" I think they're still they're still getting their feet under the desk after the announcements and trying to figure out what to do so. TAB, Mark McIntyre:" I don't have any specific for you, but I think it's I think it's a good opportunity for us to really show how we partner with a customer to customers.

TAB, Mark McIntyre:" Okay Okay, and then looks like. We're shaking up to have about 45% of revenue in 2025 in the first half and a little bit more front end loaded than normal. In terms of thinking about the back half and that 55%, would you expect it to kind of look like historicals of maybe 25% revenue in the third quarter and 32% in the fourth?

Yeah, Pete, I think that goes back to my previous comment. If you look at that model, that underlying base spring reckoning, all that at that 8%. And then the variability in Q3 and Q4 will be predominantly in that license fee. So both renewables, 90, net new, and Q4 is always a little bit heavier than Q3.

So I would say that that mix for second half is Tom Preston- Probably all right okay okay great and then, if you hear me just on kinetic. Tom Preston- You know sounds like we're making some nice progress there and and but but but like what milestones should be thinking about this year in terms of. Tom Preston- You know kind of a number of demos beta customers and and and then, when do you think you actually start to see some customers go live. Tom Preston- The first customers go live and the GA version.

yeah so um well in terms of i i don't i don't know the exact number of people we've already given a a pretty significant number of demos and um the way the way i thought about this was i did not want our uh our sales people to be out there selling uh i i call it sales by powerpoint you know they're and we've all seen this i'm sure we're It's really easy to show somebody a really cool technology if it's not real. And in PowerPoint, I didn't want to do that. We did not do that. We did not give any demos. We talked generally about Kinetic. We weren't calling it Kinetic in the beginning, but we talked generally about it, told them to expect more. We now, at the end of last year, as planned, we had our – super robust working demos. We can actually show what look like absolutely real transactions with test data that's robust and looks like the data that customers expect. So we've had that since I think the beginning of December of last year. At the end of April, as planned, we released Version 1.0, which is, I actually think we coded it a little differently. I think it's 0.1 or something like that. But anyway, the first version that could be deployed. And so we're using that now as the basis of our demo. So we're going to have a lot of demos this year. I don't know exactly how many we've given. I don't know exactly how many we're going to give this year. But there's a tremendous demand. to see more, to understand how it works. Let's play with it with real, you know, our real data. I get this question a lot. And we're prepared to do that. We're doing that. We've trained all of our salespeople on how to talk about the program, how to demo it. I'm not saying everybody's great at it yet, because they're not, but they're going to get better and better. And so... You asked about first live customers. My expectation, I don't know exactly. It depends. But I think it will be early next year that we'll have live. But we're going to, I'm absolutely confident we'll have some sales occurring before that. So probably late this year. And really the interesting thing is, We've got a lot of demand, a lot of people pulling out, wanting to be one of those beta customers. And we're trying to be pretty thoughtful about which customers are the right ones to be those beta customers. So that's really what we're working through right now. And each quarter, we'll talk about that and how we're progressing. But we're achieving the milestones that we set out. The demo late last year. First version, end of April, we've achieved both of those milestones and we expect to continue achieving those.

Great. Well, that's good to hear. I'll get back in the queue. I appreciate your time. Thanks a lot.

And your next question comes from the line of Church Sutton with Creek Halem Capital. Church, please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, guys. Logan on for George and congrats on another nice quarter here. Maybe to start, Tom, you called out an increase in the pipeline opportunities as a result of the now combined bank and merchant segments. Can you just maybe give us any more detail on what you mean by that? And then maybe just broadly kind of any benefits you've seen in the go to market motion there?

Sure. So I'll give you an example and I'm going to give you an example. I can give you a customer name on this, but. I recently was was was traveling in the Middle East as well. I've made two trips to the Middle East in the last six weeks. It's an interesting region, a lot of traveling. But what I was talking to, I was talking to a very big bank that has a big set of customers that are large merchants. And historically, we've approached bank customers and bank value propositions almost completely independently from those merchant opportunities. And I'll give you the specific, it's about thought. And so we have great broad solutions, but we've tended to create value propositions that are specifically aimed at a bank or specifically aimed at a merchant. So I was having this conversation with a bank whose customers are mostly big merchants. And they were really interested in how we package our fraud solutions so that the bank gets the benefit and they have specific needs. And then they can also use those same basic tools and same approaches to help their merchant customers get better fraud detection and prevention, better insights into what's happening with transactions. And so because we've now combined those businesses and I have one customer success manager. So that's like an account manager. That's what we call an account manager. We have one for both the merchant opportunity and the bank opportunity calling on this customer. We were able to have a much more comprehensive discussion about the opportunity. And so that turned into a pipeline opportunity. It's sitting in our Salesforce pipeline now. And I think in the past, That wouldn't be the case. Maybe we would have had a bank opportunity. Maybe we would have had a merchant opportunity. But this combined bank, we wouldn't have had that yet. We might have gotten intervention. So that's a specific example of that. But I think the big thing is we've begun to train our sales team and our account management team across all of the solutions in payment software. And so now they can have much more robust conversations with customers across all of those products and services instead of having to say, well, let me bring in one of my colleagues to talk about this other thing. We're not having to do that as much. So that's the – there's a little bit of an efficiency thing in the last thing I was talking about and what that's leading to is incremental different hyponormatives. So that's what I was alluding to.

Got it. Appreciate the detail. Maybe just a quick follow-up. Obviously, we'll be able to see the numbers when the queue comes out, but can you just give us a sense for what the contribution was from real-time payments this quarter, and then maybe just broadly kind of how should we think about the cadence of that revenue? I mean, I look at it being, I think, kind of flat last year relative to fiscal 23, and it feels like that doesn't

really represent the true momentum there so maybe just kind of help us square that and how we should think about that going forward yeah this is scott yeah i'm going to sign payments that is almost entirely um on premise so you're going to have volatility when you look at quarter to quarter because of timing of renewals and timing of new deals um it doesn't have as big of a base of that you know kind of recurring revenue stream um and it's called 10 to grow at double digits. So, you're going to have zero repairability just based on the timing of the renewals. But if you look at it over the course of the year, it'll still be real-time and broad detection are still going to be our highest growing segments, both double-digit growers over the near and long term.

Okay. Got it. Thanks for taking my questions.

Thank you. And your final question comes from the line of Alex Newman with Stevens. Alex, please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Just to start off, could you discuss where you're seeing traction in different product areas that led to some of the higher net new business this quarter?

Yeah, sure. a lot of it came from our issuing and acquiring solutions which you know those are those are flagship solutions for us um they are they are absolutely proven technologies cadillac solutions you know our clients used to base up talking about them but the what's really interesting is and if i use that asia pacific uh competitive takeaway that new as the example We won that deal for two reasons, and they're obviously connected, but there are two reasons. One, here's a customer that needed a better issuing and acquiring solution right now, and they were one of the few very large banks in the world that don't use our base 24 platform, and they they wanted to use it. It was sort of a historical reason. I don't even know all the reasons, but they, they didn't use it before. And they, they really, they knew it was a great solution. They, they were interested, but they, you know, they've never decided to, to make the effort to, to switch. But then piece number two happened. And I had the first conversation, but, smarter people than me followed up and helped this bank understand the journey that we can allow them to make to modernize their time payments infrastructure with Connect. And so we were able to show them we can solve your problem right now with the best solution in the market and we allow you to show your board, your your stakeholders of all kinds, that you have a very clear, lower risk, absolutely rational path to get from where you are to where you want to be. Cloud, cloud native, rapid scalability, vertical and horizontal, all the things that we're able to deliver. And so that a combination of those two things, solve their problem now, give them a very clear path to the future. That was, it was almost, you know, a no-brainer for them. Once they were able to dig in, talk to other customers, talk to our architects, understand how it's going to work, that became very clear to them that this is the right way to go. Let's do it. And so that basic conversation is, It's happening in multiple places around the world. I had a few of those conversations last week in the Middle East, very similar. And that is what is getting prospective customers and our current customers really interested in exploring opportunities going forward.

Okay, makes sense. For 1Q, what was the uplift on Biller this quarter from the reduction vendors for IRS processing? And then what are your expectations for FX on growth for 25?

Well, on Biller's total revenue grew 11% in the quarter. And we don't describe or we don't call out what any particular customer delivers, but it was obviously a contributor to the Q1 growth. We'll see that further a little bit more in Q2, but that was obviously a contributor not just through the IRS, but through our other partners that we do bill pay for on a tax preparation software. So I would say it's more broadly not just the IRS, but our tax partners as well. definitely contributed to the opportunity growth. And on the full year of FX, we're probably talking, it's going to give us, it's going to be, what, 5 million, or not a year, then we thought, coming into the year. We started the year with about, we thought it was going to be about a headwind on FX of about 12, 13 million. That's come down by five.

Great. Thank you for taking my questions.

Thanks, Tom.

There's no further question at this time. I will now turn the call back to the company.

Okay. Well, thank you. First of all, thanks for joining us again, and we appreciate the support. I look forward to continuing to deliver for our shareholders and delivering more and more shareholder value. The last thing I want to say is I want to reiterate my intense personal thanks to Scott because he has been, as I said, he's been an amazing partner to me. I've known Scott now for about 10 years in multiple ways. We've interacted in multiple ways and each one of those ways and opportunities has been a super positive experience for me and I hope it has for him. After nearly a few decades of service, he absolutely deserves to to enter the next phase, and great for him, great for his family. We'll obviously miss him, but he's going to be, he's been very clear he's going to be tremendously supportive to us as we find his replacement. I don't know if replacement is even the right word, but the next CFO of ACI, and we're well underway in that process, and as I said, we'll keep you up to date, but congratulations, Scott. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. Thanks, everyone.

That concludes today's call. Thank you.