ACI Worldwide, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to ACI Worldwide Inc. reports financial results for the quarter ended June 30th, 2025. All participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker's remarks, we will conduct a question and answer session. To ask a question at that time, you'll need to press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to John Kraft. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning, everyone. On today's call, we will discuss the company's second 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 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 Bobby LeBrock, our new CFO. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom. Tom?

Thanks, John. Good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining our Q2 2025 earnings conference call. I'm going to start by highlighting some key takeaways of our second quarter results, and then Bobby, in his first earnings call as our CFO, will provide a financial and segment level review. He'll conclude with our updated 2025 guidance. We'll then open the call for questions. Q2 was another solid quarter for ACI. Revenue was up 7% year over year versus Q2 2024, and it was up 15% versus the first half of 2024. The momentum we're achieving gives us the confidence to raise our full year guidance for revenue and adjusted EBITDA for fiscal 2025, and Bobby will discuss that in more detail shortly. Our strong business momentum is reflected in strength across both our segments. And turning to the segments, the biller segment was up 16% in Q2 and up 13% for the first half of 2025. Our payment software segment was roughly flat in Q2, and that was driven by the timing of our renewal and new business signings between Q1 and Q2, but it's up 18% in the first half of 2025. As a company, we signed notable new contracts and our ARR bookings in the quarter were up 86%. That brings our first half 2025 new ARR bookings growth to 71%. In May, we officially launched Kinetic, our next-generation payments hub platform. As a reminder, Kinetic is cloud-native and it provides enhanced capabilities such as automated decisioning, straight-through processing, declined transaction reduction, and AI-powered insights that support fast decisions and superior value for our customers' customers. We have several live opportunities right now with particular interest related to real-time payments and wire transfers and the feedback about Kinetic from potential customers continues to be overwhelmingly positive. Our pipeline is strong, and I'll keep you updated on our progress. In addition to our continued investment in technology leadership and innovation, we remain committed to returning capital to shareholders. In the second quarter of 2025, we repurchased 2.4 million shares, representing approximately 2.4% of ACI's common shares outstanding at the beginning of the quarter. Our ability to take these important steps to enhance shareholder returns is built on the foundation of work we've done over the last few years to strengthen our company's balance sheet. We finished the quarter with a strong cash balance of $190 million and a net leverage ratio of 1.4 times adjusted EBITDA, which is significantly below the recently lowered target of two times that we have previously discussed. I'd now like to revisit the revenue growth I just mentioned. As you know, our quarterly growth rates can fluctuate due to the timing of our term license-based business, with both new contracts and renewals having significant revenue recognition up front. Because of this, it's important to analyze longer-term trends to get an accurate sense of the trajectory of the business. And those trends are improving. While Q2 revenue was up 7%, for the first half of 2025, revenue grew 15%. And that's on top of the 10% revenue growth we achieved for the full year 2024. These first half results position us well for achieving our upper single digit revenue growth target in 2025. And they let our team focus on new business, closing opportunities more quickly, and expanding our pipeline. And that supports meeting or exceeding our long-term growth target of sustainable high single-digits revenue growth. I want to highlight the changes we've made to improve our growth performance. This hasn't been an accident or a fluke. There are several factors that contribute to the growth acceleration we've seen over the last few years, and just a few of those include improving solution mix, active portfolio management, including a strategic divestiture, and more aggressive pricing. but one that really stands out to me is our conscious effort to complete the signing of new contracts and renewals earlier in the year. While the revenue from a renewal contract cannot be recognized earlier than the renewal date, that's just how the accounting rules work, getting these time consuming renewals out of the way continues to allow us to focus on new customer wins, which can often be recognized at the time of signing. That allows our sales team to be far more efficient and it's shown a direct impact on our results. In fact, this quarter marks the first time our estimated 60-month backlog has exceeded $7 billion. Before I turn the call over to Bobby, I thought I'd take a moment to address stablecoin, which has increasingly entered the discussions I've had over the last few weeks, particularly after the Circle IPO. You may have heard me say before that real-time payments use cases yet more interesting as cross-border payments are allowed. Stablecoin is a potential driver of more adoption of cross-border real-time payments, and our solutions can already support those payments. If I broaden the lens beyond cross-border, from my perspective, the most important news to share with you today about Stablecoin is that ACI is well-positioned to benefit from Stablecoin adoption in general. Our solutions have long accommodated many different digital currencies. One of ACI's sales differentiators is that our software handles more alternative payment networks and methods than any other competitor. Quite simply, increasing payment complexity drives customers to our solutions. It's part of our core competencies. We're actively working with players in the stablecoin space as partners enabling additional payment types for our solutions And even as customers, our software is a great way to switch stable coin transactions, for example. With increasing regulatory clarity, such as the signing into law of the Genius Act in the U.S. recently, we see new use cases, and we're excited about the opportunities this trend represents for us. To sum up, we see potential here with stable coins. We feel very well positioned to take advantage of the opportunities it presents and it will present in the future. I'd also like to point you to the newsroom page on our website where we published some articles about stablecoin and how it may impact the global payments ecosystem over time. Have a look. There's some interesting stuff. Lastly, I'm proud to say that our leadership in the payment software industry and our ability to stay on top of emerging trends around the world has helped ACI to earn recognition as one of CNBC's world's top FinTech companies for 2025 and one of Time's America's best midsize companies in 2025. These two honors are a recognition of our continued efforts to power the global payments ecosystem. with people and technology that push the envelope, that move our industry forward, and that solve money movement needs for banks, merchants, and billers alike. ACI Worldwide is continually committed to excellence. I want to provide a huge thank you to the entire ACI Worldwide team for helping the company earn both awards. I'm going to turn it over to Bobby to discuss our financials and our guidance. Bobby?