ACI Worldwide, Inc.

Thank you for standing by. My name is Janice, and I will be your conference operator for today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the ACI Worldwide Incorporation fourth quarter and four-year ended 2025 financial results. 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 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 ACI Worldwide's fourth quarter and full year 2025 results, as well as our financial outlook for 2026. We will then open the line for your questions. The slides accompanying this webcast can be found at ACIWorldwide.com under the Investor Relations tab and will remain available after the call. As always, today's call is subject to safe harbor and forward-looking statements. You can find the full text of these statements in our earnings press release and in our filings with the SEC. These documents describe important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in any forward-looking statements. Joining me this morning are Tom Warsop, our President and CEO, and Bobby LeBrock, our Chief Financial Officer. Tom will begin with an overview of our Q4 and full-year performance, strategic highlights, and the progress we're making against our long-term plan. Bobby will then review our financial results in more detail, including segment performance, cash flow, and our outlook for 2026. We will then open the line for questions. With that, I'll turn it over to Tom.

Thanks, John, and good morning, everyone. I appreciate you joining our Q4 and full year 2025 earnings call, and let me start with the headline. 2025 was a very strong year for ACI. We delivered another year of double-digit revenue growth, improving margins, and solid free cash flow, all of which are consistent with or better than the long-term financial framework we outlined at our investor day two years ago. For the full year 2025, we delivered $1.76 billion in total revenue. That's up 10% from 2024. And that was our second consecutive year of double-digit revenue growth. Adjusted EBITDA increased 9% to $507 million, and our adjusted net EBITDA margin expanded to 42%. We also continue to execute against our capital deployment strategy. Our balance sheet remains exceptionally strong, and we ended 2025 with $196 million of cash on hand at debt leverage ratio of 1.2 times. This gives us significant flexibility to continue executing on our growth agenda while also returning capital to shareholders. In 2025, we repurchased 4.2 million shares, about 4%, of the outstanding shares at the beginning of the year for $203 million. This strong performance is a direct reflection of our committed focus to our multi-year value creation strategy. As a reminder, our strategy emphasizes growth within our core vertical markets, disciplined operational execution, and a return-driven approach to capital allocation. I also want to take a moment to discuss some of the important strategic successes we had at a segment level during 2025. First, in our payment software segment, in 2025, we took a major step forward in scaling our bank and merchant businesses by unifying them into a new segment we call payment software. This increases efficiency, it accelerates innovation, and it simplifies our operating structure. This part of our business delivered 9% revenue growth and 10% adjusted EBITDA growth. Demand was broad-based, with issuing and acquiring solutions growing 11%, building on strong double-digit growth in 2024. The year also saw meaningful growth in real-time payments, with new contracts for both central infrastructure and bank solutions. In the fourth quarter, we signed a large European bank to Kinetic, our cloud native payments hub. This was the second Kinetic signing in 2025, and that's further validation of its differentiated architecture and our long-term modernization vision. Customer interest continues to accelerate. Kinetic is central to our long-term strategy. It offers customers both the immediate stability of proven technology and a path to modernization through a modern cloud native architecture. Kinetic's combination of capability ACI's proven reliability and future readiness are major differentiators. Earlier in the year, we also signed one of our largest competitive takeaways in the Asia Pacific region in our issuing and acquiring segment. We're making progress on getting this customer live, and we fully expect to use them as a reference as we actively pursue other potential customers with outdated systems. In real-time account-to-account payments, we continued to sign new logos and extend our reach with existing customers. In Q4, we signed an important expansion with PayNet, Malaysia's real-time account-to-account national infrastructure. In the fourth quarter, we also went live with Banco de la Republica, the Central Bank of Colombia, which was a very strategic regional win for ACI. We also renewed and expanded our relationship with Canada's leading digital payments network. In the U.S., FedNow and RTP adoption is slowly increasing, and we're optimistic that volumes will continue to grow and be material. In 2025, ACI's biller segment delivered another year of strong, consistent performance, with full-year revenues growing 13%, and segment-adjusted EBITDA expanding year over year, reflecting continued transaction growth and investment in advancing our market-leading SpeedPay platform. The segment benefited from sustained momentum across core electronic bill payment transaction growth and ongoing customer adoption of ACI's go-forward platform, SpeedPay One. We added many new biller logos and expanded relationships with many other customers including one of the country's largest insurance billers and a top credit union to add new payment types and an upgraded modern payment experience. ACI is gaining share in the biller market as more billers consolidate onto modern outsourced digital bill pay platforms. ACI is increasingly the partner of choice. I'll let Bobby cover the financials in a moment. But first, I want to address a topic that's top of mind for many investors, the impact of generative AI on the software industry and the volatility that has come with this. At ACI, we view generative AI as a significant opportunity, not a threat. We are already deploying it across the enterprise to improve engineering productivity, to enhance customer outcomes, and to reduce structural costs, all while supporting our strong margins and cash flow profile. There's been a lot of speculation about whether AI could fundamentally disrupt software. While modern AI tools are very effective at generating code, and we use them extensively for this, ACI's platforms are not simply collections of software modules or computer programs. They're large-scale, mission-critical transaction processing systems operating at global scale, built on decades of payments expertise, deeply embedded regulatory and network rules, and proprietary data derived from billions of transactions. Generative AI is a powerful tool, but it is only one component of what's required to design, operate, and continuously evolve industrial-grade payments platforms. From a technical perspective, our advantage rests on three foundations. Transaction level data at massive scale, deep domain expertise in payment message flows and exception handling, and highly resilient infrastructure engineered for always on high throughput environments. AI augments these foundations. It does not replace them. And when combined, those three foundations are difficult to replace and they provide ACI with durable, long-term competitive advantage and they lead to strong, sticky relationships. We at ACI are applying AI in three primary ways. First, engineering productivity. Our development teams are using a combination of industry standard and proprietary AI tools to accelerate design, coding, testing, and maintenance across extremely complex code bases. These platforms involve thousands of interdependent components, integrations, and country-specific variations, and AI helps our engineers move faster while maintaining the reliability and security our customers require. As adoption deepens and training completes, we expect these productivity gains to compound over time. Second, operational efficiency. We're using AI to automate and scale knowledge intensive workflows across our business. One example is our ability to index query and analyze our entire corpus of customer contracts in real time. This allows us to instantly assess regulatory impacts, contractual obligations and pricing terms across the installed base, and that dramatically increases productivity in legal and compliance functions while lowering costs as we scale our business. Third, and I think most importantly, enhanced customer value. I want to give you an example within ACI Kinetic. We're applying AI models trained on data from billions of historical transactions to address one of the most complex and costly problems in payments, exception handling and payment repair. Today, Many large institutions employ hundreds of people to manually resolve errors in high volume payments. By embedding AI-driven intelligence directly into the transaction flow, we are able to automatically identify likely corrections when there is an error and dramatically reduce manual intervention. The result is lower operating costs, faster settlement, and a materially better customer experience. This capability cannot be created by an LLM, Large Language Model, alone. It requires deep domain expertise, purpose-built software, and of course, unmatched data at scale. In short, while we understand the broader concerns around AI and software, at ACI, we're leaning in. We have an AI-first approach across the company. that's coordinated through what we call our velocity program and we are already seeing tangible benefits across productivity efficiency and customer outcomes and quite simply the combination of our resilient infrastructure our extensive proprietary data and our unique domain expertise will allow ACI to continue delivering mission-critical payment and billing software that is deeply embedded in our customers' operations and very difficult to replace. We believe this positions ACI to remain a leader as payments technology continues to evolve. And one last important item before I turn it over to Bobby. I'm pleased to share that as part of our ongoing board refreshment process, we announced today the appointment of Kim De Beers, whose unique skill set and deep professional and advisory experience will further strengthen the Board of Directors governance approach and risk culture, complementing the backgrounds of our other directors. This appointment follows the previously announced additions of DDA LaMouche and Todd Ford back in October of 2025. And as part of a planned succession, Jan Estep and Charlie Peters have transitioned off the board. I would personally like to welcome Kim and, of course, thank Jan and Charlie for their many years of helpful service. I've enjoyed our time together, and I look forward to hearing about your future endeavors. In summary, 2025 was another year of significant progress for ACI worldwide. We had strong, balanced growth, expanding profitability, and broadening global demand for all of our solutions, including our cloud-native Kinetic platform. And we continue to invest in our AI-first roadmap, including kinetic capabilities such as real-time payments and digital currency connectivity, including stablecoins, reflecting the themes we've talked about throughout 2025. I'm proud of our team, and I'm excited for the opportunities ahead to continue our shareholder value creation journey. I'll hand it over to Bobby to talk more about our financial results and the outlook for 2026. Bobby?