ACI Worldwide, Inc.

Thank you for joining us and welcome to ACI Worldwide Inc. Report's final results call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I will now hand the conference over to John Kraft. You may begin.

Thank you and good morning, everyone. On today's call, we will discuss ACI Worldwide's first quarter 2026 results, as well as our updated financial outlook for the remainder of the year. The slides accompanying this webcast can be found at ACIWorldwide.com under the Investor Relations tab and will remain available after the call. We will then open the line for your questions. As always, today's call includes forward-looking statements and is subject to the Safe Harbor provisions. 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 today are Tom Warsop, our President and CEO, and Bobby LeBrock, our Chief Financial Officer. Tom will begin with an overview of our Q1 performance, strategic highlights, and the progress we're making against our long-term plan. And Bobby will then review our financial results in more detail, including segment performance, cash flow, and updated outlook for 2026. We'll then open the line for questions. Before we begin, I'd like to let everybody know that we will be attending several upcoming investor conferences, including JP Morgan's 2026 Global Technology Media and Communications Conference on May 18 in Boston, Baird's 2026 Global Consumer Technology and Services Conference on June 4 in New York City, and D.A. Davidson's 2026 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 us for our first quarter 2026 earnings call. We're pleased with the start to 2026, and that's building on the strong performance we delivered throughout 2025. We're executing well, we're delivering on our promises, and we're staying focused on our strategic priorities. We're in a strong competitive position, and we're increasingly optimistic about the outlook for our business. But look at the first quarter. We delivered 6% organic revenue growth and constant currency. And that growth compares against the strongest first quarter in the company's history last year. That is the strongest quarter until this quarter since we grew on top of that. So I'm particularly happy with this performance. Our focus on operational efficiency combined with the operating leverage in our model drove over 160 basis points of FX adjusted net adjusted EBITDA margin expansion and 8% adjusted EBITDA growth. The combination of this overall strong operating performance and our continued share repurchases, I'll detail that a little bit later, translated to double digit growth in adjusted EPS. Bobby's going to cover the quarter in more detail in a few moments, but for my part, I'd like to step back and provide an update on our strategic initiatives and what we're seeing in our markets. Our business momentum stems from continuing sustained focus on our multi-year value creation strategy. As we regularly discuss, our strategy emphasizes growth within our core vertical markets, disciplined operational execution, and a return-driven approach to capital allocation. We expect our strategy to enable us to deliver at least high single-digit organic revenue growth, strong cash flow conversion, and the allocation of capital to drive incremental value, all with a focus on maximizing shareholder returns. Our growth strategy is built on expanding within our existing customer base in addition to winning new logos and, of course, accelerating innovation all along the way. Within our payment software segment, we took a major step forward in 2025 when we unified our bank and merchant businesses into what we now call payment software. The goal was to increase efficiency, to accelerate innovation, and to simplify our operating structure. We're seeing the benefits of this strategy and the payment software business had a very solid first quarter, growing 6%, 2% on a constant currency basis. Now, again, as you recall, Q1 last year was particularly strong in this area, driven by our largest competitive issuing and acquiring takeaway ever in the Asia-Pacific region. Our issuing and acquiring solutions remain leading edge and strongly in demand. We've been at it for 50 years, and our latest versions of these proven tools utilize leading technology as we continue to innovate and deliver market-leading customer value. And these solutions are, to put it very simply, mission critical. They're so critical, in fact. that we actually had one Middle East customer push itself to not let an upgrade go live date slip, even with the Iran conflict raging all around them. Together, we successfully delivered on time. And that's just another reminder of the resilience of our customers, the dedication of our employees, and the mission-critical nature of the solutions we provide. They just wouldn't let it slip. We also saw strength in real-time payments. That part of the business grew revenue by over 20% as increasing real-time payment volumes drive larger total contract values at renewal. Transaction volumes, as most of you know, are one of the key levers we use at ACI to expand our relationships with existing customers. I'd like to share a specific example from Q1 of how this sometimes works as it relates to real-time account-to-account solutions. We had a renewal of a base 24 customer in the first quarter. It happened to be in Asia. And this is a customer that's seeing very significant growth in real-time payment transaction volumes. We were able to construct a deal which drove mid-single-digit growth in the pricing for their renewing portion of their transactions and 25% plus growth in pricing related to the net new real-time transactions. And those transactions are generating new business, incremental business for the customer. Overall, when you put all that together, this led to a healthy overall increase in total contract value from this customer. And as RTP volumes continue to grow, we expect similar opportunities across our portfolio. This is a demonstration of the power of having many different payment solutions our customers can use as the market evolves. They see ACI as a partner across payments, not just in a particular payment area. I gave you an example of RTP and its impact in Asia. Much of our business and the growth we're seeing right now is international, but the U.S. adoption of real-time payments is also starting to pick up. FedNow and RTP adoption is increasing. This is obviously a huge opportunity for us, and we remain optimistic about future volume growth here domestically. So the volumes are still small in the US, but we're definitely seeing them start to expand. We also continue to make progress advancing ACI Kinetic. And that, of course, is critical to our long-term platform and modernization strategy. In the quarter, we expanded Kinetic's scope and momentum. We extended the platform to modernize card payments, to unify multi-rail US clearing connectivity, and to embed advanced fraud and verification capabilities directly into the payment flow. These advancements reinforce Kinetic's role as a single cloud-native foundation that helps customers reduce complexity, manage risk, and modernize across payment types at their own pace. Kinetic's capabilities combined with ACI's proven reliability and future-ready roadmap remain and are in fact growing as meaningful differentiators between us and our competitors. And I want to share something about the broader kinetic strategy that may not be quite as clear to some people and may require a little more explanation. So let me try to put it this way. Simply investing in kinetic, and of course, that's the name of our next generation payments technology, Just investing in that is providing confidence in our customer base that our longer-term technology roadmap is aligned with where most people in the industry want to go. I want to use a sports analogy here. We're skating to where the puck will be, not where it is today. As we compete for work under RFPs and during renewals, we're consistently asked about our Our multi-year roadmap and how we're going to help customers modernize without introducing undue risk. And Kinetic is that roadmap. It's resonating. Even when a customer isn't ready to migrate immediately, they're not ready internally. Aligning our strategy with theirs builds confidence and supports expansions and longer duration commitments. We've had several customers sign significant contracts with us for our core solutions because of Kinetic, even when they're not quite ready to go all the way down the Kinetic path. So to illustrate this dynamic, I want to use another specific example from the first quarter. We had a renewal with a major North American bank and I personally engaged to finalize the renewal terms. And the entire conversation was not about the renewal itself, the products they use today, it was about Kinetic. And even though the bank is not ready to embark on the modernization journey Kinetic enables, they know they need it in the future. The bank CTO told me he wants Kinetic He wants to begin the preparation for it during the next few years, and that's during the renewal period, this renewal period, and that he wants us to be ready to hit the ground running at the time of the next renewal. And when I say us, I mean the bank and ACI. In the meantime, they've asked for our help to get the bank to a place where they can make the progress they need internally from a business process, a personnel perspective, and a technology perspective. They want our help and of course we're thrilled to support them. This is an example of Kinetic supporting expansion of a renewal deal and positioning us as the long-term partner for our customers. Now I want to turn to Biller, where we continue to see strong results, and that's building on the momentum we saw in 2025. A key area of focus is advancing our market-leading SpeedPayOne platform, and that's driving core electronic bill payment transaction growth and new customer relationships. We signed significant new contracts in the quarter and our total new ARR bookings grew 39% for the company, a majority of which was attributable to Biller. We signed several new logos and we saw some nice expansionary upsells with existing customers and our utility and insurance verticals in particular. One renewal that I'd like to highlight provided us an opportunity to improve pricing substantially while offsetting interchange increases. And that shows the strength of the relationship and leadership position we hold in the utility sector. Another large client was able to work with us to significantly improve its customer experience while also dramatically lowering operating costs by shifting transaction volume from calls to self-service. And when they do that, that reduces the operating costs from about $20 per inbound call to about a dollar for a self-service interaction. That client was also able to consolidate four platforms into one while significantly improving the overall experience and adding new payment options at the same time. Another deal in the quarter involved an existing customer in the insurance industry, and that also happens to be my personal insurer. In the first quarter, this customer nearly doubled their relationship with us, and I can personally attest that the experience is straightforward, quick, and convenient. These are the types of significant outcomes we're able to achieve within our biller business that benefit both ACI and our customers and their customers. ACI is gaining share in the biller market as more billers are consolidating onto modern outsourced digital bill payment platforms. ACI SpeedPay One, they're meeting customers where they are with mobile-first digital payment experiences that enable them to tailor payments to their preferences. This is a highly fragmented market, and the immediate opportunity is converting the significant portion of the market that is using legacy or outdated platforms to ACI. Increasingly, we are the partner of choice, and we're excited by the opportunities for our builder business through a modern, scalable, resilient platform, SpeedPayOne. So I want to talk a little bit about operational execution across ACI. Our model remains highly scalable. As we grow, we have a clear opportunity to continue expanding margins through operational discipline and continued productivity improvements, while we still continue to invest in the initiatives that support our long-term roadmap. We saw that in the first quarter with about 200 basis points, nearly 200 basis points of margin expansion. And while near-term investments have a little bit of ebb and flow and they can modestly dampen operating leverage in any given quarter, we expect the underlying scalability of our business to become increasingly evident over time. We're also very focused on our disciplined approach to capital allocation. We benefit from a strong business that has limited capital requirements and generates strong cashflow. And that gives us the flexibility to execute on our strategy. Our capital allocation strategy prioritizes investments in organic growth, strategic M&A, capital return, and maintaining financial strength, of course. As we've discussed, a key area of recent focus has been returning capital through our share repurchase program. Last quarter, we committed to allocating at least 50% to 60% of our cash flow operations to share repurchases in 2026. And that reflects our strong financial position, our confidence in the long-term outlook, and our belief that current valuations are particularly attractive. During the first quarter of 2026, we repurchased 1.5 million shares, and that brings the total repurchase since the start of 2025 to over 5% of the shares that were outstanding at the beginning of last year. We remain in a very strong financial position with leverage well below our targeted range of two times EBITDA, and we remain committed to our capital allocation framework. To sum all that up, I'm excited about our recent financial performance, and I'm very encouraged by our path ahead. I'm proud of what we've accomplished, and we have a lot of work ahead, and I mean that in a really good way. We'll continue to invest in our key growth initiatives, and that includes our cloud-native kinetic platform and SpeedPay One. In addition, as I discussed last quarter, we're investing in our AI-first roadmap. We view generative AI as a significant opportunity, not a threat. We're already deploying many tools across the enterprise, and this is accelerating our process. ASCI is able to combine the power of these tools with our 50-plus years of engineering and architecture expertise and substantial volumes of proprietary data. When we put all that together, we can provide enormous customer value. Further, we provide certifications with hundreds of networks and payment schemes around the globe, and all of those regularly require updates. We are really good at that. AI simply cannot deliver these aspects of what we do. As I emphasized on our last earnings call, we see generative AI as a big opportunity, and we're well down the path to taking advantage of it. Before I close, I want to briefly address the macro environment. The conflict in the Middle East and the resulting energy shock have introduced real uncertainty into the broader economic outlook. And of course, no organization is entirely insulated from macroeconomic pressures, but our business at ACI is purpose-built for moments like this. Payments infrastructure doesn't take a pause during geopolitical disruption. If anything, the resilience of our customers and the criticality of what we provide becomes even more apparent. The example I shared earlier from the Middle East is not an exception. It's indicative of who our customers are, the role they play in the world's economy and what our solutions mean to them. I want to thank all of our employees across the organization for their hard work and dedication. We're excited about the opportunities ahead as we continue our shareholder value creation journey. I'll hand over to Bobby to talk more about our financial results and our updated outlook for 2026. Bobby?