ACI Worldwide - Q4 2022

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the ACI Worldwide, Inc. fourth quarter and full year ended 2022 financial results. I would now like to turn the call over to John Kraft, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Finance. Please go ahead.

John Kraft (SVP of Strategy and Finance)

Thank you and good morning, everyone. On today's call, we will discuss the company's fourth quarter and full year 2022 results and our financial outlook for the rest of the year. We'll 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 on the first and final pages of our presentation deck, a copy of which is available on our website and with the SEC. On this morning's call is Tom Warsop, our interim President and CEO, and Scott Behrens, our CFO. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Tom. Tom?

Tom Warsop (Interim President and CEO)

Good morning. Thank you all for joining us this morning. As usual, we have a pretty packed agenda today. I'm going to speak about several topics, including our fairly recent CEO transition, my initial perspectives from my time in this role, and of course, our 2022 results, including sales performance and our outlook for 2023, including an update on the interchange challenges we talked about on the last call. At that point, I'll turn the call over to Scott, who's going to provide more details on our results and our outlook. It's been about 3 months since we announced a change in our CEO, I stepped in as the interim leader of ACI, and it's been a fantastic 3 months and very interesting for me.

What I can tell you is that very clearly we've entered a new phase for ACI. We have some different needs from our leader. We're shifting our emphasis even further toward accelerating growth, towards capitalizing on our market position as three discontinuities take hold across our industry. Number one, payments continue to mature as a key differentiator for our customers. Second, the real-time payment revolution around the world is real and it's accelerating. Finally, customers are becoming more open to new operating models for payments infrastructure that often manifests itself as cloud opportunity, but it's more than that. I'll talk more about that in a few minutes. ACI solutions underpin successful strategies to take advantage of all those market dynamics for customers around the world. That's a great place to be.

When I think about our next CEO, the next CEO will have significant financial services and payments experience, proven transformational leadership, large-scale sales acumen, and demonstrated service excellence expertise in highly complex, regulated organizations. A balanced set of capabilities and experiences with intense focus on growth provides the basis of our ideal profile. We've engaged a leading executive search firm, and they've identified several very promising candidates already. We expect to identify the next CEO in the coming months. I want to make one thing absolutely clear. You should not expect major shifts in strategy from ACI. The foundation of our business is strong. We're on the right track. We're intensifying our execution focus to drive results even faster than in the recent past.

As you may know, I'm very familiar with ACI, having served on the board since 2015 and as a customer of the company off and on for more than 20 years. When I was the non-executive chairman of the company, I was optimistic about ACI's future. I can tell you that I'm even more optimistic after diving into a new level of detail as the CEO. Our products are mission-critical, they're market-leading, and they're extremely sticky. What we do is at the absolute core of our customers' business. Of course, our clients account for a substantial portion of the financial services market around the world, including leading financial institutions, merchants, and billers. We have a substantial market position, and the untapped opportunity is massive and growing fast.

ACI is a consistent cash generator in a business that isn't extremely cyclical, and it's not particularly impacted by economic swings such as a potential recession. The strength of our business gives us a strong balance sheet with excellent financial flexibility, and that allows us to take advantage of organic and inorganic growth opportunities as they arise, all aimed at delivering shareholder value. ACI is well positioned to capitalize on the real-time revolution I already mentioned. With the additions of three central bank infrastructures in the Middle East, ACI now powers 25 domestic and pan-regional real-time payment schemes across 6 continents. We have more work to do to fully capitalize on the opportunities ahead, and we have a strong roadmap, and we're ready to execute. I will let Scott walk through the details, but I'll make a couple of high-level comments about our 2022 results.

Overall, we deliver results in line or better than the last guidance we provided. Again, in 2022, we delivered mid-single digit organic revenue growth. That's 7% when adjusted for exchange rate fluctuations in our divestiture. Our EBITDA was nearly flat with 2021 levels, despite significant pressure from the interchange issue we discussed on our last call. During 2022, we set an all-time new ARR bookings record, delivering more than $100 million in new annual recurring revenue, up 35%, creating a strong foundation for the future. Specifically, our new ARR bookings in biller grew 93% over 2021 as we signed well over double the number of new logos. Our merchant segment new ARR bookings increased 87%, coming from 37 new logos.

This, combined with our visibility into our banking segment renewal calendar, provides us significant confidence in our revenue outlook that Scott will discuss. In fourth quarter, we significantly increased our repurchase activity. In total last year, we repurchased 8.6 million shares for $207 million, which effectively completed our previous authorization. Today, we're also announcing that the board has increased our repurchase authorization up to $200 million as we continue to actively pursue opportunities to enhance shareholder value. We expect to deliver revenue growth between 4% and 6% in 2023, building on the solid sales performance we had in 2022. Our EBITDA is expected to grow by between 6% and 10% to a range of $380 million-$395 million this year.

Scott will walk through some more details, but this is in line with our prior statements about ACI's trajectory, and it positions us to deliver on our target of upper single-digit organic growth in 2024. I want to make a couple of comments about interchange, the inflation-driven impact to our biller business we talked about in the last call. As mentioned in November, we saw an increase in interchange costs primarily driven by larger average bill size in our utility segment. We noted that we have a dedicated team focused on offsetting this impact, working contract by contract in that segment to reduce or eliminate our exposure and to take full advantage of special programs and our volumes to lower interchange rates wherever possible and to optimize our net revenue performance.

We've completed our work on approximately 70% of our client accounts, and we're going to work through the remainder over the coming weeks and months. I considered starting with a discussion of market speculation, but I decided to save it to the end. It's not unusual for rumors to circulate during a leadership transition. We don't comment on rumors, as you know. What I can tell you is that my team is fully aligned on doing what is best for the long-term interests of our shareholders. That isn't going to change no matter how many stories pop up. I've spoken to many clients and shareholders to make this point clear. Let me sum up. ACI is mission-critical for our customers. We've made good progress securing and accelerating organic revenue growth and expanding our annual recurring revenue. We are a strong and consistent cash generator and a disciplined capital allocator.

We are driving payment modernization with many customers, including strengthening our real-time and payment cloud capabilities. We are investing to continue executing technology transformation and enhancing operational excellence to capitalize on the many opportunities in front of us. While I understand you may have some near-term uncertainty regarding ACI's leadership, you should not expect major shifts in strategy from ACI with a new CEO. Operationally and financially, ACI is focused and on track. Lastly, the bookings we signed last year, combined with our renewal calendar, provide me with a high degree of confidence in our future, and I intend to drive more visibility for our shareholders no matter which role I hold going forward. Thank you very much for your support, and I'll turn it over to Scott to discuss financials and guidance. Scott?

Scott Behrens (Executive VP, CFO and CAO)

Thanks, Tom. Good morning, everyone. First, I plan to review our financial results for 2022. I'll then provide our forward outlook, including 2023 guidance. We'll open the line for questions. I'll be starting my comments on slide 4. Full year 2022 revenue was $1.422 billion, up 4% from 2021. Total adjusted EBITDA was $373 million compared to $384 million in 2021. Adjusting for foreign currency fluctuations and the divestiture of our corporate online banking product, full year 2022 revenue growth was 7% and total adjusted EBITDA growth was 2%. As previously announced, we closed on the sale of our corporate online banking products on September 1, 2022 for approximately $100 million in cash. Total ARR bookings for 2022 grew 35% over 2021.

Moving to the segment results. Bank segment revenue increased 9% and bank segment adjusted EBITDA increased 4% versus 2021, adjusted for foreign currency and the divestiture of our corporate online banking product. Merchant segment revenue increased 5% and merchant segment adjusted EBITDA decreased 4% versus 2021 on a constant currency basis. During 2022, we increased our investment in selling and marketing and product initiatives, which we expect to improve growth in 2023 and beyond. Biller segment revenue increased 6% while biller segment adjusted EBITDA decreased 17% versus 2021.

Throughout 2022, we operated in an inflationary environment in our utilities vertical, which resulted in higher interchange fees and contracts where the price we received per transaction is fixed, but the interchange cost to us fluctuates with the average ticket size. In the second half of 2022, we implemented several initiatives, including price adjustments, to mitigate the impact and improve profitability in 2023. ACI ended 2022 with $125 million in cash on hand and total debt outstanding of approximately $1 billion. Our net debt leverage ratio was 2.6 times, which is within our long-term target of 2.5 times. During the fourth quarter, we repurchased $116 million of our stock, bringing our total 2022 share repurchase amount to $207 million and $315 million over the last 24 months.

During 2023, we expect to continue to deploy a significant portion of our cash flow to share buybacks. Finally, turning to slide 5 with our outlook for 2023. Despite the uncertainties in the market, we expect to once again produce mid-single digit organic revenue growth in 2023, with revenue in a range of $1.436 billion-$1.466 billion, representing 4%-6% growth over 2022 on a constant currency basis and adjusting for the sale of our corporate online banking products. We expect 2023 adjusted EBITDA of $380 million-$395 million, which represents 6%-10% growth on a constant currency basis and adjusting for the divestiture.

For your modeling purposes here on slide 5, we have shown 2022 on a pro forma basis for the sale of our corporate online banking products and have reflected 2022 on a constant currency basis with 2023. This excludes one-time costs related to the move of our European data centers to the public cloud and cost savings initiatives. For Q1, 2023, we expect revenue to be in a range of $280 million-$290 million and adjusted EBITDA to be in a range of $20 million-$30 million. Our 2023 bank license renewals are more second half-weighted than in 2022, we would expect our quarterly phasing of revenue and EBITDA in 2023 to look more like 2020 or 2021.

Further, with the strong bookings growth we achieved in 2022 and the expectation that those projects will go live here in 2023 and give us a full year benefit in 2024 provides us confidence in our growth trajectory. We remain on track to deliver our long-term target of 7%-9% organic revenue growth in 2024 that we highlighted at our 2021 Analyst Day. Our debt balances are near our leverage targets. We expect to continue to use a significant portion of our cash flow for share repurchases. The board has approved an increase in the share repurchase authorization up to $200 million. With that, we will now open the line for questions. Operator.

Operator (participant)

The floor is now open for your questions. To ask a question at this time, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If at any point you'd like to withdraw from the queue, please press star 1 again. You will be provided with the opportunity for ask 1 question and 1 further follow-up question. We'll take a moment to render our roster. Our first question comes from the line of Pallav Saini from Canaccord. Please proceed.

Pallav Saini (VP of Equity Research)

Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I have a couple here on your real-time payments business. Maybe you can remind us how big your RTP business is right now and how much it grew last year and what type of growth are you expecting in 2023 and some of the drivers there, and I have a follow-up.

Scott Behrens (Executive VP, CFO and CAO)

Yeah, Well, let me clarify. Real-time payments is about 10% of our business when you look at real time from a product line perspective. Our overall strategy is really to productize within all of our product solutions, real-time payments capabilities. Whether you're a biller or a consumer of a biller, and you want to pay with real time or you're a merchant and you want to use real time, our strategy is really to implement real-time capabilities across all of our product set. From a particular product set, it's 10% of the business, growing double digits. Again, we're productizing it throughout our whole product suite.

Pallav Saini (VP of Equity Research)

Got it. Thanks for that clarification, Scott. I believe the Fed is now rolling out its FedNow program this year. Maybe you can broadly frame what this means for your RTP opportunity in the U.S. I think you are also participating in the pilot program. Anything you can share from that experience would be helpful. Thank you.

Tom Warsop (Interim President and CEO)

Yeah, thanks. The FedNow program is indeed launching this year. We've been participating all along with the Fed and, you know, everyone's making progress. Certainly we are. Our clients are very interested in the program. I think if you step way back, the I talked earlier about the real-time payments revolution. The United States is way behind the rest of the world. I often tell the story of my daughter who went to university in China and how, I had to learn about real-time payments, like real-time on the street.

'Cause I didn't know anything about it. That was, that was many years ago. The FedNow launch will be a big part of that. We have we're not in a position to make specific forecasts about how fast that the real-time environment in the U.S. grows once FedNow launches. What I'm absolutely confident of is it's going to grow much faster than it has in the past. I think Americans generally are gonna get a lot more comfortable with the idea of real-time payments, which is great for us because we've been making investments for some time, and we are prepared for that to start to take hold.

Operator (participant)

Great. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Peter Heckmann from D.A. Davidson. Please proceed.

Peter Heckmann (Managing Director and Equity Research)

Good morning. I wanna follow up on that last piece. When you think about real-time payments in the U.S., what is, what is ACI's primary opportunity? Connecting the banks to the switch, powering portions of the switch? How do you think about that? you know, best guess, ACI put out a really interesting white paper last year on real-time payments penetration as a percent of electronic payments and wide variety of wide range of penetration from, you know, some countries have had real-time payments for decades and are at 1%, some are at 50%. I guess, how do you see the U.S. adoption of real-time payments unfolding?

Scott Behrens (Executive VP, CFO and CAO)

Ultimately our primary customer there will be the banks and the connectivity to whatever that scheme is in the case of what's rolling out in the near term FedNow. It's really connecting the banks. I would say that would be the primary. Then it's really how does real time manifest itself in the U.S.? What are the use cases? How does it develop? You know, when we look at our portfolio of products and customers is really having the endpoints, whether it's the banks, billers or merchants, really having those endpoints of electronic payments, those relationships. We are our software or our SaaS solutions are running those transactions. The question is how does it manifest itself? What we're positioning ourselves to be is no matter where those use cases develop and what payment types, that we will have the capability to provide that to our U.S. customers.

Peter Heckmann (Managing Director and Equity Research)

Okay. How do you feel about just the general pricing philosophy for real time? You mentioned that you're working in 25 countries, powering, you know, government switches, and we're looking at a roughly a $100 million revenue business. I guess when you think about the... I mean, I think the next largest provider of real-time payment software to government switches perhaps has 1 country. Do you feel like the pricing is appropriate there? You know, it seems like you're actually playing a bigger role in many of these countries, but the economic benefit to ACI doesn't seem as significant as maybe it should be.

Scott Behrens (Executive VP, CFO and CAO)

I mean, the pricing is pretty consistent with. I mean, it's, you know, our place in the market is really providing the software solution. What we are doing is very similar to, say, the issuing and acquiring on debit and credit transactions. Our pricing model is, it's still volume-based. They're priced very similar to our issuing and acquiring product. And, you know, obviously, it's still gonna be volume-based. Most of the customers are buying at a low volume today, and waiting for that, you know, critical mass of volume to come. What's important for us now, and what has been for years, is selling the solution, getting it installed to that central infrastructure.

Then, when the transaction volume does come, we will be able to, you know, charge the capacity component of our license fee. That's, you know, pretty much almost all margin at that point. There's really no incremental fulfillment costs to deliver that. Priced very similar to our other licensed products, that drive high volume, in the issuing and acquiring, and volume-based pricing.

Tom Warsop (Interim President and CEO)

Yeah, I'll just add one thing. It is right now we are very focused on planting the flags. That's why I highlighted the 25 schemes and central infrastructures that we support today. That's really important to us. It's, you know, it will become a much more meaningful part of the business as volumes grow, as Scott just highlighted. And obviously, the margin characteristics that he just highlighted are very important as well. We're trying to make sure that we get ourselves inserted into as many of these schemes around the world as we can, and I think we're, I think we're off to a very good start.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from the line of George Sutton from Craig-Hallum. Please proceed.

George Sutton (Senior Research Analyst)

Thank you. Nice to see the continued buyback emphasis. Tom, welcome to the call. Tom, I'm curious, the way you described the business, I liked it. You said we've got a substantial opportunity, a large untapped opportunity, growing fast. The market, I think, has viewed this largely as a relatively mature business, without necessarily the open-ended sounding growth that you're talking about. I wondered if you could just give us your perspective on that thought process.

Tom Warsop (Interim President and CEO)

Yeah, sure. I think it's related to the last topic, in many ways. I know I keep using the same word, but the revolution in real-time payments, you can feel it, but as we've highlighted, today it's 10%-ish of our business. It should become a significantly larger portion. As real-time payments subsume primarily cash transactions around the world, that's an entirely different part of the payments ecosystem for us to participate in. Which, you know, we really have very little to do with the cash transactions around the world, which in many, many countries, account for the bulk of payments. That is really exciting.

I think when I look at some of the, some of the geographies where we have played a lesser role, I mean, I think about Africa in particular. I spent a lot of time with our, with the team that's chasing after and supporting, the business in Africa recently. There is a huge set of opportunities there that we've barely scratched the surface of. There's some, there's some geo-geographic opportunities that we really haven't pursued as strongly as we will. There's the real-time payments, revolution.

The final point I would make is that I think we've talked about before, that we now offer most of our products in a SaaS, a software as a service model, which we have not done previously until quite recently. We have a couple of those clients that are live today, a couple of others that are coming live soon. That, again, opens up a whole new segment of the market. Smaller financial institutions around the world that don't have the infrastructure to manage our software themselves, so they don't have the data center that they need, they don't have the expertise.

Now, we have created offerings which will allow us to support even, you know, a different set of financial institutions.That's a bunch of stuff I just threw at you, but when you put it all together, it creates a lot of really interesting opportunities. Our biggest challenge, I think, is making sure that we focus on the ones that are gonna make the biggest difference, and don't spread ourselves too thin.

George Sutton (Senior Research Analyst)

One other question. We have, I believe, been anticipating the next gen platform to be launched this quarter. There wasn't any sort of mention of that on the call. Could you just address where that stands?

Tom Warsop (Interim President and CEO)

That's ultimately gonna be the FedNow offering, at least as it relates to the U.S. The rest of the investment is really being made in overseas hub capabilities. In the U.S., it'll lead to the FedNow. Which is a bit later this year, as we said.

George Sutton (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. Thanks, guys.

Tom Warsop (Interim President and CEO)

Sure.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from the line of Charles Nabhan from Stephens. Please proceed.

Charles Nabhan (Managing Director)

Good morning, thank you for taking my question. Had a quick one on the biller segment. If I heard you correctly, you said that you were 70% of the way through your contract negotiations. With that said, I was wondering if you expect to be complete by year-end 2023? Secondly, given some of the new wins in the segment over the past year or so, is there anything different about the normalized margin profile of the business, given some of the new verticals that are growing and some of the new wins that have come on recently?

Tom Warsop (Interim President and CEO)

Let me. I'll touch on the 70% question, then I'll let Scott respond to the second part of the question. We are roughly 70% through, and as I think we've described before, this is a. I wish it were a situation where you could send out a letter and say your price has changed, but that actually isn't how it works. We literally need to go contract by contract, so that is what we're doing. I would expect substantially all of that, of that work to be completed this year. I don't know if it'll be 100%. I hope it is, but it'll be close if it's not 100%.

The reason I'm hedging that just a little, just to give you a tiny bit of color on it, is when you're talking about clients in the utility space, utilities as we know, are highly regulated entities. To the point where their rates and fees have to be approved in multiple places in the regulatory environment, particularly with they tend to be called the Public Utilities Commission or something similar to that in their local jurisdiction. They have absolute authority to approve or not approve rates and fees. We can come to an agreement with a utility provider, but it still has to go through an approval process, a comment period, all those things that you have to do in a highly regulated environment.

We are working through these things with our clients. Honestly, we haven't found a single client that doesn't understand why we're having the discussion and what the, you know, what needs to happen. I'm not saying they're happy about it because at the end of the day, it's a, it's an increase that they're gonna be paying. They do understand and we're just slogging through it one at a time, as I said. The quick answer to your question is yes, we expect essentially all of it to be complete this year.

Scott Behrens (Executive VP, CFO and CAO)

Yeah. In relation to the margin profile in 2023 in particular, you're going to see two benefits of the margin profile of the business. One is the go live, the revenue growth that we're going to see in 2023 in the biller segment from the deals we sold, you know, prior to 2022 that went live late in 2022. We get a full benefit of that revenue in 2023. That revenue layered on top of a relatively fixed cost base. That business has scale. That's going to drive profitability in 2023. Second will be this year-over-year benefit of these interchange initiatives. Number 1 will be the revenue growth from the go lives that hit here late in 2022, full benefit next year. Second will be the interchange initiative. If you look every quarter, this year, Q1, at least interchange percentage of the total biller revenue will be about on par with Q1 last year. Q2, 3, and 4, you'll see a significant year-over-year improvement.

Charles Nabhan (Managing Director)

Got it. Okay. As a follow-up, I wanted to touch on the merchant segment. I know it doesn't get a lot of airtime, but revenue is up 8%. That's slightly below your double-digit target. My question is, number 1, is it when you think about getting back to a normalized hitting your target in 2024, is it still, should we still expect the merchant segment to be up double digits? Secondly, could you talk a little about some of the growth drivers of the business during the quarter?

Scott Behrens (Executive VP, CFO and CAO)

Yeah. I mean, ultimately, the short answer on 2024, yes. In terms of double digits, if you look at merchant exit rate of recurring revenue growth in Q4 of 2022 is 9% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. That's really and they have a little bit of a licensed software business, but most of that is gonna be recurring revenue. That trajectory of growth continues here in 2023. That licensed software business is becoming a smaller portion of that business. Again, recurring revenue exited last year at 9%. This year will be our fastest-growing segment at double-digit growth and further growth in 2024. What is driving the growth in that business is really a lot of secular trends in particular, e-commerce, electronic transactions.

Because it's not, although we have an Omni-Commerce in-store presence capability, the bulk of our merchant capabilities are very geared towards e-commerce, whether that's e-com alternative payment gateways, card-not-present fraud detection, which is really e-commerce merchant transactions. It's really the secular growth in e-commerce. You know, I think it came up in the last call. What are we seeing in terms of transaction volume there? In merchant, we did see higher. We thought we'd end the year strong in transaction volume. We actually came in a little bit higher in transaction volumes in the merchant segment, so we're not seeing a lot of weakness there as it relates to global economic concerns. We're pretty happy with where we're at going into 2023.

Charles Nabhan (Managing Director)

Got it. Thanks for all the color.

Scott Behrens (Executive VP, CFO and CAO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

I would now like to turn the call over to John Kraft for closing remarks.

John Kraft (SVP of Strategy and Finance)

Thank you, everybody, for your time this morning. We look forward to catching up in the coming weeks. Have a great day.

Operator (participant)

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.