Q4 2024 ACI Worldwide Inc Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

John Kraft; Head of Strategy and Finance; ACI Worldwide Inc

Thomas W. Warsop, III; President, Chief Executive Officer; ACI Worldwide, Inc.

Scott Behrens; Chief Financial Officer, Chief Accounting Officer, Senior Vice President; ACI Worldwide Inc

Peter Heckman; Analyst; DA Davidson

Trevor Williams; Analyst; Jefferies

Jeff Cantwell; Analyst; Seaport Research Partners

George Sutton; Analyst; Craig-Hallum

Presentation

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your operator speaking. Today's conference call will begin momentarily. You will be placed back on music hold until then.
Thank you for your patience.
Good morning. My name is John, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the ACI Worldwide Incorporated reports financial resources for the quarter and full year ending December 31, 2024.
All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise.
The speaker 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 one again.
Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to John Kraft. You may begin your conference.

John Kraft

Thank you and Good morning everyone.
On today's call, we will discuss the company's fourth quarter in full year 2024 results, as well as our financial outlook for 2025.
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 harbour 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. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Tom.

Thomas W. Warsop, III

Thanks, John and Good morning, everyone. I appreciate you joining our full year 2024 earnings conference call.
I'll start this morning with some comments about the full year, and then I'll hand it over to Scott to discuss detailed financial results for the year, as well as our expectations for 2025.
And then, as always, we'll open the line for some questions.
Let me start with this. I am immensely proud of the results my team delivered last year. Performance was strong across every one of our metrics. In fact, 2024 results were ahead of our own expectations and the guidance we provided throughout the year.
Total revenue was up 10% over 2023, which was above our upper single digit longer term forecast we provided at our analyst day last March.
Our adjusted EBITDA for the year grew 18%, also notably above our guidance. Our adjusted Net EBITDA margin of 41% expanded more than 300 basis points over last year, which highlights the inherent leverage in our software model.
And cash flow generation remains strong with cash flow from operating activities of $359 million in 2024, more than double the previous year.
As we've discussed throughout the year, we made a conscious effort to complete the signing of contracts, renewal and new earlier in the year.
Well, the revenue from a renewal contract cannot be recognized earlier than the renewal date, getting these time consuming renewals out of the way allowed us to focus on new customer wins, which often can be recognized when signed.
As I reflect on 2024, this effort was clearly successful in delivering results ahead of our quarterly forecasts throughout the year, and it's something we're continuing to do in 2025.
Further It helps reduce the heavy seasonality we've traditionally seen. It also allowed us to start working on deals in our 2025 pipeline. This momentum and our large current pipeline provide me with high confidence in our full year 2025 outlook.
Before I give you a little more colouring segment, I want to discuss an organizational improvement we made starting on January 1, of this year.
We've combined the bank segment and the merchant segment into one new business called payment software.
This makes sense for a number of reasons. First and quite simply, the fundamental software, the code that we use to serve banks and large merchants, is very simple.
Well, the software is configured differently for the bank and merchant customer targets, the coding expertise and much of the functionality and the R&D is shared.
The combination is synergistic and it simplifies operations in many ways.
In addition, We're moving to a general manager structure, for the business unit. We did this with the builder segment last year and we found significant success. We're highly confident this change will allow us to accelerate progress in the payment software segment as well.
I've asked Erich Litch to lead this new business. As I mentioned on our last call, I've known Erich for many years, and I'm highly confident in his abilities.
His experience is perfect for this role, including the years he was involved selling and servicing mission critical enterprise software to the largest global banks, which of course he will continue to do at ACI.
Look for us to report our financial results in this new structure starting in the first quarter of this year.
Turning to the three segments you're familiar with, the bank segment, which will now be the majority of the payment software segment, grew 14%. In terms of revenue and 20% in terms of EBITDA compared to 2023.
We saw particular strength in our issuing and acquiring solutions with revenues up 23% from last year.
Our increased focus on next generation modernization and software, especially our payments hub product. Really is driving the pipeline.
The merchant said. Which going forward will also be included in the payment software segment, saw revenue grow 10% in 2024 and adjusted EBITDA grew 57%.
Before moving on from payment software to builder, I want to provide an update on our next generation payments hub solutions.
Investments are continuing, development is on track. We remain extremely focused on our launch in 2025. Our offering will be cloud native, which increases usability in terms of how customers utilize the tools and in terms of the breadth of customer segments we can target.
And we're not just targeting our current very large bank segment.
One important addition to our payments hub efforts, I hope you saw the announcement that I hired Philip Bruno as our chief strategy and growth officer. I've known and worked with Philip for a very long time and we're excited for him to join the team.
Phil will be instrumental in helping ACI execute on the broader strategy we launched in 2024. In particular, Phil will be utilized in a customer facing capacity, helping our sales efforts by partnering with ACI customers and providing valuable assistance with their modernization efforts. We expect his efforts to be a very large part of our hub go to market strategy.
Now turning to Biller, Our 2024 revenue was up 6%.
We signed some significant contracts during the year and our bookings momentum closing out the year is wrong with ARR bookings in Q4 up more than 20% over 2023 Q4.
Overall, we're very happy with our full year financial results and we're confident in our 2025 outlook. We started the year very strong. We created a Smart Start program to encourage and reward early new business execution this year.
As part of this program, early this month, we signed the largest new logo and competitive takeaway we have ever had in our Asia Pacific region.
While the contract is an excellent win by itself, the relationship is opening up additional opportunities for us in the region.
Inclusive of this very large new logo win, the team has, as of today signed Net Revenue contracts in our banking segment yielding more than $50 million in first quarter revenue.
Scott will give more details about Q1 in the first half, but I'm sure you can appreciate the benefits of signing deals early in the year.
Now I'll turn it over to Scott to discuss financials and our guidance.
Scott.