ACI Worldwide Inc

NASDAQ:ACIW

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q4

[Operator]

Good morning everyone. Thank you for standing by and welcome to the ACI Worldwide Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker’s presentation there will be a question and answer session. [Operator Instructions] And please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today Mr. John Kraft.

[John Kraft, VP, IR]

Thank you and good morning everyone. On today’s call, we will discuss the company’s fourth quarter and full year 2021 results, our financial outlook for 2022 and then we will take your questions. The slides that accompany this call and webcast can be found at ACIworldwide.com under the Investor Relations tab and will remain available after the call. Additional operational statistics have been provided in the supplemental tables of our materials. 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 materials, a copy of which is available on our website, as well as with the SEC. On this morning’s call is Odilon Almeida, our President and CEO; and Scott Behrens, our CFO. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to Odilon.

[Odilon Almeida, President and CEO]

Thank you, John. Hello, everyone. And thank you for joining our fourth quarter 2021 earnings conference call. I took over as CEO 22 months ago, and facing the reality of no organic growth, we committed to a disciplined approach to turning around our business. Until 2020 together with our leadership team, we created our three pillars strategy, which has already shown results. In 2021, we increased organic growth from flat to mid single digit. This growth is the highest we have seen in almost a decade. We have increased margin and have achieved the rule of 40 for the first year ever. We have deployed a rigorous, disciplined and systematic approach to M&A, focusing on creating value. And we have increased the allocation of our strong cash flow towards share repurchases in a sign of confidence in the company’s future. In summary, 2021 was a transformational year for ACI. We delivered on our commitment, generated financial results of both our guidance and consensus and achieved the rule 40 coming in with a score of 43, all while building momentum for 2022. This year, we will cement our mid single-digit growth and prime ACI to accelerate growth to seven t7% o 9% by 2024. Scott will take you through our financial results in detail. But first, let me step back for a moment and update you about our three pillar strategy. As a reminder, in the fit for growth pillar, we focus on streamline our structure, sharpening our go-to-market strategy and execution. We have a simpler and more efficient operating model with fewer layers, broader spans of control, smart talent development, and more robust governance. We are more agile and accountable. These factors contribute to our momentum today. Our weekly operating cadences give us a clear line of sight to make the business more predictable wherever we operate across the world. Every revenue, product and technology leader connect to facilitate critical decision making real-time each week. Linking sales compensation closely to company revenue has also been an important lever. The benefit of local boots on the ground across international markets has increased our ability to seize commercial opportunities ahead of the competition, meet the different local demands with agility and global scale and accelerate innovation cycles. And it is worth repeating that with a simplified and more efficient organization, we captured $60 million in annual cost savings last year, out of which was reinvested in our focus on growth priorities. Moving to our second pillar, focus on growth. We have four investment areas; real-time payments, sophisticated global merchants, international markets, and the next generation real-time payments platform. Starting with real-time. We continue to invest in both low and high value real-time solutions. Real-time transactions continue to grow in every region globally. Early insights of our annual global real-time analysis indicate the 60% year-over-year rise in real-time transactions in 21. By 2026, more than 25% of electronic payments will be through real-time payments. In Asia, we want a real-time payments infrastructure for Indonesia, a global top five economy. We are driving the new bypass scheme for Indonesia’s central bank. It will become an integral part of Indonesia’s ongoing digital modernization initiative and central to its payment system blueprint. Multiple banks across Indonesia have already signed for ACI real-time solutions, which can scale to billions of transactions. Overall, we signed a total of 70 new real-time wins. Some examples of real-time modernization successes for the last quarter include a major bank in South Africa. It will be the first of many expansions in South Africa. A top commercial bank in Indonesia, and a part of a global banking network, a leading German based FinTech offering banking as a service, a top US [Indiscernible] Bank headquartered in Texas, and the largest financial institution in Kuwait. Moving to sophisticated global merchants, our priority on expanding innovative omni and e-commerce solutions has led us to increase our offerings and signed large sophisticated merchants and merchant intermediaries worldwide. Last week, we launched the innovative global Buy Now Pay Later solution, enabling access to 70 plus BNPL lenders through a single integration. The innovative user interface ACI PayAfter enhances acceptance rates and serves a broader base of credit worthy customers boosting merchant sales worldwide. BNPL has become a must have for merchants. It offers new avenues to serve a broader base of customers by enabling them to stagger their repayments over time while driving revenue. Sophisticated global merchants value the range of our solutions. Last year, we signed 22 new logos. Some examples worth highlighting from the previous quarter include an established FinTech in Europe will use our secure e-commerce payment gateway for rapid geographic expansion. In a significant evolution of our relationship and independent US supermarket with 240 stores, we use our omni grocery focus solution. In the UK, a top grocery and few store, we will migrate to the multi tenant platform in [Indiscernible], the largest travel center truckstop in North America, we use multiple solutions to broaden card acceptance and integrate fraud management for their commercial fuel customers. Their largest acquired Latin America chose our fraud solution to secure 10,000 plus gateway merchant base. Now moving to our international markets, we continue to increase our presence across global growth markets with an unrelenting focus on improving our sales pipeline. Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South Pacific are core to this expansion. Some examples of ACI wins from across the world for quarter four include our first SAS deal in the Pacific region is with a leading bank in New Zealand, a top bank in India, as they reinforce their market leadership. A National Bank in Sri Lanka expanded its remit to modernize its payments infrastructure. Two major banks in Saudi Arabia embark on their payment modernization, a multinational commercial bank in Qatar, as they modernize to capture growth driven by the upcoming World Cup and new events like the FIA Formula One Grand Prix. Our leading bank in Brazil sought our expertise to upgrade their payment services. One of Ireland’s top four commercial banks has kicked off it transformational journey with us. The world’s largest building society headquartered in the UK, is now partnering to drive modernization strategies. Our fourth focus on growth investment is about building the new generation real-time payments platform to cement our global leadership in real-time payments. Designed to end platform, we will deliver payment capabilities across all payment rails, with real-time as its center of gravity. It will bring a breadth of rich functionality unmatched by any other competitor in this space. It’s designed to be simple, secure, and flexible. And we will leverage the latest cloud native principles with a faster time to market. Our efforts with our third strategic pillars step change value creation through M&A remain a high priority. We continue to spend significant time reviewing our business portfolio and M&A opportunities to ensure we maximize short and long-term value creation for our shareholders. We look at many investments and divestitures options, whether big or small, global or local. Turning to our cash flow and capital structure. Our consistent cash flow generation and solid balance sheet gives us significant financial flexibility to make investments to support growth and return cash to shareholders. As a reminder, at our November Analyst Day, we announced our expectations to generate $900 million in cash flow over the next three years. In December, we increased our share repurchase authorization to $250 million. Before turning things over to Scott, I like to summarize my comments by reiterating that ACI had a transformational year in 2021. 2022 will be an inflection point for ACI. This year, we expect to cement our mid single-digit growth and prepare the company to accelerate organic revenue growth to 7% to 9% in 2024. We also expect a gradual increase in net adjusted EBITDA margin over the same period. Combining this outlook with our capital location framework and the optionality associated with step change value creation to M&A, we believe we are well positioned to deliver sustainable shareholder value. With that, I will turn it over to Scott to discuss financials and forward guidance. Scott?

[Scott Behrens, CFO]

Thanks Odilon and good morning, everyone. I first plan to go through our financial results for Q4 and full year 2021, then provide some commentary regarding our outlook for 2022. We will then open the line for questions. As Odilon mentioned, 2021 was a transformational year, and 2022 will be an inflection point for ACI. Fourth quarter revenue was $467 million up 21% from Q4 last year, and adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $205 million up 31% from Q4 last year. Full year 2021 revenue was $1.37 1 billion up 6% from 2020 or 5% on a constant currency basis and the highest level in many years. Total adjusted EBITDA on 2021 was $384 million up 7% compared to $359 million in 2020. And net adjusted EBITDA margin was 38% in 2021 compared to 37% in 2020. Turning next to full year segment results, our bank segment revenue increased 12% and adjusted EBITDA increased 13% versus 2020. Our merchant segment revenue increased 2% in total, while the underlying recurring revenue increased 8% and merchant segment adjusted EBITDA increase 2% versus 2020. Our biller segment revenue and recurring revenue increased 1% and the biller segment adjusted EBITDA decreased 5% versus 2020. We ended the year with $122 million in cash on hand and a debt balance of $1 billion. We repaid $94 million in debt during the year bringing us a net debt leverage ratio of just under 2.5 times. We repurchased 3 million shares of our stock during 2021 for $107 million and it further repurchased an additional 800,000 shares for $27 million so far here in 2022. And we have approximately 190 million remaining on our current repurchase authorization. And finally, turning to our outlook for 2022. We expect to cement our constant currency mid single-digit organic revenue growth in 2022 with reported revenue in a range of $1.415 billion to $1.435 billion positioning us to accelerate growth into the upper single digits by 2024. We expect 2022 adjusted EBITDA of $400 million to $450 million. And this excludes one-time costs related to the move of our European data centers to the public cloud as communicated at our Analyst Day back in November. With our debt balances now at our leveraged targets, we are changing our capital allocation priorities in the near-term, increasing the expected cash flow use for repurchases to approximately 50% of our cash flow. We announced a $250 million share repurchase authorization in December with plans to use a significant portion of this in the near term. And finally, for Q1, 2022, we expect revenue to be in a range of $310 million to $330 million and adjusted EBITDA to be in a range of $60 million to $80 million. And just a modeling note here from a quarterly phasing perspective, we do not expect our revenue and EBITDA to be as back end loaded here in 2022, as we experienced in 2021. So with that, I will pass it back to Odilon for closing comments.

[Odilon Almeida, President and CEO]

Thank you, Scott. 2021 was a transformational year with solid results. I want to thank the ACI family for all the efforts and outcomes in 2021. In 2022, we will cement our mid single-digit growth and position the company to deliver 7% to 9% growth by 2024. Thank you.

[Operator]

And we will now open it up for questions. [Operator Instructions] First question comes from the line of Mayank Tandon of Needham. Mayank your line is now open.

[Mayank Tandon, Needham]

Yes. Good morning. Congrats on the progress. I wanted to start with question on the seasonality. Scott, you mentioned that it would not be as back end weighted. But the 1Q guide does look pretty good relative to expectations. But we’re not seeing that flow through for the rest of the year. So just wanted to get some thoughts around like the 1Q guide versus your expectations for the full year and how should think about seasonality in general?

[Scott Behrens, CFO]

Yes, I think generally speaking, if you look at 2021 it was unusually back end loaded in Q4 both from a revenue and EBITDA perspective, I think if you look at kind of pre 2021, if you look at even 2020 for the comp, I think that’s probably more indicative of the revenue base and we’ll see kind of you look at that first half versus second half. But as you indicated, our Q1 guidance is strong. You just won’t have to wait till Q4 this year to see year-over-year shortage.

[Mayank Tandon, Needham]

Got it. And then just a quick follow up in terms of the growth between the three components, banks, merchants and bidders, how should we think about that progression over the course of the year? And then maybe like what’s embedded in your full year guide for the three components? Thank you.

[Scott Behrens, CFO]

Yes. I would say I wouldn’t look at it on quarterly basis, I’d look across year-over-year 2021 to 2022. Obviously, the banks had a very strong 2021. That growth rate should pull back a little here in 2022. Billers growth should be, call it in that mid single-digits year-over-year and then merchants should be a little bit higher and again, I’m talking year-over-year not necessarily quarterly phasing. So I’ve looked at it as being our highest growth would it be in merchants than billers and then again, just because of the overall relative strength of banks, and in 2021 that growth rate should pull back a little bit in 2022.

[Mayank Tandon, Needham]

Great, thank you so much.

[Operator]

Next question comes from the line of George Sutton of Craig-Hallum. George your line is now open.

[Unidentified Analyst]

Hi, guys. This is James on for George. Congrats on a great quarter and great full year. So first off, I’d love to just hear some color around some of the traction you’re seeing with the crypto or crypto partnership with rocket fuel thus far, and then what inspired the decision to tap into Buy Now Pay Later the way you did by sort of going agnostic and enabling access to 70 plus, Buy Now Pay Later providers?

[Scott Behrens, CFO]

Well, I wouldn’t necessarily talk specifically in terms of kind of the economics of the rocket fuel deal. Obviously that’s another, call it endpoint or gateway that we offer to our merchants. I think maybe a little bit more exciting would be the ACI Pay After capabilities. And what’s really driving the opportunity there is I think what we’re seeing with emergencies, some pain points, in terms of access to a variety of Buy Now Pay Later Vendors. And what our capability is going to do is it will provide our merchants with essentially a gateway, initially to about 70 different Buy Now Pay Later lenders and by the end of this year over 200. And what it is doing is allowing our merchants to provide choice, increase the overall acceptance rate of those consumers and ultimately, from our standpoint, it’s not only do we get the economics of the per transaction, which we would get today in our e-commerce solution, but we get essentially revenue share on the dollar value of the lending. So we are really excited about that opportunity. Again, I think we’re addressing a pain point in the market as it relates to merchants being able to provide choice to their consumers.

[Odilon Almeida, President and CEO]

And then just to complement, we are very opposition for merchants, we have an acquire agnostic solution. So when you talk about crypto partnership BNPL, those are all their methods of payment for us. And now our job here is to get sophisticated merchants. Why do they call them, we call them sophisticated, because they want to run the show. They want to be responsible to direct the transaction to the different acquiring methods that we offer. So it is critical that we offer everything that is there. So when you go with -- or you go BNPL is going the same direction, which is if you are with ACI, you have multiple methods of payment and it’s all about maximizing revenues for our merchants. Right.

[Unidentified Analyst]

Got you. So it sounds like you sort of exist or identified existing pain points which I guess sort of sounds like there could be some existing demand already at this point. Is that a fair?

[Scott Behrens, CFO]

Right. Yes we’re getting a lot of, I would say a lot of inbounds on the ACI Pay After capabilities. And again, if we even go back to crypto not to minimize the crypto crip. All we’re doing there is giving our merchants another path to payment and expand their total addressable market.

[Unidentified Analyst]

Got you. And then just one more follow up if I could. So in Latin America, the impact COVID drove a pretty material decline in cash, increase in digital payments. You identified Latin America is one of your growth markets. Could you talk about within Latin America, sort of what specifically you’re targeting, like which market and sort of what the growth strategy is within those markets?

[Odilon Almeida, President and CEO]

We have three big markets in America. We have Brazil, Colombia and Mexico we are very well developed in both markets. But we are reaching like another 10 or 11 countries already with a good penetration. We have foot in the ground, and our bank solution -- majority solutions and could be the switch the issuing the acquiring the real-time payments. It’s very popular in most of the countries over there. Now, the next frontier is merchants. So since last year, we started to expand our merchant services internationally to Latin America. And we are already seeing a very strong pipeline in fraud prevention, Omni-commerce, so it’s really working. So I would say that we have Latin America in all cylinders now. And you can expect great results from Latin America. By the way, just for you to know I’m in Brazil today, I’m calling to you. I’m describing, I’m holding this call from Brazil.

[Unidentified Analyst]

So your boots are literally on the ground. Sounds good.

[Odilon Almeida, President and CEO]

Very much.

[Operator]

Next question comes from line of Peter Heckman of DA Davidson. Peter, your line is now open.

[Peter Heckmann]

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to talk about the biller business. The net revenue was down and was below our forecast has been down a couple quarters in a row but that the extent of the down in the fourth quarter made me think did the calendar fall in such a way that maybe the end of the month or the end of the key week push some bill pay into January?

[Scott Behrens, CFO]

No. Pete I would say generally speaking if you’re looking at bill pay, it came in low single digit growth year-over-year. The net revenue growth was lower than that. But I would look at 2021. And we spent a lot of time in 2021 really focused on finishing up the TSA that we have a speed pay. And so a lot of that effort was really I’m sorry, with Western Union and moving that business over to our data center. So a lot of time was really on that migration. We have a significant backlog of on-boarding of new projects that we’ve got. Now we’ve turned our attention to here starting in the fourth quarter to get those deals live here in the early part of this year. And so I don’t think that we’re still going to probably see the phenomenon of net revenue growing less than gross revenue, because of interchange and mix. But I would say that really what’s going to be the driver of growth here in 22 is getting those projects live that we’ve already sold. And you should see those coming online here early in the year. So that’ll push gross revenue up. But, a push in net revenue up you always have a bit of a delta, I think in terms of the interchange mix.

[Peter Heckmann]

And then just thinking about the mix of revenue and your guidance, clearly very strong software year in 2021. And in order to get to your guidance, I’m having a difficult time, not basically stating that software is going to be at least flat to get to your numbers. And that seems like a relatively high hurdle. But is that how you’re thinking about it? Or is there another offset like for example, subscription revenues, accelerating towards the high single-digit?

[Scott Behrens, CFO]

Yes. I think generally speaking, you’ll see recurring revenue increase, year-over-year. If you look at our midpoint of our 2022 revenue guidance Scott, constant currency midpoint is a 5%. Merchants should grow in excess of that, really powered by the recurring revenue in that business, transaction growth in recurring revenue. On the biller side, should come in probably about in line with the total company, and then the software side, predominance software side, which is the banks, again, that’s what I was saying in my prepared remarks, that’s going to be we’re coming off of a very strong year with banks. And so, I’d see that coming in kind of less than our midpoint of growth rates, mostly because we’re really coming off of a strong year. But I would maybe even add to that, and I think you see it, even in our Q1 guidance that banks, we were really seeing banks open up the wallet in the second half of 2021. And we’re continuing to see that strength here in the early part of 2022. So it was very encouraging to see the bank spending.

[Peter Heckmann]

Okay, good to hear. Thank you.

[Operator]

Next question comes from the line of Joseph Vafi of Canaccord. Joseph, your line is now open.

[Joseph Vafi, Canaccord]

Hey, guys, good morning. Great execution in 2021, looking forward to a good 2022. Just going back to the guide real quick, could you break down what you would see as the growth contributors from US domestic versus international? And then I’ll have a quick follow up on that.

[Scott Behrens, CFO]

Let me maybe answer first by kind of providing some color in 2021. 2021 had if you exclude what I call more of our mature markets US and Europe are the rest of our international markets drove about 15%, 16% year-over-year. We would expect that to continue in emerging markets, growth markets are driving higher growth than I’d say in our kind of more mature markets. So I would expect that to continue in 2022. And then if you look at say part of our business, billers predominant is entirely US domestic. Merchant banks has more of an international footprint than biller.

[Joseph Vafi, Canaccord]

Sure, that’s helpful. And then if you wanted to break down between banks and merchant internationally and the growth outlook in each of those segments which one would be ahead of the other or are they about equal?

[Scott Behrens, CFO]

Generally speaking, merchants going to grow whether it’s international or domestic is going to grow faster than banks. That’s just the following the trends and in overall transaction growth and e-commerce. If you look at the underlying recurring revenue of merchant in 2021, that grew 8% that’s really subset of what the transaction growth is. And so we’d expect that to continue. I don’t, I’ll be honest, don’t have necessarily our mix on banks and merchants split between international domestic, but we can get that. They are pretty balanced. I mean merchants more international than banks.

[Joseph Vafi, Canaccord]

Sure. That’s helpful, Scott. And then just circling back to U.S. domestic banks we’ve seen in a lot of the other names, we follow resurgence and demand from banks here and I think clearly you saw some of that exit in the year. Do you think if you look into the pipeline and the business there? Are we kind of fully caught up at this point on delayed deals at this point? Or would you say that and we’re kind of now at a normal cadence of business and it does feel like the banks won’t do as much delaying as perhaps they did over the last couple of years. And maybe that’s also a positive for your business. So any comments on that would be helpful. Thanks a lot.

[Scott Behrens, CFO]

Yes. There is no doubt the banks, like I was saying, the banks really opened up the wallet here in the second half of 2021. We’re continuing to see that. I don’t know if we’re quite at the end of the catch up period. Again, we’re seeing particular strength in banks. And I wouldn’t isolate it to just our US bank market. We had a strong year, in both US and the international markets with banks.

[Odilon Almeida, President and CEO]

I think I can add more color to that Scott. I was in Dubai last week and I’m in Brazil today. And I’ve been traveling around the globe and talking to the CEOs of banks, not only US Europe, but all around the globe. And what I’m listening is, I think that we are going after COVID now. It’s coming from pandemic. So everything that you have heard this happening and the banks are starting to really talk about modernization, even more than before. So when I talk to them, for example, about our next generation payments hub, payments platform, and I tell them that we’re going to have a roadmap of that, like in the middle of the year and I explained to them, that’s going to be a journey, it’s going to be one, two or three years, they get very excited. They get real excited. And they are calling us to sit on the table and map demo organization with them and tell them what is this not new technology about. I can tell you that conversation was not happening in 2021. So it’s a very different environment.

[Joseph Vafi, Canaccord]

That’s great color. Thanks Odilon.

[Operator]

There are no further questions at this time. I’ll turn it back to the speakers for any closing remarks.

[John Kraft, VP, IR]

Thanks, everybody, for joining us today. We look forward to catching up in the coming weeks. Have a good day.

[Operator]

Thank you so much for presenters and to everyone who participated. This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect. And speakers please stay on the line for the post conference.