ACI Worldwide, Inc. (NASDAQ:ACIW) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

So when we look at the – and that’s not just Biller, it’s across the whole business, it’s really business that’s already sold and live or business that’s sold and ramping. So very little reliance next year on business that has to be kind of sold in year and converted in year. So that’s where we’re getting our comfort in the 7% and 9% for next year.

Charles Nabhan: Got it. And just as a follow up, you had alluded to some investments you’re making in order to pursue some new revenue initiatives. Could you maybe double click on that a little bit and provide specifics on areas where you are investing as well as any potential impact on the P&L?

Scott Behrens: Yes, I would say that maybe as the second question first is we are, it’s not what I call incremental to our run rate of spend. It’s a reprioritization of what we are spending and it’s going to be targeted predominantly towards the bank segment, kind of the tier that Tom’s talking about and developing payment hub capabilities where we’re seeing a lot of demand, not just in that next tier of banks, but also our global install base is looking for hub capabilities. And so it’s going to be predominantly in the bank segment hub capabilities and it’s not, you’re not going to see a significant increase in expense versus our current run rate. It’s going to be a reprioritization of what we’re spending today on R&D.

Tom Warsop: Yes. We call that, Charles, we call that intelligent payments orchestration. You probably heard me say those words a couple of times. And the industry tends to talk about it as a payments hub and how do we help our clients manage all varieties of payments and ensure that they are handled with scalability, reliability, that they have the ability to route them correctly, process them very efficiently, offer new services, and ACIs of course extremely well-positioned to take advantage of that across the industry because of the install base we have, the reputation that we have, and the absolutely proven nature of our software product. So we’re clearly well-positioned, but that is by our estimation the fastest growing portion of the banking business, banking payments software business worldwide, and so that’s true across all, all size segments of the market and all geographies.

But then when you layer on the opportunity with that next tier down of banks, what you find is that’s the fastest growing segment from a size perspective. So that’s why we’re, we’re so excited about the opportunity and focused there. And as Scott said, I mean, we are making investments there for sure, but it is not, we’re not talking about net new investment, we’re just making sure we’re investing where the opportunities are the rightest, so to speak.

Charles Nabhan: Thanks, Tom.

Tom Warsop: Mark, are there any other questions?

Operator: Your next question comes from the line from George Sutton from Craig-Hallum. George, your line is now open.

George Sutton: Thank you. Tom, now that you’ve had a more detailed peek under the tent, I’m curious from an allocation of capital perspective. When you look across the segments, I think we all agree banking has done relatively well. Biller has really improved. Merchant has struggled. Where do you think of these incremental growth opportunities at one point? Is, is merchant something you’re not putting more focus on? I’m just curious how you’re thinking across the segments?

Tom Warsop: Sure. Now we continue to, we continue to believe in the opportunity in all three segments. And Merchant been obviously a little bit of a laggard from a performance perspective this year, but we still feel great business. As Scott said, we expect that to flip the growth beginning in the fourth quarter. So we’re continuing to invest there. There’s no – there’s, don’t take anything that we’re saying as it’s not, it’s not important. But I think there is a very large growth opportunity in the banking space, which I was just talking about. And we, we intend to focus significant resources and a higher portion of our investment on taking advantage of that opportunity in the short run. But we will continue to invest and Merchant.