But I don’t know. But we’re going to obviously continue. We’re a very important player in the payments ecosystem. Digital commerce, to a large extent, relies on ACI, we’re going to make sure that our products can support whatever medium and mechanisms, consumers and commercial customers want to use.
Pallav Saini: Great. Thank you.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of George Sutton with Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Unidentified Analyst: Hey, guys. This is James on for George. Nice results. So the recurring revenue growth in the bank segment over the last couple of quarters have been pretty encouraging. Could you talk about what’s driving the strength there? And then last quarter, you also mentioned moving down market. Could we sort of get an update on those efforts? And then lastly, would you be able to sort of quantify what you think is a sustainable growth rate for the real-time payment solutions over the next couple of years?
Scott Behrens: Yeah. I think on the — what’s driving on the bank side, recurring revenues, it’s really just — it’s the maintenance on the license software. And so that is — that’s both a function of price. It’s — those have built-in CPI inflationary mechanisms and then just the go-lives of new customers. So that’s on the maintenance side. But probably the bigger growth year-over-year in bank recurring revenues come from the SaaS business. So that’s go-lives and ramping of customers that we’ve sold in bank SaaS. And bank SaaS, it’s not a significant component of the overall bank business, but had nice growth in 2023.
Tom Warsop: Yeah. And then you asked about mid-tier and — we have — we’ve been primarily focused on pipeline development for the mid-tier. We’ve got a lot of conversations going, but that isn’t — it hasn’t really shown up much yet. That’s a future opportunity. And those conversations I was mentioning earlier about modernization, many of those are with this mid-tier. And just to reiterate and remind everybody, when we talk about mid-tier, we’re talking about $50 billion to $250 billion in assets. So these are still very large financial institutions. But historically, our sort of sweet spot has been $250 billion and up, the mega banks. And this — so we’re — we call it mid-tier, not everybody might call that mid-tier, but it’s a little bit smaller, and that’s where they are — they tend to be more interested in SaaS and/or cloud models than the mega banks, and that’s why that — the development of those infrastructures and capabilities, Scott just referenced the growth that we’ve seen there.
That’s why that is so important. And it’s generating great conversation, great pipeline expansion, and we have signed several of those customers, and that’s what’s driving that growth Scott was just mentioning.
Scott Behrens: Yeah. And I would say if I look at the — our expectation going forward in terms of what real-time growth is going to be, it should be a healthy double-digit growth, very similar to our fraud detection software capabilities. I mean, we have — those are natural cross-sells to the existing customer base. And as you know, we have blue-chip bank customer base that has been with us for a long time and the natural cross-sell of new products to that same customer base is typically going to be in real-time payments and fraud detection. So both those areas should have healthy double-digit growth in the future.
Tom Warsop: Yeah. And just a final point on that. Scott mentioned the natural cross-sell, absolutely right. And real-time payments and fraud are — I mean those things go together extraordinarily well. So we often package the two together. So it’s a great, great offering, great couple of offerings.
Unidentified Analyst: Great. Last one for me. Can you just touch on the competitive landscape in Biller and Merchant? And any changes you’ve seen there sort of just given the momentum seen in adding net new logos?
Tom Warsop: Sure. So I wouldn’t say that I’ve seen a lot of change in that. We tend to see some of the same competitors. I think we’ve — so if I — let me start with Biller, very strong year, obviously, last year in Biller and some of the wins that we’ve talked about before. One of the reasons that I think we’ve seen the success is if you think back a couple of years, we were still digesting the Speedpay acquisition from Western Union, and we finished that, I don’t know, end of ’21-ish. And so we were able to turn our full attention to running the business and growing it, and that’s definitely worked well, and we expect that to continue to work well. So I think that’s the primary driver in Biller. On the Merchant side, again, kind of the same thing.
I wouldn’t say there’s a big change I think we did have a bit of a slow start, as we mentioned, in ’23, finished the year pretty strong, and we’re seeing very good signs that that’s going to continue into ’24. And so we should see better growth this year. And that has primarily to do with the business that’s already been sold and is ramping up. So very good visibility in that business. And our sweet spot there tends to be the really large — a little bit like the banking example I gave, they tend to be very large global retailers that are looking for consistent experience, very predictable, very positive experience for their consumer, whether it’s in the store, online, whatever channel the consumer wants to use. And the reason it tends to be global is they don’t want a bundled solution from an acquirer typically because they can’t — there is no acquirer that can handle them everywhere.
