ACI Worldwide Raises Guidance, Commits to Digital Assets

0:00What if data didn't sit still? What if intelligence moved with us? Not buried in reports, but activated in real time. Where lives are being shaped. Where decisions are being made. It all starts with a question. Where is the potential? Cotality turns data into clarity. Intelligence into insight. Insight into action. Because when intelligence moves, we all move forward. Cotality. Intelligence beyond bounds. Small businesses are the pulse of every community. They bring people together, create opportunities, and drive growth. Chase for Business helps business owners like you with personalized guidance and convenient digital tools all in one place.

0:43With that guidance and your determination, you can take your business farther and help build a brighter future for your community. Learn more at chase.com slash business. Chase for Business. Make more of what's yours. The Chase Mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JPMorgan Chase Bank, NA. Member FDIC. Copyright 2026. JPMorgan Chase and Company. The thing about AI for business, it may not automatically fit the way your business works. At IBM, we've seen this firsthand. But by embedding AI across HR, IT, and procurement processes, we've reduced costs by millions, slash repetitive tasks and freed thousands of hours for strategic work.

1:27Now we're helping companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business, IBM. When you're running a business, the best days are the ones where priorities stay on track. For midsize and large companies, risk can affect multiple parts of the organization at once, from property and liability to cyber and regulatory challenges. At that level, managing risk becomes an ongoing discipline. At the Hartford, the focus is on helping businesses manage risk before it turns into something more disruptive. And when losses do happen, that work is paired with insurance coverage shaped by years of underwriting, risk engineering, and claims experience.

2:08Learn more at thehartford.com slash risk mitigation. Policies provided by Hartford Fire Insurance Company and its property and casualty affiliates, Hartford, Connecticut. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. The season is underway. The global e-commerce and payments platform company, ACI Worldwide, says friendly fraud is expected to increase 25 % between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. That's according to an analysis of billions of transactions of global e-commerce businesses. That's what they do.

2:47They see a lot. Joining us with more is, and kind of on that story as well as their business, in our latest installment of CFO Briefing is Robert Liebrock. He is CFO of the more than$4.8 billion market cap company, ACI Worldwide. The stock, by the way, down about 9 % year to date. And also with us here in studio is Nina Trentman. She's Bloomberg News Senior Editor. She writes the CFO Briefing newsletter, which you can subscribe to at Bloomberg.com slash CFO Briefing. A new one comes out every Sunday. Bobby, welcome, welcome. Nice to have you here with all of us. I'm not sure everybody's familiar with what you do.

3:23Share with us a bit on what the company does. Who are your customers? The type of categories so that our investing audience has a good picture of what your business is all about. Yeah, that'd be great. And thank you for having me, Carol. I think, as you described earlier, we're right at a peak season for our company. We're right in the middle of all of the payments that run through the economy, not just here in the U.S., but around the world. And as you think about what ACI does, it's the infrastructure of payments. You know, we know around computing, there's cloud, there's data centers, there's the edge.

3:55Around payments, we are the infrastructure that does that across all the banks, all top 10 banks, 60 of the top 100 banks. Also across 3 ,000 customers here in the U.S. that need bill pay technologies. If you paid your U.S. tax bill, you've probably used our platform, your insurance bill. And then a big, you know, this weekend actually is when you talk about friendly fraud and the uptick we're seeing there. We service 80 ,000 merchants globally with our technology around payments there. And as you step back, you know, where ACI really comes in is a mission critical layer of software and as a service technology that allows them to scale, provide the reliability, the fraud detection that you need across those.

4:39As you think about what we can do across those platforms, it is perfect to come in on the Wednesday here before Thanksgiving here in the U.S. Like I said, it's a big peak season. As we look at the transactions at this time of the year, they were up more than 25 % last year. We're expecting that to happen again this year through our platform. There's lots of fraud that can come along with that. It's one of the areas we're infusing AI into that for these merchant providers. As you think across ACI, you mentioned almost$5 billion market cap, almost$2 billion in revenue that we have globally with a very healthy performance underneath that, about$500 million in EBITDA.

5:19I joined just under six months ago, so relatively new to the team here. And think about what we do. It's really a big reason on why I joined. I was excited to come in the middle of a company that's mission critical to everything we do around payments and the ecosystem and the economy. But the other equally important part of why I was excited to come was we're a 50-year-old company that's rapidly transforming. About two years ago, we had a new CEO come in, Tom Warsop, and he's really jolted the company, increased our growth about 2x. We grew 10 % last year. We're on track to 9 % to 10 % growth this year.

5:56And as you look at that, the other big jolt was innovation. We have a new platform that we're bringing out around cloud native. It's our ACI kinetic platform. And those were two big things that got me excited to join this team and the transformation we're on. Thanks, Bobby, for joining us here, Nina. Yeah, just wanted to actually follow up on the data that you have from your business. We earlier talked here on the program about the K-shaped economy and the divergence between sort of affluent spenders in the U.S. and those with lower incomes. Is that something that's reflected in your numbers? And what are the trends telling you for this holiday season?

6:34Yeah, I think, good question and good to see you again, Nina. I think the, underneath of that, and let me provide the global scale of ACI. We operate in about 90 countries globally and our banking business is actually about 75 % outside the US. And as you think on how that's developed, a lot of it has to do with, Nina, how we're servicing economies that are either undercredited or underbanked. And giving them the ability to do digital payments through a debit transaction or other types of electronic payments is really important to our culture and our mission. So as we go do that, we're seeing good demand across Asia, Latin America, you know, for these different payment schemes and real-time payments to provide to those folks.

7:18As you think about this season, I mentioned this is a peak season. We think the shift more and more towards digital payments is continuing to happen. We see that through our platform. When we last talked, I mentioned on a year-to-date basis, we're going 12%. So really nice demand. And that's across both of our businesses here in the US or internationally as well, as you look across our payment software business. Yeah, just curious, actually, do you see this growth in buy now, pay later transactions that we've seen across platforms as also that's showing in your business? Yeah, and I will say, I mean, our business is largely agnostic to how you want to pay, but that is a good reason why to use a digital electronic payment versus, let's say, cash.

8:05And the ability to do that, it's one of the reasons we're taking good market share within our bill pay business. This is a business that we've gotten it from lower to mid-single up to market share levels that grow in 12%. And to the point of your underlying of your question there, that is providing more payment types is why a lot of customers in this space are choosing to no longer write their own bill pay technology in their app or their website, but come to a leader like ACI to do that for them. that can give them more options around pay later, use credit, use other forms of payments as well.

8:42Well, on that, Bobby, we actually had Tom Warsup on Bloomberg Crypto just about five weeks ago, back in the middle of October. He was here in the city to talk a little bit about stablecoins, speaking of different types of payments. And I'm wondering how big of a business at this point you see that getting use of stablecoins, especially for cross-border transactions. Do you see it sticking? Yeah, I think I remember I think he said that, you know, you were talking about the death of cash is greatly exaggerated, right? When he saw it. And admittedly, what we were trying to lean into there was we don't see, you know, any one payment type really going away.

9:21And I think that's the reason why there's such a need, you know, as stablecoin sees more adoption, continues to ramp, you know, I will. As you look underneath of that, it's it's definitely an emerging payment type provides faster, cheaper, more transparent ways to transfer money, particularly across borders, like you mentioned. But it adds a ton of complexity for our customers. To add this as an additional payment type, it's one of the core reasons when we went out and surveyed 200 customers about two years ago, we asked them, where should we invest? It was a very customer-oriented product market fit for our new platform, ACI Kinetic.

9:58And this is a payments hub. It doesn't bias one payment type, one rail. It can lean across all these payment types. It helps you orchestrate them because the complexity of adopting stablecoin, you see a lot of banking announcements on either their own stablecoin or their ability for tokenized deposits. It's great optionality. And in ACI, we love the idea of giving consumers and more optionality and choice and flexibility. But that provides a lot of complexity for our customers, which is where they need our help and is right in our sweet spot. Just wondering, actually, in terms of stablecoin payments, is that consumers using those on your platform?

10:36Is it business to business? What is that looking like? Yeah, I think we, so as you think of our multiple platforms within our bill pay, our merchant business, we've provided the option. We had a strategic partnership with BitPay that we announced last quarter that unlocks the ability to use those across those platforms. If you think of our critical banking business, that's really a mission critical layer that banks are using around the world. Those volumes, we have the capability there. We have the payment infrastructure. We support stable coins, tokenized deposits to the new payment type, the interoperability.

11:16Most of the volumes I see there, Nina, are within the crypto universe themselves. It's going from a highly volatile cryptocurrency. And if you want to get the stability to move that, you'll see a transaction of going from, you know, a Bitcoin over to a stable coin. We don't see a lot of transactions that, you know, So, you know, compared to the, you know, we do billions of transactions every single day with trillions of dollars attached to those transactions. And within those, there's still more across the traditional payment types that we see within our banking data. Hey, you know, we kicked off, Bobby, our introduction to you talking about the so-called friendly fraud expected this holiday shopping season.

12:02And in particular, we're looking at the weekend and all the way through. How much risk is there from this? And especially when customers dispute transactions following a purchase. Yeah, I think, you know, friendly fraud for folks is a new term to this is things like wardrobing, buying something, wearing it for a long time, returning it or, you know, stolen goods that you try to return to the provider. And there's they're getting more and more sophisticated. It's terrible. Yeah. I mean, come on. This is growing upwards of 25%. And if you think of the average return, it was about$150. If you remember last year, it's up to about$200, the average transaction that's going through these types of friendly fraud.

12:46We have a platform. So I talked about servicing 80 ,000 merchants globally through our product and our software there. We have payment intelligence, and we can get up to 98 % prevention within that space. So it's really a big value add there. And we talk about, you know, I'm a believer in, you know, the use cases around AI. And this is one of them that I love talking when I'm meeting with investors because it shows them a real life example around where our customers are seeing an ROI on reducing this friendly fraud with the capabilities we have on our platform. Maybe we should all take an ethics lesson.

13:23I don't know. I hadn't heard friendly fraud before. Right. It's just, oh my gosh. You know it when you see it. You know it apparently when you see it. Hey, listen, Bobby, thank you so much. We really appreciate it. Happy Thanksgiving. Bobby LeBrock, he is CFO of ACI Worldwide. Nina Trentman, thank you always. Happy holidays. Bloomberg News Senior Editor. She writes the CFO Briefing newsletter. You can find it at Bloomberg.com slash CFO Briefing. And for more Bloomberg coverage of CFOs, be sure to check out the latest episode of the Chief Future Officer Series. It features the CFO of Standard Chartered Bank, Diego De Georgie, on his major role and the bank's expansion into digital assets and how AI is changing the job of CFO.

14:04You can watch Chief Future Officer right now on Bloomberg.com and of course on YouTube.

14:12Whatever your goal, trade show giveaways, client gifts, or team gear, 4imprint has the promo products to match. With thousands of options, from apparel and drinkware to tech and totes, it's easy to find the right fit for your brand and budget with standout choices at every price point. And with their 360 degree guarantee, you can be 4imprint certain your order will show up just right, right on time. Explore more at 4imprint.com. 4imprint. 4certain. When you're running a business, the best days are the ones where priorities stay on track. For midsize and large companies, risk can affect multiple parts of the organization at once, from property and liability to cyber and regulatory challenges.

14:52At that level, managing risk becomes an ongoing discipline. At the Hartford, the focus is on helping businesses manage risk before it turns into something more disruptive. And when losses do happen, that work is paired with insurance coverage shaped by years of underwriting, risk engineering and claims experience. Learn more at the Hartford dot com slash risk mitigation. Policies provided by Hartford Fire Insurance Company and its property and casualty affiliates, Hartford, Connecticut. So as a pizza genius, I know pizza shop orders come from, well, everywhere. With Genius by Global Payments, online orders actually sink straight into your kitchen.

15:31It's as simple as pie. And with digital menu boards, your specials, your prices, your brand, always front and center. It's one system, ready for game night crowds. Any night of the week, really. Big league reliability for any business. That's genius. These days, it seems like AI agents are just about everywhere you turn. Every field and every function. But without identity, you can't trust they'll serve your business instead of jeopardizing it. Fortunately, Okta helps you get identity right by securing your AI agent's identities, giving you a single layer of control, a single standard of trust.

16:09So whether an AI agent supports a single user or your entire enterprise, with Okta, you'll turn risk into opportunity. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. Okta secures AI.