Good morning, everyone. Everybody hear me okay? All right. My name is Chuck Nabhan. I cover the payments and fintech space at Stephens. Pleased to host Bobby Leibrock, the CFO of ACI, as well as John Kraft, Head of Investor Relations. For those that aren't familiar with the story, ACI has been the center of the global payments ecosystem for over 50 years, providing mission-critical payment software for banks, merchants, and billers worldwide, including 19 of the top 20 global banks. Gentlemen, appreciate you joining us here again.
Thanks, Chuck.
Look forward to our discussion. Bobby, you're relatively new to the seat, joined earlier this year. I'm interested in what attracted you to the role, what you've learned since joining, and your focus heading into 2026.
Yeah, thanks for letting me start there. As I jump in, appreciate everyone tuning in, and excited to meet everyone here today. In terms of joining the role, I joined about almost six months ago now. To level set on how Chuck described ACI, we're a $1.7 billion software and SaaS company, mission-critical to our customers and the consumers that use these technologies of our customers. I was excited to jump in the middle of this. I have a software background and apply it to a space like payments that's growing so fast, has the complexity that's within this that our company is positioned to capture. Also, we're a very sound company. When you look underneath of it, we've got about $500 million in EBITDA that we generate from that, about two-thirds of that's realized in cash.
It gives us a good footing to actually place bets and serve that mission for us. In terms of six months in, probably two broader observations that were exciting for me. One, we've had a number of events that I've got to meet our customers, our consumers of our customers, our partners, and the broader ecosystem. It's been really exciting how really mission-critical what we do is for everyone that we serve, whether it's how we're trying to move faster in the world of payments, whether how mission-critical we are to the businesses that we've partnered with. I think that's you mentioned, Chuck, you've been around for 50 years. Really, that mission-critical nature of it is what's there. We serve all the top 10 banks. We serve 60 of the top 100 banks with our banking software platform.
We serve a few thousand bill pay customers on that side. We are the largest bill pay provider with our Speedpay platform. When I have gotten to meet them, kind of the thing that has really stood out to me is how important we are to them. They need our help to compete and to drive their business forward. That actually gives us a ton of permission to invest in this space and continue to grow in this space. The other part, and this is part of why I joined, but it has been substantiated since I joined, we are just getting started.
Yeah.
I think it's a couple of years in. We have a new CEO, Tom Warsop, that joined a couple of years in. We're reorienting the company towards high single-digit growth, EBITDA to pace along with that, and really investing in innovation that our customers have asked for. I'm excited to get in on kind of the early innings of that transformation we're going through as a team. It really jumped out to me that we're just getting started and there's a lot of opportunity ahead.
Got it. I want to branch off that a little bit. You're mission-critical in the sense that I've heard ACI described as the plumbing of payments. What you do and the service you provide is necessary just for many of your clients to operate. You touched on innovation. You touched on adding value. Could we maybe branch off and talk about your focus in terms of innovation and how you're adding value on top of just the basic plumbing of payments?
Sure. I'll zoom into one of our largest focuses right now on the banking payment software side. This is an area, like Chuck said, we've got decades of trust that we've built up with our clients dating back to when we're doing all of their debit switching to all of their wires, all these different payment types. What's been obvious, and then a lot of discussion around stablecoin, how are we going to capitalize on that opportunity as well? The word that comes up across all those customer conversations is complexity. That's usually when you ask a partner for help like ACI. To me, the innovation that we're providing there, we call it intelligent payment orchestration. I think intelligent is our humble way of saying AI. In our company, we're infusing payments and different payment types with the intelligence that our customers need.
When I say we're just getting started, admittedly, the payment area, when you think of banks and what they're doing around payments, they're just getting started in terms of unlocking the capabilities for their business they could there. There's a lot of those top 10 banks, top 100 banks that I've talked with that they're still using human-based capacity to check that payments are right. They're looking at when you and I go in to do a wire at a bank here, there's human beings offshore making sure that those numbers are right that the teller put in for the wire. In the year 2025, our software, we've showed them, when you go to our new platform, the intelligent payment orchestration, it's a payments hub called Connetic. That's our marketing name for what we're bringing to bear there. It is the most holistic, the best breadth, the most payment types.
It can provide AI-based solutions in those areas to displace the need to have people doing what those banks call repair. They have hundreds of people that are doing repair and wire transactions. They see the opportunity in our Connetic platform to do that. The other side of it, bill pay, equal focus on what customers need there as well. We have a platform there called Speedpay. We have multiple platforms that we've acquired through the years there. We're investing all of our innovation and R&D efforts into a platform called Speedpay One. All new customers go into there. Really, the way we've been able to outpace the market there and take share is this is an area where a lot of customers might have written themselves a bill pay solution.
They're a utility, they're an energy company, they're maybe consumer finance, they wanted the ability in their website or their app to do a bill pay. Twenty years ago, fifteen years ago, maybe writing it yourself was good enough. With how fast payments are moving, we have partnerships with BitPay out there if you want to pay with crypto. We have, of course, your Google Wallet, your Apple Pay. To keep up with the pace of how consumers want the flexibility to pay, you need to continue to innovate that platform. It is not the competitive advantage of our customers or utilities or governments to do that. They turn to us as the leader in that space.
Got it.
Just to add on to the complexity theme, I think it's underappreciated with the investment community, particularly in the banks, how complex their systems are. Not only have they done years of acquisitions and not always integrated very well, but there's new payment types coming on every day. We don't get rid of old payment types. There is just more and more complexity, which is what's driving the business and I think part of our growth acceleration to ACI.
Thanks.
Just to drill into bill pay a little more, you've put out a 7%-9% revenue growth target, but you've exceeded that through the year. Could you talk about the factors that have led to that outperformance?
Yeah. To your point, I mean, we've posted 12% growth there through nine months, and we have a strong backlog there going double digits within that business. I would say some of it is the market factors I described, right? Kind of a consolidation towards the top players in that market, us being one where customers want to turn to a proven solution with the resiliency they need. Really, as I've gotten underneath the covers in that business, yes, we have mission-critical software that runs the top banks. That business is providing mission-critical payments for consumers and our customers. These are payments where if you miss one, your credit score gets dinged. That's a mission-critical payment in my household. If you miss a payment, it's going to impact your credit. Our mantra there is never miss a payment.
That goes from our engineering teams to our teams that are supporting those customers, our SaaS platform, to the customers we have, to the consumers. That mantra really across there has resonated. The other part I'd say, though, on how we're accelerating our growth, because this is two or three, four times the growth rate we've posted in this segment of our business in the last five years. We acquired the bulk of this business about five years ago. We've gotten very disciplined. I mentioned we're in the early innings of what Tom, our CEO, and our general management model under Ron there is doing. We've segmented our sales force, not exactly a hunter farmer, but think of it that way. We actually have people going out every day looking, how do I expand this into other components of the customers we have?
How do I expand it into new logos? That is what has driven our growth this year. We have a good pipeline and have had good execution across that.
Great. Looking high level, you're coming off another strong quarter, 7% revenue growth overall, 10% recurring, and you've raised the full-year guidance. If you take a step back, there's historically been a license-based concentration that's caused some issues in terms of revenue visibility and performance versus guidance. What's changed in terms of your philosophy and just operations of the business that have facilitated some of the predictability and the momentum that you've been seeing in the past year or so?
I mean, as you're describing, Chuck, for folks that haven't dove a layer deeper in ACI, we do five-year contracts, not perpetual licenses, but five-year recurring revenue contracts. Every five years, our customers come in and commit to another five years. It speaks to the mission criticality of our software that they're willing to commit to us for five years because they don't want that volatility of going through an RFP or a technical assessment every two or three years, like other parts of the tech industry. Philosophy, I definitely believe that the visibility and sometimes the lumpiness of how those licenses come in can impact a general investor's perception of willing to commit to ACI. I acknowledge that I've heard that feedback. I spent a lot of time getting firsthand feedback from current and potential investors over the last six months.
Visibility-wise, to your point, the benefit of our model is we have over 85% visibility into next year's revenue. We usually guide entering a year within 1%-3% ranges, right? That's the beauty of a $1.7 billion business growing 10% last year, guiding up to 10% on the top end this year. We can get pretty close to what that's going to be. Within that, though, it's usually not the years that are volatile. It's the quarters.
Yep.
This year, our business grew 25% in the first quarter. We were ecstatic about that. It almost felt like we got punished after that. We grew 7%, 7% the last two quarters, 12% year- to- date. We are really pleased with how the business is performing. We are not going to make a change that satisfies, let's say, the recurring side of it and gives up the commitments that we are getting from customers, or it forces customers to consume in a way that they are not willing to on a SaaS-based model when most of these top banks still want to run software in their own private clouds. It is something we are working on. I think the quarterly visibility could be something that folks would appreciate more.
Yep. Certainly agree. Great. If we could talk about the payments software business and some of the trends underlying banking, how do you see the shift towards real-time payments and cross-border modernization playing into your advantage?
Yeah. I think, and for context, this is just a bit more than half of our revenue and probably makes up three quarters of our EBITDA. I mean, Chuck's asking about one of the core valuable pieces of ACI when we look at this. The magic number is 12 year to date. This is also growing 12%. Each of our segments are growing 12%. As you think about real-time and fraud, that's going to be where I come to is how are we driving some of this growth on a multi-year basis. If you think about it, I like to decompose it, think about it like on an NRR approach, right? This business has very high retention rates, in the upper 90-ish type retention rates.
The base business, we're able to secure that, and customers don't want to switch this to a homegrown solution, or no one has the breadth we do across all the different payment types, including real-time and fraud. Within that, every five years, we price this and we attach value to this part of our business to customers' transactions. They pay us more the more transactions they do. They like this because it's complete variability to their model. Yes, they pay a platform fee from a software license and maintenance, but that is smaller than actually the capacity they have to pay. We get nice capacity on top of that kind of base retention rate. Plus, we get price.
This is an area that, with the leadership position we have, we're judicious with it, but not complacent with the price that we pass along to our customers in this space. The balance there is we want them to invest in new capacity or new products like fraud, like real-time. As you think about this, the volume we've attached to, it's usually debit transactions, it's wires. Fraud is a capability that is an add-on solution across each of those, or real-time payments is another payment type. That's really where the volume's coming from.
Chuck, just to add on to the real-time part of your question, that is the fastest growing new payment type out there, right? The U.S. is just launching the FedNow. We're getting a little bit of a slow start, but there are many countries around the world that have been at it for a few years now, and we're seeing incredible growth rates in India and Brazil and some of these places. As Bobby said, our contracts are based on transactions ultimately. Every five years when they come back, if there's a good tailwind of growth, those contracts grow nicely. That's one of our, well, it's our top growing product right now. The cross-border portion of that is sort of phase two. We're still in really early innings, I think, of real-time. We're still getting countries that are just getting set up.
Step two might be, and there's starting to be some pilots. I think a couple corridors have the cross-border real-time, but that's the next thing. There are years and years of exciting growth and just in real-time.
Yeah, let's drill into that a little bit. I think here in the U.S., many of us are familiar with FedNow, but it's been relatively slow to ramp up. I think part of the reason for that is that in some respects, we have entrenched payment behaviors here in the U.S., such as using credit card. Could you talk about maybe distinguish between RTP in the U.S. versus RTP in other pieces of the world, such as Brazil or India, where some of the systems there are more mature? I was at your user conference last month, and Colombia had just launched theirs as well.
There are other systems that are launching, ramping quickly, and in the earlier stages. I'd love to drill into that, given that it's such a catalyst for your business.
Yeah. Good. Go ahead. Yeah, I think, I mean, I'll jump in, and John, you can add. To frame a bit where Chuck's coming at too, this part of our business, it's half of our revenue, call it almost $800 million. It's 75% outside the U.S. It does not look like a normal U.S.-headquartered software install base. That's 25% U.S., 75% non-U.S. It speaks to the demand that companies and actually citizens of these countries have for how they can make payments. In the U.S., the access to a lot of us here in this room to credit, credit cards, I mean, I was given a credit card in college before I got a job. It was kind of silly, right? I think that access to credit does not exist in a lot of these countries. You mentioned Colombia.
Debit transactions historically have been higher there, issuing those types of cards. Now a lot of them are going towards real-time payments. That is a big unlock for the digital economies of these countries. A lot of the investments are not coming only from the private sector. They are coming from the government sector to invest in this across Malaysia, across Colombia, across Brazil. That is exciting because then they need a trusted partner to provide the secure, scalable software that can do those payments. Most of the time, they are choosing us, which is exciting for us. They have dealt with us in the past. We have got a long-standing relationship, and they want to expand it from dealing with the banks in their country to a more government central banking relationship for those switches. It has been exciting that we have been chosen for those. I think you have got the stat.
I think it's almost 10 or more across the.
Central infrastructures, yeah.
Yeah, central infrastructures.
Yeah. I mean, just to add, specifically in the U.S., you mentioned the existing credit card infrastructure, right? That works for people. There isn't a huge problem to fix. The other issue is mandates. The countries that have had really strong growth have had mandates to force that growth. Many times, they didn't have a credit card infrastructure. They're going from cash to this electronic payment. There are different drivers in different regions. I think ultimately, we believe that transactions are going to move towards lower-cost methods of payment. That's going to be putting downward pressure on prices, and it's going to be driving people to use lower-cost mechanisms like real-time payments.
Yep. Yep.
Staying with the global payments theme, stablecoin has been obviously a hot topic in the space and for ACI in particular.
I think initially this year, there was some concern around stablecoin disintermediating your revenue from SWIFT, when, as Tom addressed on the second quarter call, I believe, there are ways that you monetize stablecoin adoption, which is still very much in the early stages. It is still very much early stages, and it is a complex topic. If you could maybe help us understand, number one, the role you are going to be playing in stablecoin, and number two, how you see some of the use cases evolving as it pertains to your business.
Yeah. As you pointed out, I think stablecoin could be one of the more misinterpreted factors for ACI. I think we saw some of that happen in Q2. We have been very proactive to try to get out there and describe how we think this is a net benefit to us over the long term, probably neutral based on the volumes we see in the immediate term, because underneath of a new payment type is complexity. As we have looked across the multiple decades of payments from a digital basis that we can see, payments do not go away. They are additive. Whether it is real-time, it is different ways to do crowd. As we think about our business, there are two halves of it, our bill pay business. We are going to allow our merchants and our billers to accept crypto when consumers want to do that here in the U.S. or globally.
That's kind of just easy table stakes. The more high-value work that we can do around stablecoin is going to be within our banking business, where we can think about stablecoin as another point of complexity that, whether it's wires, ACH, debit transactions, that's going to add complexity to the banks that are keeping up with this. You're not going to see ACI, we don't need to come out with a stablecoin because we're the software provider that's going to allow the teams that either need to come up with a stablecoin or want to transact stablecoins through it. I think about it as almost another using the rails or providing the capabilities to do across that. For us, we view it as neutral to upside over the near to medium long term.
I do think it's good to bring it up because I think there's a lot of hype around it, and we're excited by it. You asked where could it probably unlock new opportunities. I think it's around the cross-border. Thinking about cross-border payments being and our customers being banks able to do that faster. I think the thing we'll have to navigate through, not ACI, but more those banks, regulatory. How is that going to work when you're sending payments? I think the top two use cases are in the U.S., sending payments over to India or Mexico. It's domestic labor, workers sending money back to their families. Could stablecoin provide an opportunity? Yes. Is the regulation going to have to keep up with that? Yes. Will ACI be a provider that helps banks facilitate that for workers here in the U.S.? Absolutely.
One of the key differentiators at a high level of ACI, just in general, across all of our products, is that we're agnostic about the types of payment rails, the types of payments, the POS systems, whatever mechanisms are already out there, our software plays nice with others. Our software, specifically, you mentioned the wire and SWIFT. SWIFT is one of the wires or the rails. Fedwire is as well. Stablecoin will be as well. Some of these others regionally, too.
I think it's a good point. Thank you. I want to dive into product a little bit. I know you touched on Connetic. Could we double-click on that?
I know you described what it was, but you had provided, I think it was before you joined, but at the investor day last year, there was some sort of longer-term, medium to longer-term targets in terms of what that could mean for growth. You also signed your first customer as well, which is a great development. Maybe double-click on those developments and how we should think about the timeline.
Yeah. Great. I'm glad to jump in on Connetic . It's really the most exciting thing happening with ACI right now, and we view it as a catalyst for growth over the medium term here, as Chuck was describing. As you get into it, it is a cloud-native payments hub that provides intelligent orchestration. Marketing words, but let me describe what that means for me, the finance guy on the team within there. It is in what that unlocks. Being a cloud-native, our existing predominant way of selling banking software is customer-managed. Think of that as a license. They're buying our software. They're managing it in their own data center. Cloud-native allows us to expand our customer base, expand the TAM in that space.
It unlocks going from the top 10 banks or 60 of the top 100 that use our software to going into the next tier of banks. In the past, those tiers of banks have either gone to an outsourcer, one of our partners that uses our software to provide it, or they've tried to write it in-house or not provided these capabilities. By having a cloud-native solution, they can adopt our Connetic platform and start to have some of the capabilities that the bigger banks have that they want as well that we can help them provide. The cloud-native piece. The payments hub, Connetic is not a payment type. It's not just real-time payments. It's not just stablecoin. It's not just ACH or debit or wire. It's the hub of how those come together.
Customers want, as John said, that agnostic—they want to provide that agnostic experience to their consumers. The hub will allow you to have the value prop we've had for 50 years of security, scalability, and now more intelligence we can put around that, around fraud and what the help they need to unlock that capability. The other thing that it's done that I think has been a game changer for our growth profile, when you're signing a renewal in the software business, customers look at where you're spending their maintenance dollars. They want to know, why am I investing? As much as everyone at this conference is an investor in different companies and ACI, our customers have an investment mentality when they continue to buy five-year renewals of our software. They want to see what they're getting for that.
Connetic, it's not just something we brought to them to try to excite them. It's something that they co-developed with us. Two years ago, we asked our top 200 banking customers, what do you need? A lot of companies have come up with a payments hub. We could have done that easily. We wanted to listen to our top 200 customers and ask them to co-develop, what do you need most? It was around this orchestration of all the complexity they're dealing with. Complexity isn't just payment types. You described mandates. When I met with one of their top Mexican customers a couple of weeks ago, I asked them, what's your biggest pain point? He said, mandates. Keeping up with the regulation that the government comes out that he needs to comply with in Mexico is what he needs our help with.
Having a central hub that we can do that and bring that value to him real-time is what got him the most excited. You think about the you asked the modeling question too. You did not use the word model, but that is what you are hinting at, right? You are like, when do we model in the growth? My thought, as we think about there, we just signed our first deal. We have a good pipeline that we have been talking about. The good part about asking 200 customers about what they want and then building it is you know who your target audience is in terms of pipeline. We have got a rich pipeline that we are managing through. I expect a drumbeat of wins here, but these are going to be deals that take a bit of time to implement.
If they were easy, the customer would not ask our help and use our software. They would do it themselves or a less trusted player. The way we have described it in our medium-term, longer-term roadmap is right now, when I talk about next year, we have got confidence that we are going to grow high single digits again next year, our long-term model. It does not include a benefit from Connetic yet. That will be on top of that. We do expect to start seeing revenue from this platform, but it will be additive to that model through time.
Just to be clear, there's no disintermediation of anything. This is an additive product. There's nothing that's going away. This is just one more product in our suite. To put a fine point on that, it's also a recurring revenue source as well.
Yes. Yep.
Great. Switching gears to biller, you've talked about the Speedpay One platform, which is the new cloud-native bill platform. At the investor day last year, you talked about consolidating some of your legacy platforms. Could you talk about the innovation that this is bringing to the value proposition it's bringing to your clients?
Yeah. I think the customers, I mean, it was a packed house. We did a demo of what we call our Speedpay One platform, which is, as Chuck said, where our development efforts are going on. Where new customers go, we have existing customers there. As we've done acquisitions in the past, like our PAY.ON, or you get into the S1 acquisition we did, we have an install base of customers using our prior bill pay technologies. We wanted to create a destination that they're incented to go to. As they look at that, there's a couple of benefits there. One, this area around capabilities, different payment types that they can provide their customers. What I've been interested in is, as you think back, I was alluding to it earlier, the bill pay experience for a lot of these customers is the customer experience.
If you're Starbucks, the payment experience has evaporated, right? Now we go on the app, we pick out our thing, and we show up, and our coffee's ready. There's no product that we really get excited about when you're paying your energy bill or your propane bill, right? There's not a, "Oh, I got better energy from this." No, there's only one source. Your customer experience when you're dealing with these types of entities is the bill pay experience. It's the clarity of that. It's the consistency and the explanation of why your bill might have gone up or it might go down or it might be. Within that, it's the ease of being able to pay that as well. Those capabilities, that transparency, the people I meet with, with our customers here are not the CIO. It's the VP of customer experience.
Those are the ones that care about our product in this space. They get very excited about what they see with our Speedpay One platform. It is not just bells and whistles. They do get excited about those. They want to see kind of the customer experience side, but they also care about the reliability, the backup. Do you have, take me through your data center strategy, your cloud backup? What are you doing with our data? This is a regulated area that gets a lot of eyeballs on it that they trust ACI to manage for them. It is those couple of buckets. I will say it is an area that is not a forced migration. We are not forcing customers to change out this experience. We are incenting them.
The word I used was incenting them to do it with the feature functions they get with the reliability, the security, and that side of it as well.
Got it. Ultimately, that'll save us some money in managing these disparate systems and just having one to focus on cost and investment. Got it. I want to finish with a couple of financial questions, and then we'll open it up to questions. As you look at the 2026 and beyond, I think you've mentioned a target for sustained high single-digit revenue growth with improving margins. What are the biggest priorities for ACI over the next, say, 12 to 18 months? I know you've touched on some of them in terms of positioning the company to hit those targets.
Yeah. Since Tom has come in, he's restructured us for a growth orientation. That's everything from incentives to sales commission design to how we segment our focus of our sales team. Most importantly, our innovation, getting back to a culture of providing the innovation that our customers want. To me, the two big buckets, thinking about 2026 and delivering on those targets. To me, what we do in 2026 is equally as important to 2026, but also 2027, right? That's our mentality, we're thinking about this in multi-year, long-term sustainable growth. I have a lot of visibility into next year's revenue, I want to take the actions over the next 12 months that give me just as much visibility into the next year after that on an accelerated basis when we can. Within that, it's hitting the innovation roadmap.
Connetic, as I described it, has kind of a rolling thunder approach to innovation that our customers need. We've prioritized the U.S. and Europe. I've got loud customers in APAC and in Latin America that would love those capabilities unlocked. Those are in the years ahead. There are different capabilities within the Connetic roadmap that are going to come out in Q1, Q3, and throughout the year that are going to unlock that. Hitting those milestones. On the Speedpay One, we have a similar roadmap we need to deliver against. The other half of it, though, is that sales execution and growth orientation that we have. There's an equal part to this around partnerships. We did our Payments Unleashed event, which is the first event we've done globally like this.
When I step back and think about what was one of the bigger takeaways I had from there, the complexity and the speed at which our payment ecosystem is moving is forcing our customers to want us to partner more. In prior jobs, I have managed IT departments and IT innovation for a company. That was the biggest thing. It is like, stop coming to me as point providers. I want you. I think I saw a lot of our partners, the ecosystem around payments coming together to say, what can SWIFT do plus what can ACI do together with BitPay, with different central governments? To me, that partnership side is going to be important as we enter next year within our go-to-market model as well.
Got it. I want to finish with capital allocation. One of the aspects of the story that sometimes gets overlooked is the capital flexibility. You have been pretty active on the buyback front recently. You also announced an acquisition as well, which we could touch on. Could you talk about your priorities in terms of capital allocation and maybe touch on where you are from a leverage standpoint?
Yeah. Happy to. I mean, what we're working with, like you said, a lot of flexibility, that $500 million of EBITDA we're going to generate this year. We typically generate about two-thirds of that in operating cash flow. This year, we bought back 3 million shares, about $150 million through the first nine months. We upped our authorization to $500 million here within the last few weeks. The reason we're doubling down on the share repurchase right now is we've paid down our debt quite a bit the last few years. Our leverage, we had a target of 2.5x. We took that to 2.0x. We're right now at a 1.3x leverage. Paying down debt has been a priority. The next priority after that becomes returning capital to shareholders and also balancing that with what other alternatives are out there.
We recently announced we're always doing what's the smartest allocation of capital to drive the innovation I talked about. We acquired a small company called Payment Components out of Greece, a Europe player that is accelerating our Connetic roadmap. That was a smart use of cash in our view because it allows us the quicker time to value of our Connetic area. We are going to be opportunistic with it. We are always looking at ways to accelerate our business inorganically as well. We return capital to shareholders from a share repurchase standpoint, though, as well.
Terrific. Thank you. We have a few more minutes. I want to open it up to questions.
Yes.
Just given you made a reference to some acquisitions in the past and just as it relates to maybe the systems consolidation journey, I think it'd be helpful to get a sense of, I guess, how many systems are you guys currently running on today and what's the goal going forward and just kind of the journey there?
We see an opportunity there. I mean, within our bill pay biller business, we have customers running on about four different generations within those acquisitions with concerted efforts not to attrit any of those customers through kind of a forced change, but to get them into the new technology. To us, if you do it in the right way, you can have a win where you start to improve adoption on a revenue standpoint, and you also could get the margin expansion by consolidating in a more cloud-native and modern way too.
I guess, on the real-time payment side, how many different systems would you say?
I don't think it's a system basis there. Most of those are customer-managed. The main deliverable there around Connetic being a SaaS cloud-managed or cloud-native environment, that's a single cloud-native architecture. We're writing it as a cloud-native solution. If customers want to run it in their own data centers, we're not going to say no because we've learned in the banking area that could be table stakes for them to adopt our technology, but they can run it on Kubernetes and a private cloud as opposed to in a classical way.
The only area where there's this systems integration, kind of to the root of your question, is on the bill pay side from those acquisitions. As Bobby said, we've got the new Go Forward product. All new customers are going there, and we're going to be very gentle getting the existing customers there. In the real-time space, there are a number of different country-specific systems that we write the software for, but that's all ACI homegrown, homebuilt.
Okay. I read somewhere between 20 and 40 systems. That's the wrong number?
Gosh, the account keeps changing, but we have 10 or 11 central infrastructures.
System, you said, though, right?
That's right.
Yeah. No, you're going to answer central banking. I think system sounds like a pretty generic word. If you show me where you read it, I'll try to put it in better context.
Okay. Yeah. I guess because recent CFI has just kind of given the Pfizer earnings, I think they talked about going from 15 to 5, and it sounded like that was so just being conscious about kind of where that might.
Yeah. We do not view this as a big problem. We view it as a bit of an opportunity. It is not something that is holding us back or restricting investment. That is where I think Pfizer, I think, might have been referencing to it. On our banking side, our banking software side, the bulk of that business is us writing the software and selling it to a customer, and they manage it themselves. Yeah.
In the 12% kind of growth across your businesses, I guess how much of that is, I guess, new logos versus all universal pricing? I'm just curious the pricing component.
Yeah. We have not given a specific numeric, but I'll describe how I've been referencing that. I was alluding to it a bit where our base renewal rates are very strong. They're in the high 90% across that area of our business. When you add on top of that volume and price, that gets us into our historical growth ranges, which go back three to five years. We used to grow more in the low to mid single digits. The expansion into new products, new scope for our customers, as well as new logos, is going to get us the delta. When you look at the 12%, that includes a 25% growth in Q1. We were transparent that a lot of that came from a new logo that we got in Asia-Pac, which was a big competitive takeout for us.
That was all on top of what we'd get from price. Yes.
Are UPI and PIX both customers now? Can you talk about the economics for transactional now?
I didn't hear the first thing.
Are UPI and PIX both customers now? Economics for transaction?
Yeah. I think.
We're involved in both countries. Yeah. It's not really a customer situation, but it's a software-enabled situation in those countries. Yeah.
The economics for transaction there, what's?
Typically, as Bobby said earlier, the bulk of the real-time payment systems that we've implemented to date are with our existing customers that prefer an on-premise type of software arrangement. Our licensing prices essentially come down to the volume that they're doing. It's the big component of the license itself, but it's all five-year deals based on the volume they're doing.
I think on a unit economics basis, we've talked about this, whether it's real-time or stablecoin and some of your points there. We get better unit economics there per transaction because the volumes are smaller than, let's say, debit or wire currently. You'll start to see maybe those curves touch each other some decade or some year. At the moment, new payment types mean better unit economics for us because our customers will pay more per unit of transaction earlier in the adoption curve.
Yes.
Can you refer to net revenue retention?
Yes.
Certainly in the mid-90s. Is the goal to?
No, no. Base.
That's gross.
Yes. Yeah.
Then the idea is net will be where it's laid down, is it going back into the 100%?
Yeah. I was trying to choreograph. To me, a net revenue disclosure could be something that would be helpful. We have not disclosed that historically. Me being relatively new, that's kind of a table stakes software disclosure. I was trying to describe in the context of net revenue retention, how are we growing 12%? We're not growing 12% with a high 90s net retention rate. It's better than that. I've been happy with our net revenue retention rates, and I think it's something that we could get credit for with more disclosure.
For PIX and EPI, for example, I guess, are you helping to connect the bank to the, I guess, centralized? I guess what actually you're doing there?
Yeah. I do not think either of those are our central infrastructure, but we have bank customers and help those banks connect to those networks. Really, in all these real-time schemes in each country, there are two pieces. There is the central infrastructure, which is sort of the hub, and then there is the bank connectivity. We participate in both those, but we tend to have more weighting with the banks than with the central infrastructures. John, maybe drill into that a little further. Maybe give an example of if a global institution was to move into a new country and wanted to connect to the switch, how that accelerates their ability to do so versus maybe building their own solution.
I mean, just the central infrastructures are typically run by the central bank or a consortium of banks in a particular country.
They decide whether they want to write software or outsource software to run that central infrastructure. We go in there. If they want software that they want to manage themselves, that's where we would compete. That's kind of the model in our business. Further.
Transfer-based connecting, yeah.
Yeah. Further, we'll go to all the banks and we'll help them with the connectivity software that they'll need. If they're going to transact across that network, they need to interface with that. There are two sides of the transaction.
Got it.
Okay. John, Bobby, appreciate you joining us. Thanks to everybody in the audience. We'll be around all day if anybody has any questions or yeah. Thanks, guys.