ACI Worldwide, Inc. (ACI) develops, markets, installs, and supports a broad line of software solutions that deliver intelligent payments orchestration to banks, merchants, and billers.
ACI powers the payments ecosystem by supporting any channel, any network, and any payment type. The company’s solutions support the new payment experiences that help power customers' growth and drive innovation. The company’s intelligent payments orchestration solutions empower customers to modernize their paymen...
ACI Worldwide, Inc. (ACI) develops, markets, installs, and supports a broad line of software solutions that deliver intelligent payments orchestration to banks, merchants, and billers.
ACI powers the payments ecosystem by supporting any channel, any network, and any payment type. The company’s solutions support the new payment experiences that help power customers' growth and drive innovation. The company’s intelligent payments orchestration solutions empower customers to modernize their payments infrastructure to support the transactions their businesses need to stay ahead - at scale and without downtime.
At ACI, the company builds software solutions that make complex payments simple and secure for the world’s leading financial institutions and large enterprises. The company’s solutions and services are used globally by banks of all sizes, central banks, intermediaries, merchants, and billers, as well as third-party digital payment processors, payment associations, switch interchanges, and a wide range of transaction-generating endpoints, including automated teller machines (‘ATM’), merchant point-of-sale (‘POS’) terminals, bank branches, mobile phones, tablets, corporations, and internet commerce sites. The authentication, authorization, switching, settlement, fraud-checking, and reconciliation of digital payments is a complex activity due to the large number of locations and variety of sources from which transactions can be generated, the large number of participants in the market, high transaction volumes, geographically dispersed networks, differing types of authorization, and varied reporting requirements. These activities are typically performed online and are conducted 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
ACI combines a global perspective with local presence to tailor digital payment solutions for the company’s customers. The company has one of the most diverse and robust digital payment solution portfolios in the industry with application software spanning the entire payments value chain.
The company markets its products and services under the ACI Worldwide brand and has gained significant market recognition under this brand name.
Target Markets
ACI’s comprehensive digital payment solutions serve three key markets:
Banks
ACI provides payment solutions to large and mid-size banks globally for both retail banking, digital, and other payment services. The company’s solutions transform banks’ complex payment environments to speed time to market, reduce costs, and deliver a consistent experience to customers across channels while enabling them to prevent and rapidly react to fraudulent activity. In addition, the company enables banks to meet the requirements of different real-time payment schemes and quickly create differentiated products to meet consumer, business, and merchant demands.
ACI’s payment solutions support intermediaries, such as processors, networks, payment service providers (‘PSPs’), and new financial technology (‘fintech’) entrants. The company offers these customers scalable solutions that strategically position them to innovate and achieve growth and cost efficiency, while protecting them against fraud with its artificial intelligence or AI, human, and data expertise. The company’s solutions also allow new entrants in the digital marketplace to access innovative payment schemes, such as the U.S. FedNow Services and RTP from The Clearing House, the U.K. Faster Payments, European TIPS, Australia NPP, South Africa RPP, the Payments Network Malaysia (‘PayNet’), Real-time Retail Payments Platform (‘RPP’), and others.
Merchants
ACI’s support of merchants globally includes Tier 1 and Tier 2 merchants (in-store and online), PSPs, independent selling organizations (‘ISOs’), value-added resellers (‘VARs’), and acquirers who service them. These customers operate in a variety of verticals, including general retail, grocery, hospitality, dining, travel and ticketing, fuel, telecommunications, and others. The company’s solutions provide merchants with a secure, omnichannel payments platform that gives them flexibility and independence. ACI Payments Orchestration Platform serves more than 80,000 merchants worldwide and is powering payments for five of the top 10 retailers globally. The company also offers secure solutions to online-only merchants that provide consumers with a convenient and seamless way to shop.
Billers
Within the biller segment, ACI provides electronic bill presentment and payment (‘EBPP’) services to companies operating in the consumer finance, insurance, healthcare, higher education, utility, government, mortgage, subscription provider, and telecommunications categories. The company’s solution and products enable these customers to support a wide range of payment options and provide a convenient consumer payments experience that drives consumer loyalty and increases revenue. The company also provides fraud abuse protection to its biller customers leveraging the company’s proven AI, human, and data capabilities.
Solutions
ACI is a global software company that provides mission-critical, real-time payment solutions that deliver intelligent payments orchestration to banks, merchants, and billers. Customers use the company’s proven, scalable, and secure solutions to process and manage digital payments, enable omni-commerce payments, present and process bill payments, and manage fraud and risk. The company’s strategic solution areas include the following:
Issuing and Acquiring
ACI offers comprehensive consumer payment solutions ranging from core payment engines to back-office support that enable banks and intermediaries to compete effectively in today’s real-time, open payments ecosystem.
ACI Acquiring is a solution that helps merchant and ATM acquirers process credit, debit, and prepaid card transactions, deliver digital innovation, improve fraud prevention, and reduce interchange fees.
ACI Issuing is a digital payment issuing solution that helps issuers process card transactions, accelerate innovation, give customers new payment offerings, and deliver innovative security, with flexible cloud-based or on-premises deployment.
ACI Enterprise Payments Platform is a market-leading technology that provides payment players global payment processing and orchestration capabilities for all digital payments, including high- and low-value payments, real-time and alternative payments, and cards.
Account-to-Account Payments
ACI supports account-to-account payment processing for banks and intermediaries globally, ensuring multi-bank, multi-currency, and 24x7x365 payment processing capabilities, as well as complete and ongoing regulatory compliance. Offered to the market in several forms, the ACI account-to-account payments capability enables banks to process all types of digital payments with a specific focus on two key growth areas for digital payments:
Support for domestic low-value real-time payments with a complete range of capabilities for 24x7x365 processing of real-time payments, including origination, orchestration, clearing and settlement, fraud detection, and connectivity.
Support for high-value and cross-border payments offering multi-bank, multi-currency, and wire and Real-Time Gross Settlement ("RTGS") payment processing capabilities, as well as cross-border and domestic SWIFT messaging with seamless integrations to multiple clearing and settlement mechanisms.
Merchant Payments
ACI offers merchants a secure and scalable payments platform with the flexibility to support in-store, online, and mobile payments.
ACI Payments Orchestration Platform is a holistic, omnichannel payments platform that orchestrates and optimizes payments by combining a powerful payments gateway with multilayered, AI-based fraud management, advanced business intelligence tools, and access to an extensive global network of acquirers, third-party providers, and alternative payment methods.
Payments Intelligence
ACI’s payments intelligence framework supports banks, merchants, and billers by leveraging generative AI. It effectively combines artificial and human insights with data intelligence to achieve precision, mitigate sophisticated threats, and deliver value-added services for hyper-personalized consumer experiences.
ACI Fraud Management for merchants and billers provides a combination of patented AI technology, referred to as incremental machine learning models, fraud and payments data, predictive and behavioral analytics, positive profiling, customizable fraud strategies, expert support, and consortium data to mitigate risks and reduce the burden of compliance, delivered as a multi-tenant platform as a service, deployed in the public cloud, or on premises. It enables customers to protect their payments end to end from customer check-in to payment and post authorization, enhancing the customer experience.
ACI Fraud Management for financial institutions offers banks, intermediaries, and merchants with private-label portfolios a robust, sophisticated, and easy-to-integrate solution that is able to deliver precise and actionable intelligence in real time by using a combination of sophisticated AI powered algorithms, data orchestration capabilities, network intelligence, and advanced predictive analytics to help prevent fraud and reduce the burden of compliance, delivered as a service, or deployed in the public cloud, or on premises.
ACI Fraud Scoring Services, part of ACI Fraud Management for financial institutions, is an AI-first approach powered by the company’s patented incremental learning technology, delivered via API calls to enhance fraud strategies and complement existing fraud prevention solutions. Available as a service from the company’s platform, it provides customers with a risk assessment that combines the most advanced AI, human, and data capabilities, delivering the precise fraud scores for any type of financial transaction, accompanied by explanation for the assessment. ACI maintains a large set of signals, features, and machine learning models, and orchestrates each transaction through the path that delivers best results. When necessary, ACI monitors, maintains, and refreshes all the machine learning models and strategies used, reducing the burden a customer would have to deploy and maintain the most advanced AI solutions.
Bill Payment
ACI meets the bill payment needs of corporate customers across myriad industries through a range of electronic bill payment offerings that help companies raise consumer satisfaction.
ACI Speedpay is an integrated suite of digital billing, payment, disbursement, and communication services that lowers the cost of presenting and accepting bill payments while delivering industry-leading security. ACI Speedpay is a true omni-channel solution, allowing customers to pay their bills through their preferred channels, whether online, via mobile, or in person. This flexibility is crucial in digital age, where consumers expect seamless and convenient payment experiences.
On-Premises, On-Demand, or Hybrid Software Delivery Options
The company’s software solutions are offered to its customers through either a traditional term software license arrangement where the software is installed and operated on the customer premises or in a cloud environment, through an on-demand arrangement where the solution is maintained and delivered through the public cloud or ACI's private cloud via its global data centers, or a combination of the two based upon their unique needs. Solutions delivered through ACI’s on-demand cloud are available in either a single-tenant environment, known as a Software-as-a-Service (‘SaaS’) offering, or in a multi-tenant environment, known as a Platform-as-a-Service (‘PaaS’) offering. Pricing and payment terms depend on which solutions the customer requires and their transaction volumes. Generally, customers are required to commit to a minimum contract of five years, or three years in the case of certain SaaS and PaaS contracts.
Partnerships and Industry Participation
The company has two major types of third-party product partners: technology partners, or industry leaders with it works closely that drive key industry trends and mandates, and business partners, the company either embed the partners’ technology in ACI products, host the partners’ software in ACI’s cloud as a part of its cloud offerings, or jointly market solutions that include the products of the other company.
Technology partners help the company add value to its solutions and stay abreast of market conditions and industry developments such as standards. In addition, ACI has membership in or participates in the relevant committees of several industry associations, such as the International Organization for Standardization (‘ISO’), Accredited Standards Committee (‘ASC’) X9, ATM Industry Association (‘ATMIA’), Financial Services, Nexo Standards, the U.K. Cards Association, the U.S. Payments Forum, and the PCI Security Standards Council. These partnerships provide direction as it relates to the specifications that are used by the card schemes, real-time payment standards, and, in some cases, hardware vendors. These organizations typically look to ACI as a source of knowledge and experience to be shared in conjunction with creating and enhancing their standards. The benefit to ACI is having the opportunity to influence these standards with concepts and ideas that will benefit the market, the company’s customers, and ACI.
ACI also holds important positions at different payment advisory leader groups worldwide, including advisory board membership with the Faster Payments Council in the U.S., global advisory board membership with the Merchant Risk Council (‘MRC’), and a key stakeholder membership with the European Payments Council (‘EPC’).
Business partner relationships extend the company’s product portfolio, improve its ability to get the company’s solutions to market, and enhance its ability to deliver market-leading solutions. The company shares revenues with these business partners based on several factors related to overall value contribution in the delivery of the joint solution or payment type. The agreements with business partners include referral, resale, traditional original equipment manufacturer (“OEM”) relationships, and transaction fee-based payment-enablement partnerships. These agreements generally grant ACI the right to create an integrated solution that the company hosts or distributes, or provides ACI access to established payment networks or capabilities. The agreements are generally worldwide in scope and have a term of several years.
The company has alliances with its technology partners Microsoft Corporation, Amazon, Red Hat, Google, HPE, IBM, and Oracle, whose industry-leading hardware, software, and cloud-based infrastructure services are utilized by and in delivery of ACI’s products. These partnerships allow the company to understand developments in the partners’ technology and to utilize their expertise in topics like sizing, scalability, and performance testing.
Services
The company offers its customers a wide range of professional services, including consultation, analysis, design, development, implementation, integration, testing, and project management. The company’s service professionals generally perform the majority of the work associated with implementing and integrating its software solutions. In addition, the company works with a limited number of systems integration and services partners, such as Accenture, LLC, Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation, and Stanchion Payments Solution for staff augmentation and coordinated co-prime delivery where appropriate.
Product support services are available to customers after a solution has been installed and are based on the relevant product support category. An extensive team of support analysts are available to assist customers.
In addition, ACI education services with instructor-led courses include both theory and practical sessions to allow students to work though real business scenarios and put their newly learned skills to use. This hands-on approach ensures that the knowledge is retained, and the student is more productive upon their return to the workplace. Some training topics are further supplemented by self-paced eLearning, available to students on demand to support their skills journey. ACI’s education courses provide students with knowledge at all levels to enhance and improve their understanding of ACI products. ACI also provides further, more in-depth technical courses that allow students to use practical labs to enhance what they have learned in the classroom. The ACI trainer's ability to understand customers' systems means ACI may also provide tailored course materials for individual customers. Depending on the products purchased, training may be conducted at a dedicated education facility at one of ACI’s offices, online, on demand, or at the customer site.
Customer Support
ACI provides the company's customers with product support that is available 24/7. The company offers its customers two support options:
Standard Customer Support: After implementation completion, the company provides maintenance services to customers for a monthly product support fee. Maintenance services include new product releases (major, minor and patches) for active products; 24-hour hotline for priority one (P1) problem resolutions; access to its online support portal (eSupport); vendor-required mandates and updates; product documentation; hardware operating system compatibility; and user group membership.
Premium Customer Support: Under the premium customer support option, referred to as the Premium Customer Support Program and available at additional cost, customers are provided support beyond the standard offering. The services available may differ by product and are defined in the customer contract.
The company periodically provides new product releases, which often contain minor product enhancements, that are typically provided at no additional fee for customers under standard customer support agreements. Agreements with the company's customers permit it to charge for substantial product enhancements that are not provided as part of the standard or premium customer support agreement.
Trademarks and Service Marks
ACI, ACI Worldwide, ACI Payments, Inc., ACI Pay, Speedpay, and all ACI product/solution names are trademarks or registered trademarks of the company or one of its subsidiaries, in the United States, other countries or both.
Competition
Key competitors by solution area include the following:
Issuing, Acquiring, and Account-to-Account Payments
The software competitors for ACI’s Issuing, Acquiring, and Account-to-Account Payments solutions include Atos Orgin S.A., Fidelity National Information Service, Inc. (‘FIS’), Finastra, Fiserv, Inc. (‘Fiserv’), Mastercard, NCR, OpenWay Group, SiNSYS, Total System Services, Inc. (Global Payments), Visa, and Volante, as well as small, locally-focused companies such as BPC Banking Technologies, CR2, Financial Software and Systems, Form3, HPS, Icon Solution, Lusis Payments Ltd., Opus Software Solutions Private Limited, PayEx Solutions AS, Renovite, and RS2.
Merchant Payments
Competitors for merchant payments (ACI Payments Orchestration Platform) come from both third-party software and service providers, as well as service organizations run by major banks. Third-party software and service competitors include Adyen, Cybersource (Visa Acceptance Solutions), Fiserv, Ingenico Group, NCR, Square, Inc., Tender Retail Inc., VeriFone Systems, Inc., Worldpay Inc. (FIS), and Worldline.
The company is also competing in some areas with the traditional orchestration layer providers such as IXOpay, Payoneer, Nuvei, and Spreedly.
Payments Intelligence
Principal competitors for the company’s ACI Fraud Management solution are Accertify (American Express), BAE Systems, Cybersource (Visa), Fair Isaac Corporation, Featurespace (Visa), Feedzai, FIS, Fiserv, Forter, Kount, NCR, NICE LTD, and SAS Institute, Inc., as well as dozens of smaller companies focused on niches of this segment such as device identification and anti-money laundering.
Bill Payment
The principal competitors for the company’s ACI Speedpay bill payments solution are FIS, Fiserv, Invoice Cloud, Inc., Kubra Customer Interaction Management, Nelnet, Inc. and Affiliates, Paymentus Corp., PayNearMe, One Inc., Repay, TouchNet Information Systems, Inc., Transact, as well as smaller vertical-specific providers.
Customers
The company provides software products and solutions to its bank, intermediary, and merchant customers worldwide. The company’s biller products and solutions are sold in the United States. As of December 31, 2024, the company served thousands of organizations, including all 10 of the top 10 banks worldwide, as measured by asset size, and 80,000+ merchants, and it has customers in 90+ countries on six continents.
Selling and Implementation
The company’s products are sold and supported directly and through distribution networks covering three geographic regions – the Americas, Europe/Middle East/Africa (‘EMEA’), and Asia Pacific. The company’s primary method of distribution is direct sales by employees assigned to specific target customer segments. The company has sales and services personnel in offices throughout the United States. Outside of the United States, the company’s international subsidiaries sell, support, and service its products and solutions in their local countries. The company’s broad geographic footprint allows it to leverage the business and technical expertise of a global workforce.
The company generates a majority of its sales leads through existing relationships with vendors, direct marketing programs, customers and prospects, or through referrals.
The company uses distributors and referral partners to supplement its direct sales force in countries where it is more efficient and economical to do so. ACI’s distributors, resellers, and system integration partners are enabled to provide supplemental or complete product implementation and customization services directly to the company’s customers or in a joint delivery model.
The company distributes the products of other vendors where they complement its existing product lines. The company is typically responsible for the sales and marketing of the vendors' products, and agreements with these vendors generally provide for revenue sharing based on relative responsibilities.
Proprietary Rights and Licenses
The company relies on a combination of trade secret and copyright laws, license agreements, contractual provisions, and confidentiality agreements to protect its proprietary rights. The company distributes its software products under software license agreements that typically grant customers nonexclusive licenses to use the company’s products. Use of the company’s software products is usually restricted to designated computers, specified locations and/or specified capacity, and is subject to terms and conditions prohibiting unauthorized reproduction or transfer of the company’s software products. The company also seeks to protect the source code of its software as a trade secret and as a copyrighted work.
In addition to the company’s own products, it distributes, or acts as a sales agent for, software developed by third parties. However, the company typically are not involved in the development process used by these third parties. The company’s rights to those third-party products and the associated intellectual property rights are limited by the terms of the contractual agreement between it and the respective third party.
Government Regulation
Certain of the company’s solutions are subject to federal, state, and foreign regulations and requirements.
As a provider of payment services to banks and intermediaries, the company is subject to regulatory oversight and examination by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (‘FFIEC’), an interagency body of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the National Credit Union Administration and various state regulatory authorities as part of the Multi-Region Data Processing Servicer Program (‘MDPS’). The MDPS program includes technology suppliers who provide mission critical applications for a large number of financial institutions that are regulated by multiple regulatory agencies.
ACI Payments, Inc., the company’s EBPP affiliate, is registered as a Money Services Business. Accordingly, the company is subject to the USA Patriot Act and reporting requirements of the Bank Secrecy Act and United States (‘U.S.’) Treasury Regulations.
The company has implemented policies, procedures, and internal controls that are designed to comply with all applicable anti-money laundering laws and regulations. ACI has also implemented policies, procedures, and internal controls that are designed to comply with the regulations and economic sanctions programs administered by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”), which enforces economic and trade sanctions against targeted foreign countries, entities and individuals based on external threats to the U.S. foreign policy, national security, or economy; by other governments; or by global or regional multilateral organizations, such as the United Nations Security Council and the European Union as applicable.
History
The company was founded in 1975. The company was incorporated in 1993. The company was formerly known as Transaction Systems Architects, Inc. and changed its name to ACI Worldwide, Inc. in 2007.
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