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ACI Worldwide Inc (ACIW 1.62%)
Q4Â 2019 Earnings Call
Feb 27, 2020, 8:30 a.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the ACI Quarter four Earnings Announcement Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]
I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. John Kraft. Thank you. Sir, you may go ahead.
John Kraft -- Vice President, Investor Relations and Strategic Analysis
Thank you, Sarah, and thank you all for joining our earnings call for the quarter and full year ending December 31, 2019. I'm joined this morning by Craig Saks, our Interim President and CEO; and Scott Behrens, our CFO. Before we begin, please take note of the forward-looking statements disclaimer included in our press release issued earlier today and filed with the SEC. We will make forward-looking statements on today's call, including about 2020 guidance. Forward-looking statements inherently involve risks and uncertainties and reflect our view as of today, and we are under no obligation to update this information.
With that, I'll turn it over to Craig.
Craig Saks -- Interim President and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, John. Good morning, everyone. I trust you all are well, this week's market noise aside. Nonetheless, thank you so much for joining us for our 2019 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Earnings Conference Call. Before we discuss our results, I would first like to take a few minutes to talk about the leadership announcement we made last week. Since Phil Heasley announced his intention to retire back in November, the board has continued working on a succession planning process, which included working with executive search firm, Russell Reynolds, to identify potential candidates to be a successor. As you saw, following a comprehensive process, ACI has appointed Odilon Almeida as President and Chief Executive Officer, effective March 9, 2020. He will also serve as a member of ACI's Board of Directors. Odilon joins ACI from Advent International, where he was most recently an Operating Partner, supporting business development at the fund's portfolio companies, with a particular focus on growth initiatives that supported the higher sales and earnings. Prior to his time at Advent, Odilon had a distinguished 17-year career with Western union, culminating in his role as President of Western Union's Global Money Transfer business.
Odilon is a seasoned executive with leadership experience spanning multiple industries and countries, two decades of Payments experience and a strong track record of growth acceleration and value creation. He has a deep understanding of ACI's markets and customer segments and has proven expertise leading companies that are navigating digital transformation. I look forward to getting to know him better and working with him in my new role as Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer. ACI has tremendous prospects for growth and long-term shareholder value creation, and we're all excited to have Odilon help us achieve our goals. With that, I'll now turn to our results. As we announced in our January call, ACI's 2019 revenue and adjusted EBITDA were negatively impacted principally by a large customer expansion contracts that did not sign as expected in December. As a result of this contract not signing as expected as well as other deals that slipped into 2020, our new bookings also did not meet our expectations. I am, however, pleased to announce that we have made progress on this delayed 2019 contract. Recently, this customer signed an amendment to our contract, which renews the current relationship and secures our long-term and secures their long-term commitment to ACI. While this contract renewal does not deliver incremental revenue at this time, it includes a framework for future increases in capacity and enables us to focus on growing our relationship. As a mutual affirmation of our partnership as well as the next step toward a future expansion, I view this very positively as a win-win.
Now that we have closed our 2019 financials, I would like to put the full year into context and share some customer highlights and momentum that position us very well for 2020 and beyond. Scott will follow with some additional details on our financials in a few minutes. 2019 was a positive year for ACI on many levels. We continue to advance and grow our business amid the M&A activity that transform parts of our industry. We believe we have a unique value proposition serving the real-time any-to-any payment needs of banks, intermediaries, billers and merchants. We continue to secure strategic wins that validate ACR's strength and leadership across the real-time, retail payments, merchant and e-commerce payments, bill payments and Payment Intelligence areas. Our pipelines are strong. Our solutions continue to be industry leaders. Our recurring revenue streams are a large and growing part of our business, and we are confident about our outlook. In terms of growth. ACI's revenue increased 25% over 2018, with the Speedpay acquisition making an important contribution to both revenue and EBITDA. The acquisition brought substantial scale and profitability to our ACI On Demand business, which now represents more than half of consolidated revenues and contributes to our more than 70% recurring revenue. On an organic basis in 2019, ACI also grew revenues in key solution areas, in particular, e-commerce and real-time payments, which represent two of the fastest-growing transaction areas globally. Strong growth in these areas validates our strategy and positioning efforts. With an unmatched number of payment endpoints and global reach, ACI is very well positioned to seize an even greater share of these opportunities in 2020 and beyond.
Now I'd like to turn to our core customer segments, highlighting representative customer wins and momentum. Starting with our biller customer segment. The additional Speedpay places ACI as the number one direct Bill Pay provider in the U.S. We see further opportunities to accelerate revenue growth in this business via the additional functionality, including the fast-growing areas of real-time payments and subscription billing. Our road map is advancing as we bring together the Speedpay front end with the ACI back end to create best-in-class biller platform capable of tremendous scale and continued improved operating margins. We continue to see strong retention and cross-sell opportunities among our biller base. In particular, we are very pleased with our early success in adding our patented mobile digital wallet solution to our existing base of customers. In Q4, we signed both new and expanded electronic bill payment deals in key verticals, including utilities, insurance, consumer finance and government. Let me highlight a few examples. One of these was a multiyear renewal with one of the largest utilities in the U.S., which represented one of the largest ACI contracts ever signed. Another utility we signed in Q4 was Clay Electric, one of the largest electric co-ops in the U.S., which will utilize ACI Speedpay to enhance its customer experience. Also in Q4, we signed Grange Mutual, a leading property and casualty insurance provider. And in the government segment, a large Mid-Atlantic states signed a deal to utilize our bill payment solution to support permit payments. Shifting to our merchant customer segment. Our eCommerce platform supported a stellar holiday season. We processed 50% more transactions across the globe in Q4 2019 than we did in 2018. ACI continues to be successful in winning new business and supporting the growing payment needs of some of the world's largest brands for a range of omni-channel, e-commerce and fraud prevention needs. In 2019, we secured leading retailers with our merchant and e-commerce solutions. We also had a very strong renewal and expansion activity in Q4.
Representative merchant deals in Q4 included a leading fuel retailer, which expanded its use of ACI solutions to better serve customers at thousands of convenience stores across North America. We also signed one of the world's largest furniture stores to expand its use of ACI as it grows its e-commerce footprint. A global sportswear giant selected ACI technology to simplify it's payments globally. Also in retail, we signed one of the largest auto care companies in the U.S., extending its relationship with ACI to improve transaction processes. And we signed large supermarkets, including a U.S.-based supermarket giant, an ICA, one of Sweden's biggest retailers, who use ACI solutions to better serve their many thousands of customers. For banks and intermediaries, ACI continues to be the payment provider of choice supporting digital transformation as these organizations seek to modernize their infrastructure, enable open APIs and embrace real-time payments and the public cloud. Our leading real-time payments, retail payments, digital payments and Payment Intelligence solutions are solving the complex needs of financial institutions so they enter new markets, scale to address higher payment volumes and meet customer needs. In Q4, we launched a global strategic collaboration with Microsoft to support payments in the cloud. And in 2019, three banks selected ACI's retail payment solution running on Microsoft Azure to power their global payments platforms. two of the 3, both of which are top global top 30 banks, signed in Q4. Our investment in Mindgate Solutions in India is allowing us to seize the very exciting real-time payment opportunity in that market and other growth markets.
In particular, our real-time solutions continue to see success, both with new logos as well as selling into our retail payment base. I'm very proud to say that in an unaided global server of payment decision-makers, ACI was again the top recognized and preferred brand for real-time payments for a second year in a row. This is a very strong validation of our strategy. Some Q4 highlights in the bank and the intermediary segment included, BB&T and SunTrust, which recently merged to form Truist, the 6th largest bank in the U.S., extended its commitment to ACI's UP Real-Time Payments solution. BNP Paribas, one of the world's largest banks, is consolidating several high-value payment systems into a single ACI UP Real-Time Payments solution. BNPP is currently live in seven countries and will add another 8th countries during 2020. In the quarter, we also signed ING, a leading multinational banking and financial services corporation and a long-term ACI customer. We expanded its use of app retail payments to keep up with increasing transaction volumes. In Indonesia, one of the three largest banks is utilizing both UP Retail Payments and UP Real-Time Payments as a single payments UPP to ready itself for the country's upcoming rollout of immediate payments. And in Mexico, one of the largest banks, Banorte, expanded its use of app retail payments for its open banking and systems consolidation strategy. Finally, Network International, the largest payment processor in the Middle East and the first independent vendor certified by both Visa and MasterCard for payments in the region, has expanded its use of app retail payments as it enters new geographies. All in all, these deals and many of the exciting deals we are working on at the moment underpin our confidence in ACI's growth prospects in the payments industry. Our 2020 pipeline is strong, and we expect solid revenue growth. We have also implemented several initiatives aimed at both reducing costs and reallocating resources toward our fastest-growing solutions.
On the sales side, we continue to adjust our sales processes to better target our evolving marketplace. Our sales teams are fully staffed and have already hit the ground running in Q1. Our go-to-market approach is our customer segment focused with dedicated sales, solution consulting and customer success teams who are tightly aligned to the needs of banks, intermediaries, merchants and billers. This transformation of our sales practices provides a solid foundation for future sales performance improvement and is already demonstrating positive results. In addition, our customers are also responding well to this approach by renewing and expanding their relationships with us. In our most recent annual survey at the end of 2019, our customer experience scores increased significantly in all categories, including in the very important areas of customer satisfaction and likelihood to continue, recommend and expand the relationship with ACI. I'd like to complement the whole ACI team for the ongoing areas efforts in these areas. In summary, our fundamentals are sound. We're off to a good start in 2020, and we have a lot of growth opportunities to be optimistic about in the years ahead.
And with that, I'll now turn over the call to Scott to provide some additional financial highlights. Thank you very much.
Scott Behrens -- Senior Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer
Well, thanks, Craig, and good morning, everyone. I first plan to go through the highlights of 2019 and then provide our outlook for 2020. I'll be starting my comments on slide six with key takeaways from the year. Our overall bookings were down from 2018 with higher term extensions, offset by lower new bookings. As Craig mentioned, this was partially a result of a large expansion contract that did not sign as expected, as well as other deals that slipped into 2020. And going forward, we're evaluating the use of this metric and considering adjusting future reporting to be more applicable to our evolving business, which has shifted from being traditional software license based to now more than half of our revenue coming from our On Demand solutions. We saw strong backlog growth with 12-month and 60-month backlog up $18 million and $144 million, respectively, with most of that growth coming in the fourth quarter. Full year revenue was $1.3 billion, up 25% over last year, and excluding the impact of Speedpay and foreign currency, revenue for the year was up 3% organically. Recurring revenue grew to 71% of total revenue, up from 65% in 2018. Adjusted EBITDA for the year was $308 million, up 23% from last year. EBITDA margins expanded by 300 basis points year-over-year, driven by the contribution from Speedpay as well as the improving margin in our AOD business as we focus on profitability growth. Turning next to our operating segments. Our On Demand segment grew 57%, driven primarily by the Speedpay contribution and continues to deliver solid margin improvement with our net adjusted EBITDA margins hitting 19% this year compared to 5% last year. And specifically, our fourth quarter net adjusted EBITDA margin was 30%, which represents the highest quarterly margin contribution ever for our On Demand business and shows solid progress toward our Rule of 40 targets.
This margin expansion will continue to improve with scale as we grow under the infrastructure we've built out over the last few years, and we expect 2020 to take another step higher. Our On Premise segment grew slightly from 2018 and delivered adjusted EBITDA margins of 55%. Adjusted operating free cash flow was $108 million versus $148 million in 2018. We ended the year with $121 million in cash and $1.4 billion in debt, bringing us to a pro forma net leverage ratio of 3.75 times. During the year, we purchased 1.2 million shares for $36 million or $29 per share, and we have $141 million remaining on our share repurchase authorization. Turning next to slide seven with our outlook for 2020. As previously provided on our January call, for 2020, we expect total revenue to be between $1.48 billion and $1.51 billion, which represents approximately 18% to 20% growth over 2019. Recall that Speedpay was acquired on May nine of 2019, so 2019 results include only a partial year of Speedpay. So part of the growth we expect in 2020 will come from having a full year contribution from Speedpay. We expect 2020 adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $425 million to $445 million, which represents approximately 38% to 44% growth over 2019. And similar to our revenue targets, our EBITDA growth will also benefit from having a full year of Speedpay contribution in 2020 versus just a partial contribution in 2019. In addition, our commitment to achieving our long-term profitability goals include continually assessing our operating efficiencies. In 2020, we expect to realize approximately $20 million of cost reductions from these initiatives and those are assumed in our guidance.
This guidance excludes between $5 million and $10 million of continued integration-related expenses from Speedpay and approximately $10 million of onetime charges to implement the cost reduction initiatives. And as it relates to both large renewal, Craig mentioned earlier, we have secured a long-term commitment from this customer from this renewal, but we don't expect any incremental impact to 2020 at this time. Also on slide seven, we did provide additional guidance information to help you build out your financial models. And finally, we expect Q1 revenue to be between $285 million and $295 million, which is an increase of 38% to 43% over Q1 2019. We're not providing full year new bookings outlook at this time, as I mentioned earlier, as we assess a more applicable industry standard metric for our SaaS and PaaS business, we do expect Q1 new bookings to be a solid double-digit grower over Q1 2019 on a consistent reporting basis. So in closing, we expect to deliver solid revenue and profitability growth in 2020.
So that concludes my prepared remarks. Operator, we're ready to open the line for questions at this time.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Peter Heckmann from Davidson. You may ask your question.
Peter Heckmann -- Davidson -- Analyst
Good morning, gentlemen. Congratulations on getting that slipped deal closed and maintaining some discipline around those deals. I'm curious, though, while it certainly sounds like it will help front-load bookings for the year. How is the contract structured so that we don't we shouldn't expect an initial license fee-related to that contract expansion in 2020?
Scott Behrens -- Senior Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer
Yes. Maybe Pete, this is Scott. I think just to clarify what this is, is they've renewed for the long-term and what they already have. So that secures the long-term commitment of this customer on our products. This is not the expansion deal that we were talking about at the end of last year. So I would say, at this time, there's no incremental revenue just from the pure renewal, but that it has committed into the long term. But generally speaking, it provides a framework for future expansion.
Craig Saks -- Interim President and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. Let me elaborate slightly on that. So I think it's a very important point. The big question in the market was, does ACI have long-term relevance in the post M&A era? While this continues to validate our importance to the very biggest players and our ethnos to the very biggest and globalized players. And the parties have reaffirmed our mutual commitment to each other and growing our businesses together. So that's correct. And within that construct of the renewal, which gives us that long-term certainty, we've established a framework where we will work together to grow the relationship as their business grows. And so I think it's a very constructive outcome. It takes a big strategic question off the table and helps us focus on mutual growth in the coming years.
Peter Heckmann -- Davidson -- Analyst
Great, great. That's helpful. And then just as a follow-up then. I guess, my understanding of the five year term license contracts with volume components was that if a customer did make a major acquisition, then they really had to complete that contract expansion before they could do their own internal platform consolidation. And so what is there a time where the remaining three large companies going through mergers have to complete those contract expansions?
Craig Saks -- Interim President and Chief Executive Officer
So as and when they run out of capacity, which is a function of a number of different things. Their own growth rates and some of them are growing really nicely in some of their markets, as we understand it. Or when they win new add-on business, all of whom as part of the rationale of the consolidation, is that they want to target new add-on business. So either of those events typically would drive a conversation with us as around expanding the amount of capacity they need to buy. And of course, when they come and buy capacity over and above the run rate of the current arrangement for example, the one we've just renewed, then obviously, it's add-on business and new revenue.
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of George Sutton from Craig-Hallum. You may ask your question.
George Sutton -- Craig-Hallum -- Analyst
Thank you. A big focus at your Analyst Day was around the concept of the scale that you can now really achieve given where you stand. The organic growth in 2019 was low single digits. I'm curious, as we look out to 2020 and beyond, particularly with a new CEO coming in extensively with some growth focus, what are the governors to that organic growth? And what are the real opportunities?
Craig Saks -- Interim President and Chief Executive Officer
So the opportunities, let me start there. So as we said in the call, I think there are a myriad of opportunity. Let me highlight 3, just off the top of my head. Now real-time really does continue to become to be a very important trend in the marketplace. Our brand leadership, I think, is a fantastic affirmation of our ability to participate in that, as, quite frankly, by our product leadership in that realm. So we're excited about real-time. We continue to see opportunities evolve. So that's the first thing. But beyond real-time as a stand-alone opportunity, we're seeing significant opportunity with real-time in conjunction with our other solutions. two examples would be the addition of real-time to biller. It's only a matter of time before real-time and expedited Bill Pay becomes an important part of the biller direct equation in the U.S. And so we're excited about that. And we are are rolling out real-time payments as part of our biller solution through this year, and expect good results from that. The other places that Indonesian Bank I mentioned, for me is a great example of what's happening quite often. Banks are sitting with a large card franchises, which are historically powered by ACI.
And now they are wrestling with, how do we convert that to an account-to-account or a multi-payment real kind of environment to a multi-payment type of hub. And just about every one of our large card customers is talking to us about the addition of real-time payments to the existing ACI footprints. And so that not only expands those relationships, but quite frankly, protects those franchises for the long-term as volumes may start to transition from one realm to the other. And then the third area that continues to excite us is all things online. E-commerce is good. You could probably regard some of our bill payments as being a form of e-commerce. And the growth rates and the macro forces in the industry remain solid. So there are a whole bunch of fundamentals around the world that continue to be interesting to our business and represent future opportunities. I think impediments to that, quite frankly, are in our own four walls. It's our ability to execute on those sales. It's our ability to deploy those wins quickly. And we continue to really double down our efforts on being a better sales organization, a more consistent sales organization and to optimize our operating processes in terms of getting customers' wallet. So those revenues flow quickly.
Scott Behrens -- Senior Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer
Yes, I think the only thing I'd add, George, is when it comes to the scale I mentioned we're looking at operational efficiencies. We're looking at we're actually looking at reducing costs in certain areas of our business and reinvesting costs into some of those high-growth areas. And also, if you look at our Q4 exit rate on our On Demand business had the highest EBITDA margins ever. So that scale is going to layer on top of a relatively fixed cost base, also where we continue to drive improved efficiencies, but to be able to drive a pretty high dollar revenue-to-EBITDA conversion. So that gets back into the scale as we start to see accelerated growth, we're also going to see a high conversion to EBITDA.
George Sutton -- Craig-Hallum -- Analyst
A couple of things you did not mention, Craig, and we've talked about them a lot in the past would be the Azure partnership, and I think the ability to continue to grow through that. And then also, Linux is a hardware component that lowers the ultimate cost of a changeover. What are those doing for your pipeline of opportunities?
Craig Saks -- Interim President and Chief Executive Officer
So the public cloud is a strong driver of opportunity and discussion. And I mentioned the Azure wins we had last year. We continue to build and grow that relationship with Microsoft. In fact, I'll be in Redmond next week to continue those discussions and to further the go-to-market plan. So I feel very good about the opportunity that the public cloud gives us as our customer base more and more think about the impact of the public cloud on their deployment options. We also, quite frankly, see it is going to open up some new opportunities. It makes it easier for existing customers to expand into new markets. It also makes it easy for new entrants. And so we're finding that we have some new opportunities that are coming out of the woodwork just because it takes that the barriers of entry from an infrastructure perspective away as people think about growing the global payment businesses.
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Joseph Vafi from Canaccord. You may ask your question.
Joseph Vafi -- Canaccord -- Analyst
Hi, gentlemen, good morning. John, I was wondering, just kind of circling back to the first question and the outlook here for this year. Just with the M&A backdrop perhaps kind of dying down now a little bit. Do you see that relative to the guidance, reducing potential lumpiness and in large deals and the ability too? I'm sorry. And less lumpiness to the guidance given the competitor or the M&A landscape are perhaps settling down?
Scott Behrens -- Senior Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer
Well, our license software business, I think, is always going to have an element of lumpiness to it just because of the nature of recognizing all the license fee at signing. And so in a lot of our sales happening in the second half of the year, a lot of our renewals happen on their anniversary dates. That's where we get another lumpiness in the inflow of license fees. Those are typically going to be in the third and fourth quarter. So I think we're on the license offer side of the business, we're still going to see that lumpiness. On the but our On Demand business has now become over 50% of our overall business. That is inherently all recurring revenue, much more predictable recurring quarter-over-quarter on a sequential basis. And with the Speedpay acquisition last year, so not only did it bring a lot of recurring revenue to our business, but a lot of recurring profitability. And so that also is going to level out the quarterly variability. But so I'd say, as our On; Demand business gets bigger, it will reduce the lumpiness, the software license software side of the business, will still have that degree of lumpiness, just due to the timing of sales and the timing of renewals.
Joseph Vafi -- Canaccord -- Analyst
Sure. That's helpful. And then just on the real-time side of things. It sounds like a lot of banks, a lot of financial institutions, a lot of merchants or billers are eager to perhaps get this going at a bigger level, especially in the U.S.. Do you see there being a kind of a catalyst for larger adoption here across the payments landscape, at least in the U.S. for real-time? So it seems like you need to have something of a network effect in place with enough players involved in being able to provide it that you can kind of really light it up and make it kind of a capability that is kind of more pervasive in the marketplace?
Craig Saks -- Interim President and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. And you were totally right, the dynamic that drives adoption and the rate of adoption varies by market and the extent to which the regulators are involved. Within the U.S., I've seen a little bit of an increased urgency after the FedNow announcement. So I've seen more and more activity of people deploying and trying to activate the core infrastructures we already have with the clearing house and with Zelle. I mean just this last week, I saw announcement from one of the large core providers where they had activated hundreds of banks to under Zelle network. And so to your point, the network effect is building up to a critical mass. And we're pretty close, I believe, to the tipping point in terms of banks in the broader ecosystem that are connected, with the big core players participating more and more, with the big banks that are already out there. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing is, as that critical mass from connected consumers and accounts builds up, you're going to start to see the applications. That's one of the reasons why I'm actually quite excited about Bill Pay. Our position in the marketplace and the relevance of Bill Pay is going to support the real-time story. It's actually going to be greatly supported by the tipping point that we're getting to in terms of critical mass of connected participants. So I would argue that in the next few years, you're going to see very aggressive growth in the use and adoption of real-time in the U.S. as the network effects kick in and reach maturity.
Operator
[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Brett Huff from Stephens. You may ask your question.
Brett Huff -- Stephens -- Analyst
Good morning, guys. Thanks for the time today.
Scott Behrens -- Senior Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer
Hi. Brett.
Brett Huff -- Stephens -- Analyst
Question on just some numbers. I want to make sure that I understood the implied organic growth for 2020. You gave us a range on the 2020 outlook and you, hopefully which is kind of $1.495 billion midpoint-ish. But then you also give us, I think, a $228 million what I think is the stub or the partial year inorganic revenue contribution from Speedpay. And if I remove that from the $1.495 billion or so midpoint, that gets me kind of just slightly positive organic revenue growth. Is that the right way to think about those numbers? Or am I getting that a little wrong?
Scott Behrens -- Senior Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer
Yes, the range on the organic side. And you're right, we didn't break out the Speedpay from the organic, but it would be in the low to mid-single digits.
Brett Huff -- Stephens -- Analyst
Okay. That's helpful. And then the sales process, Craig, I think that you talked about, what was the driver for that? Is this just sort of a normal, let's take a look at the sales process? Was it driven by something specific? I mean, were these larger deals? Is there maybe a way to take care of these larger renewals or opportunities better or kind of give us a sense of the driver of it? And then if you could just kind of rearticulate the two or three key changes that have been made or will be made?
Craig Saks -- Interim President and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. So the I mean, look, we've been at this for a few years. And quite frankly, it was driven by a desire to grow our business through more new business wins. We've got fantastic products and a fantastic global footprint, and we've not been thrilled by the rate of growth that we've managed to get through new business development. So it really is a desire to make sure that we get our fair share and more. And so we've been reengineering our sales organization for the last while and particularly doubled down last year. As we look forward at the opportunity we saw, we definitely do not see ourselves as just being trapped in a cash cow kind of status. We see ourselves being in a market with growth opportunity and sales is the sharp end of that spear. So that's what really motivated it. In terms of things we've done, there's a huge list. There are a number of activities that we've reengineered the sales process end-to-end. I would call out refreshed and reengineered pipeline management and forecasting processes. I would talk to a doubling down on the sales leadership that we have in place and the alignment of that sales leadership to our key customer segments, I think that's really important.
We've got some continuity in that leadership and in-depth knowledge and alignment with the customers is really going to help. And then the last thing is, it's not just about the sales organization. We've really doubled down the organization. Sales is a one ACI team support. sport. And so we've reengineered and integrated the product side of the house with the operating side of the house, with the sales side of the house, with the marketing side of the house and with the customer success side of the house, to make sure that the entire ACI engine is aligned around the task of sales and winning new business. And we've made great strides over the last six to 12 months of having a far more aligned organization that is far more committed to selling. If you sat in on our executive meetings the last few months compared to many years ago, I can tell you now, we spend much more, if not the majority, of our meeting time talking about sales and winning in the market than we've ever done in the past. And for me, that's part of the positive trend toward becoming very sales-centric in our day-to-day thinking as a company.
Operator
There are no further questions at this time. Presenters, you may continue.
John Kraft -- Vice President, Investor Relations and Strategic Analysis
Well, thanks, everybody, for dialing in. We look forward to catching up in the coming weeks. Have a great day.
Craig Saks -- Interim President and Chief Executive Officer
Bye-bye.
Operator
[Operator Closing Remarks]
Duration: 37 minutes
Call participants:
John Kraft -- Vice President, Investor Relations and Strategic Analysis
Craig Saks -- Interim President and Chief Executive Officer
Scott Behrens -- Senior Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer
Peter Heckmann -- Davidson -- Analyst
George Sutton -- Craig-Hallum -- Analyst
Joseph Vafi -- Canaccord -- Analyst
Brett Huff -- Stephens -- Analyst
