ACI Worldwide, Inc. develops, markets, installs, and supports software products and services for electronic payments in the United States and worldwide. It operates through Payment Software and Billers segments. The company offers solutions such as ACI Acquiring, ACI Issuing, ACI Connetic, ACI real-time payments, ACI RTGS and cross-border, ACI digital central infrastructure, ACI Payments Orchestration Platform, ACI Fraud Management, ACI Fraud Scoring Services, and Speedpay. It also provides electronic bill presentment and payment services to various sectors, as well as product installations, custom software modifications, and consultancy services. The company was formerly known as Transaction Systems Architects, Inc. and changed its name to ACI Worldwide, Inc. in July 2007. It was founded in 1975 and is headquartered in Elkhorn, Nebraska.
ACI Worldwide and Cognizant Test BASE24-eps on AWS, Processing 4.6 Million Transactions Without Failure
ACI Worldwide and Cognizant announced the results of joint performance testing of BASE24-eps, a foundational component of ACI's card acquiring and issuing solutions, on Amazon Web Services. Under simulated point-of-sale load, BASE24-eps sustained more than double its target transaction load for 30 minutes with no failed transactions, and across the full test it processed more than 4.6 million transactions without a single failure. Cognizant ran the program end-to-end in a non-production environment, designing the target architecture, provisioning the environment and deploying BASE24-eps using an AWS account operated by ACI, with installation and deployment automated. The environment ran on Amazon EC2 with Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, and observability was instrumented to the OpenTelemetry standard and monitored through Amazon CloudWatch. ACI Worldwide Chief Architect and Technical Fellow Ajmal Syed said the testing put BASE24-eps under sustained load on AWS and it ran well past target without a failed transaction, while Cognizant's Strategic Business Unit Head for Fintech and Payments Nitin Bahl said banks move payment systems on evidence rather than optimism. The companies noted that production deployment is a further step requiring resilience across availability zones, failover and disaster recovery testing, security hardening, additional nonfunctional testing and payment network certification.
ACIW · Technology · Positive Joint testing showed ACI's BASE24-eps sustained over double its target transaction load on AWS with 4.6 million transactions and zero failures.
CTSH · Technology · Positive Cognizant designed the target architecture, provisioned the environment and deployed BASE24-eps end-to-end in the successful AWS performance test.
AMZN · Technology · Positive BASE24-eps ran on AWS infrastructure (EC2, RDS for PostgreSQL, CloudWatch), validating AWS as the cloud platform for this payments workload.
Mastercard, Visa race to set standards for AI agent shopping payments
Mastercard rolled out a payment option Thursday that lets cardholders give an AI agent a virtual card to buy things online without checking in before each purchase, with limits on spending, retailers, or required approval before checkout. Rival Visa partnered with Alchemy earlier this year and has announced its own AI shopping and payment product, Visa Intelligent Commerce, which the company says is still being deployed, while Meta's Muse can search for products and navigate checkout but presents the purchase for the user's final approval. Phil Bruno, chief strategy and growth officer at payments company ACI Worldwide, called it "a land grab for infrastructure standards," saying that if card companies set the standards for agentic commerce they can keep the commerce in their environments for decades to come. Consumer appetite lags the infrastructure push: just 7% of U.S. and U.K. consumers surveyed who buy fashion items said they would allow an AI assistant to make purchases without approval under predefined conditions, according to research commissioned by ACI Worldwide, and more than half said they were uncomfortable allowing AI to purchase on their behalf. Mastercard has developed a digital paper trail called Verifiable Intent to record who authorized the agent to shop and what it was authorized to buy, but when asked who would be responsible if an agent made an incorrect, fraudulent, or unauthorized purchase, Mastercard pointed back to Verifiable Intent and did not specify who would ultimately be responsible if an agent bought something outside those instructions.
Digital Finance & Tokenization › Payments Modernization & Rails ▲Technology
Artificial Intelligence › Agentic AI & Autonomous Workflows ▲Technology
Digital Finance & Tokenization › Distribution & Revenue-Share Partners Competition
MA · Technology · Positive Mastercard rolled out a new AI-agent payment option with Verifiable Intent, positioning itself to set agentic-commerce standards.
V · Technology · Positive Visa's Intelligent Commerce AI shopping/payment product and Alchemy partnership are cited as its push to set agentic-commerce standards.
ACIW · · Neutral ACI Worldwide executive comments on the agentic-commerce standards race and its commissioned survey showing low consumer appetite, but no company-specific development.
ACI Worldwide to Acquire Cranium Ventures for Card Switching Tech
ACI Worldwide has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Cranium Ventures, a privately held developer of cloud-native card payment switching technology, and will incorporate its microservices-based card switching framework into ACI Connetic for Cards. The acquisition accelerates ACI's existing Connetic for Cards roadmap, bringing planned card switching capabilities to market sooner. Cranium Ventures, founded in 2018 in the United Kingdom with operations in Singapore and Malaysia, developed SYNAP, a microservices-based card switching framework that runs in cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. Under the agreement, ACI will acquire Cranium's technology, intellectual property, and commercial relationships, and co-founders Ashraf Dimitri and Tony Horrell will join ACI. Financial terms were not disclosed, and the transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions and approvals.
Digital Finance & Tokenization › Payments Modernization & Rails Technology
ACIW · Capital · Positive ACI Worldwide agrees to acquire Cranium Ventures to add cloud-native card switching tech, accelerating its Connetic for Cards roadmap.
Cranium Ventures · Capital · Positive Cranium Ventures is being acquired by ACI Worldwide, which will take its SYNAP card switching technology, IP, and commercial relationships.
Inter Pag Selects ACI Worldwide to Advance Intelligent Payments Orchestration in Brazil
Inter Pag, the merchant acquiring business of Banco Inter, has selected ACI Worldwide's cloud-enabled acquiring platform to power its next phase of growth in Brazil. The strategic partnership combines payments intelligence, AI-driven fraud prevention, analytics, advanced ecommerce tools and orchestration, and includes back-office card management capabilities powered by RS2. Inter Pag serves more than 100,000 small and medium-sized businesses across Brazil, and the platform will help the company simplify operations, increase flexibility, strengthen resiliency, and bring new payment services to market faster. The agreement comes as Pix has grown to nearly 170 million users and accounted for 54.7% of all payment transactions in Brazil in the second half of 2025.
ACI Worldwide Raises 2026 Outlook After 7% Revenue Growth
ACI Worldwide raised its full-year 2026 revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance after reporting second-quarter revenue of $430 million, up 7% from a year earlier. Net income rose to $32 million from $12 million, and adjusted diluted earnings per share increased 54% to $0.54. Adjusted EBITDA grew 12% to $91 million, with the margin expanding to 34%. The Payment Software segment led growth with revenue up 9% to $196 million, driven by a 37% increase in issuing and acquiring revenue. The company also signed its first U.S. customers for the cloud-native ACI Connetic platform and highlighted AI initiatives that saved more than 6,000 engineering hours. ACI raised its 2026 revenue outlook to a range of $1.895 billion to $1.925 billion and adjusted EBITDA to $545 million to $560 million, while continuing share buybacks with $41 million repurchased in the quarter.
ACI Worldwide Shares Surge 5.6% on Strong Payment Software Demand
ACI Worldwide shares rallied 5.6% in the last trading session to close at $49.26, driven by strong demand across its payments portfolio and continued execution of its long-term growth strategy. Management attributed the momentum to expanding customer relationships, winning new clients, and improving operational efficiency, while also emphasizing disciplined capital allocation and shareholder returns through share repurchases. The Payment Software business benefited from robust demand for issuing, acquiring, and real-time payment solutions, with real-time payments seeing strong growth as rising transaction volumes increased contract values during customer renewals. The Biller segment remained a key growth driver, supported by adoption of the Speedpay One platform and new customer wins, with annual recurring revenue bookings increasing significantly in the first quarter of 2026. The company is expected to post quarterly earnings of $0.49 per share, a year-over-year increase of 40%, on revenues of $429.7 million, up 7.1% from the prior-year quarter.
Fraud attempts surged more than threefold at past World Cups, ACI Worldwide finds
ACI Worldwide reports that fraud attempts surged more than threefold during previous major soccer tournaments, and similar warning signs have re-emerged ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Based on 24.5 million transactions across 61 live-event merchants, card-not-present attempted fraud reached 4% of transaction value in the build-up to Copa America 2024, averaging 3.6 times the 2023 baseline. Alternative payment methods recorded a 0.57% attempted fraud rate, compared with 3.97% for traditional cards, a sevenfold difference. Fraudsters targeted high-value purchases, with fraudulent orders averaging $405, 1.5 times the $270 legitimate average. Cybersecurity firms have identified more than 300 replica ticketing websites and nearly 10,000 fraudulent World Cup-related domains registered in April 2026 alone.
Cybersecurity & Digital Trust › Security Operations (SIEM/SOAR/XDR/MDR) ▲Demand
Cybersecurity & Digital Trust › Endpoint & Network Security ▲Demand
Cybersecurity & Digital Trust › Data Security & Cyber Resilience ▲Demand
ACIW · Demand · Positive Article highlights ACI Worldwide's fraud detection services as critical during major events, with fraud attempts surging more than threefold, implying increased demand for its solutions.
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