ACI Worldwide’s reported sale of its Bill Payments arm has already reached the stage of seeking advice from investment bankers, as private equity firms are emerging as the leading parties interested in acquiring the business.
ACI Worldwide is reportedly looking to sell its payment billing business arm due to industry demand for payment software and recurring payments.
According to several sources cited by Reuters, ACI Worldwide has brought investment bankers – who have not been named – to facilitate the sale of the billing business. Some of the interested parties to buy the business include unnamed private equity firms.
Early forecasts for the valuation of the deal have estimated ACI Worldwide’s billing arm to be worth $1.5bn.
ACI Worldwide’s Bill Payments allows businesses to process digital recurring payments for one-time transactions and monthly bills.
The business acts as a third-party processor and has an omnichannel presence, which allows ACI Worldwide to integrate its billing services across multiple services, such as online digital payment portals, mobile banking apps and digital wallets.
In 2025, the ACI Worldwide business unit generated $818m in revenue, a 13% increase from the year before. Adjusted EBITDA was $141m, a 7% increase from 2024, with 100% of the revenue generated classified as recurring revenue.
Last year also saw ACI Worldwide merge its banking and merchant businesses into a singular payment software platform to streamline its operations. The billing business remained as a separate entity.
Some of the companies and organisations that have used ACI Worldwide’s billing business predominantly come from the public sector, utilities and healthcare services. This includes the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in the US, as well as Blue Cross Shield and Horizon Healthcare Services.
ACI Worldwide has also partnered with the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud provider, as well as payment processors Mastercard, Visa and Worldpay.
Recurring payments surge in interest
Recurring payments have become a key strategy for financial institutions, payment processors and digital platforms as subscription payments have been essential to many of the services consumers use each month.
Stripe acquired Lemon Squeezy in 2024 to complement its existing Stripe Billing business. The acquisition enabled Stripe to simplify local tax codes for businesses to automatically calculate the cost of remittances used in global sales taxes with recurring payments.
Another acquisition in 2024 saw GoCardless buy Nuapay to consolidate its position as a leading company in account-to-account payments. GoCardless leverages Nuapay’s variable recurring payments services to allow businesses to withdraw varying amounts from a consumer’s bank account which may be applicable to the service.
To adopt embedded recurring payments, Nuvei acquired Paya in 2023. This allowed the Canadian fintech firm to deploy embedded recurring payment services within non-financial companies’ infrastructures to enable simple outflows of consumer and business payments.
It’s expected that private equity firms will have a particular interest in ACI Worldwide’s Bill Payments business as it offers 100% annual recurring revenue.
Recurring payments businesses also come with near long-term guarantee base line cash flows, as partners and contractors using the service can be signed up to lengthy contracts using the service to maintain cash flow without the manual processing needed each month.
