Several of us just came back from New York where ACI Worldwide celebrated its 50th anniversary with the bell ringing at Nasdaq and hosting Payments Unleashed, a two-day conference to discuss how payments will evolve over the next 50 years.

I don't think you would be surprised to hear the main topics of discussion: they covered the gamut of the hottest topics of today, ranging from AI and agentic commerce to stablecoins, payments intelligence, and embedded finance. However, the line up of speakers was certainly impressive:

• Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank (via video);
• David Malpass, an economist and former President of World Bank;
• Gary Cohn, the Vice Chair of IBM and former President and COO of Goldman Sachs;
• Kevin Surace, AI futurist and serial entrepreneur;
• Gijs Boudewijn, the Chair of European Payments Council,
• ... and many others, including, of course, ACI executives, led by Thomas Warsop, CEO.

All these speakers and so many clients from around the world both in the audience and on stage demonstrate the influence ACI Worldwide has on the industry today. In the meantime, the company is making significant investments, such as Connetic, its cloud-native payments hub, Speedway One, its biller platform, and fraud management and payments intelligence services, all of which are positioning ACI to lead the payments industry into the future.

Thank you to the ACI team for hosting us and for engaging conversations, and congratulations on an amazing milestone!