Payments Firm ACI Worldwide Sees Large Stock Purchase From CEO

Following insider buying at smaller companies can be a very profitable trading strategy. Smaller companies are less researched than larger businesses, meaning that they offer greater potential for outperformance. 

In this report, we are going to highlight insider buying at a small US-listed company, ACI Worldwide Inc (ACIW:US). ACI Worldwide is an electronic payments company. Founded in 1975, it serves more than 6,000 organizations around the world today, including 1,000 of the largest financial institutions and intermediaries. It is listed on the Nasdaq and currently has a market cap of around $2.50 billion.

Large Purchase From CEO

Our insider transaction data shows that between June 6 and June 7, ACIW’s President and CEO Thomas Warsop purchased 43,000 ACIW shares at an average price of $23.63 per share. This trade cost the insider just over $1 million and increased his holding to 178,307 shares.

FinTech Experience

Mr. Warsop has only recently been appointed CEO of ACI Worldwide. However, he has plenty of experience at the company as he joined the board in June 2015 and became non-executive Chairman in June 2022.

He also has significant experience in the FinTech space. Previously, he was Group President at Fiserv, a provider of technology solutions to the financial industry, from 2007 to 2012.

It’s worth noting that this stock purchase from the insider has increased the size of his holding significantly. This suggests that he is confident that the stock is set to move higher.

New Opportunities 

ACI Worldwide appears to have momentum right now.

On May 22, the company announced that it is set to offer banks new cross-border, real-time payment services via Swift Go. It believes these services will enable banks to improve customer experiences and become more competitive.

Then, on May 24, the company announced that it is collaborating with Red Hat to expand its payments cloud offering. This collaboration will help ACI customers take advantage of the cloud.

Looking ahead, management is confident about the remainder of 2023.

“Looking to the rest of the year, we are energized by new opportunities across our businesses, particularly in real-time payments and cloud-based technologies, and we are confident we have the right strategy in place to capitalize on them. Our renewal calendar and implementation pipeline provide us with confidence we are on track to deliver our outlook for full-year 2023 and to achieve our revenue growth target of 7-9% by 2024,” said Mr. Warsop in the company’s recent Q1 results.

In light of these developments, we see the insider buying here as a bullish development.