Company: ACIW
Filing Date: 2025-02-27
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000935036-25-000006
Chunk: 91

Company: ACI WORLDWIDE, INC.
Filing Date: 2025-02-27
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 91
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 improving, and making investments into our risk management infrastructure, techniques, and processes.

14

Potential customers may be reluctant to switch to a new vendor, which may adversely affect our growth.

For banks, intermediaries, and other potential customers of our products, switching from one vendor of core financial services software (or from an internally developed legacy system) to a new vendor is a significant endeavor. Many potential customers believe switching vendors involves too many potential disadvantages such as disruption of business operations, loss of accustomed functionality, and increased costs (including conversion and transition costs). As a result, potential customers may resist change. We seek to overcome this resistance through value enhancing strategies such as a defined conversion/migration process, continued investment in the enhanced functionality of our software and system integration expertise. These actions require the expenditure of time and resources, and there can be no assurance that they will result in a potential customer switching to use our products and services. There can be no assurance that our strategies for overcoming potential customers’ reluctance to change vendors will be successful, and this resistance may adversely affect our growth.

Risks Related to Our Intellectual Property

We may be unable to protect our intellectual property and technology.

To protect our proprietary rights in our intellectual property, we rely on a combination of contractual provisions, including customer licenses that restrict use of our products, confidentiality agreements and procedures, and trade secret and copyright laws. Despite such efforts, we may not be able to adequately protect our proprietary rights, or our competitors may independently develop similar technology, duplicate products, or design around any rights we believe to be proprietary. This may be particularly true in countries other than the United States because some foreign laws do not protect proprietary rights to the same extent as certain laws of the United States. Any failure or inability to protect our proprietary rights could materially adversely affect our business. Additionally, various events outside of our control may pose a threat to our intellectual property rights, as well as to our products and services. Effective protection of intellectual property rights is expensive and difficult to maintain, both in terms of application and maintenance costs, as well as the costs of defending and enforcing those rights. The efforts we have taken to protect our intellectual property rights may not be sufficient or effective. Our intellectual property rights may be infringed, misappropriated, or challenged, which could result in them being narrowed in scope or declared invalid or unenforceable.

We also use a limited amount of software licensed by its authors or other third parties under so-called “open source” licenses and may continue to use such software in the future