Contrasting Mitek Systems (NASDAQ:MITK) and ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ:ACIW)

ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ:ACIW) and Mitek Systems (NASDAQ:MITK) are both technology companies, but which is the superior investment? We will compare the two businesses based on the strength of their analyst recommendations, risk, institutional ownership, profitability, earnings, dividends and valuation.

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of recent recommendations for ACI Worldwide and Mitek Systems, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
ACI Worldwide	0	1	1	1	3.00
Mitek Systems	0	2	1	0	2.33

ACI Worldwide presently has a consensus target price of $66.00, suggesting a potential upside of 29.74%. Mitek Systems has a consensus target price of $19.33, suggesting a potential upside of 9.23%. Given ACI Worldwide’s stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, equities research analysts plainly believe ACI Worldwide is more favorable than Mitek Systems.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

94.7% of ACI Worldwide shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 83.6% of Mitek Systems shares are owned by institutional investors. 1.2% of ACI Worldwide shares are owned by insiders. Comparatively, 2.2% of Mitek Systems shares are owned by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, endowments and hedge funds believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Volatility & Risk

ACI Worldwide has a beta of 0.99, suggesting that its share price is 1% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Mitek Systems has a beta of 0.94, suggesting that its share price is 6% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares ACI Worldwide and Mitek Systems”s gross revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
ACI Worldwide	$1.76 billion	2.92	$226.66 million	$2.18	23.33
Mitek Systems	$179.69 million	4.44	$8.80 million	$0.47	37.66

ACI Worldwide has higher revenue and earnings than Mitek Systems. ACI Worldwide is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Mitek Systems, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Profitability

This table compares ACI Worldwide and Mitek Systems’ net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
ACI Worldwide	12.40%	17.62%	8.47%
Mitek Systems	11.39%	19.16%	11.32%

Summary

ACI Worldwide beats Mitek Systems on 9 of the 14 factors compared between the two stocks.

About ACI Worldwide

ACI Worldwide, Inc., a software company, develops, markets, installs, and supports a range of software products and solutions for facilitating digital payments in the United States and internationally. The company operates in three segments: Banks, Merchants, and Billers. The company offers ACI Acquiring, a solution to process credit, debit, and prepaid card transactions, deliver digital innovation, and fraud prevention; ACI Issuing, a digital payment issuing solution for new payment offering; and ACI Enterprise Payments Platform that provides payment processing and orchestration capabilities for digital payments. It also provides ACI Low Value Real-Time Payments, a platform for processing real-time payments; and ACI High Value Real-Time Payments, a payments engine that offers multi-bank, multi-currency, 24×7 payment processing, and SWIFT messaging. In addition, the company offers ACI Payments Orchestration Platform for optimizing payments; omni-channel payment platform; ACI Fraud Management, a real-time approach to fraud management; and ACI Speedpay, an integrated suite of digital billing, payment, disbursement, and communication services. The company offers electronic bill presentment and payment services to consumer finance, insurance, healthcare, higher education, utility, government, telecommunications, and mortgage sectors; implementation services, include product installations and configurations, and custom software modifications; and business and technical consultancy, on-site support, product education, and testing services, as well as distributes or acts as a sales agent for software developed by third parties. It markets its products under the ACI Worldwide brand. The company was formerly known as Transaction Systems Architects, Inc. and changed its name to ACI Worldwide, Inc. in July 2007. The company was founded in 1975 and is based in Elkhorn, Nebraska.

About Mitek Systems

Mitek Systems, Inc. provides mobile image capture and digital identity verification solutions worldwide. Its product portfolio includes Mobile Deposit that enables individuals and businesses to remotely deposit checks using their camera-equipped smartphone or tablet; Mobile Verify, an identity verification solution that is integrated into mobile apps, mobile websites, and desktop applications; and Mobile Fill, which includes automatic image capture, minimizes the numbers of clicks, and expedites form fill completion. The company also offers MiSnap, a mobile-capture software development kit that enables an intuitive user experience and instant capture of quality images of identity documents and checks. CheckReader enables financial institutions to automatically extract data from checks once they have been scanned or photographed by the application; Check Fraud Defender, an AI-powered and cloud-hosted model for fighting check fraud; and Check Intelligence that enables financial institutions to automatically extract data from a check image received across any deposit channel, including branch, ATM, remote deposit capture, and mobile. In addition, it provides MiVIP, an end-to-end KYC platform that allows companies to design, build, and deploy robust KYC journeys with little or no development resources; and MiPass provides protection against most sophisticated forms of identity theft and dangerous fraud techniques, such as deepfakes and synthetic identities. Further, the company provides ID_CLOUD, an automated identity verification solution that is integrated into a customers’ application to read and validate identity documents; IDLive Face, a passive facial liveness detection product; IDVoice, a robust AI-driven voice biometric engine; IDLive Voice to stop spoofing attacks on voice biometric systems; and IDLive Doc that works to fight fraud related to digitally displayed document images. The company was incorporated in 1986 and is based in San Diego, California.