Hello, and welcome to Alkami's Second Quarter 2023 Financial Results Conference Call. My name is Sarah, and I will be your operator for today's call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After today’s presentation there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Steve Calk. Steve, you may begin.

Thank you, operator. With me on today's call are Alex Shootman, Chief Executive Officer; and Bryan Hill, Chief Financial Officer. During today's call, we may make forward-looking statements about guidance and other matters regarding our future performance. These statements are based on management's current views and expectations and are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Our actual results may be materially different. For a summary of risk factors associated with our forward-looking statements, please refer to today's press release and the sections in our latest Form 10-K entitled Risk Factors and Forward-Looking Statements. The statements made during the call are being made as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. Also, unless otherwise noted, financial measures discussed on this call will be on a non-GAAP basis. We believe these measures are useful to investors in the understanding of our financial results. A reconciliation of comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in our earnings press release and in our filings with the SEC. I will now turn the call over to Alex.

Thank you, Steve, and welcome, everyone. I am pleased to report another quarter of strong operating and financial performance. In the second quarter of 2023 Alkami grew revenue 30%, once again ahead of our expectations. We exited the quarter with 15.8 million live registered users on the Alkami platform, up 2.5 million compared to the prior year, and we achieved a $2.5 million adjusted EBITDA loss better than the high end of our expectations for the quarter. During the second quarter, Alkami continued to execute with a consistency that has characterized our business for over a decade and recently as a public company. Since our IPO in the second quarter of 2021, the number of registered users on our digital banking platform is up almost 50%, our quarterly revenue is up 79% and our ARR is up 78%. Our consistent growth in operating improvement has occurred quarter-after-quarter to both low and rising interest rates and various economic and political cycles during the spring banking crisis, in which three mid-sized US banks failed and during and after global pandemic. This consistency gives us confidence in our revenue growth targets and our ability to achieve a 20% or better adjusted EBITDA margin by 2026. Alkami is able to achieve a level of consistency in performance that is superior to most enterprise SaaS companies because of the unique attributes of our business. These include the mandatory nature of our products, size and health of our TAM, client [Indiscernible] innovation, the levers that we have in our growth model, and the culture of our company. The first reason for our consistency is that our target market considers digital banking to be a mandatory innovation. In every piece of research we conduct, the number one decision criteria for selecting a new financial institution is the…

Thank you, Alex, and good afternoon everyone. During the second quarter of 2023, we delivered another quarter of strong financial results. We continue to see strong demand for digital transformation, including a higher adoption rate of the products offered through our platform to serve our clients’ end users. For the second quarter of 2023, we achieved revenue of 65.8 million, which outperforms the high end of our financial guidance and represents growth of 30%. This was driven by balanced performance across our primary revenue drivers. We implemented 12 new clients in the quarter bring our digital banking platform client count to 218. We now have 40 clients and our implementation backlog representing 1.5 million digital users. We exited the quarter with 15.8 million registered users live on our digital banking platform, up 2.5 million, or 19% compared to last year, and up sequentially 730,000 digital users. Over the last 12 months, digital user growth continues to be driven by two areas; first, we implemented 38 financial institutions supporting 1.5 million digital users; second, our existing clients increased their digital user adoption by 1.3 million users offsetting digital user growth, which turn to just over 300,000 digital users, of which the majority is represented by a single client that transitioned off our platform during the third quarter of 2022. We continue to maintain a very high gross retention rate of approximately 98% measured in terms of ARR and digital users retained over the last 12 months. We ended the quarter with an RPU of $16.20, which is 6% higher than last year, driven by add-on sales success and the addition of new clients who tend to onboard with a higher average RPU. Subscription revenue grew 28% compared to the prior year quarter, and represents approximately 93% of total revenue. We increased…

Thank you. We will now begin our Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Patrick Walravens with JMP Securities, please go ahead.

Oh, great and congratulations on the continued execution. I had that two questions that are sort of related to the demand environment of what your -- and your customer. So Alex, the survey sounded really interesting. Could you just repeat that and maybe break out for us how many were up versus flat? And then secondly, I'm wondering what the customer base is thinking in terms of demand for Gen AI driven kinds of solutions.

Yeah, one thing I said in the script, Pat, was that kind of even in the wake of the banking crisis, 89% of the target market expects technology budgets to remain the same or increase over the next 12 months. There are a lot of data points in there but basically we haven't seen any fall off in the focus on, let's just call it, digitizing the front of the house for the financial institution, so that continues to be a priority. The areas that people are interested in AI, within a financial institution would be really three areas. One is around security, we continue to work with customers on brand new threat vectors, in terms of either trying to penetrate an account or have any kind of account takeover. So anything that can help a customer through any kind of pattern recognition, determine that they've got a new threat factor, they're getting hit with a threat is something that's interesting to customers. Anything that can help them read the transactional data that they have, and provide them opportunities to increase revenue or increase retention of their consumers or customers, we've actually just released a, I'd call it like a -- it's a capability that the customer can use themselves to compare the economic benefit of what they have in transactional data in terms of being able to get people that are paying mortgages to another financial institution and maybe provide them an offer. We've provided a tool that allows them to see how they're performing in the use of their data versus their peer sets in the industry. So any kind of use of artificial intelligence or any kind of learning against their transactional data that improves business performance is interesting to them. And then anything that is in the call center -- right, the call center continues to be a source of expense and investment for a financial institution, and anything that they can do there. So those are the three areas past security, the use of data and in the interactions with their customers or members.

That's super helpful. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Mayank Tandon with Needham, please go ahead.

Hey, guys. It's actually Sam on for Mayank. Thanks for taking the questions this afternoon and nice results out here. Can you guys dig in a little bit more into the add-on sales success you guys had this quarter and maybe talk a little bit about how that stacks up relative to last quarter, if that changed at all?

Sure. So the add-on sales team, as you're probably aware, that was a team that was created in 2019 and our ultimate goal from our add-on sales team, which we refer to as client sales, is to deliver a 50% of our total contract value year-in year-out from that team. Presently, we've been running in the, call it, mid-30% of total contract value, maybe as high as 40% of total contract value originated. So that's occurred year-to-date in 2023. From quarter-to-quarter, the production from that team has been pretty even and consistent. What can cause some variability from that team is the number of renewals they may have in any one quarter. Year-to-date so far through 2023 we've had five renewals as we mentioned in our prepared comments but we expect to have 15, maybe as many as 20 renewals in the back half of the year. So we expect a lot of productivity coming from this team in the back half of the year. Areas where we're seeing some good cross-sell adoption from our client base continues to be, and this is true for 2023 as well as 2022, our money movement products, our security products and our marketing and analytical products.

Great. That's super helpful. And then just a quick follow up on M&A. I know it's been a little while since you guys did the segment acquisition and that's worked out pretty well for you guys by the sounds of things. So I guess just curious what the appetite is for M&A today and maybe any potential areas you guys would look to target?

So we view M&A as a part of our strategic product roadmap along with some of our third-party IP partners. And so we're evaluating what's available but it has to fit within our product roadmap, it has to meet our financial model requirements. And then also, it's a capital allocation decision, it has to be a good return of capital. What we're finding today in today's market is while it's starting to occur, the evaluation expectation for M&A is still yet to catch up to where the public equity markets are at. Meaning, we think deals out there that are attractive are still fairly expensive. So we're just demonstrating a lot of discipline as it relates to M&A where we evaluate our third-party partner pipeline, which can be a source of M&A for us, a couple of our acquisitions actually came from that group of partners that we've completed so far but that's the way we think about it and where the market is today and would it yield the right capital return. Areas where we focus on really fit into some of the same areas where we're seeing some add-on sales success. So the fraud security area would be of interest for us, some continued extension of products within financial wellness would be interesting for us, as well as marketing and analytics.

Yep, got it. Okay. It sounds good. Thanks, guys. Nice quarter.

Next question comes from Chris Kennedy with William Blair. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and thanks for taking the question. Alex, you've talked about the data platform that you have but can you just go into a little bit more what the opportunities are, as you think about your roadmap, your product roadmap, over the next couple of years?

If you think about a bank trying to interact with their customers digitally, it's the same as any other generalized industry who wanted to interact with their customers digitally. So to do that, you need several different elements of a platform, right? You need a great CDP or customer data platform, you need the ability to develop content and distribute content, you need the ability to plug into any kind of automated delivery of messaging, you need to be able to report on the results of your campaigns, so anything that you and I might think about in the generalized marketing technology stack like CDP, marketing automation, content management, integration into ad networks, campaign ROI reporting, all of those capabilities are going to be necessary in a microcosm for a regional or community financial institution to engage in a digital channel in the same way that they engage in a branch and the market understands that. What the market has been looking for is a set of technology that can be consumed by the skill sets and the skill level that exist inside a regional and community financial institution. So, hopefully, that gives you a sense of, there's a lot of different vectors that we can go in, in terms of providing technology for a financial institution. The summary I would just tell you is these financial institutions have succeeded because they have a personal relationship with their customers or members. And they understand that the digital channel is now becoming very important. And what they want to do is replicate the quality of the personalized relationship that they've had in the branch, they want to replicate that digitally. And it's not something that we have to -- we don't have to sell them on the idea. They understand it, they want to do it and so that's the wide range of opportunity that we have in front of us, is all of those kinds of capabilities.

Fantastic. Great. Thank you for that. And then just one last one. You talked about the renewal outlook for this year. How does the renewal outlook for 2024 look compared to 2023? Thanks for taking the question.

If you look out over the next several years, our renewal pipeline is about 10% of ARR each year. It's pretty consistent for the next two to three years that could -- depending on the size of the clients that are renewing in those years, it could be more or less than the 20 clients or so that will renew this year, but it is around the 10% of ARR.

Thanks for taking the questions.

The next question comes from Jacob Stephan with Lake Street, please go ahead.

Yeah, hey, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. Congrats on the quarter. I just kind of want to touch on the two times ARR sanction among the 2018, 2019 cohorts. With the 2020 and 2021 cohorts, are you seeing the similar kind of trajectory that you've seen with solution uptake within the 2018, 2019?

We are and so in fact, the increase in each of the individual cohorts, it's really being driven by two things. And then this is the beauty of our financial model, because we're not overly dependent on any one lever but what's driving it historically has been our clients growing their users. And then as I mentioned earlier in the Q&A session in 2019, we created our client sales team and they're gaining a lot of momentum cross selling into our client base, which is now adding another component that's driving ARR expansion within each individual cohort. But if you look at 2020 and 2021, there are between 150% and 200% expansion from their original contractual minimums.

Okay, awesome. Maybe just kind of touch on the pipeline, did you kind of break out the banks versus credit union in the implementation backlog?

Yeah, well not in the implementation backlog, we have a lack of speak to that. So we have 25 bank clients under contract of which 10 are live and 15 are in the implementation backlog. Our total new logo implementation backlog is 34 million of the 48 million represented by close to 40 financial institutions. As it relates to our sales pipeline, banks now represent just under 40% of our total pipeline, our pipeline is higher than it was at this point in time last year. It continues to grow year-over-year at a nice healthy pace. And then which provides us great visibility into our future sales that we closed that leads to our implementation pipeline and ultimately revenue. So revenue visibility on into 2024 is now developing at a pretty nice pace. And as I mentioned in the prepared comments, year-to-date, our new sales are 75% plus over 2022, which is pretty fantastic in this market.

That's great. Hey, thanks for the color. Congrats on the quarter again.

Our next question comes from Saket Kalia with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Okay. Hey, guys, thanks for taking my questions here. Hey, Alex. Hey, Bryan, how you guys doing?

Good.

Great, Saket.

Excellent. Alex, maybe for you. Maybe building on that last question, great to see the bank wins so far this year, and just that come through in the pipeline? Maybe the question is, can you just remind us how the profile of a bank win compares to the profile of a credit win, for example? Is it maybe higher users with a bank contract, or is it higher ARPU, anything on sort of how the profile of a bank contract win versus a credit union contract win that'd be really helpful to understand?

Yeah, I would just generalize it to say that the contract value between a bank and a credit union is likely not that different. In the credit union, you were going to have a lower ARPU and more users because of the retail focus, and then in a bank win because we add in some of the our higher priced products, we will end up with a lower number of users but a higher ARPU. And Bryan, I don't know if you have any specific examples, but just generally think about it as across the TAM, the ACV or the ARR per customer is going to be pretty consistent; credit Union, lower ARPU, higher number of seats; bank, higher ARPU lower number of seats.

Yeah. And if you look at our implementation backlog, which today, as I mentioned, in the last question, is 40 financial institutions, 15 of which are banks, the RPU for all 40 financial institutions in the new logo backlog is around $24. Credit unions are at $22 and banks are at $30. So that gives you a sense of the RPU difference. In some respects that's because 100% of the banks have commercial banking, generally, as a product. And on average, it's about 60% of the credit unions may have commercial banking. And as Alex mentioned, generally, banks will have fewer users. But Alex did call out in his prepared comments that we signed our largest contract value bank client this quarter and it just so happens, that client has over 150,000 digital users. So that's a little bit of an exception, in terms of the number of users that a bank will have. This was an eight year deal. They took 21 products, it was a competitive deal with a few names that you would be very familiar with out there that we compete against and we won that deal, and we're super excited about it.

That's great. That's great and congrats on that win. Bryan, maybe for the follow up for you. How do you think about sort of the user adds here in the back half? And maybe just the different components in terms of how many are coming from backlog, how many were kind of coming from sort of growth, and whether there was any sort of seasonality that we should think about in that net add trajectory?

Yeah, so every year, I mean, it's very different. There's not really seasonality to our business, it is more about the timing of when the new logo wins occur about 9 to 12 months before the implementation. But year-to-date we've implemented from new clients click just under 700,000 digital users would expect unless we have an implementation that could slip out because it happens from time-to-time. We should be somewhere around, call it, 800,000 to 850,000 digital users that will implement in the back half a year with a lot of concentration in Q3. As it relates to our clients growing their digital user base, just continue that 100,000 digital users a month is the way that we think about it. We're a little over that year-to-date. Through June 30, I would expect we will add somewhere in the neighborhood of 600,000, 650,000 the back half a year.

Got it. Very helpful. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Charles Nabhan with Stephens. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and thank you for taking my question. My question is on M&A and the impact it could have on your business over time. Obviously, consolidation activity is pretty slow right now. But as we near an end to the rate hike, and presumably a soft landing, hopefully, I was curious if that's become a topic of conversation with your clients? And if so could it potentially be a catalyst for investment in technology as some of your clients prepare for another M&A cycle?

Fortunately for us, our customer base tends to be their customers that are more digitally advanced. Thinking about investing -- if you think about an Alkami customer, it is somebody who has by definition decided that they are going to have best-of-breed technology and they're choosing best-of-breed technology because technology is part of their growth strategy. And so these are the customers that tend to be the acquirers in an M&A environment. And so one of the things that was in my prepared remarks is what we've seen so far. It is that the M&A transactions that have occurred have been a benefit to us because our clients have been the ones making the acquisitions. So once again, there's almost 10,000 financial institutions in the United States. We target the top 2000 financial institutions in the United States and they tend to be the acquirers of the smaller institutions that are not being competitive. So in general, we think of M&A in our market as being good for us. And the other thing to think about is, and I know I'm telling you stuff you already know, but we price per seat, right. So the overall number of seats, even if M&A is occurring in the United States is not going down, it continues to grow. And if a financial institution is buying another financial institution, they're not buying them because they have the same customers, they're buying them because they want to grow. So our pricing model also helps us in the M&A environment, because we price by number of seats not necessarily a huge platform fee that's charged to an individual financial institution. So, in summary, M&A is good for us.

Got it. And I apologize for missing your comments earlier, I hopped on a little late. Apologies in advance if you've addressed this one, as well, but wanted to get your comments on the competitive landscape with private fintechs more focused on profitability and funding drying up. Curious if you're seeing anything different in the competitive landscape and, conversely, if you're seeing any different behavior from the larger guys to compete against as well?

Not really. I mean, we think about it, if somebody is going into a, first of all, as you know, 100% replacement market, so we don't ever go to our customer and go, we have this cool idea around digital banking, and they go, oh, my gosh, I've never thought about that. So the primary wins continue to be against legacy technology that is not providing the type of digital and sales and service platform that the institution wants. So by the time that somebody is starting an evaluation process, which can take a period of time, they've already decided that the legacy technology that they have, is insufficient for their business needs. That's why they've kicked off a process a process in any case. So, there's good competition in the marketplace. We all compete honorably with each other but, really, what we're primarily doing is replacing legacy technology. And once again to reiterate, when we launched our IPO, we said the market was 185 million users in our target market. That continues to grow. And even with our growth, we're still serving less than 10% of that market. So I think the good thing about this market is, there's a couple of folks that can compete really well in this market and grow nicely because there's a lot of legacy technology to replace.

And I'll just add a couple of comments to Alex's commentary. If you look over the last two and a half years on a run -- on a win rate -- from a win rate perspective, that ARR that's up for grabs. We're consistently winning in that 34%, 35% of the ARR that we're competing for. That was consistent in 2022 and it's been consistent in year-to-date 2023 as well. What's interesting in that is, as it relates to credit unions, very consistent, and it actually we're probably a little bit on the higher end of that number in 2023. We're approaching 40% of the ARR that we've been competing for. Now, what I find even more intriguing is our win rate for banks is increasing but more importantly, the number of bank deals that we're competing in, that's increasing as well. So there's a lot of marketing effort, lot of marketing energy focused on increasing our share of voice in the marketing sub-segment of the market that we're going after. So that's just a little bit of flavor on how we're performing in terms of win rate as it relates to the ARR that we're competing for in each of these deals.

Got it. Appreciate the color, guys. Nice quarter. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Daniel Hibshman with Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead.

Hey, thank you, guys. This is Daniel on for Jeff. First off, just kind of on the sales motion for banks where do you guys think in terms of the go-to-market in terms of is that refined in terms of the pitch? Is that -- do you guys have a sound yet or does that need more work yet on refining the pitch? And then kind of just looking forward to where we're at sort of like six -- if I have this great six signings of banks in the first half of 2023 versus about six signings first half 2022, just what are you guys thinking in terms of the bank adoption curve? Is this steady, slow acceleration? Is there a point at which there's a critical mass or inflection point, how should we think about that kind of adoption rate?

Yeah, this is Alex. I’ll take the first half of the question. I'll let Bryan take the second half of the question. In terms of the sales motion, in Q1, we identified 12 specific skill sets that you can't learn to swim in the front yard, right, so we started making progress in the bank market, we started engaging with bank prospects, we started winning some banks, and then through that, we started seeing -- okay, actually, and I would kind of expand it to not just the sales motion, but to say from the sales through the implementation motion, what have we learned. And as I was saying earlier, we learned that there were 12 specific skills that we needed within the organization and then we set a goal for ourselves to bring those skills on board in the second quarter and we were able to bring those skills on in the second quarter. And then Bryan, as you know, the question, the second part of the question was related to how do we see the adoption of banks moving forward? Is it going to be in the same ratio that we have right now? Is that ratio going to change?

Yeah, I mean, longer term, we think that will remain at our current level of competitiveness for credit union, so we'll continue to win between 30 to 35, maybe as many as 40, credit unions per year but once you get to 2026, and beyond, we would expect to win the same number of banks. So last year, we won 11 banks; this year, year-to-date, we're at six, with a building and strong sales pipeline. So I suspect that we're going to do better -- quite a bit better than that 11 that we signed last year, and then next year, it'll continue to increase. And then, as we reach out to 2026 and beyond, we will be at that 30 in terms of number of banks that we're winning each year, which will be a commensurate amount as to what we're winning on the credit union side of the market.

Thanks. That's great color. And then just kind of maybe sticking to the go-to-market theme, in terms of sales capacity, maybe just refresh us on how many reps you've got now, and whether that's a good amount or expecting to seal that up where that might be by the end of the year?

Yeah, we don't really disclose the number of sales reps that we have. In terms of total sales team we're in that kind of that 60 to 65 FTEs and so that includes sales support, sales engineers, as well as direct sales reps for new logo and client sales. But when we do go to market, we do have a hunter and farmer mentality, meaning we have a new logo team, we have our client sales team that's responsible for renewals and cross sell. And then as relates to some of our acquisitions, we'll have a few sales reps that are more of a specialty sales rep variety as it relates to those individual products because they may have some uniqueness to them and then it also helps support and drive sales through those other teams by having the sales specialist involved.

I'll say just want to add-on comment with Bryan. One of the things that we really like about this business model is if you look at a company like an Alkami versus generalized SaaS company, in a generalized SaaS company, you have to spend maybe 30%, 35% of revenue on sales, because you have to stimulate the market with your sales organization. And so, as you're growing revenue, you're actually having to add sales expense ahead of time to make sure that you're pushing the market, for lack of a better term but obviously in a highly verticalized SaaS target industry. And then if you go deeper than that, the thing that's great about our industry is it's really an industry where you can really do account-based marketing, because think of all of the data that's published about every single one of these institutions, what they have to publish to the government. And so what you would normally have to do to leverage your marketing organization to drive demand, in a lot of cases is really hard because of the lack of data about the industry. But here the data is there and so it allows us to utilize the marketing organization in a much more targeted manner than in other kind of go-to-market situations, which allows us to keep sales headcount, frankly, lower than a lot of other SaaS models.

That's great color. Thanks so much for taking my questions and congrats on a great quarter.

This concludes our question-and-answer session, and our conference is also now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.