Greetings and welcome to the Vertex, Inc. First Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Ankit Hira, Vertex Investor Relations. Thank you, Ankit. You may begin. One moment please, while we deal with some technical issues.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining us for Vertex’s financial results conference call for the first quarter ending March 31, 2021. On the call today, we have Vertex’s CEO, David DeStefano; and CFO, John Schwab. Before we begin, allow me to provide a disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements. This call, including the Q&A portion of the call, may include forward-looking statements related to the expected future results for our company and, therefore, are forward-looking statements. Our actual results may differ materially from our projections due to a number of risks and uncertainties. The risks and uncertainties that forward-looking statements are subject to are described in our earnings release and other SEC filings. Today’s remarks will also include references to non-GAAP financial measures. Additional information, including reconciliations between non-GAAP financial information to the GAAP financial information, is provided in the press release. This conference call will be available for replay via webcast through Vertex’s Investor Relations website at ir.vertexinc.com. With that, I’ll now turn the call over to David.

Thanks, Ankit and thank you all for joining us today. We had a strong start to the year and we’re very pleased with our performance, with strength across all our key markets segments, product lines and verticals. We continue to execute on our strategy and focus on our customers, the results another strong quarter outperforming our Q1 guidance. We grew quarterly total revenue to $98.2 million in Q1 and annual recurring revenue grew to $320.1 million. The outstanding efforts of our teams around the globe and the investments we are making to accelerate go-to-market, deliver new products and enable great customer experiences are building strong momentum in our business as we move forward. We believe that as tax revenues continue to be a key part of our global economic recovery, the mission critical role of our solutions to enable growth and reduce friction will continue to increase. The investments we are making in our cloud platform, keep us well positioned to seize these opportunities and deliver innovative end-to-end solutions to companies wherever and however they do business. And we are incredibly excited about the acquisition of Taxamo, which we announced earlier today, bringing new and differentiated capabilities to our portfolio and significant growth opportunities in e-commerce and marketplaces. Our vision is simple, but it is bold. We intend to accelerate global commerce. Why? Because it benefits everyone companies, consumers and governments. Because of our breadth of enterprise grade cloud and end-to-end product offerings, we are ideally positioned at the intersection of where most of the world’s commerce happens and the compliance required in it. What’s so exciting how fast this vision is playing out the global fabric of commerce, meaning, incredible opportunity and expansion across all channels, but also comes with complexity from a tax perspective. It requires intelligent tax…

Thank you, David, and good morning, everyone. Today, I will discuss our first quarter of 2021 results. And then I will wrap up with comments on our capital structure and provide Q2 and full year 2021 guidance. Our guidance will include the results of our recently announced acquisition of Taxamo. First on the Q1 financial results, total first quarter revenues grew 10.1% year-over-year to reach $98.2 million, exceeding the upper end of our quarterly guidance by 176 basis points or $1.7 million in aggregate. Our subscription revenue component expanded 9.9% year-over-year to $83.3 million. Our services revenue grew 10.9% year-over-year to $50 million. Our annual recurring revenue or ARR grew to $320.1 million as of the end of March, 2021, representing approximately 13% growth year-over-year. Our net revenue retention rate or NRR was 105% for the – at quarter end, demonstrating our customers’ ongoing commitment to our software and solutions. Our gross revenue retention rate or GRR was 95% at quarter end, which excludes the impact of existing customers migrating to our cloud solutions, which was approximately 4%. This is consistent with quarterly performance throughout 2020. We continued to see strong growth in our cloud-based solutions among both existing and new customers. In the first quarter of 2021, cloud-based revenues grew 42% year-over-year, and was directionally aligned with the guidance we shared in March. As previously mentioned, we expect our cloud revenue base to exceed over $100 million for the full year of 2021 and are targeting annual growth rate of approximately 35%. We continue to believe that our customers shift to cloud presents a unique opportunity for us to drive additional revenues and ARR growth. We believe the approach to serving both cloud and on-prem customer needs continues to be essential for us to meet the complex needs of…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. Our first question comes from Samad Samana with Jefferies. Please proceed with your question.

Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. Maybe first one, David for you, when I think about M&A, it seems to be picking up with the most recent deal this morning, and then another one earlier this year, and I think some of your competitors in the market have also been inquisitive. Just how should we think about the consolidation and how that factors into Vertex's strategy may both for this year and kind of maybe on an intermediate term basis?

Yes, Samad, great to talk to you, and thanks for the question. As we said all along, we see a balance of opportunity in greenfield that we can grow with what we have in the market and what we're building organically. But we also see the opportunity and the need to make acquisitions in particular, in certain tuck-in areas that will complete our end-to-end capability. This acquisition of Taxamo is wonderful because it expands our presence in Europe. It will increase our mid-market and enterprise opportunities, and also it really will accelerate our e-commerce and marketplace growth. And I think those are the areas we're going to continue to look for opportunity as we continue to expand our portfolio.

Great. John, and then maybe one for you, when I think about cloud revenue, I know the company isn't going to guide for that every quarter, but how should we think about how that looked in 1Q and is it on track to do kind of better or consistent with that 35% outlook provided for the full year?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Samad. I think, again, as we mentioned, we did about 42% in the first quarter. Our full year expectation, as we mentioned on the call was about 35%. Yes. We expect that it's somewhat in line. We may see a little here – we may see some improvement there, but I wouldn't, we're not planning it right now. So we stand by the 35%, but we think there's opportunity to perhaps increase that.

Great. And then just, I guess, when I think about the NRR, we definitely appreciate that disclosure, down to just a point in the quarter and if I miss this, but just – was that more as a result of gross retention changing or cloud conversions or was it just maybe U.S. upsell activity or upsell, cross-sell in the quarters, help us maybe unpack? I know it's one point, but just trying to try and get way better there?

Yes. No. Our GRR was consistent with where it's been throughout 2020. So that hasn't really changed. It really is about the upsell activity with existing customers. That was really the driver there.

Great. Thank you so much for taking my questions.

Good. No problem.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Brad Sills with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.

Great. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask also about net revenue retention, the 105%, I guess, given the current penetration in some of these larger accounts for your footprint and some of the traction you're seeing with the cloud. Could the cloud potentially accelerate that net revenue retention is? In other words, are cloud customers’, propensity to buy more and expand more? Is that greater? Are you seeing that type of sign within the cloud installed base? And if so, why or anything that could get that net revenue retention perhaps accelerating?

Yes. Thank you, Brad. Appreciate the questions. This is David. Yes, I think there was a few dimensions to your question. I think the first is, as we continue to bring new products to market. Some of the accelerated products we pull out the data integrity offering, those things are all designed to expand our customer experience, improve our customer experience, which will increase NRR as we deliver more value. I think the second thing is, oftentimes, the migrations we see, the demand driver behind most migrations of an on-premise solution are typically going to be the complexity of their tax environment. So they were using one solution, say sales tax, and now they're starting to have consumers use tax challenges or VAT challenges. And so when they're looking to address an upgrade or a migration at that point in time, it allows us to expand our ARR multi-dimensionally. It's not just moving to the cloud, which will improve our ARR and therefore the NRR, but it will also allow us to sell other products. An example, that was what I talked about earlier in the quarter, we drove one client up 300% in ARR just because of their migration process. So I think those are sort of tipping points. And then obviously as customers move their infrastructure to the cloud, our relationships with SAP and Oracle, which are the larger platforms that we support when they're moving to the cloud, that's a very logical expansion opportunity for us. So I think you have to think about it, all those dimensions as we grow our NRR.

Great. Thanks so much. And then one more, if I may, just on Taxamo, will this accelerate the adoption, if you will marketplaces for digital tax solutions for their merchant base like yourself. I know for example, you have certain large marketplace providers as customers but what would it take to get them to sign on as a partner and more materially resell essentially Vertex? And if you could remind us also kind of what are they offering to customers today for sales tax automation? Thank you.

Yes, sure. So every marketplace has a different approach on how they're solving tax. The tailwinds that are coming from the legislation in July that started in the UK in January around the marketplace requirements are going to be significant. And I think that's where our – we see immediate opportunity. The Taxamo has well positioned themselves with a true end-to-end solution. They handle registration, filing, all the qualified tax payments, really the whole end-to-end process through seller validation, liability, invoicing, and payment. So that comprehensiveness of suite allows for acceleration. It also allows us to now bring those capabilities to our – as you noted to our install marketplaces where we already have a presence. So we now have a larger opportunity, a portfolio of solutions to bring to that market. So we definitely see it as an opportunity to bring to both new marketplaces that Taxamo is well positioned with as well as our stable of marketplace we're already working with.

That's. Great. Thanks so much, David.

Sure. Appreciate the question.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Pat Walravens with JMP Securities. Please proceed with your question.

Great. Thank you. I actually have two, and by the way, congratulations on the results. I mean, David, it sounds like things are going really well. But when I look at the ARR over the last five quarters, it was gone 17%, 16%, 15%, 14%, and now 13%. So can you just help us unpack, what's going on under the covers that is leading to this consistency acceleration [ph] over the last year? Yes. That would be really helpful.

Sure. And I think, when you look at the slowdown that SAP, Oracle and Workday have all been talking about. And now starting to see their pipeline build, we're following the exact pattern. I think we saw the same trend play out for our businesses. They slowed down during the pandemic, it has a lag effect on us. So it hit us a little later into the year. But now as they're starting to talk about, and we're seeing through our pipeline activity, the demand drivers beginning to pick up with the acceleration, they're all experiencing. We're seeing the same follow-on discussions now starting with our customer base, as they start to plan for the activities that they're being driven through their organizations. And so it's actually following the pattern. I think we've been trying to layout, Pat, that as those larger companies are moving, the SAP, Oracle, Workday overall we sort of follow that trend. I think the second part of it is the heavy investment we've now been making in channel and e-commerce, and now with marketplaces around Taxamo is the other side of the equation, more the front office side and the acceleration we're now – we now start to expect to see there, moving forward in the back half of this year and into 2022.

Okay. That's super. Thank you. And then can you just touch it? And you mentioned the changes in the tax rules in Europe and cross border. Would you mind just touching on sort of what the biggest issue is around cross border and how those changes fit in?

Sure. I think fundamentally governments are trying to get their fair share as the economy is moving into a new dimension, meaning that commerce is happening in places they historically have not been able to pursue legislate – compliance in. And so what we're seeing is now a great opportunity because they're pursuing that fraud, they're pursuing more accurate filing. So, and they really want to shift the burden to marketplaces in e-commerce vendors as the way to – or logistics companies, even we're seeing the logistics and supply chain company having to deal with a new form of compliance. All following this legislation that's come – that's being brought out in July. And so those are now new demand drivers, much like we've seen here in the EU. U.S. with the marketplace facilitators were some States are starting to pursue liability exposure to the marketplace for third-party sellers. I think it's going to happen in – we know what's happening in Europe. There's other countries both in North America, Latin America, and actually around the world that we're now seeing opportunities to explore it.

Great. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] Thank you. Our next question comes from Bhavan Suri with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks for taking my question and nice stuff in the quarter there. I guess I wanted to touch on something you mentioned really briefly, but the idea that you might be moving into payments with Taxamo, I'd love to understand just a little bit more clarification there and sort of, as you think about that and e-invoicing, there is the ability to move into payments, right? So bill.com does AP, AR and it has a take rate around transactions too. Is that something you're exploring? Is that something that's further a field? How should we think about that, because obviously that layers in a totally different type of revenue stream with a different margin profile?

You're absolutely correct, Bhavan. And that was a key part. It's a natural adjacency for us. It's something we've been looking at for a while, as we've been working through our strategy and Taxamo brings those capabilities and an active solution in the market for that. We also partnered with other payment providers already. I mean, Stripe is a partner of ours. And we're thrilled to have them as a partner. So we've been working in this space for a while. The Taxamo acquisition and the capabilities move us closer and deeper into the e-invoicing and payment partnering suite. And it is a different model and it's one, we're very excited about looking forward.

Got you. Got you. And so I guess what I'd love to understand is sort of how big is that business today and sort of any sense of, I know, it's probably too early to sort of give us any guidance. But some sense of how big that might be. Think that could be saying two or three years and what your expectations are for that payments part of the business specifically. And then maybe the competitive environment there is very different, right? It's a different buyer. It's not necessarily, it may not be treasury. It maybe may not be tax, right. It's sort of an operations maybe or e-commerce buyer and the competitors are different. So maybe how that go-to-market also shifts for you guys and the investment you might make there. So a couple of questions in there, but let's understand that a little more color. Thank you.

Yes. Thanks for the question, Bhavan. And I'll start with it and maybe David, you can have some other commentary. But I think, from an overall standpoint, as you saw from some of the guidance that we provide, you can kind of get a feel for the magnitude and the size of where the guys at Taxamo are now, in terms of kind of their revenues and how they've been operating. And so I think there's an opportunity there as we think, and we look into 2022 and we think about what that's going to look like. We do – absolutely see the opportunity for significant growth there. Obviously, we're buying it midyear. So we'll get the full year next year, but with the regulation and everything that's going on, kind of now-ish, in this mid-year timeframe, that's going to only accelerate growth in their business. And it's going to accelerate growth in the businesses that touch on payments as well as the areas of their business that are focused around the marketplaces. So I think it's a combination of all of the above, that are going to really fuel the growth that we're going to see from them.

And Bhavan, I would just add, the founders of Taxamo came out of the payment space. That's where their expertise actually lies and they backed into tax as a short term opportunity. But that connection for them is a very natural one. And so that go-to-market motion that you asked about what it would be different than our historical go-to-market motion, is actually very native to the Taxamo team because that's where they grew their chops over the years. So I think that's – again, the synergy we see in the natural connection between their business and ours.

Got you. Interesting acquisition, sounds like a bunch of different areas, but nicely expansive on TAM. Thanks for taking my questions guys.

Yes. It's definitely going to be increasing our TAM, very excited about that.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Brad Reback with Stifel. Please proceed with your question.

Great. Thanks very much. John, on 35% cloud growth, does that include Taxamo or is that on top of that?

Well, so the 35% growth, first of all, for the first quarter, we came in at 42% and when we gave that growth estimate out, that was at the beginning of the year for the first quarter. And we said that was for the full year that did not include – that does not include the Taxamo growth. So that was excluding that.

The 35% guide for the year should we think of that as inclusive of Taxamo?

That did not, that did not. That’s a great question. Thanks for clarifying that Brad. It did not include that. So Taxamo increase – it will certainly increase to the extent that the majority of their activity is cloud-based.

Okay. And then on the cloud revenue specifically for 1Q this sequential dollar increase was pretty modest compared to what you saw in 4Q and 3Q, which is running at about $2.5 million plus per quarter. Is there seasonality in 1Q or are there some other things going on that weighed on that sequential absolute growth? Thanks.

No. I think again, as we’ve talked a little bit about we still offer a hybrid solution, right? We have the opportunity for customers to buy both cloud and cloud non-prem. And as we talked about, I think at the end of the year in our March call, on occasion, we’ll have customers that come in and want a real big opportunity in on-prem. And that’ll kind of move things around a little bit. So we’re not seeing anything unusual happening in the business. It’s kind of as we had anticipated that, we would say, so there’s no real big movement going on there. But again, the fact that we offer both of the products, customers can choose to go on-prem and that impacts a little bit of what’s going into that cloud revenue growth.

And in fact, as we talked about in Q4, our fifth largest deal in the history of the company was an on-prem deal. And then this quarter, we had some very large Brazil deals that were all on-prem. So again, it’s just the nature of the buyer sometimes at the larger enterprise level we’ll want to keep it behind the firewall. And that’s something we can differentiate with when we need to, even if we’re leading clouds in everything we do, at the end of the day, we’re about customer experience and giving them what they need to support their tax operations.

Got it. Thanks very much.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Joshua Reilly with Needham and Company. Please proceed with your question.

Hey guys, nice job on the quarter. So if you look at the pipeline of increased Oracle and SAP activity, is that primarily on-premise installations going to cloud or is on-premise customers buying more solutions, or just generally, how should we think about that and the implications for ARR growth later in the year, because obviously if you’re converting or migrating them, the impact to ARR would be greater. Thanks.

Absolutely. And you’re right. So the growth, remember, it’s both new logos and existing customers migrating, but yes, certainly the SAP S/4HANA platform is beginning to gain more traction and we’re in much more pipeline discussions there than ever before. Some new logos, some migrations and then I think OCI and what Oracle is doing has been really a solid partner for us for 25 plus years. And they’re seeing really nice traction there, and we continue to support that. We’re very fortunate to work with them the way we are. So I think both organizations, candidly are seeing the type of cloud lift we would expect, as they move year-to-year, especially coming out of the pandemic now and feeling stronger about the economy. I think the businesses are getting more bullish on it, and we’re seeing that in our pipeline discussions as well.

Okay, great. So it sounds like a mix. So if you – just a follow-up. If you look at the sales go-to-market kind of post-COVID, pre-COVID you guys were a heavy in-person sale type process, obviously you’ve moved to virtual. What do you see as a post-COVID sales dynamic in terms of hybrid versus in-person?

In terms of the sales, I think our – obviously, our sales team is anxious to get back in front of our customers and continue to support them and build the trusted relationships that we’ve enjoyed for all these years. So I would definitely expect it will very least be a hybrid. I think every customer is going to be different though. I think some customers don’t want people on site yet, and they may not want them on site for a considerable period of time, where they may not be having their tax team in the office anymore, in which case it would limit our ability to go meet them in person. So I think it will really be driven by what our customers are doing, consistent with our practice for 40 years of working, meeting our customer, where they’re at. I see that following suit with our sales organization. If our customers are in, we’ll be there. If our customers are working remote, then we’ll happily work with them in the virtual environment we’ve been.

Okay. Great. Thanks.

Thank you, Josh.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Daniel Jester with Citi. Please proceed with your question.

Great. Thanks for taking my question. Good morning, everyone. Maybe another one on Taxamo and sort of the VAT rule changes. You mentioned that the UK went live with those changes already earlier this year. So we’ve got maybe four months of data, like how did Taxamo benefit from that? Can you quantify at all? And just as a point of clarification, is this going to be a driver of new logos? Like i.e., people don’t have something for this compliance change, they have to get something? Or is this going to be a situation in which many customers already have, but they need to provide an additional service in order to get into compliance as the year progresses?

Yes. So on the latter question, I mean, obviously we see this as an opportunity to – we’re expanding our new logos around the e-commerce capabilities they bring as well as the marketplace. The marketplaces are now having to deal with this, Dan, just this is new – this legislation is just coming on stream here in July. So it’s really just new conversations that are starting with marketplace that previously didn’t have to deal with this liability. The good news is we’ve got our footprint in with a lot of the best marketplaces already given that we’ve been handling their first party sales. So this new third-party liability and bringing these capabilities to bear is sort of a natural extension of what we’ve been doing. I don’t know if we – John, if you have data on…

Yes. We don’t have data on sort of how the just the specific UK piece. Again, keep in mind, Taxamo offers sales tax solutions across the board. And so, they’ve had a revenue stream that’s floated in, in addition to just the UK activity that took place – that started in January. So they have a nice strong business. They’ve been growing it very successfully over the last couple of years, and we’re excited about adding the marketplace into it’s going to really mean to us.

Okay, great. And then going back to your own business and the comment about 34%, 35% of new bookings in the quarter is from new logos. Can you just remind us, like how does that compare to the last couple quarters? And as you think about sort of the guidance for the full year, how do you see sort of the new logo implications into the revenue growth stream? Thanks.

Yes. I think it’s important to note there again is 92% of those new logos are cloud. And I think that’s consistent with our go-to-market strategy and it’s working very well. I think as we continue to expand our investment in the middle market channels we’ve been doing, remember about 35% of our customers are already coming from the middle market. So we’re very comfortable in that space and been working there for years. We’re now able to expand it. And I think that because of the compliance challenges that are showing – complexity challenges that are showing up in the middle market, that’s really the greenfield that we’re running to building from our base within that middle market. And so I expect that to continue. I think this quarter ran very similar to every other quarter in the last several. And I just see it solidly growing as we continue to expand our footprint in our channel and go-to-market investments.

Great. Thanks a lot.

Dan, good talking to you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Stan Zlotsky with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Perfect. Thank you so much guys. A couple of questions from my end. Just going back to Taxamo for a second. So if I recall, you guys already have very strong capabilities in marketplaces. So is the right way to think for us to think about Taxamo as it adds your capabilities to really expand internationally and the potential to add more payments capabilities. Is that the right way to think about it?

We already had strong relationships with the marketplaces and good capabilities, this expanded to the third-party seller regulations even faster than our roadmap. So it was always on our roadmap with these new regulations that are hitting third-party sellers, Taxamo was already there. So they actually just get us farther faster in our roadmap, number one. Number two, clearly expanding our European and rest of world presence. That’s really their dominant position of their customer base is European and rest of world. So expanding our footprint, we’ve talked about the importance of Europe in our strategy. And then as I mentioned on the call, the ability to take – our customers, we have large enterprise customers that are setting up their own marketplaces now, and this is a new experience for the industry. So it’s not just these third-party marketplaces, it’s our own customers, one of the largest auto manufacturers in the world did this past quarter with us. And so having all the Taxamo capabilities to bring to that are additive. And then as you noted appropriately Stan, the connection to payments and the fact that they’re handling that element of the business as well has been – we see as a big upside going forward.

Okay, perfect. And then John, I had a couple of just some high level questions. If we look at guidance for the full year and back out Taxamo, and then figuring the beat that you guys put up in Q1 that implies that the guide for the remainder of the year is actually slightly lower than what you guys talked about on the Q4 call. Maybe help us to understand, how are you thinking about the remainder of the year given those dynamics?

Yes. Stan, from a guidance standpoint, we feel very good about the end of the year. I think we had a very good quarter and we feel like there’s opportunity there for us to increase over time. That said, we didn’t want to use one quarters’ results to sort of influence what the rest of the year guide was. So we left it as is, and we figured we would adjust as we got into the second quarter and had more visibility into the back half of the year. So that’s simply how we thought about guidance. And that’s what we felt. We feel very good about the numbers that are out there, and we feel very good about our ability to be so – that’s kind of – that was our thought process there.

Got it. And maybe I missed it in the prepared remarks, but did you guys give us the ARR per customer metric like you guys have done in prior quarters? Or maybe just absolute customer account number?

Yes, we did that at year end. We did that at year end, Stan. I don’t think we provided it this quarter. But I think from an overall customer count, the customer counts very consistent with where it was at the end of the year within a handful of customers. So it’s not a significant change either way.

Got it. As it stayed flat, did go up or did it continue to decrease slightly like what we saw in Q4?

It went up slightly, Stan.

Got it. Understood. Okay. And then last one from my end. I’m getting a lot of questions from investors right now, as far as what the actual cloud revenue was in the quarter. And I think if you kind of look back at some of the questions that there were being asked, I think that’s what people are trying to get to, because depending on what people are assuming was the Q1 of last year cloud revenue, if you put 42% growth on it, it either implies that cloud revenue was flat in the quarter, or maybe up, something like $500,000. So I just wanted to see if we can get the raw cloud subscription number to help answer some of those questions.

The cloud revenue that drove the 42% was 26.9%.

Got it. Very helpful. Thank you, guys.

Okay.

There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the floor back over to David DeStefano for closing comments.

Yes. Thank you very much and thank you for the questions today. Appreciate everybody’s time. As we move forward through the year, we will continue to execute on the important advancements we’ve talked about today from the acquisition we’re making to further expanding and building upon our capabilities and driving additional investments in our partner ecosystem. We also continue to drive R&D investments to accelerate our innovations and coverage of our end-to-end solutions to be wherever commerce has done. We see tremendous opportunity ahead, and we are well positioned to capitalize on these opportunities. I thank you for your time.

This concludes today’s conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation. Have a wonderful day.