BILL Holdings, Inc. (BILL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

I'm really happy to have BILL with us today. It's a company that I honestly have been covering both private and public. I'd say I'd keep an eye for years and years now at this point. We really picked it up a few years ago as a public company. I mean I think I was saying to John a second ago, they only went public in 2019, right?

Yes.

But we've kept a close eye on this company since its private days and seen a lot of growth in what's an incredibly impressive addressable market. And I think the distribution channels have differentiated you guys, I think the software obviously has. And as we see, there's been a lot more from a consolidation standpoint, helping your offerings as well. But look, I should have said, I mean, we're happy to have John. John is the CFO of the company. We have Karen, [indiscernible] from IR with us as well. So thank you guys very much for being with us.

Great to be here.

So maybe we'll start off by recapping the most recent quarter. John, I mean, if you talk about the recent trends, TPV, take rate, customer adds, anything else you think it's worth highlighting for investors, we could start there.

Sure. We start with Q2, I'd sum it up by saying we had a very strong financial performance, 22% year-over-year revenue growth. Non-GAAP net income grew 48%, 23% margin -- 23% free cash flow margin and ex-float operating income positive, which is an important milestone for us. We also had good customer acquisition. On the BILL side, 3,900 net new adds. On the Spend & Expense side, good demand from the larger businesses. We saw lower net adds due to the smaller customs that we've been intentionally deprioritizing given the credit environment that we're operating in. spend patterns and TPV came in, in the December quarter, better than we expected. Still relatively muted versus, say the pandemic era when most businesses were expanding like crazy but the small business segment, the smaller businesses of the SMB tend to be holding up pretty well, larger businesses, I think, are more cautious. The other big moving part is monetization. And for us, take rate was down slightly in the December quarter. It ended up a little bit better than we anticipated but nevertheless reflects some of the recent trends that we've experienced around, more cost sensitivity on the part of suppliers trying to lower the overall cost of payment acceptance. We're working through that with a number of initiatives and feel really good about where we're starting for the rest of the fiscal year.

Good. Maybe -- I mean, you mentioned it just a second ago, but I mean you talked about Spend, and it was a little bit better than we've also in the last quarter in terms of TPV trends. Maybe if you could just help us give -- provide us some insights into the SMB health spending trends you're observing into '24, so far, how these trends inform your strategy moving forward?

Yes. I mean I don't have any specific commentary on 2024, this calendar year or this quarter. But I can say that the trends we saw in Q2 were definitely encouraging. There's a little bit of tale of 2 cities in the customer base where smaller businesses seem to adjust pretty quickly. They have obviously lower discretionary spend. And over the last few quarters, we saw them pretty quickly adapt to lower their discretionary expenses and get to where they needed to be. Larger businesses are still in a slight contraction mode, less so than previously, and that's what led to the better overall performance. Some of the other things that are important is engagement seems to be really good. So while spend might change by customer segment, the way they use our platform, the number of transactions that they execute, the number of suppliers that they're interacting with is all really stable. So that's a good sign that for BILL, we're continuing to deliver value for customers. We're continuing to engage with the platform, even though they're maybe running less spend through it given the macro environment. So it's a sticky product. That engagement is a good sign. And I think suggests to us that we're pretty well positioned further down the road when we see the macro turn a little more positive. We get some clarity on interest rates and things like that and Spend expansion starts to occur.

Right. So said another way, and the Spend side, it was a decent quarter but still a uncertain macro environment from what a business decides to do on their own. On the other hand, what you see them doing with your products is still resonating pretty well and...

I think it is. It's -- once a customer gets up and running, it's less of an elective product that they use sometimes and don't use other times. It tends to be more they've changed the way they operate. They have adapted processes. They've gone digital. Once you do that, you're not going back to analog.

Right. Can you just remind us on the topic of demand, just what you've said again about new customers and what kind of trends you're assuming in demand from new customers for your offerings?

Yes. Demand has been stable to growing, particularly for larger businesses. I'd say our sweet spot on the BILL platform is, call it, 10 to 100 employees. We do really well above that also. And on the Spend & Expense side, it's definitely larger businesses. I think hundreds of employees. And demand has been really strong there. On the smaller customer segments, we still see very good retention and stability and usage from all of our businesses. On the Spend & Expense side, we've been pretty cautious on the credit component of that. So we've actually scaled back our efforts to reach these smaller businesses but we've seen very healthy demand trends from larger businesses.

Okay. Maybe we shift to the '24 outlook. I mean a couple of quarters ago, not this one you just reported but 2 ago, you changed your guide a little bit, and I think there was a hope that it was building and conservatism on the macro front. So maybe just help us understand what assumptions are made in that outlook? And how does that compare to what your current observations are?

Yes. I mean I refer you to the script with the specifics on the outlook. And I say we don't really have any updates or changes to that. But it was grounded in a good signal in the December quarter around the health of SMBs and their spending patterns. But that was a very micro almost isolated event. And what we're looking for is consistency in TBP growth, potentially the beginning of declines in interest rates and be able to match that pattern to say, look, businesses are in expansion mode now. For BILL, that creates incremental monetization opportunities, both in subscription fees in higher retention and higher monetization, more TBP. So we haven't seen all of those signals yet. So we're a bit cautious on the macro environment and the spend outlook, and therefore, that's reflected in our numbers as well. We said we're likely to be very range bound in terms of monetization this fiscal year -- the rest of this fiscal year. We are expecting to recover from the slight decline in monetization we saw in the December quarter. But some of the product initiatives and improvements that we're making that will have a positive effect there will also play out over multiple quarters as we think about getting to more significant expansion mode perhaps later in FY '25.

Okay. So over the past few quarters, we've obviously seen a some of it is the modernization where you just alluded to but the cyclicality of the business playing out through a few different -- some of the different KPIs. And at the same time, you guys have also been integrating and growing incremental opportunities both organically and through M&A, right, in the last couple of years, especially. How do you think about investments and how they impact your growth and profitability over the next year or 2?

Yes, it's a great point. So we are oriented towards growth. We're investing in payments, integrating and improving our solutions and expanding our ecosystem. Those are all sort of unique capabilities that we have. We have a significant lead over others in the market. We sort of created a category that others are following. And so our strengths in this area, plus bringing together AP, AR, Spend & Expense, more recently, cash flow and insights reporting for small businesses gives us a huge head start here. We think continuing to expand the breadth of our payment capabilities is going to be really important. More choices for buyers and suppliers is going to be a good thing. It also gives us more opportunity to drive incremental adoption on more of our ad valorem payments, which in the end is in the near term, what drives revenue growth. You've seen our investments play out recently in expanding our ecosystem, both within financial institutions and also more recently, taking the learnings from what we've done with FIs and embedded solutions now to the software market. We can obviously talk more about that. And then the network that we have, 5.8 million network members continues to be a significant differentiator for us and identifying ways to beyond just monetization and driving adoption, create more value for suppliers such that we become the go-to software platform for them to drive payment acceptance much like we are on the AP side. Small businesses come to us as the best solution to drive automation in AP processes. We're looking to create more balance between both sides of the network by investing more in the network membership experience.

I think it's important when we put that in perspective. You have somewhere around 250 -- on the buyer side, 200,000 to 250,000 customers when we combine Divvy with you direct, right? You have, like you just said, 5.8 million on the network, right, on the supplier side, effectively, that clearly shows there's an opportunity if you could actually offer the right value add to those suppliers. Is that the way you guys are thinking about it?

That's exactly right. And we grew a network using essentially a freemium model. So we haven't gone and recruited or tried to acquire any network members. Our buyers have brought those relationships to us. Over the last few years, we've started to offer payment choices to network members. That's what's driven some of our ad valorem adoption increase in transaction monetization and yield. But over time, we're going to deliver more software experiences to these members. And ultimately, they can bring buyers to us at the same time. That would be like a viral aspect of a network that doesn't yet exist because we're still relatively early in the journey of establishing deep relationships and improving the value proposition of the platform for network members.

That's something I think is under [indiscernible]. I mean the long-term opportunity of that supplier side is probably pretty enormous if you can execute on it correctly, right? And so is that something the company has been spending a lot of resources on, a lot of focus on right now?

Yes. We by necessity started to evolve how we work with suppliers. We now have a small dedicated team who is proactively doing outreach to suppliers, identify product improvements that can help their overall level of automation, identify where we can create incremental value for them. So it's been an ongoing source of investment, and I think it's one that will pay off in the years ahead.

Okay. I mean, on the topic of new things, the last few months, you announced expanded partnerships with Adyen and Xero. Maybe you could just help us understand what each -- what you do in each case and what changes?

Yes. Adyen, most recently, we announced a new set of capabilities around virtual card issuing. So they become another partner for us. if you think about having a diversified base of partners that we rely on to deliver card experiences and payments. We've been working with Adyen for some time on accounts receivable. And then the relationship also opens up the opportunity down the road for us to also think about things like enabling network members to accept cards to become merchants. We haven't done this historically but the interest and demand for creative innovative card solutions is really high, particularly amongst network members. So we're excited about the Adyen relationship and how it can help us bring more products to the market.

And you mentioned Xero.

On the Xero side, I think we view Xero as the first step towards taking the learnings that we've had in working with financial institutions and bringing those learnings to a software market. So we -- it's hard to get your foot in the door with large banks. There's a price of entry around regulatory and compliance and those sorts of things, and we've done that. We've perfected at some level, enabling third parties to deliver a great experience for their customers. And we've seen a significant amount of inbound demand from other software companies, not just in the accounting system world but across all categories of software to where they realize it's going to be really difficult to build proprietary payment capabilities on their own, almost impossible to build a network like we've build. And we're also able to package some of the capabilities around know your customer, know your business, regulatory and compliance as a service alongside of these payment capabilities. So we're excited about the partnership. Xero obviously has a large U.S. customer base. We're focused on the U.S. region for now and feel like there's going to be more to come.

Okay. Maybe just switching to competition for a minute. I mean, you obviously have always had a great distribution or there it's your direct but also obviously, the accounting channel is, in our view, a differentiated go-to-market. With all that said, we've heard a lot of questions on competition from investors and obviously, it's because a lot of companies are saying they can do more, right, on the B2B space. So what are you seeing in the market in terms of competitive landscape around SMB and accounts payable in particular?

First, just stepping back, it's important to recognize that the market is large. Obviously, there's millions of businesses with employees, 6 million, and there's tens of millions that don't have employees sole proprietors. But it's still early and evolving. It's not like a consumer payment space. It might be hard to believe but we get thousands of new customers every month who are doing something for the first time. They're not moving. They're not upgraded, they're not trying to optimize for a better solution. They're literally doing some digital activity with payments for the first time. So that's super encouraging. And as a result of some of that, I think there's more capital, there's more companies, there's lots of interest in offering services in this category, and I think that's a good thing actually. We have a big competitive advantage as it relates to a bunch of things that we do. We've touched on some of them already. But obviously, our platform is designed around process automation. It's not just about payments. Payments are kind of a shiny object because of monetization but we get to those only because of the things that we do for small business. Nobody comes to us just for payments. You mentioned our ecosystem. It's hard to replicate. We have a trusted, known relationship with accounting firms. We've been working with them for years with banks and soon software providers. And then obviously, our scale is really hard to replicate. So I think it's true that there's more attention on the space and there is going to be a convergence of software and payments. But we feel like the investments that we're making are really important to maintain the product differentiation and lead that we have over other companies.

I mean it's still a big white space. So when you're in the market competing, do you see more in the way of another accounts payable software provider trying for the business? Or are you still trying to win share versus most companies that are still manual or doing things in-house? Or what does it look like from a competitive standpoint when you're going to market?

There's a few different ways to look at it. On the core BILL side, it's mostly companies doing something for the first time. And they're small enough that they're not doing like RFPs or competitive processes or things like that. On the Spend & Expense side, there's usually another card company involved either in existing player..

Max or somebody like that.

Exactly or there's one of the newer players that I'd say is a subset of the businesses that we look at. In the case of serving financial institutions and other partners, I think that's a more rigorous process where we're often up against other companies, and we're competing on the basis of, again, differentiation things like the size of our network and compliance and regulatory and customer experience capabilities. But I'd say day-in and day-out, we don't named competitors as being something that's changed dramatically in the business or an obstacle to tapping into current demand or the trends that we're seeing.

You mentioned before, obviously, the supplier side and payment monetization. So let's just shift there given it's been a hot topic. You talked about -- and you guided to this. Your take rate will be down. I think it was down about 0.3 bps in the second quarter, and then you talked about how it would stabilize and come back up in the end of the year back to what it more or less was, right? And so if we could talk through, I guess just if that's still the stated goal. And then more importantly, what are the initiatives like straight-through processing or data incentives, where does BILL currently stand regarding implementation and the effectiveness of these things? And maybe just a little more on the projected time line for achieving some of your outcomes.

Yes. We have a phased approach to this. It starts with improving the product experience that we have today. In the case of virtual cards or our international payments and FX. Those are the 2 largest drivers of monetization expansion for us. First is to focus on the total cost of ownership, if you will, total cost of acceptance, and we're driving more automation for suppliers in the things that we control today. And that is passing more data, doing more extraction of information from invoices and other documents in order to make the reconciliation side easier. We've already seen some success and progress with and this is one example of an initiative where we're seeing higher payment success rates as a result of giving suppliers more data with which to reconcile. Intermediate to longer term, we're going to bring more relationships to bear the -- there's a lot of companies that serve suppliers. It's a fragmented market. We work with a number of them today. But to the extent that the supplier -- a large supplier has a preferred relationship, and they've consolidated their technology and payment automation with that relationship. We should be able to connect with them and deliver a more seamless payment experience for suppliers. And there's obviously plenty of economics to go around to make that work. So I would put that in the kind of intermediate-term category as we bring more solutions to market. Assuming we got an improved product experience with automation, we've got the ability to work with a preferred provider for straight-through processing that a supplier might want. Incentives probably play a small part in this as well to the extent that we can create alignment between buyer and supplier and BILL in executing on payments, that's something we're open to as well. To date, we've only really done small-scale testing in that regard. And we know that there are behaviors that can be influenced by making sure that we get the economics right. So we've got lots of tools and levers, and I'd say here over the next year or so, these things ought to stack up, and we'll start to see expansion in monetization, driving more adoption of high-value payments and obviously creating a better payment experience and more value per perspective.

So it sounds like you've seen some evidence of the data side, at least already, right, resonating with the supplier side and some of the initiatives are early adoption of some of the straight-through processing could have going to make some progress but it's going to take some time for these fact maybe a year.

Yes, those aren't going to be super quick wins but nevertheless, as we bring on more partners and we start to work with them, the ability to scale volume with them will happen a little bit faster than say it does on our own.

It's interesting. We had another B2B provider here mentioning how, in their view, similar to what you're saying. It's not about pricing that much. I mean, it may be a bit but it's more around the experience on the supplier side to be low friction and have data to really get the ball rolling again and make sure for them also, it keeps moving.

Yes. There's lots of pieces to the payment acceptance puzzle that suppliers need to look at when they're optimizing cost. The easiest one is just the cost of the payment, right? And in the case of an ACH payment, it's close to zero. A virtual card payment, it's much higher. The reality though is there's a big human cost associated with manual reconciliation processes. So we're trying to work directly with suppliers to take a more holistic view and optimize their product experience to create automation and ultimately lower the total cost of payment acceptance and maybe the absolute nominal cost of the payment is 1 component but it's not the only component.

Right. And just while we're on the topic of payments, I mean, if you could just discuss incremental opportunities, additional payment products like card payments or invoice financing and how these can potentially enhance your value within the network and improve payment monetization also?

Yes. We've made a, ton of progress scaling our card business. After the Divvy acquisition, we're making good progress with having BILL customers use that solution as well. That's provided lots of learnings about the credit side of the card business. Obviously, we're in the charge card space, not the revolving credit space. And so we're using these earnings combined with what we've learned about real-time payments and how that might be of interest to smaller suppliers. And that's led us to launch our initial beta into working capital solutions, which I'd say it's very small scale at this point but we've done tens of thousands of loans, north of $100 million, and we're proving out the thesis that there is demand. We are able to underwrite target, identify and predict propensity to pay with suppliers because we have huge data advantage, right? We have a history, we've transactions, we have documents, and -- so I think that opens up a whole another segment of potential payment and cash flow solutions to both buyers and suppliers that we work with. Now it will take time for that to play out. Obviously, with the credit product, we're going to approach that more cautiously than we would with other payment products. But we're pretty excited about the potential to add value. If you talk to small businesses and you hear the list of challenges in their business, cash flow and working capital is always high on the list. And so we know there's a real need.

I would think just given the data you have on the buyer side, you should be able to provide pretty good offerings and maybe even advantageous pricing to the supplier side in terms of invoicing or in terms of working capital.

I think that's right. We've started on the supplier side, small suppliers with invoicing advances. So it's where we have a supplier with history. They have a buyer and an invoice outstanding with history. I think there's an equivalent product down the road where we're providing buyers more time to pay. We're not trying to become a financial services company in this yard but we know that the moment -- where we sit like in the middle of transactions, the moment of decision making about access to capital, we play an important role there. And may be over time, we bring more partners onto the platform to help us with scaling these types of offerings. But the initial learnings that we've had in validating the ability to underwrite and target the potential size of the opportunity that we're looking at have been really encouraging.

So we've said that about 70% of the business spend is accounts payable spend and about 30% is often T&E, just broad industry estimates. Your acquisition of Divvy made a lot of sense because it gave you that other -- access to that other 30% even for your own customers that potentially weren't servicing before, not to mention new ones, right? And so when we think about the cross-sell now and where we are in that journey between BILL and the Divvy side or the expense management side, help us understand what the path is going to look like? It's been consolidated, you guys closed that, what, a year ago, 1.5 years ago.

A couple of years ago.

Yes. And -- so you talked about, I think it was 8,000 or so customers that have cross-sold but I forgot the exact number. More importantly, you still have a monster opportunity, I think. And help us understand where we are on that.

We do, and it's still early. We launched our integrated platform, which was bringing together all of our solutions, Divvy, BILL, the AR parts of invoice to go into one solution we since launched the cash flow product that I mentioned, and we basically had low-hanging fruit adoption of Divvy by BILL customers prior to this integrated platform. With the integrated platform, we're now positioned to be able to be much more proactive in particular with accounting firms, which we haven't done much there. We do have adoption from several hundred accounting firms who are using this Spend & Expense product and offering it to their clients. But we haven't worked very closely with the largest firms yet, in part because there was integration steps that we wanted to perfect before we brought it to them. So we feel really good. We've had very stable, consistent growth in sort of organic cross-sell of the Divvy solution by BILL customers. And I think from here, it's likely that we should be able to accelerate that in part because we do the same level of credit exposure concerns that we do when a new business comes to us then with BILL. And the product is now proving itself out.

Okay. That's great to hear. When we think about the, let's call it, end of '24 -- calendar '24 and early '25, I mean, is this going to be something we'd expect to hear more from in terms of momentum and new cross-sold customers? Or is it just becoming fluid as part of the business?

No, I think it will be a bigger part of what we're doing. I mean, we're starting to think about card payments more holistically. So we talked about this discrete product Spend & Expense. It's got a charge card. Maybe you can use a prepaid card or a debit card if you don't qualify for credit. Then we have the BILL business and we've got virtual cards and in some cases, pay by card. The reality is there are lots of options to deliver value to small businesses using cards. One small example will be that on the BILL customer base side, it may be that our charge card feature becomes a funding option for AP payments without even adoption of Spend & Expense product. So you're going to see much more integration between our products and driving multiple different use cases than just these stand products that we've had historically.

Okay. Okay. Let's talk about the FI space for a minute. I mean, the company obviously has made good problem for the years with a handful of FI partners. But when we think about the strategy going forward now, just talk to us about what your vision is for that distribution channel that partnership opportunity and what it could mean for you?

Yes. We're north of a decade into investing in financial institution partners. It's a tough space to get into, as I mentioned, there's a high price of entry, a high bar. Today, it's a small percentage of revenue, less than 5% of revenue. But we have still, I think, great potential in doing more with the financial institution partners. Given the size of the customer base, the small business relationships that they have, they're one of the trusted partner firms that small businesses rely on. It's obviously also been a really important proving ground for us to understand how to better embed our solution in other third-party software to create experiences for small businesses. Now I'd say for banks, we've done more of the heavy lifting in terms of that customer experience and we'll do in future with other third parties. It will be much more of a build your own on top of our capabilities. But we're still excited about the opportunity. There's a lot more we can do to increase adoption, working with our bank partners as well as closing the ARPU gap that exists between customer that we acquired through a financial institution and one that we acquired directly, which is a very significant gap today. We've now launched. I think it's with 6 banks or so are ad valorem payments. So they're actually using our full suite of products where many of the large banks haven't done that. And it's a step in the right direction towards being able to monetize these relationships in a big way in the future.

And maybe you could just touch on -- I mean, last quarter, we obviously heard about one of your larger bank partners, and there's been some changes observed. How has the dialogue been with them evolved in it? And how has it evolved over the recent quarters? What's the likelihood of BILL servicing customers in the back book?

Yes, shift in strategy from the bank to want to take more control over customer-facing experience of bringing together different solutions. And I think we've had really encouraging discussions with them about how we plug into that. So it's a different model instead of taking our solution to an existing installed base, it's taking components of our solution and plugging into a standardized technology stack. So there's still some open questions about what that product experience will be. We're working very closely with the bank to resolve those questions. And out of that will come clarity on the economics and the contractual relationship, which we would expect actually sooner than later but no specific updates at this point.

Okay. All right. Maybe we just kind of hone in then and wrap it up with the variety of different distribution channels you have. John, I mean, when you think about FI as we just talked about, you think about accounting channel, direct, where are you spending most of your time and putting most of your new capital and investment in terms of going forward?

I think there's 2 categories. One is the dollars and resources that we control directly. Think of it as people, sales, direct demand, gen marketing, we are directing that at larger businesses. We're still in the small business segment. We're not pivoting to enterprise or mid-market but customers who are going to receive immediate benefit from the advanced solutions that we have. We still want to serve millions of customers. There's tens of millions of business out there. The second category is accelerating our investment in indirect capabilities to enable third parties to serve small businesses. And that's how we'll attack the low end of the market. So those are the 2 big areas of investment that we're really excited about.

And then you also have been -- obviously, like everyone -- I mean the whole industry more focused on profitability but we had a recent restructuring, what was it 3 months ago or so.

December.

And so if you could just help us understand if at all, the savings resulting from that restructuring. I don't know if we can help quantify it. And then how do you plan to reinvest or allocate these savings for the remainder of the year?

It's about a 15% reduction in force at the beginning of December. On an annualized basis, that was about $60 million in operating expense savings. Impacted every area of the company, it wasn't targeted at one specific area. We had two broad priorities for reinvesting a portion of that. So $30 million for the half fiscal year, we took about half of that, and we're reinvesting in increasing our resources in our San Jose headquarters around R&D in part because we closed our Sydney office, and we had some AR specialists there; and two, enhancing and growing our sales capacity in order to support both partners and our larger businesses that we're going after. We think both of those things ultimately have a really good return profile and will allow us to continue to scale into FY '25.

Right. That's helpful. And just more broadly on your focus on profitability, your strategy around profitability going forward?

Yes. We're profitable on a non-GAAP basis, excluding the impact of float. That's our goal to scale there. It's not a focus to optimizing profitability in the short term. We're still investing to return to higher levels of revenue. But as we mature, it's important to us that we scale on an annual basis, profitability.

Okay. I think maybe we have time for just one question if anyone has in the audience. One question to ask. Go ahead.

So how has initial feedback been for the new cash flow insights and management products launched this past week?

Great question. We just went into general liability. We've been beta testing for a number of month. This product was released based on the core of what Finmark built, which was the acquisition we did a little over a year ago. The feedback has been good. It's especially useful when it's tied into an accounting system, payroll system, all of the tools that a small business is using. And feedback has been really positive. It's kind of the next product category for us to do more than financial operations or management but about helping a business, make better decisions, have more visibility, more insights into what they're doing.

Guys, I think we're going to wrap it up there. John, thank you very much for joining us. Karen, [indiscernible], great to have you guys. We have a break now until 3:15. Please come back and be back in your seats at 3.15 for the CEO of Nuvei. And once again, John, thank you very much.

Thank you.