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

Okay. Welcome here, and welcome to the Deutsche Bank Tech Conference. I'm Bryan Keane. I cover the payments processors and IT services here at DB, and we're super excited to have BILL and John Rettig, who's the President and CFO of BILL. So I got a laundry list of questions. Obviously, BILL just reported earnings last week, and so we'll go through them. And then if there's time, we'll see if there's any Q&A. So thanks, John, for being here, first off.

You bet. Great to be here.

The big announcement on the quarterly earnings call last week was the step-up of the $45 million investments that BILL is making in fiscal year '25. I was hoping you could span on the investments across the virtual card, new products, go-to-market and the accounting channel, and just give us a sense of these offensive investments like what might be some of the importance of -- or some of the priority of those investments to drive future growth?

Yes, for sure. I think you're right. They're all offensive moves on our part. Just the quick background is in '24, we obviously -- fiscal '24 delivered increased profitability and operating leverage, and we have a good handle now on scaling and improving profitability over time. And as we enter '25 we see a very stable environment for SMBs, a number of priorities that we have with relatively short-term payback periods, and we figure that now is a great time to really pull forward investments that we might otherwise have had in fiscal '26 in order to produce results faster. And for those 4 key areas, there's a range of duration. Most of the things we're going to do around payments are pretty short term. So you work on those for a couple of quarters or a few quarters and you start to see immediate benefits. And then we have a longer-term one, which is a whole embedded strategy and working to expand our ecosystem that is really a multiyear payback. In terms of our platform, enhancing and expanding existing solutions, we're really as much as anything, trying to drive widespread usage of card payments across the BILL platform, which is still relatively small. We obviously have a spend and expense solution. And we're moving faster on some of the newer product categories that we have. We talked about working capital, invoice financing. There's a whole bunch of ancillary capabilities like pay over time and risk-based pricing and other things that we know we can do by moving a little faster there. In terms of our platform and ecosystem, we're really working on both product and go-to-market for suppliers, really creating more demand for suppliers to come to BILL versus buyers bringing their suppliers, and we're making great progress there. And then on the ecosystem, we talked about doubling down on accountants. There's some very specific product features we're improving, multi-entity, multicurrency, spend and expense, integrating cash flow to help accountants and accounting firms work across their entire portfolio of clients. And in fact, we recently just this week, have announced that we brought on a senior leader to help drive our account channel with significant experience. So we're really betting that we're going to extend our lead in the whole accounting area. And then finally, just with the ecosystem. This is our embed strategy that we've talked about, and it's really about driving expansion and adoption of our embedded solutions and expanding the ecosystem to touch more players, more companies that are serving SMBs over the longer term. All these things together collectively give us confidence in our path to reaccelerate revenue growth in -- later in '25 and certainly getting into '26.

Just a quick clarification. Is the $45 million a onetime investment for fiscal year '25? Or does it carry some of that carry forward into -- also into fiscal year '26?

Yes. I wouldn't view it as a onetime and goes away. I would view it as pulling dollars forward from '26. So we probably have lower incremental spend and investment as we go into '26, and we have more leverage to the extent that we're reaccelerating revenue growth and we have a larger business. And that's in -- we talked about the beginnings of scaling, operating efficiency, leverage, profitability, those sorts of things.

Yes. And then what can we expect for the gross margins in fiscal year '25 and '26?

I think for quite a while now, we've said over the intermediate term, we would expect low to mid-80s in terms of gross margins. And that really reflects the evolving payment mix composition in the platform. To the extent that we have some of the newer products, they might have lower gross margins, that will equalize over time. We're expecting lower interest rates, as we talked about in our assumptions for fiscal '25. That has the effect of -- we're not in a growing float revenue environment now. We're -- it's pretty stable. But over the next couple of years, we expect that to come down a little bit. And those are the variables that feed our assumptions about lower 80s is probably where we'll be.

Got it. Got it. So the key bull-bear debate always seems to be around the payment take rate. So I was hoping we could just dig down a little bit and maybe start high level. We estimate about 60% of BILL's stand-alone volume is going through ACH and then maybe about 31% through check. We estimate the take rates to those is small, maybe 1 basis point for ACH and 3 basis points for check. So I guess just to start off, are those percentages of check and ACH correct and those take rates sound about right?

I'd say directionally, I mean, we don't generally get into specific products, but ACH is the vast majority of volumes, so probably higher than that 60% number. And check's a little bit lower. But directionally, it's correct. And in terms of monetization on those products, yes, ACH rounds to 0 and checks are low single-digit basis points. So I think you've got that right. But look, the volume, especially ACH, is very important to -- and over the years, we've driven a significant reduction in check volume and increased ACH. And having that digital connection with buyers and in many cases, their suppliers is what opens up the opportunity for us to drive adoption of other more advanced, higher value and, therefore, higher monetization payment capabilities.

Yes. And I think everybody would agree that nobody wants paper checks and that's going to drop as a percentage of volume, and that always represents a great opportunity. I think the bears would argue though that ACH will continue to grow as a percentage of volume versus other payment modalities. So I guess what's wrong with ACH? And why won't this form, if it's cheaper processing, continue to gain some share?

Well, let me start with, I think those that maybe are suggesting ACH will rule over the long term, probably have never reconciled receipts or ACH payments. It is a challenge. Its single #1 advantage is low cost. And you can think about all sorts of different product corollaries. If that's the only thing that's really great about it, there means there's limitations. We definitely prefer ACH payments over check. As I mentioned before, getting to an electronic connection is really important. That opens up lots of possibilities for us. But plain vanilla ACH has some inherent limitations with the data that you can pass with a transaction. It works pretty well for one-off transactions. You have an invoice, you get one payment. That's not very hard to figure out what the payment's for, unless there happen to be a credit memo or an adjustment to the dollar amount and it doesn't match. But when you have batches and many larger suppliers, larger businesses do, you're paying many invoices on one payment. ACH is like very difficult. You're going to apply manual labor, more cost to get that reconciled and you're probably not going to have automation surrounding that. And so -- and then there's just other considerations like needing to share bank account information and other stuff. So suppliers definitely look at more than just cost when they think about which payment choices they prefer. And in fact, we had an interesting example lately. I won't name the name, but a large software company who used to use virtual cards with us, moved to ACH payments. And recently -- this was 3 quarters ago, and recently moved back to virtual card payments because the main limitations they saw with virtual card was not cost. It was in payment exception handling and automation around that. And once we improve those components of the product, the value proposition works just fine for them. And it's those sorts of things that we're focused on, value proposition over other things.

Yes, I was going to ask that. Like when somebody moves to ACH, do they -- is it hard to get them off? Or maybe you can help us understand how you get them because you said the key thing to understand is once they go electronic and they get to that piece, it's easier to move them to VC or some other payment modalities.

Yes. It's -- our like business model, if you will, isn't centered around needing to win back like volume from virtual card that has attritted to ACH. Like that's a thing. But I think over time, that will be a motion that we're able to be successful with. In the near term, we're more focused on just increasing the value proposition, faster payments, better reconciliation. In many cases, feeding data directly to ERP systems or wherever a large supplier wants it, so that they're really minimizing manual activity. And by increasing the value proposition, it makes that type of payment more attractive, even though the absolute cost and nominal cost might be higher than other payment methods. I'm just giving an example of one payment type, but there's these things that exist across all of our payment modalities.

Got it. Got it. So when we think about virtual card and instant transfer, virtual card is about 200, 250 basis point take rate. Instant transfer, I don't know, we got it at about 100 basis points for instant transfer. But I'm intrigued about the new electronic payment option you guys are building. It feels like it's something better than ACH, but priced below virtual card, let's call it, build advanced ACH product. What would be the take rate of this product? And how fast can you roll it out and convert some of that ACH volume onto it?

Yes. We're very bullish on this category and there might end up eventually being 2 or 3 products in this space, but it starts with automation and reconciliation in mind. As I mentioned, those are the core capabilities, including direct connections to ERP systems and things like that. Suppliers have actually been asking for this for a long time. And so we're delivering on that promise. We're in the initial stages of that delivery right now and expect to go GA with this product in the second half of our fiscal '25. So it's one of our highest priorities in terms of new payment product introductions in the year. We'll have more to say on the absolute monetization on it as we bring the product to general availability. But it's safe to think of a product like that being 5 to 6x our current BILL stand-alone overall monetization. Like it's a higher monetizing product because it creates a ton of automation and ease in reconciling data but much less than, say, a virtual card payment or some other card acceptance payment.

Could it cannibalize virtual card or not necessarily?

We don't think of it as -- we're not concerned about cannibalization per se. We're actually more focused on increasing the ad valorem percentage of our overall TPV. So the idea that -- we finished fiscal '24 at 14% ad val. On our earnings call, we said, look, longer term, the floor on that is probably 20%. I happen to believe it can be much higher than that. So it's a portfolio approach. And most of the products that fall into the ad val category are very high margin, financially attractive products. So if that's a product that works better than virtual card for a supplier, it means we have more of a chance to actually get higher volume with them. And so I'd actually, over the longer term, rather have that than just the highest monetizing products. So that's a little bit about the portfolio approach that we take.

I mean, to me, it seems like this is a huge opportunity. I guess my only question is why not have launched this in previous years?

We always have a long list of things and it comes down to always trying not to take on too much at any given time. I'm getting all choked up now. And maybe in hindsight, having the macro cycle evolve the way it did and us seeing more cost sensitivity on the part of suppliers and then needing to adapt some products, maybe it would have been better to launch it earlier. But with the facts and the priorities we had at the time, I think now is as good a time as any.

Got it. So another new product you plan to roll out is your supplier financing solution. What is differentiated about that versus what's in the market or the existing option? And how do you see that long term? Are you funding it? Or is it you're going to go out to a bank partner?

Yes. In terms of what's different, BILL approaching a product like this, first, we're in the middle of transaction flows. Tens of millions of transactions, billions of dollars between lots of entities. And we have scale, right, across that. And what that leads to is a significant data advantage. So we have the ability to understand buyers, suppliers, individuals' identity, do real underwriting and whatnot so we can do fine grain targeting about who are the best candidates for products like this that necessarily involve a little bit longer duration credit. And then we obviously have a ton of expertise in payments and risk and compliance and all those things. So those competencies, I think, lead to us feeling like we are uniquely positioned to manage risk associated with products like this. And we should be able to deliver multiple versions of these types of credit products. As I mentioned before, invoice financing that we're doing for smaller suppliers right now is just one example. With that particular product in the short term, we're in what I would call a very controlled narrow launch of that in order to prove out the value proposition, our ability to target our returns so that we're positioned to scale before we launch other products. So in that controlled launch phase, we are funding that with our balance sheet. As we start to scale any of these longer-duration credit products, it will be with partners and either off-balance sheet or a combination of warehouse facilities and off-balance sheet. So we won't consume more and more of our capital to support these products as they scale, but our capital is used to test and prove the model, which is what's required to go to the external market.

Got it. Got it. Just want to close and kind of hone in on the core build take rate that has accelerated the past 2 quarters, beating ours and Street expectations in the fourth quarter. Why has take rate improved sequentially the past 2 quarters once you normalize for the onetime gain in the third quarter? And why is it expected to be flat in the next 2 quarters before reaccelerating in the third?

Yes. We're super pleased with the progress in Q3 and Q4 on monetization performance. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out, it wasn't a surprise to us, though, like we did exactly what we said we were going to do. We knew we had some challenges in fiscal '24. We took a step backwards and then we recovered from that by the end of the year. I'd say in '25, our assumption for the first half of the year being flattish is just around the product life cycle and where we are in driving more adoption on some of the newer products. I mentioned the one example of a product that is in market now, but really not launching with any scale until the second half of the year. So we have really good line of sight to the volume and the flows in the business that should give us support for expanding monetization in the second half of the year.

What was the key thing that happened? The second quarter was that low -- second quarter of fiscal year '24 was that low in take rate and then the improvement started in the third and fourth. What was the key thing that happened? You said you guys weren't surprised. What did you guys do to improve it? Or you knew you were going to be able to improve?

Yes, 2 factors. One is some of our newer products starting to achieve more volume, and therefore, having a positive impact on monetization. These are things like pay by card, we talked about working capital even on the AR side. The second thing is rapidly iterating and improving the virtual card payment experience, which leads to volume being less of a headwind or a drag. We're still not at the point where we see significant volume growth on that product, but that's part of what we're planning for in the second half of the year. So these are obviously things we talked about then that were already in motion, and we're starting to see a positive impact.

And do you guys have room to negotiate or improve pricing in any of the products or players across the ecosystem to drive adoption?

Pricing is always a lever for us. I'd say it's the combination of adoption, repeat usage and pricing that we look at. Optimization around pricing is probably -- our filter is, does it lead to sustained upticks or increases in adoption and usage over time? And if so, that might be something that's interesting. But our primary focus is around the value prop. Once we get that right, then -- and pricing is a component of it, but we don't normally lead with pricing. I'd say when we look at the margin profile of some of our products, we certainly have significant room to the extent that there was a great trade-off between pricing optimization and volume and sustained growth.

Got it. We've been getting a lot of questions on the amended agreement you announced with the top 3 bank. Can you just walk us through the mechanics of what is going on with the renewal, which my understanding is just the front book? And why is this a good deal for BILL?

Great question. So it's a good deal for BILL because we're, in a sense, helping our partner, a large financial institution who spends billions of dollars a year on technology with an evolving set of product needs that they have. Those product needs are different than when we entered into the agreement. And in adjusting or amending our contract with them, we're also introducing an element of our embed strategy by making our newest APIs available for their use and we're also delivering for their customers. So to the extent that the relationship continues to evolve, and we continue to deliver, we're not necessarily counting on upside in the relationship today, but we're certainly there to be a good partner. And then in terms of the actual mechanics of what we've done, we've essentially taken the RPO that existed as of the end of June and spread that over the new contract term, which is 4 years instead of, I think, approximately 18 months. So it's a longer duration. That means slightly lower revenue per year that is guaranteed. But ultimately, it's our new spot in the whole suite of products that they're bringing to life.

And is there a way to break through those minimums because you're taking over a longer period, the 4 years, you're taking less money per year? Is there a way to go through that? Or is that just -- it's going to be tougher to get through the minimum?

I think it will take some time with revised product scope, how we're fitting in with the new capabilities that we're making available to see what the evolution and what the growth path might look like.

Okay. And then maybe just stepping back, just thinking about the bigger picture of the FI channel as a whole. I think it represents something like 32% of BILL customers, but only 2% of the core BILL revs. So even why go through the trouble of servicing these clients at such a massive discount to the direct and accounting channel?

Great question. So we started down the path of working with large banks, financial institutions as a part of an ecosystem strategy to be wherever there are large numbers of SMBs, like who are the trusted partners of small businesses, and banks are certainly at the top of the list as our accountants and things like that. I'd say we'll likely do more in the FI channel over time. But increasingly, we're going to be using our evolving embedded strategy to do that. We'll do less one-off product builds, less super specific to one bank deliveries and things like that. And longer term, we expect our indirect efforts and our embed strategy will be a much larger percent of our business than it is today, that you've mentioned combined, say, 2% of total revenue. I think down the road, if you look over the intermediate term, it should be a lot bigger than that. And then the other important thing is just the way the model works. Whenever we do what I call an indirect deal with a partner, where we're delivering software and payment capabilities for them to serve their clients, it means that they take on a bunch of responsibilities that BILL would otherwise have if we're going out and acquiring customers directly. So all the go-to-market sales and marketing activities, all of the customer support, all of the ongoing operational activities are borne by our partner. So by definition, that means much lower operating costs for BILL, which is how we get very comfortable with the strong margins that we have with this indirect partner strategy, even though the absolute monetization on those partners is lower. And I'd say the final point would be as we take our product to new types of partners, software companies, things like that, through this embed strategy, one of the criteria that we're using there is that we bring all of our payment products to bear, at least the ones that we want to, maybe not credit initially. And so that should give us all of the monetization levers that we have with the BILL direct business, which is obviously in stark contrast to most of our financial institution partners today, where we have pretty limited monetization levers.

Yes, because I was going to ask that. Like how do you drive up the revenue growth rate to be something more material than 2% in an FI channel to 10% or 15%? Is it -- what is it -- what has to happen for that to grow like that?

More payment products is the key to that. We have a few examples where we've done that really well. Another large bank has taken our ad valorem products, including our spend and expense product. Several small banks have taken our entire suite of products. And so over time, that will be one of the key criteria that we look for in terms of how a deal should operate.

Got it. Customer adds were really solid in the fiscal fourth quarter and with 4,600 net adds in the direct and accounting channel, I think it was 6,700 in the FI channel. So those numbers are very solid. What has caused the resurgence in the new client adds? And what can we expect for core BILL customer growth going forward?

As we talked about, I think it was our Q3 call, we were quickly adapting our go-to-market motion, just given the new realities of, we launched a brand-new product in the fall, the integrated platform. We changed brands. We moved -- made a bunch of tweaks to the business at one time that ultimately had a negative impact on some of the volumes that we were seeing and what translated into a new customer adds. So we quickly revised those. And for Core BILL, AP and AR, we got back on track to a much higher customer acquisition in Q3 and Q4. I'd say the demand environment has been healthy all along. So the customer acquisition variation between quarters is not really driven by market sentiment or demand or things like that, but we're definitely back on track now. For spend and expense specifically, our focus continues to be on just larger businesses, higher propensity to spend, get value out of our product more quickly. And as we've made that shift probably 3 quarters ago or so, we're seeing the early cohort data pay off. We had our highest ever spend, card spend per spending business in the fourth quarter, and we see those cohorts growing very nicely versus some of the earlier cohorts, say, from the first half of fiscal '24, when we had much higher customer acquisition numbers for spend and expense, it was -- many of those were much smaller businesses. So we're adapting that. We're probably less focused on the number of acquired new customers for spend and expense than we are of the dollar value of those customers. And I think Q4, where we exited the year in terms of net new adds is probably a good proxy for how we're thinking about the near term in fiscal '25.

I mean the big fear was competition. This is such a great sector. There's going to be a lot of players coming in, bigger players, smaller. It just doesn't seem like the competitive environment. I mean, although it's always been kind of high level or high level of interest, it doesn't seem like you guys are seeing really any pressures there.

Well, I think we have a huge lead in the market, both from a product standpoint, from a trusted brand standpoint, from unique differentiation around how we work with accounting firms. So all of that is true, and it continues to play out and we leverage those advantages. The other thing that I think is sometimes overlooked is that it's a huge market opportunity. Like this is not a one company wins all type of market. We've talked previously, Bryan, about you could look at the payroll market as an analogy, like these are huge markets with -- there's going to be scale players that support them, and we're obviously focused on maintaining our leadership position and continuing to grow.

Got it. I wanted to get an update on the integrated platform. The combined AP and spend management clients grew, I think, 60%. What are you guys doing to drive further cross-sell? And is there a way you can differentiate these users in terms of ad valorem payment adoption, ARPU lift or any other sort of benefit?

Yes. We feel really good about the progress to date. But actually, what's more exciting is it is one of the single largest growth opportunities we have, and it's captive. It's something that we know we can go do. It's not dependent upon market trends or other things like that. So it's a pretty interesting growth opportunity. We launched an integrated platform in the fall. We very quickly added a new layer of insights and cash flow, budgeting and forecasting. And what we've seen is where we have new customers coming on to the platform, they're adopting AP and spend and expense, and this cash flow insights product. They have much higher retention. We retain many more of them. They have a higher ARPU, and we know those 2 things ultimately translate into a much higher lifetime value. Now it's still small as a percentage of overall new customers. We still have individual front door is available on our products. But over time, we're going to continue to create more integration on the platform. One of the big things we're working on in the near term is just improving the whole onboarding experience, making it super easy for new customers to pick whatever parts of the product or the whole platform, whatever they want. And then we feel like we still have an untapped opportunity with spend and expense, in particular as it relates to our accounting channel, which most of the progress we've made to date with those cross-sell numbers has been with BILL customers who came to us directly, not necessarily through the account channel. So we're working hard on that.

Great. I know we've got about 5 minutes or so, so I wanted to ask a couple of high-level ones to end. BILL felt comfortable enough to guide to the 20% fiscal year '26 top line growth. When you decided to go with that number, I mean, it's not an unreasonable number, but do you need an improving economy and a recovery in B2B spend to hit that kind of 20% fiscal year '26 revenue growth? Or is it product releases? Like what's built in that has to happen for you to hit the 20%?

Yes. The key assumption is that there's no, like, economic rebound. There's no material increase in B2B spend. So we're not counting on a tailwind from the economy or how that might transfer even lower interest rates and how that might translate into accelerating growth for B2B spend. If those things materialize in '25, those would be tailwinds to assumptions we already have made around the things that are within our control, which, as you suggested, our product launches, improvement to our product launches, more focused on our go-to-market to reach the highest-value customers with the propensity to spend, continuing our lead in the accounting channel. These are all things that they're tied to the investment suite we said we're making and there are extensions of the progress we made in fiscal '24 around improving our go-to-market and products. So a lot of the confidence that we have in '25 and then moving into '26 is grounded in kind of the line of sight that we see in the products that we're able to evolve and scale the adoption that we see changing in our ability to grow monetization. So it would be great if we also got tailwinds associated with the economy and interest rates and things like that, but we're not anchored to those things.

I mean it almost feels like to me like the B2B spend is at a depressed level already, like almost a recession type level. Like it would hard to be -- to see it get a lot worse. I mean, hopefully, everybody thinks the economy is going to get better here. But how does it -- is there a possibility that it would get a lot worse? It just seems like this is kind of like the floor and if things get better, that would be upside.

It feels like a floor. But obviously, I'm not an economist, it's difficult to predict these things. But if you think about the dynamics of our, say, revenue retention, which we talked about on the call, is lower than previous years. But those previous years were pandemic years, when spend -- B2B spend went crazy. We were seeing 30-plus, 40% growth in payment volume. And we're now off of that by low single-digit percentages. And so the businesses that we serve, small businesses in general, are much larger than they were pre-pandemic, and they're more financially stable and they're going to be fast. They're going to be much quicker to move once they see less uncertainty and they have more conviction in the demand profile for their businesses. So it feels like we've talked often about the resiliency of small businesses, and it feels like they're better positioned today than they've ever been. And that feels like a really important variable in terms of where we are in the cycle and could it get worse or could it grow from here. Our bias is that there's probably more upside than downside from here. But obviously, we'll need to see what the next few quarters, how that plays out.

BILL also announced a new $300 million buyback last week. And so was just hoping that you guys could give us a little update on how you think about the capital allocation and the timing of that buyback as obviously, you think there's a disconnect with the stock right now?

Yes. And this comes on the heels of we did a $300 million buyback in fiscal '24 that we finished in the fall. We repurchased about a little bit under $1 billion of 2025 converts. And now the Board has authorized a new buyback of which we're -- we've talked about $300 million. And it just really reflects I think our point of view that the stock price today in this environment doesn't match like the opportunity that we see, our leadership position, our ability to scale the business. We just feel like we're undervalued. So by itself, it's a good investment opportunity. And I think it just speaks to the conviction that we have in our ability to scale the business and continue to grow. And that extends to personally Rene and I buying shares as well. We have high confidence in the assets that we have, the products that we have, the ecosystem we've built and frankly, the team that we have to execute.

Yes. I was going to ask about the open purchases that you guys made this week. Like why now, I guess? Like what got that confidence that you wanted to make a statement like this is a great time to own BILL?

Yes. Well, I think we would have preferred to do it sooner or maybe in addition to now. We're caught up a little bit in a technical period where because of pre-existing 10b5-1 plans that Rene and I had last year in fiscal '24, there's a 6-month waiting period after the termination of those plans before you can buy shares. And that termination period ended at the beginning of June. We obviously went into our blackout period. So this last Monday was literally the first time in like 8 months that Rene and I could buy shares, and we bought shares on the very first day that we had the opportunity, as really just a great opportunity for us in terms of viewing BILL as being undervalued and speaking to the confidence we have about growing the business from here.

I mean the last question I'll ask you, because I get this too, is with the stock being -- selling off as much as it has, and we also think it's undervalued, would BILL ever be interested in some kind of strategic alternatives?

Well, we are big believers as the buybacks and whatnot, I think, demonstrate in our ability to scale the business with the capital we have, the assets and the people. We think there's a huge market opportunity, gives us an opportunity to create a big business. We're going to reaccelerate growth. We're going to expand profitability, and we think we're really well positioned. Notwithstanding, there's more moving parts today than there were a couple of years ago during the pandemic, but we're very confident in our ability to scale the business from there.

Okay. With that, we're -- the clock's at 0. So we'll leave it there, John. Thanks so much.

Yes. Thank you.