Boardwalktech Software Corp. (BWLK.V) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Boardwalktech Software Corporation Fiscal Third Quarter 2025 Quarterly Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded on Tuesday, February 25, 2025. I would now like to turn the conference over to Sean Peasgood from Sophic Capital. Please go ahead.

Thank you, John. Good afternoon, and welcome, everyone, to Boardwalktech's Third Quarter of Fiscal 2025 Conference Call for the period ended December 31, 2024. On our call today is Boardwalktech's President and Chief Executive Officer, Andy Duncan; and the company's Chief Financial Officer, Charlie Glavin. Andy will start the call with his opening comments, followed by Charlie's overview of the quarterly financial results. And then Andy will share the company's outlook. Following their prepared remarks, we'll open the conference call to a question-and-answer session. Before we begin with our formal remarks, I would like to remind everyone that some of the statements on this conference call may be forward-looking. Forward-looking statements may include, but are not limited to, financial projections or other statements of the company's plans, objectives, expectations or intentions. These matters involve certain risks and uncertainties. Company's actual results may differ significantly from those projected or suggested and any forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors, which are discussed in detail in our regulatory filings. Today, we issued our third quarter of fiscal 2025 financial results, a copy of which is available in the Investor Relations section of our website as well as SEDAR+ and at Sophic Capital's website. All figures are reported in U.S. dollars unless otherwise indicated. Boardwalktech's financial statements are prepared in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards. Please refer to the unaudited condensed consolidated financial statements and management discussion and analysis for the 3- and 9-month period ended December 31, 2024, filed on SEDAR+ for more information. I'd like to remind everybody that today's call is being recorded on Tuesday, February 25, 2025. I'll now turn the call over to Boardwalktech's President and Chief Executive Officer, Andy Duncan. Go ahead, Andy.

Thank you, Sean, and welcome, everyone, to Boardwalktech's quarterly earnings call to discuss the company's financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2025. Calendar 2024 was a very pivotal year for Boardwalktech. We delivered on some very significant milestones, including we repositioned our go-to-market strategy, the Boardwalk Intelligent Information Platform, to highlight our product's competitive differentiation at solving customer needs, while aligning our offerings to close deals. This involvement of realignment of sales resources, netting substantial expense savings in the process, while expanding our channel partner program having signed -- having now signed 10 channel partners and advisers, ranging from TCS to ServiceNow, to look for us to discuss more details about our intelligent information platform in future announcements. We also saw continued progress with our Unity Central product with several early adopter customers. We successfully executed a coordinated road map with 3 partners on the delivery and implementation of our Velocity product at our largest customer in the financial services market, a top 5 U.S. bank, where our partners have dedicated additional resources to delivering the Boardwalk Velocity product across the bank. And we also executed the launch of our first big process -- our business process outsourcing or BPO client for the world's largest BPO that includes implementation with 2 of their large customers. And we also closed a $4 million line of credit facility, which has given us working capital flexibility. So it's been a very busy calendar 2024. As a reminder for existing shareholders and for any new shareholders joining the call, Boardwalk provides a software platform to enterprise customers with a patented time-based database, avoiding the need for constant coding or queries to better manage and analyze structured and unstructured data in order to make better business decisions. And yes, AI will play an integral part of our holistic solution, as we integrate and augment AI functionality into our existing offerings. Despite the success we have seen in several areas and the new strategy we have put in place, we cannot ignore the past 12 months has been a challenge, and our revenue did decline. This was mainly due to the fact that we lost 2 customers and roughly $1 million of annual recurring revenue, as previously disclosed. This was due not to our product capabilities, but as a -- but we were effectively a victim of mandated cuts and reorganizations at those customers. We actually anticipate reengagements with these customers once the dust settles. In the meantime, we have been adding new professional services revenue and POCs, which is proof of concepts, to the company, not just to backfill the revenue gap, but to grow annual recurring revenue. Investors should recall that professional services tends to be a good leading indicator to future licenses. Despite the revenue impacts and delivering on the new go-to-market, we were able to make continued progress on improving EBITDA. With the success of our Velocity product in financial services, the introduction of our new product Unity Central, the opportunity in front of us to partner with large and leading BPO providers and the new partners we have signed, our pipeline is stronger now than ever for both our Velocity and our Unity Central products. Our Velocity product targets Excel spreadsheets and currently is gaining traction in the financial services sector, as we help banks not just meet regulatory hurdles but improve risk management capabilities so banks can expand revenue opportunities and manage costs. With our first banking customer for Velocity, we are officially partnered with 3 major IT firms at the client's request to help the bank deploy Velocity across their organization. I am pleased to announce that just a few weeks ago, we announced an expansion here and the project with the bank and our partners is going very well. However, the opportunity is not confined here, as these partners who are being trained on our products and experienced the high ROI of Velocity firsthand are now selling and generating new opportunities for us with their other financial institution clients that they have trusted relationships with. Our second product is Unity Central, which manages all messages, files, documents, workflows and alerts into a single intelligent platform, enabling automation and reducing manual work to lower operating costs and increase efficiencies. We have also expanded our partnership with Accenture, a long-term customer for our digital ledger, now to deploy the Unity Central extension to several new opportunities associated with their business process outsourcing division. We hope to be able to share new customer wins from this relationship in the coming quarters. I will now pass the call over to our CFO, Charlie Glavin, who will provide an overview of the financial results of our third quarter of fiscal 2025. Charlie, please go ahead.

Thanks, Andy. Before I begin, I'd like to take a moment to remind our listeners that all figures reported on today's call are in U.S. dollars and their fiscal year end March 31, with reported figures based on IFRS standards unless otherwise specified. Additional details can be found in our financial statements and MD&A as filed on SEDAR+. Total revenue for the third quarter of fiscal 2024 was -- fiscal 2025 was $1.29 million, which was a 1% sequential increase on revenue from the second quarter and a 12% decrease from the $1.47 million of revenue in the third quarter of last year. Professional services revenue, which was 22% of total revenue in the third quarter, increased 61% sequentially, as the company opted to recognize a 6-month recurring development and maintenance contract paid in arrears at the end of the third quarter and subsequently renewed for another year as professional services then as a recurring license. That final determination will be done at our fiscal year-end audit. SaaS license revenue decreased both sequentially and year-over-year due to, as Andy mentioned, expired licenses that 2 customers did not renew given mandated reorganization actions undertaken by those customers. Some of that impact will spill over into the fourth quarter. What we do know based on direct feedback from these customers is that these actions were not due to our products, but rather the mandated cost cutting by the customers during the reorganization, also consistent with the market headwinds and internal customer issues that we've described and discussed previously this past year. Annual recurring revenue, or ARR, is a non-IFRS measure, which the company calculates as the recurring revenue expected based on annual license subscriptions and recurring services on a trailing 3-month basis. ARR at the end of December 31, 2024, was $4.2 million. Gross margin for the third quarter of fiscal 2025 was 88.4%, down slightly from the second quarter level of 88.6% due to slightly higher hosting expenses sequentially and down from the 89.1% in the third quarter of fiscal 2024 due to the lower revenue levels. Net loss for the third quarter of fiscal 2025 was $0.59 million or $0.01 loss per basic and diluted share. And the net loss during the quarter improved over the prior quarter's loss of $0.72 million or $0.01 per share. Quarter's net loss also improved over the $0.78 million loss or $0.02 per basic diluted shares in the third quarter of last year. Year-over-year and sequential improvements were primarily driven by lower operating expenses from the previously announced cost saving and realignment actions. Total adjusted operating expenses, which exclude share-based payments and depreciation in the third quarter was $1.43 million, which is down from the $1.5 million in the second quarter and a $400,000 reduction from the $1.7 million in the third quarter of last year. The company has already recognized $900,000 in cost savings year-to-date in fiscal 2025 from our previously announced marketing efforts. This is on the comparable relative to the year-to-date period versus last year. The $900,000 also exceeds our targeted range of $600,000 to $800,000, which we mentioned in previous calls. On a non-IFRS basis, net loss for third quarter of fiscal 2025 was $0.4 million or $0.01 per basic and diluted share versus the $0.5 million non-IFRS loss or $0.01 per basic and diluted share in the second quarter and the $400,000 or $0.01 loss in the third quarter a year ago. Despite the revenue headwinds, as Andy alluded to, adjusted EBITDA loss for the third quarter was less than $290,000, which is a 21% sequential improvement over the $370,000 loss in the second quarter and a 26% year-over-year improvement versus a $390,000 loss in the third quarter of fiscal 2024. Turning to the balance sheet. As of December 31, Boardwalk had over $200,000 of cash plus $0.5 million of collectible receivables versus $2.3 million of debt on our $4 million credit facility. As of January 31, which is the most recent monthly certification on that credit facility, the company had approximately $600,000 of its credit facility available. This concludes my prepared remarks, and I'll now turn it back over to Andy.

Thank you, Charlie. For some time now, I've highlighted the company's land and expand strategy as a key growth driver. And for the last 3 months, recurring revenue from new SaaS licenses has grown at a 39% compounded annual growth rate on a trailing 12-month basis. I'd like to point out that even though we've grown the company with limited resources, we expect higher growth rates going forward. The reason I say this is because our addressable pipeline has also scaled and has a number of engagements, which are in later stages. We admit that many of these opportunities haven't closed as quickly as we'd like. Large enterprises move at their own speed and have their own processes of evaluating external solutions, while our prior sales resources lack the deep industry knowledge. Not enough to sell a superior product, you need to address and resolve customer needs. But broadly speaking, enterprises are looking at data and automation to drive efficiencies and reduce costs, leaving us much more optimistic exiting fiscal 2025 and heading into fiscal 2026, given a pickup of license agreements in process of execution. A great example of automation comes from a proof of concept we did with a large consumer food company where we compared our Digital Ledger versus the existing manual batch and merge. This traditional process used many companies -- used by many companies involves ingesting daily data like feedstock data in this case and inputting it into a master spreadsheet, which is time-consuming and prone to errors and outdated inputs. Based on this POC, the ROI was in the range of 5 to 10x. Companies across all sectors need to be able to track and record every change and be able to keep an immutable record of these transactions in a much easier and auditable manner. With the movement toward more automation and AI, our potential customers are now recognizing Boardwalk's technology as a key tool to drive efficiencies and accuracy. This example illustrates why large enterprise companies are using our products, validating our solutions as well as our business strategy. Although investors ask for specific customer names, we typically do not provide them not because we don't want to, but because many customers don't want to disclose that they need solutions to address regulatory and even privacy issues, thereby admitting that they have issues. What I can say is that our customers' brands have global recognition and include the top 5 global bank I mentioned as well as the previously mentioned Fortune 100 food company. Over the past 3 quarters, we've signed several new teaming and partnership agreements with leading IT consultancy and service firms that have existing business relationships with targeted customers in the banking, financial services, consumer products group and manufacturing markets. Our new partners have already or are currently identifying opportunities to leverage our offerings across their customer base, which should lead to new licenses for us. Recent engagements indicate that prior headwinds have or are in the process of dissipating. While the lead times to close transactions with large multinational organizations and financial institutions remain long, these have already been factored into our pipeline and projections. Overall, the future is bright for Boardwalktech. Our strategy and go-to-market are now set correctly. We are seeing significant new revenue opportunities, and they are advancing every day. Our pipeline is building, which should drive revenue growth. We also have major strides -- we also have made major strides in improving EBITDA, and we will see sustainable EBITDA positive quarters ahead. And we are close with a few more customers and modest growth in ARR. We continue to focus on EBITDA positive and with strong margins going forward, we should certainly see improving operating leverage in the business. This concludes my remarks. Operator, we are now ready to take any questions.

[Operator Instructions].

Okay. Operator, well, it looks like we don't have any questions. So I will then go ahead and move forward to closing remarks. I would like to thank everyone for taking the time to join us here today, and we truly appreciate your support. We look forward to giving you additional updates and announcements regarding our progress in the near future. If you have any further questions, please reach out to our Investor Relations team at any time, and we look forward to providing you with more news and more updates. Once again, thank you for joining our call. Have a pleasant afternoon and evening. Thank you, operator. This concludes the call.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.