Clearwater Analytics Holdings, Inc. (CWAN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for joining us at the Clearwater Analytics session at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference. I'm Gabriela Borges. I head up the emerging software [ vertical ] here at Goldman. Delighted to have my colleague, Kelly [indiscernible] on stage with me and the CFO of Clearwater Analytics, Jim Cox. Jim, thank you for your time.

Sure thing, sure thing. thank you for having us. Can I ask you what is Communacopia? Help me with that.

It's an excellent question. So this was originally the Goldman Sachs flagship communications and telecom conference, telecom media and out of all of the conferences we do, that was one of the stronger brand names. And so when we merged the Technology conference, into the Communacopia conference. The folks that get, that have intelligence on these things told us that we should keep the Communacopia...

The brand, all right.

The problem is it doesn't fully address the technology piece of it and now we have a mouthful, which I'll say during every presentation, which is Communacopia & Technology, and it's also really annoying to spell. So with all that said, we're very excited to have you here. It's a really good combination of companies that we have presenting across tech. And I think for Clearwater, one of the biggest pieces of how your company strategy is evolving versus this time last year is the transition to a multiproduct company.

Yes.

And so talk to us about the longer-term strategy and where you envision Clearwater going based on what you have today? And then what are you most excited about on milestones to be able to assess your progress in meeting that strategy?

Yes. No, Thanks, Gabriela, and thanks for having us. Good morning, everybody. Thanks. Hope everyone had a good labor weekend. So yes, you're right. One of our key growth driver is really pivoting from what was a single product company for many, many years into this multiproduct company. When you back up and you just think about Clearwater and what we do for our clients, and we're fortunate to have great gross retention, very high NPS, and about 1,200 clients kind of across, you start to say -- when you have those attributes, clients start to come to you and say, "Okay, what more can you do for us. Here's a product that's next to us. Or here's kind of what you're providing, but could you do more?" And so that was kind of the impetus to it. It's not only -- initially, we were using kind of that high NPS and good client relationships to kind of add incrementally more and more customers. But then also when you just kind of back up and you say, "Hey, wait a second, what's the total TAM? What are clients spending", right, on to solve these types of problems. It's a multiple, multiple of what they're spending with Clearwater. And so that was kind of the -- kind of origination of kind of thinking about the multiproduct strategy. But there's a bunch you have to do to convince the folks on the team that, okay, when you've only sold Clearwater, right, how do you even think about a product? What do you think about a SKU? How do you do that? So the first thing we stepped through was, okay, how do we think about this contractually. So that what's very normal to clients saying, "I would like you to do more, you should pay more for that." If you ask someone on our client services team, they might ask that question, well, this will make the client happy, should we charge extra for it? The answer is yes, make the client happy, and yes, charge more for it, right? And so we went through kind of a contracting process to step through and think about that. Then -- the next step is then, okay, how do we think about our product or think about what we offer, the solution we offer, how do we think about making that discrete between each of those products and for the next product that someone asks for. So I'll give you an example. This is real life. When a client who bought another book -- a large insurance company and bought another book in France, and they called up and they said, "Can we please turn on the French GAAP." And we always would do that, right? We were just, okay, great. Any GAAP, any asset class, anywhere in the world, whatever you want, we can do that. And so we said, "Hey, wait a second. Why don't we just take 24 hours", call them back and say, "What it's going to cost something before we flip that switch for you?" It's absolutely totally understandable. And so that's kind of how we've kind of built that out. I use that as a tiny little example because now we have a lot more to do. So the proliferation of alternatives at our clients, alternatives are difficult to account for. But there's lots of things about alternatives that are difficult, and maybe accounting is maybe one of those difficult things, but it's probably not the most difficult thing for those folks. So LPx is a product that we use, and I'll just use this as an example, kind of across that is. So what's your LP value? I'm an LP investor. My LP value has told to me once a quarter, probably 90 days after the quarter. And yes, there's nothing I can do about it. Not that interesting from an accounting perspective. But what I really care about as an LP investor is when is my next capital call. Am I going to get a distribution from that same GP in advance of that capital call? Or do I have to find capital from somewhere else to think about that? And then most important is, well, within that LP investment, if I look through and into that, what are my exposures underlying now. Now that's -- I'm one person, and I probably have 1 or 2 LP investments. When you think about an insurance company that has hundreds of billions of dollars under management and you have -- we have 7,000 LPs on our platform, you start thinking, wow, this could be interesting. So that's kind of another kind of product that we kind of can -- would have potentially had we gone back 3 or 4 years, we might have just offered that functionality of folks. But here, this is a very viable product for us. So first is kind of thinking about getting a change in what we'll broadly call contractual structure, but it's more than that. It's really getting people to understand that there's value between those. Second is then having people who are out there talking to our investors -- sorry, not our investors talking to our -- they are investors, our customers and kind of building that out. And then lastly, we have to then fund a lot of new discrete development or acquire something along those lines.

So the observation I have listening to you talk about the strategy is there are greenfield pieces to how you monetize the business. However, as you grow from being a single product company to a multiproduct company, the companies that you go up against, the vendors that you're competing against is also going to evolve. So I'll ask the question is, how is the competitive environment changing? What's happening at, let's say, a secular level? And then how is the competitive environment changing as you broaden your product portfolio?

Sure. Sure. So what I would say is, in general, we're fortunate to be in a replacement market. And I think that we really like our relative competitive positioning as kind of a new offering. And so I think that that's really great in that environment. As we think about the broader suite. So -- it's a much more bespoke and much more varied competitive environment. There are point solutions for things, and then there's also broader solutions. So as we think about broadening, we need to leverage where it's great to be broad, right? We are the most comprehensive. We are the most trusted. We have clients that have given us very high NPS. And so we need to leverage that halo effect of being and understanding that to be able to broaden that threshold. And I think that if you have a great kind of client relationship, generally, clients want to do more with you.

And so the clients that want to do more with you, what are they telling you in terms of the products that sit next to you, the point products, what are the types of point products that they want you to consolidate?

Sure. So again, as you're thinking about -- so we're taking it from we do investment accounting, reporting, performance and risk. And so anything across that area. And then that's one vector. The second vector is then globally, how do I do it globally across kind of each geography and each regulatory environment and framework and thinking about that. So those are 2 areas. And so if you can solve that solution in both directions, that continues to help. And then there's the depth, right, and the other things that you want to do around that. And so I think very much we have a right to win there because it kind of ties on to that. Does that help?

Yes, yes, absolutely. And it allows me to ask specifically about JUMP because it's about a year on. I would love to hear what are some of the milestones that you're really proud of accomplishing and what are you most excited about?

Sure. Sure. So JUMP was like a relatively small company, $6 million in ARR when we bought them and we closed December 1 of last year. But it's kind of a watershed event for the company because we've been entirely organic growth up until that point. And so when you think about, when you back up and say, why did we do JUMP? It was 3 things. One was, they have about 100 people in Paris, France, and growing internationally. We've been talking about back to the base and kind of multiproduct strategy. But another big vector of growth is really growing internationally and having people in geo, speaking the same language. So kind of having been there time and again, really helps. So number one was kind of in France. And I think that a pleasant thing is that it's been -- we thought it was a halo effect for us, having 100 people there. It's been a halo effect for them being attached to a public company. They were kind of a small, small scrappy start-up. And so that helps. So that's number one. Number two was then -- they offer a broad kind of -- they were about 50-50 insurance and asset management clients. And so -- but they offer a broad kind of set of functionality, including portfolio management, order management, some performance risk. And they had one solution for insurance companies that was really interesting, which is called unit-linked funds, not in North America, but it's very important in Europe, and it's a big piece of kind of the AUM there. And so we've been pleasantly surprised with how the unit-linked funds business has evolved for them. That is not yet integrated together, but it continues to evolve. Where we have had some success in North America and not like basically, what we did was we went out and we found a few kind of smaller clients that are existing clients of ours because the third piece we wanted to sell was, what can we sell back into our base, which was where you started the question, sorry. So back in the base is this OMS, portfolio management, order management system with them. And we have 3 clients that we were able to find that we signed up that have connected with them. We also have another client where we're using them for what we call Performance Plus. We have a performance in attribution platform and JUMP does as well, and it creates a little more flexibility for the asset manager who wants to slice and dice their performance information in a way that's most potentially favorable for them, right, with it gives compliance, of course. But who would think that you would want to make your performance to the best it can. So we found kind of what I would call the alpha kind of clients. One of them has gone live. And so we -- I think what we're working on is onboarding and getting those things going. And I think that that's the next big phase. We have validated there's a market there and there's demand. The next is, okay, let's operate seamlessly together, and that's where we're at. And then from there, we'll broadly felt across the whole market.

So you guys have talked about strong -- okay. You guys are talking about strong bookings through the end of last year and beginning of this year, kind of giving you a lot of visibility into the back half of this year. When you look forward to next year, kind of be what are you seeing now from a demand perspective that makes you confident in that and just what kind of has happened since the end of 2Q when you reported?

Yes. So we continue -- I would say that we continue to see demand is strong. So again, we're in a replacement market. We're selling to insurers, asset managers, corporates. The one greenfield place where we live is with the corporates and so we generally get a little bit of a tailwind from the IPO market and as companies go public, they have excess cash, they are then able to invest that excess cash and then they use Clearwater to account for that excess cash that they've invested. So I think we continue to see strong pipelines across. One thing that happened in Q2 that I think helps create a halo effect in Europe is we announced the go-live of Aviva. This is a client that we had onboarded and really a very significant insurer in Europe. And so we kind of feel like if they're live in using our platform, then any other insurer in Europe can look at that and say, okay, because we had to build out across many different kind of jurisdictions within Europe. So that's been able to build. I think we have a lot of confidence in looking out to 2024, 2025 and beyond and thinking about kind of being a 20-plus percent grower into the future. And we just have a lot of confidence around that because we just have so many different vectors that -- to pull on that to grow at 20%. We don't need everything to work perfectly, but -- so we have some optionality around that. And those include kind of international expansion. Obviously, we continue to win kind of in North America, and it is this replacement market, which helps. And then this new vector -- relatively new vector for us pivoting from a single product company and just client acquisition to being able to go back to the base on that.

And a lot of companies, I think, throughout the past year have talked about some impacts on close rates and sales cycles. Have you guys seen any impact in any part of your business from that?

No, no. We've -- I think we've been fortunate. And I think that when you think about this, what we're doing is we're doing investment accounting. These are decisions that are really lifeblood decisions for organizations and so I think that there might be places where you dial up or dial down, these are career making decisions for people. And so kind of there's a typical cadence. It is a replacement cycle, but it isn't a fast replacement cycle, right? It's people don't wake up one morning and decide they're going to switch their accounting solution, right? And so I think the reason why we've seen such steady demand is that the underlying trends that are driving that demand do not change with market environments or do not change with that. So kind of the idea that asset owners are moving into more complicated assets and thinking about things more globally and trying to get a consolidated holistic view. That challenge persists. It existed years 20 ago when I started dealing with investment accounting, and it still exists today. It's only gotten more complicated over that period of time. And what we find is really -- we talk about there's a pain in switching, but there's a pain in staying. And so what we know is the pain of staying just gets larger and larger and larger over time. And as more and more clients have moved to us, it becomes more apparent that this is the right way to go. And I think that those trends remain pretty consistent over time.

And staying kind of on the topic of demand, what are you seeing in the U.S. versus Europe? And then I just wanted to dig into a little deeper to the U.S. part of the business, which I think grew 13% in 1Q with an accelerated to 19% in 2Q. So just what changed in that part of the business?

Yes. So I think that you got to go back to -- so there's -- so let's just talk about -- so we're starting from a smaller spot internationally. And so -- and when you look at TAM, kind of for us, it's about 50% in North America, 50% international. So kind of say if you just look where global assets are, that's kind of how it breaks out. We've obviously been at play in North America for much longer, and so kind of have more scale there and continue to grow. I think we feel really good about the trends there. We have a very stable kind of go-to-market team. I think what we've learned in North America is every time we take a go-to-market team and we shrink kind of the size of the kind of the amount that everybody has on everybody's plate, they still make their numbers, and we have a lot more plates. And so kind of we have kind of continuously done that, and that helps us further clarify kind of particularly within insurance and asset management, those verticals. And then what that does is that frees us up to look at new adjacencies like state and local government, like pensions in those areas. That's in the U.S. And so I think we have a pretty good model, and I think we understand those markets pretty well. So the vector of growth there is then just doing more for those clients as well as continuing to add clients there. Internationally, it's been a real pleasant surprise. I think Europe, we feel like we've made the investments there that's these are multiyear investments and I think we're starting to see productivity out of those teams. Asia has been complete -- for me, a pleasant surprise. So we feel like we continue to invest go-to-market in Asia, but it's because we're being pushed there. So if you would have thought about it, so FWD is a large insurer. And it makes sense upon reflection, we didn't really invest there right away. But Europe is more complicated than the United States because you have these different jurisdictions. Well, Asia is even more complicated than Europe because you don't even have kind of the basis around IFRS. You have a lot more of this variability there. And so the needs are even greater there. And so that's been a real pleasant surprise, and I think we'll continue to see momentum there. And I think it's becoming apparent to us that this is something that -- we've made this great investment in Europe and the fruits of that coming to fruition and those investments coming to fruition. And I think we can continue -- we potentially see that happening next in Asia.

Just going back, you talked about this earlier, but the kind of 7- to 10-year refresh cycle that you typically see, how do you organize your sales teams around those? And then what kind of is in your control to potentially speed up some of those catalysts into...

Yes. So what we do is we organize the teams based on size and go-to-market, and we believe in salespeople having time in market and understanding that, you have awareness of kind of what their contracts are and how to fit that. I think that what speeds it up is take insurance company, A,B,C, and they have some -- and they say, "I want to invest in this new region or I want to have exposure to this asset class. The truth is that their system can't handle that. And so they ultimately have maybe 3 choices, right? One choice is don't do that. So you go to your investment team and say, sorry, we can't do that." And that happens. I mean, but boy, isn't it a shame that your strategy can't be executed because your tools aren't worthy of that, right? So probably what ends up happening is when say you can't do it, and then they come back and they say, that's not an option. So then they say, okay, well, we'll figure out a way to kind of manually work on it or pick some specific thing or figure that out. And people might accept that, and that might solve a small sliver of it. But then when you back up and you say, well, wait a second, I want to understand this comprehensively. I want to understand this holistically. Then, okay, well, there is other things off on the side. How does that solve that? And so what ends up happening, where we see demand really coming about is that just -- it's just untenable. It's just -- and so people have to look at that. And so I think it's just so powerful. We have a number of clients who are reinsurers and reinsurers will add books, invest in new books, sell books, move things around. It's a real fundamental part of reinsurers strategy to be able to be agile when they think about their assets. Well, if you weren't on Clearwater, you would have to figure out all of those operational things about each and every one of those. Clearwater really frees you up to not have to worry about the operational execution of any of those strategic initiatives. Whether you're a reinsurer or just an insurer that's trying to do grow your business in some way. And so that's really what's so powerful is to say, "Oh, I have a strategy, I can execute it, and it's somebody else's. It's my vendor's problem to solve it." And so that's -- I think that's why we have the really high NPS that we have is because when someone asks, how do you do this, we say, okay, we'll solve for that. We'll do that for you.

And then the switch you made at the commercial pricing model and kind of that culminating and you're reaching in 109% NRR in the last quarter, very impressive, by the way. But kind of when you think forward, any update on kind of how that rollout track versus your internal expectations? And then secondly, longer-term NRR goals, how do you think you can get there...

Yes, yes. So look, that was in May of last year, right, with interest rates rising and asset values falling and having an AUM-based pricing model. Every investor meeting I had only wanted to talk about AUM pricing. And we're all about durability. We're all about reliability. We're all about consistency for our clients, for our investors, for everyone. And so that's why we made the shift to what we call this base plus commercial pricing model, which is really -- it's not that complicated. It's like, here's your book of business. Here's your fee for that book of business. Now if your book grows, then there is some plus that we'll charge about it. And most importantly, what you bought this is it today. And if you want to buy something additional product, services, solutions in the future, you probably have to pay more for that. It seems pretty rudimentary. But like if you go back a couple of years, it was kind of the business thought about things differently. So we were able to kind of execute on that. And I think that, that's the financial expression of NPS, I've always struggled to really think about what's a financial expression of a high Net Promoter Score. And it's that. It was -- we took 6 months and we met with a lot of clients to say, "Hey, we want to evolve this model to this?" and they said, "Yes, understand it makes sense, great." And we were able to get through that. So that just puts us in a good firm footing to talk about. We talk about the contract changes. It's really the most strategic element to it is it now allows us to have a furthered conversation with everyone about a multiproduct strategy. And so kind of -- I think we're past it. It was kind of lot of time and energy and was something I frankly worried about last year, right? And so that's why we spend a lot of time on it. We're past -- we're not immune to -- everybody likes it when the market's up, and that helps everyone. We're not immune by any stretch. But when I think about what I worry about, it's about us executing on the multiproduct program as opposed to executing on that contractual change. And yes, it's -- thank you for the congratulations on the NRR. That's great. That was last quarter. We're worry about this quarter and keep going on that. But it was satisfying to see that. But we do think that if you have a client base, it's as healthy as our client base, and they have as many needs as the client base, we should actually be way better than that NRR rate. And so we think about -- internally, we think about how do we get that to 115%, like the best companies in the world. We have great gross retention, 98% gross retention. I'll put that up against anybody. I think that's as good as it gets. But this path to kind of get better, it just shows a well-run company if we're able to kind of move to that level. But that's a multiyear program that we've got to kind of execute on lots of phases.

So if I connect the dots, 115% NRR long-term aspirational, plus 7 to 10-year cycle brownfield opportunity, new logo growth. I could bridge to a long-term growth rate that is not north of 20%, but perhaps north of 25% or 30%. Is that the right way to think about it?

You could. You could, yes. Yes. We -- and I think that, that's -- if you look historically, we've grown 20% to 25%. There's a natural normal cadence there. And I think that, that was at a lower NRR. And so you could see that. Let's stay focused on growing at 20%.

[indiscernible]

Yes, exactly. Exactly.

All right. Let's pause and go to questions from the audience.

Would you quantify what percentage your new business is ribbon replace versus greenfield?

Yes. So the question is what's replacement cycle versus what's greenfield. And so what I would say is if we can just talk about it in -- by market, so if you think about it, we think about insurers, we think about asset managers, which is like -- and then corporations. Insurers and asset managers are almost always a replacement cycle. So -- and that's about 83% -- 85%, sorry of our total revenue. For corporates, there is some replacement, and we have those occasions, but that's the one place where we do have some greenfield. Our startup gets funded and they would come to us.

I want to ask about your new Chief Product Officer, Sunil Dixit. I'd love to hear what stood out to the exact team about Sunil, and what have you toss him with first priorities as he gets around?

Yes. So I think maybe -- so first of all, great guy, he's already leading on the shoulders of Souvik, our CTO, who then has now added kind of the CPO. Adding a CPO at this time is exactly the right time because we are moving into this multiproduct strategy. And so we want to think about things discretely. And so with Sunil's background, he understands kind of both incubating as well as kind of he came to us from the sales force. So understands large market and kind of all the pieces of adding kind of additional kind of solutions into an existing client base. And so where we are today is at a really unique point. We put a lot of investment into the platform as we grew internationally, right? And as you can see, our R&D had really ticked up over time. It's north of 26% in the last quarter as we kind of built out internationally. We talked about Aviva going live. And that -- a lot of that was -- it was not specific to Aviva, but what that proves is the functional footprint that you need for all of those European locations is now in place and working. And so now we're going to have a lot of capacity free up, right? They were working on kind of building out internationally. Now they have the opportunity to, again, build something else. Perfect time, enter a Chief Product Officer, who is really building for us, the discipline around how do you think about where -- what do we want to build? So Souvik did a great job, our CTO, of really increasing the productivity and the throughput and just how much we're getting out of R&D. He's just done a wonderful job building that. And now is the natural next step to say, okay, not only are we building a lot, but are we building the right thing? And are we really challenging ourselves to that next step. And so that's why now is the right time for Sunil. And Sunil is just -- he's a great person and has been already impactful for us in the short period of time he has been with us.

So if we think through all of the strategic initiatives that Clearwater is making progress on, can you execute a strategy where you're building to multiproduct, you're building international and also see margin expansion at the same time?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And we're able to do that because the network effect, right? So because we have kind of the single golden copy of the data and a single instance multi-tenant solution across that, you should naturally expect those benefits. So we'll see margin expansion at the gross margin line level. And you'll see -- you will also see expansion within R&D. So we're up above -- kind of when we went public, we said 25%, we were up to 26%. If you go back a couple of years, we were at 22%. I think you can see us, we'll always grow, right, R&D, but I don't think we have to grow it as quickly as we're growing the top line because we've made a lot of those investments and they never go to 0, right? There's always more to do, but you can redeploy a lot of those resources as opposed to having to incrementally add them.

Good stuff. We'll leave it there. Jim, thank you for your time.

Thanks so much. Thanks.