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

Okay. Thanks, everyone, for joining us. My name is Michael Infante. I'm a research analyst on the fintech team here at Morgan Stanley. Appreciate you all coming, Sandeep, welcome. Before we get started, I just have a brief disclosure to read for important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. So with that, Sandeep, great to have you here.

Thank you -- thank you for having us.

Thank you for joining us. Maybe for those in the room that aren't as familiar with the Clearwater story, just give us the overview. You've obviously come public in the last couple of years, give us an understanding of your customer base and the pain points you're solving for customers.

Sure. So what we do for customers is we basically give them a comprehensive view of their global portfolio every day in the morning. So quite simply, but that's what we do. And that sounds simple until you think about many of these clients have many, many asset classes they invest in. So they don't just do equities and bonds. They do structured products, they do private credit. They do all of those kind of asset classes. Secondarily, they invest in many countries. So then you got all the issues about how do you value assets of a certain kind, and we provide them with a comprehensive view every morning, and that's our proposition. So just more about the company a little bit as revenues continue to grow nicely for the last 5, 7 years. Each year has been between 20% and 25% growth. So it's pretty consistent the way we have grown with the sole exception of 2 really small acquisitions, has been all organic. So our company continues to do well there. We have a really high gross revenue retention. It's about 98% every quarter. So that provides a foundation for growth, if you will. And then gross margin is very nice. Gross margin, we focus on a lot because unit economics matter and unit economics have been 74%. It grew 76%, 78% in the last quarter. And we produced a reasonable amount of cash and EBITDA, EBITDA was 31% in the last quarter and 70% of that converts to cash. So all in all, it's a good business. It's a stable, nicely growing business with improving economics at the bottom line and the gross margin line. But it's not a [indiscernible] as business, not a business which is going to go 50% and 10% and 50%, it just is more even key growth, if you will.

Not necessarily [indiscernible], but there's not too many fintech businesses that are running north of 30% margin. So I'm sure it's an area we'll discuss later. Maybe just pivoting to the TAM opportunity. At the Investor Day, you outlined roughly a $6 billion TAM, $4 billion of that was in the asset management space. I know there's geographic distinctions there, roughly $2 billion in insurance and the residual in the corporate space. How do you think about not only the TAM opportunity and where you're most excited, but also there's only a finite number of accounting systems that one can ultimately replace. So the importance of transitioning the business away from what predominantly was a single platform company to more of a platform-type approach would be great.

Yes. So we think a lot about growth. A lot of companies like ours have grown nicely and they slow down and things. So we think a lot about how do we drive growth in '25 and '26 and '27. And so we're very conscious of that. So I think you're right. So look, about $5.9 billion TAM is from the one you're referring to. But that is about new logos in North America and Europe. So the TAM, that's sort of the $5.9 billion was. What you have to think about is Asia. It's a reasonable market, adds about $1.2 billion of the TAM in last year, we set up an office in Singapore. This year we setup an office in Hong Kong. We won quite a few clients already. So again, we think that adds to the TAM. Secondarily, we also launched Prism, which is really successful. Which also adds about $1.2 billion to the TAM. And thirdly, you've seen us announced government wins to the government wins to pensions, and that also adds to the TAM. So we think -- it's about a $10 billion TAM, right, give or take a little bit. And our current guide for the year is $440 million in revenue. So we feel like there's -- are we 5% of the market, yes, something of that -- and therefore, we feel there's huge runway ahead of us, and that's how we think about that. Should we do more? Yes. So we think a lot about how do we go from 1 bp to 4 bps is what we talked about at the Investor Day. So it isn't -- it isn't like you need all of this to grow in '25 and '26 and '27. But when you think about the longer term, as you said, there's a finite number of clients and if we don't keep increasing who might need your product, eventually you slow down.

Sure. That's helpful. Maybe just on your earlier point about some additional targeted tuck-in acquisitions. You obviously acquired jump on the PMS and OAMS side. You recently announced the acquisition of some risk and analytics capabilities from Wilshire. As we think about the core business and sort of the win rates that you guys have in the 80%-plus range, how should we conceptually think about Clearwater's right to win in these new adjacent markets?

Yes. So look, we first wake up when we think about new logos, it's just reality. So we think we win at a really high rate. The sales and marketing efficiency is quite high. So what can we do more there? And that's why I was talking about adjacent markets in North America, the insurance market in North America. And then we're talking about Europe, how do we grow Europe and how do we then grow Asia. So new logos continues to be a super integral part of what we want to do. But the second one, which you think a lot about is how do we grow NRR. So NRR starts quite nicely because we have a 98% gross revenue retention. But right now, our NRR is about 108%, 109%, Q1 was 110%, but that is pretty pedestrian. I mean, GRR of 98%, I think, is world-class. But NRR of 108%, 109%, 110% is, yes, it's okay, but it's not world class. So a lot of focus on how do we grow that to 115%. in a reasonable time frame. And so you see us investing a lot of money into R&D with the hope of coming up with 2 or 3 products every year, which sort of gives you a 2%, 3% point of growth each year. And then we think about M&A. The reason I was building up to this was, we think M&A is really important. And we have money on our balance sheet. We generate real cash every year. So could you use that to do tuck-in acquisitions, absolutely. So sorry, the long-winded answer, but then you come down to these two acquisitions specifically. And they are fundamentally in the service of what our current clients want. And these two especially talk about risk. It's just very hard to build a risk model because you have to try it at the time things go wrong. So -- and then you have to adjust your models again. And so this takes a decade to be believable as a risk model. And therefore, we bought something because then you can take it to your current clients, and they will already believe in this because [indiscernible] those models have been around for like 30 years or something like that. And that's why we bought it. We have the data already. And so when you have the data, you can feed the risk models instead of having to collate it. So when you talk about right to win, we already do one of the really hard part of the thing, which is to get the data in one spot. And so then you convert it, feed it to the risk models and bring it back into your system. And that's why I think that works really well.

Understood. Maybe just on the competitive backdrop, more specifically. I know there are a range of different competitors as you think about some of the underlying subsegments. But maybe for Wilshire specifically, talk about how important that is just in terms of being able to provide some of those differentiated insights. And obviously, AI is an important factor here. But maybe just talk there and then also how you think about some competition on the risk side from some of the larger incumbents in the space.

And look, I just want to say that, first, we think about this accounting and analytics space, which is the 1 bp. So we always think about, okay, what can we do there? And there's the new logo and NRR. So when you talk about risk, the risk and performance, you're talking about how do you go from 1 bp to 4 bps , right? And what is the competitive landscape there? So I do think that Clearwater already does risk for a certain class of clients. And for another class of clients at the very top, they will always go to the competitive products, which are much, much more robust. And so the objective wasn't quite yet to go after them right away. But higher than what Clearwater does, but not quite at the most complicated event. So we feel that it can fill that need in the middle. So you think about the mid-sector or the mid-markets, there, I think it can be a really powerful product. But do I believe that it is going to be a product next year, which will compete with the most biggest risk systems, I don't think so. So you will see us approach this 1 bp to 4 bps sort of incrementally one after the other is how we think about it.

Understood. Maybe just zooming out broader demand environment, what you're seeing in terms of asset management, insurance and some of the corporate opportunities. As I know -- on the corporate side, it's been an area that's been depressed with the lack of IPO activity, but that seems to be an area at which we're getting some green shoots. So conceptually just segment backdrop on a demand basis and what you're seeing geographically as well.

Yes, obviously, we have seen all these larger tech companies sort of talk about growth sort of slowing down, and we sort of think about that. So then you got to think about, okay, what drives Clearwater's growth. And you've got to think about what are those factors? And I'll give you a list of them what I think drives growth for us. One is new asset classes. So when you have a company which invest in 10 asset classes, and they certainly had 4 more and they have to do yet another aggregation this year, can't forget that. Let's go to Clearwater's thats one. Secondly, more countries. So sometimes clients will buy a portfolio in Germany another portfolio in some of the country or in Japan. And then they will say, "Oh, I'm not going to do a German gap and buy the system for Japanese gap. So let's get rid of that that's got to Clearwater. The third thing which drives the people towards the regulation. So regulatory reporting, as you can imagine, you have to have the whole book, right, or the way that makes sense. But then if you have the whole book, you've got to bring it all together, all asset classes, all countries. So regulation and the rise of regulation brings people to [indiscernible]. And fourthly, risk, because risk for just one part of our portfolio doesn't make sense, you have to look at risk on a comprehensive basis. But the point is that all of these 4 are not about, is the economy growing at 2% and 4%. It is about managing your ability to be agile on the business side. So we just haven't seen it yet. I don't want to be -- I don't want to say, "Oh, we don't expect to see it. We don't know. And so what we are very watchful about right now is what's the pipeline? Does that continue to grow? Does they continue to convert? Does it continue to move, and we haven't seen anything yet. But it's -- we are watchful -- and I don't think we're going to change any of our investments, though, because we have a lot of room on our P&L, and we can make these investments while growing EBITDA.

Yes. How about on the growth side of the equation. You're guiding to effectively 20% growth for this year, right in line with the long-term level at which you guys intend to operate if you sort of strip out some of the benefit of some of the acquisitions that you did on the jump side in '23 and also with Warsaw this year, it seems like organic growth is actually prime to accelerate in 2024. Maybe speak to some of the drivers of that. and maybe what you're seeing just in terms of that evolution on the MDR side?

Yes. Just firstly, obviously, your commentary is accurate. I do think that Q1 was pure in the sense, in the Q1 of '23, I think we obviously had JUMP. JUMP had acquired it in '22 and so 2023, Q1 was pure because [indiscernible] also got done, I think, in the end of April. And we grew very nicely. I think we had 21.4% growth. That was purely organic, so to speak, there was. I also think that [indiscernible] may give us a point or about a point, but that's all on the edge, I think. I think the first quarter growth of 21.4% was really solid from my point of view, and it was obviously organic. So look, I think we want to grow at 20%. And when you hear me talk about all of these investments in sales and marketing in Europe and also in Asia, that's in the service of putting enough irons in the fire that if the U.S. slows down or something, so we still have an ability to get to 20%. You see us push this much money into R&D to try and get NRR to 115% because some is going to work some years, something may not work, like we used to depend like you brought up IPOs. Yes, it doesn't work right now. I don't know to say about it, but that iron is in the fire that tomorrow next year, if the IPO market came back somewhat would it give 1% or 2% growth, I think it would. So our -- I think my role here is as companies get bigger, how do I ensure that we continue to grow at 20% and the path to that is to make enough -- put enough irons in the fire to make sure that if a certain subsector will then work, we can still make 20% growth occur.

Understood. I know an important piece of delivering on that 20% is the NRR. I know when I saw the 110% in 1Q, I know everyone got excited. If I go back to some of your commentary and Jim's commentary just in terms of how NRR should evolve for the full year of 2024, I think the previous messaging was for around 106%, 108% on the NRR side, you obviously put up a really strong number in the fourth quarter or in the first quarter of this year, excuse me. So just talk to me about like where we might fall within that range for this year. I know it's still some orderly, but could it prove to be somewhat conservative.

Look, why do we try and hedge that a little bit? Because a lot of it is from growing new products we are bringing to market. And by definition, it's a little bit hard to say how quickly they'll come to market? How quickly people accept it, give you the deals around it. So what we found it's a little bit hard to and tricky to try and forecast new products. Now when you talk about the basic business, we are very, very strong about our guidance because, guess what, I know GRR is likely to be 98%. I know what the price is going to do. I know what the wallet share improvement is going to be. And I also know how does that pipeline move because we've been doing it for so many years. These new products, it's just hard. Like we overperformed in Q1, because we didn't think it would happen this quickly, just that. Now could I tell you that, yes, it will happen in Q2 also? I don't know. But I will know over the next 4, 5 quarters. And so I think with NRR, we have said in the beginning of '26, we expect to be at 115%. And that -- by then, I think we would have enough runway to have seen these products come to market, see how well they can work and have a better sense of it go. So look, we are excited about the 110%. We're excited about GRR 99%. Okay, I don't think that is realistic. I don't think you can we've had GRR, gross revenue retention at 98% for 20 quarters, something like that. One quarter it was 97%. So I think we -- this is 99% just to prove a point. That it moves by one point up and down. I didn't really mean that. But I do think 98% is not realistic over time.

Sure. I know on the interest rate backdrop, it seems to be changing every day just in terms of level and magnitude of rate reductions. The business obviously saw around 1 point or 2 of contribution just from AUM uplift on the platform more generally. Talk to us about if we were to see a rate cut or sort of later this year, whether or not we should expect the same magnitude of uplift that you historically have seen. I know you obviously underwent pricing transition as well. So talk to us about some of those factors.

Yes. I think, look, it's quite simple for me. I think that if interest rates came down, it should boost prices of assets, and that should do well for us, right? So I just think of it very simply as another iron in the fire to help us grow, is just like the IPO. I do have a point of view about when there will be an interest rate cut, none. And thank you. A lot of Morgan Stanley when we spoke to you all your side don't build in anything into your forecast, right? And people in the first quarter, we're talking about 3 rate cuts, and you're very, very cautious in telling us how you thought about it and thank god, right, if you sort of build that kind of -- so really, these macro things I don't mean to be pessimistic or optimistic. I think our job is to make sure that if that occurs, we are there to sort of get benefit from it. And a price increase makes sure that if it goes the other way, we don't get hurt badly by it. Right? And so the price increase wasn't a price increase as much as a model change in how we bill our customers and how we charge them. And so I'd be ecstatic if they cut to interest rates. I'm not holding my breath.

Sure. On the net new side, you've spoken about having several irons in the fire. On the most recent call, you effectively alluded to 1/4 of bookings being derived from those new products collectively. I think that was relative to 10% historically. So it seems to be a nice uplift. I know it's still early. How are you thinking about sort of targeted mix of those new products or maybe attach rates relative to the Clearwater platform?

I think that is the game. I think that what we have done is. We had two products, right? So we had two products and they gave us this 10% growth, which was LPX and Prism and after November of last year, we have now invested 60% of all revenue. All R&D budget into innovation, and so we are coming up with 5 different markets, '15, '16 new ideas. So it's very much a transition here of a lot of these products coming to market, how do you price them? How do you make sure they come up in bundles that clients can understand and drive value from. But all this is in service, you should think about all of this in service of trying to get to NRR 115% where 3 of these products out of the 16 contribute 2% each or 3% each. And that's the game. That is the bridge between 108% to 115%. And there's 7 points there. So they get 3 products with 2% each or you got 3 products with 2%. It's going to be some mix there. Unfortunately, you've got to think of attach rates as some of these are ideas which are $25 million to $50 million of TAM, is really small, but they happened really quickly, like we announced [indiscernible] deal. And some of those are the larger ones like risk. And that's going to be $100 million, $200 million, $300 million, but they take a much longer time. So really, we think of this as, how do I have enough of each kind to get growth in the short, medium and long term. But you do have to invest for the longer term today. and the medium term today. And we are doing all of that right now.

How about on the pricing side of some of these newer products. Talk to us about -- I know the whole transition, the whole strategy is unlocking the incremental 3 bps expanding beyond just investment accounting. But talk to us how you're thinking about that pricing for some of the newer products? And what you've seen maybe anecdotally from an ACV uplift perspective once an existing customer adopts one or several new solutions?

Yes. I think that the way to think about it, so we basically go to our clients and we do a Net Promoter Score survey. And we have a really high score, right? Is it in excess of 60%. And so we go to them and say, okay, what adjacencies can we deliver on, right? And they would say, "You know what, you're doing accounting for the LPs, but my problem is not accounting, my problem is I don't know what's in each partnership. And when you look at that over 200 partnerships, it gets way murky really quick, right? So we look to our clients to sort of guide us and help design the product with us. The attach rates could the attach rates be 10% or 50%, it could be both of those, right? And I do think that today, it's a little bit early for us to say what this is, except to say that we know they spend 3 bps on that entire activity, right? And so how much of that can we bring is really, really what our challenge is right now.

Understood. Maybe pivoting to the margin side of the equation. You're targeting roughly -- or sorry, you were at an adjusted EBITDA margin base of roughly 29%. This year, you're targeting 250 basis points of expansion. The long-term model is to get to close to 40% adjusted EBITDA margins. Talk to us in terms of what you're seeing from an operating leverage perspective. It seems like in addition to some modest gross margin expansion, a lot of that leverage is actually coming from the R&D line, sort of migrating down from mid-20s to around 20% in terms of percentage of revenue. Talk to us just in terms of how you're thinking about spending R&D dollars, the highest priorities from that perspective and maybe how AI is a key factor in enabling that?

That's a really long question with a really long set of answers. But let's just talk about the model first and then I can talk about AI after that. So if we just sort of look at the model and you go to the Investor Day as sort of a starting point. And so the Investor Day, if you go back and look at it, our gross margin used to be 76%. And we said we're going to grow that 50 basis points every year. So we said 76.5%, 77%, like that. And Q1 was 78%. So we did overperform very massively on unit economics. And a lot of that is because of Gen AI. So we talk about that separately. So I feel like the 76% to 80% is what 400 basis points out there. Historically, you go back and look at R&D, it used to be 21%, 22% in that range. So why did we take it up to 26%, 27%? Firstly, we could, while growing margins. So that was great. But we were doing a big movement to the AWS cloud. And not a little bit, all of it. And that takes obviously a whole lot of investment. And the second thing was we were spending a lot of money getting the platform ready for Europe. And I think we announced in April was it last year that Aviva was fully live, which meant we were able to execute across Europe for a client of that size and magnitude. And once those 2 got done, then frankly, that's where we took that team, which was like 55%, 60% of whole R&D and switch them into innovation like you could say why have you still got all of those teams there. And our thought was, no, we can still grow EBITDA 200 basis points. Let's keep them, let's pivot them to innovation and so when you see that 26% come down to 20%, it's not going to be because we're going to reduce the team. It's just that revenue is going to grow and the dollar terms, if we can hold it constant then it sort of comes down. And so we think there's 400 basis points on the gross margin line, 600 basis points on the R&D line, and that's at 10%. Now could we do it much faster, Yes, we could, but for what? I'd rather go out and chase the growth when a product is disruptive, why would you not push? And one thing I'll quibble with you about is in the Investor Day, we were at 27% EBITDA. And we said 200 basis points each year from that number. Now it just so happened that we delivered much better. We delivered 29% but we still said, okay, we are not going to do 29% this year. We'll do 31% or 31.5%. So we're a little bit ahead on the margin gain, and it is driven by unit economics. The unit economics says what is much ahead of the game. And that is a little bit influenced a little bit. It's influenced by Gen AI, which you're obviously excited about. So I do think a model is sort of is doing what we thought it would do and a little bit better than what we thought we would do. One last point. So when you think about the '31 to '40, I'm not talking about any business model change. The gross margin is going to continue to improve with the network effect. And so we think we'll get to 80%. The R&D is nothing dramatic. We just constant come down. So in both of those, we feel like you don't have to change the business to get to 40. You just passage of time and it will get to 40. And so we feel excited about it. I think the model is working.

Great. Maybe just in terms of use cases from an AI perspective, what are the -- I know you rolled out Clearwater GPT, I know there are several other initiatives within the company that are exciting. Talk to us about what you're most excited about on the AI front and then we can talk about gross margins afterwards.

Yes. So look, AI -- we were very structured initially about, firstly, we're very excited about AI. And then we are like, okay, excitement is great. What are we going to get through it? And we try to figure out what you could actually get return. So let's talk about use cases. So we do investment accounting, as you know. So clients get their portfolio analytics every morning. And they'll have questions. I'll say why was amortization $32 million? Why is it not $14 million or whatever the number is. So they call us. As you can imagine, this is not a call center operation because really someone has to understand the amortization, what it means, how does it work, how does it interrelated with the other financial metrics. And so that's very expensive. And that's what sits as cost of goods sold. So when you look at the revenue line and the gross margin, what system between a vast majority of these people. So what we got, what we did was we launched something called CWIC, which is called the Clearwater intelligence console. What does it do? It takes the top 10 queries of questions people ask us. And we did the prom engineering behind it. So that if you click here to say, is it one of these? They say, "Yes, let me click it. Let's say give us the account number, whatever. And then the prompt engineering behind it is good enough and written by us, that it will try and produce the answer. Producing the answer if you as the client said, "Oh, yes, that makes sense, good. Great. So we think of that as deflation, which means the question never even came to us. Because it got answered by Gen AI upfront. So if you deflect, let's say, 12%, well, theoretically, you need 12% less people or you could grow 12% without adding any more people. So deflection is something you can measure very accurately on a month-to-month basis. Then you look at the second part, which is, you didn't like the answer and you send the question over to us, and I'm the analyst. So I sit down -- and the Gen AI tool tries to answer the question. If I like the answer, I'll say, "Oh, it makes sounds good. They send it on. Or if I don't like the answer, I'm going to say, no, I'm going to do it myself. Now if I do it myself, I'll take the same 2 hours as it took earlier no improvement. But if 25% of the time, 20% of the time, I can click the Gen AI and say, yes, this is correct. Then I spent only 10 minutes instead of 2 hours. And as you can see, so that is just the productivity of the analyst goes up. These 2 are very easily measurable. And each of them sort of should result in a higher gross margin. And when we did 78% in Q1, we also announced that in the 20% growth, the number of people we had added was 0, and that's a point. Because we were able to do more on the deflection and because we were able to do the productivity, there was a hard number we could provide, which was instead of improving by 50 basis points, improved by 200 basis points and 150 basis point was the sort of result of the 6 months of effort. So very clear about what we are chasing and why. It isn't GenAI could be great. I don't care what it could be. What is it doing now? And then you got to think about what can it do in the next 3 years. So it's very, very topical to us, very important to us. But we are not waiting for Gen AI to stop hallucinating. It is going to -- I don't really care. And each one of these, I'm not looking for 100% deflation. If we can get 20% deflection. That's twice as good. If my productivity goes up a little bit, every little bit is helpful without wanting -- waiting for perfection. I think some people are -- I want the GenAI tool to give me the right answer all the time. I'm not sure why. If it can give you the right answer, 80% of the time or 25% of the time, what's the difference? 25% of the time you saved yourself all this time, nothing to dislike. So I get very, very happy and excited about GenAI but also a sober about how to deploy it.

Sure. Maybe just in terms of what it could mean for gross margins more generally. I know you're effectively at 78% gross margins right now. Your long-term target is 80%. I know it's still somewhat early to call what that number could ultimately evolve to, but what are the guideposts that we should be tracking to sort of determine what that magnitude and timing could look like?

I think we also said when we did so, we said, look, we acknowledge that it can't be 80%, it can't be the high water mark anymore. It is definitely higher than that. Now is it 81%? Is it 85%? Is it -- I don't think we have a position today. But I've got to tell you that if you just think about this technology and the ability to learn, we go to both of these. The first example of deflection, when you did not accept the answer, you said, I don't accept it. And eventually, the answer came into the system. So the tool learned. And the second thing is that when all these are coming to me and these are 50,000 questions in a day and a week, things like that, right? Every time I'm not accepting the answer, and I'm providing an answer, I'm teaching right? And so I'm not quite sure why this should be restricted. I think there is a lot of potential also because the customers like it. A customer rather than send me an e-mail and sort of have an answer come back, if you can respond comprehensively and right away, obviously, customers prefer it. So our eagerness to continue to invest is quite high, but we're also lucky that we're getting a full return from it already. Like if you got 1.5 basis points guess what, you got $7 million, $8 million that you can reinvest, without losing anything. And so we feel -- I'm not sure what the number is, though yet.

It's a good problem to have.

I do think our P&L is -- has a lot of room some of it because of the GenAI. I mean, clearly, the 150 basis points came from GenAI. So I feel like we have room in our P&L. We are ahead of Investor Day, we said 27% EBITDA were up at 31%. So we feel like we have a lot of room while continuing to make a really massive amount of investment in R&D.

Great. Maybe just on implementation time lines. I know this is an area that you have been increasingly more focused on, particularly as your trying to drive time -- faster time to revenue more broadly. How have they been evolving? What have been the key factors that have been driving some of that acceleration?

You see, obviously, you know our business model is a single security master, which means that if 5 of my clients use -- have a certain security, we're already processing it. So when the sixth client comes along and she also invested in that security, we don't have to do anything to -- it's already there. We're already processing it. if the same client has a new custodian and we're already connected to the customer, we don't have to go do that. And so obviously, just by definition, each new client involves less work. And so you continue to speed up implementation not because we are geniuses but simply because the model allows you to get better with each one. Our current implementation average is 5.5 months. which if you just talk to people who do ERP accounting system implementations, that's a little bit ridiculous. Is that good, I think. And it's because you don't have to do all the work. While if I came to your office and sort of implemented it, for you. I would have to set up all the connections for you all the custody. In our case, you don't have to. It's a single instance, multi-tenant. So I think we're happy at this point. I think this current pace of onboarding is good. I do think you can't cheat time because once you on board, then there's a period in which we are comparing our numbers with your numbers to make sure everything is sort of solid and then you switch over, right? So you can't sort of say, "I'm not going to do any parallel run. You should, it is sort of best practice. So I think we're in a really good way. We do a great job. I think we have a really high net promoter score from there. And so it's good.

30 seconds, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about capital allocation, particularly given the acceleration that we've seen of late. I know you've hired some senior M&A leaders to prosecute this effort. Talk to us about where the product portfolio sits now and the types of assets that you'd be interested in?

Yes. So we would -- so firstly, we are somewhat lucky to have a good solid balance sheet. We also generated a fair amount of cash every year. So we have the ability to do things. But it is #3. So we start with new logos. We want to go to NRR 115%, and then we want to do M&A. What would you do? One is new products which current clients would buy. So we always think about what are my current clients going to buy? Or where is there a pain for we to what spend like Wilshire would be, right? So that all was #1. #2 is geographic footprint. So we are very thoughtful about is this something we can do to accelerate our adoption in Europe or Asia, and that could be a second thing. Third thing is just more movement from 1 bp to 4 bps. So you'll continue to see us, continue to move incrementally into the 1 bp to 4 bps. And so again, but we also have a pretty high bar if the company is not growing well, then we are super cautious if the company doesn't make money, that's a real problem. And the company has got to have a good gross margin. So it's not the easiest thing to find to find scale business, which are growing nicely, great margin, great EBITDA and so it's a little difficult to find.

Understood. Thanks very much, Sandeep. We're out of time, but thank you for joining us.

Thank you.