HealthEquity, Inc. (HQY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Please go ahead, Mr. Putnam.

Thank you, Chris, and good afternoon. Welcome to HealthEquity's Fiscal Year 2021 Sales Metrics Conference Call. My name is Richard Putnam. I do Investor Relations here for HealthEquity. Joining me today is Jon Kessler, President and CEO; Dr. Steve Neeleman, Vice Chair and Founder of the company; Darcy Mott, the company's Executive Vice President and CFO; Tyson Murdock, Executive Vice President and Deputy CFO; and Ted Bloomberg, our Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. Before I turn the call over to Jon, I have 2 important reminders. First, a press release announcing our sales metrics for FY '21 was issued after the market closed this afternoon. The metrics reported in the press release include the contributions from our wholly owned subsidiary, WageWorks, and accounts it administers. The press release also includes definitions of certain non-GAAP financial measures that we will reference today. A copy of today's press release, including reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures with comparable GAAP measures, and a recording of the webcast can be found on our Investor Relations website, which is ir.healthequity.com. Second, our comments and responses to your question today reflect management's view as of today, February 8, 2021, and will contain forward-looking statements as defined by the SEC, including predictions, expectations, estimates, or other information that might be considered forward-looking. There are many important factors relating to our business which could affect these forward-looking statements made today. And these forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause the actual results to differ materially from the statements made here today. As a result, we caution you against placing undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. We also encourage you to review the discussion of these factors and other risks that may affect our future results or the market price of our stock, which are detailed in our latest annual report on Form 10-K and in subsequent periodic reports filed with the SEC. We assume no obligation to revise or update these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. And at the conclusion of our prepared remarks, we'll turn the call over to our operator to provide instructions and to host our Q&A. With that out of the way, I'll turn the mic over to our CEO, Jon Kessler.

Thanks, Richard, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. I will talk about the FY '21 sales results. Ted will describe our plan to beat them in fiscal '22. And then Tyson is going to update FY '21 guidance and offer a first look at FY '22 based on the results we're reporting today. Steve and Darcy will join us for the Q&A. So one thing that makes working at HealthEquity very special is the fact that our aligned -- our mission and our business are so well aligned. The team's ability to help our members connect health and wealth and successfully build health savings also fuels our long-term growth. Our members had a lot of success this past year in that regard. HealthEquity HSA members ended fiscal '21 with $14.3 billion in HSA assets, up 24% from a year ago and 26% on an organic basis. Organic asset growth, which excludes both gains and losses from the WageWorks acquisition and migration, increased from $1.8 billion in fiscal '20 to roughly $3 billion in '21. Even more exciting is the growth in average HSA balance, which grew by 15% in FY '21, up from 7% in fiscal '20 and 2% in fiscal '19. The majority of that growth occurred from the result of sales and member engagement efforts throughout the year. What happened? First, our new members added more assets than ever before. HealthEquity ended fiscal '21 with 5.8 million HSA members, up 8% year-over-year and 11%, excluding migration-related closures. That total includes 687,000 new HSA members added during the year, which is down from FY '20's record 724,000. Almost all of that year-over-year gap occurred in the second and third quarters, during which new hiring by existing clients ground to a halt as a result of the pandemic. Q4, driven by open enrollment and new client wins, was much stronger. As Ted will describe in a bit more detail, these HSA wins included both cross-sell clients consolidating with HealthEquity, a top and existing CDB relationship and new logos. The new HSA clients fed approximately $300 million in HSA transfers from other custodians in FY '21, which was up 35% year-over-year, most of which occurred in January. Second, more of our members, both new and existing, learned the full power of an HSA, transitioning from spenders to savers and investors. The number of our HSA members who invest grew 51% year-over-year. 51%, that's a lot. The percentage of HSA members who invest reached 5.8% at fiscal year-end compared to 4.1% a year ago. HSA-invested assets grew 48% year-over-year, far outpacing stock or bond market gains. $4.2 billion in HSA-invested assets now make up 29% of total HSA assets as of the fiscal year-end. These are really positive trends for the long-term value of HealthEquity, in our view, because more members, using the full power of HSAs, drive our profitability and cross-sell and client takeaways spur outperformance atop a still growing HSA market. They speak to the return on our investment in integration to a total solution in a single proprietary platform which drives cross-sell and in the engagement infrastructure and capabilities of that proprietary platform which drive members to action. CDB enrollment was not so exciting, at least temporarily. At fiscal year-end, HealthEquity managed 12.8 million total accounts, including the 5.8 million HSAs we've discussed, plus 7 million CDBs. HealthEquity sold and implemented new CDB accounts with nearly 1 million members in fiscal 2021. That's good, but CDBs in total still fell 0.4 million or 5% versus a year ago and ex Commuter still grew by only 0.3 million or 4%. There are 2 reasons for this, both related to the pandemic. First, as I just mentioned, about 650,000 Commuter accounts remain in suspense due to the continuing full-time work-from-home, and these are not included on our total accounts numbers. Second, we did not see -- and I should say, we did not see significant office reopening in Q4. Second, a similar number of FSA members did not reenroll for fiscal '21, and these include dependent-care FSA members with temporary lack of access to or need for child care during work-from-home and health FSA members who, perhaps at the time of enrollment, were still carrying significant 2020 balances due to interrupted health care access during the pandemic. Ted will talk about our opportunities to spur recovery in these areas in his remarks on our fiscal '22 opportunities. As information on the HSA market growth during this cycle comes around from various sources, we'll have more to say about our performance versus competitors and the market as a whole. So now let's look forward. While the pandemic remains with us, the HealthEquity team intends to beat the results I've just reviewed and to do so decisively, demonstrating the strategic value of the WageWorks integration and our total solution strategy. I'd like to turn the call over to Ted to discuss our plans to do that in fiscal '22. Ted?

Thanks, Jon. Good afternoon, everybody. Let me start with a message to all of our HealthEquity team members, clients and partners. Thank you for all your contributions to fiscal 2021's sales achievements. My remarks will focus on the opportunity to accelerate our success in fiscal 2022. As you know, HealthEquity has multiple paths to growth: first, winning new network partner and employer client logos; second, cross-selling more services to current clients via our total solution strategy; and third, growing employee adoption and use of HSAs and CDBs through engagement and education. Let's start with our network partners, which are health plans, retirement plan record keepers and benefits administrators with whom we actively go-to-market. We grew the number of our network partners to 174 in fiscal '21, up from 165 1 year ago and 141 2 years ago. Beyond adding these partners, we improved the quality of the relationships. 12 of our partners added more HealthEquity services to their offering this year, showing optimism that our bundled strategy can help them serve their clients. We've also integrated more deeply with retirement plan partners, expanding our coverage from 25% to 35% of the defined contribution or DC market and achieving significant enterprise client wins together. Most importantly, for maintaining our Purple culture, year-end partner satisfaction surveys earned nearly perfect scores from combined results across all types of network partners, despite a fair amount of platform migration-related activity this year. We believe that more happy partners offering more HealthEquity services will lead to more wins in fiscal 2022. Direct-to-employer and broker-driven new logo wins are also poised for fiscal '22 growth because last year's deferrals are this year's incremental opportunities. For enterprise employers, the pandemic may change more difficult this year, reducing the number of new enterprise RFPs market-wide and leading many to stall. But our talented enterprise sales team made the most of its opportunities, producing twice as many new HSA members in fiscal '21 as we did in fiscal '20. So we've proven we can win an outsized share of opportunities, and based on our early fiscal '22 pipeline and results, we believe demand is returning this year. Now let's talk about cross-sell, where, as you've heard Jon say, we see $400 million in revenue potential in our existing managed client base alone. Cross-sell was new to HealthEquity in fiscal '21, and yet we made a strong start. Over 50 of our largest early-adopter managed clients added a new HealthEquity service to their benefits package this year. Now with significant pieces of the go-forward platform in place and HSA migration substantially completed, we're poised for more. As fiscal '22 begins, the team is actively engaged in cross-sell discussions, with roughly 20% of our managed client base. We are also beginning to scale cross-sell efforts into our small and medium employer client base, which unlocks further opportunity. Across both new logos and cross-selling, the sales and account executive teams are off to a great fiscal '22 start, with more business already closed than at this point last year. Finally, engagement, which increases the value of both new wins and current client relationships. As Jon discussed, we had our best year ever, encouraging HSA members to grow their balances. And there is more room to run. For fiscal '22, our new Engage360 Hub is winning rave reviews as a source for education for members as well as for clients and partners. Also, we are expanding the health savings score as a tool to target our efforts and inform clients' plan design decisions. One example of the power of making engagement and education core to our platform came during the first few days of January. A week after the most recent stimulus bill became law, HealthEquity delivered live and recorded information -- education about what FSA and COBRA changes mean for employers, and we provided a streamlined process for them to take action. More than 5,000 employers and brokers engaged with our content, and nearly 2,000 employers have requested planned document changes to give their employees flexibility. This is part of the effort Jon mentioned to reactivate CDB members whose benefit utilization patterns were interrupted by the pandemic. We do not need to wait until next open enrollment season to make progress. In summary, we are well positioned to win new business, grow existing business and help our members succeed by guiding them towards the right spending, saving and investment decisions for their families. I will now turn the call over to Tyson Murdock. Tyson?

Thank you, Ted. Closing the books on fiscal '21 is [indiscernible] and the initial results allow us to update our guidance with the following for fiscal year ended January 31, 2021: revenue in the range of $729 million to $733 million; non-GAAP net income in the range of $125 million to $128 million; non-GAAP diluted EPS in the range of $1.67 to $1.71; and adjusted EBITDA in the range of $236 million to $240 million. The revised guidance implies adjusted EBITDA margin for the full fiscal '21 between 32% and 33%. This is a remarkable achievement given the loss of high-margin Commuter and interchange revenue and lower yields on HSA cash during fiscal '21. We will, of course, report final year-end results next month. Given the expected financial results for fiscal '21 and the sales results released today, we have sufficient confidence to provide early guidance for fiscal '22 revenue, which we expect to be in the range of $740 million to $750 million. I would like to take a moment to describe key assumptions underlying this guidance, including those related to the unusual circumstances of the pandemic. With regard to Commuter benefits and its impact on the service and card fees, our revenue guidance assumes that Commuter will deliver less than half of its annual $75 million in pre-pandemic contribution revenue. With respect to health care spend and its impact on card fees, we assume that member spend will return to pre-pandemic levels within the first half of the year as vaccinations roll out and health care access is broadened. We have not, however, assumed a snapback in card spend or spending above pre-pandemic levels at this time. As Ted discussed, we have an opportunity to work first with employers and then with their employees to reactivate dependent and health care FSA enrollment depressed by the pandemic. As we are able to gauge traction, we will incorporate that into future guidance. Due to the stronger-than-expected HSA cash bill in January and the placement of those funds at current rates, which, as you know, are below our current average yield, today's guidance assumes a yield on HSA cash with yield for this next year to be at the low end of our previous yield guide or about 175 basis points. The acceleration in seasonal January deposits beyond our expectation provides additional evidence that our members and employer clients understand the power of HSAs and of course, will provide additional benefit to HealthEquity as interest rates and interest rate policies begin to normalize. We expect adjusted EBITDA margins during fiscal '22 will be at comparable levels to today's upwardly revised guidance for fiscal '21, even with outlook prudently accounting for the pandemic's persistence. We will report our Q4 earnings in the third week of March and with more information in hand, look forward to providing additional outlook at that time. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Jon.

Nicely done. Tom Brady may not be passing the torch, but we're getting it done here. Thank you, Tyson. So for a long time -- I'll just close with this. For a long time, we have predicted that using the full power of HSAs, that American families could eventually build roughly $1 trillion of health savings, and that seemed like a big number. But our vision and our mission and our values are all connected to that belief in that number. And our vision, which is that health savings will be as much a part of American families' saving strategies as 401(k)s and other retirement accounts are today, implies 50 million to 60 million HSAs. And we think that's going to happen by 2030. And our mission, which is to be the best at helping HSA members build health savings, is about relentlessly driving all balances upward to -- and we believe the end game on that is to the $15,000 to $20,000 balances that we see in our mature account cohorts today. And in fact, based on today's numbers, our investors, both new and long-standing, are all -- are, on average, already there, even though, obviously, their numbers have grown very quickly, and so we have a lot of new investors. So this is a long journey. It's a long journey to a $1 trillion of assets being put towards health care security by the American public. But the path to that $1 trillion prediction gets clearer every time we report these sales results to you. Before going to questions, I want to join in the thanking and in particular, to thank those who are truly responsible for the results we're reporting today and driving HealthEquity in our industry forward, which is not us, but rather our sales executives around the country; our marketing team; our sales support superstars; our hard-Zooming account executives, they used to be hard-traveling, now they're just hard-Zooming; service managers; implementation specialists, technology and operations; service delivery teams; and of course, our member services specialists who welcome new members and really get them off on the right foot and just did a fantastic job this year in January. And a big thank you to our network partners, our health, retirement benefit plan partners as well as, of course, our employer clients, for all they do to support their members in building health savings. It's really as a direct result of their efforts that HealthEquity closed fiscal '21 setting new highs for our number of network partners, our HSA members and assets and really showing that we've got millions of families doing something positive about health care in America by building health savings. So with that, I will open the call for -- turn the call back to the operator and open for questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Your first question is from Greg Peters from Raymond James.

First question, just a big picture question. The last several months, we've seen some changing or some headwinds for the industry. I think the Allegis CEO has stepped down. Webster's fourth quarter results weren't great. ConnectorCare was sold. Can you give us sort of a perspective from where you sit on what's going on with some of your competitors that's resulting in the change and what the headwinds are there?

Yes. I mean some of those maybe could be characterized as headwinds, some not. I think, without commenting on any specific competitor, Greg, that -- and thank you for the question, that -- I'm surprised you're even available in Tampa. I would think you would be out partying and whatnot, but -- a little groggy maybe.

I am definitely groggy.

All right. Good. Groggy is good. But -- it's better than drunkie. But look, I think that what you're seeing is some consolidation of the industry based on the fact that succeeding in this industry takes capital. It takes -- really, it takes talent, obviously. And it takes investment in both technical capabilities, but also in a technical ecosystem and connectivity. And for folks who are not able to make those investments or haven't made those investments, it's going to be challenging to continue to put up numbers. And we're poised to try and take advantage of that. We've -- as you know, we've accumulated quite a bit of operating cash. And based on the numbers Tyson reported or guided towards, I expect that we'll grow that cash pile this quarter. We have a ton of capacity out there. And so we're going to be kind of focused on where those opportunities make sense for us on potential M&A and other kinds of transactions that really help us take advantage of that consolidation. And of course, then beyond that, we're going to beat competitors in the marketplace. And I think relative to what other competitors have put out there so far, our growth in terms of assets and accounts and whatnot feels pretty good, particularly on an organic basis. And -- but we'll see what others have to say as the industry reports. I guess I basically think the industry as a whole is not only alive and well, but it's doing what we said it would do, which was, over time, right, accounts would mature and the asset component of those accounts would start growing and so forth. And over time, as we said, I'm back 6 years ago, I remember you were there, is that like all industries, the winners and losers would separate from each other. And I think we're a winner.

Yes. So the other question I had was around just account retention and network partners. Obviously, the results were challenged last year. I'm just -- I'm not looking at account -- specific account retention, sort of like an employer retention, what your retention of your customers were, if that makes sense. And then on the new network partners, the hospitals, I think you said 174 versus 165 versus 141...

Yes.

And I'm just curious what the percentage of the HSAs relate to those? Is it an increasing percentage of your HSAs relate to those network partners? Is it a static number? I'm just trying to understand how that percentage is changing.

Yes. I'll try and take the first part, and I'm not sure that we're yet in a position to report accurately and specifically on the second part, but I'll give it a shot. And if Tyson or Darcy wants to chime in, they're welcome to do so. The first part of your question, I think, was about employer retention. And the gist of it was -- now I forgot that we've allowed you to do a 2-part question and now the floodgates are open. So who knows how long -- but I imagine Richard texting me in the background somehow. But at...

Well, you were giving me a hard time about the Super Bowl, so I figure I get a pass.

That's fair. That's fair. So I think in terms of employers, the truth is, and I think we commented on this a little bit in the third quarter call, we did extremely well. Our biggest source of attrition this year in HSA is -- was the accounts that we were moving over, and we've talked about those in each quarter. There were another, I don't know, 10,000 or 15,000, whatever it was, in this quarter -- this last fourth quarter. But those numbers have trailed off as, obviously, as we've moved accounts over. Barring that, we had a very good year in terms of account attrition. And I think also from an employer perspective, as Ted talked about, one of the things that ultimately surprised me a little bit was the contribution to HSAs from new logos. We said throughout the year that winning new logos, particularly in the direct market, was going to be challenging in the context of the pandemic. But the team really did a nice job with the wins that we got. We went for some big ones and won those. And that's the reason that those contributed so heavily to dollars transferred over in January and obviously will be with us for a long time. So that's my sense of it. I -- the last part of your question was about the percentage rate of HSAs that are coming from partners versus direct. Obviously, our goal, to some extent, with the total solution strategy is to expand our direct and broker-enabled sales. It's a weird year to look at that in fiscal '21 given all that was going on. Our partners remain very strong. And as Ted commented, we started to see some notable wins from the retirement plan channel even as we continue to kind of increase the foundational infrastructure there. So -- but I feel like if I look at it and take a step back, there are 4 ways you can win business in here. You can sell direct to employers. You can sell through brokers. You can sell through -- in partnership with health plans, and you can sell in partnership with retirement. And in each of those areas, we saw good contributions this year from both existing and new partners. But obviously, it's a little bit tough with the pandemic, and we hung in there. And we think that puts us in a great position going forward.

Your next question is from Stephanie Davis from SVB Leerink.

Congrats on the numbers.

Was that you and your dogs in the background or no?

You know what, if you heard my dog barking, it is a very scary deep bark. So I do not think it was mine. She's napping happily on the couch.

Outstanding.

So I have a quick question on the forward numbers because they seem so different from the positive takeaways on the metrics that you gave earlier on the call.

Yes...

What is the driver of that implied guidance?

Yes, I'll speak a little of this and then ask Tyson to detail. And I think the core is that we don't know, as you're well aware, we don't know how the coverage analysts and the like think about, particularly, the pandemic impacts on Commuter and the like. And I think that's probably where the big delta is. But Tyson, you can provide some details on how we thought about those issues and kind of where the opportunities are going forward.

Yes. Hey, Stephanie. Thanks for letting me have the opportunity to outline these. There's still those headwinds there. We really haven't seen improvement in Commuter. And if someone knows better than my team about when that will come back and how that will work through the pandemic, I would love to talk about it. But it just hasn't been so. That's why we put the numbers in the script about where the run rate was and where we're actually landing in this forward year. It will be even lower than this last '21 year. And so that's an area that it can -- at the end of the day, we haven't included a lot in that forward model relative to Commuter. In the second half of the year, there may be something as people come back to work. But that's really a big driver of that. When you think about the spend side of it, that's also something that I think we've been a little [indiscernible] about. I don't think that that's going to spike back. I think people are going to do that in a different way. And so we've been a little careful about that. I mean the good news is we -- there's a lot more assets that came in. And so that -- we'll do a couple of things. One, we can replace it. And the other thing is that people will spend some of that. And so that will help drive some of that, but we really haven't put anything in there that would really push that along. And then I think where the work actually has to happen and where we have to actually see what the team -- how the team executes is in this FSA runoff and some of the change in the legislation. And that's really something that Ted and I have talked a lot about and the whole team, is about how to execute on that. We were out really early with our webinars on it. We have a lot of feedback from our partners and our employers about what they're going to do with plan design, but they actually have to follow through on that. So we'll see if we get something there as well. But again, not included in there. So that's -- those are the main assumptions that I think you would be looking at. Of course, there's still interest rates in there that are lower than we wanted to be in those type of things.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but given the timing of your fiscal year, don't you really only have, let's call it, 2 months of tough comp on the Commuter business? Or do you assume it's going to get markedly worse than what it was during the height of pandemic last year?

No, you're correct. And that's why we've really taken it down to the run rate over the last half of this fiscal '21 year into the next year. And you're correct, we had good results in February for -- Commuter in March and how things -- it sort of lags the shutdown because people don't turn their cards off and pull away from it until that point. But you're exactly right.

But the key point there is the timing, is that last point Tyson made, Stephanie. So I think as we talked about, if you go back to our script from the first quarter of last year, we saw some falloff in -- really in April revenue for Commuter. But even then, it wasn't as substantial as it ended up being for the full year mostly because stuff kind of -- folks, either they were -- wherever they were in the world, still going to work or they thought they would be or what have you, or they just didn't get around to it one way or the other. But what we did is took where we were in the fourth quarter and extended that out. And I think that's -- it's -- we're -- I feel like if -- from an investor's perspective, our job there is just to be clear about our thinking. And if we can do better, great. And we'll -- by the way, I'm sure you'll be hearing about some things we're going to try and do to accelerate that kind of -- that benefit as a whole and make it more relevant in the future workplace. But nonetheless, we wanted to be prudent about it.

Understood. I'll be hoping for some conservatism so we're not spending a whole other year back at home.

Your next question is from Donald Hooker from KeyBanc.

So have -- so just on the topic of the yield, the guidance around the yield -- cash yield from the HSAs, which sounds like, I guess, is a little bit lower than you had thought, is there a way to think about sort of the incremental yield on that incremental deposit dollar because you're giving us sort of an aggregate yield? I think we're all trying to figure out where this thing is going to set out at kind of what -- I don't know if you're willing to share that or directionally kind of give us visibility because there's sort of obviously a lag effect. This will play out over a little bit of time beyond even this coming year. Can you give us a little bit of guidance on that?

I think maybe that's a good one for Darcy. You want to take this one?

Sure. And you're right, we don't give what individual placements are in specific contracts from a competitive standpoint. But the movement from what we guided in at the JPMorgan conference was based on our range of estimate at the time. And if you'll recall, we estimated our cash would be between 9 6 and 9 7 -- $9.6 billion and $9.7 billion. We reported today $10.1 billion in cash. So however you want to calculate that, that's another $400 million or so. And so we have now placed that money, and it's at depressed rates right now. We will continue to ladder things out, Don. And so we're saying that our midpoint of our range before was in the -- between 1 75 and 1 80, was kind of in that 1 77, 1 78 range, which we were very comfortable with. And we're just taking it down to the lower end of that range because of that impact of the new money at a lower rate. Rates are very interesting to watch. I've watched them for 14 years now in trying to predict what our revenue will be. And yes, we are kind of at the low end of that. And the good news is that we've got all $10 billion placed. And we rely on our depository relationships, and we have very strong, good relationships with all of our depositories. So we will be opportunistic as the year progresses. We'll see if rates firm up a little bit. Maybe you get a little bit of benefit there. But the most exciting thing is that we continue to grow. We can grow our cash assets and our investment assets. And so our yield, we -- every quarter, we will give you our complete clarity view of what we believe our yields will be for the remainder of the year.

Okay. And then maybe I'll ask one follow-up and jump back in queue. You guys did reference that the COVID-19 outbreak, not surprisingly, caused some distractions among your network partners, and there were some deferrals. Is there any -- can you give us any sort of incremental commentary around those deferrals? Are you going to get kind of -- I don't know if you're willing to -- I don't know if it's possible to quantify them or these deferrals are going to be recaptured in this fiscal year going into -- so for fiscal '23, you'll sort of get a catch-up? I'm just trying to sort of think through that based on the comments there.

Yes. Ted, why don't you take this one? I interpret the question as basically being about the magnitude of our pipeline deferrals and what we're seeing so far early in 20 -- in fiscal '22 with regard to capturing that demand this year.

Sure. Thanks for the question. And we try to analyze this topic pretty diligently, but there's no sort of like lead table for the number of RFPs that are out in the marketplace. So the way that we do it is we survey our big broker and consultant partners. And the vibe that we got was enterprise RFPs were down depending on geography, depending on business line, significant sort of double-digit percentages kind of across all the people that we surveyed, which is an anecdote, not analysis, but just kind of gives you some anchor. And I think our experience in -- sort of supported that also anecdotally, which is that we started a bunch of cases that ended up getting deferred. I mentioned in my remarks that our closed sales through this point in the year are significantly higher than in previous years. And that's in large part due to cases that rolled over year by year. So we know where those deferrals are. We're working them diligently, and we're excited about their volume. And we expect it to be -- that it will be reflected in the opportunities that we have in this sales year. But to your point, exact point, it's hard to get an exact analysis of how many opportunities got deferred industry-wide, how many did we get, what are the opportunities, et cetera. So the best we can do is kind of say that we're pretty optimistic about some of those cases that got deferred last year coming back this year.

Your next question is from Sean Dodge from RBC Capital Markets.

I guess maybe not to belabor, but asking Don's earlier questions just a little bit different, just to make sure we're clear. So around the sales outlook, I think this time last year, you all said you had something like 136 RFPs from September 1 to January 31 that you had received. We should think about that being kind of the metric here and that being down, I guess, "strong" double digits. Am I interpreting that right?

If I understand your question, maybe a way -- another -- the way to think about it is, and we can think about it in terms of RFPs or opportunities and I should say, in this regard, we're going to be in a better position to talk about opportunities, which is the right way to think about it, since especially in cross-sell, you don't -- maybe you don't go to RFP, that's the whole idea as we've -- as the team has now kind of completed, at least from a sales-facing perspective, the integration of our sales CRM systems and so forth. But I guess a way to think about it is simply as follows. Industry-wide -- and then this makes total sense. There was less like -- if it wasn't critical for you to do, you didn't do it, right? So especially when you think about customers that were having to make those calls in the relatively early part of the year and into the summer, which would be your larger customers, right, where we -- none of us really knew what was going on. And so that was reflected in aggregate RFP volume industry-wide. We actually did reasonably well, meaning we kind of roughly held serve in RFP volume, but then, as Ted mentioned, right, we saw a considerable amount of, "Okay, we started this process, but now we realize what it's going to take. We've got other stuff to do, are going to stall out." I commented in an earlier call that about 1/3 of our -- on the enterprise side, about 1/3 of our RFPs actually ended up being deferrals that are into next -- into this -- now this year. And so our job is to go win those -- and well, first, to kind of get them restarted and then go win them. And we've done some of that already, and we'll keep doing it. But I think that's -- the broader picture is that, certainly, when it comes to this kind of stuff, it wasn't a great year for switching activity, and yet we did okay. And in truth, the only thing that -- the only area of weakness that really shows up in the numbers on a year-over-year basis is actually not related to anything we're talking about now. It's related to the absence of new employees in the middle of the year, right? So meaning, in other words, new employees, existing clients, where people come in and you have the opportunity to win that new guy, plus the old guy can stick to maybe who he or she replaced, can stick around. And you can see that in the month-over-month data really clearly, that up until about May, we were in really good shape and in fact, kind of is hiring, in that it occurred in February and into March, so first benefit's a month old -- well, might be April or May. And then things kind of slow down. And then come November, December, they speed up again. Well, why? Because November, December and January is when we see the benefits of open enrollment, meaning new clients and new open enrollment activity. So it's -- I think -- I guess the way I would summarize it is, looking at our new client wins, looking at our accounts from new clients, et cetera, we did more than -- we at least held serve. Looking at assets, we did more than hold serve, including cash assets, not just market growth and all that. But where we were challenged -- but that having been said, our goal wasn't to hold serve. Our goal was to do better based on the fact that we're rolling out this integrated solution and an integration and total solution strategy. And I think what we're trying to communicate is we think that, with a little bit of the dust settled, that we can get back to that pattern that we were on at the very beginning of last year and really have a good year this year.