Intuit Inc. (INTU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Well, good morning, everyone in the room and everyone on the webcast. Welcome to Intuit's 2020 Annual Shareholder Meeting. Really pleased to be with you this morning. For those of you that I've not had the opportunity to meet, my name is Sasan Goodarzi, I'm Intuit's CEO. And before we get started, let me do some introductions. First of all, I get the pleasure to work with an incredible Board, and I think most of them are here. We have Scott Cook, our Founder, that I don't believe has yet arrived; Brad, our Chairman. We have Suzanne Nora Johnson, Dennis Powell, Tom Szkutak, Rick Dalzell, and Eve Burton, and then we have Deb Liu, Raul Vazquez and Jeff Weiner. So I get the pleasure of serving with this Board. And we also have a number of our management team in the room that actually runs the company, and I have the distinct pleasure to serve with every day. And if you can raise your hand, folks know that you're in the room, and it's a great opportunity to get to know them and ask them any questions that you have. So my plan today is to do a very quick look back in terms of the company performance, and then to talk about our game plan to deliver for our customers as we look ahead. But before I jump in, I'm going to let you know who else is in the room and then turn it over to Kerry. We have Chris Hummel from Broadridge, the inspector of elections. And we also have members of Ernst & Young in the room. They are our registered, independent public accountants. And so with that said, let me turn it over to Kerry.

Thanks, Sasan, and welcome. First on formalities, I have an affidavit from Broadridge, certifying that notice of the stockholder meeting was properly mailed around November 27, 2019, to all stockholders of record as of November 25, 2019. I also have a list of the registered stockholders entitled to vote at this meeting, which is available for inspection. And the inspector of elections has executed his oath, which will be filed with the minutes of the meeting. This year, we received a proposal from one of our stockholders for consideration at the meeting. The proposal is submitted by Hal Scott, the trustee of The Doris Behr 2012 Irrevocable Trust, which holds around 900 shares. In lieu of Mr. Scott presenting his proposal, we'll provide a brief description of the proposal on his behalf. As set forth in further detail in the proxy statement, the stockholders requested that the Board adopt a bylaw that requires mandatory arbitration of all stockholder claims under the federal securities laws. For the reasons described in the proxy statement, the Board of Directors recommends a vote against this proposal. Broadridge has counted the votes cast on each proposal, and Chris has informed me that we have a quorum. The polls are open. If you've already turned in your proxy, you shouldn't vote again unless you want to revoke your proxy or change vote. If you'd like a ballot, please raise your hand. Stockholders will vote on the 4 proposals described in the proxy statement. Following the vote, Chris will tally the ballots and proxies to determine which proposals have been approved and I'll announce the preliminary results. Proposal #1 is the election of 11 directors. Proposal #2 is the advisory vote on executive compensation or say-on-pay vote. Proposal #3 is the ratification of Ernst & Young as our independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal 2020. And proposal #4 is a stockholder proposal to adopt a mandatory arbitration law. Management recommends that you vote for all 11 director nominees and for proposals 2 and 3 and against proposal 4. [Voting]

The polls are now officially closed. We'll publish the final vote totals in a Form 8-K that we expect to file within the next 4 business days. Based on the preliminary results of the vote, the stockholders have elected the 11 Board nominees named in our proxy statement, approved the advisory proposal on executive compensation, ratified the selection of Ernst & Young as our independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal 2020 and not approved the mandatory arbitration by law. That concludes our formal business today and the formal portion of the meeting is now adjourned. In just a moment, I'll turn the meeting back over to Sasan to give you his business update and answer any questions. Sasan's remarks may contain forward-looking statements, and there are a number of risks that may cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations. For more information about those risks, please see the webcast version of this presentation and our SEC filings, which can be found on our Investor Relations web page. Thanks for your time this morning, and now I'll turn things back over to Sasan.

Thank you, Kerry. So let me get us started with a brief look back. We are a company that falls in love with our customer problems and not the solutions, which is why over the last 36 years, we've been able to reimagine the company and have felt confident to disrupt ourselves. And because of the culture and reputation of everything that we do every single day, that's landed us year in and year out on Fortune's Great Place to Work, and we've accelerated customer growth, and if you have been a shareholder, you've been a very happy camper. Now what you see here is the fact that because we are so focused on reimagining the company and focusing on our customer problems, we have led through significant platform shifts over the last 4 decades, which, in essence, has delivered the results that I just mentioned. On Fortune's Best Place to Work year in and year out, we've accelerated customer growth. And again, if you've been a shareholder of the company, you've been a very happy camper. FY '19 was no exception. We had a very strong year. Our top line grew 13%, and you can see that our non-GAAP diluted EPS grew 17%. That momentum carried into the first quarter of the year, where we grew revenues 15% and our non-GAAP diluted EPS by 41%. Now that is a brief look back at our history and the performance of the company. But at the end of the day, everything starts and ends with our customers. It's why we show up to work every single day. And everyone that we serve has a common set of needs. Everyone has a set -- common set of behaviors, and they are looking to make ends meet. They're looking to find ways to make ends meet by the end of the week, put food on the table, be able to write their bills. And depending on the country that we serve, they're looking to get their largest tax refund, which is the largest paycheck of the year. For those that have been bold enough to be an entrepreneur, be a small business, which drives 50% of the global economy, they have an additional set of needs. They're looking for ways to grow customers and get customers. They're looking to get paid for their hard work. They're looking for ways to get access to capital so they can grow their business, pay their employees and ultimately, ensuring that they are compliant. These are the set of customer problems that we have galvanized the whole company around and all of our partners around, though, because we can't do this ourselves, it's important that we do this with our partners, to ensure that we deliver for our customers. This, along with a few trends have really been a catalyst for growth for the company. The first one is that artificial intelligence is reinventing user experiences. Now artificial intelligence is something a lot of folks talk about, but it's actually not new. It's been around for 40 -- the concept has been around for 40-plus years. It's always needed access to a lot of data and compute power, both of which are available today. And in the simplistic terms, artificial intelligence can ultimately automate most of the work that gets done today, and/or things that need to get predicted. In our space, whether it's categorization of expenses, whether it's paying your employees, whether it's knowing how much risk that we can take to give you access to capital, whether it's motions in driving a car and making it self-driving, to being able to do as good of a job as a doctor would in the medical industry, artificial intelligence is fundamentally reinventing experiences across every single industry. And our belief is that we're just seeing the beginning of what is possible. The second is more and more people are adopting digital expertise, especially those that were born after the smartphone, they expect instant help if they need it, whether it's through chat, whether it's through video, they expect help instantaneously. This is particularly important in our industry, where we're talking about people's money, where they need to make decisions with a lot of confidence. And no matter how easy the product or the platform or the feature is, folks still turn to, can I get help and expertise in any way in which why I want it and when I want it. This is a catalyst for growth. Third is more and more consumers are looking to free consumer apps to be able to run their life, whether it's Chime where I can use -- have a -- in essence, a free bank account, and I can get early access to my money; to Credit Karma, where it's free to use it and you get access to a lot of financial products that are right for you; or Robinhood, more and more consumers are turning to free applications to be able to run their financial life. And that's something very important that we must take into consideration to solve the problems that we set out to solve. E-commerce is growing 3x faster than bricks and mortar. 40% of small businesses are product-based businesses, so there's a significant rise in omnichannel commerce where small businesses are looking for ways to be able to have their products online, sell them online, understand the profitability of their customers and be able to understand if they have the inventory to fulfill it. And then last but not least, small businesses have traditionally in the mid-market, and we define mid-market a segment that's between 10 to 100 employees. Traditionally, they've adopted the cloud a little bit later than consumers. Now these same small businesses are consumers, but they're willing to do things in their personal life they're not as willing to do in their small business life. We're seeing a significant acceleration of small businesses in the mid-market that are embracing the cloud and shifting to the cloud because they see that they can be much more effective, much more productive and drive faster growth and be positioned to deliver for their customers. So the customer problems that I just mentioned, and these trends are what inform our game plan. And let me run through our game plan very quickly. This is what we call the alignment triangle. It's our pursuit of clarity and simplicity for our employees to be crystal clear what the company's plan on the page is, to deliver for our customers. And it starts with our mission. We show up to work every single day to power prosperity around the world. And what we've learned is prosperity means very different things to those that we serve, whether it's being able to write a check to the ailing parents, whether it's to be able to help their local communities, whether it's to be able to make sure that they can buy a book back for their kids and grandkids, prosperity means something different to every single person, which is why our mission is to not only help accelerate powering prosperity to the products and services that we provide, but also doing good in the community. And we are guided every single day by our values. We have 8 values, 2 of them that have been unchanged, which is doing right when nobody is looking, integrity without compromise. And the second is leaving the planet in a better place than what we found it, which is through our "We Care and Give Back" initiatives. We have set some very bold aspirations for ourselves to bring all of this to life as to where we want to be by 2025. We've set prosperity goals. We want to double household savings rates and increase the success rate of small businesses by 10 points. We want to focus on improving the life of those that we serve, and we're putting our money where our mouth is and measuring ourselves relative to where we want to be by 2025. We want to be one of the most reputable, best-in-class companies when it comes to reputation. We measure our employee engagement on always strive to be best-in-class. And we're striving to be best-in-class when it comes to the reputation of the company because that encompasses what we stand for and who we are as a company. And then last but not least, we also believe, based on the customer problems that we're solving, based on the foundation of the company that we actually have the ability to accelerate the company's growth. Now we have specific metrics tied to this that we don't share externally other than we'd love to be in a place where we have 200 million-plus customers, but know that our aspirations are power prosperity, one of the most reputable companies in the world and to accelerate the growth from what we deliver today. This informs our 3- and 1-year plan. And as a company, we are very focused on measuring and inspecting what we expect, and it starts with our employees. If we create an environment where they can do incredible work with the best talent, they will do amazing things to deliver for customers and being partners with our key partners to deliver for our customers, that ultimately drives shareholder growth. Now as you can see, the specific metrics are empty. We have metrics for both -- for all 4 stakeholders for the fiscal year that we're in and 3 years out, it's actually what the Board holds me and the management team accountable for. And this is how our performance gets reviewed. So these -- this is the mission of the company, the aspirations for 2025 and our 3- and 1-year plan goals. Let me talk about our strategy and how we will achieve the objectives of the company. There are 2 things that I will touch on. First is the benefits that we are focused on. There are 3 benefits that matter most to our customers. It's about finding ways to deliver more money in their pockets. It's about eliminating work and drudgery, so they don't have to work as hard to get -- earn the money that's well deserved. And last but not least because this is about money, it's ensuring that they can make their decisions with confidence. These are the 3 core benefits that we continue to ensure every single day that everything that we work on, that our employees work on, that our partners work on, focus on these 3 benefits. That's a core element of our strategy. The second is what we call AI-driven expert platform. Everything that we do hangs off of an AI-driven expert platform. What we mean by that is the following: First of all, let me start with the platform. In order to solve the problems that we've declared, it's about us and our partners, solving those problems. So our view is that we have an open platform, where us and others solve the most important problems on our platform to deliver for customers. So we have PayPal. We have Square, we have Salesforce. We have 39-plus financial products on our platform, all in service of serving our customers and their products that we didn't build and we're actually proud of that because we together can solve the problem for our customers. The second element is accelerating artificial intelligence to deliver the benefits that I mentioned. We've defined artificial intelligence in 3 specific areas within the company. One is machine learning. It's leveraging our customers' rich data sources with their permission to build that decision engines and algorithms to solve problems for them. It's about knowledge engineering, which is, in essence, turning rules and relationships between data into code so that we can solve the most impressing problems for our customers. And it's natural language processing, which is taking human interaction and automating and then delivering better experiences. So we have very specific ways in which we define artificial intelligence and very specific areas that we invest to accelerate the progress that we need to deliver for our customers. And the last piece is expertise, one of the largest unsaid problems for our customers is confidence. Because again, if I'm a consumer and I'm trying to run my financial life, if I'm a small business and I'm trying to run my business, it's about having confidence that I'm doing the right things and making the right choices. And so for us, an AI-driven expert platform, this is an open platform, where many build on our platform to deliver for customers, leveraging artificial intelligence to fundamentally revolutionize experience at a pace that's unprecedented and having expertise on our platform. But at any point in time, you can get help immediately on the platform to make decisions with confidence. That is the essence of our strategy. Now with that said, we've declared 5 big bets that we've galvanized the entire company around that we believe go after the largest customer problems and ultimately the biggest growth drivers for the company. Let me run through what those are very quickly. The first one is about revolutionizing speed to benefit. We believe that we can do far better here to deliver instant benefit for our customers when they come to us. A stat that I'll share is we have over 155 million customers that come to us, and more than 100 million are not our customers because we don't deliver the benefit that they instantly seek from us. This is a significant technology bet. This is about accelerating artificial intelligence in the 3 areas that I mentioned, so we can put more money in the pocket of our customers, eliminate work and drudgery, and ensure that they can make decisions with confidence. Now imagine having the easiest, best product in the world. On top of that, we want to connect people to experts on our platform because what we know is no matter how easy the platform is to use, a consumer, a small business wants to know that they're making decisions with confidence. And so this is where we will ensure that at a touch of a button, whether it's through chat, through video, any which way you want, you can get expertise. The third is to unlock smart money decisions. Now let me share just a few stats. Most folks live paycheck to paycheck. Most folks have overdrawn bank fees of $60 billion to $100 billion. Most folks overpay on credit card fees, home loans, auto loans, and they don't have the ability to actually understand how to improve their financial life. For us, this bet around unlocking smart money decisions is to be an agnostic platform to connect our customers with the right financial products that are right for them. High-yield savings account, give them access to their paycheck a couple of days earlier than they otherwise would get it, connect them to the best loans that are right for them because we're agnostic platform. It is about helping them with advice on how to improve their credit score. If they want to buy a house. It's about encouraging them in terms of how to save more money. It is ultimately being a platform that allows us to go beyond just tax and accounting to truly impact people's lives in ways that powers their prosperity. Now if you happen to be a small business, our fourth bet is about being the center of small business growth. This is about helping you run your life and run your business. Now we have abilities to help you get paid, to give you access to capital, to help you pay your employees and to help do your accounting. We want to automate all of this so in one place, you can run your entire business and we deliver insights to you through notifications to help you understand how to improve the growth of your business, how to be much more effective, and everything else gets run in the background for you. And the additional focus in this area is that how do we move into the omni-channel world to help our product-based businesses to be able to sell their products online. And then last but not least, it's to take our game to the mid-market, which, again, we define as small businesses with 10 to 100 employees. This is something that we've done for years with our desktop business, we call it Desktop Enterprise. And now we're building out the platform in the cloud, so we can serve our customers with the needs that they have and at a price that is far more affordable than other alternatives. So these are the 5 big bets of the company, and this is, in essence, everything that I just ran through on one page. Now we take incredible pride to be crystal clear about what's most important and what we want the entire company to focus on because being clear about what's important and focus is one element of delivering for customers. But the second is the secret sauce. It comes down to execution. And we have a saying in the company, it's about 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. So let me just share 2 areas of our secret sauce, where we're looking to improve every single day to actually improve our execution for our customers. The first is actually continuing to teach our methodology and executing our methodology around what we call Customer-driven Innovation and Design for Delight, really identifying the customer problem, having multiple different solutions that we test and ultimately, leveraging data to decide what's the most important product that we would launch that will change our customers' life. The more we can get good at this secret sauce and this methodology, the better we will get at delivering for our customers. So one is about our customer-driven methodology. The second is about how we run the company. And this matters a ton because when you look at a company with almost 10,000 employees, 50 million-plus customers, being able to do things at scale, so we get everybody to row in the same direction, whether it's us or our partners, is very important. And in terms of how we run the company, there are 4 behaviors that we've learned from our employees that we've got to get better at. You can see what these are here. And the way we run the company is to really -- to ensure that we can become far more customer obsessed, that we can become far more data-driven and create that data-driven culture and raise the accountability across the entire company, all singularly focused to deliver for our customers. And so what you can see here in terms of how we run the company, it's really in 3 dimensions. One is about setting expectations and strategy for the company. The other is about actually delivering and transforming experiences. And the third is really all about ensuring that we are aligning and inspiring all of our employees and all of our partners because our partners are equally as important to deliver for our customers. And this is how it shows up in terms of how it comes to life from the top, which is where we plan 6-plus years out to make sure that we're thinking about what's going to be most important to our customers, the problems we need to solve, the trends that are going to be impacting our customers and how do we ensure we have the right game plan, so then it informs our 3- and 1-year plan, then it informs looking at how do we ensure that we grow the talent and the skills of today, while we create and acquire the talent of the future. And I won't go through the rest of this, but you can see at the bottom, it's where we focus on the experiences that we need to deliver, the day-to-day, but also transforming the experiences of the future. And then the last bucket is around how we, in essence, inspire and align the entire company. I want to call one element out, which is something that we do that's focused on input goals. And for us, input goals are really about the deliverables to get to the outcomes that are the most important. For the big bets that I just mentioned, we have 100-plus input goals. And for our core innovation priorities where you can see we have about 180. And then input goal is improve the payments experience, deliver XYZ in payroll, deliver XYZ on our consumer platform. It's what we're going to focus on to deliver for customers. For every input goal, we have a leader that's accountable for it, and we get together once a month to review how are we doing? Is it red, yellow, green? And what we need to do to ensure that we deliver for customers. The reason I take you to this level of detail, and if I just now pull back up, we take pride and clarity for the future but we also take pride in where we need to improve our execution because at the end of the day, everything comes down to executing for customers. And what we're doing today from an execution perspective, maybe a little bit different than 10 years ago, but it's all in service to reimagining the company and to be confident in disrupting ourselves because we're all focused on the customer problem, and it's what has allowed us to lead through 4 platform shifts and what gives us confidence to lead through the next era of a platform shift, which we consider is artificial intelligence. Now doing this right and improving how we do what we do every single day, gives us the opportunity to build advantage. And you can see on the right side of the page, the more through an open platform you can get -- solve customer problems on our platform, whether we build it or somebody else, the more they use the platform, the more we can leverage what we know about them, with their permission, to deliver more benefits through applying AI and through connections with others. Whether it's experts or other businesses on our platform, we truly create a network effect that will deliver benefits for our customers. And this is what allows us to penetrate a very large total addressable market around the world. So we're just getting started in terms of what is possible and the problems that we can solve for our customers. So let me end with where I started. We show up to work every single day to deliver for our customers, and it's about powering their prosperity. And we are so privileged to be able to focus on solving these problems for our customers, and we know we have so much work ahead of us to do the things that we know we are capable of. So with that said, let me open it up to any questions in the room?

Regarding customer data and having their permission, is it a pretty simple statement that is very obvious? So is it a big, complex legalese thing that they have to agree to?

Yes. Thank you for your question. First of all, we developed data on privacy principles, 10-plus years ago that has actually guided us in terms of how we think about the privacy and security of the data. And the first principle is, it's the customers' data, not ours. So it's your data, not our data. And anything that we do with the data has got to have your permission, and it's got to be to your benefit. And we strive to make it as simple as possible. We, in fact, do a lot of user testing to make sure that it's very clear that with the use of your data, we can actually deliver more benefits. And we do user testing to make sure the clarity is there, the simplicity is there as much as possible to ensure that it's not in language that you can't understand and we improve it year in and year out. And we also try to make it very transparent, like in our TurboTax product. It's actually early and very upfront, where we won't do anything with your data unless you consent. And that's something we -- is always in user testing to make sure that it's a simple and elegant as possible. So that's the -- those are the principles that we have and then the approach that we use.

My name is Justin Danhof, General Counsel with the National Center for Public Policy Research, and I just have 2 quick questions this morning. Earlier this month, you guys announced a partnership with Project Drawdown to become "climate positive by 2030." The company has already achieved so-called carbon neutrality by, among other things, purchasing carbon offsets. Now sustainability may be a fine goal, but carbon offsets are meaningless. They're regularly ridiculed as a way for corporations in the Hollywood elite to cleanse their guilt over production and consumption. Even the far left publication, ProPublica, funded by George Soros, did a deep dive earlier last year into these, and they found "in case after case, carbon offsets hadn't offset the amount of pollution they were supposed to or they had not brought gains that were quickly reversed or they couldn't be accurately measured to begin with. Ultimately, the polluters got a free pass to keep emitting CO2, but the forest preservation that was supposed to balance the ledger either never came or didn't last." So my first question is very basic. How much shareholder money have we spent on carbon offsets? If we can get a number on that, I'd appreciate it. And then the second question involves the company's complicity with the Human Rights Campaign and its corporate ratings rate called the Corporate Equality Index. For those in the room who don't know the Human Rights Campaign is perhaps the leading antireligious freedom organization in America. Intuit consistently gets a perfect score on this index. This means the company is barred from donating to numerous Christian and conservative organizations. You must also accede to the demands not to oppose any shareholder resolution, which HRC supports. Furthermore, you must have 3 outward-facing events every single year to advance LGBT causes. And you must do all of this to achieve the perfect score, and they're working on moving towards political donations in your -- in packs as well. So to be so perfectly in line with HRC's index is to basically say the company has become an advocacy arm of a far left organization, supporting only approved liberal causes and events, and kowtowing to HRC regarding support or opposition to shareholder resolutions. So my second question is this, given that Intuit operates in lockstep with HRC's far left antireligious demands, why should conservatives and why should particularly Americans of faith continue to use your products?

Thank you for your question. Let me start with the last one. We believe in a culture of diversity and inclusion, and we live that every single day, and we're very proud of that. And in that context, I'll just use one example. We allow our employees to donate to 503 -- 501(c)(3) nonprofit causes, and there's hundreds of them within that program. And it's something that we also match because we believe in diversity and inclusion. And so we are very proud of the fact that we support what's important to our customers, and we support what's important to our employees. The second question that you asked around climate. We are actually very proud of what we're doing around climate because we believe it's actually critically important for our customers, and it's very good for business. Everything that we do is all in light of -- by making the planet a better place, we ultimately do a far better job delivering for our customers and it's far better for shareholders. I don't have the specific shareholder number to give you because we don't disclose that, but what I would tell you is we're very proud of the fact that we've reduced contribution to wastelands by 80-plus percent. We have reduced our carbon footprint by 80-plus percent. We've made a commitment of 50 by 30, which is taking our 2018 footprint and actually contributing to being climate positive by 2030. And all of those things are actually good for your kids, it's good for the future and good for our customers. And so we think about this not just in context of helping improve and leading the world in a place -- a better place for the sake of doing it. It's actually important for customers and it's important for business, and we believe it's the right thing to do. Any other questions? Going once. Great to see you again.

Are you part of the S&P 500?

Are we part of the S&P 500?

Are you -- is Intuit included?

We are part of the S&P 500. Yes.

Because some years ago, I recommended looking at Paycom as a possible merger, acquisition or what. And yesterday, it was added to the S&P 500, and my holdings went up a lot more than they did with Intuit.

Well, I think if your question is how we think about acquisitions in Paycom, everything for us starts with the customer problems that we're trying to solve. It's all about speed to market for us. And we sequence and prioritize what's most important in terms of what we build and ultimately where we need to think about partnerships and then where we need to think about acquisitions. Certainly, Paycom is a great company, good management team, but we think about it relative to our principles around delivering for customers, speed to market, and that's what drives what we look at in the landscape. So thank you for your suggestion to look at Paycom, but that's just ultimately how we look at our M&A road map. Yes. Well, if there are no other questions, thank you for your time, both in the room and on the webcast, and we look forward to seeing you next year.