MeridianLink, Inc. (MLNK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Great. Let's get started. But first, I want to say thank you to Nicolaas Vlok, CEO of MeridianLink Link, for making it out here to Scottsdale for our conference. So I really appreciate you making the trip.

Thank you for having us, Nik. It's been great.

All right. Well, I just wanted to kick things off with, what's top of mind for you and your customers heading into 2025?

I think we're going to start seeing an improvement in the environment. I don't expect a lot fast. I think we need to calibrate ourselves to there's still a lot of macro that is impacting the landscape, the market, our customers. But customers are certainly looking at not just investing and making what they have better, but there's kind of a renewed interest in retooling, rebuilding digital front-end for the consumer base. So on the new logo side, we're starting to see some activity that customers are asking about help us budget, start thinking about making investments in '25 and '26. So I feel like we're entering a phase where once rates start coming down, our customer base is kind of the Goldilocks principle, it shouldn't be too high or it shouldn't be too low, but it should be just right. And they have more ability to go and invest and spend in platforms and solutions for their customer base. So it seems we're on the front end of that cycle.

Sounds consistent with what we've been hearing as well. So wanted to next just to kind of go through some of the new hires that you made in the leadership team over the past few months, some pretty significant hires with bringing in Larry Katz as President and Elias Olmeta as CFO. Maybe we can go through that.

Yes, I'm very excited about both of those folks joining our senior leadership team. And Larry actually joined us -- Larry joined us earlier in the year originally as our CFO. And one of the things that really drew me to Larry to bring him on as an executive in the company was his industry experience. More than 15 years with Bank One, JPMorgan Chase, where he ran mortgage businesses, he ran credit card, retail, consumer businesses for the bank. And his knowledge and experience is incredible. At our user forum in May, right after he joined, he was brilliant with customers. The way he could articulate his experience and kind of having been on the other side and then being on the side of a vendor was incredible. And when we saw our President go-to-market leave the business to be a CEO at a separate new company that he joined, it kind of got to be a natural, like I wanted to expand Larry's reach. I want to bring him into the commercial side of the business. He's got the industry experience. He's been with $1 billion and a $2 billion revenue business before. Help me scale MeridianLink and help me take what you know from an industry standpoint and engage with our customers. And I think it's the best decision we've made in a long time is just kind of taking Larry out of that CFO more inward focus setting and gave them the commercial part of the business, asking him to streamline not just go-to-market, but our whole commercial delivery, services support, customer success under one view. And then Elias as CFO is maybe now 2 months into it, but it feels like 2 years. The gentleman has -- Larry has known him before. He's worked with them at JPMorgan Chase. So apart from industry experience, he has worked in auto insurance at Mitchell International. He's been -- he's on the Board of AutoCanada, the largest dealership group in Canada. So what I have in those guys are scale experience, like $1 billion to $2 billion run rate businesses, industry experience and, in Elias's case, also quite a bit of auto knowledge and auto experience. And I mean, it's refreshing in the planning cycle, how we think about it and how we think about it from a customer perspective. And I would tell you, I'm excited. I don't think where we've been as a company before, we've not had the benefit of industry experience like we've got now with them on board, but also being around scale, done scale, executed at scale, the conversations in terms of getting ourselves ready for when tailwinds start showing up and more volume and rates decline, I mean, I feel as confident about our prospects, if not better than any time before.

They both seem like very strong hires and I know my interactions with Larry have been very positive. So I can definitely see what you're referring to. Another topical question for a lot of the companies at the conference just anticipated impacts from another Trump presidency, a Republican Congress as well. Generally, like high-level benefits for a lot of financial services companies depending on where you sit. But do you see any impacts to MeridianLink's business or your customer base?

That's a really good question that I have a terrible answer for. Like I think it's very early on in the cycle. It's hard to call it at this stage. If I go by what I hear and read, my concern would be tariffs more than anything else. I think if we -- if tariffs are more than blasted to bring some folks to the negotiating table, I think we're going to see pressure on kind of pricing. I think inflation is going to be more persistent in that setting, which will probably keep rates higher for longer. If we see a reduction in rates and kind of maybe somewhat of an acceleration to what my expectations are, I feel like that would be a tailwind. But right now, I'm more in a wait-and-see approach. Our expectations and our planning isn't for any fast rate declines or rate reductions. I don't even know if we're going to see a rate reduction of 25 basis points coming up here. We may, we may not. But I think the Feds are going to be cautious until we've kind of seen what changes are happening in Washington. So I would say in overall, wait and see. There's not a ton based on everything we all hear and read. I feel like it may delay kind of rates coming down a little bit.

And then we kind of see that in the interest rate market as well last like 2 months. While on the topic of rates and loan origination trends, I mean, MeridianLink has shown an acceleration in the consumer lending business if you back out mortgage into the high single-digit range in the last 2 quarters. And looking like ballpark, those trends are going to continue into Q4. So maybe we can just kind of unpack what's driving those trends in the business.

Well, Larry would point out to me since he started but let's look at what we've been doing well. We've been doing release of backlog well. We've built the services organization, and we've built a customer success and we've retooled our organization, these leaders in place now that runs it efficiently and quite optimally. And there's a great balance between the bookings in flux and also what we are returning to a severe release or backlog release. And that is what's driving most of the growth. Same-store sales is still challenged from a volume perspective. But as we bring new customers online and we see the volumes being added to the platform, there's buoyancy and that's the growth that you see on the consumer platform in kind of high single digit.

Understood. And is there any kind of difference in trends between like the various buckets of consumer lending [indiscernible] used auto is like the largest portion of it and then there's credit cards.

Another really good question. If you look at what makes up the consumer lending business, half of the revenue there is tied to auto. About 70% of that is tied to pre-owned auto, which is more challenged in volume still than new. New has recovered. If you look at the data sources like J.D. Power and Cox Automotive, they would show that new auto volumes are reasonably healthy. That has not translated into volumes yet into the preowned market. That -- it still needs to change hands from a newly purchased vehicle into preowned. So volumes have not shown the same level of recovery in preowned than what we see in new. Another component there is if you look at the Manheim auction pricing on auto, on pre-owned auto, it's starting to come down, and we've had a few good months where it kind of trickled down and it's not kind of been too radical going up. If that continues, that's also going to drive more normalization in preowned auto, which will benefit MeridianLink. On the other loan channels, credit card personal lending has been fairly buoyant, but you kind of expect that in the cycle that we're in. Some of it is seasonal, some of it is cyclic. And then HELOC, HELOANS, continues to perform in line with what you would expect with the rate environment.

Understood. Understood. And then shifting to the mortgage piece of the consumer lending business. I know that we're starting to see some uptick in mortgage origination volumes, but we're not through the thick of it by any means yet. So not expecting any big acceleration near term just kind of given the rate uncertainty, but what are you kind of seeing in the business there?

We are seeing some volumes return and some strength. There was kind of a period, 3 kind of rate cut where there was more buoyancy and then post rate cut. But since kind of the, call it, the last 2 months or so, mortgage rates have moved in the wrong direction. And I would say that has put a little bit of a damper on mortgage volumes. But if you zoom out and you look at it as a market and as a whole, there's not a ton of refinancing activity that's going to happen until rates have declined to say, call it, low 5s or even in the 4 because for the regular consumer in a home, it doesn't make too much sense to go refinance at a higher rate. Now there may be life moments or instances where people go do it. But more programmatic happening, I don't see it until we're in that state. For MeridianLink and our customer base being more depositories, home purchases would be the bigger driver in not refinancing, yes, on our RMB side, and we will capture some of the refinancing volume. So there's been some steady rise in it. But remember, our mortgage business runs on minimum commits and we've got a section of our longer term or longer contracted customers who, today, is operating substantially below minimum. So they still need to grow into their shoe size before they can go through minimums. More recent customer wins, say, last 12, 18 months, they have a different minimum commit profile. So there's growth as the volumes return. But I think it's going to be muted in our business until we've seen rates move down into kind of the low 5s, even high 4s. I feel like there's a little bit of a recovery curve that is going to trail what rates are going to be doing in the short term.

Maybe just a reminder for the audience, but what is like the average duration of a contract on the mortgage side? I just kind of think about which contracts are going to be reset in 2025.

So our average, we like to contract between 3 and 5 years. We have -- we don't like to and we don't really offer anything less than 3 years. But we have contracts that would go up to 7. But think about a sweet spot in that 3- to 5-year range and not just on the consumer -- on the mortgage side, but also on the consumer side.

Got it. So maybe by like the end of '25, you should have -- like be approaching kind of half of the customer base kind of being at the lower levels kind of depending on what happens in '25?

We've had customers approach us over the last, say, 2 years, 18 months, where they ask for a leave on a minimum commitment, we would have a conversation, but then get relief on the minimum commit, but they would commit to a higher per application volume. And more often than not, people would go, you know what, we're waiting for the recovery. We will just stick with what we have. We will pay a minimum commit fee right now because once volume is starting to come back more meaningfully, we don't want to be on a higher per application fee. We would like to lock in that benefit go forward. So we've not really had meaningful downsells. The churn that we see in our mortgage business is mostly around IMBs. IMBs are the kind of the feast and famine part of like -- not everyone, but they tend to come and go when there's spikes in volume around refinancing more. And that's the largest portion of the churn in our business has been around that.

Right. So like the depository and the credit union portion of your customer base has been...

Very stable. Very stable.

Right. As we would expect.

The only part there that you would see as kind of volume down sell really, not meaningful any other Impact.

Got it. That makes sense. So just shifting gears to the go-to-market strategy and just all the success you guys have been having on the new logo generation as well in a tough environment. Can you just kind of walk us through the changes and the work that you've been doing here? I know it's been a journey over the past few years, but you guys continue to make strides there.

Yes. When Thoma Bravo invested in the company, we had a fairly small basic go-to-market sales, call it, sales marketing engine. And we started investing in that first we kind of executed along the Thoma Bravo investment plan and playbook. At the time of IPO, we had a CRO change shortly thereafter, and we brought in new leadership. And new leadership has been very steadily investing in building different teams, and we've got a, call it, a new logo team that's focused on consumer and a new logo team that's focused on mortgage. We've got a cross-sell account exec team that's focused on the existing customer base. And then we also have a channel organization that's kind of enabling channel partners, selling with and through channel and then our partner marketplace. So we've been investing in kind of that round as a Phase 2. I would say with Larry and the team taking on kind of a broader commercial remit, there's a big focus on driving efficiency and kind of driving more of an account focus and how customers can benefit across the whole module, the whole platform from all the modules because it's becoming so integrated between sales in the wholesale business channels, service delivery, support and customer success. And one thing that we've been working on over the last year or so is a customer success organization where our customers with a customer success partnership tend to be about 10 points higher on NPS score, which doesn't translate into immediate business, but what it does is it sets you up for business in a budget cycle out, like plus a year, like I would think it will benefit '26, later '25, '26. And that to me is the investments that's kind of a Phase 3 cycle, if you can call it, in the business. It started in being budgeted last year, and we implemented it this year. But now being in one commercial operation, there's a lot of like DNA cross pollination between groups is like smoother handoffs, more efficiency, how do we think of it as a renewal in kind of the hands of a customer success on an account rep. So I feel like that is going to drive scalability in the business and set us up, especially as we're starting to see higher levels of engagement on the new logo side and new conversations starting, I think we're going to benefit from that in '25 and '26.

Understood. I really appreciate all the color there. And I just wanted to dig into some of the more recent performance this year. I mean, it's been like pretty powerful with the sales performance year-to-date and even like within this challenging environment. Like maybe just split it between new logo and cross-sell in terms of the sales performance this year.

Sure. And when we've spoken about it, our cross-sell and upsell success into our existing customer base has done exceptionally well. But I would say you should expect that from a vertical software company, right? You sell a platform and kind of in more challenging times, customers are willing to make an investment to make things they have better or more efficient. An example is a customer running MeridianLink One and they want to do more with the analytics or they want to do more with auto decisioning, which is efficiency gains. People are willing to invest when they have your platform. And we've seen great success with cross-sell. We've seen really good momentum with our mortgage cross-sell as well kind of opening up a new loan channel with our customers in depositories. We've had our challenges with new logo. But I would say kind of the last 2 years and maybe even around the Silicon Valley Bank saga, our customer base kind of said, well, if it can happen to Silicon Valley Bank, can it happen to us. And people kind of took a slower, I think, cycle to budget and approach there. I feel an underlying change in tone with our customer base where they are leaning into wanting to be more digital ready. They want to invest in digital interfaces to the benefit of their consumer because they realize not every consumer or member banking or interacting with them is going to walk into the branch anymore. People want to do it on their handheld, folks want to do it on their laptop. And that kind of -- and the ability to auto approve a loan, a personal loan or a vehicle loan, if it's kind of within parameters and kind of -- that is starting to weigh in on people and being top of mind and the conversations are accelerating. There's more of those conversations happening. And I feel we will see an acceleration in new logo over the course of the next 12, 18 months. You're getting into budget conversations, you're getting into budget cycle. So we've done very well with cross-sell, upsell and we've been more challenged on the new logo side. I feel we're going to see the new logo side starting to accelerate as well.

Got it. So just on the new logo side, maybe it would be good to take an update on the competitive environment and just kind of like who you're going up against and who are these new logos? And has there been any kind of change in the competitive landscape over the last, call it, year or so?

Well, first of all, no real change. We still mostly compete with what I have is good enough, which is more on the core legacy provider side. And it's predominantly a workflow-based solution. It's not a data enrichment, no auto decisioning, no kind of how do you look at the consumer debt wallet? How do you look at the secured -- the asset from a kind of a security backed loan or a nonsecurity back loan. And you kind of put it together decision it. It's more workflow where you get in the front of a loan officer. That is what we would compete with, and that's also our most beneficial market to go sell into, folks want to kind of get ready for the next decade in their business. On the consumer side, we would compete with kind of other players that either have a more directed point solution or somewhat of a platform play. And I would say there's origins and then there's 1 as 2 kind of smaller competitors. There's nCino, but nCino is a commercial lending platform. In the small number of instances where we will find nCino, it's typically around the customer who already bought the nCino commercial lending platform, and it's more of a add to it than a full-blown consumer retail lending purchase. On the mortgage side, on the high end, it would be Ellie Mae -- sorry, on the consumer side, there's -- above us, there's Temenos. They are a highly customizable enterprise solution. We think of our product as configurable that gets enabled through our partner integration so you can implement much, much faster than a customizable solution. And I think that would also be a differentiator if you think of it in terms of the larger commercial platforms that may drift into consumer lending. On the mortgage side, on the high end of the old Ellie Mae now [ ACE ] mortgage, they tend to be above us. In the instances where we would compete, I would say, it's on their smaller end and our kind of higher end. And then there's your more point solutions like Calyx Point, Mortgagebot and like probably half a dozen other players. Constellation Software bought some of the old Black Knight assets, [ Empowered ], and they bought Optimal Blue. We would see them occasionally out there, but Empowered tends to be a larger, higher in the enterprise solution, too. So our focus -- one of the things I believe in this is you play to where you have the right to win. And I'm not trying to be competing with every deal that's out there. We're trying to focus our mortgage efforts on the depository base. We basically, overall on our business say, there's about 5,000 depositories that we want to compete for. We have about 1,500 of them today as clients. We are in those customers cross-selling our mortgage solution and then we're competing in the rest with our consumer lending and our mortgage solution. I'm not going after the whole bigger market. I want to be the best in this mid-market with the leading digital lending platform, whether it's your consumer channels that you lend on or on your mortgage side. And if I compete with folks that's coming in, nobody competes with MeridianLink on a platform basis. Nobody have debt wallet optimization. Yes, there is a mortgage-only offering, then it's probably a little bit more of a dog fight. But once you have the platform discussion, there's not a competitor to MeridianLink in consumer lending.

At a high level, no real change?

No real change. And I don't see anybody kind of rising to the platform conversation today.

Got it. And the target market for MeridianLink kind of remains like up to $10 billion give or take and kind of in the low end, like $1 million or $2 million?

Well, on the lower end, probably in that $250 million, $500 million range. On the banking side, depends on the balance sheet. We kind of say banks, there's a little bit more of an upward number. It's kind of $20 billion, $25 billion. But then you look at the whole balance sheet. And if you really want to be truthful to where we like to compete, it's on banks with either predominant consumer retail balance sheet or a significant size, portion of the balance sheet that is in commercial lending. But we're not marketing to the top 100 banks because it's just not our sweet spot if...

Very different market.

Put us around the 5,000 institutions that we would like to call our sweet spot, and that's where we put our focus, our efforts, focus our go-to-market organization.

All right. Got it. We only have a few minutes left, so we definitely need to touch on the margin side of the business because you guys have, I think, Street estimates for, call it, like the last 5 quarters or so, including the most recent quarter, and raised the margin guidance for the year. And I think that's a reversal of a trend for the, call it, the prior year or so before that. So I mean, what's changed on the cost execution side because the environments remain kind of tough on the top line side?

We -- first of all, we're very diligent in cost management and how we execute. We are trying very hard not to get ahead of ourselves and our skis. So we deliberate. We -- in the detail, and we control what we can control and execute on the areas where we can execute well, which is backlog ACV release and cost management. I would say if you -- in a specific quarter, a little higher than 40%, that's because we've taken a deliberate approach and controlled expenses and investments. We're guiding to a 40% business long term. We believe in a normalized market, we can run a very healthy business and growing kind of low to mid-double digits at a 40% margin. And if we, in the short term, kind of keep beating that 40% that we're guiding to, I would say, look at it from a more quarterly standpoint than an overall perspective. We're very confident in the 40% number, but I wouldn't like for you to think of it as a long-term trend at this stage.

Got it. I mean, 40 is a very healthy margin. So maybe in times when volume picks back up, the incremental margins will flow through. But you guys are very focused on the top line as well, so we would expect it to kind of...

We're very focused on building a rule of 50 company. And we feel 40% margin can set us up well for that rule of 50 plus business.

Right on. All right. Well, just with the last few minutes left, I think we haven't touched on the data verification business. So maybe you can just kind of like walk through the trends that you're seeing there. I know the employment market has been a little challenged. Like what are you seeing? What are you expecting, call it, for the next 12 months?

First of all, the business is made up of 2 kind of focus areas: one, mortgage credit verification, which is our MCL product; and then our employment background tenant verification business, which is TazWorks. On the mortgage credit verification, it's very much tied to mortgage volumes. So it's been under pressure, and we've also had a client that has been running at minimums and will run through minimums at -- through the end of the year. On the TazWorks side, we see a decent performance. TazWorks is tied to employment verification, background and tenant screening. There's some seasonality to it, but not a ton. But what I want to highlight is maybe understand that there's a volunteer component, and we've seen quite a bit of success in growing our footprint in the volunteer screening environment and think of kind of youth sports and kind of -- I mean, school sports. So I don't want you to kind of like use 1 quarter, which has been a good quarter for TazWorks as kind of the barometer. It's a kind of a mid-single-digit growth business in a normalized environment, and we think of the MCL business being similar. So big pressure, we think of our DBS business as a kind of a single digit, mid-single digit and kind of times a tailwind, probably a little higher than mid-single-digit grower. But a very profitable, steady performer for us.

Got it. Well, thanks for all the color on the data verification business. And thank you so much for making it out to Scottsdale. We really appreciate it.

Thank you. It's been great visiting. I appreciate that. Thank you.

Thank you, Nicolaas.