nCino, Inc. (NCNO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
January 13, 2021
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Mayank Tandon
analystHello, everyone, good afternoon. My name is Mayank Tandon. I'm the fintech analyst at Needham. I'd like to welcome nCino to our conference. We have Pierre and David from the company.
Mayank Tandon
analystSo I'm going to jump into Q&A. And then we'll take questions from the audience as well as we go through the session. Pierre and David, thank you so much for joining us.
Pierre Naude
executiveThanks. It's nice being here.
Mayank Tandon
analystSo I want to kick it off high level. I'd like to understand nCino. Just you could take us back in time. What are the pain points nCino is solving within the digital banking spectrum? Digital banking clearly is a hot area, but we'd love to hear about your positioning. And again, what are some of the key areas you're focused on relative to other participants in the market?
Pierre Naude
executiveYes. It's very interesting. As you look over time on the investment where banking and bank technology companies in fintech, et cetera, has focused a lot of their time and efforts and money, a lot has gone to the payments environment. I mean you can go back all the way to PayPal, you can look at point-of-sale companies. It's always about transactional elements, okay? So in a bank, you've got the back end core, then you've got transactional things like ACH, wires, point of sale. And then you've got online banking, which is what you and I use in our phones every day, okay? We transfer money, we pay a bill, we look at balances. And if you're a small business, you can do some ACH and wires, et cetera. That is what I call the plumbing of banking, and we're not in that business at all, okay? You look at Square, that's a point-of-sale kind of a type thing. So -- but then there's a layer right above that, which does 3 fundamental things. The first one is to onboard a customer in a legal and compliant way as efficient as you can. The second one is to originate a loan from the most complex commercial loan syndicated, all the way down to an unsecured personal loan. And then finally, there's account opening. But not only account opening front, actually all the way through to the middle, back office processes, et cetera, okay? And so where we saw the opportunity was, what if we tackle that fat -- what I call the fat middle layer, which is high compliance, lots of compliance, very labor intensive and in banking, very paper and manual process intensive, okay? What if we tackle that in a cloud-based platform and truly transform how these banks operate, okay? And that was the original intent. We looked at that vision and then started with commercial loan origination as our first solution, and then we expanded across the platform to where we are today.
Mayank Tandon
analystPierre, given that I think maybe some people might not be as familiar with some of the ins and outs of that middle layer. Could you give us -- or share with us some examples of the type of clients you work with and some of the pain points you've solved for these customers?
Pierre Naude
executiveYes. So let's start with what I would say is our cornerstone solution, commercial loan origination, where the company has made its name and its presence and then we expanded across. But -- so if you look at most banks in North America, the place where they make money is with -- by making commercial loans. And then typically, they like to get deposits from the retail side which is why they have branches. And that's where they get their deposits sitting in the checking accounts, savings, money market accounts. And they take that funds and they make loans to commercial entities. That is a very complex process. There's lots of regulation. There's covenants and there's collateral attached to each of those loans, okay? If you look at that whole process, from the moment a small business or a large complex business, say, I want to make a loan, collecting all the data, collecting documentation, talking to appraisers, talking to CPAs and lawyers in that whole process, it's like herding cats. And what we noticed was it's all e-mail, manual processes, the customers aren't really involved. What if we create an ecosystem similar to a Facebook where multiple people can go in the same time. And so I know the lawyer owes me something. I know the CPA owes me something. So what we did is we took those processes and bring it down from about a 65-day process to about 40 days, which -- that accelerates money to the customer so you win more business. It accelerates interest income to the bank. So it had a very much a dynamo effect on the income stream and the business growth of that bank, deploying a system like nCino.
Mayank Tandon
analystIn that vein, can you share any specific metrics that you've -- you mentioned in some of them, but any hard data that you could share with us in terms of what kind of ROI some of your bank customers have seen as they've deployed your core solutions.
Pierre Naude
executiveThere's 4 values that the bank typically look at buying software. The first one is can they increase revenue. Second one is can you reduce cost. Third one is can you improve efficiency. And the fourth one is can you improve compliance because it's costly, okay? So some examples across that landscape, we have a bank that use us for account opening, for instance. And in the account opening process, what used to take them 4 days, they can now open an account in 3 minutes and 40 seconds. And that's purely because we streamlined processes, got the policies in place, okay? We have an enterprise bank with $187 billion in assets that took time [ to use ] for a commercial loan from 7 to 2 business days and time to cash from 17 to 4 business days, okay? So those are concrete examples. On cost savings, an enterprise bank, $302 billion in assets, retired 10 legacy applications and 26 legacy checkers, documents and spreadsheets, rolling out nCino into 10 or more lines of business with 2,600 users on nCino within a 2-month period. That's the deployment, not the implementation, okay? Implementation took about 8 months in that case. So those are some examples of real-life impact on the bank's operations and ROI.
Mayank Tandon
analystThat's very helpful. And then can we talk about the market at large? I think it will be helpful to maybe parse out the whole digital banking spectrum. What is the addressable piece for you? And what does a typical customer look like? Is it the regional bank, is it the credit union, all of the above? So maybe a little bit of framework around the TAM or SAM, as you call it, might be helpful.
Pierre Naude
executiveYes. Yes, and I will do that. So what's exciting about this company is the fact that because we embrace the cloud so early on in the cycle of cloud, okay, literally people said banks will never go to the cloud due to not secure enough, et cetera. If you look today, it's one of the very few companies that can sell to community banks, credit unions and scale all the way up to Bank of America, which is a customer, by the way, okay? And then out of the box on that platform, the force.com platform, we get more than 100 currencies in more than 100 languages as well as an entitlement engine. So therefore, we, as a company, could expand overseas after only being in business for 5 years, okay? Actually, scale up and down, you cover the whole thing. So from a SAM perspective, which is a bottoms-up calculation we did, we address about a $10 billion market, okay, and realize we charge per seat. So [ if one thing ] to be -- the bank use the software, they buy that seat and they get most of the software nCino's got included there. And so that's how we go to market and it's how we sell. We've penetrated our existing customer base by about 9% on average. So there's massive expansion opportunity in our existing customer base, okay? And as you take the company that's roughly a $200 million revenue company, as you can see, going to $10 billion, we are barely starting.
Mayank Tandon
analystIs there a way to maybe segment the penetration further in terms of the different tiers of the banks that you service, where the penetration is maybe [indiscernible] versus where it's still earlier days?
Pierre Naude
executiveYes. In the community and regional space, which is your smaller banks in the U.S., okay, we don't work with the banks below $500 million assets. They're just too small to automate to this level. But through this [ $2,000 million ], we target from $500 million to about $10 billion in assets, that's your community space. There, we penetrate normally about 17% because they are more focused on commercial origination. That was where we started the company, okay? If you go above that, we typically get that 9% penetration I mentioned earlier. So think like this, if you -- overall, you look at the 9% or 10%, we can multiply this company by 10 by just selling to my existing customer base.
Mayank Tandon
analystTypically, when you look at a customer, how many products are they buying? Is there a number you could share with us? Any kind of metric in terms of the penetration within that typical customer today? What is the growth plan?
Pierre Naude
executiveI'm going to give you some examples of our land-and-expand strategy, okay? So we can -- today, we've got enough mature products on a single platform that we can land with any of our different products, okay? So here is an example, a $1.5 trillion asset bank, which is a global bank, okay? They landed in the U.S. with business banking, which is your small, medium-sized businesses, okay? And then they expanded in the U.S. with commercial, which is your big loans, treasury management onboarding as well as in the U.K. with commercial lending, okay? The second one is a $115 billion asset. They landed with retail. So they took retail account opening first and then expand it to commercial. I'm going to give you some numbers to go with that. This retail landing was a $400,000 contract. And that bank today, on our ACV annual contract value, spent with us $2.5 million. So you know that 6x that account grew. That first example, the $1.5 trillion landed with a $1.3 million contract and today, they spent $5.5 million with us. So that is a nice 4x growth there, okay? I've got another example, a $20 billion bank landed with deposit account opening. And they expanded to commercial, went from $100,000 to $1 million today. And so I've got more examples like that. But today, we've got a mature enough product suite and a platform that you could land with any of these products and expand further in the bank.
Mayank Tandon
analystThat's very helpful. With that, I'm going to segue into like my next question, more financial oriented and maybe either of if you can address that. As we think about the growth of nCino over time without maybe giving any specific growth rate, how should the growth play out in terms of the contribution from new logos versus contribution from the land-and-expand strategy? And then maybe you could also layer in some thoughts around M&A, how important that is for your long-term growth rate?
David Rudow
executiveYes. So on the new versus the installed base, I think it's been fairly balanced over the years. We have the activation schedules and we're allowed to upsell, but it's important for us to add new logos as well. So if you look at the expansion internationally, new logo focus that we've actually been able to upsell, some of those newer customers as well with different product sets. So I would look at it in the future and say it's balanced 50-50 as we continue to grow in the future.
Mayank Tandon
analystGot it.
Pierre Naude
executiveSo the M&A question, we've done 2 acquisitions, as you're aware, with FinSuite and Visible Equity. It's now over a year. Was it 18 months ago?
David Rudow
executiveYes.
Pierre Naude
executiveWe did that specifically to kickstart our nIQ offerings, which is our nCino IQ, or it's all solutions under this umbrella that is around machine learning, AI and analytics, okay? What we like about these 2 companies was the technology and the culture. We replatformed them and launched a number of products, okay? Or twofold, accelerated nIQ, the rollout of products like that. But secondly, to prove to the market that we know how to do M&A and actually have that as a tool going forward, okay? Now with that said, from day 1, we said we're going to build a single platform for all lines of business to originate products from -- do loans, do account opening and onboard customers. So that is all on the platform. Underneath is what I'm looking to add acquisition targets, okay, which is the moment you get to AI, machine learning, et cetera, there are so many little specialist companies that you can add like transaction and analytics, maybe Fannie, Freddie rules, et cetera, to expand our mortgage offerings and so on. And so that's how we look at this. And we will look very strategically because to me, it's like pieces of the puzzle, okay? It's an architectural puzzle. And if we can add good pieces to the bottom that will accelerate growth as well as drive intelligence and differentiation to our existing platform.
Mayank Tandon
analystThat's helpful. And Pierre, regarding the M&A pipeline, maybe David can talk about this, too, in terms of expectations in the market, you have a healthy valuation, to say the very least, in the market. Great to see. Reflects the growth rate and prospects looking ahead. What does the M&A pipeline look like? And how are the expectations within the private market from these companies?
Pierre Naude
executiveYes. So yes, I want to make sure we all understand. If you look strategically at this company, we would like to have organic growth rates for best-in-class SaaS companies long term. And with that, I always refer to Veeva, which I've got the greatest respect for Peter Gassner and Marc Benioff at Salesforce. I mean those are your 2 bellwethers, okay? So we aspire to those kind of organic growth rates, okay? But then as you know, as you grow like that, you want to plug in, just like Salesforce, components that's really beneficial to your business and enhance your penetration into your customer base and cross-sell. So again, I look at these, what I call engines that will add intelligence to our enterprise, okay? So I will not buy it for the pure purpose of revenue. We'll buy it actually to make sure the architecture puzzle is better. Now of course, there will be some revenue coming with that, okay? But that at least gives you a mindset on how we look at this. Or maybe I find a product that differentiate me in a specific country like the U.K. or Germany, and I'll do that to accelerate penetration in that market, okay?
Mayank Tandon
analystWhat are the gating factors to growth? Again, the market's large and you have seemed to position yourself as the leader within that middle layer of digital banking. What are the generic gating factors of growth? And especially internationally, one would think that with the regulations being so different across markets, different compliance issues, how are you addressing that as you look to expand your TAM internationally?
Pierre Naude
executiveYes. So if you look at what we take to market, and that's why we started with commercial origination and small business, that is a lesser regulated environment. Consumer lending is heavily regulated with specific rules by country. And so the great thing for us is, I can take that product, make a few tweaks and a few extra integrations and I go into the U.K., into Australia, well, I've got great customers, okay? Anywhere into Europe and we see that this thing is applicable. So what I would tell you is the gating factors are not TAM and the availability of business. It's actually us evangelizing cloud adoption, just like we did here. You start from scratch, you do small banks and you got big banks, then Canada, then the U.K. And now we're trying to get across the English channel to get into Europe. And while the U.S., I can fly to Nashville and go sell some software, well, in Germany, they don't want to see a Brit coming there. They would like to buy from a German. So with COVID, that is the one negative impact of COVID on the company is our expansion plans for hiring local people in-country in Italy, Spain, Germany, et cetera, was really hampered by COVID because I can't go there and recruit and lay out the vision and so on. And so when we went public, the profile of the company went up tremendously, and all of a sudden, we started seeing an influx of -- so I would say that's one gating factor. You can imagine Japan, okay, we're coming there. We set up a joint venture, and you have to win that first account, get the references and build it from there. There's no other way to do this. So I would say that's one gating factor, cloud adoption, brand recognition of the company over there. Thirdly, culture. If you look at banking in general. When we started the company was that banks would never do this stuff. The software they use for the functions we do is 25-plus years old, okay? Well, there is a time it becomes obsolete. And there's a time that compliance and inefficiency drives this value prop, okay? So I'm very optimistic. You will see on the long-term growth trajectory, there may be times where it's slower because it's a difficult environment. But overall, if you look backwards, we've proven this can be done. And we are an aggressive, optimistic group, and we believe we're going to rule the world.
Mayank Tandon
analystRight. It seems like it. Pierre, actually, you brought up COVID. So I have to ask you, you went public in the midst of COVID. You've had tremendous numbers since you came public. And of course, prior to that, too, you have great growth rates. I'm just trying to understand what has been the impact from COVID on the sales process? You touched on that in terms of the international side. But just in general, has that actually accelerated the move to the cloud within your North American clients given that there's this urgency to now transform digitally? What has been the overall impact from COVID, if at all?
Pierre Naude
executiveNo, it was a very interesting experience to go through. So you can imagine, middle March -- towards the end of March, boom, this thing hit and it's kind of national, international, it ripples. And in the first few weeks, we're all like what's going to happen here. You watch literally a wreck in front of your eyes. And then in retrospect, what happened was there was about a 4-month period where the market just froze up. No deals were in front or rear like looking what's it's going to do. So I can literally see my closings and deal pipelines now for 4 months, everything just pushed back, okay? Implementations carried on and so on, projects, because people quickly had to work remote, but all the new deal activity froze and moved back. Good for us was that the team quickly recognized this PPP thing is coming about the Paycheck Protection Program and then later in the U.K. CBILS, and how the government is going to use banks to distribute money to small business. And we jumped on that opportunity and distributed over $50 billion to small business, which I'm very proud of, okay? So that -- and if you look at the revenue model, we sign a contract. And in the contract, we say, what is the activation schedule for seats, which means revenue, okay? So we've got a very nice view into the future. What was PPP, those activation schedules got compressed because the bank needed to do the system right now, and we stood up the system in real double time. So that accelerated revenue growth, that's why we disclosed it to make sure people like you understand and investors that look, man, there's this unnatural acceleration of revenue. There's a potential for churn there. But overall, it's going to make it a tough compare for -- this was FY '21, for FY '22, because you've got this unnatural revenue growth. And we've been very open about that and transparent so that people understand it. David can give you more numbers around the PPP impact.
David Rudow
executiveYes. So PPP benefited us by $600,000 in the first quarter; $3 million, second quarter; $5 million in the third quarter; we had a $1 million catch-up from a consortium deal we did with our partners. We expect $13 million for the year. And so the run rate, if you back in the numbers, is $3 million -- $4 million for the fourth quarter. Those revenues will continue because most of those contracts are co-terminus with the original contract. There's been some questions that we've had. Does it drop off? Does it go away altogether? These customers are using it. They use it for PPP to inbound the loans, and now they're using it for forgiveness to manage those loans during the loan process. And so that will continue out. We do assume -- there's a couple of 1-year deals. We do some level of churn next year. The sales force is actively looking to help place those seats elsewhere in the bank to be used with -- somewhere -- maybe somewhere in the small business group. So I think that's the -- and that was a large reason for the upside in the first and the second and the third quarter that we reported. So the ability for us to upside is we had -- is limited just because PPP is, I think, pretty much done. Even though there is this new PPP that was released on Monday, we think our customers have the seats they need. And we did -- within the guidance, we didn't expect any PPP contribution from the PPP expectations that are out there. So -- and PPP didn't affect the shutdown on the quarantine. I think I watched collections and cash very closely at the time. Pierre said the banks will continue to pay. I didn't believe him and I was wrong because we saw no delays in collections. We saw no asking for discounting or any negative renewal rates held in there. And actually, we redid our collection process and actually decreased our DSOs during the lockdown and the quarantine, and that continues on to this day. So much to my surprise, PPP had very limited to no impact on the installed base and the renewals. So we'll see what it brings. We'll see how active PPP is with this new release. But we do not expect to see much -- any material benefit from new seats from that.
Mayank Tandon
analystRight. That's very helpful clarification. Thank you so much for that. Maybe I'll shift gears a little bit again and maybe, Pierre, for you. How important are the SI partnerships today in terms of driving the adoption for your business? Which -- I don't know if you can share with us any of the major SI partners you work with. And then how do you look at the services business as a whole for yourself? Is that going to be a core competency that you provide to your clients? Or do you ultimately look to deemphasize that over time and focus purely more on the pure software revenue?
Pierre Naude
executiveYes. We want to be known as an innovation company focused on software innovation and recurring revenue, okay? Now there's a reality in the market we address, which is -- banks below $5 billion in assets really cannot afford an Accenture-style project or a Deloitte or a PwC or the West Monroe. So yes, I'm very proud of the relationships we've built. Accenture is a global partner. PwC is a global partner. Deloitte is a global partner. And then West Monroe, partners out of Chicago, handles projects for us. And banks typically, when you get down to about $50 billion assets down to about $5 billion, okay, that middle market and in a smaller market, we do ourselves. The reason I like that is, number one, we launch our new products in the small market, okay? And you work out the kinks. And you kind of get to know what's going on in your own people, they know the product best. Then as the product matures, we start pumping it upmarket and we train our SIs to do it. So to me, it's a very strategic element, but it's not a revenue growth element, okay? Because of the [ enabled ] and the training and those people are bringing back into product. I put them back onto the SI teams. So even in our largest deployment, we will always put 3, 4, 5 nCino people with the Accentures, Deloittes and PwCs of the world, okay? So that's strategic to us. What I want you and the audience to understand is although they are great references for us and they champion what we do, they have to maintain their neutrality as well. So what you'll find is they may recommend to banks this is a good company, et cetera. But in the end, we sell on our own, we stand on our own and we build our own reputation, okay? But these are deep relationships, very strategic to us which are on a global basis. And also, it enables us to grow at a pace that you could never do if you try to do all this yourself. Over 300 customers, all these projects. So I'm very proud of that strategic alliance for those companies.
Mayank Tandon
analystRight. Thank you for the perspective. And I just want to break here and ask the audience. [Operator Instructions] I'll continue in the meantime. So Pierre, maybe we could turn to competition. Again, in digital banking, most investors think of nCino [indiscernible], they think of companies like Alkami on the private side, some of the legacy core processors. Or maybe you could help, given your comment and disclosure in the presentation, can you talk about who is your primary competition when you're competing on these RFPs?
Pierre Naude
executiveYes. So I'm going to break the market into 3 different segments because that's how I see the competition. So let's start with international. It's very interesting. The bigger banks internationally either has homegrown solutions or I see quite a bit of Pega or Appian in those markets, which I would coin as more of the traditional-style, component-based software, and I reuse components, but I build my own solution and system, okay? In my view, that's a dated approach, but that's what's still very prominent in the European markets. Many of these IT departments, it's on-prem software, it's server deployment, et cetera. You come to the U.S. where the cloud adoption is a lot more advanced. In the enterprise market, on the commercial origination side, I don't see much competition at all. We've got Fortinet, the top 25. It's more of a do nothing. And in a few cases, it's, "Hey, I think I'm going to build this myself," which really is stunning, okay? If you go to the consumer side, there is one big player that's entrenched and the software is about 20, 25 years old. It's [indiscernible]. On the commercial side, in the community bank space, there's a company called Abrigo that I see has got a good solution and we respect them highly. I want to clarify that Q2 is not really a comparative. Remember, Q2 is online banking. That's what you're doing in your phone every day. We are account opening, loan origination and customer onboarding, which is what's called a banking long process. It's very complex and it's highly regulated. And then finally, the core providers. The cores really has moved into transaction processing. If you look at payment processes, with all the acquisitions, Fiserv and FIS buying Worldpay, okay, and as you look at when you see they do in the market and all that they do is processing, that's very different in business process transformation. So we see them as partners. We integrate with them, and we have very good relationships with them.
Mayank Tandon
analystThank you for that perspective. David, maybe shifting to margins, could you talk about the long-term profitability opportunity for nCino as you scale the business? What are the various levers you have? And I don't know if you've shared any long-term margin goals, but if you have, we'd love to hear about it.
David Rudow
executiveYes. So I think as we continue to expand internationally and sell more to the enterprise, we'll see continued improvement in our subscription gross margin. We also have started support as well. And we have seen some price increases in support over time. Professional services will become a smaller and smaller piece of the total revenue base. We're running in -- I think it's around 10% of margins in that -- somewhere in that range. We do -- as you release new products, you'll naturally have lower utilizations because you're perfecting that product in the field. And we're expanding internationally, too, so we're a little less efficient at the moment. So that will improve, although the revenue contribution will decline over time. And then on sales and marketing, yes, we are expanding onto the Continental Europe. We're hiring. We have accelerated some hiring because we're seeing a lot of interest on the continent. We have the JV we set up in Japan, so we've been expanding there. So our market -- sales and marketing expenses are increasing because of that expansion. And then R&D, we continue to invest to build out products and create new products, commercial pricing we're working on, maturing the retail product as we continue to invest and expand our commercial product line as well. And then G&A, going public, becoming a public company. Insurance is wildly expensive. So we've seen an uptick in costs related to being a public company. But we should be able to gain some efficiencies with that over time. We did talk about, in the IPO process, a margin target. Think about it as kind of very similar to what you see from other SaaS companies in their kind of long-term view. It's very similar, lower on the gross margin side because our force.com fees are embedded in our subscription gross margins, but then we make up for that on the R&D side. So we're kind of the standard SaaS, long-term operating margin company.
Mayank Tandon
analystRight. One thing I forgot to ask, and this is relevant to the margin question is, is multi-tenancy relevant in this case? Or is it going to be single tenant just given some of the customization that is required inherent in the digital banking technology stack? Pierre, could you share your views?
Pierre Naude
executiveNo. So remember, we have one code base that run for every customer. In other words, whether you're Bank of America or a $2 billion community bank out of Chattanooga, Tennessee, you use exactly the same code base and you get upgraded twice a year, that's what we do. So that's not at play here. It's not a question because our solution was built in its 1 code base, okay? And we upgrade them all every 6 months.
Mayank Tandon
analystGot it. I do have a question from the audience. The question goes as such. It says, "How does your business or your platform transition to blockchain and crypto businesses over time? If that's something that you started to maybe think about."
Pierre Naude
executiveYes. So we're tracking that marketplace, but realize this -- so there's 2 questions. So crypto is a currency, okay? Whether you want to pay me in dollars, in yen or in South African rand, I can just turn on other currencies. So I don't see any issues with that. If we ever do a loan in a cryptocurrency, I would love to see that myself. It will be kind of fun. But in any case, so we can accommodate that. When it comes to blockchain, we've seen stops and starts with that. We monitor it but realize that is more of a digital contract. And I've known the examples of power companies trying it and so on. It's not something that really pertains to our business today and what we do. But as we look at the use cases, they've got scalability issues with that technology. And over time, we'll track it. And if it becomes applicable, we will do it. But today, we track it more from R&D perspective as opposed to a true deployment. I have no activity going on there.
Mayank Tandon
analystGot it. And then I know we're going to be bumping up against time. David, I want to get this question in as well around capital allocation. You talked about M&A as being -- again, you're approaching that in a very targeted manner. But just maybe your general comments around how you think about deploying free cash flow would be helpful.
David Rudow
executiveYes. Well, number one, it's going to invest in the business, right? The sales and marketing expenses, the international expansion, R&D around more -- additional products. I don't think we have an earmarked amount for M&A. I mean I think we're always looking. Everything's expensive right now, of course. But we keep our eyes on the M&A market, too, for any additional additive products that we can snap into the nIQ platform. So I look at free cash flow as continuing to invest as long as we can justify it from a growth perspective. I call it responsibly investing for growth. And we see the opportunity there, so we will continue to expand. Now you got to remember, this year, we had PPP which activated immediately that was margin enhancing, and we don't have travel and conferences, which saved us a lot of money. It doesn't go back to 100% next year. I mean I think travel will sneak in and kind of filter back into the model. But we will have that headwind as that returns. And we're telling our employees, our salespeople, if you can go see a customer, go see them. I think going to see a customer and explaining the benefits of nCino, and then once you sign a deal and you go out and work on the strategic formation of the workflows, I think it goes a long way. Even negotiating a contract, I think if you can send a couple of attorneys out, you can close deals a lot quicker. So as soon as we're able, we will be going up and seeing customers. And we will not -- I think a lot of companies are going to say, holy cow, I saved x million dollars in travel and now I got to come back to it. But we will gladly spend that money because we can close deals faster, expand ACV and make our customers happier. So that's kind of how we're thinking about it. We do focus on operating cash flow generation at some point in the future. And so we're on target with our original plans that we talked about at the IPO.
Mayank Tandon
analystRight. I think we covered a lot of ground. You guys answered most of my major questions. Any parting thoughts, Pierre and David, that -- or anything you want to call out that we didn't necessarily touch on that investors should be cognizant of?
Pierre Naude
executiveYes. No, I just think as a -- from a high-level perspective, we play in a unique place. We're the only company who built a platform end to end to do loans, account opening as well as onboarding that scales across the world, essentially, okay, internationally. So I think the potential of the company, if you look at the SAM of $10 billion plus, which is a bottoms-up conservatively calculated SAM, that this company literally is in the very beginning of its formation. I believe we've got the cultural building blocks to build a big company. I always tell the story when we had 7 employees, I put up a sign in here that said nCino Worldwide Headquarters, okay? So I think we are poised for the long-term future to truly live up to the promise of a Veeva and a Salesforce, okay? We picked the right platform, we've got the right culture. We've got the right people. And then you call our customers, you typically will get a very good response about how we take care of them and we understand the market. So I'm highly optimistic, and I can't wait for this virus to go way so I can get on a plane to sell some software.
Mayank Tandon
analystRight. We're all waiting for that day to get back on the road. Right. Well, I want to thank you again for taking the time to present and share your insights on the business. Really appreciate that. Looks like there's a big runway for you ahead. So we're looking to hopefully keep up on the story and enjoy that. So again, thank you so much, Pierre and David. Really appreciate it. And I think with that, we will close out.
Pierre Naude
executiveGreat. Thank you.
David Rudow
executiveThank you very much.
Pierre Naude
executiveNice to see you.
Mayank Tandon
analystOkay.
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