Paymentus Holdings, Inc. (PAY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Thanks, everyone, for joining us in here and on the webcast. My name is Will Nance. And rounding out the conference this year is the team from Paymentus. We've got both Dushyant and Sanjay, CEO and CFO.

Dushyant, you founded Paymentus in 2004. I'd love to kind of do a look back over the last 4 years since the IPO. Could you talk about the opportunity for bill presentment in the U.S. and just how the industry has changed and how you still think about the market opportunity?

Sure. I think the market has moved a little bit more in our direction since our IPO. In fact, if you look at it, the year before our IPO, we were a $300 million company. Right now, at midpoint, we are at $1.1 billion, so -- over $1.1 billion. So we feel very fortunate. A few factors. First is the nondiscretionary part of the market we serve in the U.S. So we are a nondiscretionary -- serving the nondiscretionary side of the U.S. economy. That has been very helpful. The second thing is the platform, the way we designed, we designed it for this day. We knew that once the noise clears, the customers would be looking for a partner with a platform that can scale with them across all verticals, customers will move beyond purpose built for a specific vertical model to a horizontal play because customers are like consumers. They know a household pays not just one insurance bill or one telecom bill, they pay all their bills, and they would want symmetry there. So that has worked well for us. We also felt that if we design the platform in a way that is one code base across all verticals, all customer sizes, what that will do is as the in-house solutions start to large enterprises, when they look at the in-house solutions, the CTO and CIOs will become friendly towards Paymentus as opposed to competitor towards Paymentus. They will start to take a look at this is an answer to the problem posed by CFOs that, hey, how can I get more efficiencies out of my bill payment opportunity. So as a result, we are seeing a lot more opportunities. And the way we have set the stage right now for the business, we believe that we're just getting started. The market is huge, the platform we have built for scale. And we believe that we will be a lot -- the base -- where we are today is sort of like the starting base, the jumping pad, if you will. We are going to be a lot larger company.

I'm always struck by how manual the bill payment process is for a large part of the market. How -- I mean, if you think about penetration and where you are today, just how does the average biller break down in terms of monthly auto pay versus manual payments? And I'm wondering if you could kind of quantify the impact that Paymentus has on those stats when a biller implements your solution?

Yes. I think for that particular thing, I would like to actually set the right context. Auto pay is not a technological situation, it's more a financial situation. It's an economic situation for a typical household. A typical household is battling how I'm going to pay this month, this particular bill, which particular payment method I will use. Do I have money in my bank account? I just bought things for my kids for their school and so on. Is this -- do I have enough ability to pay? So -- and on top of that, if there is variability in the bill amount, customers, especially in the U.S. they want control. We don't want to give up control over you just take money out of my bank account without looking at it. So the auto pay and for that matter, even the banking bill payment is more geared towards the folks who are easiest to collect from and has never been the issue for the billing companies. And that ends up being about 15%, 20% of the population. Majority of the population is not that privileged where they can say, I can set it and forget it, take money out of my bank account. Well, they don't have money all the time in their bank account. So for us, the way we think about it is how can we make that percentage of the large -- the biggest cohort of a -- for a given billing company, how can we make that easy for them? And that's where most of our investment goes in and thinking about how do we make it easy to easier experience for them, but also how do we reduce the cost to serve. So that's how it settles out.

Yes. No, that makes a lot of sense. And then when you just think about the market then, how do you frame the opportunity and the penetration of more modern bill presentment platforms like Paymentus versus legacy, in-house solutions, bank-dominated billers? How would you frame the market opportunity that's in front of you?

So we have captured -- if you look at our last year's transactions, over $600 million, while there are, last year, $16 billion to $17 billion payments which were paid to the billers. So we have only captured about 3.5% to 4% of the market. Our run rate is over $700 million right now based on last quarter's transactions. So we are making inroads. We're doing well as a company, but there's a lot of room for growth here. One of the other things I actually want to point out to all investors is that when you're taking a look at our market share we have captured, which is, let's say, 4% or so, even within the customers we have already signed, even that -- we haven't captured 100% of those payments. So there's a significant opportunity for us to grow even in our own customer base through same-store sales. That continues to be a secular tailwind for our business.

Can you expand on that? What does that look like for a biller who is not processing payments on Paymentus, but as a client, how do those bills get paid?

Yes. So -- which is pretty interesting everywhere. So if 30% of the payments or 40% of the payments are running on Paymentus platform, rest of the payments are coming -- and believe it or not, these are all real scenarios and some of -- you may actually relate to them as well that you are making payments through check. You are -- some of the customers are making cash payments. They're walking in and making a payment. Some of them are making a payment at the retailer stores. Some of them are going to the bank and so on. And that's why our Instant Payment Network strategy to extend the scope of the ecosystem of a billing company to all of these verticals was very -- all of these channels was very important. We wanted retailers to be able to accept payments through Instant Payment Network. We wanted banks to be able to accept payments, so that a billing company can reach all of their customers exactly the same way.

Perfect. And then just bringing it back to Paymentus, you talked about the market has increasingly moved towards more modern solutions like you. I think that's been a tailwind. How has the company itself changed since the IPO? And obviously, you've grown substantially. You threw out a couple of stats. But strategically, what's kind of stayed the same and what's changed?

I think the core DNA of the company has been the same. We are an innovative company. We are a customer-centric company. We realized early on that a company -- actually, I'll give you this perspective, which is my own -- this is the way I look at it. If you are a business starting today, you may not have a single customer, but you will have a competitor. You will have competitors. And if you are shutting down your business, you will not have any customers and you still have competitors. So the companies that spend a lot of time thinking about just competitors, they lose sight of what the reality of the customer world view is. And we designed our DNA of the company to be customer-centric. And be aware of what's happening in the market, but there's still -- for a company like us who has had tremendous success, our close ratio ends up being very high. Some of these can give you big head very quickly if you're inside the company. So humility has to be a big factor of it. And one of the best ways to get humility is you talk to your customers. They can always tell you what you're not doing right and -- versus just looking at the competitors, oh, we have this much percentage of wins against them and so on. We don't spend a lot of time on that. So that has remained the same. What has changed is that we have become more bullish on the market itself that we felt that there was a certain part of the market, which was not available to us or to anyone. It was in-house solutions. And we wanted to be that company. We wanted to be the platform that a lot of these large companies who are debating how can we get this old lethargic infrastructure taking payments and these complex workflows, how can we port them over on a more modern platform, they never found anyone. They never thought that there could be a platform like us. But today, where we sit as a company that has publicly demonstrated that we can implement large clients, sometimes we can deliver them earlier than our anticipated time lines. And that is very positive for the prospects to hear. Likewise, the aspect where customers can take a look at a company which is public, is profitable, growing rapidly, taking market share and has a very strong balance sheet. So a lot of the business leaders in the organization, in addition to the technology leaders, become very comfortable that this is the company we want to do business with. So that has changed.

And if I may just add, what has changed in the last 4 years to what Dushyant said is the company has become efficient in almost every aspect, in every function when I think about. So for example, if you see our operating leverage is coming to light in every quarter, which we have been delivering in the past few quarters. Most recently, our Q2 '25 results, our incremental adjusted EBITDA margin was 50% plus compared to EBITDA margins of 30% plus. So our 20% extra points gives us a lot of flexibility to actually go and spend more in sales and marketing if we need to, and this is all discretionary spend, mainly to capture the market. So the efficiencies we have seen in operating leverage, efficiencies we've seen in implementation time lines, the average size per customer is getting -- to implement the time line is becoming shorter and shorter. And the average size of customers which we are onboarding is becoming higher and higher. And both of these are working in a combination that the benefits of scale and the economies of scale are coming to light, and that's purely generating cash as well. Our free cash flow is up as well. So I think the company, as it's scaling is becoming very efficient and profitable.

Yes. Makes a lot of sense. Look, I think one of the hallmarks of Paymentus that you mentioned earlier was that it was built to span multiple verticals. So continuing the TAM discussion, what does your exposure look like today across verticals? And where do you see the biggest expansion opportunity?

So we -- our roots were in the utilities space and utilities still is close to 50% of our business. And I want to explain why that is. There are 2 aspects. First of all, the bill payment itself is the most complex part of the payment ecosystem. So when you look at payment spectrum, bill payment will be the most complex because of the business rules involved in accepting the bill related to identifying which bill you're paying and how you're paying and how much you can pay and several rules and what payment method you can pay with and so on. So it's very different than a retail checkout. So that part. And utility is the most complex part of that in the sense that utilities took time and they had no ability, no other option otherwise, which was to focus on taking all inefficiencies out through the paper process itself because their amount per bill was small and number of bills they were issuing were a lot larger for their size. So you're sending $100 bills to 5 million users every month. You better get all your ducks in a row in getting the paper processes out. So to make a profitable business in that market, getting them to appreciate the Paymentus platform could be very successful was very big for us. And the fact that we have still captured a small portion of that market gives us a lot of great feeling that we will continue to grow in that vertical. As a result of that, as we expanded over -- since our IPO into multiple other verticals, insurance, government services, health care, telecoms, education and the like, banking, loan repayment, mortgage, auto, very horizontal play. We believe that all of those -- and we did this analysis earlier in the year, how have we done relative to last year or past years. All of those verticals are doing well, including utilities. So our focus is we have a great platform, which is the story and ecosystem, and we need great storytellers specific to the verticals they're going after. And that's our focus, and we feel like we'll continue to do well.

I just want to touch on the macro environment briefly. I mean we were chatting as you came in, I think you have a lot less macro sensitivity than most of the payments and fintech coverage in our space. Maybe a little bit on the energy prices and inflation side. Is there anything top of mind over the last 6 months or so that we should be thinking about?

I think, first of all, we are very humble about it that we have been very fortunate that we are focused on the nondiscretionary side of the domestic U.S. economy. And so we are somewhat not as impacted by a lot of the macro, which is taking place. And the second part is the nondiscretionary nature of these bills we serve. Just to be able to cook, you need multiple of these bills to be paid so that you can have water and electricity and heat or gas. And obviously, phone is a necessity along with the rent for the home or the mortgage and so on and the insurance. So some of the verticals we are serving, they are very essential just to run a household. And same is true for businesses as well for that matter. So we are very fortunate from that perspective. And to your point about energy sensitivity, as we demonstrated, as inflation was rising, the historical inflation rise, we were able to adjust our business and just -- and our customers were very supportive. The reason they were very supportive is, first of all, we are a very customer-facing -- customer-centric organization. We wanted to be very empathetic to our client base. As the inflation were rising, they were dealing with a lot of challenges and a lot of vendors were hitting their doorsteps next morning for raising their prices. We wanted to be the company which even though we had contractual provisions in the agreement, but we wanted to be the one -- well, let's just see if it is transitory as we were being told or is it more like permanent. So we did that. And the second part is we are the central nervous system for a given billing company to collect their revenues. In other words, pay their employees and their vendors. We are the central nervous system for collecting that. No billing company, no customer is trying to take that lightly. So as a result, we sit in a very good situation where we will be continuing to serve that market in different economic environments.

And if I may just add on that point, the energy prices, as we are scaling and as we are expanding into multiple verticals, the impact of this inflationary impact is getting modest every quarter, every year for us.

Yes. That makes sense. So Sanjay, let's stick with you for a sec. I wanted to maybe talk through the top line growth algorithm. So when you think about building up to your growth forecast in any given year, how do you think about expansion with existing customers versus contribution from new customers in any given year?

Well, I think the largest factor for our growth is the new implementations. And that has been very good in the past few quarters. We've seen great bookings and great implementation time lines. So the new customer launches have been a significant portion for our growth. I would say the second vector of growth is the same-store sales from existing customers, we are seeing that growth. And as we are moving more and more towards digitalization and as the manual checks and the cash payments are reducing and the digitalization effect is by default generating revenue growth for us, these are the 2 vectors in the order of priority.

Makes sense. And then maybe sticking with some of the pipeline commentary. I think at earnings, you guys sounded very positive on the strength in bookings and the visibility into 2026. Is there anything more you can share about the composition of the pipeline in terms of biller size or industry mix? And if that gives you -- if there's any sense you could give us for how 2026 is shaping up?

Yes. So pipeline and backlog, both actually are very strong, and the composition is very good. It's a mix of a lot of verticals. They are not concentrated on any one particular segment or one particular type of customers. We are seeing small-sized customers, medium-sized customers as well as large enterprise customers. We saw more and more large enterprise customers starting Q3 of 2024 when we first talked about them and then they were early implemented, that gave us a lot of boost. But then at the same time, we also started booking more enterprise customers, which are sitting in our backlog. So our backlog is very good at this point, and that's one of the reasons giving us the confidence for raising the guidance, which we recently did for this year. At the same time, giving us early visibility into 2026. Given the nature of the contracts we have entered into, they are long term in nature. Normally, our contract period is 3 to 5 years, but we have very good renewal rates as well. In fact, we have so many customers who have been with us for 15, 20 years. So we feel very good about what the future entails for us, the way the visibility we have. So we feel very good.

Okay. Talking about new business. I was also hoping you could hit on the distribution side for a minute. Just maybe for those who aren't familiar, can you give us an overview of your top distribution channels? And then if there's any color you can share on just how that mix has evolved over time and which channels do you see growing at a more elevated clip?

Yes. So we, as a business, were very focused on initially direct sales. As I just mentioned, we felt that as long as we have great storytellers, we'll be doing well. Over the period of time and increasingly so since IPO, our channel strategy has evolved significantly. We have now channel partners, banks as channel partners. We have processing partners who are channel partners. We have software vendors as channel partners. We have print vendors as channel partners. So in the entire ecosystem, wherever you might be playing in the life cycle of a given customer, we are looking at those opportunities that how we can partner. And all of those channels seems to be doing well or continues to do well for us. But one of the reasons that seems to be is that one of the things which seems to be helping us is our direct channel remains very strong in all of those. And what happens is that actually becomes a source of inspiration for the channel side as well. So imagine a scenario where you're a software vendor partner of Paymentus and you hear from your customer that they have chosen Paymentus as the platform of choice. And you'll have 2 reactions. First, how did we miss that? And the second reaction would be that we've got 5 more we should be talking to. And that's exactly what we are trying to do. So all of the verticals are doing well for us, all of the channel partners. So it's the decided strategy of Paymentus now that we will continue to be very forward leaning towards our partners. We value their channels and the customer base they've built over the years, but also direct sales in all of the verticals.

Great. Maybe you can just hit on the competitive environment. Who do you see in some of the RFPs? What is usually the deciding factor between Paymentus and a competitor? And what are the barriers that keep traditional payments companies from offering similar products as Paymentus? For example, we're in San Francisco, there's billboards everywhere for Stripe Billing. What are some of the competitive barriers to entry there?

Yes. So the part which is very interesting is that, as I said, bill payment is not payments. Bill payment is a lot more complex. Each organization has their own rules. And the way Paymentus has built our business, which is one of our key -- we believe that it will go down as one of the best decisions we made. When we went to our technology team, we didn't say, build an API set in multiple languages and release it to the customer and let the customer make all the decisions of integrating. We believe it's a short-term strategy for scale. Long term, it will not be as great. What we decided instead was we don't want our customers to do work. We wanted our customers to have their current integration, current ERP system in place the way they are. And Paymentus should be the one who should be doing the work to integrate and should be able to do it in such a short period of time that it doesn't cost us any -- a lot of money, meaning we can offer it free to our customers. So as a result, we have built tremendous rule-based capabilities in our system where all of the integrations that take place right now, they don't require any coding. So that will be a big thing for us. The second part is Paymentus is a multichannel, multidimensional platform where we have thought through how a customer is identified by a given billing company across all channels and all dimensions and how do they then interact and how do they make the payment and how do we treat the payment in such a way that all of those workflows to integrating with the ERP system can take place very quickly. So it's not easy to replicate what we have built here. And as to any of the new companies who have billing notices and billboards or whatever, they're all focused on the SMB side of it. So they were competing potentially against some of the software vendors who might be in that market.

Right. Right. Okay. Maybe you mentioned on the IPN earlier. Can you talk about this as a competitive differentiator? How did you see the IPN network opportunity when you came up with it? And then I guess, what can you share about the rate of scaling of the platform?

Sure. So IPN was -- right from the beginning, we thought that IPN will be a big and important critical step to our long-term growth. So right from the beginning, contracts talk about IPN. They already have -- gave us permission to allow the acceptance of payments to any of the IPN channel partners we may bring in. So that's the first part. The second part is the IPN itself is a way for a billing company to get access to or reach all of the customers wherever they might be. So if I'm doing -- if I'm used to making a payment at a retailer store, can I make that -- can I have integration with that retailer store so that Instant Payment Network could be used to make a payment. Likewise, for the banks, can the banks utilize our platform to initiate payments and stop losing their customers. As we all know, the bank's primary checking account is a big thing, and you lose primary checking account customers or primary checking account users, which are tied to bill payments, there's a big loss. So we believe the banks will continue to pay tremendous attention to how they can retain and grow that customer base. So IPN helps there as well. IPN continues to grow. But more importantly, IPN is an integral part of our go-to-market strategy. It's a unique network to us. It's the -- it's a very large real-time bill payment network. We have thousands of billing companies on it. So we feel very proud of it from that perspective. Long term, as number of billing companies which are on our platform, they continue to grow. Let's say, a few years out, we have 10,000 billing companies on our platform. This could be a pretty valuable asset on its own for all the different things we can do to it using it versus just in current form.

One of the things I think has been particularly noticeable over the last year has been, as you onboarded some very large merchants in the back half of last year, I think maybe the payment method mix of those merchants was a little bit different than the average. And so we saw a really large impact on top line revenue. Contribution margin also accelerated, but I think there was a little bit of a matching offset in some of the interchange costs that you see. So presumably that's the credit cards. As we lap that in the back half of the year, presumably, you see some impact on the top line. How are you thinking about the run rate for that contribution margin line, which has been a lot more stable and consistent and quite strong. And if you put that in the context of some of the pipeline commentary, it seems like there are more enterprise customers in the pipeline.

Yes. So based on the guidance we recently gave on our Q2 call for the full year, I think that's what we expect at least for this year. And outer years guidance will come when the time is right for that. But overall, when we think about the business and the growth and especially for outer periods, as we get more enterprise customers, you may see variability among the quarters for the contribution profit or contribution margins. Normally, any business which it scales and as you get more enterprise customers, you will see the gross margins kind of become softer, which is normal. But at the same time, the economies of scale, which is giving you the benefit in operating leverage and the combination of both gives you better profitability, and that's our objective as well. We want to grow at a profitable level, and that can be achieved by a combination of managing the gross margins at the same time, taking the economies of scale benefit. So I won't go beyond a year in terms of thinking about how the particular one metric will go because contribution margin could vary. But at the same time, it has to be in a combination of operating expenses. Overall, what we can say is we've shared for a longer term, we have 2 primary metrics, the top line growth of 20% CAGR and the bottom line growth, i.e., adjusted EBITDA dollars growth of 20% to 30% CAGR. And we are well beyond that. If you look at our past CAGRs of last 4 years, overall, we feel that the right combination of the new bookings we are getting or we already have in our backlog is going to generate the primary metrics what we have set for us.

Great. I'm not sure which of you this is for, but I want to talk a little bit about COGS optimization. I mean credit card costs today are a large structural piece of the cost base. And so I'm curious how you think about the opportunity longer term to leverage alternative payment methods such as real-time payments, FedNow, RTP or something similar to drive down those costs? And how do you think about the time line of kind of realizing some of those potential benefits?

Yes. I think it's in the outer years for sure. But all of the options you've talked about and add to that stablecoin and so on, all of those are beneficial to us. And I think this is one of the reasons why we called out that this is our decided strategy to -- we want the interchange to flow through our P&L. We want our clients to allow us to have the interchange as part of our P&L, so that gives us an ability to optimize that for the benefit of our clients, but also for our own shareholders. So we feel good about where that's headed. More options, the better. And any option that doesn't have interchange is a pretty valuable positive thing for our business.

Right. Yes. So that makes sense. If I can kind of go one level deeper on that. I mean one thing we hear from the card networks is just cards are easy, consumers are familiar with them. And so when we think about the trade-offs in terms of higher margins versus a little bit more friction on things like account-to-account payments, do you have data internally that shows sort of the impact between billers that require bank drafts versus allowing carded payments? And can you give us any sense for how much like Paymentus software can kind of mitigate that drop-off in conversion between bank draft and card payment?

Yes. So first of all, I would just say that card networks are right. I mean the cards are not going away. I mean cards will continue to be. What I'm speaking to is that the card networks themselves evolve with the evolving world. And I think our partnerships with continue to be -- we already have great partnerships with all of the card networks and we'll continue to get better. So as a result, I think we are -- we think the combination of the 2, our own ability to impact the user experience in a way that allows us to have customer behavior understanding and impact the customer behavior towards different payment methods, combined with card networks themselves evolving with the evolving payment methods coming into the market, I think our future is very bright from that perspective.

Yes. That makes sense. You spoke a little bit about Agentic AI. It would be very nice if you could ask someone to pay your bills for you. And so how do you think about that opportunity over time?

Yes. I think we think of Agentic AI to be a big opportunity. So there are 2 aspects the way we think about Agentic AI is one is our own internal operations, which everyone is focused on. Everyone talks about it. But we think of Agentic AI as not just a cost efficiency thing internally within the company, but also redefining the entire landscape of our own customer base and how we go to market is that given the strength of the platform we have built and our ability to handle the data at scale in a way that our -- there's a trust between us and our clients already, we believe that this will also lead to -- our ability to using Agentic AI as a revenue driver to help our clients improve their efficiencies and customer experience. And the example you gave is one of the examples we will look at.

Great. Just in the last minute here, you talked about your cash position, allowing you a lot of flexibility. When you think about capital allocation decisions, you did a little bit of M&A around the time of the IPO, but it's been mostly an organic story. So just how are you thinking about capital allocation? What types of assets could Paymentus consider over time?

Yes. Our priorities for cash have not changed since some time. We believe in organic growth, and that's where we've seen success in all these past years, and that's our #1 priority. We have a large pipeline, a very strong TAM we operate in and a very small share right now at 3.5%, as Dushyant said. So we are marching on the path of organic growth, and that's where we would like to spend majority of our capital. And if -- yes, our cash is increasing, it's a decent amount on the balance sheet, and that's because our free cash flow capability is getting better. We also want to keep extra cash for working capital growth as and when you expand, you might need cash for working capital. There is no current plan for any M&A, but we always remain opportunistic in this regard. We get a lot of teasers, and we want to see what's out there. And if something makes sense, we will look at it, consider it and take it to the Board. But at this point, nothing is in the pipeline. We are not looking at any M&A.

Great. Well, I think that takes us to time. But guys, I really appreciate the opportunity for the conversation. Thanks for your continued support of the conference and really enjoyed it.

Thank you so much. Thank you for having us.

Thank you.