Q2 Holdings, Inc. (QTWO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm William Tang, and I work with Bryan Keane, who heads the fintech research team here at Citi. With me on stage today are Matt Flake and Jonathan Price, the CEO and CFO, respectively, of Q2. Thank you both for joining today.

Thank you for having us.

I wanted to start with a higher-level question, one that I think will be helpful for investors. Matt, can you frame for us where Q2 sits today within the broader digital banking and fintech ecosystem? How would you describe Q2's competitive differentiation across its [ solutions ]?

Yes. So Q2 is 22 years old. We're the largest standalone digital banking company in the world. And we provide digital banking, which is the experience that customers of a bank, whether it's a retailer or a commercial customer, feels when they interact with the bank. They log into the system and then they do their payments, their transfers, their balance inquiries. And so we have about 450 digital banking customers that we have 40% of the top 100 banks, 40% of the top 100 credit unions, but our platform scales to the smallest banks to up to a $400 billion, $500 billion bank. And the differentiator for us is when we started the business, we built a single platform. And the single platform was designed to be able to allow a high school kid to start banking, go to college, start a business. They can add their business accounts to it on an on-demand function, and then they can grow that business and they can become a corporate banking solution. So one of the challenges banks had in their -- community and regional banks had is they'd have multiple systems and they would have to start over, move all their data. And so they would lose customers. It was a dangerous time for them. And so for us, what we did is build a single platform so there's a unified experience across all mobile phones, tablets and desktops. In conjunction with that, so the value of a single platform to a bank is you get a modern experience like Netflix, Amazon, Meta, you become operationally more efficient because you have 1 system to administer rather than a retail system that has a back office, its own set of integration, small business and corporate and all the other solutions that go with that. So you become more efficient as a bank. We as a company have one set of codes. We can roll code out faster. And then the fourth piece is that we have all the data. So we have the behavioral data, the transactional data, the demographic data. And we can use that data for machine learning, AI, all those other things. So that's really the differentiator for us in how we built the business.

That's awesome. Just one more for you, Matt, and don't worry, Jonathan, I've got questions for you as well. You touched on this in terms of the TAM, but can you talk about how maybe broader, bigger picture, what is your targeted customer? How do you see the TAM? And then as you approach new and existing customers, do you typically start with just one offering? Or do you try to bundle as you lean into the respective customer bases?

Yes. So there's about 9,000 banks and credit unions in this country, and we have 450. If you get a little more specific to the target, we largely target about $750 million and above. There's about 2,000 of those. And from a bundling perspective, I talked about the platform, but we also have fraud products and we have a marketplace called Innovation Studio where startups, fintechs can participate. We have more than 200 fintechs that participate in that. With our APIs, they're able to integrate elegantly. And we have an economic relationship there. We also have a relationship pricing tool that helps price a relationship for a bank. So 9 of the 15 largest banks in the United States price their loans and deposits on this tool that we use. So from a go-to-market on digital banking, we have a group that focuses on community, which is below $1 billion, and then we have a group that's focused on our key accounts, which we call, which is $1 billion to $5 billion. And then we have our Tier 1 and enterprise, which is above $5 billion. So we kind of go to market that way. And so when you're below $5 billion to $10 billion, you're usually buying the total suite, which is retail, small business and corporate, and then the fraud products. As you go upmarket, above $10 billion, you typically have a business line that buys one of those aspects. So you have somebody who runs corporate, somebody who runs a small business, who runs retail, and they want to buy a best-of-breed solution in that case. And so for us, we're really proud of the fact that we are -- we have one best-of-breed retail, small business and corporate banking, the only vendor I know that's ever done that. So if you look at our numbers, we have about 110 clients that are above $5 billion in assets, and 60% of them are only using one of those major products. So we have a significant cross-sell expansion opportunity within our customer base to be able to go cross-sell those products, plus our lending products and our fraud products.

Phenomenal. Jonathan, can you help us size the revenue materiality of your key solutions today? And how does the pipeline look for those solutions? And how can you faster -- how can you more quickly ramp new contracts?

Yes. So today, the way I'd segment the business, I mean, obviously, on the face of the P&L and the filings, we segregate revenue into 3 big buckets: subscription, transactional and services. Today, as of the third quarter, about 82% of the revenue is subscription revenue, which for us is the holy grail of what we're trying to win and strategically emphasized within the business. It's the highest margin component of the business. It's the fastest-growing component of the business. So that's what you see on the face of the P&L. If you want to look at it more from a product standpoint, digital banking, which Matt just talked about, represents just over 80% of the revenue. And within the digital banking line item, you would also have our fraud solutions, which are mostly embedded within digital banking, even though there's some standalone element to it, and Innovation Studio because the partners all integrate through the digital banking platform to surface to the end customer. So that's about 80%. When you think about everything from a major product line perspective, relationship pricing that Matt just talked about, our Helix and Symphonix business, together, they combine to mid to high teens, is their composition, and there's some smaller ancillary products. So Helix, Symphonix and PrecisionLender business. And what we shared is PrecisionLender is about twice as big as the other 2. So you start to get this 50-50 split of that other component that is the PrecisionLender business versus Helix and Symphonix are about equal weight.

Got it. Perfect. And then just to follow up there. When we think about the drivers of growth, is future growth expected to come from new logos or more upselling/cross-selling into the existing portfolio base? And what are the primary drivers there in your mind?

Yes. So both have performed really well so far in 2025. Just in the third quarter, we talked about a really strong performance on the net new side. But we're starting to see more and more, because of the fraud solutions, because of the Innovation Studio ecosystem, is the mix of bookings that are actually coming from an existing logo have expanded. That mix has grown from what historically was always about 50-50 to now we're seeing the expansion opportunity become sometimes 60-40, depending on the quarter, 65-35. And the reason for that is, take a deal we talked about in the third quarter call, an $80 billion bank that's been a commercial customer of ours chose us for retail. Economically, that's as big as any net new logo, like that's a big economic deal for us, but it's from an existing customer that expanded, as Matt talked about, to buy another big piece of the platform. And so that's an example. As those opportunities continue to surface, you're going to see the mix shift more and more to the existing customer components without that being a -- or denigrating the net new opportunity at all. You just have fewer logos, let's say, at the $80 billion level, in that example, to go win that new. And so we're taking the ones we have and also expanded within them.

Matt, going back to you. We get this question a lot, so it would be great to hear your take on this. But how has the macro environment, especially thinking about the trajectory of interest rates and the trend of bank consolidation, how has the macro affected customer demand in your pipeline? And are you sensing any adjustments from your existing or new accounts? Would love to hear your take there.

Yes. So I think that to understand what's going on in the marketplace, you got to have a little bit of context for the last several years. 2012 to 2022 were probably the golden era of banking where money was free and deposits were easy to get. And then you have the pandemic that happens in '20, which drove a lot of digital utilization, which began to expose weaknesses to the legacy technology that's out there provided by legacy providers. And so then you hit '22 and rates go up 500-plus basis points. And so deposits again became the center of the universe. In the history of banking, deposits have always been the key to lend money against. And so they had to earn them and the rates were going up, so money was moving. So we had this kind of perfect storm of deposits becoming the center of the universe, banks were exposed to their legacy technology during the pandemic, but they weren't able to do anything because they were busy doing PPP loans. And then you come out of that and you see the demand environment that happens as we began to see a lot more activity in '22 and '23. Then you have [ March of ] [Technical Difficulty] [ that are ] going to backstop those deposits. So a lot of our customers saw an exodus of commercial deposits from their commercial customers because their boards were saying, "We can't keep all this money in community and regional banks." So you have utilization rates are through the roof, legacy tech, deposits are the center of the universe, and then the fear put in these banks that we have to lock in our commercial customers because they're the most profitable and the largest accounts. So that's really driven the demand environment for us over the last -- we've had record bookings '23, '24, we had our best third quarter in the history of the company this year. So all of that is what's driving the demand that we see. And so the interest rates, I want them to go down for our banks so they can do more lending, they'll make more money, they'll buy more software from us. Because I don't think they're going away from this model where they just do the loan and they don't take the operating accounts. They have to have the operating accounts and they have way more discipline around that like they've had other than that 10-year stretch. So we continue to see a lot of demand for the platform because of our commercial functionality and the single platform and all the stuff I talked about earlier. And then you have -- there's a lot of pressure on the larger general ledger players right now, for different reasons. And that seems to be a tailwind for us as well. So I think that people are asking, whether if rates go down, it slows the demand environment -- I don't believe it does. I think it's actually a tailwind because they still are going to focus on getting the deposits with the loans, they'll make more money, it will take more pressure off their P&L. So it's a really good environment for us right now, but we do want the economy to pick back up, so I think that will even increase the demand environment.

Got it. Got it. And then thinking about industry consolidation, I think bank M&A has been a topic for several years now. As this trend continues to take place, can you talk to us about how that does or does not impact your business? And on a consolidated basis, do you view Q2 as a net winner? Or is this a challenge that the organization can hopefully manage?

Yes. So M&A has been part of the community and regional banking space really since the early '90s. And what we look at is, obviously, we -- there's 9,000, so there's plenty of them. But what we look at is the number of people that are banking with community and regional financial institutions. And that has grown at a steady pace of about -- because we get paid on a commercial business or a consumer. So that's our revenue -- what generates our revenue. And so they're buying themselves. Bank of America, Wells, Chase, Citi are out of the acquisition game for the most part. And so when you translate that to what that means to us, is if you look at like 2020 through 2023, we had 290 acquisitions or MOEs in our customer base. We were the surviving entity in 272 of them. So 90% of the time, we're the winning bank that remains. And so this year in '25, we're at 94% of the time we're the remaining entity. So it's a lift for us, and we continue to be on the right side of those trades, and we hope that certainly continues.

That's a very impressive retention rate. Jonathan, how should investors think about Q2's margin expansion opportunity? And how important is it in your mind that margins expand year-on-year at this point in time?

Yes. I mean it's been a big pivot we've made sort of around the time Matt just talked about when interest rates started rising. I think the history of the company, this has been a grow-at-all-cost type business and growth was the primary value indicator or value metric that we were measured on. And in 2022, we made a pretty significant pivot towards a strategy we've been calling profitable growth. And if we're sitting here in November of '22, you would have looked back and seen trailing free cash flow that was negative. Whereas now you look back and you see the numbers we're talking about, $150 million of free cash flow approximately this year and expanding rapidly, and 90% conversion from EBITDA to free cash flow. So it's been a big part of the last 3-year journey to get this business more durable, more healthy from a financial perspective. And then as we look ahead to '26, we already put out a preview into our financials for '26. And one of the reasons we did it is we had a 3-year financial framework that we've had out there since the beginning of last year. With the outperformance that we've put up in '24 and now in the '25 guide, the implied EBITDA expansion in '26 was really low. The average we gave over the 3 years basically implied only 30 bps of EBITDA expansion in '26, which we feel confident is very light. So we put out there just here in the third quarter our expectation that gross margins will exceed 60% next year and that EBITDA expansion will be approximately 250 basis points of expansion versus that implied 30. And so I think we feel really comfortable that that is an ongoing part of our story. 250 is not as much as, for the last 3 years, we've shown over 500 basis points of EBITDA expansion. But what's embedded in that 250 bps for '26 is really now a '26 plan that incorporates a reinvestment back into the business in some of the product areas that Matt talked about. So Innovation Studio, commercial functionality on digital banking, fraud tech, AI, those are areas that we have now built the '26 plan that incorporates some of that reinvestment. And so that's why the 250 bps doesn't look more like '24, '23 -- or '25, '24 and '23 levels of expansion. But we still think after 4-plus years of showing over 2,000 basis points of expansion, another 250 in '26 is still strong. And more importantly is we feel like that's what gives us the ability to elongate this trajectory of subscription growth rate that we've been on, which I think is really important for this business and for the opportunity we think we have in the market.

That was a thorough answer. You anticipated my follow-up. Matt, this is a question that you probably anticipated. But on the last earnings call, you spent a lot of time talking about the AI initiatives at Q2. Can you provide us the broad philosophy around how you plan to integrate AI into your platform? And how are you measuring success for these initiatives?

Yes. So we, on the earnings call, we talked about the structural change we made in leadership, which is we took our Head of Engineering and made him the COO. So he is going to be responsible for the delivery, support, hosting and building of the products. Because to make the product easier to install, the engineering team has to work on it. To make it easier to support, the engineering team has to work on it. Easier for hosting, the engineering team has to work on it. And so tying all that together gets one unified leader that has control over that to make sure that we're using AI tools and using our engineering team to build the best, most efficient products we can. As a company, we have adopted enterprise-wide ChatGPT enterprise licenses for all employees. In 6 days, every employee had logged into it. We're using other tools, Cursor and other tools, to leverage AI internally as a company to make us more efficient and drive better processes. From the customer perspective, there's 2 approaches that we have. One is to use AI in our platform to make them more efficient, whether it's how they -- the processes they have or how they scale their business. And then also building the products for their customers, which are the retail and commercial customers of the bank or credit union. So at this point, we're fully committed to it. We're structured the right way. We have been using AI tools for quite some time. And we anticipate, whether it's fraud, cross-selling products to our customers or cross-selling products to the end user with agentic AI that could recommend, "Hey, you have too much money in your savings account. You need to put it in an interest-bearing account," or, "Your cash flow is looking low, you need to make these changes," all that is where we're going. So we're 100% engaged in using AI and assuming that it's going to be a differentiator for us. I believe -- on the earnings call, I talked about I think there's really a couple of components that give us an advantage. Number one, I believe incumbency is an advantage in AI. We have more than 1,000 customers, we have contractual relationships with them. We have a compliance framework with how we keep the data. We're examined by the FFIEC, FDIC, OCC, FRB. All those regulating agencies come in and examine us. And so there's a trust component that our customers rely on. Two kids from Stanford that graduate and go to Huntington Bancshares and say, "I got this great AI idea. Send me all your information, I'll put it in my LLM," is not how these guys operate. Those startups are going to flow through us through our marketplace Innovation Studio, we believe, to get access to that data. The data we have is all the stuff I talked about earlier: account activity, account balances, demographic information, behavioral information, what device they use, when they use, who they pay, how much they pay, how often they pay them. And so we have all that. We have a contractual relationship. We'll have a -- with the financial institution, we'll have -- as the startups come through us, they will want access to that data. And we will participate economically with them, and also from a technology perspective. And the distribution model. When we built this business, I was in rental cars and Southwest Airline flights going to hundreds, if not thousands, of banks telling our story. I don't think that's the model they're going to use. They're going to try to find people that have the data, have it organized and have it in a secure way where they can access it. And the bank is going to want that as well. So we feel very good about our incumbency and the trust as well as the data we have and our ability to distribute those products, whether we build them or somebody else does. So we're really excited about the opportunity, and we think we have really intrinsic advantages that other people don't.

That's great. Maybe this is a good one for you still, Matt. But how do you guys think about the competitive landscape? Who or what do you compete against most frequently? And if there are any nuances that you'd call out regarding differences in dynamics as it relates to your larger versus your smaller clients, that would be great.

Yes. Jack Henry, Fiserv and FIS control about 95% of the back-office general ledger systems in the United States. And they have legacy digital banking systems that we compete with to replace. A lot of those companies are large global payments companies, some of them are general ledger companies with a little bit, and then all of them dabble in digital banking. But we wake up every single day and think about how does somebody feel when they use the technology, how does it work within the financial institution. And we move at a pace that's very difficult for these companies to be able to move. So that's who -- upmarket, in particular, above $10 billion, Fiserv and FIS are largely the general ledgers there. Below $10 billion, it's Fiserv, Jack Henry and FIS. And we compete favorably against them. We have great relationships with them. We work closely with Jack Henry and we'll compete like hell, and we'll win some, lose some. But we try to be open and partner-oriented with them. So those are the -- kind of the main players. And then you have, like in commercial banking, you have Bottomline Technology, which was acquired by Thoma Bravo, and Dragonfly, which was acquired by FIS. And those are more corporate, commercial banking solutions. We continue to make headway in that space. If you've seen our wins, we continue to win upmarket, which is where they are largely. And then on the retail side, and some of these guys have small business products, you have Candescent and Alkami, which are good companies, but they're more focused on credit unions and retail, with some small business functionality. But we don't sleep on any of them. We continue to work and differentiate ourselves. But our win rates are around 50% in that market or even higher than that. So we feel really good about our competitive position, but there's still a lot of work to do.

Got it. Perfect. And in case anyone has any questions, we are feeling the mic today, so feel free to raise your hand. In the meantime, have one for either of you. If you think about some of the recent innovation that has emerged in fintech in the last few years, whether it's stablecoins or real-time payments or open banking, et cetera, where do you see the greatest potential for opportunity for Q2 longer term? And just would love to hear your thoughts around that topic.

Well -- and feel free to chime in. I think all of those are opportunities. It's about being in a position to partner, build or capitalize on those opportunities. So stablecoin is -- we don't -- we're not a payments company, but we initiate trillions of dollars of payments every year. And so if people begin to use stablecoin, when you log in, you want to see your current financial position, your assets and your liabilities, and stablecoin would be something we would partner with. There's several people we're talking with now about how to present that information to them so they can do -- they can transact off of those accounts and get a full picture of their financial position. AI, I already talked enough about that. We believe our Innovation Studio is a huge differentiator for us and a huge opportunity that ties to open banking, it ties to innovation. One out of every 5 venture capital dollars from 2010 to 2020 went into fintech. And so the idea that we could go build all of that [ is impossible ]. So we open the system up with APIs, and now we can work with as many of those partners as want to come to us. And as I said, we have a contractual and a financial relationship in those transactions. 100% of the deals we have done this year have said Innovation Studio is a reason for us to do that. So that gives us leverage. We have more than 1,000 non-Q2 engineers that work on our platform. So it gives us a lot of leverage and scale in the business. And we've been able to build this business -- we haven't done a major acquisition since 2019, so this is all organic growth that we're doing and building on. So we have a lot of opportunity there.

I think you covered it, Matt. At the end of the day, our job is to help enable the bank or credit union execute their strategies. And so if they have prioritization in their strategic road map around stablecoin, just like we did when Bitcoin was coming out and was a hotter thing, more in the sort of investing in crypto versus in the stablecoin is more of a payment use case. But in the case of crypto, we said we're not going to be able to build the infrastructure, we're not going to be a custodian for holding the underlying cryptocurrency as Q2 or the bank. But what -- if our banks want to offer the ability to buy sell and hold cryptocurrencies to their customers, we have to help enable that. So we partnered, in that case, we partnered with NYDIG at the time, who had a partnership business, to basically embed, buy, sell and hold capabilities through Innovation Studio into the digital banking platform. And so wherever the market goes in terms of these trends, whether it's stablecoin, real-time payments, financial wellness, we have a mechanism by which we sort of embed ourselves and help the bank execute that strategy. And as Matt said, it could be building our own products, it could be partnering with anyone that, through the Innovation Studio, is now much easier than we used to do before that. And then obviously, the potential for M&A, our job is to help the banks execute their strategy.

Great. I have one for you, Jonathan. What was the impetus for the new share buyback authorization? And what's the philosophy around its usage? And maybe as a follow-up, I'll just ask you right here, how are you thinking about balancing this buyback against the rest of your capital allocation strategy?

Yes. So back to the point I made earlier, we've come a long way in pivoting this business to be a highly cash flow generative company. And so with that, we've really seen a turnaround in the balance sheet. And so just last week, we paid off the 2025 converts. The 2026 is due at the beginning of June. We're in a position where most likely the play will be to retire those at maturity as well. And so you kind of had, through the first half of '26, a $500 million maturity wall. But we're in a cash position, for the third quarter balance sheet, just under $570 million of cash and cash equivalents. We're generating cash, like I talked about earlier, the free cash flow generation to where the buyback, like all the other levers we've talked about, is just one more point of optionality we have to execute our capital allocation strategy. Historically, we didn't have the cash flow generation to go down that path. Anything we wanted to do from a capital perspective was either investing back in the business or M&A. Now we're in a position, and the buyback is sized appropriately, to where we feel like, with the cash generation we have going forward, the balance we sit on and the balance sheet today, plus the maturities, that that's sized to where we can execute the buyback opportunistically, still be credible and competitive in M&A, and still invest back in the business, as I already mentioned, we're doing through the 2026 guidance that we already provided, to where we can do all of the above. And so we're not boxed in, in any way to where we feel like we have to do any one of those things at any one period of time. But we're in a position now where we have full optionality. So we're excited about it. I think that's a healthy place for us to be compared to where we've been over the last few years, and we're going to use all those levers. But things like M&A happen when a lot of things come in line: valuation expectations, financial criteria of the targets, strategic imperative to own the asset. And so that's more episodic by definition. Investing back in the business I already talked about. And then when we're in an excess capital position where we don't have all of our cash going to those 2 things, then returning capital becomes the way we would go. And obviously, now with the buyback authorized, we can do that at our discretion.

Makes sense. Again, I just wanted to give the audience a chance to ask questions in case there were any.

Could you elaborate a bit on what some of those strategic imperatives are more from an inorganic strategy standpoint? It sounds like with the partnership ecosystem, it's easy to plug and play for all kinds of players. So curious how you think about that.

Yes. I very much think when Matt talked about like our product priorities, where we want to invest in '26, the M&A strategy, it's not like we're following a different strategy. It very much mirrors what the organic path would be. The opportunity would be when assets come to market, whether it's in the digital banking space, to scale and add functionality, or customers on the digital banking side, on the Innovation Studio side, like it is an incredible lens into these fintechs to see how they sell into the banks, how the end users adopt these products, where they churn these products, all that data that you'd never see in a normal M&A process, we get visibility into. But the bar for why we would need to own one of those given this 2-sided marketplace we built, has scaled and is working, it's pretty high. Because take an example of an asset that traded in the market this year. MANTL is an account opening product in our space that we partner with and we are partnered with today even after the Alkami acquisition. But we have more than 6 other account opening products that are live in production in the Innovation Studio where a bank may have or choose the value prop of a Prelim or an Amount or an Attune or all these other guys, or grow for us, historically, our own products. And so we've sort of put this position in the financial -- institutional landscape that we want to be Switzerland. And so for us to then go and buy one, it's not that we would never do that. In fact, I think that puts us in a real advantage to go be a buyer. It's just the bar is high of like why we would strategically need to own it, because you would most likely be compromising that Switzerland position. So again, that's sort of why I think the bar is higher. But as far as where we go, it's those same areas. It's commercial, it's fraud tech, it's AI. It's all the areas where we're investing organic dollars that would be optionality for us on the M&A front too. And as Matt said, with so much fintech VC money that went in over the last decade, there's a lot of assets out there, and we don't need to own most of them, but it's possible that one comes to market where it makes a lot of sense.

Anyone else from the audience? Okay. Just one more question from my side, and feel free to take this from either of you. Just trying to be thorough here, but we've covered a lot today, what element of the business do you think investors either new to the name or even familiar with the name are under-appreciating at present? I'd be curious to hear which particular strengths come to mind.

Well, I think to some extent, the AI conversation we talked about. As I said, I asked people about -- tell me who -- what AI solution is going to replace us? And it's kind of like the Boogeyman with my kid, like I can't prove he's not there, but he can't prove he is there, but he stays up all night worrying about it. So I don't know what to do about that other than we got to continue to win in the marketplace and innovate and drive those. So I think there's a huge opportunity with the data and the regulatory framework that we work under to capitalize on the AI opportunity. I also think that there's an environment where, just because Fiserv is having a rough patch, it doesn't mean we're having a rough patch. In fact, it could be a tailwind to us in some cases. So we're not all directly connected. And I think there's a big opportunity for us, even if Fiserv is having a tough time or FIS or Alkami, we can do well in this environment. And there is a demand environment that I believe is going to be strong for the foreseeable future because of the importance of deposits as we move forward. And rates can go down and lending can pick up, and we can -- that can still be a tailwind for us. Unless we go back to a ZIRP environment, deposits are going to be a critical part of running a bank like they have for more than 100 years, so -- or thousand years. So that's the part where I think there's huge opportunity for us ahead of us. And early innings for us, less than 5% penetrated in the banking space. We have a long ways to go. And we have a lot of expansion opportunities, we have a great customer experience that we provide and a great culture. So we're going to continue to execute on that.

Thank you 2 so much.

Thanks, William. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Appreciate it.