Tyler Technologies, Inc. (TYL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Welcome, everyone. I'm David Chen with Morgan Stanley and very, very pleased to have Brian Miller here, EVP and Chief Financial Officer of Tyler Technologies. Thanks, Brian.

Thanks for having me.

So Brian, how long have you been at the company?

I'm in my 27th year.

27 years at Tyler Technologies. So amazing. So maybe for those of us who may be newer to the story, maybe just kind of just warm us up with the company, kind of the mission -- kind of a founding mission of the company and kind of the core products that you serve.

Sure. Tyler is a vertical software company focused on the public sector exclusively. Although we're narrow in terms of our focus on the public sector, we're very broad in terms of the breadth of our product set. So we have a broader set of solutions for sort of essential back-office functions of government, a broader set of solutions than anyone else in the space and a bigger customer base than anyone else in the space. Historically, we were mostly focused on the local government markets, the cities, counties, school districts, local agencies. But in recent years, we've expanded more into the state market, primarily through the acquisition of NIC back in 2021. And we have a small presence but growing in the federal space as well. In addition to providing essential back office software like property tax systems, ERP systems, courts and justice, public safety, licensing and permitting, those kinds of applications, we also have a large and growing transaction-based business, primarily around processing payments for governments and other kinds of providing digital access to back-end government systems when in came to the NIC acquisition. So we complement our software business with layering on additional set of payment and other transactions processing opportunities.

I thought maybe if you could just -- before -- we're going to get into a lot of the core business today, but I thought maybe just -- it's a super interesting, the history of Tyler back in the day. So I mean, you've been there for 27 years. I think some of your partners have been there even longer. And so just give us a sense for the -- just the foundational pillars of Tyler. And you've been a publicly traded company for...

Yes. Tyler has been public since 1966. It was not a software company. We're actually one of the very oldest companies listed on NYSE. Tyler, from 1966 to the mid-90s was an industrial conglomerate, kind of a classic, '70s, '80s industrial conglomerate. Operate in a lot of different businesses, in iron pipe foundry, entire manufacturing company with the core business but had a military building company, a chain of auto parts stores, all kinds of interesting businesses. And then when conglomerates fell out of favor in the early '90s, the parts were worth more than the whole and they spun off or divested most of the business, dividend, a lot of money after the shareholders and tried to figure out what to do with the company and focused on this government software space. It was and still is a very fragmented business. Historically served by a lot of niche players, people who are usually very narrowly focused from a product perspective and often nearly focused from a geographic perspective. So the opportunity there was to create something that didn't exist, a national brand, a national company with a broad set of products serving all of the major software needs of public sector entities. And as I said, there wasn't a company like that at the time. So we were a vertical software company before that was a name. We didn't have a name for it, but that's what we were. And so we did a lot of acquisitions initially to kind of bring together the core products in the first few years. And since then, it's been more of an organic growth story. So we've had pretty consistent high single, low double-digit organic growth supplemented by acquisitions. We've done about 60 acquisitions over the time I've been here. And then it really created a -- products that work together, so not just a holding company with a collection of products, but products that are actually integrated that work together, and create more value for customers from having those products all from one source.

Right. So super interesting. Maybe you can just like take it down a level in terms of like where -- we all live in our respective cities and municipalities and where would you say are the kind of 3 or 4 core markets for Tyler, just so we can kind of place the business and the products and the markets?

So we have products that probably touch each of you that you don't know about because we're not a consumer name. The biggest product set in terms of revenue generation is our public admin or ERP solution. So [ biotic ], ERP, accounting, human resources, payroll. Within that set of solutions, there are dozens of applications that are all integrated that serve very specific vertical needs of government, so things like a utility billing system, water, sewer, trash utility bill could come from the Tyler system. Licensing and permitting. If you apply for a business license or a building permit or an animal license, that could come from a Tyler system. Things like parks and recreation system that manages your soccer league or your park facilities or recreation facilities, outdoor recreation, hunting and fishing licenses, stuff like that. Courts & Justice is an area where we are, by far, the leading player in the U.S. So we do case management systems that manage all the aspects of the civil, criminal, family, probate court case, all the parties, the documents, the events. We have about a 55% market share, of course, in the U.S. and very high win rates, north of 80% in that space. Around that, we have products like jury, prosecutor, jail, probation. And then we have Public Safety, which would be 911 systems, computer-aided dispatch, and then police, fire, and ambulance records management. So we really are the only provider that has that whole end-to-end justice solution. Property taxes, a very important area for local governments, particularly. It's generally their biggest revenue stream. So we manage the math appraisal, so valuing your house for property tax purposes as well as the billing and collection and administration of property taxes. So those are kind of the major functions. So touch a lot of citizens. We have data and analytics platforms that sit on top of those that provide stuff like crime mapping or transparency, open check book, so you can see where your city or your county is spending their money. And so we have a lot of those other applications on top of our...

On top of the pillars that you just talked about. And so yes, so give us a sense for how it all comes together. Maybe kind of walk us through some of your favorite case studies, big customers and how one customer can actually use more than just one of the pillars that you just mentioned.

Yes. So government is a market that's very different from the private sector. Our customers don't really look at these purchases from an ROI basis or from a competitive standpoint. Our customers are not profit motivated, they're not ROI driven. And effectively, they don't have competition. So wherever you live, you don't have a choice about where you pay your utility bill or pay a traffic ticket or get a property tax bill. So governments, while they would like to provide better service to citizens and a better experience, they'd like to be more efficient. And it is a common theme that they have to do more with less. They have limited resources, whether it's from a people standpoint or a technology standpoint. But all the things that we automate are essential functions of government. They're all mission-critical functions. But governments, because they don't have competition and aren't profit motivated, they don't buy a new system because of that or to have a competitive edge over another city or to make more money, the reasons like Tyler might buy a new ERP system. So they tend to be also risk averse. They don't like change. None of this is probably a big surprise. And so they tend to use systems much, much longer than private sector entities would. The average system we replace is probably 20 years old. It's not uncommon that we replace systems that are 40 or more years old, including some very big places that have mainframe systems. We replaced the court system in Cook County, Chicago, second largest county in the country. It was a mainframe system that was 43 years old when we started the project. It was written in COBOL in the '70s. And they'll use these systems as long as they can because they don't want to go through the process of changing. But when it gets to the point that, that system is unreliable, in their case, no more COBOL programmers, so literally might be afraid that, that system could break and not be fixed anymore, then replacing it becomes a kind of a nondiscretionary decision. So over time, the these systems turn over slowly, but it creates a very steady market and a very sort of reliable market. We have -- we've talked about broadly our average customer has 2 or 3 products from Tyler and could have 8 or 10 products. So we have a big cross-selling opportunity within our customer base. And we had an Investor Day middle of last year and talked a lot about the cross-sell and upsell as a major driver of growth going forward. So customers tend to add more products over time, whether it's within a suite of products or more broadly, adding somebody that has a court system adding their ERP system or adding their property tax system when that need comes about. And as we've moved from sort of an on-prem license and maintenance model to a cloud model that made it a little bit easier for that to happen. And so we believe we can continue to accelerate the pace. But we have customers, I think about somewhere like Mobile, Alabama that has almost everything from Tyler, from ERP to court to licensing to just about any application they could have all in the cloud and kind of a true kind of total Tyler story. We talk a lot about our vision for connected communities, which is really enabling departments within a jurisdiction, so within a city or a county. These systems tend to be very siloed, bought by different decision-makers used in the silo. So they have a lot of difficulty sharing data or using data from multiple solutions. We have an analytics data platform that enables that. And then enabling governments in a region to share data or across jurisdictions, whether it's the police department, when they arrest someone to be able to prepopulate a jail booking rather than starting all over when they take them to the county jail. Those kinds of things that create efficiencies and tie these systems together.

Very interesting. But you did mention just on the go-to-market side, if -- how often are they literally separate decision-makers, like take Mobile, Alabama. And then how is Tyler's go-to-market considered to...

Yes. Often, they are different decision-makers within a city or a county. So the finance director might be the decision maker for the ERP system, the police chief for the public safety system. In accounting, the tax assessor, who might be an elected official deciding on the property tax system. So we have to win each of these deals on our own merits by features and functionality, by references and reputation, by technology. So we have competition, it may be different competition for each one of those products that we have strong competition for each one of those, so they have to win on their own merits. But we believe that the advantages of our integration and our connected communities vision bring to the products from whether it's technically the public safety software and the court software being integrated out of the box. So the data flows through that process. Or whether it's having an analytics layer on top of it or having a common workflow engine or one single sign-on and security platform across all of our products that, that creates an additional value in a more -- and competitive advantage that creates the reason why someone should buy that second, third and fourth and fifth product from Tyler as opposed to from a different vendor.

Do you ever see it? So it's common workflow, integrated capabilities across different products. Do you ever see a classic kind of software strategy as just kind of more of the enterprise license agreement that provides a lower total cost across multiple components? Or does that not really...

Not really a thing as much. But we do, I think, show them a pretty compelling story around the efficiencies they get from having those multiple products from Tyler as opposed to having them from a disparate set of vendors that have to be integrated in a one-off manner. So we have done a lot in the last couple of years really to facilitate cross-selling more effectively from modifying our compensation structures to make sure everyone is getting commissions and getting paid appropriately, to redefining or redesigning some of our go-to-market strategies to make it easier for sales reps across multiple Tyler products to work together to sell those multiple products, have multi-suite deals or have cross-sells. And particularly around driving some of the cross-sell motion through NIC, which was a large acquisition a couple of years ago that we have sort of 2 directions of cross-sell there.

Why don't we -- since you mentioned that, why don't we jump into that?

Sure.

Huge acquisition for the company. Pretty transformational. Just give us a sense for NIC and what that did for the company.

Yes. So NIC was, by far, the largest acquisition in the company's history in [indiscernible]

I think you dropped off. Do a test there. Okay.

[ So April of 2021, it was a $2.3 billion ] purchase price, another public company for the first time. The only time we've acquired another public company. And so very complementary business. So NIC, Tyler historically has been mostly focused at the local government level. We had some state government business, but most of our relationships and a lot of products that would work at the state level, but we really didn't have a sales organization or a lot of relationships there. NIC was focused mostly at the state level and where Tyler mostly provides essential back-office software, and I see mostly provided digital access to the back office systems. So mostly at the state level. They have 28 statewide state enterprise contracts where they provide -- or we provide digital access to what are often mainframe legacy back-end systems. So manage the state's website, build integrations to systems like a DMV system. So if you renew your motor vehicle registration, get your new license plates, we would have built a portal that connects to that back-end system, you would go through our portal to renew your license plates, you pay a fee for that. We get a convenience fee typically. So there's -- it's self-funded model that the users are generally paying the fees that fund all these services. And then we typically process those payments. So we processed north of $50 billion in payments for governments last year. We're the largest payment processor for the public sector. So it's a transaction-based model as opposed to a software model. And so really besides it being a really good complementary stand-alone business, it opens up a ton of cross-selling opportunities for us to be able to sell Tyler software products in the state government where we didn't have a presence through these very deep NIC relationships. They have very broad contracts that allow us to sell software, often bypass the competitive process, make the contracting much easier. And we've seen a number of opportunities, but more -- so far, we've had several every quarter, but really are building up a much bigger pipeline of these opportunities across lots of different Tyler products. The cross-sell going the other direction is that Tyler has a lot of software products that facilitate payments, whether it's utility billing or property taxes or licensing, lots of payments are being processed through Tyler systems. We're not doing that processing. And we had started to build a model that was more sort of a reseller model so we would bring payment partners to the -- to our customers and do some integration to our software and get a revenue share from that payment processing. With NIC, we have a very robust payment platform with robust mobile capabilities, obviously, processing billions of dollars of payments for -- including all the payments for the state of Texas and the state of Florida. So we're taking that platform now and bringing that down to local government. We've integrated that platform to our core software products that facilitate payments. So it creates efficiencies for the government. Can automate the reconciliation process, automate some things that would otherwise be more manual with a horizontal payment processor. And so we're embedding it when we sell new software systems. We're going back to our existing customer base and selling payments on top of that. And really looking to do enterprise-wide payments even at the city and county level. We're still in the very, very early days of that. We've done a lot to sort of integrate our 2 payments organizations to do a lot of technology integration with our products and now are kind of going to market. We did about 600 new payments deals with Tyler software customers last year. 172 of them in the fourth quarter and really look for that to be one of our drivers of kind of double-digit payment growth over the next several years.

Right. So in addition to adding the payments pillar, it also added a different revenue model to the company. But maybe let's just step back. That's obviously been a big focus for Tyler over the last decade and just kind of changing the revenue model. So can you just level set on just perpetual SaaS transaction, where did you come from and kind of where you're going?

Yes. So Tyler, historically, on the software side was for a long time a traditional perpetual license model, front licenses, big capital spend and then maintenance on top of that. Very, very sticky, though, the maintenance. Our attrition is between 1% and 2% a year over a really long period of time. So our customers don't get acquired and they don't go out of business. So we get a little bit of a head start there, but it is a very, very sticky business, whether it's maintenance or subscription. We started really moving from license to sort of a hybrid model for a number of years where we sold our products either on-prem with a license or hosted with the subscription. We hosted them at one of our proprietary data centers, and we let customers choose, and we're kind of neutral or agnostic in what model they picked. And then going back, I guess, 2019, we said, now we're cloud first. We're all in on the cloud. We -- for most of our products, we stopped selling them on-prem at all. Started more actively migrating our existing on-prem customers to the cloud. Entered into a partnership with AWS to be our public cloud hosting partner and started a process to exit our data centers, get out of the data center business and move to the public cloud. So all those things sort of accelerated the cloud shift over the last 3 or 4 years. Obviously, put pressure on margins as cloud transitions will do. So we started losing the license revenues and building up the maintenance -- the subscription stream. Last year was really the -- sort of the inflection point or the pivot here. So our SaaS revenues now exceed our maintenance plus license revenues. In the fourth quarter, 89% of our new software sales volume was cloud. And so we just really have a small handful of products that we still sell on-prem at all with public safety being the biggest. So we've really kind of -- and then last year also was the trough on the margin. So we're now at the point where we've built up that SaaS stream at higher margins and that offset the impact of the mix shifts changing. So today, our overall revenue mix, we're about 30% SaaS, about 30% transactions and about 25% on-prem, which would be maintenance plus licenses. And then about 15% services and other. We do most of the implementation services around our software products with our own professional services team. But again, almost 90% of the new business is SaaS, so that mix will continue to shift and -- so transactions, and we've talked about longer-term kind of high teens to low 20s growth in SaaS revenues and then transactions kind of being low double-digit growth.

You mentioned kind of the margin pressure and that abating. Can you talk about the back end, your contract with AWS, just the strategy around that and timing?

Yes. So we actually just signed a new contract with AWS that went into place January 1. Our initial 5-year agreement is coming up on renewal. We've learned a lot over the last 5 years, AWS has been a fantastic partner, and we've been really pleased with the relationship. Now we're much further down the road in terms of the transaction. We've deployed most of our products in a cloud efficient model in AWS. So we've done a lot of development around our products to get them to run more efficiently in the cloud. And we've seen unit costs continue to come down as we scale up there. We started a process a couple of years ago to migrate out of our data centers. The first of our proprietary data centers will close mid '24 and the second on the will close around the end of 2025. We have what we've called bubble costs until we get to that point because as we move customers out and into AWS, we start paying AWS but we still have a lot of fixed costs around our own data centers. So that's the...

Double.

The double, yes. And so we'll start to get some relief from that around midyear this year, which will contribute to our margin expansion. And then we'll get more as we get [indiscernible] we've been -- I'd say our unit costs have generally been running a little bit below plan. So as our products -- as we released our cloud efficient products, they've run more efficiently than we had anticipated. So we're pretty pleased with where we stand in terms of our margin progression. But most of that is coming from our cloud operations.

All right. So I think we were talking about NIC. One of the -- I think you announced a very large landmark deal with the California parks and recreation.

Yes.

Thank you very much. It was a one of the largest deals in the history of Tyler, but also there was a unique structure where it was kind of like at no cost to California taxpayers. Give us a sense for what was the structure underlying that, and can we expect to see those type of things in the future?

Yes, this is the fourth quarter deal. As you said, the largest deal by estimated value in Tyler's history, whether transaction or software based, and it's got elements of both in it. So we have a very robust outdoor recreation software solution that manages things like parks entrants and campground reservations and retail, all the aspects of running outdoor recreation. We also obviously have a big payment processing business. So the California State Parks, which is the largest state park organization in the country, wanted to replace its solution, and we won that opportunity in the fourth quarter. So we're replacing Conduent as the prime contractor for kind of managing all the aspects of the park and then replacing Elavon as the payment provider. So we were able to bring a unique -- because California does have budget issues and faces some pretty serious budget pressures, we were able to bring a solution to them that's entirely self-funded. So parks have a lot of fees associated with them, whether it's an entrance fee or a fee you pay to tour the Hearst Castle or all those kinds of things that they can basically tack on a convenience fee that comes to us to fund all these services and fund our software. So we'll be doing the payment processing. We'll provide the software, and we have some subcontractors that are doing some aspects like call center support. It's a contract -- we had a small piece of the software under the Conduent arrangement. So doing less than $3 million a year in revenue. This will take it up to -- this year, because we started late in the year, it will be around $6 million of revenues. So it takes us up to $20 million or so in revenues next year growing to close to $30 million by the end of the contract. It's all transaction-based so it won't show up in our software revenues, even though part of it is providing software to them. But I think the key is that we were in a unique position to be able to provide all of those solutions and to fund it with a transaction-based model that we were comfortable with because we have a lot of experience with NIC. I don't know that it will be the major way we deliver software or fund software, but there are some instances where there are transactions or revenues associated with it that can -- that the cost can be passed on to users. It's not the case with everything, like a payroll system. But -- so I think in some areas like parks and recreation, it can be a way that we can have an advantage there. But I don't expect to see a major shift in the way we account for a software...

You account a solution that was a win-win for you and that particular customer.

Yes.

Got it. In terms of the solutions that Tyler delivers, when you think about classic enterprise stack, I think people tend to think of Tyler as more on the application side because you think about courts or schools, et cetera, you deliver a specific functionality. But actually, you're actually doing both. You actually have some infrastructure elements as well. Give us a sense for some of the components underneath, and do you expect to do more of that to complement your applications stack.

Yes. In addition to these specific vertical applications, we do have some sort of platform solutions, so we have a low-code application platform that's primarily used at the state and federal levels to manage a lot of -- sort of like a similar to Pegasystems or Salesforce kind of a platform designed just for government. So again, very specific sort of accelerators or modules that have been built around that. We sell it, especially in the federal space. We have a really wide network of partners that do some of the sales and also do a lot of the implementation work. So it's used for things like business process management or case management. So for example, in the federal space, background checks and security clearances, every federal agency has to do background checks and security clearances. One might think that they would have a federal system to do that, but they don't. So each agency has to go out and find a solution for that. So we have built an application on our platform that does that. And we had, for example, a big deal last year with the Department of State, which does a lot of background checks and security clearances that will manage all that, things like managing EOC claims, veterans' benefits. So a really strong platform there that we're now able to leverage also at the state level and use that for a lot of the development of applications to manage -- to support services that NIC provides. And then, of course, our payments platform and our transaction-based platform, which we've expanded more recently through another acquisition to add disbursement capability that we can also leverage across our customer base.

Right. I have to ask the question. So you made 3 recent, let's say, tuck-in acquisitions that were related to AI. And so yes, so what's been that impact as an accelerator of your business? And maybe another -- the second question is like, is it something that you're just going to bring in-house to enable you to deliver your applications in and of themselves? Or do you actually look to charge separately for new AI capability in customer base?

Yes. It's a little bit of both. It's a mixed bag in our customer base. So in some cases, governments, some governments are really actively looking for AI. In some cases, they're banning AI. I mean, you see in some states that have said no AI. So -- and they're all learning. Rarely is government on the leading edge or the very first to embrace anything, whether it's the cloud or now AI. So we believe there are a lot of opportunities within our product set to utilize AI to -- or to improve operations for our customers, especially where governments do a lot of things that can be kind of repetitive, processing a license application, things like that, and especially where governments really face people shortages. And they've lost a lot of people during COVID and haven't rebuilt their workforces, so they do struggle. And so to the extent they can offload some of that or make it more efficient with AI, that's a benefit to them. One of the companies we acquired that's really AI focused is in the sort of the document management space with a focus on redactions, especially in courts documents. So taking documents to come into the courts that would be made public and eliminating sensitive data rather than literally a person going through with a black magic marker, the use of machine learning to identify that data and redact it. We believe that technology can be used more broadly across other Tyler products. So we have a task force internally that's focused on prioritizing those opportunities for us to either make acquisitions or direct R&D dollars to areas in our products that can have the biggest impact. And we have some of those projects underway as well as internally, how we can use it around customer support or internal software development to operate more efficiently as well.

Great. I have a couple of questions, but I do want to see if we have any in the audience with any questions. Anyway, just think about some questions, and I'll just go in with gross margins. So give us a sense for the components of your cost of goods sold across the portfolio and what are the drivers going forward to expand.

Yes. We have various transaction revenues and software revenues, which have different kind of margin profiles. Transactions are lower margins, especially if they're in a gross model where we pay a significant amount of merchant fees, so they're kind of a pass-through. But just the impact of merchant fees, if you take this out of both our revenues and our cost of revenues, it has almost a 200 basis point effect on our overall operating margin. So pretty meaningful there. But the transactions are very good cash flow and very complementary to the software business, the different margin profile. We do believe that we can improve margins around transactions over time as we sell more sort of premium priced services because of the integration to our software. On the software side, margin improvement mostly comes from our cloud operations. So as we scale in AWS, as we move our on-prem customers to the cloud, typically, we're getting about a 1.7x uplift in revenue and higher margins from those. And then we have major opportunities around version of consolidation. So we have a lot of versions of some of our products, and that impacts our margins around both support and development. And we have -- as we move our customers to the cloud, we consolidate on one version, and that is taking place now as we eliminate some set older versions of products, but that will be a driver of margin improvement. So we've talked about overall taking our operating margins from we were about 23% last year to 30% plus by 2030 and roughly 25% by 2025, a couple of hundred basis points over 2 years and averaging about 100 basis points a year, although not necessarily in a linear fashion.

Any questions? Over here.

Just on margins. Is there any limit given your client base, you think, to the upside for profit margins?

Well, I'm sure there's a limit. We think there's a significant expansion opportunity, particularly as we scale in the cloud. I think maybe structurally, one of the things that may be a little different about Tyler compared to, say, a best-in-class pure SaaS company might be that because we have a lot of products that's a strength of ours, it gives us a lot of cross-sell opportunities. It makes each of our products more competitive. But there are some things that we just can't quite scale across all of our products. So we have different expertise in each of those products to the person that develops or supports or implements a property tax system is a different person than the person that does that for a public safety system. So I think inherently, there may be a little bit of a margin limiter there. But we believe there's a lot of runway ahead of us in terms of margin expansion for a number of years.

Right. One more back there.

Can you tell us a little bit about the health of your clients' budgets? Fiscal spending has been pretty robust. Do you expect to see some of those turn into awards over the next couple of years? Or has the spending already happened?

No. I think generally, our clients' budgets, California state budget notwithstanding, generally, our clients' budgets, especially at the local level are pretty healthy. I mean, we've talked about pretty consistently for the last year market activity at an elevated level, definitely beyond pre-COVID levels kind of at an all-time high in most of our products, in terms of the RFPs we're seeing, the number of demos we're doing, the way sales are progressing. Now our sales cycles are long. They're typically, a year, 1.5 years would be very normal for an average deal. So that activity, if we get an RFP today, that might be a contract a year or 18 months from now and then revenues after that. So we did see a really strong fourth quarter in terms of bookings and new business, and I think that's reflective of some of the activity we've seen for recent quarters. But we're not seeing it slow down. Generally, it's pretty strong. Stimulus, the ARPA funds are contributing to that. They're not the biggest factor, but they've got until the end of 2026 to spend those funds. And so we think that's a tailwind for the next couple of years. But even absent the ARPA funds, it's a really active strong market for most of our customers.

All right. Fantastic. Well, Brian, despite the record attendance at the tech conference here, I don't think I'm going to help you with the California state budget, so -- but outside of that, congratulations on all your success. And thanks for coming.

Great. Thank you. Appreciate it.