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

Perfect. Thanks, everyone. I'm Jeff Hickey, and I'm here with Brian Miller, EVP and CFO of Tyler Technologies. And just as a reminder, you should all have a QR code. So if you have any questions, you can feel free to just use your phone, scan the QR code and type up a question. And I'll get it on the iPad up here.

So Brian, maybe just to kick things off, for those of us in the room, not as close to the Tyler story, maybe you could give us a bit of background of the business in general. Obviously, a lot more public sector exposure than a lot of enterprise-focused software companies that are here at our conference.

Yes. I mean we are exclusively focused on the public sector. So we're a vertical software company focused on the public sector. We take a pretty broad view of the public sector. For a long time, we were mostly focused on local governments, cities, counties and school districts. But in recent years, we've significantly expanded our footprint in the state level. And we have a small presence at the federal level, about 5% of our revenues, which also came from an acquisition. So we're broad in terms of levels of government we serve. We're 98% domestic, so most the U.S. government, most of the international parts of Canada. And then we're very broad in terms of the breadth of products that we offer. So we provide a wide range of what I can describe as back-office software that runs multi-essential functions of government. So courts and justice, the systems that run the court cases, jails, juries, probation, prosecutors, public safety. We have 911 systems and police, fire and ambulance systems, property taxes, the biggest revenue stream for most local governments, so that's an important application, licensing and permitting, ERP systems, so financials, payroll. Human resources is about 1/3 of our business. So all these are essential functions of government that we provide the solutions to manage. And then we've layered on top of that a growing transaction-based business around payments and other transactions that complements the underlying software business.

Got it. And when we think about just with -- you mentioned roughly 5% of your business is loosely federal. Is there any impact we should be thinking about with just the recent election cycle roughly a month ago? Or is that a little less material just given so much is...

Yes. Not a surprising question, but the answer is really no impact on it, whether it's in our federal business or at the state or local level. I've been at Tyler 27 years, and I don't think ever, over that time, on either an earnings call or in MD&A, we've mentioned elections as a factor, positive or negative. We're about 85% recurring revenues from the essential solutions. Federal changes in administration may slow down some sales processes that are underway because of agency to get new heads and that can slow things down. But that's not a significant factor. The demand is still mostly driven by replacement of aging systems. And by aging, I mean decades-old systems that is generally kind of a very steady kind of supplier of demand in our space.

And just thinking about like the backdrop of demand, what are the other kind of key significant drivers? And how healthy is that right now just in terms of...

Yes. We've been pretty consistent for the last several quarters talking about activity in our marketplace, demand, sales activity, kind of even going back to the kind of the very beginning of sales cycles, the number of RFPs we're seeing, the number of sales demos we're doing that lead ultimately -- and we have long sales cycles. So the typical mid-range software deal might be a year to 18 months from RFP to signing a contract. So we've talked about that activity being at an elevated level, certainly back to pre-COVID levels. In most cases, it's across our products. It's kind of at an all-time high, but it's stable at these very elevated levels. And we've had a really consistent commentary for the last 3 or 4 quarters around that. Doesn't -- we're not seeing signs of it slowing down new budgets as they go into place, a lot of places, midyear of this last year. We saw new budgets. So generally, we're pretty consistent with last year. There is sort of this underpinning right now from the federal stimulus, the ARPA funds that for the last couple of years have provided, at a minimum, sort of this added comfort to governments. There might have been concern about recession possibilities or effects coming out of COVID. So the federal stimulus is -- I don't -- I wouldn't say it's been -- I think it's a factor in that active market. I don't think it's the biggest factor. I mean generally, budgets are in pretty good shape really at all levels, certainly at local and at state levels. So pretty strong economic backdrop, supplemented by the ARPA funds. They've got until the end of '24 to commit those funds sort of internally and until the end of '26 to spend them. So we think that will continue to be a supporting factor, but I don't really see a big drop-off when those go away. It's just been a pretty solid market. But the ultimate driver, as I said, is governments replacing old systems. Because governments aren't profit motivated, they're not ROI driven, they don't have competition, so they tend to not like change a lot. They don't -- they're not -- they're motivated by the same reasons as a private enterprise would be to replace a system to become more efficient or have a competitive edge. So they tend to use these systems until they don't work anymore, until they're dead or dying or not supported by the vendor. A lot of in-house systems that were custom-written, some of them in the '70s that are still being used that are COBOL systems. There aren't any more COBOL programmers. So those are the kinds of things that ultimately drive them to replace the systems and create demand. So it's a very steady demand. It's hard to accelerate. It's never explosive. But I think we have seen more recently, as there has been more of a push towards digital modernization and especially coming out of COVID, where there are, obviously, the need to support remote or hybrid work. That wasn't something governments were very good at. And some of that is because their systems only worked if you could come into the courthouse and sit at a desk that had a terminal at it. And so I think there is some increasing desire for things that might have been thought of as nice-to-have, but now they're saying we really should have that functionality. There's online access. There's self-service. All those kinds of things have become more important and maybe accelerating the replacement of some of these older systems.

Got it. Need to modernize. With the multi-decade systems, it's kind of terrifying. There's a lot out there still running on COBOL and whatnot. I'm curious, like with the advancement of just generative AI and developer tooling, code-completion tools, like that's been one area that other people we've spoken to say it's much easier to refactor old applications to something new because you get help from that. Do you see any increased velocity from your customers to that? Or is it still just very steady as you alluded to?

Another kind of characteristic of the government is they're not -- typically, they don't want to be the first with anything. I'd say we're using AI tools internally increasingly and including in our development efforts. But for our customers and what we do in our product with AI, I think right now, there's a lot of curiosity that we saw at our user conference this last May. We put on a lot of sessions around AI. Our customers are very curious about it. They hear a lot about it, but they're not just demanding it. So we're being pretty -- taking a pretty thoughtful approach to -- we don't want to spin up dozens of AI development projects across all of our products. So we're trying to prioritize, figure out where we can leverage things across multiple products and where we can provide the most value to our and ultimately monetize that as well. The governments do a lot of routine processing, license applications or data entry kinds of things that -- and that they're generally faced with pretty meaningful staffing shortages. So they're being -- increasingly has to do more essential things but with fewer resources. And they're having -- as they face -- they have retirements or people leave the workforce, trouble attracting new workers. So the use of AI to do things like automate data entry from, say, a court -- we did an acquisition last year of a company that was a partner of ours in the court space. So we provide the court case management system. Most of the documents come into the courts electronically through a Tyler electronic filing system. But often once that document comes in and say it's a lawsuit, it's got data in it, a clerk has to take data, track data and create a case file. And this is the plaintiff. This is the defendant. This is the amount. So this solution uses AI to pre-populate the -- create the case and then to redact sensitive data from -- there was a point where they used the black Magic Marker to do it. But now AI -- if that's a Social Security number, we're going to cross that out. So those are examples of around how governments -- we think there's a lot of opportunities for governments to address problems they have through the use of AI, particularly around processing.

Got it. Last year, on the Analyst Day, you put out some longer-term 2030 targets. I believe low double-digit loosely recurring revenue growth, CAGRs. Help us just understand kind of the bridge to get there, the different moving pieces. You've got -- you've made a number of very significant acquisitions, touching on things like payments or underlying data platforms. But how should we think about the drivers to achieve that over that long period of time and...

We put out 2025 and 2030 targets around revenue growth, margin expansion and free cash flow growth. We thought it was an important time to do that. We were really at an inflection point in our cloud transition, which has been a multiyear cloud transition. But last year, '23, was the year we kind of crossed over that inflection point where our SaaS revenues now exceed our license and maintenance revenues. Almost 100% of our new business is coming in the cloud, and SaaS has turned from a headwind into a tailwind from a margin and a revenue growth perspective. So we thought it was important to kind of realign where we thought that would take us over the next few years. And so all of those targets really were organic only. They didn't include M&A, although M&A certainly will be a part our growth story as it has been in the past. So that -- from a revenue perspective, we have our recurring software revenues growing, I think, 9% to 12% and then -- which is a couple of ticks above where historically we were kind of 8% to 10%. And then the transaction revenues, which are payments and other transaction funded revenues, growing a tick above that, I think, 10% to 13%. There's sort of the core -- the stable business that I talked about, the steady new replacement business. But there's an increasing contribution from cross-sell and upsell. So recognizing that we have even though it's still a very, very fragmented market with most of the systems currently being used still came from a vendor who's no longer competitive in the marketplace but still very, very fragmented in terms of where those systems came from that we have, by far, the largest product line or product offering of anyone. And we have, by far, the biggest customer base with roughly 40,000 installations of our software in about 14,000 different jurisdictions. So this customer base that we've accumulated over decades provides a huge cross-sell and upsell opportunity. So our average customer has 2 or 3 products from us and could have 8 or 10 products. So doing a lot of things internally to align ourselves to take advantage of that and be positioned better, whether it's suggesting sales commission, structures, how we credit revenue internally. Structurally, are we doing everything we can to maximize cross-sell opportunities? Adding -- and then as we add more products either through development or M&A, that gives us more products to put in the sales reps' bags, more cross-sell opportunities. So that's a bigger focus of kind of going from what our historical growth rates are to a little bit above that. The payments business, most of the -- that higher growth there, again, comes from cross-sell. So we have this huge customer base of local government software customers that are using products that facilitate payments, present bills, facilitate payments, utility billing systems, municipal court systems for traffic tickets, property tax systems, licensing systems, parks and recreation systems. All those have payment components. So with the payment platform that we got with the NIC acquisition, which is mostly focused at the state level, we've taken that platform, embedded it with our software products now and so created a payment -- an integrated payment platform with sort of the system of record. So it provides more value to our customers than a generic horizontal payment processor. It automates reconciliations, provides better reporting and data and analytics capabilities. And customers are willing to pay more for that. So it's better margins than the kind of the commoditized payment business. So that's really where our focus is today. We're still kind of in the early stages of executing on that cross-sell, but we're seeing it grow nicely quarter-over-quarter. Last quarter, I think we did 260-some new payments deals with existing software customers, adding $8.5 million of new ARR. And that should just continue to grow. So there's kind of layering that on. But cross-sell is a bigger and bigger piece of the sales opportunity going forward.

So I think I have a parking ticket I need to pay when I get home. So it's running through that. When you think about like the roughly 2 to 3 use cases that could be 8, 9 or 10, are there any natural areas that cross-sell really easily, like things that attach really naturally? And like what are the lowest hanging fruits?

Yes. I think probably the biggest one is Courts & Justice and Public Safety. And maybe not coincidentally, we've seen really strong growth in Public Safety in the last year. And that's been a really bright spot for us. So we're the only company that has both the court system and the public safety systems. They're clearly adjacent markets, but they have completely different sets of competitors. So we have the ability to offer -- if you think about a life cycle of an event, there's -- something happens. There's a 911 call. So that's a computer-aided dispatch system that's in our Public Safety suite and officers dispatch. There's, say, an arrest. So there's a record system, which is also part of the public safety suite, but those are 2 different applications. You take them to jail. There's a jail system. There's a booking. Then the prosecutor files charges. That's a prosecutor system. There's a court case. So that's a case management system. There's a jury selection. So there's a jury system. And then there's a probation system on the end. And there's a few other things around there, but those are the big ones. A lot of places, that would be whatever that was, 8 different systems from 8 different vendors. And it can cross over jurisdictions, too, because the police may be at the city but the jail and the court is at the county. So we're the only company that has the ability to offer one system that's -- or one set of applications that are completely integrated so that the data, the parties, everything flows through that, and that it stays together. So that's where we're really seeing nice cross-sell opportunities. That's probably the most natural where there's -- we have -- and we have the -- the courts is our biggest individual market share. So we have about 55% of the U.S. courts. Public safety is a very competitive market. We're newer in that space. So we don't have -- and we've got a single-digit market share there, but we're really seeing the ability to leverage that quite a bit. There are other areas like land records and property tax. So the system that the county court keeps the deeds and titles and liens and all that, and then that data flows over to the property tax system. So those are kind of natural adjacencies, ERP interfaces with a lot of things. So there are a lot of natural connections that provide us with the ability to sell new suites of products. And then we've done a lot of work around sort of creating these common foundational elements across all of our products because we have the -- each of those products needs to win its own merits. It's going to compete against a competitor in public safety, like a Motorola or a Hexagon or our different courts competitor. And so we've got to win on features and functionality and reputation. But the fact that these systems work together well provides us with an added competitive edge. And so we've also created sort of foundational elements that are common. So the same service bus, the same security and sign-on. So you use multiple Tyler products. Whether you're a citizen or a government employed, you're only going to have one password and one set of security credentials, common payment engine, common workflow engine. All those things, again, create more value, simplify it, make their -- a better -- an added reason why you should buy that next product from Tyler as opposed to another vendor.

With the kind of broad number of applications Tyler has, how do you think about just maybe areas you might look to inorganically or just organically develop internally? Are there any kind of hot areas that you feel like there are just gaps in the current product portfolio that you pursue? Or...

There's not big gaping holes. Around each of our products, there are a lot of tuck-in opportunity, whether it's adding technologies like the AI-based court partner we had or adding like our jury system and our probation system came from acquisitions of small SaaS companies that just did those very narrow products. So there's still a lot of tuck-in opportunities. Sometimes they are companies we already partner with. And we regularly look at those kinds of acquisitions usually because we can leverage our sales force. We can leverage our customer base. Those are things we certainly expect would grow. Even if they're starting out a small companies, that can grow at rates significantly higher than our core growth rate. In terms of bigger areas, I'd say there are some things around citizen engagement. So not necessarily just a software application but around citizen engagement that either we're making investments in or could look to make acquisitions in. And more broadly, maybe at the state level and the federal level, where we have a smaller presence on the software side. One of the key strategies around the NIC acquisition, which primarily provided digital access to state systems that didn't really have a lot of software products on their own. So it's provided us an opportunity to sell Tyler software products to state governments through their relationships. But there's other applications that would be state-specific that we could look to add through acquisitions, so to broaden our offerings there. At the federal level, we primarily serve that market with a low-code application platform, but there could be specific sort of federally focused products. Core to our strategy is always though that we're an off-the-shelf software product company. We're not building custom one-off systems. We're not a systems integrator to go build one big system for the federal government for some specific thing. We build systems that we can sell off-the-shelf software over and over again. And so to the extent we can address the state and federal markets with products that meet that criteria, then we're interested in expanding in both of those markets.

Got it. And maybe just dovetailing off M&A. How do you think about just capital allocation, whether it's paying down some of the debt you have or think about share repurchases? I think you guided to, what, low 20s free cash flow margins. How do you prioritize that?

Low 20s in the near term, high 20s to low 30s in the longer term, and that's one that we're actually already finishing 2024 well ahead of the target we set for 2025. So we're running ahead on the cash flow. We generate a lot of cash. Our cash flow characteristics are improving as more and more of our business is recurring and SaaS business is paid in advance, payments getting paid at the time of the transaction, so lower receivables and better cash flow. We have made a lot of progress -- or we have been focused over the last couple of years primarily on paying down the debt that came from the NIC acquisition. We had some term debt that was floating rate, and then we have a convert. We prepaid all the term debt well in advance of the term. Earlier this year, we paid off the last of that about 2 years ahead of its scheduled term. So that's largely behind us. We have left a $600 million convert that's due in the spring of 2026. That's at a quarter point of interest. So we're fine with that. It is in the money, but very low interest rate. So really, from a debt perspective, we're kind of where we need to be and have a lot of capacity, a lot of opportunity with our balance sheet. We've said that in the near term, I think the kind of tuck-in kinds of acquisitions that are mostly more on the small side, kind of more manageable, are likely to be where our focus is. And when I say near term, probably the next year or so. Because we've got so many significant initiatives on our plate around the cloud transition and the cross-sell and the payments, and there's just -- and still integrating the NIC acquisition, so from a management focused perspective, we want to be sure we get all those things right. So in terms of being -- actively looking for a $2 billion acquisition or $3 billion acquisition, that's not something that in the near term but will be a little bit further down the road. And I think those kinds of opportunities will be there, and we'll be well positioned for that. Buybacks have always been something we've been really opportunistic about, particularly when there have been bigger pullbacks, especially when those aren't really related to kind of the way we see the long-term opportunity with the company. But when there have been some of those pullbacks, we've taken advantage of them and been aggressive buyers of our stock. We have not done that in the last couple of years because we've been focused on paying down the debt. But I'd say from where we stand right now with the balance sheet that we're certainly well positioned that if there are compelling opportunities in the stock, that would kind of be higher in priority for us.

Got it. You brought up a key focus area, obviously, the focus on shifting to the cloud. And you have some ambitious targets of just flipping some of those existing maintenance customers over to the cloud. So could you help us understand maybe what customers maybe are still hesitant to move over and what the roadblocks and blockers and things you can help alleviate to...

Yes. So if you look at our whole customer base today, we've -- obviously, over the last several years, an increasing percentage of our new customers have come to us in the cloud. We had a hybrid model for a long time where we were agnostic, and we let customers pick. Now it's pretty much -- last quarter, 97% of our new contract value is SaaS. But with existing customers, we've got these decades of customers that have been deployed on-prem. We've been migrating them. That's starting to accelerate. So if you look at our whole customer base today, it's about -- in terms of dollars, about 40% is in the cloud today and 60% still on-prem. We've said that by 2030, we expect that 80% to 85% of that on-prem base will have migrated to the cloud. And when they migrate to the cloud, we typically get a 1.7 to 1.8x uplift in the annual revenues. So that volume of customers migrating has been increasing, both in terms of the number of customers, but more importantly, the average ARR. So more of our bigger customers are starting to migrate. The -- but we've said that when we're at the peak and whether that's 3 years from now or 2 years or 3 years or 4 years from now, that we'll be doing twice as many flips as we are today. The -- one of the big gating items around the pace of those flips have been that we've had a lot of customers in the cloud and we only have one version of the software and everyone's on it. Everyone upgrades at the same time, but that hasn't been the case with on-prem. So we have supported multiple versions of multiple products of software, and that's really expensive and doesn't provide the best customer experience, and it's expensive and burdensome for us. So as we move those customers to the cloud, if they're not on the current version, they need to upgrade. And we've been sunsetting older versions, consolidating down the number of older versions to get customers on the current version to be in a position to flip and have made a lot of progress with that in the last couple of years. So that's kind of one of the gating items that we've made progress with. And then just in general, the market. Like with a lot of things, government has been slower to embrace the cloud. But now I think generally, they understand the advantages both -- for them. Cybersecurity is a big concern, and that's probably been one of the biggest drivers in accelerating flips as customers either experience a ransomware attack or see one of their peers experience one and their comfort with the AWS environment being more secure than their own on-prem networks. So a number of drivers there that are accelerating that. But we're very confident around those targets and getting that revenue uplift as well as improving the customer experience as they get into the cloud.

Got it. I know we're almost out of time, but I was going to squeeze in 2 just from the audience. One is you were touching on just efforts to migrate to the cloud and how it can be costly to manage all these different past versions. When you get customers to the cloud, does that make it easier to cross-sell other products just naturally?

Yes. It makes it easier. We control the environment. It also provides us with, I think, an upsell opportunity at the time of the flip that we're really kind of just starting to take advantage of or to pursue more actively that they have products from other customers -- other vendors like the probation system. It might be from another vendor that's on-prem, and that gives us an opportunity to accelerate the replacement of that and bring it in. So yes, I think the cross-sell and upsell, both from a logistical sort of deployment, it's easier, but it provides us with an opportunity to have that conversation and try to sell them more things.

That final one I'll squeeze in is, how many competitors do you typically compete with during an RFP? And what are you doing that your competitors aren't doing? Maybe that depends on what exactly you're targeting...

About 1/3 of our deals take place without RFP as a sole source and through either a joint purchasing agreement or piggybacking on the existing Tyler product. But in those competitive processes, it can be -- in an ERP, it could be 4 to 6. It could be, in courts, 2 or 3; public safety, 2 or 3. Multiple competitors. It would -- features and functionality, references and reputation are kind of the top criteria, and we do really well in all of those technologies further down the list and price even further down. So again, the ability to offer the suite of products that are interconnected, given our presence, the history we have investing in products and continuous improvement in our products as these customers make these long-term decisions give us a real competitive advantage. And in most of our core products, the ERP, tax, courts, we have north of a 50% win rate.

Got it. That's great. Well, I know we're a little over time. But thank you, Brian, so much for being with us today.

Thank you.

We'll give you a round of applause. Thank you.