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

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Really fortunate to have Brian Miller, CFO from Tyler Technologies, with us to kind of talk about how things are going with the business and take your questions at the end. So with that, I'll start it off, I mean we just finished off -- Tyler finished off, its '24 fiscal year. Just how is business kind of heading into '25 and kind of just the overall kind of outlook?

Yes. Really off to a strong finish to '24 and off to a good start to '25. I think our guidance was at least in line with what people expected for '25. We had an Investor Day in '23 and laid out some '25 targets and 2030 targets. And we're certainly on track to meet or exceed all those 2025 targets, especially around cash flow, where we've already -- in '24 went well past where we're targeting for 2025. So the market remains very active in the public sector. We continue to see level of RFPs, number of sales demos, those kind of leading indicators continue to be really stable at elevated levels. So coming into the year with a really strong outlook and a lot of momentum coming off of Q4.

Great. We will dig into some of that because I think there's some cool announcements that you guys have. But I guess, just generally, there's been a lot of work around the platform, whether it's kind of making version control, et cetera, bringing things to the cloud, all the things. How are you balancing kind of in your seat as CFO, the product, the spend around product innovation versus kind of just maintaining those great free cash flow numbers that you alluded to, how is that kind of process?

Yes, they're working pretty well together. We certainly don't have limitless resources, but we have raised our R&D spend coming into '25 around some specific areas, especially around some investments in AI. And fortunately, our margin expansion and cash flow growth are both meeting our expectations to be able to fund that elevated level of R&D and still achieve our margin targets and grow cash flow the way we want to. So a little bit of elevated level of R&D. We also have some geography change in R&D, some development expense that formerly was classified as cost of sales is now being redeployed down to the R&D line, which will look a little bit more like some of our peers, but a little bit elevated level. Again, mostly AI is kind of a big focus of that investment. But we continue to be able to invest at a high level in initiatives that impact our customers, especially in this era of government efficiency. So we believe that those investments and those features and functionality in our products will enable our customers to work more efficiently and play into the kind of initiatives that we're seeing in government today.

Great. Well, since you brought it up, and I didn't have to, we'll talk about AI a little bit. We're at a tech conference, so I think it's appropriate. You mentioned on the call for the -- to close out the year that you're going to be building AI kind of pretty much into every flagship product that you offer. How does that -- and given the added spend, how does -- does that kind of look equal across all at the same time? Or kind of how does that progress? And do the benefits of that AI in each of those individual products kind of look the same to customers? Or might they kind of have different fields...

They could have some different flavors to them. What we are trying to do, and Tyler has a very broad portfolio of products. We have a lot of products. And one of the things we are trying to be very thoughtful about is being very coordinated about those AI development projects and where we can leverage some of that technology across multiple products, maybe do similar things, but in different functional areas. We're certainly trying to do that. We don't want to have a lot of AI projects being spun up in different business units, maybe trying to accomplish the same thing but in different ways. So being pretty thoughtful in looking at it from a Tyler-wide view. There's really kind of 3 major areas in our products that we're looking at the use of AI. One is around decision-making. So basically providing better data and analytics that government leaders can use to make more informed decisions. Example of that -- and as you said, we've said that by the end of this year, we'll have a really clear AI story around each of our flagship products. Some of that's already in place. Some of those products are there today. Others are under development, and others are yet to come on the road map, but customers will understand what those all are and how it can impact them. On the first area around decision-making, example is a product that we already have. It came from an acquisition in 2023, a company called Rexource X. And it's around priority-based budgeting. So a different way of budgeting for governments and budgeting obviously, is very important to governments. And so it really uses AI to analyze, to take the input of where their priorities are and where they want to be able to devote more funds and helps them identify areas that they can cut or take funds away from. And so high return to them, really very impactful on the way they budget. This last quarter, we had 3 large contracts for that project -- for that product, one with Los Angeles County, which is the largest county in the country for $1.2 million in ARR, one with Kansas City, Missouri and one with Johnson County, Kansas. Those added up to about $2 million of ARR. So very, very impactful product driven by AI. So that's an example of the kind of the decision-making capabilities. The second really is around citizen engagement, resident engagement. So things like agents and assistance to help citizens interact with the government more efficiently. We went live late last year in the State of Indiana with a resident engagement portal. I believe it was the State of Indiana's first AI project. So a portal with agents to help them help citizens figure out how to negotiate the complexities of government. So if you say I want to start a nail salon, what do I need to do? What kind of licenses, permits, the registrations, what do I have to do? And where do I go for all that? So rather than calling up and talking to people. The third and probably the biggest area is really around process improvement, and it's kind of the boring part, but really about automating routine processes like data entry or data retrieval. Another acquisition we did in 2023, a company that was a partner of ours in the court space, provides a solution for that. So where we have -- we're a large provider of court case management systems. Documents come into the courts electronically, but a clerk has to create a case file. So they have to look at that document, take data out of it, who's the plaintiff, who's the defendant, and create a case in the system. This solution automates that using AI. It finds all those data points in the document, populates the case. So it frees up clerks to do more high-value functions and helps governments deal with staff shortages. So those are kind of examples of the areas where we see the focus around AI, looking for areas that can have the most impact on our customers and ideally that we can best monetize.

Great. No, that's awesome. That's kind of a good set of examples. It seems like kind of early traction, whether it's with Rexource X people being willing to kind of spend. So I guess that's -- my follow-on there is, do you get a sense that, that state and local government, I guess, practitioners, users are ready for -- I mean, regardless of the citizens it might be empowering, are they ready for AI kind of in the Tyler stack...

They seem to be. Yes. Last year at our user conference, there was a lot of discussion like, like you said earlier, you really can't go more than 10 minutes without hearing about AI somewhere. So a lot of discussion, a lot of curiosity. Governments typically aren't the first -- or don't want to be the first to adopt anything. But now there continues to be more and more interest and especially as they look at it as how it can help them deal with their desire to be more efficient. So interesting because it really is a clear ROI, for example, with the court document management, they can clearly tell how many heads they're able to replace or how they can grow without adding new heads. It's a very clear ROI case and something they find value in.

Great. Awesome. Okay. Well, we look forward to hearing kind of hearing more kind of throughout the course of the year on that. We'll switch gears a little bit, another topic you brought up around kind of government efficiency. And I thought you gave some great statistics just around how both kind of county, local government and then even state level kind of how the government federal funding kind of comes into those budgets. I think it sounded like state level, maybe a little bit more kind of contribution, if you will. Are there any dynamics there or like added risk on that state level because it's taking some of that federal funding as a larger portion? I know kind of payments is probably more where state deals are kind of more common. So I guess maybe just talk us through those kind of those puts and takes around the budget, but then also what do you see as the opportunities around efficiency kind of as well?

Yes. So just to frame it for Tyler, about less than 5% of our revenues are from the federal government, 20% to 25% at the state level, 70% to 75% local. At the state level, most of our revenues, we do have some software solutions at the state level, but most of our revenues are transaction-based through the former NIC business. So it's where we're providing portals and have built interfaces to facilitate transactions. But largely, that's a self-funded model in that we don't -- we're not a line item in the state's budget. We get paid by convenience fees or user fees. When you make a campground reservation or renew your driver's license or renew your CPA license, you pay a convenience fee that goes to Tyler. So they're really not a budget item. And then at the local level, generally providing mission-critical software products that are -- run things like courts and taxes and public safety. From a funding perspective, at the federal -- at the state level, yes, about 30% on average of state revenues come in some form or fashion from the federal government. And when you get down to the local level, about -- there's not much that goes directly from federal to local, but about 14% of local budgets come from state governments. So the trickle, trickle down impact of federal is relatively small and local. Now they have local taxes and things that could be impacted by employment issues and other things. But in terms of direct federal funding, there's not a lot. And again, most of the things we do are pretty much mission-critical essential kinds of replacement of aging systems, and we're about 85% recurring revenues. From a government -- from an opportunity perspective, which is really where we see the biggest impact of not as much DOGE at the federal level, but that -- we're starting to see DOGEs at the state level now. And -- but just generally a heightened awareness and a heightened focus on government efficiency at any level. And ultimately, the way that's going to happen is through improved use of technology. And we've talked a lot about how the biggest driver for governments replace -- or buying systems from us is that they have an old system that's at end of life that they've used for 20 years or 30 years. And they've used it as long as they can because governments aren't profit motivated or they don't have competition. So they tend to put off -- they don't like change. And so they tend to keep these systems for a lot longer than you would see in the private sector. And then when they get to the point where it's dying, then replacing it is sort of a nondiscretionary change. But it's hard -- it's been historically hard for us to accelerate that. So even though there is replacing a 30-year-old court system with a new court system, gets paper out of the system, all the costs associated with that provides for citizen self-service and online access. We'll have AI capabilities. So there is a biggest efficiency gain, and there's an ROI to that, but governments haven't historically looked at those kinds of purchases from -- through that lens. And so we believe there's more focus on efficiency that they look at things differently and say, yes, if I do the effort and replace the system now, even though I don't have to, there's a big gain in efficiency. And so we believe that ultimately, if there continues to be this sort of momentum around government efficiency, that will lead to the sort of the acceleration of replacement of aging systems and more in line with the way you would see things happen in the private sector.

Great. So maybe even a shortening of kind of what are generally pretty long sales cycles for government, right? Potential if there's some urgency around it?

Yes. And I don't expect -- I don't want to make people think that there's -- in the next couple of quarters, we're going to see a flood of new deals. It's still -- we have very long sales cycles and it takes governments a while to make decisions. But certainly, it's encouraging that there's a focus on efficiency because we've -- before this was a thing, we -- I think it's always been part of Tyler's tagline in our corporate description that effectively, we make governments more efficient.

Yes. Great. Well, let's talk a little bit more about payments. It's an important kind of pillar of kind of future growth for Tyler. And you hit on it in terms of the state kind of level of where that typically kind of operates especially via the acquisition as well. But can you maybe just talk about the TAM around payments, I guess, for lack of a better term? And does it look really just like deals at the state level? Or are there other payments kind of opportunities kind of even in lower maybe larger counties that aren't state level but that would have that kind of need...

Yes. At the state level, most of our payments are transaction revenues or what I described earlier for these state enterprise agreements that we have with, I think, 28 states where we manage the portal. We have built these interfaces to what are often legacy back-end systems and provide the functionality for people to transact business with the state. And we get paid through convenience fees, and we typically process those payments around all those transactions. And those volume -- that's typically kind of a high single-digit growth around increased volumes and adding new services and new connections and interfaces. But for NIC historically, it was kind of an 8%, 9% grower. It may be growing a little bit faster now with -- as more and more people look to do more things online. But really, our growth around payments and where the big TAM is with our -- more at the local level and is an integration with our software products. So we have a lot of software products that facilitate payments that present bills. So we have utility billing systems, licensing and permitting systems, parks and recreation, property taxes, municipal courts, traffics and fines and fees. And so there's a lot of payments coming in governments through our systems are being facilitated by our systems, but historically, we didn't process as payments. Through the technology we acquired with the NIC acquisition, we've got a very robust government-focused payments platform. So what we've done is integrated that with our software products to create one integrated payments and application platform, which provides value to our customers. It automates the reconciliation process so the system of record that produced the transaction also is integrated with the payments. It provides better reporting and analytics. So it's a higher value solution than just a generic kind of horizontal payment solution. And as a result of that, we can charge -- have premium pricing around it. Governments are willing to pay more for that. And they often are willing to pay more for that because, again, there can be a convenience fee tagged on. So to pay your utility bill online, they may charge you a $2 convenience fee. And so Tyler gets 2% plus $2. But it doesn't have to -- that incremental revenue doesn't have to come out of the city's budget. So what we've done really just in the last year, 18 months, have sort of launched this go-to-market. We've built these integrations. And so now we're both selling payments with our new software sales and going back to our thousands of customers that have utility billing systems or municipal court systems and looking to either move their payments from their existing processor to us. Or in some cases, it's the first time they've done online payments. Last year, we signed just shy of 1,000 deals, 995 deals with Tyler software customers to add payments, but still have a huge runway of those ahead of us. And that was maybe a little bit ahead of our plan in terms of the volume that we've been able to sign so far. And even in some cases, taken a step further beyond just the Tyler's application. So here in California in Riverside County, which I think its maybe the fourth largest county in the state, we initially talked to them about adding payments to their land record system, which is a Tyler system, but ultimately, we're able to capture their entire county payments, transactions, whether it's around the Tyler application or not. So they were able to consolidate from multiple payments vendors down to one. So big, big opportunity, a lot of that on the acquiring payment side, but we see an equally large opportunity on the disbursement side. So helping governments manage outbound payments. And that's something that we're just at the very early stages of, but we've seen a couple of successes with that and also a big TAM expander around that as well. So payments are growing low double digits. And in some cases, last year, fourth quarter, it was closer to 20% growth. So we see a lot of opportunity around the payment side of the business and are very enthusiastic about that as a complementary add-on to our software business.

Great. That's awesome. It sounds like a good -- kind of good platform, kind of expansion opportunity, getting all the kind of engines -- and the -- all the cylinders firing, as it were. Maybe one more -- actually, no, I will -- just on time, I will kick it out to the audience just to not hog the mic. So any questions for Mr. Miller? Sir?

So if there are like -- if there are delays in [budgeting necessarily], you'll have that. But like, if there are delays, things gets pushed out. Is it just like once it get resolved, its easy to start off again or like is it like a switch or -- I mean I guess it's just software...

Yes. I mean, we're mostly recurring revenue, either maintenance from on-prem or today, mostly SaaS. And so those are annual agreements, but they're all mission-critical applications. So we just don't see those being interrupted and they're not interrupted. Again, local governments don't exactly work like federal government where there's sort of a funding, a shutdown or things like that. So I don't think we've ever seen contracts interrupted that were in process. But all the things we're automating are mission-critical things like 911 systems or utility systems or property taxes or courts. So where we sit in terms of government priorities is very, very close to the top.

Brian, thank you for your time. You mentioned you met expanding TAM. Can you talk about like what you think the numbers are there? And particularly according on the disbursement side, how much will that expand TAM?

Yes. The question is about the size of the TAM. And if you look back at our Investor Day materials from a year ago, there's some charts on the different sizes of the TAMs around both kind of starting with our existing customer base, how much payments are running through there and how much we reasonably think would be sort of addressable and then outside of our existing customer base. But we believe that with our existing customer base in terms of a revenue opportunity to Tyler, if we kind of captured all the payments around that base, it could be in the $2 billion to $3 billion range in terms of payment revenues to Tyler. Obviously, there are billions of dollars of -- tens of billions of dollars of payments going through those. And we think that the inbound and the outbound are roughly equal to each other. Almost all the revenues today are from -- for us, are currently from inbound payments. But we've got a number of opportunities that we're starting to see around disbursements that we're excited about, especially because the margins are a little bit better on the disbursement side.

You can get the cash flow bump on the disbursement side as well, right? I think you had talked about just because of the nature of the way it...

Yes, there's a float component. And that actually with -- we had a new disbursement arrangement with the State of Indiana, where we manage the disbursements for subsidies they pay for child care. And that just went into place in the fourth quarter, and we had about $25 million that we received from the state right at the end of December, and we made the disbursements in early January. So there is a float component to that as well.

Maybe I'll tuck in one last one. Maybe in the last minute here. Could you just walk us through kind of the decision by the leadership team to expand or, I guess, create the new state-focused kind of selling team?

Yes, Yes, we're excited about that. So we are expanding our sales resources and especially at the state level. So with the NIC acquisition, one of the big opportunities from that was the opportunity for us to expand our presence with software at the state level. So from a software perspective, Tyler historically was more focused on the local level. NIC brought us these deep relationships with the 28 states they have where we're deeply embedded with the CIOs and the agency heads and because we provide basically the portal to all of their systems. So the idea was to be able to leverage those relationships to identify opportunities in the state market earlier where Tyler has solutions that we can sell to state governments, but we historically didn't have the sales force or those relationships. And so we've -- we have all these Tyler products over here. We've got these NIC relationships led by these general managers that manage those relationships, but we really needed sort of this middle layer of a dedicated state sales force that has access to all the Tyler products and works closely with the NIC state managers. And so we've put that structure into place. At the end of the year we'll be adding roughly 15 sales executives focused on those states and expect that to kind of accelerate. We've seen some good successes around selling Tyler systems like Cannabis Regulatory Systems into NIC states that legalized marijuana. But we've got a lot of opportunities, and this will provide us with sort of the power we need to really take advantage of those.

Great. Excited to watch it all unfold for '25. So thank you, Brian, for being here with us. Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Yes.

Thanks, a lot.

Appreciate your comments. Thanks, everyone.