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

Yes. I think you -- as we've talked about for a long time, there is a lag from the time we signed something to the time those SaaS revenues start to show up in the income statement, and that's true both with respect to new deals, which is probably a little longer of in 1 or 2 quarters, but could be longer. And flip. There's also a lag there as well. So I think the accelerated bookings in both of the last 2 quarters don't have as much of an impact, certainly on the current quarter, but even in the next quarter or 2 as they do beyond that. And that lag, I think, is something you have to keep in mind. I don't think there's anything particular around timing. We always have deals that move around some that -- so we typically aren't calling out deal slippage as a major factor because it's -- they're all the time. There's nothing unusual about this quarter. And I'd just say that our outlook for the full year hasn't changed, and we don't give quarterly guidance. And -- but I'd say there's not any meaningful change to our outlook for the year.

Got it. And then maybe on the AI ACV contribution as a percentage of your new SaaS ACV this quarter I think you called out New SaaS ACV growing about 22%. You talked about document automation attach continuing to be really healthy. Any sense for what that attach rate looks like on the installed base and like how much should we think about that potentially being a tailwind to new SaaS ACV over the course of maybe beyond this year?

Yes, I'd say, as Lynn mentioned, it's beyond this year where we expect it to be meaningful. The direct sort of AI stuff that we've talked about is still a real small percentage of the total ACV. As we've said in the past, we expect that revenue contribution really is probably 12 to 18 months down the road when it starts to become more meaningful it's certainly growing, but it's still a very small percentage of the new ACV.

Your next question comes from the line of Trevor Walsh with Citizens. .

Brian, maybe to start with you, a real quick one. You made some comments around that $10 million transaction business or that deal with -- for motor vehicle. Do you have a sense of the ramp on that $10 million annually number? And if so, kind of how does that compare maybe to other similarly situated size deals?

Yes. I think the biggest difference between -- from state to state is whether adoption is mandated initially or whether it starts out as optional or voluntary. In the case of the state that we signed this quarter, it is not yet mandated. So we expect it will start out at somewhere around a $2 million ARR run rate and that probably starts at some point in early 2027, and then would ramp up to to $10 million plus as it becomes mandated. In the case of the state we signed last quarter, it has been mandated. So we expect that ramp up. But I believe that one was closer to $20 million. They are that, that ramp-up will start faster. And it just depends on state policies from state to state how they decide to govern that.

Yes. It's not too dissimilar from our and e-filing business that we -- as you remember, 10, 15, 10 years ago, 12 years ago, as we were rolling out e-filing lot of counties were sort of voluntary and then as jurisdictions went mandatory, which will happen over time as they see the value of the solution that then you'll start to see those revenues pick up.

Got it. Super helpful color. And maybe just one quick follow-up. Maybe, Lynn, for you, but Brian, feel free to weigh in as well. I know at the Investor Day, you guys talked a little bit about more disincentives or negative types of consequences, i.e., sticks, which you didn't like to use that term, which I get as far as flipping to the cloud. And then I think you had mentioned either in your prepared remarks or some of your comments earlier Lynn that you've rolled out e-mail or comps basically the customers saying kind of what to expect going forward. Any just initial feedback from customers around maybe some of the more negative aspects or the stick pieces of that? Just trying to get a sense of kind of how you think your -- the new order, if you will, of getting people to kind of move faster is kind of being received by the customer base.

Yes. Sure, Trevor. I'd say right now, yes, communication has gone out since Investor Day to our clients. And it's really about -- look, we want to be there and hold your hand and work with you on the plan that's going to get you to the cloud. We'd like for you to have a plan in place by -- within a certain time period. We're still focusing mostly on the incentives. We're not necessarily communicating right now what those disincentives will be. But -- and I'll tell you, the feedback we've got from a lot of clients as well, both at Connect that we had this past quarter, our client advisory board, our focus groups and just generally, our general day-to-day working relations with our clients is -- some of them also need our help in sort of selling the move to the cloud internally. And so we're working with them on the talking points that they need to go internally to sell those. The disincentives, I think you'll start to see come out more over the next 12 to 24 months as opposed to something that we're really focusing on right now today.

Your next question comes from the line of Allan Verkhovski with BTIG.

You mentioned in the prepared remarks how you are testing pricing models in the market with respect to monetizing AI? And you went through different methods of monetization at the recent Investor Day. But can you just share what your latest learnings are coming out of the support on that front?

Yes, sure. I mean right now, the proof points are, it's validating. When I think about how we price AI, and I think we covered this at Investor Day, there's really sort of 3 different models that we're talking about. The first is really what I call start essentials or table stakes. This is stuff that's going to be in our product. It's going to improve our competitive position, it's going to improve our win rates, it's going to improve client set. But I also think it's stuff that as we continue to bake stuff in the product, that may also allow us to increase annual rates. . The second is obviously the subscriptions uplift, where we're bundling the AI capabilities and then outcome-based type of pricing. On the subscription uplift, yes, we're seeing that in the market right now that's being well received. We're still testing and talking with our clients about the amount that we can charge for that and the viability of those going forward, similar with outcome-based, it's still early but it is being validated in the market. And again, you're going to start seeing more meaningful revenues coming from AI, really probably the second half of '27. We'll ramp up between now -- but second half of '27 going into '28, I think you'll start seeing more meaningful revenue.

Perfect. And then maybe internally just regarding that early internal productivity benefits you're seeing across development, implementation and service delivery can you just expand on what you're seeing there and how we should think about those benefits alongside your unchanged R&D guidance?

Yes. I think right now, some of it's still anecdotal. We're really trying to tease everything out and make sure there's clear ROI before we go invest too much internally on the developer side, we're seeing as much as anecdotally, 30% increase in productivity. I don't know that, that translates into anything other than our developers are going to be 30% more productive. And the way I view productivity is we want more productivity, not less. In the areas of support and implementation, we have some -- we have some guidelines that we're shooting towards. I'm not ready to publish those. But we are looking at different ways to both shorten implementations, which shortens time to value, which increases client sat, which helps us with cross-sells and upsells and same thing on the support side, how can our clients get their answers faster and we've got a lot of things in motion there. But again, it's still a little too early to say hey, this is going to mean x return or y return. All I can say is we're extremely diligent to make sure that whatever investments we're making in AI are going to have a meaningful ROI attached with them.

Your next question comes from the line of Gabriela Borges with Goldman Sachs.

This is Grayson on for Gabriela. I wanted to start with a little bit of the labor augmentation thesis that you discussed at your Investor Day and sort of you outlined this vision where AI can expand your TAM beyond targeting traditional software budgets into more of the labor-related spending I know it's early, but I wanted to ask, what evidence have you seen so far that customers are evaluating solutions through an ROI lens tied to labor rather than traditional software procurement? And are there any specific workflows where you're starting to see that shift materialize? .

Yes, that's a good question. And I'd say a couple of the products that we talked about earlier on the call, document automation, resident assistant. Those are being viewed specifically through the lens of the labor budget. In fact, one of our clients made the comment as we were going through the sales process that they were going to be able to tap the labor budget to go ahead and procure this product. I think we outlined at Investor Day Tarrant County, which is a document automation, product. And we went from, I think, a $900,000 SaaS arrangement to about a $1.3 million total ARR. So pretty significant increase. We've seen it with resident assistant being able to document fewer amount of calls and Q&A that jurisdictions employees had to take because we all know, and we've talked about it for years, is that one of the things the public sector workforce is facing over the coming years is a shrinking labor force, both through retirements and also a lack of hiring and technology. So tapping that labor budget is becoming more meaningful. It's part of our playbook and discussion. We're still in the early innings, like we talked about everything else, but it is getting traction in the market.

Great. And then just one quick follow-up. In your prepared remarks, you highlighted the 40-plus AP automation wins in the quarter as customers sort of adopt these workflows, how should investors think about the economic implications for Tyler. Like do you see a bigger opportunity here for incremental software ARR, higher payments penetration or sort of a combination of both?

Yes.

It's a combination of both for sure. AP automation is when we called out. on an individual basis as we add that to our ERP clients. It's a relatively small uplift in the SaaS fees, but it is a SaaS fee uplift, but it does open up additional opportunities to leverage payments in association with that automation of invoice processing. So it creates a new conversation and a new opportunity to bring in more transaction-based revenues tied to that automation.

Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Sherman with TD Cowen.

Great. And I like the new format on the call, so kudos on that. Lynn, on the -- how would you rank order the product strength across the different portfolio of products across ERP, public safety, financials and Courts & Justice, how would you rank order those? And how is the pipeline building across those? And how would you drive cross-sell up across -- there are some big cities and counties that might not have all of those core products, what are you working on to drive cross-sell there?

Well, I'd say this, when we talk about sort of our Cornerstone products, our view is that we want to be #1 in the market with each of those cornerstones. I wouldn't rank one over the other. You can look at it in terms of -- I wouldn't rank one over the other in terms of our competitiveness, our functionality but you can look at some things where we sit in the market and our market share, clearly, a place like court, we have a lot higher market share. There's fewer competitors and we really dominate that market. ERP and public safety, more competitive markets, but our competitive position is really strong and continues to get stronger. We've made significant investments, for example, in our ERP product over the last 12 months. And we're always doing that. Public safety, some really nice wins this quarter against some really key competitors which I always like to see. So I would say, generally, when I look at our portfolio, again, our flagship products, we want them to be #1, and I believe they're very competitive in each of the markets they serve.

We've talked about cross-sell as being one of the key pillars of our growth. You're correct that especially in larger customers, very few have all of our flagship products. And there are a lot of underpinnings that we're doing to create those opportunities to make a more compelling story for why that next product and the next product when it comes time to replace those should come from Tyler. So we've talked a lot about going from that 2 or 3 products a customer to 8 to 10 products to customer and all of the things that we're doing to encourage that, that customer base that we have that doesn't have all those flagship products is a huge opportunity for us.

Yes. I think one of our biggest cross-sells of the quarter was out of our ERP division. We sold to the Mississippi Department of Health, our Enterprise permit and licensing enterprise health. It was a $700,000 ARR deal, and that came -- that was leveraged by our DSD or former NIC relationships. We've made great inroads with the State of Mississippi, and we're looking to turn that into what we call Total Tyler state. But that doesn't happen without those relationships across our different divisions.

That's great. One more follow-up, Lynn. The Riverside deal in public safety was -- seemed like a big one any way to ballpark size that and just the state of the public safety market and budgets, I would love to hear any color on that.

Yes. I think the public safety market is pretty healthy and budgets seem to be stable as generally across all of our business lines. Our competitiveness is really strong. I'm happy with where we are in public safety. As you pointed out, we won some nice deals. As I mentioned, I don't like to call out competitors, but we had some really nice competitive wins against some very competitive companies in Q2 and the momentum and engagement and my general excitement about what we're doing at Public Safety remains high. I don't have the Riverside deal off the top of my -- at the tip of my tongue. I'm not sure we won a nice deal in Santa Cruz, California. Maybe that was -- I don't have Riverside, that was about a $660,000 ARR deal for our RMS and enforcement mobile solutions.

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Turrin with Wells Fargo Securities.

Appreciate you taking the questions. I guess just first on the Q2 metrics, I think what stands out is the new SaaS ACV and flip ACV growth. So I'm just curious, Brian, how durable is that from your perspective at this point? Is there anything we should be just mindful of in terms of comparison seasonality there or just the right way to think about those metrics going forward?

Yes. I -- obviously, those are really good growth numbers. And regardless of what the comp was, those were our SaaS bookings and our total bookings were all-time quarterly records. So it was the highest quarter ever for those bookings, again, regardless of the comp from last year. Clearly, as we talked about a lot last year, the first 2 quarters of last year, were weaker booking quarters. So those are against somewhat easier comps, although the second quarter improved sequentially from the first and then the second half of last year was stronger. . I think one thing to point out is that both last quarter and this quarter, the good bookings number weren't really on the back of mega contracts are really big deals. The biggest deals were transaction-based and they're not showing up in those SaaS numbers. So it was just a lot of volume of good sort of traditional mid-sized deals and a handful of a little bit larger deals, but no mega deals. Those things are still in the pipeline. It's hard to tell what quarter those could fall in. So the comps are a little harder in the second half. But as we said, the underlying factors of the strength that we're seeing in RFPs, the strength in the activity in sales demos, all those point to continued good bookings throughout the rest of the year.

That's great. Just as the follow-up, Brian, you've now bought back more than 5.5% of shares outstanding year-to-date. Just maybe speak to how you're approaching the buyback from here as part of your overall capital allocation framework, what would lead you to hold that cadence going forward throughout the rest of the year versus moderate? Or what could we see going forward?

Yes, Michael. Over the years, I'd say our priorities have sort of evolved based on what's going on in the market, what's going on in the business at a particular time. If you go back 10 years ago, our priority focus was internal investment in 2017, 2018. Coming out of NIC, our priorities were debt repayment. I'd see right now that share repurchases are taking a higher priority for me. And that's based on the confidence I have in our 2030 outlook and what I see the valuation in the stock market, I think it's a great time to buy right now. There have been 3x in Tyler's history, where we've really sort of gone hard at it, I'd say, in the early 2000s post-recession, 2010, 2012. And now we've sprinkled buybacks in between those times. But I just think where things sit today and the valuation that Tyler has in the market, our free cash flow, our outlook, the confidence in our future it's a compelling value. And I think you'll see us continue to execute on that as we try to continue to reduce our share count and then really maintain that reduced count going forward.

Your next question comes from the line of Jonathan Ho with William Blair. Please go ahead. .

I wanted to just better understand. I think you said in the prepared remarks that you're embedding AI into your workflows. Can you provide a little bit more color on what customers are looking for in terms of embedding and what the opportunity is to more broadly build sort of that AI functionality across your entire portfolio? .

Yes. I think at a high level, Jonathan, we're talking about automating just more routine work, reducing those manual responses helping our clients be able to make better decisions through data assistance and generative AI predictive and analysis, basically just generally bring our clients up to do other things. again, we talked earlier about labor savings. It's not just -- it's making their day-to-day work go faster and making them more efficient in addition to being able to compensate for lost labor actually in the market. And you see that stuff with things like we talk about our document automation, our party-based budgeting, AP automation, report writing assistance. Georeconciliations, policy assistance, permanent review assistance, just things like that, are getting inside of our products inside of our workflows and making them our clients be more efficient with their daily tasks.

And in terms of that being embedded in the workflows as opposed to bolted on, that's really key to our clients. We're hearing from them that that's what they're looking for. They want those -- from Tyler, they want them integrated and embedded in the system of record that's doing the work, and it's really a matter of trust and their comfort with how that data is being handled, how those models are working, and they want that from the same provider as the system.

That makes a ton of sense. And it seems like it would sort of have you bring AI to the customers as opposed to large language model provider. Can you talk a little bit about maybe the spending environment, particularly as new state and local budgets start to unlock. I know you've said that the pipeline looks pretty good here, but I just want to get a sense for -- on a forward-looking basis, whether there's any concerns out there over the macroeconomic or anything that you're seeing on either the compliance driver side or grant driver side as well?

Yes, Jon, we're not seeing any real change. I would say the market dynamic budgets are generally healthy and stable. It's been pretty consistent now for the last, I don't know, several quarters, maybe 1.5 years, 2 years. So I think that's pretty stable. A year ago, for example, we were talking about some decisions taking a little bit longer. The market didn't go away, but some decisions. We're actually starting to see it's still anecdotal, particularly like in our ERP area that an uptick in the decisions actually being made. But generally speaking, the overall demand environment, the overall health is pretty consistent with where it's been.

And I think we're -- customers, and it certainly varies from place to place, but where customers are seeing pressure. That's where the ROI analysis comes in and becomes more important as they work -- drive towards more efficiencies and doing more with less, the understanding of how technology can make that happen. So looking at that ROI and that's also, as we talked about earlier, where the -- in certain instances where the transaction-funded model is attractive. So the systems that we've talked about states acquiring under that model. They don't have to appropriate budget funds for that. It operates sort of outside of the budget through self-funded revenues and the budget pressure does not enter into the equation.

Your next question comes from the line of Mark Schappel with Loop Capital. .

Lynn, in the past, you've discussed the goal of getting every client onto a single code stream for each of your products. I was wondering if you could just provide some additional details on how far along you are in that journey and maybe which businesses such as [indiscernible] or maybe the furthest along.

Yes. There's a lot to unpack there. So -- at Investor Day, we talked about our whole cloud Living initiative, which is to get everybody on that single stream that's got continuous improvement, continuous delivery. Before we can even achieve that, we've got to get people down to a single version when we're going to get them in the cloud. You will see us start to enroll cloud living. We're launching pilots throughout 2027, and we're going to start to have clients referenceable on '28. When you look generally at version control, what we've done, for example, you mentioned in courts over the last 3 years, we've gone from 89% of our clients being on a legacy system to only 7% today. And look at our enterprise ERP, we've got about 85%, 90% are on the current version. That's not necessarily our cloud living version, but getting them current, then moving the cloud and getting them into our cloud living road map is a goal that's going to drive higher clients, higher retention, increased upsell and cross-sell opportunities. It's pretty exciting. It's a pretty bold vision. We've been working on it for many years, but you're going to continue to see gains year-over-year over the next -- over the coming years.

Your next question comes from the line of Clarke Jeffries with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead. .

I noticed had another sizable city of Orlando public safety slip. And you made the comment at the Analyst Day that, that segment has really had to change a part when it comes to SaaS, nearly 100% going to cloud. Just wondering if we could get a state of affairs across products, really what segment remains the biggest set of holdouts. Is that the state court and just tactically, is the state team going to be taking over tackling those slips on the largest core clients at the state level? Will they be working jointly with Courts & Justice team? And then one follow-up.

Yes. I think the answer to the second question is I don't envision that. Those are -- it's a smaller client base. Our relationships are strong and deep within our Courts & Justice division. So they'll they'll continue to work those. And there, just like other places, we talk about how the clients -- they like to watch what their neighbors do and they like to see it successful we did that Idaho state flip a few years ago. That was the first one. Everybody watched it, and that spurred more interest. . Generally speaking, yes, Orlando was a really nice SaaS flip for our Public Safety division. It involved I think our CAD product, our RMS and our newer product, emergency networking that came through acquisition last year. I don't think there's really a segment of the market that has sort of the reluctance that we used to talk about a few years ago with public safety. Public safety is moving all -- is moving to SaaS. That's all we're selling. We're actually one of the a pure SaaS provider. Many of our competitors are still more in the lift and shift mode. But I think just generally, across the board, I don't think there's any sort of structural or individual vertical market resistance. It's just the same factors that we've been talking about for the last couple of years. And as more clients go, as more see the value as we continue to roll out incentives and eventually disincentives we'll reach our goals that we outlined in Investor Day.

Perfect. And then I did see federal courts of Australia for the record getting that transaction. Just wondering if there's any appetite to follow with other products in the portfolio for the international opportunity, anything that would make sense based of for the record, having that presence -- and then remind us if it's an inside or a field sales motion for some less international markets?

So FTR is based in Australia. So not surprising, they had a presence. They used to own a manual transcription business there. was actually sold off when we owned a piece of FTR several years ago. I don't know that FTR -- they'll continue to do things in Australia, and they'll continue to have sales international. They had a couple of international sales, small deals this past quarter. I don't think it changes our overall strategy, which is -- we still got a lot of runway ahead in front of us. We've got a lot of strategic initiatives. We're rolling out -- moving our U.S. clients in the cloud. We're rolling out AI here. So I think it would be a bit of a distraction to think that we're going to start taking other products more international when we've got still such great runway in front of us here.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Lynn Moore for closing remarks.

Thanks, Maria, and thanks, everybody, for joining our call today. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact Brian Miller or myself. Thanks again, and have a great day.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.