Thank you, everyone, for joining. My name is Alexei Gogolev, and today I'm delighted to welcome the management team of Alkami. We have CEO of Alkami Alex Shootman and CFO of the company, Bryan Hill. Welcome both, and we appreciate you being with us on the heels of a rather important acquisition that you recently did. Before we get into the exciting stuff of M&A discussion, do you mind giving us a quick overview of Alkami? Obviously, you've been public for 4 years now, but for those that are new to the story, your key customers, and the overreaching value of Alkami offering.
First, thanks for having us here, Alexei. Appreciate it. The best way to think about Alkami is that smaller banks and credit unions white-label our technology so that they can compete effectively with large institutions. If you look at the overall market, the market splits into consumers and businesses that choose to do business with Chase and Bank of America, and consumers and businesses that choose to do business with regional banks and credit unions. We charge per seat, and the majority of the seats available in the United States are with the market that is regional and community financial institutions.
Those institutions consider their competition not to be the bank down the street, but their competition to be Chase and Chime, and they don't have the technology that they need to be able to compete with those institutions, and they don't have the people that can build the technology, so they buy our technology and they white-label our technology. That's what we do for a living. The overall and the addressable space for us is about 250 million seats. We just reported that we have about 20.5 million seats live and registered right now, so still a lot of market space for us.
Alex, you often talk about how in this space a lot of the opportunity, new logos are displacements of some sort, either it's in-house solutions or some legacy vendors. What is the mix of your customer base that is coming from competitors versus in-house?
It's actually pretty rare that a customer has built something in-house. Some of the larger institutions might have had the ability to build something in-house, but virtually 100% of the situations that we're in, somebody has an existing digital banking application. Why is that good? That's good because there's budget, so we're selling into known budget, we're selling a known technology, and if they're in market to buy something, they've made a decision that what they have, which is a legacy product, is not good enough for them to be successful. Pretty much when we're in a sell cycle, like I said, somebody's got a budget already, they have a need, they have an existing solution, and they're deciding whether or not to displace a legacy solution with modern technology.
In the past, you also mentioned that probably a 50/50 split in terms of your goals that you want to achieve, banks versus credit unions in terms of the new additions. How's that progressing? What are the win rates that you're currently seeing for both types of customers, and is there anything else that you need to add in order to better compete on the banking side?
When we think about the enterprise value that we want to create long-term, and we think about the new ARR that we're adding to the company, half of that we want to come from new logos, and half of that we want to come from selling more product to our existing customers. Of the new logos, we'd like to have half of that coming from banks and half of that coming from credit unions. Our biggest competition is a customer deciding to do nothing. Still about probably half of the time that a customer might consider making a change, they decide to do nothing. That was one of the main reasons why we made the Mantle acquisition. What the market was telling us is that they need to acquire new customers and they need to sell more product to existing customers.
That's what our credit union bank customers were telling us. They said the number 1 thing that they need is a really great modern account opening product integrated with digital banking. One of the reasons why we made the Mantle acquisition is to change the decision, if you will, from people who were deciding to stay with older technology and to move to newer technology. That was one of the things that we felt like we needed, not necessarily to be more competitive against another party because we're pretty competitive when a customer decides to do something, but to get those customers who aren't moving off of their legacy technology, that's why we wanted to acquire Mantle.
Looking forward to talking about Mantle in a second, but maybe just to switch gears and talk a little bit about macro, are there any trends to call out across your addressable customer base? Has all this uncertainty, external environment prompted any caution with regards to software spend?
All of our customers are being cautious on their software spend, but if you think about the macro environment, it has not changed the demand for digital banking. Let me explain this a little bit. These contracts are 7 year contracts, 5 to 7 year contracts. It takes about 9 months to a year to do a digital banking conversion, and people will be in a buying cycle for anywhere between 6 months to 12 months.
When a bank or credit union is thinking about making a change, they start with, "When does my contract end?" They go twelve months before that, "Okay, that's when I'm going to have to make a decision." They go twelve months before that and say, "That's when I'm going to start my buying cycle." Any kind of change that's happening in a macro environment in terms of maybe my net interest income is not that great or I need to maybe worry about some expenses, it does not really change them making a decision because they are in a pretty long decision cycle to go ahead and make that decision. We have not seen any falloff in the demand environment for digital banking.
Another driver, I think in the past, used to be in-market consolidation among regional banks. Are you seeing any increased activity in that dynamic, and how would that potentially affect Alkami?
Yeah, I'll let you take that.
Yeah. In terms of market consolidation, I mean, if you look back over the last several decades, it's been about 3% a year, and we're not seeing that changing. I mean, one trend that has occurred over the last 24 months has been credit unions acquiring community banks and then becoming a bank themselves. So that's an interesting trend. When we look into our client portfolio and installed base of clients, we're not seeing really any more consolidation occurring this year than what we've seen in past years. When consolidation does happen, given that we focus on the top 2,000 financial institutions or top 2,500 financial institutions, generally we're benefiting from consolidation. It's normally the smaller, so the lower half that's consolidating up into the larger financial institutions, which generally is a benefit for us.
Yeah, because if you think about it, when an institution like that consolidates, they're consolidating to add customers. They're not consolidating for operational reasons. If consolidation happens for us, it's good because we charge per seat. Somebody buys somebody else or merges with somebody else, it adds seats, and we have the opportunity to grow.
Yeah. I mean, we expect to add 300,000-400,000 users this year. And to put that into context, Alex mentioned we have 20.5 million users live on our platform, but we're going to add 300,000-400,000 this year that's through consolidation of our clients acquiring other financial institutions.
This is a good segue to my next question about growth algorithm. Bryan, when you think about midterm revenue outlook, would it be fair to anticipate this sort of trend that you highlighted about mid to high teens growth of customer additions and then mid single to high single digit growth of fees charged per user?
Yeah. This has been an evolving journey for us. Early in our life cycle, as you might imagine, we were the greatest contributor to our growth, which is just adding new users to our platform. That happens in 2 ways. One is acquiring a new client, but then also our clients are growing. Their digital banking user base is growing each year, and it has been growing in the high single to low teen level of growth. What would augment our user growth is expansion of revenue per user. In other words, we are selling more product into our installed base, expanding the revenue per user that we are actually able to realize. Today, on average, we have 14 products installed into each client. We have 32 products that we offer, and new clients are onboarding with 20 or more products.
All of our products are relevant. We're under-penetrated just based on when we innovated and developed those products and then offered them. It's been heavy user base with some ARPU expansion that then would lead us to a 20%+ growth rate. As time evolves, what's happening is we're establishing a large user base, so the growth rate on users has been declining, but our ARPU expansion, because we have more opportunity now to sell into our base, is starting to expand. Alexei, I think over time you'll see those are going to be more equal contributors in the next 3 to 4 years, and then beyond 4 years, so 5 years plus, you'll likely see more revenue growth being driven from ARPU expansion and selling into the base versus just adding market share.
When it comes to customer growth, it sounds like a lot of this confidence that you have is likely supported by very high level of visibility into the backlog. Can you update us what the backlog is right now and what is the split between credit unions and banks?
Sure. We exited the first quarter with just under $405 million of live ARR. Use that as a backdrop for the next bit of information I'm going to provide. We have $68 million of ARR in backlog for implementation. That's split between new logos and then also the add-on sell success that we've enjoyed, and there's a contribution from the Mantle acquisition that we just completed. If you just focus on the new logo component, it's just under $30 million of ARR, 1.1 million users, and those users are split about 700,000 credit unions and about 400,000 banks. What's key is the banks are at a $37 RPU, so very high RPU. The credit unions are close to $20, and it blends to $24. That compares to a backdrop of our live clients that are at $20.
That evidences that more products are needed in our installed base, and there's a higher RPU that we can extract out of our installed base.
Another metric we obviously look at is RPO growth. I think you've highlighted that in Q1 it was 20% RPO growth on an organic basis.
That's right.
How do you see that evolving for the rest of the year? Out of the 8 contracts that you signed in Q1, how many were renewals?
Yeah, so in Q1 we had 8 contract signings, so that includes new logo wins as well as renewals. Q1 is always a seasonally low year. You come out of Q4, which is a seasonally high quarter. Q1 is a seasonally low quarter. Q4 is a seasonally high quarter. Our RPO was $1.6 billion, which is about 4 times our live ARR. We have a lot of visibility coming from our RPO, a lot of visibility that comes from our implementation backlog. We've got 96% subscription revenue. The visibility that we have into future revenue, say 12 months out, is very, very high. What that does for Alex and I is it allows us to think about the investments that we need to make in our platform.
Knowing when the revenue is going to happen, contrasting that with our financial commitments that we've made, that allows us to be very strategic in how we allocate internal capital to the projects that we would like to invest in.
Switching gears to profitability, maybe this is even a question for you, Alex. On the gross level, gross margin level, Alkami has made a very strong effort to drive efficiencies, and I know you've been driving hosting costs down. Can you maybe talk about other initiatives that could support margin expansion?
Yeah, there were really 2 things that we wanted to invest in to improve our gross margin position. One was the effectiveness of the implementation team. As y'all may know, we amortized both the revenue and the cost of the implementation over the initial life of the contract. To the extent that we had more efficiency in the implementation of a new logo, then that would help with our gross margin position. The second thing is we're running a pretty large-scale platform, 20.5 million users, and this is something that has to be up 24 by 7. It has to have 3, 4-second response time. There are ways that you can use cloud technology that can drive efficiency in that type of system.
Those are the 2 investments that we've made that, as you can see, when Bryan and I came to this community and said, "Hey, in a couple of years, we'll be 65% gross margin," and then if you look at the rest of our income statement, if we're at 65% gross margin, given our sales and marketing efficiency, we can still spend a lot on R&D and still be a highly profitable company. We were probably at 55% gross margin when we made that statement.
That is probably one of the things that he and I are proud of is our ability to grow the business while at the same time we are meaningfully expanding gross margin, which for an investor, now if you look at the shape of our income statement, you could look at a company that can spend a lot of money on R&D to create a great future for itself and be pretty predictable from a profitability perspective.
Yeah. What allows us to do that in large part is just how efficient we are from a go-to-market perspective. We create $1.20-$1.50, depending on the quarter, of net new ARR, so that's net of any attrition, for every dollar of sales and marketing that we spend. That puts us in the top 5 in terms of go-to-market efficiency when you're looking at SaaS companies. That allows us to then invest in the platform that just keeps the flywheel going, that allows us to have more product. Now we can cross-sell in our base very efficiently and still drop a nice profit. When we provided our 2026 guide, to Alex's point, at the time, we said, "Okay, 65% gross margin, 20% Adjusted EBITDA margin." We were losing money from an Adjusted EBITDA perspective, and we were kind of in the low to mid-50s for gross margin.
We put up 64.3% gross margin in Q1. We'll likely be just under our 65% this year because Mantle provides about a 50-70 basis points gross margin lift. We're going to achieve our gross margin objective for all practical purposes a year early. Now we've had 7 straight quarters of being Adjusted EBITDA positive. We were 12% Adjusted EBITDA margin in Q1, 27% organic growth. We were a rule of 39, which was nice. What will happen in 2026 is the acquisition of Mantle, that business has not yet scaled to our Adjusted EBITDA margin. It would be about a point or so dilutive in EBITDA margin, but positive EBITDA. What we like to talk to investors about in terms of where can we take the business?
I mean, because that's what's really important is where is Alkami going to be in the next 4 to 5 years? Mantle should allow us at a pretty significant scale to stay at or slightly above 20% organic revenue growth. If you believe that, then what you would be buying into is Alkami over the next 4 to 5 years will be a billion-dollar revenue company. At that scale, Alkami will achieve a 65%-70% gross margin, so call it high 60s, and Adjusted EBITDA margin of 30% or slightly more with a free cash flow conversion Adjusted EBITDA of about 92%. 4 to 4 and a half years from now, Alkami crosses a billion dollars and is generating $270 million or so of free cash flow. That's the real investment opportunity from a financial model perspective.
Thank you for that, Bryan. This is probably a good way to double-click on the Mantle acquisition. You completed the first large-scale M&A in a while. Can you talk a little bit more about what Mantle does in terms of the digital account openings and also expand on what the Mantle acquisition enables Alkami to offer in terms of product perspective?
Yeah, let me describe the journey that we went through in terms of coming together with Mantle. We've known them for a while. We've known them since 2019. If you think about what happened in our market when the pandemic hit in 2020, if you're serving a market that has not really gone through digital transformation yet, all of those institutions started saying to themselves, "Oh my gosh, I have to open an account digitally." What that created for us was an initial acquisition in 2021 of some nascent digital account opening technology that could open one type of account because think about what's happening in 2020. That's what our customers were focused on. We made an acquisition, and we then had a product that we were selling that could open a basic checking account. That's what it could do.
For about 10% of our customers, their business model, that was sufficient. As we got into that market, a couple of things happened. One, we realized that, "Oh my gosh, there's a whole bunch of different types of deposit accounts that need to be opened that our customers need to open," and we're not able to open those types of accounts. For about half of our customers, they said, "You know, it's not just digital only for us. We've got a big branch presence, and we need to be able to start something online and finish it in the branch." That is happening, and we're learning that. Guess what else happened at the same time? We went into a different type of interest rate environment. I talked to one of our customers.
For our customers, what happened when the interest rates rose, then all of a sudden, their customers could move deposits pretty quickly. They got into a space where they had to be able to attract deposits. If you think about it, for 20 years, they did not have to attract deposits because people were not moving deposits over because there was not an interest rate difference in accounts. I talked to one CEO, and she told me, "Alex, nobody in my institution was working here the last time that we had to attract deposits." You have this situation where we are realizing there is a whole bunch of different types of deposits that have to get open. They have to be able to open online and in branch. Our customers are starting to say, "Oh my gosh, I have to attract deposits.
I've never attracted deposits before." That has now become a—Bryan talked earlier about some of our credit union customers being in the commercial banking business. Why are they doing that? Because those are sticky deposits. All of that is what came together. Plus, we knew the Mantle folks from 2019. We said, "This is going to be a really good strategic fit for us." That is what caused us to make the acquisition. I was at an industry show the week after we announced it. I had 20 customer meetings in 2 days. All they wanted to talk about when they sat down was, "Tell me about Mantle. Tell me, is this really going to happen? If it's really going to happen, we really want to buy this." It has been exciting early on for us in terms of this acquisition.
Alex, it sounds like in terms of customer education about the product, it doesn't seem like there needs to be much of it when it comes to Mantle compared to some of the other acquisitions that you've done. I guess that Segmint probably required a bit more of education. How do you think this is going to progress?
Yeah, what's exciting for us is we've had really good success with the ACH Alert acquisition. We've had really good success with the Segmint acquisition. And that's in the face of the buyers for those technologies were not the buyer that we were used to selling to. With digital account opening, the buyer we're selling to is the same buyer. It gives us some confidence that the attach rates that we've been able to achieve in our new logos, which is kind of 70% attach rate with Segmint with our new logos, that we ought to be able to achieve the same attach rate over time with Mantle, particularly since it's the same buyer.
The other challenge that we had with Segmint, given we were really introducing a new product to the market, and it was a different buyer in the organization and the financial institution, we were able to solve the problem in a new logo transaction when you had CEOs and CFOs and CTOs involved in the decision. A lot of the challenge was when we were cross-selling into our installed base and a client sales rep's entry point into a financial institution is generally at a lower level. That lower level has to be an advocate in the financial institution in order to get the product adopted.
Back to Alex's point, given that we're selling to a similar buyer, given that this is not a new concept and every one of our clients has some form of digital account openings, the cross-selling should come at a much higher velocity than what we've been able to accomplish with Segmint and ACH Alert.
Alex, I think on the earnings call, you mentioned that Mantle already had 5 transactions that were sold into Alkami's customer base. How quickly should we expect the acquisition to scale within Alkami?
One of the things that was exciting for us about Mantle is today they've got 170 customers under contract. About 20 of those are Alkami customers. In addition, about 70% of their customers are banks. For those of you that have followed the Alkami story, you know that we started more on the retail credit union side, and we've been making a lot of progress in the bank market. It was exciting for us, just kind of the lack of overlap, if you will. Those 5 transactions happened before we even introduced the sales teams to each other. If you think about our go-to-market, Mantle sales team will continue to sell Mantle independently, and they'll have success selling Mantle independently. Our new logo team doesn't really have to learn Mantle.
They just have to know that there's an opportunity, and the Mantle team can come in as sales specialist. Really, the 1 team that we have to educate on, and we're in the middle of it right now, is the new logo team. Why is that important? We believe that Mantle is going to increase our win rate. Our customers told us the number 1 priority that they have is to deliver an integrated account opening and onboarding solution with digital banking. Right now, what we're in the middle of doing is teaching our new logo sales team what's the value proposition of these 2 technologies coming together. From a go-to-market perspective, we don't have to teach the Mantle team how to sell Mantle, and we don't have to teach the Alkami account team how to sell Mantle. They just have to notice the opportunity.
All of those things give us a lot of confidence that this is going to turn out to be a really great acquisition.
You mentioned the customer account for Mantle. Can you maybe give us some insight into their market share in the digital account opening space?
Yeah, the way that maybe beyond just kind of just basic market share, there's a lot of white space for us. Kind of come back to the Alkami target market, which is the Mantle target market, right? 9,000 regional and community financial institutions, half are banks, half are credit unions. Alkami targets the top 2,500, if you will. Alkami, we have maybe 280 live customers.
That's right.
280 live customers. Mantle has maybe 120 live customers with very little overlap between the 2. You can see that we've got a lot of room to expand both businesses in our target market.
Mantle product already services some of your competitors, including Q2. Will they continue to do that going forward?
Yeah, our strategy is that Mantle should continue to be able to sell independently. If there's a Q2 customer and they want to buy Mantle, that's fantastic. What we intend to do is integrate the data platform, the digital banking platform, and Mantle in such a way that it creates some pretty unique capabilities for our customers. For those of you that do business with a large institution today that can spend billions of dollars on technology, what I'm going to describe next, you would say, "Can't anybody do this?" What a regional bank cannot do today, which they will be able to do when we bring these 3 technologies together, is they ought to be able to notice that a consumer is executing a lot of business transactions.
When they know that, they ought to be able to serve up an offer for a business account in the digital channel. When I'm using my mobile app, I should get an offer for a business account in the mobile app. When I click on that offer, I should be able to open an account relatively quickly and then be brought right back into my digital environment that now includes my new business banking application. That is rocket surgery for a community bank. With these 3 technologies, we'll bring them together so that they can accomplish that. When we do that, we'll be in market presenting a compelling offer for somebody to select Alkami. In summary, if a customer's got Q2 and they want to buy Mantle, that's fantastic. We're not going to keep that from happening. We want that to happen.
We want that to be an excellent experience. What we're going to do is create such a compelling differentiation that people are going to want the Alkami platform.
This is a good time to maybe see if there are any questions in the room. Please raise your hand if you have any. I also have another question about financing of this deal. How did you come about deciding on whether to use converts, credit facility, or stock to fund the deal?
Capital allocation and our capital stack is important to us and having the right cost of capital. It's pretty remarkable what changed from December 2024 when we started to engage with Mantle and then when we finally closed the acquisition in March. Everyone knows what happened in the market. We went into it not thinking we were smart, but if you look back, you're going to go, "Wow, they were pretty smart in how they handled this." We started early on with saying, "You know what? Let's amend our credit facility. It's a $125 million facility. We expanded it to $225 million, and then we have an accordion feature that allows us to borrow another $100 million." We brought in JPMorgan to be a partner along with Citibank and CIBC and SVB or First Citizens.
We did not even think we were going to need to use it, right? It is like, "Just as a precaution, let's amend our credit facility." Then we started thinking really about dilution. It is a large acquisition, 10% of our enterprise value. We want to manage dilution along the way. At the right stock price, we were willing to issue straight equity just to have a simple transaction. What was the right stock price quickly started to change over that 4 month period. We really landed in a position of a convertible note offering being a great cost of capital and affording a much lower dilution to our shareholders. I wanted all the cash upfront, right?
I didn't want to do a bond hedge or anything like that because our stock was still at a reasonable price and up 37.5%, effectively selling equity at $46, right? So $45. That was a great place to land. The market continued to deteriorate, and there was more volatility in the market. We made the decision, "Well, we need to enter into a bond hedge. We can take up the upper strike to 100%, still be issuing equity effectively at $45." We needed to tap into our credit facility, but still have enough cash on balance sheet and credit facility capacity to have dry powder to do another acquisition in the next 12 months or so without doing anything else to our capital structure. It was an evolving journey that we went through. It was a pretty volatile market.
I think the VIX was up to almost 40 at the time that we issued. We priced at the wide end on our convertible note offering. It was multi-times oversubscribed. It was a great transaction led by your employer, which we really appreciate. It was a great transaction. The thought process is really putting into place the fundamentals of the right capital stack at the right cost of capital.
Amazing. Bryan, Alex, thank you very much for joining us today. Appreciate your time.
Thank you.