Okay, I think we can get started with the next session. Welcome back, everyone. My name is Ken Suchoski, and I'm an analyst on the U.S. and Payments Fintech team at Autonomous Research. Today, we're excited to have John Rettig, CFO of Bill, at our conference this year. John, welcome. It's great to see you again. Thanks for doing this.
Yeah, thanks, Ken. Great to be with you. Looking forward to the conversation.
Great. If anyone has a question for John, feel free to submit those into the Q&A box, and we'll try to weave those in, or you can email me at ksuchoski@autonomous.com. So with that, let's get started. John, maybe to start off, you know, the confidence and conviction definitely came through on the fiscal fourth Q earnings call and conferences. What are you seeing to inform this level of confidence?
Yeah, great question to start things off. I'd say over the last year or so, there's been quite a few changes that we've worked through at BILL. The economy has evolved. That's led to lower B2B spend for small businesses. We've launched product integrations. We revised branding. We started to see some cost sensitivity by suppliers. So these are all, you know, new factors in the business that we adapted to all these changes to have success throughout the year. You saw improvements in net adds in the second half of fiscal 2024. You saw a better, you know, exit take rate than we were expecting, and so the team really rose to the occasion.
We leveraged our assets, created momentum, and with that momentum, the progress that we have seen with product improvements, direct dialogue with suppliers, you know, new customer acquisition, all this creates confidence in our ability to execute through what we really believe is a transition period that we're in right now. We've got a strong leadership position in the market. Demand is very strong. Obviously, we have a great value proposition that's proven, and so all of this leads to kind of inform our confidence, and it's backed by visibility into volumes across our portfolio of products and, you know, a strong belief and conviction that, you know, we can accelerate revenue growth and change our trajectory in the coming year.
Yeah. No, that's great, and you hired Mary Kay Bowman, and so you're, you know, you're deepening the bench. So that's definitely good to see. Maybe digging into the payment volume trends, you know, TPV per customer has been hovering at around flat, plus or minus 1% in recent quarters. I think some were thinking that normalized TPV per customer would be, you know, call it sort of mid-single digits when you think about the components, right? You have real GDP growth, maybe some inflation, shift up market, share of wallet gains. You know, the economy is still growing, so have we lost some of those tailwinds? And I guess, what's it gonna take to get TPV growth to re-accelerate?
Yeah, I'd say that the mid-single-digit view is probably a reasonable starting point, provided there's a stable economy. And I think in the case of BILL, likely a little bit higher growth than that, as we have an important wallet, you know, share gain, you know, lever that we can pull. I think the reality, though, is that it's a tricky economy for SMBs. They've been negatively impacted by a lot of things, including, you know, high interest rates, high labor cost, and things like that, and they've adjusted, you know, their B2B spend accordingly. And as you, you know, as you know, TPV per customer grew in the thirties during the peak pandemic period, which was many multiples of GDP, given stimulus and zero interest rates and all those sorts of things.
And then post-pandemic, I think we're still, you know, SMBs anyway, recovering from that period and looking for signs of a better economic environment, more demand, and things like that. I think probably the biggest trigger that we're looking for is SMBs to react to either lower interest rates or the expectation of lower interest rates ahead, and have that give them more confidence that, you know, they can expand spending because the conditions will be right at that point. You know, in the meantime, but we don't have a lot of direct influence on the overall level of SMB spend. We do have levers to continue to push on TPV. We're acquiring slightly larger businesses, as we've talked about.
We are expanding wallet share in some cases with products like international payments, and as we increase our footprint there through some product improvements, that will have a positive impact, and obviously, we're, you know, continuing to acquire customers.
No, that's great. That makes a lot of sense, John. And, I mean, I guess, what do you think of... What do you think normalized TPV, TPV per customer growth is for this business? I think you said maybe slightly higher than the, you know, the call it the mid-single digit, but any way to help quantify some of the underlying drivers, whether that's real GDP inflation, sort of shift up market and share gains?
Yeah, we haven't ruled out, like, a specific target or expectation on TPV per customer growth. I think, you know, that's something we could do once we get past this phase of the economy and start to see where interest rates level out at. But generally speaking, just directionally, we would expect TPV growth to be above that of the overall economy, and then there's probably some additive component about...
The market that we're in and the types of small businesses that we're serving, and their growth probably being above, you know, GDP. Excuse me, the products that we have, the value proposition around doing more in one place results in consolidation of spend and our expanding portfolio of payment products, faster payments. All those things mean we're gonna touch more of the dollars that SMBs are, you know, managing. So we would expect, you know, growth there, and, you know, exactly where that's gonna be, I think is pretty sensitive to, you know, the economic environment.
Mm-hmm. And maybe just last one on payment volume, and we can move on. I guess in terms of what's embedded in the fiscal year 2025 guidance, I think you're assuming fairly stable TPV per customer growth, so close to flat year over year in that metric over the next four quarters. I guess when your team talks to small businesses, you know, is there anything they're waiting for to ramp spending? You mentioned maybe the interest rate environment to change. I wasn't sure if inventories had to come down or anything like that, but it does seem like SMBs have gone through their own mini recession over the last couple years.
Yeah. It's so for 2025, just to confirm expectations, we've said that we expect stable to, I guess, flattish is the technical term, in terms of TPV per customer over the course of the year. Obviously, there's some quarter-to-quarter fluctuation in that, and we pay attention to where SMBs, where our customers are spending, so we look at PEO, which is, you know, outsourced, you know, labor and employment, advertising, physical footprint, you know, rent and facility spend, which can tell us about expansion or contraction and things like that and, you know, at the moment, and for the last few quarters actually, those spending trends are really consistent, so we don't see significant contraction across important areas.
And in our, I guess, conversations with SMBs, it's really just more certainty that they're looking for in the economy and demand before they're gonna start to get into expansion mode. I do think, and this comes up in a number of the conversations, that interest rates are an important factor. Access to labor is also an important factor. You know, payroll expenses are high, and sometimes there's a shortage of labor to support expansion initiatives and things like that. So, these are all things that we're hearing from small businesses.
Okay, great. Maybe we could touch on take rate. I mean, from a higher level, I think some of the fees that suppliers are paying for payments like virtual cards, I mean, they could be $60, $80, $100 per transaction, and the question I think then becomes, is this fee worth it to them, right? What are the benefits that the supplier is receiving? Maybe talk about the different ways BILL is adding value to these suppliers, and what are the changes BILL is making that suppliers find most valuable?
Yeah. Just to set the foundation, I mean, we're BILL is a big aggregator, as you know, of SMB payments. So, to the extent that we have a large number of customers who are paying a given supplier, we inadvertently sort of look like a big cost center, frankly, because of the aggregation that we do with payments. And we've heard from many suppliers that they want payments actually disaggregated and, along with that, easier methods to receive data for reconciliation. And this is what we're working on. This is not a brand-new initiative. We've been working on this for several quarters. We're very tight with many suppliers as we work through initial product improvements and rollout. We have proof-of-concept work going on before we scale to the entire network.
And it really comes down to our roadmap for automation. I mean, that's gonna be the key, the key component that influences the perception either, you know, qualitatively or quantitatively, on, you know, the cost of acceptance. And so straight-through processing is an important, you know, element that's an automation, you know, lever and ties into other automation that suppliers might have. We recently signed a new partner in that regard, and so we're working to increase the coverage of straight-through processing. We have a long way to go, so there's still a big opportunity there. And then I'd say more broadly, just making sure that there's many choices.
So we have talked, you know, over the last couple of years about the importance of virtual card payments as a growth driver historically for BILL. It's just one type of card payment, though. There's lots of other payment methods that can create value for suppliers or buyers, depending upon the case, and support BILL's overall expansion of monetization over time.
Yeah. No, that's a good point. And the thinking in my mind was always the benefit the supplier received should at least equal the cost of the supplier to accept that payment. You know, maybe the cost should be less, so the supplier captures some of the economic value. But how do you quantify the benefit to the suppliers? Is it really just X amount of hours of reconciling payments in AR, and so you have X amount of hours per payment times some hourly rate, or maybe there's some benefit around not sharing bank account information, I guess, how do you think about sort of quantifying the cost savings for suppliers? Because that could influence how much you actually charge them.
Yeah. Well, I think you've got those factors exactly right. The big, you know, variables are, you know, the experience between buyer and supplier, the nominal acceptance cost of a payment, so just the whatever dollars and cents associated with that. The people costs that go into things like reconciliation and cash application to close out, you know, open AR. And just generally, you know, speed, certainty of payment timing, and things like that are very critical, you know, components to how suppliers think about the total cost. And I'd say, in some cases, it's an art, not a science, for suppliers. They might not have complete visibility into, like, the total cost of ownership, total cost of acceptance. They might be looking more, might be focusing a little bit more on the nominal, you know, cost.
And the reality is, all payment methods have costs associated with them, and as much as suppliers can eliminate the human element and drive automation, the better. That's gonna lower their overall cost. And we're believers that we can significantly lower that total cost of acceptance by reducing the people costs involved through automation. So that is, if there's one thread in how we're thinking about value creation for suppliers, that's probably the biggest one. There could be cases where, you know, incentives and pricing and things like that are a component of a total, you know, offering. I'd say that, by itself, isn't the biggest driver from our standpoint. What we hear more about is process friction more than absolute price.
Where you have a higher priced product, if it can deliver, you know, lower human costs, lower friction, more automation, then the effective cost of that is likely acceptable. Then the other thing I'd say is, for the vast majority of suppliers who might have accepted or currently accept a BILL Virtual Card payment, they're likely not just serving SMBs. These are larger, you know, national footprint suppliers. They're also, in many cases, serving consumers. So they are in the card acceptance business, and so they're not making a choice, for the most part, about accepting cards or not accepting cards. It's about trying to optimize, you know, the experience for the different customer segments that they're serving.
The dialogue that we've been having with suppliers of late. We're really tapped into what they're trying to accomplish.
Yeah. No, that, like, makes a lot of sense. And I remember you, I think a couple years ago, saying that just getting cash in the door for that business is really important, so these payment types could be very valuable in that regard. One question we get just around some of the newer payment types, things like Pay By Card, enhanced ACH, the supplier financing. You know, these have been around for some time, but it seems like the penetration is still fairly low. Is that a function of, you know, not having a sales team in place or maybe not pushing those payments as aggressively? I guess, what's driving that, and what is BILL doing to push that penetration higher?
Yeah. I'd say there's a few factors at play here, but the most important one is probably just the nature of the product life cycle, and then secondly, in some cases, our own metering of product usage, and that would be most applicable to you know, like credit products, you know, working capital, invoice financing, things like that, where we are controlling the usage of that product. They're not available to all providers. I'd say there are some products, like the one you mentioned, pay by card, that's a product that is valuable to some buyers that you know, AP customers. There's demand for it. There's a fee associated with that. It's a customer using their own credit card.
There's an order of magnitude, 2.9% fee, you know, for it, so it's not the type of product that we believe would be, like, universally used by all customers, but it fills an important niche of demand that exists for our SMB base, and that's why we, you know, we offer it, and then, I'd say the other side is like invoice financing, where we are working directly with mostly smaller suppliers in that case, and it works in concert with our Instant Transfer product, so the idea of getting access to cash faster than the normal payable cycle, that would, like, that is a universal need for small businesses.
And so as we build out these products, and we, in the case of credit products, where there's risk associated with that, these will continue to scale. Our general view, though, is that the portfolio approach of having different solutions that meet the needs of both buyers and suppliers will ultimately be how we continue to drive adoption, in particular, adoption of ad valorem payments versus the fixed price payments. It's not just gonna be, you know, one product or another. So we generally try to drive product discovery, you know, inside of our platform, inside of our solution, adoption of different payment types.
In some cases, an example might be international payments and FX, where we might apply some sales resources to it, but generally speaking, we're trying to do this through self-discovery, and in product, you know, adoption, because this is the most efficient and scalable, particularly for an SMB base.
Mm-hmm, and you and the team have talked about the benefits of shifting check payments over to ACH. It's digital, it opens up the opportunity to layer in some other payment types. What is the team working on to try to upsell suppliers, meaning shifting ACH payments over to higher-yielding transactions, if appropriate?
Yeah, it really depends on the size of the supplier, the relationship between the supplier and the buyer. We're ultimately trying to cater, you know, to their needs with the best, you know, payment type that will create a sticky payment flow, right? So we try not to do things that disrupt, you know, payment flows and try to avoid seeing buyers and suppliers changing payment methods all the time. For smaller suppliers who manage their cash maybe on a transaction-by-transaction basis, it's really speed of payment, like, that's what matters most, and we have historically had very fast ACH payments. We're very sophisticated in the way we underwrite those payments and deliver fast payments as a result. Invoice financing plays into that as well.
For large suppliers, we've talked already about how we're, you know, enhancing, you know, some of the value prop of existing products, but if you think about what we do for many suppliers, we know we deliver more value than we monetize. Think about a large supplier who might be receiving all ACH payments, you know. This could be dozens, hundreds or thousands of payments that are really fast and free, so we know that there's more to do. Maybe we can enhance that experience even more, but then ultimately move to a better sort of value creation model for Bill, and so these are just some of the factors that we think over time, we have a significant opportunity to increase transaction yields as we do more around ACH payments to create better experiences for buyers and suppliers.
Right. So I think the expectation is for ad valorem penetration to hit 20% over time, and I think that 20% you mentioned was more of a floor. Can you just give us a sense of the building blocks behind that? I mean, which payment methods do you feel most confident in scaling, if you had to rank them? And any sense of the timeline for hitting that 20%? Is it, you know, five years out, 10 years, 20 years?
I don't have any timeline specifics for you other than it's not a twenty-year number. Like, that I can tell you. So the building blocks, we're at about 14% ad valorem today, of which about half is Spend & Expense, so our charge card product. So the combination of virtual card payments, IP, international payments, the FX component, instant transfer, pay by card, things like that are slightly less than half, and then we have some other smaller products that contribute. I'd say we have a ton of headroom for growth as it relates to card products generally, and our spend and expense products specifically. As you've seen in our metrics and our trends, you know, volume growth associated with spend and expense is, you know, consistently outpacing overall TPV growth.
I think we were at 30% or so in FY 24 in spend and expense volume growth versus ex-FI TPV growth of about 11% for Core BILL. That's a trend that's gonna continue. That market is still evolving. It's even earlier than the overall you know AP market evolution you know cycle. And then for some of those other products that we've already talked about, as we start to make some of the product improvements, drive more automation, enhance the you know the experience for both buyers and suppliers, we think we're you know set up for a significant runway of penetration gains there. And then some of the newer products that they're starting to influence our monetization rate, but they're still small in terms of revenue scale for you know for BILL.
This would be things like working capital. That could be its own big standalone business, if you look out, you know, five years or so. And we don't view it as a tremendous growth driver in the very short term, but we are putting in place the foundation, if you will, to continue to scale that, and then have multiple follow-on products that serve the cash flow needs of, you know, known entities. This is really about known customers, known suppliers, where we have history, we can underwrite them. And then we've talked previously about some of the like product enhancements and new product rollouts that we wanna do that fill some of the gap that exists between, you know, a free ACH payment and a much higher monetizing ad valorem payment.
There's two or three products in that category that I think we'll see will be a significant contributor to overall Ad Valorem growth, and we do view that 20% target as probably the minimum bar, as opposed to that's what we're gonna be stretching to get to. I think the opportunity is much bigger than that.
Yeah. And John, just to follow up on what you said about the working capital offering, is there anything, I guess, that you're looking for, I guess, to accelerate, you know, the introduction of that offering to your clients? Is it, you know, is it data? Is it, you know, more usage, just getting comfortable with the underwriting? Like, what's, you know, I guess, what's holding you back from really scaling that?
... it mostly has to do with how we look at targeting suppliers, proving out our ability to underwrite them. We've made great progress. We see significant demand for the product throughout this last year as we've had this controlled launch. Great repeat usage, which tells us we're getting the economics right. I'd say we have validated nearly all of our assumptions around credit and underwriting and loss profiles, and we feel good about that. It's probably not yet at the scaling stage for us. We definitely manage products like that on a margin basis. We don't just look at revenue.
And so as we continue to create some more internal tools and automation, I'd say over this next year, our fiscal 2025 is when we'll be ready to start, you know, standing up, you know, more growth there. That will come with other, you know, capabilities, like third-party financing sources, so we're not consuming more BILL balance sheet. So there's a bunch of components to that particular product, and we feel good about the setup right now, and I'd say the learnings that we've had so far have validated the opportunity that exists.
Yeah. No, that's, that's great to hear. Maybe sticking with the transaction side of the business, but maybe we can hit on the FI channel. You know, there are some banks that have taken your entire suite of products. You have at least one large bank that has your higher-yielding products. I mean, if, if we do the math, I think the transaction yield in the FI channel is hovering around one to two basis points. You know, why, why isn't that much higher, and could that yield get closer to the yield in the non-FI channel over time?
Yeah, just to step back, the way our economics work in the financial institution channel is we sell, generally speaking, this applies to all of our deals, wholesale pricing on subscription and transaction fees. And then banks are in charge of the go-to-market and actually the ultimate pricing. So the bank, if you will, is our customer. When we launched most of the relationships with banks, we just had the check and ACH payments that they were buying. And so if you think about our yield on those for our direct business, it's low, and then we're obviously discounting that for volume with the banks.
And so as our ad valorem portfolio of products has grown, we're starting to make those available, and those will certainly have a positive, you know, influence. But the mix today of transaction volumes with our FI partners is still, you know, very skewed towards ACH and check payments, and we're starting to, you know, to chip away at that. But I think there's an opportunity to expand monetization, but we don't expect transaction yields or overall ARPU or things like that to be equivalent even over time to our direct business. I think where we have a more tangible, like, ARPU growth, you know, runway is probably around our embed strategy with software companies.
Because there it's a slightly different model in that we're bringing all of our products to the relationships from day one. So we're not trying to get new products in over time. There's some exceptions to that, like we're not necessarily gonna offer our credit products to all partners and things. So the example is, you know, the agreement, the partnership that we've announced with Xero, that that's bringing all of our products from the beginning. So you'll see, as that gets up and running and we have volume there, those yields being closer to our direct business than, say, the financial institution channel economics.
Okay, great. And I wanted to touch briefly on the RPO renewal with one of your largest FIs, since that's a topic we've been getting a lot of interest in. First off, congrats on the renewal. The RPO dollar amount was kept unchanged, but it's now spread over more years. So I think it implies a sort of a price cut on a per-year basis, you know, despite providing more to this FI in the form of APIs and whatnot. So, you know, does this mean the FI channel is getting more competitive? Do you guys still see this as a viable distribution channel, just given it seems like the FIs have a lot of bargaining power, you know, relative to some of the other channels that you're in?
Yeah, that's certainly true. They're scale players in payments, and they're not going anywhere. They're gonna be in the payment space for sure. But I'd say this, arrangement that they're referring to is more of a, like, specific use case as opposed to the norm. You know, the changes we talked about in strategy and approach and whatnot, we covered all that extensively in fiscal 2024. But I'd say, we're we feel good about the amendment and the changes of the contract because it puts us in a place where we can solve the needs that they have for our solutions, within the context of a, you know, a bigger project and a solution that they want to roll out to their customers.
So we did add some capabilities to the agreement. You referenced that with the APIs. So there could be an opportunity to do more, but we feel like it makes sense to, you know, to amend the agreement to play the part that the partner wants us to play. I don't think it's really as much about competition or things like that. As you know, over time, we have learned a lot by working with these large FIs. In fact, we've become a better company from a regulatory and compliance and scale perspective. That proving ground has been really important for us as it relates to risk and all that kind of stuff.
And so we're building on that as it relates to everything else we're doing with our embed strategy.
Yeah. Okay, great. Maybe we could touch on subscription ARPU for standalone BILL, just the XDFI channel. BILL had some encouraging growth in subscription ARPU in fiscal year 2022. Fiscal year 2023, you know, by our calculations, that slowed a bit to flat to slightly down in the second half of last fiscal year. You know, I know there are some price increases historically, but I'm curious what's driving maybe some of the slower ARPU growth on the software side? And is the expectation to get back to growth over the coming quarters, and I guess is pricing still a potential driver here?
Yeah. The trends with subscription ARPU have been significantly influenced by some of the cohorts of new customers that we acquired in the, let's say, 12 to 18 months prior to our third quarter of fiscal 2024. And that's when we talked more substantially about shifting to larger customers and things like that. So we had a larger influx of smaller SMBs. So fewer, you know, smaller businesses, fewer employees, fewer seats, and they started with us at a lower price tier than an average. And we're seeing that kind of just play through, you know, the system. And that will evolve as the larger businesses. Again, we're still in the SMB segment. We're not talking about enterprise, but at...
This focus on the larger businesses will bring most customers in at a higher price point. Generally speaking, they have more users per customer. There's a little bit of sensitivity maybe around that right now in the economic environment we're in, but that will, you know, change over time. We tend to look at broad-based pricing changes every 18-24 months. Our last price change was a little over a year ago now. I'd say that the more important lever over time is evolving our platform to have more modular pricing. So we have a lot of capabilities beyond, you know, payments as, as you know, from, you know, document capture, automated extraction of data, automated routing, coding, approvals, things like that. We don't price independently for any of those features.
And I'm just giving examples there. There's many more. As we continue to, you know, to scale, the more usage that we see from larger businesses, I think creates an opportunity for some modular pricing that will obviously be additive to subscription ARPUs. And then, as we add more capabilities to the platform, obviously, that creates independent subscription growth. We are a long way from, like, price optimization as it relates to the platform, but given where we are in the market evolution, we feel like it still makes sense. So we're not trying to maximize price as much as we are trying to continue to drive adoption.
Mm-hmm. John, I wanted to ask about the cross-sell opportunity for spend and expense management. I think you've talked about pushing this more into the accounting firm channel. Can you talk about the customer appetite in that channel to adopt a spend and expense management solution, and maybe also touch on your confidence in being able to drive penetration higher in that channel?
Yeah. We see really strong interest in S&E product from accounting firms. It's a little bit different, you know, product. There's a credit component, requires some education. In some cases, accounting firms haven't worked as closely with their clients on that side of their financial house. And so, we've done a lot of work to pre-approve accounting firms, just firm-wide, you know, credit approvals. We're doing we've already re-released some enhancements to the console or dashboard experience that our accountants have, so that they can view all of the activity of their clients, regardless of whether it's a card on S&E or the BILL business.
And so we're really doubling down on that in fiscal 2025 as it relates to new products that improved AP experience, tighter integration with S&E, and we think that will have a positive impact on this cross-sell opportunity in that particular channel, specifically.
I wanted to touch on gross margins. I think the non-GAAP gross margins declined about two hundred basis points year over year in fiscal 4Q. They were roughly flat for the first nine months of the year. By our calculations, the incremental gross margin was closer to low seventies this past quarter, despite float income increasing year over year. So what's driving that sort of lower incremental margin versus prior periods? How much is that... How much is sort of payment mix shift to pay by card versus some of the other investments that you're making back into the business?
... Yeah, I'd say that the payment composition, payment mix composition is probably the biggest driver. Recall, though, that in our third quarter of fiscal 2024, we did have roughly a $6 million one-time benefit that impacted gross margin. This was related to volume incentives from one of the card networks. So when you, like, normalize for that, looking at the trailing five quarters or so, the gross non-GAAP gross margin mix is mostly driven by payment composition. Pay by card is one reason. It's a lower margin, you know, product. We've also shared that we're partway through a migration of some of our AR volume to a new service provider. So we become the program manager.
We can deliver a much better payment experience, but at the same time, that results in gross revenue recognition instead of net, which then is a lower, you know, gross margin product. So these are some of the examples when we've talked over the last probably eighteen months about, slightly lower gross margins ahead. It's this kind of payment, you know, composition.
Yeah. Okay, great. John, I wanted to weave in one question that we got from the audience just on virtual card adoption, and they're asking about it both from the customer side and the supplier side. And just on the customer side, they ask, "In order to drive adoption of virtual cards, have you considered offering incentive plans to customers in order for them to adopt virtual card and create some stickiness in that spend type?" And then on the supplier side, they ask, "Have you looked at offering different BIN rates to larger suppliers?" So instead of accepting, you know, call it two hundred and sixty basis points, maybe accepting a hundred and fifty basis points.
Yeah. On the first part of the question with buyers, it is something that we've had dialogue with, in particular, some of the mid-market customers that we work with, so the larger AP customers. We've done some testing there. I'd say we don't, at the moment, have wide-scale, you know, incentives in place. It is, in certain circumstances, something that could be an effective tool, to help drive volume to the extent that buyers have, some leverage or the type of relationship they have with suppliers, where they can significantly influence the acceptance of card payments. On the supplier side, I'd say we haven't done that historically as far as different rate tiers.
But it is a part of the dialogue, you know, that we're having around the overall product experience, and value proposition. So that could be something that exists. I'd say it's perhaps an exception rather than something that would be the norm.
Okay, and John, maybe we have a minute left, so maybe last question, just to wrap up the conversation. I mean, the stock's been under a bit of pressure over the last year or so, and both you and René have been in the market buying shares. I guess, what do you think is misunderstood in the story, and what are you most excited about going forward?
Great, great place to end. So first, I'd say, there's a few factors, starting with our capabilities and leadership position are real. So we're making a difference for small businesses. It's not just about payments. It's about helping them operate their business differently. We've got significant scale, but the market is actually still early in its evolution. We've got a huge lead, both from a product standpoint, from a go-to-market ecosystem standpoint, our work with accountants. We've created consistency now in penetrating the market with customer acquisition, and we're going through a product sort of life cycle improvement, if you will, around integration and the value proposition, that it is really gonna help us continue to scale and penetrate the market as the market still evolves.
As it relates to monetization, I think we have so far to go with both payment and subscription monetization as the market evolves. Yes, we've had some near-term headwinds both externally and internally as it relates to growth over the last year there, but we feel great about how the setup is for us over the longer term, and we feel like we're in a great position to really build a generational company. This is a huge market opportunity, in part, that we created, and we have a leadership position that we're investing behind.
Yeah. No, super exciting, and look forward to following the progress. John, I think, we're gonna have to leave it there, so thanks so much for taking the time. It's always great to see you and hear your insights.
Great. Thanks, Ken. I appreciate it.
All right. Thanks so much, everyone. Enjoy the rest of your day.