All right, thanks everybody for joining. We're a little late. Everything's running a little bit behind, so apologies for that. My name is Tien-tsin Huang. I cover the payments and IT services sector at J.P. Morgan, always delighted to have BILL with us here. Always look forward to having a good conversation with René Lacerte. René is the founder and CEO. We also have Rohini Jain in the audience here, the new CFO there. Thank you for being here, René.
Well, thank you for having us. Always a good conversation.
Yeah.
Like you said, both ways, so appreciate it.
It's, it's fun. I know you're coming a long way. I thought we'd kick it off with we learned a lot from your most recent call, René. I've been thinking about it a lot and how to be, you know, productive with this time that we have with you. You know, you called out this being a pivotal moment, right? And you talked about the opportunity for the company that you founded, right, to make some serious changes, and you've been busy with, right, focusing on profitability, I wrote down, right, investing. You got this AI workforce optimization. You got a lot of industry consolidation going on. You've announced a buyback, right? Of course, there's been a lot of shareholder engagement and activism too. How are you personally organizing all of these things, René?
I thought we'd start with that because, you know, as the founder, I know you look at it very, very closely. You have big ambitions for the company. How do you organize all of these things?
It's a great question. I think, you know, from a day-to-day perspective, I've been doing this, you know, if you include both companies, close to 30 years now. You have to have a little bit of ADD because you have to take on multiple tasks to be able to do all this because it is a busy time. The reason I called it a pivotal moment is that, you know, AI, it's a real impact, and it's a transformational impact for any software developer. And we are at our core building software to connect to payments. We are converging software and payments, and so our ability to deliver more products is real, and that's something that we wanted to like, you know, look at this moment and really understand how we could actually do more for our customers by leveraging it.
That was one component of it. I think, you know, from a focus perspective, to your point, like there's, you know, maybe one way I'd step back is, you know, we see, you know, kind of three legs of a stool of how investors probably look at us. One is shareholder return. Another would be profitability. Other would be growth. You know, from our perspective, we wanted to make clear to all investors what our intentions were across all of them. I think the focus on the workforce restructuring will give a lot more, you know, clarity on what it is that we're going to be doing from a profitability perspective, our path to the Rule of 40. All of that is I think something that's important for investors.
I think the share buyback is important. When it gets to where we really focus, it's on the growth, right? Where I'm spending my time is understanding the capabilities of AI inside the company, the capabilities of AI from peers, understanding how that can translate into experiences both internal and external. Really working with the product teams on kind of the extension of the vision. Vision hasn't changed in the company. We wanna make it simple to connect and do business, but how is it that we connect and do business for our customers? That part of the vision will change. The how we build it will change, and that is where I'm spending time. I think how we serve our customers from an efficiency perspective will also be how, you know, where I'm spending time right now.
We're in the middle of this realignment, if you will, inside the company on, you know, becoming an AI-native company both internally and externally. All of my time right now is focused on helping the teams make progress in, you know, their vision around what it means to be an AI-native company.
Let's stay with that AI-native. I mean, René, you've seen a lot of tech cycles in the past, and I'm always trying to learn from those past cycles and think, "Okay, what's going to be similar? What might be different?" I'm curious. I hear your sense of urgency around AI as being very, very high. Is that fair? How would you compare AI to past tech waves and why you're so, you know, focused on this transformation?
Yeah. I think, you know, at the core, I'm a builder. I just love to build capabilities for customers. I love SMBs and mid-market companies. I think they are kind of the glue of society. I love building. The urgency is because AI is accelerating and collapsing the distance between an idea and a vision and execution and creation. This collapsing means that it's a unique opportunity to actually deliver more capabilities to our customers faster. It is the highest sense of urgency I've felt in, you know, my, you know, 30+ years of developing software.
Okay.
It is a tool. It's a capability. Software still comes back to knowing what to build and how to build it. AI is a part of the how to build. It's not the only part of the how to build, right? There's lots of, you know, your software development life cycle, all these different things that are how you build. AI is a component of that. What you build comes from expertise. And I think us really understanding, you know, where we've developed expertise over time, allows us, because of the broad-based customers, to really think about, well, where could AI disintermediate the existing friction that customers may have or businesses may have in their financial operations? We see opportunities around onboarding, we see opportunities around kind of transaction capture, we see opportunities around, you know, the buyer-supplier relationships.
You've seen some of the agents we do on transaction capture and buyer-supplier relationships with the W-9 automation. We see all of that already starting to play out. We have over 100,000 customers that are leveraging our agents today. I think, you know, what this really comes back to is something I've talked about, and again, it's back to the urgency. You know, when I started this company, financial operations was a do-it-yourself model.
Yeah.
Every business had to figure out how they were gonna manage their financial operations. Were they gonna file alphabetically by first name or last name? I mean, simple things like that. They had to figure out how they were gonna manage their financial operations, issue checks, reconcile checks, what accounting software integration they needed, if that. We came along, and we enabled do it with you. Now we walk a customer through the entire process of how, what's the workflow you need? How do you connect with suppliers? How do you make a payment happen? Do you have to actually write a check or then separately send an ACH, or can it all be in one platform?
We're in a do-it-with-you mode now, and what I see AI doing, and this is again back to the urgency, it's gonna totally mean that we're able to deliver a do-it-for-you experience. And a do-it-for-you experience, and you've heard me talk about this before, if you think about this category of financial operations, the closest one that I see is payroll.
Yeah.
Payroll is, you know, in the dominant form, it actually probably went from a do it yourself to a do it for you. That would've been ADP and Paychex was a do it for you. Intuit came along, and some of the stuff I built at Intuit was a do-it-with-you approach. The company I started was a do-it-with-you approach. The thing that really drove the overall industry was the do it for you. AI being available now that we can actually quickly go to all the things that create a burden and a friction for customers, whether they're customers or prospects, that's why the urgency is there, and it's something that we're, you know, very excited about driving.
Do you think, René, that this expands the TAM, or does it just increase the penetration of the TAM that we've been talking about for quite some time? 'Cause I can appreciate that there's some pricing potential here.
Yeah.
I've heard you talk about monetization of some agents, but it's just this, does it accelerate the TAM penetration, or is it more TAM expansive in your mind?
I, another really great question. I think it's both, and that's probably the easy answer to give. The reason I think it's both is I think if you think about the friction that we see customers have in adopting the platform, we think that AI will enable us to remove that friction and really reduce the amount of complexity it is to actually understand what it is that they need to be doing with their financial operations. That actually means the TAM is the same number of businesses, we're just able to get to them more. That's the first part. To your second point, you know, one of the things we've talked about is moving from essentially task-based agents into roles-based agents.
When you look at the labor costs associated with financial operations, it is significantly greater than the existing infrastructure costs.
Sure
that people have. That will also expand the TAM. I don't think that's the next year or two. I mean, you'll see some of that from us. Overall, you know, what you'll see is us making sure that we're getting the solution right to expand the, to expand the penetration of the TAM while learning how to actually expand the monetization of the TAM. Both will happen, but it's gonna take, obviously, there's a first order of business, which is getting the customers, and the second order is to continue to monetize. I think the other thing that is interesting for us is that we have this combination of software and payments. I think for us, part of the TAM expansion is just getting more penetration of our existing payment products, right? We have lots of levers to grow.
It's one of the things that, you know, make it fun to work at BILL is that there is no shortage of opportunities to drive growth in the business, and that's something that, you know, all of our teams are thinking about. What you've seen us do is actually continue to drive payment adoption across the platform.
Good. I have to ask, I know it's a big topic in software and how AI might lower the barriers to entry for players to compete, it comes back to what's the moat for BILL? I've heard you talk about that quite a bit. Have you changed your thinking about describing what your moat is and why other merchant platforms or software platforms, SMB marketplaces, whatever, why they can't replicate what BILL has created?
Yeah. I think the first thing that I would focus on is just expertise in knowing what to build and how to build it. I think that's a real thing. I think I've been building software through multiple generations of, you know, tool development, and I've seen that each generation makes you more efficient in developing what you want, but you still have to know what you wanna build, and you have to have a process for that. That first one I would say for us is that we've got SMB and payments expertise that nobody else has. You just look at our size and scale, B2B payments, over 1% of GDP, over $300 billion going through our rails, hundreds of thousands of customers, billions of transactions, $1 trillion in spend and lifetime.
That's a tremendous amount of expertise that comes off of every one of those transactions, every one of those customers. That's the first part of the moat, like knowing what to go build in this AI-native world. The next part I would say is really the payment platform capabilities that we have. We have a very seamless end-to-end platform that is, you know, deeply understands the problems SMBs have and enables the different payments that they need. We have 12 different payment modalities that our customers have access to when they need access to it. Behind that, understanding what that means is that there's a lot of compliance, there's a lot of money movement, there's a lot of reconciliation, there's a lot of, you know, different challenges here and there. There's risk and credit that actually come into that play.
Our payment capabilities and the fact that we weave all of those together so seamlessly, enabling every customer to be able to make those payment decisions or every supplier be able to make those payment decisions, that's a real competitive advantage. The third area, which is predicated on the first two, really is the data that we have. You just think about the vast amount of data that we have across payments, across documents, across the SMBs and the workflow they have, that gives us insights around, again, what to build and how to actually manage the credit and risk exposure that might be inside of any business transaction. That actually really, you know, creates, I think, a fairly, you know, important, you know, moat for us because we have a size and scale that only gets bigger every year.
The last moat, the fourth moat that I would talk about is our distribution. We've been very focused and understood from the beginning that reaching the broad market is not easy. It's not easy. You have to have multiple channels to go after that market. We have a direct effort which drives, you know, great revenue per customer for us. We have an accountant effort which probably drives more units for us, and we have a partnership effort which can be both depending on the size. We have this fourth thing that we call a network that is obviously pretty helpful in onboarding a customer as well as seeing some of those upgrade in.
The distribution is something that, you know, you can come up with a new idea today, but you still need to work hard at distribution. If I were to look back over the last 20 years in building BILL, how much of it was building great product and how much of it was building great distribution? They're both equally valuable, and you can't get one without the other, and it takes time. You know, I think that is a moat when it comes to any, you know, AI players coming in. They have to go find the distribution, and it's not something that's gonna happen overnight.
We've seen some of your competitors address that by, you know, going into deals, maybe address some of those three or four items that you talked about. You know, in my mind, I think of, for example, Brex going to Capital One, right?
Yeah.
Getting a balance sheet and some scale and some distribution. I'm curious if some of the recent consolidation and activity out there, if that's changed your strategic priorities in any way.
It hasn't changed our priorities. I think, you know, when we look at everything that we've done, everything that we've built, you know, a key factor in business in general, I think it's gonna become even more critical in an AI world, is trust. What we've been able to do, at our size and scale is build trust with our customers, with our partners, with, you know, the accountants, and that's not something that goes away. As others are looking for distribution and potentially consolidating and letting themselves, you know, be acquired, that's actually a different, you know, problem. Like, we have distribution, we have opportunities. You know, we still obviously like partnering with our partners from an embed perspective, I don't see the consolidation.
When we looked at if we were to talk about our closed-won, you know, analysis, we have not seen any change over the last few years, from a cohort analysis perspective. If anything, in the cohorts we care most about because we've been focused on it, we're getting better at the closed-won.
Okay. Good. Let's pivot a little bit and talk about the workforce reduction, which I know we talked about it. Again, I know you put a lot of thought into it, René. How did you land on the 30% reduction? What can you relay to investors about why that's not gonna drive any service disruption or go-to-market disruption as you go through this new sizing?
Yeah. It's Anytime you do something this meaningful, you have to put a lot of thought into it. I think one of the, again, one of the competencies and things that we've been able to do and to consistently demonstrate, I think, to investors and others is that, you know, we execute well. We put the thought into it, and we deliver and exceed what we're saying we're gonna deliver. On this particular front, we looked at this as, you know, very simplistically, and sometimes it's easier to step back and just look at the simplistic formula. Simplistically, you know, is there 10% - 15% less stuff that we could be doing that's not creating real value for the company?
Is there 10%-50% efficiencies that we should be able to gain either through AI or just being more thoughtful about the organizational design? That's how you get to 20%-30%, which is why we said up to 30%.
Right.
You know, we're in the middle of actually doing all that work right now. We did bring outside consultants in to kind of help us think structurally about the business. Now we're applying that with the teams to actually create the business, you know, of tomorrow, the BILL of tomorrow, today. We don't wanna kind of piecemeal this. We wanna get there, and we wanna execute in that fashion. You know, the teams are very focused on understanding, you know, what drives the performance today. We have, you know, put mitigating factors in place to try to address anything that might happen as a result. Like I said, we're in the middle of this, and I would always invest in the future of tomorrow ahead of just today because we have to get this right. This is a pivotal moment.
We have to get the transformation right. We have to make sure that we address all the capabilities that we wanna be able to do as a company and are structured to be able to move at the pace that we wanna move. I think, you know, we'll have more to share in August, but at this point, we feel good about being able to balance and manage, you know, the, you know, the transformation of the business into AI data while, you know, committing, you know, maintaining our commitment to the numbers.
Got it. You're reinvesting the minority of the gross savings back into the business. I'm just curious, how did you arrive at the distribution of flowing it through to the bottom line versus reinvesting?
A lot of the thought around this was what we were ready to invest in. I mean, the teams have, you know, we have a long list of things that we want to invest in.
Sure.
A lot of the thought was around understanding the efficiencies that we were gonna get and what we expected, you know, where the increased cost might come, whether that's talent or tokens or whatnot. There was a lot of thought put behind that, and I think, you know, our focus is always on what's gonna be the right thing to drive durable growth for the business and to do that profitably. We've demonstrated that this year. I mean, I think you've seen us actually exceed the growth targets and the revenue targets that we gave out at the beginning of the year. I think the revenue targets were, you know, a good incremental beat on that, but the profit have been significantly more.
I think, you know, from our perspective, we actually can do both, and we can actually, you know, drive the capabilities inside the business the way we want to.
With that in place, I know there's more work to do, like you said. There's no question a greater emphasis on profitability at BILL. Once you've rebased with this new sizing of the workforce, what steps can we measure to see that product profitability compound? Is it more on the pricing side? Is it more maybe on sales efficiency? Help us understand where you see the bigger unlock on profitability.
I think, our focus is really driving the right customers in the door.
Right
You know, price structure, profit levels, if you will. On the right customers, what you've heard us start to talk about this past year is really focusing on, you know, the customers that get the most value out of BILL. So those customers, you know, are probably gonna be a little bit larger than the smallest customers that are on the platform. We are still gonna serve the smallest customers. We're not gonna spend aggressively at acquiring those customers. We're gonna spend more aggressively at the larger customers that drive a lot more ARPU. One of the ways that that shows up has been the cross-sell opportunities that we've had. If you look at the last year, our cross-sell of both the Spend & Expense and the AP product is now 39% year-over-year growth.
That tells you that we're driving more value for the customer because we have this integrated platform that enables them to do both, and that's really valuable. You'll see more opportunities on the revenue side, you know, from that perspective. On the margin side, what you've heard from us this past year is really, "Hey, we're gonna take a look at rewards." We have focused on rewards, and we've actually been able to start bringing that down. We know there's opportunities for us to be selective. It's not. By the way, if you look at rewards, it's not across the board. We have plenty and plenty of customers that have a very strong rewards profile that we're happy with. We've had some over the last few years that are probably more focused on the rewards part of the product versus the product part of the product.
Okay.
We're very focused there. I think the other area you've seen this is in some of the emerging portfolio ad valorem products, where we've, you know, been growing that nicely, and now we have, you know, more data and more focus on incremental margins to understand which ones of these customers are actually gonna not produce to the bottom line, they only produce to the top line. That focus and that, you know, that intention, is something that, you know, comes from Rohini coming into the company and just creating a lot more responsibility around all of our teams driving durable, profitable growth. I think that's the thing that we're focused on, and I think, you know, for investors, we've given some proof points. You will see more proof points like that in the coming quarters.
Yeah. Simplistically, a larger client's gonna have more cross-border needs or potentially you know, cash flow needs, and so that's what drives the natural opportunities to.
Well, using all of the products, right? If we have a customer that uses AP, that uses AR, that uses S&E, that uses our BILL Cash product, and then their suppliers are across the board, which they're gonna be, we're gonna get some suppliers doing FX, some suppliers doing this. I mean, all of that means a much different customer. If you look at the smallest customers, we may not be able to get them to do all those things. Though, over time, we would expect product-led growth to be able to drive all those things for all customers. That's part of the focus on, you know, AI-native, is actually removing the friction that requires humans to be involved in the marketing and sales process.
Where does Embed 2.0 then fit given everything we've talked about? I know you've given us a lot of details in the past, and you've announced some partners, but just an update on Embed 2.0.
Yeah. I mean, it is one of our unique, you know, competitive modes, I think, is our distribution on Embed 2.0. We've been able to leverage, you know, everything we've learned over the last 10 or so years with our financial institution partners and throw that into an experience that allows software providers such as NetSuite to activate, you know, into the payment capabilities that we have. What we've seen early on in the experience this past year is that we are getting those customers to activate multiple payment products. All of them ad valorem. You know, I think, the partner has, you know, four different payment products, and we're seeing adoption of those payment products at rates that are closer and more similar to what we've seen inside of our, you know, non-partner business.
That's a very, very good sign now. Obviously, some of these partnerships like NetSuite are much larger customers, if we can maintain that as we roll out the go-to-market, that will mean real revenue for the business. Our commitment is to take the, that expertise I talked about in the beginning, around payments, we have SMB domain expertise, we also have payments domain expertise, to leverage that expertise into the capabilities that other people can access, as long as we have the opportunity to obviously earn revenue and get the data we need to be able to make those payment decisions safely and securely.
Good. Maybe, I did want to talk about Spend & Expense, but before we get there, maybe just to make sure I ask the question, 'cause people will want me to ask you, just the health of the health of the SMB, René, and you always have great insight on what you're seeing in terms of, you know, spend per user or spend per SMB, whatever metric you're tracking. What signals are you paying attention to? What are you observing?
Well, I mean, the one thing that we feel good about is that, you know, our same store sales, essentially TPV per customer, is up 4% year-over-year, right? That feels good. I would say broadly though, and I've been saying this for a couple years, we're not yet really in a growth mode other than the AI world, right? Businesses, if you look, if you take out nominally the nominal growth, you take out inflation, it's still kind of flattish, right? I think what that means is, and you hear this from us in, you know, any of the specific industry data that we give any quarter, it's kind of just seasonal, right?
It's not like we can call a trend and be like you know, I think in Q2 we said construction was doing well, but we also said that was 1 data point. Q3 construction was less well, right? It's still kind of bumpy, I would say. It's not recessionary, but it's not growth.
Yeah.
I think it'll be great to get to a place where, you know, growth comes back into the equation for SMBs.
Yeah. Just seems like, I know people ask us about energy prices, but that just feels like that's the next thing to worry about. That was previously something else that we're worrying about.
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Just more of the same and still waiting for some kind of inflection up or down.
They're resilient. They're managing their business, they're growing, and that's always good.
Your spend and expense business, right? I know this, the T&E business in general, as we've been asking your peers, has actually been doing quite well.
Yeah.
I mean, Visa, Mastercard both talked about commercial activity being quite good, globally, not just in the U.S. How are you feeling about pushing that product a little bit harder? I know your appetite for credit will also play a role there. Do you see any potential for shifts in trajectory there?
Well, we are seeing, I mean, that was the data point on the cross sell units is up 39% year-over-year.
Right.
Part of this is kind of the integrated platform. You know, we are still early days on BILL Cash in rolling that out and understanding how customers are using that. To your point on credit, there's opportunities when all of that is in one place for us to be able to understand the customer's overall credit worthiness in a better light. That is something that I think over time will enable us to do more on that front. You know, we're very, very happy with the cross sell. We're very happy with the focused growth that we've been driving with S&E, being very focused on the customers and the go-to-market motions there.
When we look at our ideal customer profile, like I said earlier, we continue to, you know, do very well on our the wins on the conversion pipeline that we have. If anything, we're stronger today than we were a year ago. I think to your point, I think there is this element of S&E because of the rewards component that has a lot of, you know, excitement's the wrong word, but obviously it does drive, you know, strong revenue, not just for us, but for others.
Yeah.
It does drive rewards for the customers. There is energy there. If you just step back, we're still, if you look at modern S&E platforms, still under, you know, 100,000 customers, 150,000 customers. It's just, you know, hasn't really cracked. You still got the largest, you know, payment companies in the world that are managing corporate card Spend & Expense . We look to, you know, continue to drive as much as we can and to partner where we can as well.
When you think about pipeline and sales, just to bring it all back to the top, pipeline and sales, we've talked a lot. You know, you've said that you'll see a little bit of a dip in size of users, so less about units, more about size. Spend & Expense, we just talked about, you're pushing ad valorem . Of course, you've got the AI piece as well, how would you characterize pipeline sales? Where are you gonna lean a little bit harder on go-to-market?
Well, always are gonna lean hard on the accounts. We have, you know, close to 10,000 firms.
Gotcha.
We know that we are an unlock for them. The accountants, if you were to talk to accountants, when I started the company, nobody ever wanted to do any of this business. Now it's the fastest growing part of the accountant practice is something called CAS, client advisory services. That's because of the capabilities that we provide. Accounts will be one area, I think embed, I think the AI, you know, transformation that's happening. Every software company is thinking about how they leverage AI for themselves, and they don't know how to do payments. I think that's an opportunity for us to continue to leverage Embed 2.0 with the capabilities that we have.
I think that on the direct side, it's gonna be this more focused spend on acquiring customers. That said, I believe, you know, a year from now, we'll be talking about how the, you know, the opportunity for product-led growth is changed because of AI.
Yeah. Yeah. Six minutes left. Just hitting on take rate.
Yeah.
I know it's always an important subject, and I know it's hard to measure parts of basis points sometimes, René, but I think you guys have been leaning more into this transaction revenue per transaction metric 'cause there is some danger in.
Yeah.
Looking at take rate. What's the message here to us around, you know, penetrating and getting that monetization level higher?
Yeah, I mean, I think the most important part of the business that, you know, that we're focused on is how do we create adoption of all the payment products that we have. Sometimes the reason we're kind of, you know, starting to, you know, articulate this a little bit more succinctly is sometimes, you know, you can have large ACH transactions that come through that we're gonna get $0.69 on, but it's massive to the TPV, and that can force the take rate down. People kind of, you know, don't understand why is the take rate down. It's like, well-The TPV necessarily isn't apples to apples in that particular year-over-year comparison.
When we focus on the, you know, the transaction revenue, that gives us a chance to be like, okay, well, that will be, you know, consistent because then that large dollar amount just becomes small. You know, it's just, it was $0.69 before.
Yeah
It doesn't matter whether it's $1,000 or it's $1 million.
Yeah
That's the reason for that, because there's been a lot of questions around take rate, and we understand it's an important part of the models that folks have, and we wanna make sure that people don't get focused too much on that when there's many other things that actually make for the business growing.
Okay. Makes sense. I have to ask you about stablecoins. We talked about AI already. Just to catch you up, right, Visa and Mastercard both talked about stablecoins.
Yeah.
and the potential around B2B, cross-border, things like that. You have a play there, of course. What, how does it fit in your mental model of where you wanna take BILL? I mean, on one side, I appreciate there's an opportunity to improve your transaction expense, but then on the other side, there's questions of will that become a use case that drives demand? Could it be disruptive? Could it lower your take rate or your transaction revenue, if we wanna look at it that way?
Yeah.
How would you summarize it all for us and what's important about stablecoins?
I mean, I think what you get from me and everybody on the team is what is it that SMBs need?
Yeah.
Sometimes that comes from what they ask for, and sometimes that comes from knowing what they need.
What are they asking for?
They're not asking for stablecoin.
Okay.
Right? What they are asking for is they want speed. They want the ability to manage everything in one place. If you look at the, you know, the 12 different payment modalities that we serve, like, we give them a lot on that front. I think, you know, if you just step back and think about where is the real value with stablecoin, it's gonna be in countries that have high inflation and high volatility in their currency. When you look at just the payments that are coming out of the U.S., our customer base, and where they're going, they're pretty much going to the G7, right? It's gonna be the European countries, Canada, Australia, and China. I mean, that's pretty much where, like, the vast majority of the payments are going.
In those particular currencies, the only thing stablecoin would provide is speed, and yet we provide speed. That said, if they start asking for it, since we do 12, for us to do 13 or 14, it's not gonna be a hard thing for us to do. It's just more to where do we focus. I think what you're hearing from us right now is that we're being very diligent about where our focus is because that is, you know, can be a distraction if we go chase after other things that don't yet have a business model case. Stablecoin doesn't necessarily have a unique business model case to what we do today.
Glad to hear it, René. Glad to hear it. We're just about out of time. Let me end on a capital allocation or a buyback question. You announced the billion-dollar buyback. It's a quarter of your market cap. Just your process of deploying that or executing that buyback. Is it more opportunistic? I think I asked this on the call.
Yeah
I thought I'd ask again as we had a little bit more time.
Yeah, I mean, I think the board, management, I think most people that we talk with do feel like there's an opportunity that the company is undervalued considering the assets that we have and the growth that we have. From that perspective, we wanna be buying as much as we can, just because that's one really strong way to return value to shareholders, right? We can retire, you know, a bunch of shares. That actually creates value for shareholders, especially when you think about the profitability growth that we're talking about. You fast-forward a year from now or, you know, 18 months, whatever, if those shares are fully retired and you have the same profitability numbers increasing, then obviously your EBITDA for share ends up looking better.
That was, you know, our focus on is what can we do for shareholders right now? We can do that. We have the cash. We're not gonna go make any significant acquisitions right now. We're very focused on this AI-native. We knew for the next, you know, 12-18 months that this was gonna be a focus area for us, we felt comfortable deploying the cash knowing what the cash flow was gonna grow at. You know, hopefully people see this as just another example of our ability to, you know, take our commitment seriously and our shareholder value seriously, whether we're delivering, you know, above the growth or above the profitability expectations, we also want to deliver on the shareholder expectations.
Okay. No, look, it's an important vote of confidence. Glad to see it out there. I know you're really busy, René. Thank you for spending the day with us. It does mean a lot to me.
Okay. Thank you, Tien-tsin Huang.
Thank you, René.
Thank you.
Thank you, sir.