We'll start our next session. I'm Bryan Keane. I cover FinTech here at Citi, and we're excited to have the CFO of BILL, Rohini Jain. We will go through a list of questions for Rohini, and then hopefully, if we have time, we can see if you have a question, we can raise your hand. But with that, Rohini, thanks for being here. Yeah, sure. After reducing the workforce by 30% in Q4, the company put out a very solid first quarter print, and I was hoping you could just start at a high level, maybe with the state of the union on where BILL was last year to where we kind of are today and kind of what's left to be done.
Yeah.
I know we could probably spend the whole time on that question, but just maybe the state of the union on where we were when you first got here and then where we are now.
Yeah. Just to remind everybody, we did a pretty material restructuring in Q4 as we exited our fiscal year, which was ending in June this year. Over the year, last year, after I joined, we did a couple smaller actions before that, overall reducing our headcount by about, I would say, 35%-40% in total. That's a huge change. In addition, we changed a lot of our leadership at the top as well, and the intention was, in addition to right-sizing the profitability structure and the P&L structure, was to drive velocity in the organization led by AI, as well as accountability within the functions fairly end-to-end. This leads me to the leadership changes where we had a new CPO. We had a GM structure before where we had payment products as well as software-related products, and the responsibility of product was between two people.
We actually elevated Mike Cieri to be our CPO, and now he has single-threaded ownership across all experiences, and then the payments team under him, that distribute, and experience team distributes all of those payments products, right? The decision-making is faster, the prioritization is faster. There is one vision of where we are going, which makes it much easier to move fast as well as have one person be accountable for the outcomes. Additionally, we hired a new CRO, revenue leader for the organization. The sales team for the first time will be now comped fully on revenue, which is very exciting.
There's one person who owns the revenue for the whole company, and he's bringing in a lot of expertise, over 20 years of experience running SAP sales teams and knows how to run this machine and has a lot of muscle memory, and we're seeing a lot of changes that he's bringing, already has green shoots. Over the next three or four months, I expect to see some of that start to fall through top line and bottom line as well. In addition to that, I would like to mention John Rettig's new role, which is also really critical at this juncture for our company, where he was the CFO before me and has now taken the transformation lead role as well, where it's really important for us to execute on this AI agenda, and he owns that. He owns the transformation across the whole company.
As everybody is working through their priorities, he's driving this real change and thinking around how do we become AI native, what are the things that we need to do internally to get the most productivity out of our workforce, et cetera. That's really the new team structure, and I'm actually really excited about how it plays out over the next few quarters.
Yeah. I was going to ask just quickly on some of those leadership changes and the new Chief Revenue Officer. Are you guys hiring in sales, and how do we think about the growth in the sales force?
Yeah. We impacted with this restructuring across all functions almost equally, and within the sales function, because we also across the board did a voluntary exit program too, because when the numbers are so high of the reduction, it's just best practice to be able to allow people to opt into that program. We saw in certain pockets more exits that we had planned for. Now where we are is we're backfilling some of those roles. We are bringing in selectively skill sets that we really need to drive this organization forward. Over the last couple of months, we've actually made really good progress on filling most of the seats. The quota coverage is almost full now. Again, progress will continue to happen, but we are done with most of the legwork that needed to be done over the last two months.
But as new salespeople come in, it takes a little bit time to train them, for them to build out their relationships, their pipelines, and things like that. We will see over the next quarter or two the benefits done, sure.
Okay, great. We are getting a little bit of feedback from you guys. I do not know if that is the microphone or if you can keep it down, that would be great. Thanks. Driving AI solutions through the company has been an emphasis for the company. What are the immediate improvements you are seeing with AI throughout the organization, and where can AI drive some positive revenue change?
Yeah. Great question again. I look at AI benefits in two parts, and I will start out with the internal pieces. Is the voice okay now?
Yeah, now I got it.
I wonder if it's my coat.
Yeah
Okay.
There you go. Yeah, just wanted to be clear.
Starting out with the internal AI implementation that we are doing, there are some really good proof points, Bryan, we are seeing. Despite the 30%, 35% reduction in force within the engineering teams, we are seeing year-over-year the merge request, which is a proxy for how fast the code is gotten into production within the company, that has improved year-over-year about 10%. We're seeing some very material gains. A majority of our code is now written with AI. There is, again, a whole deep dive into how we do SDLC in this new environment, how we do PDLC in this new environment. But very good initial gains, but still a long way to go. We will continue to see some internal productivity as we go through rest of the year.
Even within my teams in finance and legal, we are seeing great adoption. Teams are able to completely simplify the amount of work that is going into making PowerPoints, artifacts, whatever else it may be, and really focus on analyzing the outcomes that we are driving. Personally, very excited about that. Thinking about it from more of a customer lens, our velocity of product release, you saw in the previous earnings release as well, has gone up quite materially. We have executed on a whole lot while going through all of this change, and we have released a bunch of new AI-led products. The categories we are focused on is, number one, is just simplified experience. Simple, easy, frictionless experiences. AI onboarding is one of the examples of that.
Secondly, we want to continue to add value to our customers, and things like risk intelligence products as well as W-9s are a great example of that. We want to give control to our customers in terms of how much they want to engage with AI. So we have released an AI Control Hub, which helps them manage how much they want to lean in versus not. So, a lot of products going out there, and what we expect those AI products to do over time is, A, drive better retention, lower churn, so the whole base and the outcome of the base improves. Product-led growth that is getting weaved into our AI experiences is going to help with getting more from every customer.
Then, last but not the least, there is a lot of work happening in understanding what we can do in terms of bundling AI products and differentiating the pricing models for high-value AI products versus things that just become a part of our main experience. So, you will see some of that over the next several quarters.
BILL added 3,000 clients in the quarter, but the focus has been on landing larger customers. What does the change in strategy say about the small business B2B book for you guys, and is there a right number of net adds? Is it 2,000 per quarter? Because you are still growing in small business, but you are changing the strategy. So where should we come out in terms of our heads on thinking about how many adds per quarter?
Yeah. Going back to the fact that we have executed a lot of change at the business. The strategy is evolving very rapidly, and the products we are working on are very different from what we envisioned even six to eight months ago. With all of that in mind, we are focusing our sales team on a very specific set of customers, which we call our ICP. This is our ideal customer profile, which is from 20 headcount to about 250 headcount customers. Those are really the customers our platform serves the best. Those are the customers our win rates are really high and continue to be high, as well as we feel like we have the right to win in that segment clearly. With the sales focus there, we are making sure that our ARPU continues to improve.
The book of business that you call is starting to show some really good results in terms of increased ARPU, about 4% we reported last quarter year-over-year improvement. The new customers that are coming on the platform, the direct customers, their ARPU was sequentially higher by 800 basis points versus before. These are some green shoots that we are seeing. I want to always think about customers and ARPU together. With the focus we have, I think for a short period of time, about 2,500 to 3,000 would be the right level of customers we add with continued ARPU expansion. But as the new products start to come online, we have reduced churn, higher retention rates with AI-led products, onboarding, et cetera, along with the Embed 2.0 partnerships, we will expect this number to start increasing.
The higher ARPU, I think you said it was 800 basis points higher for some of the new clients. Is that just the larger base, or is that more cross-selling inside that base that creates that ARPU increase?
The mid-market customers that come to our platform, they have about four times more TPV spend on the platform. We are getting more and more larger customers versus optimizing for NNAs that are coming on the platform. There are some customers that come naturally, the smaller accountants and some smaller customers of those accountants will continue to come because we have that ecosystem. But the focus of the direct sales teams is now really sharpening to go after the bigger customers in the direct space.
Yeah. Same store sales were up 7% in the quarter. How much is that just the focus on these large clients versus improving macro or other factors BILL is pushing?
So, let me start out with the macro, right? One of the things that I feel really good about the business is that we are a very diversified portfolio. We do not focus on one segment or one sector or one vertical at all. What that means is that if there is some macro improvements in one category or in one sector, we get to see the benefit of it. Similarly, if there is a headwind, we don't have a disproportionate impact of that headwind. What we are seeing, and as I said in my prepared remarks in the earnings, was that we have about one point of that seven-point growth is coming from AI-related spend, which we're seeing on the platform as well. So, that's very promising, continues to be a good tailwind to the growth.
Having said that, there is a lot of initiatives the teams are actually undertaking to improve the TPV on the platform. We talked a little bit about mid-market before. As we go to bigger customers, they have 4x TPV versus our normal base. The MPA customers have 2.2 times TPV, so that continues to grow 30% over the last few quarters, and people who do more on the platform generate higher TPV. So, a bunch of things happening within the ecosystem as well that is driving higher TPV. Ad valorem growth, by the way, was a great stat as well in the last earnings. We said our ad valorem portfolio grew in high teens. That was driven by virtual cards trends, and the emerging portfolio continues to do well. So there's a whole bunch of things that are happening that drive that TPV.
Yeah, I was going to ask about that, in particular, just the AR/AP take rate. It surprised positively. I think it was up to 16.2 basis points. What is BILL doing around virtual card adoption? And it sounds like you guys are leveraging SPP and the AI model and Supplier Payments Plus to drive a little bit of that higher take rate.
Yeah. So, good numbers on ad valorem TPV expansion. The way I think about monetizing the large amount of TPV that flows through our system is better indicated by ad valorem TPV growth than take rate alone, because take rate has the dynamic of, if you have really high TPV in some of the ACH check type of areas, then it just shows a lower growth, but then you're monetizing from the same take rate a lot more TPV, which is, I'll take that all day long as well. I feel the focus on ad valorem TPV should be more, because that's showing that our ad valorem products are growing and we're monetizing more and more dollars on the platform. What's happening under the covers, we're working across all the product portfolio.
We have a very diversified product portfolio, many ways to pay, and each one of them continues to have a bunch of initiatives to drive them forward. In the last couple of quarters, we've seen real improvements on the virtual card, primarily driven by the AI capabilities we are attaching to that product to unlock more suppliers who initially do not show up in the database as accepting cards. So, AI is unlocking that. We are also seeing, through SPP experience improvements, really good results from distribution through partners, which is helping take the growth rates of virtual card up as well. Additionally, the emerging portfolio continues to grow faster than the rest of the ad valorem portfolio or established ad valorem portfolio, which has been a tailwind for us last few quarters.
Supplier Payments Plus, I know, was a little bit slow on the uptake.
Yeah
But maybe there looks like there's signs that that's picking up. Can you just talk about that in particular?
Supplier Payments Plus manifests also in different kinds of line items, right? Because within the contracts that we are doing with these suppliers, we are preserving virtual card volume, so that sort of also helps within the virtual card portfolio. Additionally, we have enhanced ACH within SPP conversations where we are able to monetize the ACH volume by giving better recon and other faster ways to settle money to those suppliers. So again, that is a longer motion, but we are seeing over the last few quarters, we are getting bigger and bigger names and bigger and bigger TPV deals, so continue to be very optimistic about SPP as well as a driver for ad valorem growth.
Got it. Just for our modeling purposes, just on take rate, I think you talked about take rate coming down on a year-over-year basis in the second quarter, despite some of these recent improvements. Can you just talk about, on a year-over-year basis, I know there is seasonality sequentially, but on a year-over-year basis, why take rate would go down? Are we still expecting the AR/AP take rate to be about flat year over year, given these puts and takes?
Yeah. Just the dynamic of take rate from Q1 to Q2 seasonality, you understand, and our exit of Q4 and going into Q1, we continue to have really strong ACH volume with larger customers who, even though have large ARPU, they also have a very large ACH contribution, which mathematically suppresses the take rate. We saw that dynamic play out as we exited Q4. So sequentially, Q1 improved, but just that trend of very high ACH is putting slight pressure on the year-over-year growth rates. But we had better-than-expected Q1, and we expect that to continue into the next year, because seasonally, from Q1 to Q2, we see roughly a 0.4 to 0.5 basis points of reduction that then bounces back up right into Q3.
Okay. Hopeful. Then Spend & Expense, that growth is expected to slow a little bit. How much of that focus on Spend & Expense is the profitability controlling the higher reward spend?
Yeah. Some of my favorite stats to quote, probably have done that three or four times in different meetings already, is Spend & Expense TPV grew 12%. The net revenue grew 22%, and the rewards rate grew 9%, which is a third of revenue growth and less than TPV growth, which I have not seen since I have joined the business.
I was going to say, what was rewards growth when you got here? What was it growing?
Rewards rate was growing higher than revenue and TPV, right? I think some of the decisions we've made to really right-size the profitability of the business have been really important. And these results, you wouldn't see. I mean, it was just us, you know, competitive forces or anything else happening, you would not see so much expansion of profitability within one quarter. We updated our compensation plans for the post-sales teams to now align them and their incentives to net revenue. So they have been looking at the book and saying, "Okay, these are the highest reward tiers. It probably is not worth" And it's not as much about not having customers on the book as much as it is about right-sizing the tiers that we are giving rewards in.
That sheds off the last X percent of TPV for a lot of customers where it starts to be less beneficial for us.
Yeah.
We want to run a business or get to a business outcome where we have profitable businesses, they work well, and the customers who are using S&E products are the customers who want to use more than just card optimization on the platform. They want to use our AP products, they want to make payments, they want to effectively have a primary card usage case versus they have three cards and they're just playing a rewards game.
Yeah, I was trying to think about what that normalized, once we get through kind of controlling some of that high reward spend, what's that normalized Spend & Expense growth look like for revenue, volume, and profit?
Look, we are going through so much change right now, and that's one of the reasons I'm not extrapolating the growth rates outside of what happens after this year. And we are really on track to what we have guided the outcomes to be for the year. But I do believe that Q2 is going to be the trough of the growth rate for a variety of reasons, including we have a tougher lapping. We did do a step change in right-sizing the portfolio this quarter, and it starts to now There will be still some adjustments we continue to do through the year, but this was the biggest adjustment quarter, I would say. It starts to normalize a little bit more as we go into the back half. Additionally, we also had a lot of sales team structure and people changes over the last four months.
A lot of people are in new roles, have new responsibilities, have new territories, et cetera. And the comp plans are different, so it'll take a few months for them to start humming at their full capacity, and that's what I look forward to as we get into the back half.
Yeah. Part of the review process is that you guys came to the realization that these custom solutions for banks is probably not the right business solution for you guys, and profitability impact there, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Can you just talk about kind of what you're doing with the bank relationships now and what the impact to the client count and the P&L will be as a result of that?
Yeah, absolutely. We are moving from a varied set of custom-built solutions for each one of those banks to a singular solution for all banks. The banks are welcome to use it, but traditionally, it's very hard for banks to change their technology to be able to adopt a very unified platform. But we've seen that this bank channel with some of our smaller partners, we haven't seen the kind of growth and ROI that we would like to over the years. As we were reducing the workforce, getting more focused, there was a big question on what do we stop doing? And supporting the bank channel was one of the things that it's not giving the growth that we want it to. It doesn't fit into the strategy of building a platform and scaling from there as much.
We decided to de-emphasize that and move over to Embed 2.0, which is a standard platform for anybody to plug into. Having said that, our largest bank partner continues to grow with us. We have in total, the way we disclose our customer count, most of the focus is on the AP/AR customers, but we have about 240K customers which are in the I2G and bank category. And a vast majority of that number is I2G and not bank, so there will be a reduction in the customer count, but it's not extremely large part of the 240 that you see as a separate line disclosed. And the ARPU of these customers is very, very low.
As you do the math on this or model it, I've already mentioned in my prior guidance that it'll be a little less than one point of impact on our total revenue outcomes for this year.
Okay. One of the more impressive outcomes of the last quarter was the improvement in margin that we're definitely seeing. Can you just talk a little bit about non-GAAP and GAAP margin expansion for the company?
Yeah. Just to recap, in Q1, we improved our margin profile by about 1,700 basis points, a huge task. It was not a one-quarter work. It was something that we worked towards over the last three quarters or so. So, pleased with how the teams leaned into continuing to post good results with a material amount of disruption from an OpEx perspective. So, good outcome on OM. I feel like we've done a lot of work over the last year. That was a biggest focus as I came into my role on how do we right-size the profitability and architecture of the company, and we have done that. Now, the focus is going to be driving growth.
You would see in the OpEx profile that we've put out there within the guide that we are going to spend into marketing the products that we are releasing with high velocity. We are going to hire the right talent to backfill some of the key areas that we lost, and we are going to continue to invest in some of the run-the-business activities that are really critical for a business this size and scale. So, all of that will sort of drive an increase in the OpEx, but overall, as the revenue grows in a leaner structure, we get more incremental margin dollars every time we get revenue. So, as we put our resources towards growing revenue, that will be the biggest driver of our OI expansion over time.
Having said that, as I mentioned, we are probably less than halfway in our journey through to using AI internally. So, there's still a lot of potential there, and I would expect to see some improvements ongoing from AI adoption.
And I think stock-based comp has been something that you've been working on winding down or lessening at least the percentage. Could you just talk about that?
Absolutely. When I joined, that was about a year and some, year and a quarter ago, we were around 17% on the basis of net revenue of the stock-based compensation. That has come down to 12% to 13% now, and we will continue to, again, drive operating leverage on SBC as well. As revenue continues to grow, SBC will grow at a lower pace. There's a lot of programs we have put in place, like differentiating the talent more. We are now remote first, so we're going to hire the right talent in the right places with less Bay Area concentration that drives the SBC higher.
I think there's a lot of good work that has gone into it, and we take SBC seriously as a real cost, and that's why we're starting to focus now more and more on GAAP profitability, and really pleased with the increase in guide on the GAAP side as well this year.
You mentioned that Q2 is expected to be the lowest growth of the quarter or the trough. Can you just talk about what makes the You talked a little bit about some of the tougher comps and some of the headwinds there, but just wanted to think about Q2, the growth expectation slightly below first quarter, and then what are some of the drivers of it from the second half of 2027?
Yeah, absolutely. So, two components to Q2, right? One of them is what we just talked about, tougher comps. Our Q2 last year, especially in S&E, but actually both, was really strong, and S&E TPV grew 26%, and then in Q3, Q4 normalized a little bit. It was a really strong holiday with spending capacity, consumer confidence, all of those things at a high. We're lapping that quarter. Secondly, we had, as I said a couple times, material disruptions, right? We had impact on sales teams. We had impact on just our natural motions of running when we changed the structure. Our quota was uncovered for driving NNAs. You saw in Q4, the NNA number was softer, which recovered in Q1 for AP/AR, but in S&E, we had a lower NNA number in Q1.
Some of that is a leading indicator into revenue for the coming quarters. The Q4 and Q1 is also impacting Q2 outcomes, and post that in the back half as the NNA number starts to recover, which we are seeing already, it will drive some re-acceleration back in the second half. In addition to that, we have launched a lot of AI products from which we expect improved retention, churn reduction in the back half of the year as well. That is another driver of the re-acceleration. Go-to-market comes together, and the product velocity starts to help as customers attach to more products.
Yeah. The product velocity for AI, how long does that take before it actually drives on a positive on the revenue side?
Yeah. That is a good question, right? There is two components of AI monetization. The first one, which is easier and faster to see outcome, is improved churn, and with the less friction, we have better retention outcomes. That happens on the whole base of the customers fairly quickly. If you were to wait for monetization through pricing, then you have to test into it, you have to grow the base, and you have to make sure that there is no loss of customers because of that increased pricing or whatever else, which is a harder one to do. But most of our efforts this year are focused on really reducing friction, improving churn, improving retention, and even a point of retention improvement in the back half can drive real improvements on the revenue and bottom line.
That is what we are focused on, and that will be a key driver.
Got it. I know BILL has bought back about $300 million of stock in the last two quarters. How do you think about the stock buybacks from here?
Just to recap again, we had an authorization from the board to buy back about $1 billion, and we executed on $600 million rapidly within the two quarters. We are left with about $400 million of that $1 billion authorization, and again, looking at very holistically all of the capital allocation components, we work with the board and the teams internally to create a framework of how we will execute on the remaining, and we have put the guardrails in place, and it will be executed as planned.
Got it. Then just kind of thinking high level here, Rohini, how do we think about the algorithm of growth now for BILL? When you first got there, it was more about expansion of the take rate and growing the client count, and now it is more about ARPU and growing the core revenue growth. I think it is the kind of the longer term guide to mid-teens. Maybe you could just help us think about how you think about the building blocks for growth, kind of where we were and how that is now changed the model to where we are going.
Yeah. Some of how we were looking at the business before was just a result of how the business grew. We had the core software business, we acquired Divvy, we added payment modalities, and it kind of slowly grew, and we started to create mini algorithms for each one of those components. It is time now to step back and say, "What are the simplest ways we drive outcomes for the business?" In my mind, the simple algorithm for our business is really getting more customers and monetizing them, right? It will be customer growth and ARPU growth. The way I think about the initiatives that we align as building blocks to drive each one of those, from a customer perspective, there will be a few things that are really critical.
We talked about product experiences that drive better retention or churn, that will add to our customer count. We have focused the team's efforts to continue to get new customers that are high value, and then partnerships like Embed 2.0, meeting where the customer is and getting that customer into the door for BILL as well. Those are some of the building blocks for how we get more customers. From an ARPU perspective, product-led growth, the multi-product adoption across S&E and AP, and continuing to get bigger customers to drive higher ARPU, those would be the key building blocks on that. As we start to think about evolving how we share the BILL algorithm with you, the key priorities and the initiatives, building blocks over the midterm, this is going to be the framing of how we think about it.
Yeah. To sum it all up, how would you kind of pitch the investment thesis of core growth and then margin and EPS growth and free cash flow for the company and kind of over the midterm?
You remind me of one of the really wise investors. I love him. He said that any good public company stands on three legs of a stool. One is expansion of profitability, posting solid growth, and third is return to the shareholders, right? We have done fairly well in all of those three, and we continue to have really strong focus on driving all these three things in tandem. We had a little more focus last year on two legs of the stool, which was profitability expansion and return to shareholder, retaining capital to shareholders. The third one, which is revenue, which is now going to be our primary focus this year.
With that, I do believe we have tremendous opportunity ahead of us, augmented by AI products, how we are leading some of the thinking and innovation in payments with the key partners like Visa and Billtrust, that partnership that we launched and the product we launched, along with the velocity of product picking up, it looks like a very promising investment case to me.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah
For a while there, and there was obviously a lot of change. Is that on the horizon for you guys?
Absolutely. I know it is really important and top of mind for us, but it has to be done at the right time where we're actually providing valuable information to everybody with the credibility that it needs. We have a bunch of new leaders who are finalizing their strategy, really honing in on what they are, how they're going to be structured, what they're going to be driving. They need to get nicely entrenched. I want to start seeing some really solid continuous proof points of the outcomes of the AI-native work that we are doing to be able to build an algorithm that I can share with you. Having said that, we are starting to I don't want to wait for the investor day to give you guys a glimpse on how we're thinking about the business in midterm.
In the prior earnings call, not this one, but the one before, we laid out a framework to say that we are going to be in a certain trajectory for revenue growth. We want to exceed Rule of 40 over midterm. We want to continue to drive GAAP profitability. We have laid out some of those things. We will continue to build upon that. We potentially will also bring some product insights and use cases and get some of our leaders in front of you. As we think about the right timing for investor day, I do not want that to be the only event that gives you the right information you guys are looking for.
Okay, great. With that, Rohini, we will keep it there. Thanks for being here, and thanks for the updates.
Thank you so much.