So good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us for day one of Baird's Global Consumer Technology and Services Conference. My name's Rob Oliver. I follow the Software sector here at Baird, and it's my pleasure to have the management of BlackLine here. Always nice to see them. To my immediate left, Owen Ryan, Co-CEO, Therese Tucker, Co-CEO, and Mark Partin, Chief Financial Officer. Thank you very much for coming, you guys. Really appreciate it.
Thank you, Rob.
Happy to be here.
This can be interactive as well, so please don't hesitate to email me. Email instructions, if you have questions, are there on the desk in front of you. Owen, let's start with you. I think it was March of last year when you came from the board to assume the Co-CEO spot, and at the time, you laid out some, I mean, after making the rounds a little bit and assessing the situation, you laid out some things that you wanted to address, and they included, you know, execution, message and brand, value of product, sales, distribution side. Can you just step back a little bit and just give us an update now, 15 months later, as to where we are in some of those initiatives?
Sure. You've got a good memory, or you took good notes. But yeah, so I think the thing that, when we started to look back at it, and Therese and I, and Mark, we spent a lot of time talking about the journey because we've laid out a very clear path of what we're trying to do, who's responsible to get it done, and then sort of driving through and making sure we're executing. And so I think if you look at different aspects of it, so on the marketing and brand perspective, we brought in a new chief marketing officer at the beginning of the year. She's making a lot of good progress around sort of better promoting the BlackLine story in the marketplace, why BlackLine is different in our view, and a better solution set for our customers.
We're much more thoughtful and strategic about where we're spending our money, understanding, measuring things to make sure we get a true ROI. And so, you know, there'll be more to come, particularly as we get closer to the end of the summer, as a lot of the work that we're doing internally will start to get launched. On the go-to-market side of the business, I think the things that we again feel pretty good about is working closely with Therese. As we start to get more innovation back into the business, it's given our sales teams more to go out and talk to customers about. We've been spending a lot of time trying to help our colleagues elevate the conversation in the Office of the CFO.
And so that's been a good step up for us. Doing a lot of that with our partners, who tend to have a bit more brand permission and access than we do on a day-to-day basis, and so we're seeing a lot of progress there. I think one of the things we realized getting into this is that our sales team, quite frankly, was a bit more comfortable with our traditional products around financial close, not as comfortable with our invoice-to-cash, and some of the intercompany. So we've made some investments there to get our people more qualified and ready to go out and talk to customers about that. And then the big thing also is continuing to drive successful implementations and optimization. It still...
As great of a product that BlackLine is, and when you look at our most successful customers, what they do with it is amazing. But we still have so many of our customers that are earlier in their journey, and so trying to get them beyond the core products and use that in a more sophisticated way is something that we're really trying to drive. Where that's really manifested itself is through the lens of industry. So we announced, you know, that we're gonna focus a bit more by industry, and one of the things we have learned is that, you know, we could have served nine of the top ten oil majors, as an example. All nine of them are using BlackLine in different ways, and they're taking different journeys.
And so what we've been able to do now is take that information and then sort of go back to each of those customers and say, "Hey, here's other ways you might be able to use this. Here's how others have done this," connecting some of those individuals to speak with one another so they understand, not only through BlackLine, but directly talking to each other and through partners, what the art of the possible is. And then for the tenth one that we don't serve, go have a conversation with that place and say, "Look, these nine other companies are using this. Here's what we could do for you," and then trying to become a rip and replace for, for that tenth organization.
Do you find that as you have gotten more into the vertical side, that the salespeople now have a, I don't want to say easier path, 'cause it's never easy, but more access to the CFO?
I think that it's still depending on the size of the company, right? So the bigger the company, the harder it is for us to get to the CFO by ourselves without a partner. But the conversations we're now able to have are getting more attention. Because not only are we talking about what I would call... Our product is the domain expertise, but when you can combine the domain expertise of the product with speaking the language of your customer through their industry, then that really begins to differentiate and gives us a higher point to be talking to our customers about. And our people are really, you know, they're lapping it up.
They like it because it's an easier conversation to go have when all of a sudden you can start to look at, hey, BlackLine has 10 automobile manufacturers around the world. Let's go bring those to those conversations in a way that maybe we hadn't. And, and so I think that what they're finding is it's giving them an easier conversation because they can point to very specific areas where others are using it, versus us just saying, "Hey, here's the art of the possible," 'cause we're saying: Here's the reality that others are doing with this. And that's what makes it, I think, a little bit more compelling.
Last quarter, you called out an uptick in demand activity at the top of the sales funnel, and I think certainly an encouraging sign. Can you talk about what you're seeing in the market in terms of demand and how that trend is progressing for you guys now?
Yeah. So, in the month of April and May, according to the people who track this for me, I met with about 50 customers over those two months, which seems like an inordinate amount. A couple times we did some events where we'd had breakout sessions, sort of similar to something like this. But, what you can hear in, in the conversations is these customers beginning to look out over a horizon of what they want to try to do in their own finance transformation journey, of which BlackLine then becomes a part of it. And so sometimes it's through an ERP refresh that they're going through.
Sometimes it's just sort of sitting there and saying: "Okay, we know there's more opportunity for us to do to accelerate around the financial close," or, "We know we have problems in intercompany," or, "We know we have a hard time seeing the big picture of what's going on in the close." And Therese will probably talk a little bit around that, around Accounting Studio. And so I think what we're, we're just seeing in those conversations is customers who know they have things to do, they're developing their plan, and we're gonna be part of that, that solution, and so those conversations are quite, quite different than a year ago. Still hard for me to tell you when the money shows up, but at least there's planning and conversations that feel a little bit different than they did at this time a year ago.
Got it. Therese, I'd like to pivot to you, if I may. Owen mentioned the innovation-
Yeah.
And you've been a key part of the innovation here. So, since Owen mentioned Accounting Studio first, let's talk about that. It's been your baby, and it's now it has ambitious goals. Help us understand what is unique and differentiated about Accounting Studio.
Absolutely. Thank you, Rob. One of my favorite questions. In the Office of the CFO, what most people don't realize is that their financial system landscape is very fragmented. They use all kinds of hacks to get data from one system into another. Some of these companies have 100s of ERPs, plus many other systems that they need to interact with. This makes the various processes that they're trying to get through, whether it's to close their books or record their transactions or make certain journals, makes those processes fraught with sometimes errors and misses. The Accounting Studio is an orchestration and visualization layer that allows us to actually not only visualize these processes, but actually automate them in real time.
That means that the flow of data, the creation of transactions, basically the flow of what's happening in accounting and finance, can be orchestrated, visualized, and automated from end to end, not just with BlackLine's products, but also using a very robust API library that allows it to talk to other systems and coordinate things. It's actually a concept that we first became familiar with when we did an acquisition in 2016 of Runbook. They had a product called Smart Close that sat inside of SAP as an agent and automated things like closing of divisions. It would take it from three to four days down to 15 minutes. We are now able to start to do this for all ERPs and all different systems, and the reception from our early adopters has been phenomenal. They absolutely love what they are seeing and what we can do.
It's like digital transformation on steroids. It's very cool.
So all those years that I would ask Mark Partin when we're gonna be able to have Runbook across multiple ERPs-
Yes.
I guess we...
Yes
... finally got our answer...
Yes
Here. Okay, great.
We are using the APIs to do it now. We've got a lot of the Smart Close functionality already built into the Accounting Studio, and we're starting to add other ERPs as we speak.
Got it. The other area of innovation, Therese, I wanted to ask you about was Generative AI.
Oh, yeah.
Unfortunately, I was not in London for your Beyond the Black in London, but that was a theme that was front and center at the event.
Yes.
So, and we were able to catch some of the material. So can you talk a little bit about, you know, what your customers are looking for in terms of Generative AI? Because there's a lot of buzz about it right now, but in many cases, it's a solution looking for a problem. There are some clear, you know-
Yes
... instances of where it's solving issues, but, you know, for you, like, where, where the rubber meets the road, where are you seeing the interest among your customers-
Yeah
... and how are you innovating to that?
It's actually super interesting because generative AI is like a shiny new toy, okay? Everybody wants it, but they're not sure what they're gonna do with it. In fact, we are seeing that there is budget dedicated to AI in our customer base. They'll say: "We have a budget for AI. We don't know what it is that we're gonna spend it on. Can you help us?" So that's a first in terms of my time in this industry, where they have a bucket of money, but they don't know what to do with it, which is a little interesting. But you need to actually do things that are useful with generative AI. And so we're taking sort of a two-pronged approach here because our buyer base is typically very conservative and very sort of, you know, value conscious.... All right?
And yet they now have a bucket of money. How do you bridge that? How do you provide them functionality that is based on AI, that gives them real value? Because that's where the rubber does hit the road. You've got to combine those two things. So there's a two-pronged approach that we're following, and so far, it's what we're doing is we're almost educating our customers and helping them feel confident in what AI can do. And so step one is we're building in a number of different enhancements into our current product sets that really give them a great way of using AI, but it's pretty much risk-free. Some of these are silly, right?
You add a document, and rather than having to type in a description, the AI scans the document and tells you that it's an invoice with this vendor for this amount that's due on this date. All right? And then it's always right, as opposed to somebody maybe attaching the wrong document. So little enhancements, you know, credit risk evaluations, footnote generations in consolidation and reporting, you know, predictive guidance in intercompany. So building in these assists that just make them more productive and more sort of comfortable with AI. Then we're starting to also build new products, like the Journals Risk Analyzer, which is also one of my favorite children, Rob. The ability to take an entire population of manual journals, and this could be literally millions of transactions each period, depending on the size of the company.
This is what auditors are already doing, by the way. They take the entire population of manual journals, tell you where your anomalies are, where your key trends are. All right, if somebody booked a journal on a Sunday out of the Cayman Islands, maybe for a seven-figure amount that they don't normally do, maybe you want to have that highlighted. Maybe you want to see policy violations. Let's say that your company has determined that any journal less than $250 isn't worth it in terms of time, money balance. All right? Highlight those. Where are the out-of-policy things that are happening inside of your company? Things that your auditors are going to drill in on, but you get to look at them before your auditors find them. So AI-based product sets are on our roadmap in a number of areas.
The Journals Risk Analyzer is the first one that we've gone to market with. So yes, lots and lots that we're doing in this area because I actually think this technology is the first in a long time that really has the opportunity to change the entire way that accounting and finance happens.
Exciting. Thank you.
It is.
Mark, you guys have made a bunch of executive additions recently, a new chief technology officer, a new head of customer success support, and partners. Can you just walk us through, you know, why these people were good fits and maybe talk about some of the initiatives or plans for each of them? And does that relieve you of your, some of your sales ops role as well, or are you still doing sales ops?
Yeah, I appreciate that. So, as part of my role, and this is actually a little more common these days in the office of the CFO to take over GTM support, there's a lot of crossover and benefit to having that. So I've been assisting on that. But in terms of the key executive hires, you're right. I'll turn it over to my, my friends here on stage to talk about-
Okay.
-them.
Well, I've got both a new CTO and a new CIO, and, Sumit, our new CIO, has a background... He came from, Automation Anywhere, but he is very focused on using AI to automate certain internal, processes that we have. And again, we are leveraging his expertise when we think about what we take into the product. Okay, so that one, love his approach, love bringing everything together internally to make sure that all of our own systems are being used in the right way and speaking to each other in the right way and servicing the organization as a whole. Our new CTO, Jeremy Ung, is... Oh, my God. Okay, here's the difficulty that you always run into with CTOs.
Either they are still down in the weeds in terms of their expertise with technology, okay, but they have difficulty sort of having the big picture, or you get somebody who's got the big picture but doesn't understand what's happening in the weeds. And it's just simply because technology is moving so rapidly that it's difficult to get somebody who's got both. Jeremy is super technical, but he's also very dynamic, got a big-picture approach, got great experience. Honestly, I would say probably the best CTO that I've ever worked with. I'm absolutely delighted to have him on board. That allows me to look forward in terms of product vision and where we're going. So I have to tell you, my life is way more fun with those two hires.
Great.
Do you want me to finish that up or?
Yeah, please, go ahead.
Excuse me, I apologize. I have a little bit of a cold. I think what you've seen is a couple of officers that we've disclosed, but I think the important thing for everybody to understand is, over the last year or so, Therese and I have changed out a super majority-
... of the leadership team, both senior, one level down, and a level below that. I think that we realized where, what the people who had gotten us to a certain point were not gonna be able to take us on the journey for the next part of where we needed to go. So we've made a lot of changes. You know, still working through making sure that team works as harmoniously as we would like. It's always when you bring lots of new people in, you have to do that, but we did both promotions from within and bringing people from the outside, and I think we feel very, very good about the quality of the leadership team, the fresh thinking.
If you asked what's in common with all of the people we brought into leadership, is they basically show up in overalls with a lunch bucket and a shovel, and they're expected to work, right? We're not interested in the people that kick up dust. We want people that move dirt, and that's really what we're trying to focus on as we've rebuilt this team.
I want to ask, and thanks for the questions. I think I hit on a few. Most of them are around AI and growth, and so we'll get to growth in a minute. I want to ask about the partner model because partners are an area that you identified, you know, needed some work, including SAP, which I think was a surprise to some of your shareholders, even, because SAP's been a pretty consistent source of partner revenue for you guys. Maybe if you can talk a little bit about the changes you've made to the partner model and how that positions you better, perhaps to reaccelerate revenue growth this year or next, and then also, specifically maybe talk about some of the changes around SAP.
Yeah. A few things that come out of it. So, you know, a lot of software companies I've learned, they just want to have as many partners as possible, sort of like a Johnny Appleseed approach, and then hope something comes back, and, and we've sort of flipped that on its head a little bit. And so we've cut the number of partners we work with in half, so we went from 150- 75, and there's really what they've now affectionately called the CEO's dozen that we're really fixated on. And there's six, what I would call, the major global consultancies, where we're spending much, much more time with not only the people that run the BlackLine practice, but those individuals that run the SAP practice and those that are the most senior leadership of those organizations.
We have sort of a, you know, I'll use a very clear contract of what they can expect from BlackLine and what we expect in return. There's much more governance to how we're doing things, from everything from how people are trained on BlackLine, to how they bring it to the marketplace, how we go after accounts together. So we're sharing lists of our customers and where they have access to use that in different ways, where we have customers that are either ill or under-adopted, and working with those partners where they already have a footprint there to sort of try to help improve the optimization of those customers. There's lots of different things that we've really done to drive that.
Of the 12 that we sort of called the CEO dozen, 10 of them are killing it, one's kind of okay, and one is struggling. And the one that's struggling has just gone through lots of massive reorganization and CEO change and everything else, and they're still trying to figure out which way is up, but they'll be great once we get into their new fiscal year. But I couldn't be more pleased with the support we're getting from our partners. They're advocating for us in a way in deals where maybe they might not have in the past. And I think that they are much more transparent with us about, you know, what works well with BlackLine, and then what are the opportunities for us to improve?
So one of the things I love is to be spending time with our partners, right? Our customers, they give us a lot of feedback, but our customers tend to see it through the lens of their situation. What our partners bring is the ability to help us think about things across a sector. So one of the sectors that we've been focusing on is banking. And Therese and one of our partners, in particular, have spent a lot of time going through our banking solution, if you will. Our solution and how to make it more appropriate for banks. And that's been terrific. I was up in Canada, I think it was last week, the week before, with two of their money center banks.
I mean, they're so interested in what we're trying to do and really taking a keen interest in our roadmap of what we're gonna be able to do for these banking institutions. And so I think that's those are the kinds of things that we know are gonna show up and drive results. Still a little bit hard to put numbers next to it, although every partner now has an account plan by geography. And I think the other thing that we're trying to make sure that we get our partners to focus on is not just our core Financial Close, but how do we make sure they go to market on Accounting Studio, Invoice-to-Cash, and Intercompany. Those are the other big ones. So we're just kind of driving all that.
But, you know, the beauty of consulting firms, never forget this, is they have to resell their book of business every year, so they're always looking for places to go partner and things that can drive things forward.
With, you know, you mentioned how getting the partners to try to, you know, sell the... not think of you guys, hey, just as, you know, account reps or whatever. You know, going for that CFO opportunity, we hear that a lot from other vendors and other software companies selling into the financial suite. So I guess the question I would ask is, how perhaps have your competitors changed since maybe the early days when you were selling just against maybe a couple of accounting-related firms? Have you seen your competitive environment evolve?
Yeah, look, I don't think it's lost on anybody that's more competitive today than it was five years ago. I do think that, and, you know, others may, you know, not always agree with me, but I think BlackLine maybe didn't take as seriously its competitors as much as we should have. So I, I'm used to living in a world of paranoia around competitors. It's just the way I was taught, and so you're always wondering what your competitors are doing. And I don't know that we always took as seriously as we should have some of the changes that were going elsewhere. Particularly when, if you can close a product gap at the foundational level, and then your customers aren't using your product to its full potential, look, two pieces of white bread look like white bread.
And we were not doing enough, in my own view, of sort of talking about the differences of what BlackLine brings to the table. And I’ll give you an example of something that we’ve been working through. So BlackLine spends a ton of money on cybersecurity. Why? Because we have all of our customers’ information and data. We lost an opportunity to one of our competitors a year ago. Well, I guess it’s about nine months ago at this point in time. And there was, like, only a couple of questions around cybersecurity, and our salespeople didn’t push the story.
But when they picked the other company, and they started to install it, and then their CIO got involved, it was like: "Wait a minute, this thing doesn't have anywhere near the cybersecurity protections we thought." So they came back to us. It wasn't even... They didn't even ask to rebid it, they just said: "We're gonna just switch to BlackLine," right? Because of the capabilities we have. And so I think there's elements of that that we're still trying to drive. I think if you were trying to go competitor by competitor, you know, we're certainly intersecting with a company like OneStream much more as they try to move upstream, we move further downstream. You know, Oracle, we see a little bit more where they're trying to give away their ARCS solution.
You know, Trintech, we see them, we do quite well against firms like Trintech and FloQast. And so, you know, it's, it's, it's probably the same competitor set. I will say the one thing that's interesting is, so many of them that are further downstream claiming that they can do things upstream. But I think everybody's beginning to realize the real value is having the data at the original source, and that's really where BlackLine has a huge competitive advantage.
Super helpful. Thanks. Yeah, Mark, you guys just did a convert.
Yeah.
Can you just walk us through why the timing was right? I mean, it seemed like pretty favorable terms, but I think there is a concern in the market that you guys are gonna do an acquisition, maybe, which you might, I guess, but, like, maybe talk a little bit about that. Because what we hear from investors is, "Hey, they've got a lot on their plate to jumpstart growth again. Why would they go out and buy something?" So if you talk about why the timing was right and what you're thinking about relative to the convert.
Yeah. Thank you. So we did come to market recently with a $500 million convertible. We upsized it due to demand, to $600 million. The timing for us was, we have 2026 notes due, and we wanted to get out early, felt we could take some of the market risk out for later in the year. Felt like we could be preemptive with good opportunistic terms. So, we're happy with the transaction. And what it allows us to do, I think, Rob, to your point, is to have strategic capital on the balance sheet with longer term than what we had previously, and then that opens up the possibility for us, with our growth initiatives, to do M&A.
If you look at our track record of M&A, I think we've been very successful in picking out the right opportunities, being price disciplined, making sure that it goes with BlackLine's platform vision, to drive into the office of the CFO and to and in all cases so far, been incrementally valuable to our customers, and have been very strategic for us as we've increased our TAM from $10 billion- $30+ billion. And we've been able to position ourselves as a very high automation, deeply account automation company.
Great.
Yeah.
Great, thanks. And we have a minute left—so I guess we'll ask the growth question. And just kind of summarize a bunch of different questions which came through, which is essentially like, you know, the targets are still out there for you guys, but I think, you know, nobody's banking on those targets being something that you're going to hit next year or anything. But what's the right way to think about the growth of the business on a normalized basis as some of these initiatives start to, start to take hold?
Yeah. So, look, I think it's important to remember, first of all, that this is still, and continues to be, a very large market for which we consider ourselves the leader in that space. The Office of the CFO is still very early innings and a very large market opportunity for us. And I think what you hear from us today, in all of our sort of recent discussions with you is that we're reinforcing the assets and the value of BlackLine today. We're driving growth initiatives for long-term sustainable growth. We're positioning ourselves with good ROI investments in our business, with assets, and with a team, leadership team, and innovation pipeline. All of this is to help keep ourselves in the front mind of the CFO as they digitally transform.
Remember, it's still very early, and I think that's, we're positioned well.
Great, thanks. Please join me in thanking the management team of BlackLine for coming. Appreciate it. There will be a breakout session in Astor Suite B, and up next in this room will be Dayforce. Thank you.
Well, thank you so much.
Thank you.
It's always great being with you.