Thank you, and welcome everyone to Clearwater Analytics Investor Update conference call. Joining me on the call today are Sandeep Sahai, Chief Executive Officer, and Jim Cox, Chief Financial Officer. After the remarks, we will open the call to a question and answer session. You can type your questions in the Q&A window in Zoom or raise your hand. I would like to remind all participants that during this conference call, any forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Expressions of future goals, including business outlook, expectations for future financial performance, and similar items, including without limitation expressions using the terminology may, will, can, expect, and believe, and expressions which reflect something other than historical facts, are intended to identify forward-looking statements.
Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including those discussed in the Risk Factors section of our filings with the SEC. Actual results may differ materially from any forward-looking statements. The company undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events that may arise after this conference call, except as required by law. For more information, please refer to the cautionary statement included in our press release relating to the acquisition of JUMP Technology issued earlier today. Lastly, all metrics discussed on this call are non-GAAP unless otherwise noted. With that, I'll turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Sandeep Sahai.
Welcome, and thank you for making it to this meeting on such short notice. As you're aware, Clearwater has a long history of strong organic growth, and we continue to make all the necessary investments with the appropriate execution rigor to ensure that the organic growth continues. Even organically, though, we have a rich history of entering new markets, as you saw from the movement to corporates, to insurance, to asset management, and geographically to Europe and Asia. We have also maintained a very strong and balanced financial profile. Therefore, the bar to do an acquisition has always been high. Do the next slide, please. Sorry, just go back. Thank you.
What we did was we set up a dedicated team focused on corporate development about two years back, and we used external consultants and a multi-tier screening process to identify companies which would be a strategic fit for us. We also screened over 300 companies, had many, many management meetings, and frankly, JUMP emerged at the top of our list. At the time of the IPO, we also laid out the areas of priority for M&A, which included the following. Number one, geographic expansion. We wanted to accelerate our growth in Europe, where we have established a right to win, and subsequently in Asia. We wanted to broaden our functional footprint. We all often talked about adjacent functionality and essentially wanted to sell more functionality to our current clients while improving our right to win.
One of our goals here was to focus on functionality that would otherwise take multi-year R&D efforts. The third was enter adjacent markets as defined in our overall $10.1 billion TAM. Fourth, become a multi-product company in an effort to do more for satisfied clients but also grow our share of the wallet. The point is that this deal is not opportunistic in any way. It's a result of a disciplined approach to adding M&A as a lever of growth for Clearwater. To the next one, please. Thank you. We're very excited to announce the proposed acquisition of JUMP. If you look at the right side, this really furthers each one of our strategic goals for M&A. To expand internationally, it expands our presence in Europe very meaningfully. When we talk about adjacent functionality, it adds functionality to.
for our current clients and moves us towards a platform for the full investment life cycle. It helps us grow in the small and medium asset management sector. Finally, it helps us evolve into a multi-product company. A few things about JUMP. The company is based in Paris, where it has approximately 100 people. There are 70 clients in Europe. Now, the deal is subject to customary closing conditions, and we expect the deal to close in the next 45-60 days. What's really interesting about the platform, though, is that it is modular and it is end-to-end. You could buy the whole platform to provide full functionality, or you could buy modules and integrate it with other components you have.
In terms of acquisition consideration, we are paying EUR 75 million from our existing cash reserves and granting employees up to 3.8 million RSUs that will vest over the next four years. Just the structure of that will show you that we have every intention of keeping the JUMP team intact, which will ensure consistency on product strategy and development, as well as client relationship management. Let's just dig in a little bit deeper into the rationale for the deal. Next one, please. Look, I wanted to start by saying that JUMP is inherently a fast-growing company. It's not like it was slow growing and we have to do something about it. It grows pretty quickly organically by itself. There are three things it does to accelerate Clearwater's growth. One, basically significant expansion in the European market.
Roughly doubles our client base and increases employee headcount in Europe by 33%. In the European market, unit-linked funds account for $6 trillion of assets. It's a functionality we did not have, so it adds capacity to do that. Just on the face of that, we'll have significantly better capability to address the European market. The second one is additional capabilities for our current insurance clients, and therefore also improving the right to win future insurance clients. As you might be aware, a number of insurance clients now have investment management arms, and they will often buy a front office system to go along with the Clearwater system. This acquisition allows us to offer portfolio management services and order management systems, and thereby get a comprehensive and full end-to-end solution for their business needs. The second one is around enhanced performance.
JUMP has an industry-leading performance and attribution engine. In addition to what we do today, JUMP adds things like dynamic calculations and attribution, flexible portfolio benchmark solutions, customizable risk ratios, what-if predictive analysis, and other advanced features. We're very excited to bring this industry-leading performance capability to our current insurance and asset management clients. Like I said, unit-linked funds would really allow us to provide a fully comprehensive solution to European insurers. The third pillar here is about small and midsize asset managers, hedge funds and family offices. As you know, most of them buy an end-to-end platform which covers the front, middle, and back office solution. This acquisition now allows us to go to that market with a fully integrated platform.
As you can see, we expect this acquisition to open new markets, expand our presence in Europe, and provide greater functionality to our current customers. With that, I will hand over to Jim Cox, our CFO.
Thanks, Sandeep. June, you can click to the next slide. We've spoken a lot during our time as a public company about our evolution from a single product to a multi-product company. This is a fundamental strategic journey for every company, and for us, it's really critical to execute on this multi-product strategy to increase our net retention rates to the level one would expect, given our world-class gross retention rates. We are finding success with our add-on modules, as you see in the middle of this page. You've heard us speak of Prism and the LPX offering within our alternatives offerings, as well as we are beginning to offer clients incremental GAAP and regulatory reporting offerings for an additional fee. JUMP was built on a modular basis, so it will naturally align to our multi-product strategy.
We will be able to offer our existing clients as well as new clients these distinct modules à la carte, to use a French term. JUMP already has modules for portfolio management, order management, performance, unit-linked funds, and we plan to offer these modules integrated with our core Clearwater solution. Once the transaction closes, we'll be able to offer both our internally built and acquired capabilities to our clients to unlock a deeper and broader relationship across the investment life cycle, fundamentally accelerating our strategic evolution into a multi-product company. June, do you wanna flip to the next page? What's in it for you, investors? We see the benefits of this acquisition accruing to investors through greater global expansion, the opening of new TAM, and increased net revenue retention. What should you expect to see in our metrics as a result of this?
We are looking at international expansion. You've heard me talk about 40% of our TAM is outside of the United States. Therefore, investors should be able to track our progress with our growth of an international revenues as a percentage of our total revenues. We expect expansion within our existing customers through performance, portfolio management, and order management offerings. These are all additional products that will drive net revenue retention expansion through additional products and enhanced capabilities. Lastly, we're opening new markets with an end-to-end solution for smaller asset managers. JUMP has a track record in France of succeeding selling asset managers their front-to-back service, and we're looking to bring that to additional markets, including North America, with dedicated sales and go-to-market teams outside of France. As we penetrate these new markets, we expect you'll see customer count expansion within these new areas. That's the rationale.
Obviously, Sandeep and all of us are really excited about this opportunity as we look forward. Sandeep, shall we open it up to questions, or do you have any last comments you'd like to make?
No, I think that, you know, this is consistent with what we have always said. We wanna do an acquisition of roughly this size, but which meets our strategic objectives. We were and don't continue to be in any hurry, or need to do acquisitions. This one just fits so nicely, and we are frankly, all very excited about it. Still have to execute. Don't forget that. Yeah. Thank you. We'll open up to questions, and do we just wanna start with Gabriela? Do you wanna?
Yes, please. Good afternoon, and thanks for taking the questions. Congratulations on the acquisition. Sandeep, one for you, and then Jim, one for you. Sandeep, when we go to the JUMP website, there are a number of different modules that the company offers, and certainly you highlighted that in the part of your presentation where you talk about cross-sell. If you had to narrow it down, what are the one or two core competencies that you think the asset and the company is most differentiated with? Or what do you think the most common use cases are?
Yeah. You know, Gabriela, thank you for the question. If you look at the client base, Gabriela, there's a whole set of clients who buy just performance. That's a key capability, right? A number of their clients will just buy performance, and that's it. Frankly, that's how we work with other performance providers right now, is core Clearwater works provides data to a performance engine and gets data back, right? That was one part of the business they do well. The second one they do well is when you think about small and medium asset managers and hedge funds, they have a solution front to back, fully automated for that. That's a market, as you know, we don't do. We don't go to that market with a front to back solution. That we felt was the second capability.
The third big one, Gabriela, was unit-linked funds. We were a little bit surprised with how many of their clients just buy the JUMP platform for just unit-linked funds. Frankly, we weren't quite sure about the market size, and we went out and looked at it and talked to the European team. $6 trillion of unit-linked funds really in Europe. We felt like that was the third one. The fourth one they do is they sell front middle office, Gabriela. They really would take an accounting engine and in front of that put a front and middle office system, which I think is quite interesting for our insurance client base. Those four areas really makes up the vast majority of their revenue today, and frankly, fits quite nicely.
That all makes sense. Thank you for that. Jim, the commentary on the metrics that we'll see in the model, the international revenue getting bigger as a percentage of sales, the net retention rate. Maybe just taking a step back, how does this change how you think about your long-term growth forecast, the 20%+ that you all have been committed to? Is this consistent with the plan that you've always had, or is it actually accretive to your long-term growth forecast to the point where we could actually see maybe mid-20s or high 20s medium-term growth?
I just wanna say that this is the question our board asks, so it's really good. I wanna see Jim's answer. Okay.
Yes. Obviously we're really excited about this opportunity, and we think that it has all of those opportunities. Right now, you know, we stay aligned with our 20%+ long-term revenue growth margin and our path to expanding EBITDA margins on that long-term model.
Okay. Thank you.
Kevin, do you wanna go next, please?
That'd be great. Thank you so much, Sandeep, and congratulations again. Seems like a really strategic acquisition and quite synergistic. Is there any way to think about 'cause it sounds like it's about $12 million a year revenue, what the potential revenue profile could be across your existing clients so as you integrate it, because it seems like there's a lot of synergies and platform extension within the existing client base in addition to the clients you're acquiring. Is there any way to think about maybe what the potential revenue opportunity would be as you scale kind of the existing client base?
Go ahead, Jim.
As we think, Kevin, thanks. We're gonna speak about things aspirationally here.
Okay.
What gets us so excited about this is we easily see this, and when you look at the market sizes that Sandeep has described, we see this as a $100 million revenue business.
Wow.
At some point in the future when we think about all of these levers and we think about that. Now obviously there's a lot of work to do to drive to that, but that could be a very meaningful thing, and that's why we're so excited about it.
Just, it sounds like it's a really unique opportunity in terms of you as you're revisiting kinda the current pricing structure to sell this into the existing clients as it closes. I know that's a little further out, but it sounds like you may be able to leverage the price discovery you're having now with this new product. Is that a fair way to think about it?
I think there's a bunch of different ways that we think that, which Sandeep alluded to, which offers different avenues of growth. That is obviously one. Selling back into our base is really interesting. I think, you know, having 100+ people in Paris and the European opportunity that we've seen is obviously that's all new as well. We are just as excited about that opportunity as well as the unit-linked funds.
Charlie, if I could just add a couple of points. One is this was obviously a proprietary deal, right? It wasn't about. They are growing very nicely themselves. Frankly, we were growing quite nicely ourselves. We are almost uniquely complementary in what we do, and therefore, there was never a deal where there was any level of we are talking to five people or they are talking to five people. It was really a one-on-one discussion because of what you said. It just fits really nicely and strategically, and they would take several years to go build out an American business if they wanted to come here. We would take a long time to build a front middle office system from scratch or a performance system. It fit nicely. It was a proprietary deal and both sides are super excited.
Congratulations again.
Thank you. Camille, do you wanna go next, please?
Sure. Can you hear me?
We can. Thanks.
Great. Congratulations on the acquisition. One question about the customer accounting. You mentioned that JUMP has 70 customers today. How many of those are incremental to Clearwater? How should we think about the timing to cross-sell if you're able to close before year-end?
I don't know the exact count, but I think all 70 are incremental.
I was gonna say it's a very small. It's not exactly 70, but it's nearly, yes. That's all incremental. Yeah.
That's great to hear. Just one more on the financials. JUMP generated over EUR 12 million in revenue in 2021. How quickly do you expect that to grow this year organically? How do JUMP Technology's margins compare to Clearwater?
Great. Great question. They are nicely profitable, as Sandeep said. Now, one thing we'll talk about with the EUR 12 million euro revenues, that's on an IFRS basis. When you think about license revenues in US GAAP and the treatment around that versus IFRS, there's a little bit of a discrepancy between how those two are approached. We'll give more fulsome details about that when we do our Q3 results, and we'll talk about that guidance for 2023 when we provide our full guidance in January.
Got it. Thank you, and congrats again.
Thanks.
Thank you. Yun Kim, do you wanna go next, please?
Yes. Thank you. First, congrats on the acquisition. As you stated, Sandeep, the JUMP acquisition provides you with the bigger scale and footprint in Europe, but does the acquisition also help you accelerate your go-to-market in Europe overall? Just in terms of that question, what is your plan for JUMP salespeople to start selling the rest of the Clearwater products?
Yeah. Thank you. We absolutely believe that when you go sell in the French market or Luxembourg market or markets like that, having clients in the market makes a big difference. We absolutely see that as sort of helping our cause. That's number one. Number two, their own sales team, we initially expect them to stay focused on the organic growth, right? Sort of continue to grow at the pace they can. That felt like step number one. We have also set up a product team, Yun Kim, so that product team is gonna take things like unit-linked funds, they will take performance and all those and start to sell it across all of Clearwater. We see that more of a product and technology function rather than a sales function, right?
You know, as you know, we have a office and a team in Paris, and the number one objection had been, "Look, you guys are really small here in Continental Europe." As of this acquisition, after close, we'll have like 115-120 people. It suddenly becomes a real presence. That's why you see us. We think it'll help our growth quite meaningfully.
Okay, great. Thanks for that, answer. Real quick, Jim, I think you kinda alluded to the last question. You know, there's some, you know, the difference in the accounting treatment. I just wanna make sure, is the business model or the revenue model, is it not subscription? Is there some, like, license revenue component to the
Sure.
JUMP business?
As kind of a European software company, they have license revenue, they have subscription revenue, and they have services revenues. Under an IFRS basis, their recurring revenues have been anywhere from 60%-64% over those last three years. Services revenues has been anything from 36%-44% over those last three years, all on an IFRS basis.
And then-
Now, what's important to understand is, as we think about particularly, marketing in North America of the end-to-end solution, you know, prerequisites to that would be putting the JUMP platform in the cloud, and our view going forward is that we will sell this on a subscription basis in the cloud moving forward.
Gotcha. Just real quick, Jim, does the margin profile change as a result of the acquisition at all, like, especially around the onboarding process?
You know, the financial profile of the business is good. It has a good growth rate, it's a profitable business. However, like, we're really excited about this and it's really fundamentally strategically important to us. That's really the whole reason we did it. The ability to cross-sell, the ability to enter these new markets, the ability to provide the breadth and strength and reputational girth in continental Europe is really the strategic rationale behind it.
Okay, great. Thank you so much, and congrats on the acquisition.
Thanks.
Thank you. Thank you. Ella, do you wanna go next, please?
Hi. Yes. Can you hear me?
We can.
Hi, Clearwater team. Thanks so much for taking my question, and congratulations. I have two questions. My first, I'm wondering how long do you think it will take to integrate the services business into the cloud and sell on a subscription basis?
We expect, Ella, in Europe that to be immediately after close. I'd say immediately after close. The good thing is that they're also on AWS in the European cloud, and that should be there by the end of the year. Therefore, we expect it to take about a quarter to have that end-to-end platform available here in the U.S. We expect sometime in Q1 for that to be available on AWS here in the U.S. That's just in terms of timing. I do think our ability. If you just think about it, think about the performance module, for example. We work with third parties already. You could launch that literally right after close because we'll take the data from our platform, send it out to the performance engine, get the calculations back.
That can be done right away. We integrate, as you know, with front and middle office systems. We should be able to sell JUMP right off the bat and be able to use that and integrate with our accounting engine like we do with other third parties. Our ability to sell both of those is, I think, almost immediate. In Europe, unit-linked funds tend to be a different asset class. You would take that and sort of be able to take it to market right away. One of the I think Jim spoke about the modular nature, Ella, and that's what's exciting about it, is you have the modular nature. You don't have to get every piece in a certain way to make it all work, right?
We think in Q1 we'll be able to take all four of these offerings to market.
That's very clear. Thank you. My second question, I was hoping that you could speak a little bit more to JUMP's historic growth profile. I'm just curious, did it grow similarly to Clearwater or roughly more, roughly less in the past? Thank you.
Yeah. Jim, do you wanna answer that? I could just very, very quickly. It's almost mirrors our growth rate.
Similarly, yeah.
Very, very similar growth rate.
Okay, great. Thank you very much, and congratulations again.
Thank you. Ella, that was the reason when we talk about they didn't need us, it was a question of, can we help each other, sort of grow faster and get to markets we would otherwise take a long time. Thank you for your question. I see Pete. Pete, do you wanna go next, please?
Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask, in terms of their current offerings, are there certain modules that have seen higher penetration? Were they all introduced at the same time, or is it the portfolio management and OMS is clearly the leader and the others are trailing? You know, how would you talk about, you know, where their relative success has been amongst those modules?
I think to talk about just the unit counts of those modules, portfolio management is in over two-thirds to three-quarters of their client base. Sandeep already mentioned as well that performance is at that same relative size. However, when you think about revenues, unit-linked funds tend to be their larger customers as well. Although the counts are lower, the impact and the value there can be quite large as well.
Yeah. You know, if you think about it, Pete, when you think about the clients who would have a large proportion of unit-linked funds, they tend to be the very large asset managers, very large insurers. Typically, JUMP goes in and does the whole thing for, but only for unit-linked funds in that case. Therefore it fits with us really well. They would do the unit-linked funds, we would do the rest of it. We'll bring it together with Prism and the clients would get a full comprehensive view, which frankly is very, very difficult to get today.
That's helpful. When you think about the investments required to integrate and begin marketing, you know, can you talk about quantifying that a little bit? You know, what would be the schedule for that? You know, can you complete that in the first 12 months?
What I'll tell you, Pete, is that we expect revenue to the cross-sell revenue to easily finance whatever investments we would make to make this all come to market. Now, is it exactly in the quarter? Perhaps not. We definitely expect in 2023, the increased revenue in that year to sort of be able to finance the increased R&D investment. I just wanna say, Pete, just that I'm not flippant about it. A lot of these solutions can be taken to market the way they are today. It's not like you have to do a lot, because if you think about us, Pete, we integrate already with CRD, we integrate with Bloomberg AIM. We integrate with many, many front office, middle office systems already. Integrating with JUMP is relatively easy, therefore.
The same thing with performance. We integrate with a number of performance engines already, so we will integrate with JUMP in the same way. The point there is it the best integration? Perhaps not. We will continue to make investments to integrate it more and more tightly, but we should be able to take this to market pretty quickly, mostly in Q1.
Okay, that's helpful. Thank you.
Well, it looks like we're a couple minutes over time, and I don't see any other hands raised.
Jim, I do see some written questions on the side from Michael Infante and also Philip Rigby at RBC.
Thank you. Thanks for identifying those. Philip Rigby asked a question, "What can you tell us about JUMP's current growth rate, and what are the expectations in being able to accelerate that?" I think we answered that they had similarly grown like us historically, and we've talked about aspirationally of what we you know want to achieve there.
I think the other question was from Michael. Michael, how quickly are you guys growing and potential TAM uplift of your current $10 billion number, and how do you think about managing your pricing conversation, also integrating this asset? I mean, just wanna say that, you know, what Jim said, Michael, is really important for us, that these are additional modules you can buy above the core Clearwater. As you know, we've been investing time, money, and effort in making sure Prism is thought of as a separate module, just as alternative assets and Multi-GAAP and self-service are thought of as other modules. We feel JUMP brings four more modules to the party. These are all responsive to what clients need. This is not just something we are trying to sell.
Clients do want more enhanced performance, some clients do, and some want the front and middle office. We think that, you know, the pricing is gonna be separate, modular, above what core Clearwater is. Our current TAM, I think our TAM continues to be $10 billion, but if you remember, we have a core TAM of $4.7 billion, and the rest is supposed to be adjacent markets and all. This enhances that. All of this is in service of being able to address the entire $10 billion TAM, which included Europe and Asia. It really is in the service of trying to expand into our full TAM beyond what is today Clearwater's core. Okay, I think we got one last question, I know we over time, it's from Brian Schwartz.
Why is this the right time to do an acquisition, especially a European one?" Yeah, that's interesting. Look, I don't think I think as Jim said, we like the financial profile of the business, including the growth rate, profitability of the market, but that's not why we did it. We're doing this because it fundamentally helps our strategy. The strategy is about taking multiple products to our client, filling holes in our product suite when you think about the entire investment life cycle, accelerating our growth internationally, and being able to expand into our full TAM. That's what drove it, and we didn't. It wasn't driven by literally any other consideration at all.
Yeah. Brian, I would just say this, we have a market-leading product. We want to expand our lead and continue to grow it, and we believe that this will help us do that. We would've loved to have done it even sooner. Once you have a lead, never give up.
Thank you all so much. We really appreciate you, all of you joining the call on such short notice, and thank you again for your interest in Clearwater. Thank you.
Thank you.