Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Clearwater Analytics' First-Ever Investor Day. My name is Joon Park, and I'm the head of Investor Relations. I'd like to remind all participants that any forward-looking statements made today are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Expressions of future goals, intentions, and expectations, including in relation to business outlook, future financial and product 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 today's Investor Day program, except as required by law. We have a full program today, and it brings me pleasure to introduce Alphonse Valbrune, our Chief Legal Officer.
Thanks, Joon, for saving me from de-levering that. We're gonna make you an honorary member of the legal team. So I'll start off by saying that we are honored and grateful that all of you have decided to spend your morning here with us. We have a program that's geared to highlight our durable and reliable growth and the avenues that we have to continue this enviable track record. So Sandeep will start us off with an overview of that. Then we'll have Souvik Das, our CTO, who will deliver with other members of the technology leadership team a view into how our technology underpins the success that we've had and give you a view to where our technology is going.
Then we'll have our first break, followed by our Chief Client Officer, Subi Sethi, who will give you a view into our symbiotic relationship with our clients. We'll have Scott Erickson, our CRO, and Susan Ganeshan, our CMO, talk to you about our targeted go-to-market strategy. And then we'll have Souvik and Subi come back to give you a peek into our generative AI program. We'll then have our final break and our final session. At that session, Cindy Blendu, our Chief Transformation Officer and CHRO, will talk to you about our global people strategy. We will have Jim Cox, our CFO, give you a view into how our financials reflect our success. And then Sandeep Sahai will bring us home with a summary of our vision.
So without further ado, I will. Oh, actually, I forgot to mention these great-looking people. So, we will have our entire executive leadership team presenting today. We are honored and look forward to introducing them all to you. And, with that, I will hand it over to Sandeep Sahai.
Thank you. This is when you find out whether your mic is working or not, and it is. So welcome to the second-hardest ticket in town. We're not quite the U.S. Open, but we will try, and we will try and keep you as excited. But look, more seriously, we really want to thank you for coming. It takes a lot of effort to cover us or to invest in us or have a desire to invest in us, and we take it really, really seriously. We really want to be worthy of your interest in our company and, frankly, the trust you've put in us. Some of you, I just found out, flew overnight to come and meet with us, and we take that seriously. So thank you for your continued support of our company, and we hope to talk about it in some detail today.
You'll obviously hear from Jim and myself and Joon quite a bit, but the idea was that you get a chance to meet everyone on the executive team. We also have breaks built in for that, so you can sort of talk to them informally. Our aim has always been, as a company, to be as transparent as, as possible. And so if you have questions, either in a group setting here or individually, please feel free to ask. I'm on a bit of a timer, so I've got to keep moving. So what I'm going to talk about, the first aspect of what we want to build. We want to build a durable, growing company. So we wake up in the morning, and we think about that first. And so when you look at us, you've obviously seen this.
I'll do this one slide for you just to tell you what we do. You all know this, but I'm not quite sure everyone gets one point, and I'll try to emphasize that. For many of our customers, we are the investment book of record. We do the accounting for our clients. So if they have a global portfolio, we do the accounting for it that feeds into the financials. Why is that important? That's important because you can't do financials for a company and say, "I'm doing 80% of it." You have to know it comprehensively. And so when we have our asset owner clients, we know all of their global portfolio....whether it's Germany or Thailand or Japan or North America, we know what they are investing in every day. And it's not about we cover this asset class, we don't cover this asset class.
That's not a. We have to know every asset class. We have to know comprehensively what we do, and because we do that, we have to be trusted. If people don't trust us, that's not the feed they're gonna take and put into their financials. So that element of the company, I think, is important to understand. Some people said, "Do you cover all asset classes?" We have to. I'm not suggesting everything is all as automated, but we do cover everything our customers invest in. So the first thing we'd like to sort of put up here is, you talk about consistent growth, and this is almost purely organic, with this whole exception of December of last year. We obviously partnered with, with JUMP Technology. It's a relatively small investment. But the point is, we treasure the fact that we're able to grow consistently.
So you look at the growth, 20%, 24%. 20% last year, 21% this year for the first half. But we're also super excited that quarter two, you saw a re-acceleration, and we'll talk about why, but we showed a 22% year-on-year growth. I wish I could say it's always been easy, but I'm proud of this. I'm proud because last year, all of you recall, we faced really serious headwinds. And we talked about a headwind which was in the order of about 500 basis points. And so we thought, "Oh, this is unnatural. This is the first time equities have fallen at the same time as fixed income instruments, so maybe it can explain this away." That's not what we did. We said: How do we get back to 20% growth? Now, we could have fixed it.
I do believe very much that we could have fixed it with just doing something in quarter two and quarter three and making it all work. And we said, "No, let's fix it for the long term. Let's build a commercial model where this problem doesn't reoccur," because it will reoccur. The economy will go up and down. And so we came up with this base plus model, which we took out to the market. And even in this room, I've got to admit, a lot of you said, "It's gonna take you a year or two years to do this." And we said, "No, this is gonna take us two quarters." No, we didn't say two quarters. We said three. We said December end.
But the fact of the matter was, at the end of Q2, end of Q3, we had that pretty much completed, and that's why we are proud of that 20% last year. Things will happen, that the leadership have the urgency and the ability to go out and deliver, and we did. And that's why we're proud of where we were last year, proud of where we are right now. So let's talk about non-GAAP profit. I care a lot about unit economics. I think unit economics matter. You can't just grow and not have unit economics or not be profitable. So some people asked me coming in today, "Oh, wow, you guys went out in 2021. Such a different world from 2023. You must have changed so much. What's, how's your strategy changed?" I'm like: Nothing has changed very much.
If you go back and look at our S-1 and what we said then, and how we're gonna approach the market, and what we said now, it's not different. We believe very much that you must build durable companies which have unit economics, which generate EBITDA, which generate cash flow. And our financials then and our financials now reflect that. So you look at the gross profit, which really matters, and you will see 73% in 2019. It came up to 75. Excited that we are at 75.8, and we do expect this year to have a 100 basis point improvement on the gross profit compared to last year. Now, it might look like for two, three years, we were staying somewhat static at 75. That's not the case. What makes us really proud of this chart is we were building out operations in Europe.
We were building out operations in Asia. And when you build those things out, they're fundamentally inefficient for the first two, three years because you don't have the data connectivity, you don't have the securities loaded, all kinds of things, which Subi will talk about. But we were building that out, so our North America was doing better, and the rest of it was pulling it down. So it may feel like a 75. It isn't. Our business was improving in the markets we were spending time in, somewhat inefficient in the new markets, and those are becoming more and more normalized. So the 100 basis points is not a one-time event. We expect that to continue to improve in the years ahead, and we will talk about that. So we're proud of this slide. Dan, we're proud about most slides. Okay. Non-GAAP Adjusted EBITDA.
So I can tell you, we started at 30%, and this damn thing called an IPO stuck in. Like, we were like shocked at the amount of money it takes to go public. I got to tell you, Jim and I talked about it, and I was like: "Do we really want to do this?" And so we had to spend a fair amount of money getting ready for this, which we did. And luckily, Jim had done this before. So I do still remember he started with telling me, "Oh, it's gonna be $5-$7 million. Don't worry about it."... Oh! I always, always trusted Jim, but that time, he took me. But the point is, as we got to 2021, there were things like insurance costs. I'm not sure why we paid that much money, but we did.
But the point is, we got there, and then we're on a bit of a march to get profitability to where we think it can be. And so you see us come out and deliver 27.6% in Q2, and that was a good, solid 30% Q&Q, year-on-year, pardon me. As that looks all nice, but we're really proud of it for this reason: We did not want to build a company which is gonna do well for two years and three years and five years. We want to build a company which is gonna grow five years from now, 10 years from now, and be a leader in the market. So we joined us about two years back and said, "Look, if you're gonna go build that, this platform has to be seamlessly scalable.
It can't be that every time there's growth, you're sort of trying to find how to do something in your platform and make it scalable. It has to be seamlessly scalable." He also said, "You can't build global platforms, but suddenly decided to doing some pieces, structure it, architect it, correct today." We took R&D from 22% of that time to 26%. I think last quarter, we were 26.5. So while, again, profit may feel like it was 27, 27 starting to grow, this was when this immense massive investment in R&D was ongoing. And so we're proud of the EBITDA and, and just what we produce and convert to cash, but we're also proud that we did it while investing so heavily in making our platform scalable for the future.
This one we always like to put up because we are incredibly proud of it. You know, there was a bit of a frenzy in the company last quarter when we delivered 97. And lots of colleagues, you know, friends of mine who are CEOs of other companies, they're like: "97? What are you complaining about?" I said, "Dude, you got to see this chart. It's 98. We do not like this 97." Initially, we had it colored in a different color, and Jim didn't like that. He was like, "No, no, no, don't pay attention to it." But it was a big deal. We care about the 98% GRR, because I think that shows how much clients depend upon our software and how much they trust us. And then you have our NRR.
So the NRR, you all know the story last year, went down to 103, and that was the time where this is the five basis points I was talking... 500 basis points I was talking about. NRR went to 103, and we still had to find growth. And, if there's a chart I'm most proud of, it is this one. And we could have easily told all of our sales team, "Go back and change all those hundreds of contracts," and we didn't. Because if you got the sales team involved with making the changes to the base plus model, which Jim may talk about some more, growth would have suffered this year.
So the executive team, which you have all here today, we all said: "Okay, I'll take these clients, you take the next 10, you take the next 10," and we split it among ourselves and went to talk to clients. Literally not involving the sales team, and that's why we were able to change the contract and continue to grow. The 106 was wonderful. I think the 109 brings us back to normalcy. Are we happy about it? We're not. You, you know, you've heard us speak a lot about, we think that we should have an aspirational 115. Jim will talk about that some more. So then the other question we get a lot about is, you know, "Where are you guys winning more? So which markets are you winning and which ones aren't doing well?
Talk to us about it." And the first financials we have in S-1 is from 2019. 2021 is obviously when we went public, and this is the latest quarter. The point we're making is if we look at asset management, 31% then, 32% in 2021, 32% in 2023. Look at insurance, 50%, 52%, and 53%. And the point is, the distribution has remained approximately the same. So it's obvious that we are winning in every one of those markets almost evenly, and that's the point. i.e., that if you're just winning in one market, not winning in the other, you would have seen some movement. The one you do see movement in, by the way, is the corporate sector. So you see them come from 18- 16 to 14. It doesn't mean they aren't growing.
They're growing slower because that is the TAM for corporates is meaningfully smaller. We literally have a list of every company which has $1 billion or more. We track it, we know it, the TAM is smaller, and that will, over time, become a smaller proportion of what we do. Do I like it? I don't like it. So what are we gonna do? We're gonna look at other asset owners. So the company has made some announcements around REITs, around pensions, around sovereign funds, which can all add to that bucket of corporate and other asset owners. So the question is, why is it not here? It's very simple. We put up data on markets where we win 80% of the time, we get a proposal. If we don't win 80% of the time, it's still a new market for us.
The day pension gets to 80%, believe me, it's on this chart. Then you think about the big change we've been talking to you about is expanding internationally. We took some of our strong sales leaders and moved them over, moved them to Asia, we moved them to Europe, to make sure we were selling appropriately. Not selling ahead of where the platform was, but selling in the way we have sold here in North America. So that has continued to grow. 9% went to 14%. 17%, we hope to continue to grow that very meaningfully in the years ahead. And it's, it's quite simple. If you look at the insurance market, the European insurance market is actually a little bit bigger than North America. So if you continue to sell, you should be able to sell more over time in Europe than here.
Yeah, this is a plug. Good plug. You could do all this and start to show some problems. 80% win rate in those markets is true today, as it was yesterday, two years back. It doesn't mean we don't have competition. We do. But we still win 80% of the time. We write a proposal, we win. I think some of the team was asking me about the NPS, and it matters a lot. As an investor, you may be sitting there and saying, "Why do I care? I mean whatever." You should, because that is what allows us to spend only 13% on sales and marketing and generate EBITDA. That's because our customers, more often than not, refer us. That's why we went. So this slide I thought was really helpful, which was: Do we do meaningful work?
It doesn't mean that people who pay us $50,000 a year, we don't do meaningful work for them. But the criticality of what we do for large companies is sometimes measured by how many people pay you $1 million on ARR. And the latest study on June 30, 77, and that is 25% higher on a year-on-year basis. So more companies are doing meaningful work with us, so we're excited about it, and we really take that as a bit of a compliment. We want to put this up because it looks so cool, is that we continue to attract really, really big logos, continue to bring them live, and that matters. Is that insurance companies and corporates and asset managers see others doing more and more with us. That builds a nice flywheel you can sort of grow from.
So we, you know, we take this really seriously. I worked with the chairman of the board is here, and I worked with him for 20 years. The point is, when we say something, we want to deliver it. So we have obviously, relatively young public company, but we provided guidance for 2021, 2022, and part of 2023, and we have met that revenue guidance each quarter, and obviously for the year. Now, EBITDA, we missed last year. But what I'm really incredibly proud of here is we did really well in Q4, came all the way back and met, in spite of this 500 basis points problems, in spite of everything. The guidance we provided at the beginning of the year on both revenue and EBITDA, we met and exceeded.
So we take, we take this really seriously when we say something to you that we come out and deliver on it, right? Okay, shifting gears, avenues for growth. So what I've been trying to pitch to you is that we do a really good job in executing. And now the next step is: Okay, what are you gonna do next? This is so cool. Whatever you've done is wonderful. Okay, let's talk about the future. So how do, how do we think about growth? So, so let's talk about that a little bit. And frankly, I think of it as three different buckets, if you will. The first one is, how do we get new logos on a consistent basis?
The good news is, we do win 80% of the time we write a proposal, so it's not something extraordinary you got to do, but you have to continue to do and continue to win at the space. And the second thing is about how do we do more with our current clients? And you should be able to ask the question that if you have a 60 NPS, why don't you do more? How much more can you do? And that's gonna go back to the NRR discussion. And, and the math isn't that complicated. If we grew 22% in Q2, NRR was 109, now 13-ish% were new logos. It's sort of easy to compute. So that is a really important vector of how we should think about growth going forward.
And the third one is disruptive technologies or adjacencies, which you can buy. So let's talk about new logos real quick. So I've seen a lot of companies talk about TAM. I'm sure this all makes sense to them. We think of TAM very differently. I'm, I'm an engineer by training. What I like to say is, "Give me the names. If it's a TAM, show me the name of all the clients, show me the AUM, show me the take rate, and you can calculate the damn thing." And insurance companies and asset managers and corporate, they all publish this, so there's no secret here.
So we think of TAM very much as, "Show me the list across the world, and what is the genuine number you can come up with where we have a right to win?" So don't talk about pensions, don't talk about rates, don't talk about those markets where we have a right to win, defined as winning 80% of the time we write a proposal. And so we think there's a $5.9 billion TAM. We have $365 million of that, give or take a little bit. So we feel there's a whole lot of runway to just do that and more. And there is some discussion with, which is, "Why are you guys bothered with the rest of it? Why don't you just focus on just this?" And that's legit.
You could say, "Screw it all, it's $365 million. Let's just continue to grow for the next 4-5 years. The TAM is there, just keep doing that." And I think that's how you build a short-term company. The long-term approach is, what's the next TAM? How do I grow 5 years from now and 3 years from now? The other thing you can't, can't do is get satisfied. 20% is great. Let's not worry about it. Now, our job is to figure out, is there a way to accelerate that? And so we could get super satisfied with this, but that's not what you will see in how we behave and how we invest. I did wanna make the point about Europe and the US. You look at the insurance one, $11 trillion of assets here, $22 trillion in Europe, so it matters.
Same thing in asset management, it's different. It's the United States is 41, and about 31 in Europe. One other point before we just move on is, it doesn't mean this is the whole TAM. You should obviously be thinking, "Hey, what the hell happened to pensions? What happened to Asia? What happened to all of that?" Yes, those markets exist. We do win. We just don't win 80% right now. That's the point. We do expect to grow those businesses as we go along. Runway and insurance, just a little bit more specifically, you break it up, and like I said, this is... There's an Excel spreadsheet behind it. You can sort of look, we can look at it. Long runway in North America, there's enough runway in North America.
But if we don't grow Europe, then this $166 million out of the $500 million opportunity here starts to fray. And so you better build Europe when you don't need it. You better build Asia today when you don't need it at all. But if you need it, then the stakes are too high. So we are building those out today. We're investing in those today so that our growth can be at the number we want it to be and perhaps even accelerate it. Same thing about runway and asset management. There's a lot of runway to do exactly what we are doing, and again, you're not seeing asset management technology, what we do. We're talking about the market for what we do and where we win.
But the point here is that, of course, there is a huge runway here in asset management, both in North America and in Europe. I mean, that's why you saw JUMP, which is focused on asset management, because we feel we can move faster in asset management. So one question I get from several of you, I thought we'd just address it, is, you know, "If competition is not growing, why are you guys growing? What, what, what's going on? Why is your demand so resilient when the economy is sort of sputtering a little bit, your competitors aren't growing, what's going on?" And you have to look at the longer trends. People come to us because of private assets. They suddenly want to invest in mortgages.
There are two choices: Either they buy one more accounting engine for mortgages separately and integrate everything through a data warehouse, and then they buy something else in Germany and buy one more accounting system, integrate that in. How many times are they gonna do it? Then you suddenly get a customer says, "Forget all of this. I, I'm just gonna move to Clearwater." That's what drives our growth. What drives our growth is the globalization. People suddenly want to invest in Asia. They want to invest in Europe, and you have the same two choices. Do you go out and buy an accounting engine for your German book, and the regulatory reporting for Germany, and the German GAAP? Either you go learn all of that, or you buy Clearwater. By the way, when I say real estate, guess what? Same thing.
Go buy an accounting engine for real estate, regulatory reporting, compliance reporting, best of luck, or move to Clearwater. So we win because I think you see companies continuing to invest more in private assets, companies continue to invest more globally, and finally, you know, sometimes corporate activity does it. You know, you just read that all the time. People buy books, people buy companies, and, and then either you integrate these two systems or you just move to Clearwater. That's why you see resilience in our demand here. Asset management is not an easy market. It's not a market where you can go in and say, "Oh, people are really eager to spend money." Yeah, no, they're not. The question is, why do they come to Clearwater? We're partners for growth. Rarely are we brought in to say, "You know, we are doing this.
We want to do our accounting a little bit better." Nobody calls us for that. What people say is, "I've got asset owners as clients, corporates, insurance companies, sovereign funds, endowment, whatever, and they invest with a large asset manager on five different desks. They have equities, they have fixed income, they have mortgages, they have things like that, and they get five different reports." Yeah, they come to us, we go jointly, actually do joint mandates. We go and pitch together and say, "What you will get is a digital-first reporting, which is integrated. All your compliance rules are gonna be sort of taken into account." But we are partners for growth.
We help them get more assets, and that's why we continue to be resilient, even though that industry still isn't doing, you know, isn't really looking to spend a whole lot of money. The only other one is comprehensive client reporting, and people get really frustrated with, "Clients are not happy. What can you do?" Clearwater will come in and sort of help them get this comprehensive view, which is global. I do want to make a couple more points about Europe and Asia. The problem is exactly the same. If anything, the European problem is somewhat more acute than North America. And you may say: Why? Well, at least in the U.S., we have U.S. GAAP. And I mean, I see. Thank you.
But if you are a chief investment officer in Europe, and you have assets in Europe, you need to worry about German GAAP, French GAAP, Belgian GAAP, Italian GAAP. Guess what? All of those. And then you have to worry about regulatory reporting. French regulatory reporting, Germany... They all are similar, but they're all different. Switch on Clearwater, two-second response time. You can see the same data from a German GAAP point of view, a German tax point of view, or a Belgian point of view, Belgian GAAP point of view. Asia is, I think, one step more acute, because there's literally no commonality between Indian GAAP and Japanese GAAP. At least the European countries there have IFRS as a very strong basis.
The point I'm trying to make is, the US is a market, but the pain point in Europe is perhaps more acute and even more acute in Asia. So we should be able to find a way to grow that at least as fast as we grow here in North America. Okay, doing more with clients. I'm getting a look, which means I should be finishing up, but okay, so clients who we already do get a 60 NPS from. So I did want to talk about the size of the price. This is what quite, quite enlightening, is what we do is about one basis point worth. But if you look at the amount of money in, you know, these asset owners spend on investment technology, it's four basis points. So you may think, "What do you guys not do?" Well, we don't do the front office.
We don't do deep performance, deep risk, deep compliance. There are lots of pieces which clients do, which we don't do. And if clients are that happy, why would we not think about what else we can sell to them? Because remember that $5.9 billion I put up? Yeah, if you could do this and expand out to the 4 bps or 2 bps, that market would suddenly look very, very different. All those charts would look really, really different. So we saw this a few years back and said, "Okay, let's talk about... Let's see if we can build it." And so obviously, you all know about LPs, LPx, LPx Clarity, and Prism. So we funded these two initiatives two, now three years back, and frankly, they've been really successful and are sort of powering our growth right now.
Part of the reason was we did it jointly with clients. We didn't sort of sit in a room and figured this out. We went to clients and said, "What is your problem?" And jointly with them, we designed it, we put it together, and sort of launched them, and these two have really done well. With that success, we had the confidence to say, "Okay, let's go do this in four markets. Let's go to mortgages." And you got MLx. We said, "What about derivatives? What about performance? What about insights?" And we have funded four more programs to do more of the four bips. I just want to make sure one point I make, when you see MLx, you're like, "Okay, you're going to do mortgages." We always did mortgage. We always did LPs. We accounted for it.
But if you wanted to look through in what you have in your pools of assets, that's what this product does. It gives you insight. It takes you deeper into what your holdings are. If you're an LP and you invest your money with a GP, you just get a value from them. What we do now is we provide a list of all the assets they have, which countries it is in, what kind of technology it is. It provides you with clarity into your portfolio. And you may say, "Ah, somebody can just read it." No, no, no. People have invested in 100 GPs. Yeah, you're going to sort that out every quarter, really? Clearwater does that flip of a switch. So we feel like we are funding these four things, and we hope to sort of build on... They should help us accelerate our growth.
And the other one we started to learn was this. We said, "Oh, we don't have to build everything. Why don't we find somebody amazing, like Emmanuel, who's built out a really good technology, and see if he'll partner with us?" And so suddenly you had an OMS and a PMS and a unit- linked fund capability, super best in class, which you can take to your current clients and address some of the four bips. So it's not about yesterday and today, and frankly, JUMP was relatively small, but the technology was truly amazing. And so the partnership, we are really excited about, about what Emmanuel has built, out in Paris. It also helps that it's in Paris. Food and the wine is just at the point. Not that that played a role in deciding to do this.
To be really clear here, but yes, it does matter a little bit. And really, so, you will hear from Sunil, who is Chief Product Officer, and this kind of a map you can start to think about, is how do we go- If you look at this map, it says, you know, product maturity on the Y-axis, on the X-axis, you've got relative impact to date.... Prism and LP, LPx are starting to have impact on our growth already. The others, not so much. Now, usually, you'll see them start at the bottom and sort of come all the way up. But in the case of OMS and PMS, they're mature already, so it's a question of taking it to a market, obviously, there. So you've got to have a combination of these things in a structured way.
The size of the circle represents, in our view, what the size of the market is, right? Is what for that product. Okay, so the last section, we're going to talk about disruptive technologies, and you've heard me speak about this a little bit. Stuff we are really, really excited about. We think I think we're excited because it's so relevant to what we do. When you think about the work we do, we wake up in the morning, and 2,800 data sources have fed data to our platform. You have to ingest it, you have to aggregate it, and you have to reconcile it. We have literally hundreds, a couple of hundred people who do the reconciliation on a daily basis. Look at the break and figure out what the answer should be.
That is something GenAI can do really, really well. You can take the GenAI platform, point it to the 10 million reconciliations which have been done by individuals in the last three, four, five years, and it will provide a potential answer. It doesn't even have to be the perfect answer each time. If you think about human in the loop and say, "Instead of me having to research this and figure this out," GenAI can say, "Okay, here's the potential answer, maybe answer number two." They say, "Yep, number one is right." You're even training it. So can it impact efficiency in a very meaningful way? It should. This is nothing we have said, "Hey, let's just think about this a little bit. Let's try it out." We have dedicated teams, dedicated engineers, dedicated leaders, operations people.
We have a whole team going after what this can impact in terms of efficiency. But that is half the game. What can it do to improve revenue? How do you monetize that revenue? What insights can you find which people care about? If they don't care about it, it doesn't matter. So we think that it can impact our revenue very meaningfully, or the growth we have very meaningfully. It can really impact efficiency. And the third one, which is a little harder to define with numbers, is speed of innovation. No question, you innovate faster with GenAI. There's no question about that. And how does that show up in the investor communities too? Yeah, we probably don't need as many engineers as you would have needed if you weren't doing GenAI. So for us, these three are really significant impacts.
We haven't quite quantified how much and exactly when, but we expect it to start to affect our business in Q4, Q1, accelerate to Q2, and continue to have impact on the business, sort of going forward. What I thought I would do is, this is my last section, is. This is such a cool graphic. Just look at that. I hope you like the graphic coming in. That one I love. I love that graphic, the one which shows the data flowing through our platform. That is really cool. Okay, nobody's nodding their head, which means. It is really cool. Okay, I find it cool. But you know, what we, what we wanted to show was just show you one thing about how something can be used today. So a client has a problem about a book yield.
So they have an asset and a sort of complex security, and they want to know, how do you guys calculate that book yield of this? Which is out there on the platform. They see it, they don't like it, I guess, and they want to know what. And they would talk to our sales rep or send them an email, which is actually, you have to send an email so it sort of gets in the system. And typically, our client service rep will respond to it, and they'll have five more questions. It usually takes 5 point something, I think 5.2, whatever, emails back and forth for them to be satisfied that, yeah, this is correct.
And if you look at GenAI, you will be able to say, you go to ChatGPT and just say, "Show me the book yield for security number, whatever that is." And the fact is that it gets that, it goes back to the 1,500 times people have asked the question, say, "Does my coupon rate look reasonable for such a yield? Show me this thing on a table." It asks those five questions, and in the amount of time I take here to talk about it, it will produce that table. Something it would have taken us five emails over the course of several days. Obviously, the satisfaction should be much higher, but the cost to us also falls dramatically. Now, I do want to make a point that I don't think we are ready yet to let the machine do this by itself.
But instead of a client services person doing this back and forth, it's all self-generated. They like it, they look at it, they send it out. It can dramatically alter efficiency. We're not talking about, let's do 5% more, 10%. It's not the point. It's radically different in the way people should think about GenAI. And in our case, I think it affects us on the gross margin line. It should have an impact on the R&D line. There is impact on the rest of it, sales and marketing. Those are... I find it more marginal in terms of just the P&L structure. What I do feel it will make a difference is on those two. So this is in a bit of a loop, it looks like, but yeah, it's pretty cool.
Okay, so obviously, we're talking on the platform here. And so I wanted to bring on, Souvik Das. Souvik has joined us two years back, and, you know, has built very large, very scalable platforms which have been global, which have been real-time systems, which is where we are headed to. So without further ado, welcome, Souvik Das.
Thank you, Sandeep. It's really exciting to see the consistent superior execution and the consistent durable growth. I'm thrilled to be part of this uniquely special company. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here. Sandeep introduced me, so I won't spend more time talking about myself. So in today's session, we're gonna talk a little bit about our technology platform and why we think we have a truly world-class disruptive architecture. Why this architecture provides a seamless global scale, and finally, why this architecture enables us to innovate for growth at a very rapid pace. So let's talk about all of that. So when we talk about disruptive architecture, what do we actually mean? We have a single instance, multi-tenant infrastructure. What does that mean? That basically means that all our clients are hosted on this one infrastructure.
This is how the modern internet software systems are built, and we are in that cohort. Many of our competitors have fairly old legacy architectures, where every single client have their own instance. In our opinion, that's really hard to scale, maintain, and operate. Our disruptive architecture allows us to ingest data in one single mechanism. We ingest data from thousands of data sources every day. It allows us to have a single security master. We ingest hundreds and thousands of securities and corresponding pricing updates every single day, and then all of that data is fed into a single reconciliation engine. All this allows us to do complex tasks once per day across our entire customer base in a highly automated manner.
This gives us massive economies of scale, and frankly, allows us to provide faster data and higher quality data in a more reliable way to our customers every single day. So let's talk a little bit about what does this single instance multi-tenant infrastructure provide us? We believe that this gives several unique advantages to our customers. We are constantly writing software. Oftentimes, we deploy software multiple times a week to production. All of this software becomes immediately available to our customers on the platform. Let's say if you are a client in Germany, and we are building a new German GAAP and a new German regulatory report, and we push that out to production, those new functionalities are available to you as the German client instantly in a flip the switch moment. There is no need for the client to do upgrades. All upgrades are automatic.
In addition, because all of these clients are hosted on this one infrastructure, they are able to access all of these net new functionalities in a familiar, consistent user experience. Let's talk a little bit about the single security master. As I mentioned, we ingest hundreds and thousands of securities and their pricing every single day. All of this data is stored in our single repository, the security master store. Because this is one single store, we are able to apply sophisticated machine learning techniques on that one data store. We are able to reason about the quality of the data. If we find issues in one security, we are able to fix it in one place, and instantly, that information is available across our platform.
We do this every single day for hundreds of our clients on our platform, and we believe this gives truly our platform the network effect. Let's talk a little bit about the data ingestion mechanism. As I mentioned, we have a mechanism of ingesting data. We ingest data across thousands of data source providers every single day globally, and all of that data is stored in that one repository. We apply machine learning techniques. We fix issues. That data is available to our clients instantly once the issues are fixed. In addition, as we are doing this over multiple years, we are getting better and better at best practices and normalizing the data.... Our data ingestion pipeline is completely automated, and we get better every day as we apply machine learning techniques on that.
Once the data is ingested and processed and mastered, we feed it to our single reconciliation engine. It's the one engine that looks at data from different data source providers, trading systems, custody systems, third-party market data providers. All of that information is processed by this single reconciliation engine. We have a highly automated reconciliation engine. We process close to 90% of transactions in an automated way today. And as I've mentioned, similar to the single security master use case, once a reconciler finds an issue and fix it in one location, that is propagated across the entire platform. So the network effects of this single instance, multi-tenant infrastructure truly comes into play every single time. Let's talk a little bit about seamless global scale. Sandeep briefly touched upon this in his presentation.
You know, when I came on board and I looked at what we need to build to scale our platform, we decided that we really have to put in some solid bone structure across various parts of the platform to scale it globally. I worked with Sandeep, Jim, members of the executive committee, the board, and we were very fortunate to get some additional R&D investments. Over the last two years, we have significantly improved the scale of our system, both from a technology perspective as well as from a functional expansion perspective. Today, we can say that for most of that work is nearly complete, and we expect that to get to a steady state investment over the next coming months. We started the company with a private infrastructure, private cloud, where we deployed our software.
Many of our clients are quite conservative, and they wanted a private cloud deployment. As we grew and as we got more and more clients, many of them wanted us to be on GCP. Some of them wanted us to be on AWS. So very soon we had these three different deployments, which in our opinion, does not provide us economies of scale and efficiency from an operability perspective. So over the last couple of years, we have merged these three different infrastructure into one single public cloud infrastructure. Today, I'm happy to report that 100% of our front-end client traffic is hosted on the single public cloud infrastructure. About 90% of our back-end processing logic is hosted on this cloud infrastructure, and by the end of this month, we plan to finish that migration.
This gives us enormous scale that we want to utilize for future growth. As we scaled our platform, at the same time, we have now built similar global functional scale, and Sandeep talked a lot about this in his presentation about what Europe means from a global expansion perspective. We have deep GAAP and regulatory support today in our platform for our European customers and our U.K. customers. A couple of years back, in 2021, we had U.S. GAAP support and NAIC support. Today, we are confident in saying that we have support for U.K., France, Germany, Dutch, Italian. We are building Belgian GAAPs and the corresponding regulatory reports to go with that. And for countries that do not have support for... from a GAAP perspective, we have IFRS. We are truly a global platform today. I really like this slide.
Today, we can report on assets for about 240 countries on our platform. When I looked at it, I was surprised to look at some of the countries that we are able to support on our platform today. Similar to Europe, we have a modest effort in our global expansion strategy. Today, we support Japan and Thai GAAPs. We are opportunistically investing in Asia, as the business continues to grow in Asia. I talked a little bit about network effect. This slide brings it to life. We believe that our platform provides tremendous network effect for our customers. If you look at this data, our revenue has grown about 80% from 2020 to this year.
But if you look at the comparative increase in the percentage of data connections and number of securities held on our platform, that has also grown, but at a much slower rate over the same time period. We believe that this is because the network effects of our platform are taking shape. As we continue to expand, it is likely that the number of data connections and the number of securities are all going to be on our platform soon. Let's talk a little bit about so we've talked about global scale, we've talked about architecture. We want to talk a little bit about our ability to innovate and what that means for us. We think of innovation in three different vectors. One, innovate with our clients, where we listen to our clients, understand what they need, and build it in our platform.
This is truly in our DNA, and we have grown up by doing this. You will hear from James Price, who leads our Client Delight program. He's an incredible technologist and a simply incredible human being, and he's been with the company from the very early days. He's gonna come on stage and talk a little bit about how we innovate with our clients. Sandeep talked about our multi-product strategy with alternative assets, with JUMP, you know, Prism, and of course, our core Clearwater product. So today, we are a multi-product company, but in order to be a multi-product company, we need to have the structure, the rigor, and the discipline from a process perspective to understand what the market needs, build products, and drive the products to the market. As you all know, we have recently hired Sunil Dixit, who is our Chief Product Officer from Salesforce.
He has years and years of experience to take a multi-product approach and scale it, and you'll hear from him soon. Finally, we think of innovation through mergers and acquisitions, particularly in cases where we think that an internal build approach will take much longer than a buy proposition. Case in point, we went ahead and acquired JUMP Technology in Q4 of last year. You will hear from Emmanuel, who is the founder and president of JUMP Technology, soon. With that, I would like to invite James Price. He's someone that I look up to, both literally and figuratively. James, welcome.
Thank you, Souvik. Good morning, everyone. I like to joke that, I grew up at Clearwater, and that joke usually goes a little better in person than over Zoom. I was, the original CTO back when that stood for Chief Troubleshooting Officer, and I've been involved in, software development at Clearwater for many, many years. I've seen a lot of changes over those years, but one thing that hasn't changed has been our intense commitment to clients. When we first started, Clearwater itself became Clearwater when a client asked if we could aggregate all their data and report on it for their entire global portfolio. And then a few years later, a client asked if we could do their Schedule D reporting for their insurance book.
It's been listening to our clients and doing what they've asked that has helped us continue to grow. Much of what we've talked about is very visible. Oh, there we go. But some of it's behind the scenes, and I wanna talk about one of those things that's behind the scenes. Souvik talked about the hundreds of thousands of transactions that we're ingesting every day. Every one of those transactions has to be processed accurately. We have to compute the debits and credits and the corresponding change in balances, and we have to get that right every day, every transaction. Most transactions are pretty straightforward, but some are fairly complex, and some of those require a mapping or something more complex to make sure that it's handled and accurately processed.
One of the more complex scenarios we have is, we have to find multiple related transactions in different portfolios and match them off. And what I'm showing here is a suspense matching tool that we deployed internally earlier this year. What it does is it finds the net cash movement transactions from custody banks and matches them with the detailed income transactions that we receive from loan servicers, and this tool has already saved hundreds of hours. We're doing something that when I've shown it to some clients, and they've talked about what their internal process has been to do that, they've been pretty amazed at how much of this we've been able to automate. Here's another screenshot of something that is a recent innovation that we're gonna be talking more about at our user conference in two weeks in Boise.
This is the income forecasting tool. We actually released a version of this a few years ago, and it only had modest adoption. And so we spent a lot of time talking to our clients and to some prospects to find out why they were still using their old processes for income forecasting. And, basically, boiled down to three things. They needed more flexibility in the reinvestment assumptions, they wanted more control and modeling around the expected cash contributions from their business operations, and they wanted more configuration around the output of things like a longer time horizon. So listening to our clients, we've made these changes, and I'm personally excited to be able to show it to them at their user conference in two weeks.
Many of the people that we talk to will be present, and I think we're gonna get a little buzz out of this at that conference. So when this all started, and we talked about, we just had one product that we today call Core Clearwater. We now have a single platform, multi-product strategy, and to talk more about that, I'd like to invite Sunil to come join on the stage.
All right. Thank you, James. It's always a tall order following James. Sorry, I had to say that. So hey, everyone, my name is Sunil, and I joined the company just a couple of months ago as the Chief Product Officer. I came here from Salesforce, where I spent about five years building out a financial services products portfolio. And before that, I spent a couple of decades building analytical and data-driven products throughout the industry. There's many reasons to join Clearwater, but what I really got excited about was the analytical stack. It's cloud native, it's vertically integrated. And I've seen some of these before, so I knew the power and the potential of this kind of platform. The platform is built on a foundation of data.
We ingest hundreds of data sources, we normalize it, transform it, master it, enrich it, and warehouse it. For our clients who want other data outside of Clearwater, we built Prism, thus enriching that data foundation layer. The next layer is the calculation engine, which houses our brains, if you will, but it has multi-GAAP, and we continue to add more and more features around performance, analytics, risk, and so on. The user experience layer is really where all our users, whether you're a CFO or a CIO, or an analyst who wants to slice and dice the data, would use in order to get insights and value out of that data. And with GenAI, we'll have a conversational UI interface in the future as well, so people can interact it with a natural language.
Now, we can invest and extend each of these layers, but the beauty of a platform is that we can create net new applications very quickly as well. And an evidence of that is LPx and LPx Clarity, where we really created solution for alternative assets pretty quickly using the power of the platform. So as we move ahead, at this pivotal point in the company's growth as a multi-product company, you know, there's lots of options. We have, unfortunately or fortunately, a problem of plenty. We could be investing in a lot of different products. So our job is to figure out which of these priorities are going to help us go from that one bits to that four bits, kind of a revenue attainability.
So we have created a very structured process where we look at the pain point of the buyer, we look at the market opportunity, we look at our right to win, the competitive nature, as well as the investments that we would have to make across technology in building, operating, and serving our clients. That's what we are putting in place in order to make it into a much richer portfolio of products. That's the innovation part of it. Now I want to turn it over to Emmanuel, and welcome, who's the president of JUMP to talk a little bit about JUMP products. Emmanuel and his team have built a swath of applications and solutions for the asset and investment management community, and he'll talk about that next. Emmanuel?
All right, thanks. Hello. I am very happy to be here with you. My name is Emmanuel Fougeras. I am the president and the founder of JUMP Technology, a new Clearwater subsidiary. For 60 years, before joining the Clearwater Group, I worked to create the best front-to-back software solution for asset management with a small and highly motivated French team. During those 60 years, we focused mainly on improving the product and just signing French-speaking company in Europe and Morocco that would help us to finance our R&D. We succeeded in equipping asset and wealth manager as well as insurer, family offices, and private bank. We equip company managing 100 million AUM, as well as company who manage more than 100 billion AUM.
Today, I think we offer one of the best front to back solution on the market, extremely rich in functionality, all in one, end to end, modular and modern, full web, full web and cloud native on AWS, like a Clearwater product. And we are also recognized as the best as a product leader in Europe for the unique link activity of European insurer. That's why I wanted to give JUMP new impetus internationally by joining the Clearwater Group at the end of 2022, which will enable us to offer our solution internationally.... Since the beginning of the year, thanks to Clearwater teams, we have already signed our first customer in United States, Dubai, and Singapore. In the first half of 2023, we have focused on creating JUMP's new ability to deploy everywhere.
So this is why we are confident today that this international success will greatly accelerate in the coming months. As the acquisition of JUMP, Clearwater has broadened its product portfolio, bridging gaps with JUMP comprehensive front-to-back and unit link solution. This strategic move not only enhances our offering, but also creates new market opportunities, both geographically and functionally. It permits to attract new clients who seek a comprehensive and end-to-end solution, and an expanded client base translate to increased revenue potential. At the end of the year, with the launch of the JUMPstart SaaS solution for small asset manager, with less than 1 billion in asset under management, and the upgrading of our historic JUMP IMS offering, we will have an even more competitive commercial offering for all companies.
We believe that with Clearwater supports, we now have the potential to become one of the world's leading end-to-end provider against SS&C Advent, SimCorp, Amundi Alto, Enfusion, and other competitors. The acquisition of JUMP creates tremendous cross-selling potential for all Clearwater customer, as the two solutions are highly complementary. This is one of the reason that I have to join Clearwater. JUMP's OMS and PMS module complements Clearwater back-office offering particularly well. With a fully integrated solution, Clearwater is in a better position to identify and act upon cross-selling opportunities and increase its revenue per client. With JUMP, Clearwater has eliminated the need to integrate with multiple disparate system. This streamlines operations and reduces integration costs. The technical integration enables smooth interoperability between Clearwater system and JUMP's cutting-edge technology, ensuring a cohesive and efficient operational environment.
The integration of JUMP solution enhances Clearwater's competitive positioning in the asset management industry. This positions Clearwater favorably in comparison to competitors still grappling with fragmented systems. Other advantage, a seamless integrated solution improves the client experience, and we all know that happy clients are more likely to stay loyal and even expand their business with Clearwater. Finally, I would like to show you a short video capture of the latest version of JUMP, illustrating its use by an asset manager. This video will show that despite the creation of JUMP software in 2006, the solution known as the modern ergonomic interface that the market has come to expect. One of, of our strength is the JUMP integrated calculation engine.
This calculation engine enable us to calculate, in real time, all the information required by asset manager: portfolio valuation, performance analysis, risk indicator, regulatory ratio, et cetera, and to present them in an ergonomic and attractive way. You don't have to choose between a strong engine and an attractive ergonomics. The JUMP solution cover a wide range of financial assets, equities, fixed income, derivatives, et cetera. It offers all the functionalities expected of a front-to-back, all-in-one solution: trading, positioning, compliance, performance attribution, reporting, risk management, web portal, CRM. Thank you for your attention.
Thank you, Emmanuel. So what you all have heard is how we think about R&D from an investment in scale, technologically as well as functionally. With all of that investment in R&D, we feel like we are poised to, and fully intend to, invest more in building net new products that will power our growth. There is nothing more exciting and joyful than building products for our customers and help solve customers' problems so that they can grow. I'm incredibly proud about what we have built in Clearwater so far, and very excited about the journey ahead of us, and we can't wait to revolutionize the investment management industry. Thank you for your time. I'd like to invite Joon now.
...Thank you. We will have a 10-minute break. See you in 10 minutes. Thank you.
How weird, how I wish you were here. We're just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year. Running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fears. Wish you were here. Home is where I want to be, but the aftermath turned me on. I belong, born with a weak heart. I guess I must be having fun. The less we say about it, the better. Making up as we go along. Feet on the ground, head in the sky. It's okay, I know nothing's wrong. Nothing. Oh, I have plenty of time. Oh, you've got light in your eyes. And you're standing here beside me. I love you, passing the time. Never for money, always for love. Cover up and say good night. Say good night. Home is where I want to be, but I guess I'm already there.
I come home. She lifted up her wings. I guess this must be the place. I can't tell one from another. I find you or you find me? Where I'll be. Oh, read between the lines. Oh, speak it through my mind. Out of all those kinds of people, here out of place with you. I'm just an animal looking for a woman. Shouldn't see space for a minute or two. And just love me till my heart stops. Love me till I'm dead. I said, "Light up, I said to you. Cover up the night spots. Stick me on the head I got.
Your, your seats, if that's all right. Oh, I now... Just we'll start in just one minute if folks. Hey, Alphonse, can you just let people know we'll be starting in a minute?
Since you've been standing.
Yeah. Okay.
The world up to you.
Okay.
You starting to show.
All right. Good to see you. One second, one second. You have your. Oh, I'm off. Hold on. Let me just do this real quick.
I'm out the door.
Okay, good. Thanks. We're just getting the next set of speakers, mic'd up, so. There she is. Come on up. You all right?
Yeah. Yeah.
I thought I'd just get people to come back and sit, and then and let you go. So you can see. I think that's the next slide, but Sandeep, let's go in a couple.
Okay.
All right. Listen, thanks, everybody. Thanks for the quick break. Really appreciate it. Started off with our strength, Sandeep telling the whole story, and then get to another strength, our tech platform, and finally, our real strength, our core strength, which is, Subi Sethi, our Chief Client Officer. She runs all of our operations teams and really is gonna talk to you about our clients and how that fits. So there you go. Thank you.
Thank you, Jim. I like the word real. I've recorded that. Should be used appropriately. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for coming back on time after the break, and an opportunity to introduce myself. In brief, I'm blessed and grateful to have over 25 years of global cross-industry experience in building, leading, and transforming small to large-scale operations. My fluency is broad, deep, and as digitally focused as it is human. It provides me with the ability to build teams, processes, and systems that are fit for purpose and, in turn, enable our product to scale. The exposure across industries helps me to cross-pollinate and introduce best practices which would otherwise not be considered. Ultimately, the benefit is to our clients, as a world-class product underpinned by world-class service and operations organization. With that, let me dive...
Sorry, I'm a little clumsy with this clicker. Let me dive into our operations and give you a view about our client excellence philosophy. As Sandeep talked about trusted partnership, I'm a big fan of a word called trust. Simple, yet powerful. What ultimately matters is a client experience. If they believe that you're aligned and dedicated to their philosophy and agenda in meeting their needs, the chances are that they will stick longer with you. And that is very evident in our gross retention chart, which was a static chart of 98%. Now, let's talk about what are our clients looking for? What do they really want? What do they want out of Clearwater? First and foremost, a daily comprehensive view. A daily, single, and a transparent view in their portfolio performance. Second, they want a partner who can help them rapidly grow.
Rapidly grow in form of new acquisitions or in form of new complex books. Third, they want support in fiscal and fiduciary responsibility via risk and compliance. Fourth, they radically want us to simplify their complex system environment, and radically means really radically. Last but not the least, they also want best practices and insights. The good news is we do it all. We ensure timely delivery and effective execution of all of this to our clients, so that our clients can focus on making meaningful, insightful, time-sensitive decisions for themselves and for their clients. With that, let me talk about a few real stories and bring this to life on how we at Clearwater have delivered to them. First and foremost, how do we give them daily comprehensive view? Aviva, a name and a client that is super, super personal and dear to me.
Let me tell you, not that the other 1,300 are not, but this will go in my biopic. Now, I want each one of you to take a step back and imagine with me. Imagine with me a half a trillion of an asset. Mind you, it's not million, it's not billion, it's half a trillion. Receiving data on all kinds of asset classes, let's say about 50 of them. Now, those asset classes are receiving data from multiple data sources. We have to put a number to that. Let's say about 270 of those. Across many systems, and one needs clean data, not a dollar here or there, for their actuaries and underwriters to model this for the very next day. To top it all, you have to do this in a highly regulated vertical environment.
A minor detail, you have to do this daily, sometimes thrice in a day. Seems like an impossible task, yet achievable through Clearwater. This is what we do for them. While we serve them as an accounting book of record, we've made them radically seamless. This all happens on a daily basis, three times in a day, seamlessly for them. This was also an inflection point for us to establish our prime time in Europe. I'm today working with four other insurance clients, and they all tell me, "If you can do that, do this for Aviva, you can do it for us." So next time when I stand here, another $500 billion coming your way. With that, let me talk about the second example. An example of how we are our partners. We are real partners of growth for some of our clients.
As one of the premier global private equity and investment management client of ours, they grow by acquiring new books, new entities, new portfolio companies, new asset classes. Hence, it was very critical for them to have a partner with a solution which can be a plug-and-play. Which means we onboard them quickly, so that onto their investment infrastructure, so that they can get a very transparent and real-time view into their portfolio investment activities, basis which they define their growth strategy, basis which they define their growth agenda for themselves and for those portfolio companies. The second example, Fortitude Re. They continue to invest in alternative asset classes. You name it, they have it: derivatives, bank loans, mortgage loans, real estate, interpooling of those assets. Complex. It took me a while to understand them. Now, imagine they today buy a book which is simple.
Simple as in, let's say, they'll have fixed income. They expect Clearwater to onboard that, those asset classes today, let's say, in the next 48 hours. We onboard them. In 30 days, they define their growth strategy and change the entire book of business from fixed income to a combination of swaps, to a combination of mortgage loans, to a combination of real estate loans, and they expect Clearwater to change that overnight. Clearwater doesn't skip a beat. We onboard them, we support all asset classes, we have data connections, and it helps us do a plug and play. For both the private equity and a client, Fortitude Re, we are their growth partners. We are able to execute their growth strategy on a real-time basis. We grow when our clients grow. Moving to the third example of risk and compliance.
When we consider a very large asset manager relationship, 10-year-old relationship with Clearwater, with having $200 billion of assets on our system, serving 3,000 clients annually, their most pivotal offering to their client is their ability to monitor complex and ever-changing investment policies in a space where scrutiny and regulation is really, really high. With Clearwater, they can scale this function rapidly, and thereby, they bring almost 400 new clients on our system annually. Clearwater codifies each and every investment policy into a daily calculator and reports on adherence and risk parameters. This ensures delighting their customers, and thereby, we growing with them.... Last but not the least, an example of how we've radically simplified this. I would like you to take a look at this chart. Guess I don't have to speak through it. Doesn't the chart says it all?
This is one of the largest and the newest member of our family in corporate cash client, an asset owner, a really global book, and their portfolio. This radically simplified their operations. They had over 40 disparate systems for them to do all of this integrated, with, of course, human in the picture, and they moved from 40 to a single-digit system count. Everything got consolidated within Clearwater, be it reconciliation, aggregation, or any kinds of reporting. With that, can you imagine this global partner of ours, they actually close their books on business day one. So if you want your books to be closed on business day one, Subi Sethi at Clearwater Analytics. With that, let me change a little bit of gears. I just talked about some real stories, real stories about what we do for our clients.
Now let me talk about how we make this magic happen? This is about who we are and how we run this company. Since our business model is very simple, very simple, simple in terms that we just need to deliver to our clients every day, which means repeatable performance every day, sometimes more. Think of it as an event whose timeliness and accuracy is of utmost importance. Therefore, it was imperative for us to define our pillars very carefully. Over the last three years, we've invested in each one of them extensively. We've invested hugely in our leadership. We've invested hugely in getting the domain, learning about asset classes, learning about accounting for those assets, learning about the global environment. Structured a tiered delivery model.
We have all kinds of clients, and hence, it was important to create an intimacy based on the size and the kind of client we have. We have a DNA of continuous improvement. Our clients' needs change every day, and hence, we need to evolve with them. I won't read each one of them, but let me talk about global footprint and global capacity. Since everybody was showing very cool graphics, I thought I was feeling left out, so I thought I should also do that. Four countries, eight languages, 1,300 clients, 20+ industry verticals. This is unparalleled diversity and depth of service. Imagine that your data is coming at midnight Eastern Time, being consumed by our system, which Souvik alluded to, from thousands of data sources and pushed to your desk at 7 A.M. in the morning.
Mind you, the data is accurate and reconciled, thereby they can enable to make an investment decision. That's what our global footprint help us achieve. Our operating centers are of right capacity without compromising any concentration risk, and hence, they're not only able to deliver global clients, but also the European, Asian regional clients. Sorry, as I said, I was clumsy. I am clumsy. As you all can see, that we are working with all leading brands across all industry verticals. Our differentiation is obsessive client-centric culture. With that, I would like to leave you with a few quick points. We have real-time operations. There's never a dull day in Clearwater. Hence, it was important to build a DNA of measurement and monitoring. We believe whatever gets measured gets done. Second, it's a product-enabled delivery. We are the eyes and ears of our product.
What we learn today goes into—goes back into our product regularly. We have a global operating presence, which enables a very responsive client service engine. Our customer centricity definition is to establish trust-based partnerships. It is very reflective in our all-time high NPS. And mind you, it is not for one month, not for one quarter, but straight 12 quarters. It's a way of life for us. We implement an onboard first time right, which means what do our clients get? Our clients get to best in class right from the day one they start using Clearwater. With that, I would like to invite Scott Erickson, our Chief Revenue Officer. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Subi, and good morning, everybody. It's an honor to be here, and we appreciate your time and attention. During the break, checking email, I actually got a cold email that had a subject that caught my eye. It said, "Sales is hard." And the reality is sales is difficult, but I tell you what, at Clearwater, it's a lot easier, and it's such a privilege and pleasure to sell at Clearwater, because our best sales engine is our clients. And our clients are satisfied and delighted because we have such great operations teams and such great executives like Subi running it, Souvik building a great product. So while sales is hard, we are in an enviable position from a sales perspective at Clearwater.
What I'd like to talk a little bit today is about our sales organization. I've been at Clearwater since the beginning of the company. I've been able to work in just about every single department and role, and I've, I've run our sales team since 2018. What I'd like to do today is just briefly talk about the evolution of our sales organization since 2018, to highlight how we've adjusted and evolved to contribute to the durable growth that we have enjoyed thus far, and how that evolution gives us a tested roadmap by which we can continually evolve as we grow into the future. Back in 2018, we had a very small sales organization, primarily made up of individual contributors in Boise, Idaho, that had very broad market mandates and responsibilities.
So these individuals, while highly skilled and all of, most of which are still at Clearwater and contributing greatly, worked very, very hard, but oftentimes maybe not as efficiently or effectively as possible. Hop on a plane, come to New York or San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis, and would be meeting with a corporate client in the morning, an insurance client next, an asset manager next. When prior to taking over sales, I was the head of client servicing and, the head of our product team. That gave me the opportunity to spend a significant amount of time out in the market meeting with our clients. And one thing was certain, is that while all clients benefit from the disruptive single-instance multi-tenant technology that we have, all benefit from having complete, timely, accurate, and consumable investment data, there are nuances and differences between each market.
knew that going to a corporate cash client in the morning, you would talk about managing your managers in FAS 115 and other than temporarily impaired securities. An insurance company, you might be talking about Schedule D, but not just Schedule D, AVR, IMR, RBC, and I, asset management, your client's a little bit different, where you're helping them serve their end client. So it was nuanced and, and different. And our sales team was having a lot of context switching. So the first thing we did was set up teams, taking the best individual contributors with leadership capabilities, put them in charge of these teams, to focus on each market where we had the right to win, and have an intense focus on what we refer to as the center of our target and these ideal customer profiles.
We built these teams out in 2018 and had them start just focusing on each market where a tailored and nuanced message was required. That was successful, but it wasn't enough. Next, we further segmented each market based upon additional learnings, which is in each market, oftentimes, the complexity of the client leads to a little bit different sales motion and cycle. Not just in terms of their needs because of the complexity of their asset classes or the regulations or the companies... Or the, excuse me, the countries that they work in, but also because, as we all know, the larger the organization, the more complex the organization, the sales cycle in motion is different.
Oftentimes, you have 20 people in a large organization that can say no, and you gotta find the one person that can say yes, and you need to have blanket coverage over those individuals. Well, if a sales rep is working with some of the largest insurers, they don't have time to do it effectively on 75 different names. So we shrunk plates, so we had focus on those specific center of the target clients. So in insurance, we set up three teams. A mega insurance team that just covered the top 20 insurers in the United States. Two team members, 10 names each, blanket coverage on those names. Large team, $10 billion and above. A mid-tier team, $1 billion through $10 billion. So we could have that tailored approach, but also blanket coverage. Asset management, similar concept, but slightly different approach.
In asset management, unlike an insurance company, when they come onto the platform, they often don't bring all their assets on at once. They'll bring on a book of business or a, or a group or a desk. Then it's a great opportunity for us to land and expand that relationship. So we segmented out our clients and built asset management sales teams that only worked with clients, strategic accounts, where it's in a land and expand motion of helping them. As Subi said, "We grow when they grow." Helping them grow their business as those assets then would flow on to Clearwater. And another asset management team that focused on the smaller end of the market that was more of a end-to-end sell.
Similar motion in the corporate space, and as Sandeep mentioned, our center of the target is where we win 80% of the time when we write a proposal. But we also set up teams in other markets as we then work with Sunil and Souvik to build out the product, to get to a point where we're winning at 80%. So in the corporate space, we have our traditional corporate team. We also now have a team focused on public funds. We have a group, subgroup right now that's focusing on REITs, and we're seeing initial success there, and we'll continue to build that out. Last, a few years into this evolution, we set up a commercial team. The commercial team only focuses on accounts less than a billion in assets.
So less than $1 billion in assets, it's a little bit different sales cycle in motion, a bit more transactional. We also set up this team because it's a great farm system to feed our other teams. So we're able to take motivated, ambitious individuals who want to get into sales, learn the process, show propensity to hit targets, and then we promote them up into other teams. Two other quick points with this evolution. In a few minutes, I'll invite my teammate, Susan Ganeshan, up here to talk about marketing. But in 2018, we had a very small marketing team that really focused on late-stage opportunities and helping the sales team close out those late-stage opportunities through specific content and tailored content.
Susan has come in and is building a world-class, best-in-class marketing team that works all ends of the funnel, and she'll speak to that momentarily. The last piece I mentioned, this gives us a roadmap to follow as we open up new markets, new regions, as we build new product. One thing that we've talked about earlier with our delighted client base, we have a great opportunity to sell back to that base. As James mentioned, a lot of our best product solutions we've built over time is because clients come to us and say, "You've solved this problem for me. We trust you. Can you solve this problem over here?" We have a great opportunity to sell back to base, and so that's an evolution that we've started in the last 18 months, is building out teams that only sell back to the base.
So we already know some of that motion from our time working with our strategic accounts, but this year we built an insurance team that only focuses on selling to clients, and they work very closely with Subi's team in terms of daily delivery, keeping those clients satisfied. We also built out a small team in the corporate space that's doing the same. So we follow this roadmap of teams with specific focus that are in those markets. They're participants in the markets, they know the language, and they're able to then have coverage of those accounts to continue to drive sales. Big part of that back to base is then the drive to NRR, the strategic initiative of NRR 115 that we've talked a little bit about today, and Jim will talk about momentarily. As we grow globally, similar roadmap, we're just at different stages.
For example, in Northern Europe, we already have insurance teams, asset management teams, the same thing in France. But in DACH, we just have one team that's covering the whole region, and the same thing in Asia as we continue to gain traction and success in those markets. One thing that's a little bit different in our international, our non-U.S. markets than in the U.S., is that we already have credibility and have proven and delighted clients that are on the platform that are the most complex in the world. When we started working in insurance, I was the head of product, and I went to our sales team and said, "Only sell to property and casualty insurers with $3 billion or less in assets." So why was that?
Because those were the insurance companies that looked the most like our corporate clients, and then that would give the product team time to build out more complexity, to then go handle larger insurers, global insurers, life companies, and so forth. Well, in Europe, we don't have to start small. We've actually done the exact opposite, go to the biggest. Because in the US, we already had some of the largest, most complex global insurers on our platform, live and happy. So we were able to go to Aviva, able to go to Aegon and Athora, sell to them, bring them on, and what it does, it allows us to dramatically shorten the time in which we gain credibility in those markets, as Subi mentioned. If you can handle Aviva, you can handle me, and we're already seeing the benefits of that.
Same strategy in Asia, not starting small, going to FWD that is in 11 different countries, 11 different GAAPs, already live on Clearwater, creates that credibility. So we're on that same journey that we'll continue to follow as we build out products, open new regions, and, and, markets. Three other points of importance when I talk about this evolution, then I'll hand it over to Susan. The first is proximity to clients. As I mentioned, back in 2018, we were primarily in Boise. Worked hard on planes all the time, but not quite as responsive as we'd like to clients and to prospective clients. So we built out sales offices in different regions, in London, in Paris, in Frankfurt, in Singapore, that allows us to be in the market, participating with these clients and prospective clients on a daily basis, as well as New York.
So, I've been at Clearwater since the very beginning of the company. I'm born and raised in Boise, Idaho. It's a source of great pride for me, but I moved to New York with my family. We live here in the city, which we're absolutely loving and enjoying it. But the best part about it is, from a work perspective, I don't have to hop on a plane to see clients and prospective clients, and it's instead of being an event, it's a daily activity. And that's a big part of our sales motion. Also with proximity, Cindy will talk about this, Sandeep mentioned it, but we took some of these great individual contributors and leaders and then moved them to other regions. So our head of Northern Europe used to run our U.S. insurance business.
The sales leader in Asia actually closed Aviva. So we've been able to take these experts, move them, and then also hire within those regions, experts and people that are already well-known in the market. The next thing in complex sales is it's not an individual that gets it done, and it's actually not just a sales team, as I mentioned earlier. It's a client servicing team, it's a product team, it's a dev team. We all as a team work on this. But you need a team of robust support, and during this evolution, we've built out robust support functions.
An inside sales team, the main job is to feed the top of the funnel, new names, new meetings on these center of the target accounts, and work very closely with marketing to bring in and get meetings with the leads that the marketing team provides. Pre-sales team. Pre-sales team is a team built from people that come from Subi's organization. So they're individuals that know our product inside and out, and then they're that expert throughout the sales process to provide responsive answers and details about our product. Subject matter experts, hiring CPAs and CFAs that speak the language of our clients and can be viewed and used as trusted advisors and consultants throughout that process. And then last, this is pretty cool, but client practitioners.
In our sales organization, we've actually gone out and hired clients and brought them into the organization in various roles, where clients have come to us and said, "I've seen what my life was before Clearwater. I've experienced the conversion and what life is like after and how much it improves. Can I join? Can I come and help out?" So for example, our head of our corporate sales team was a client at Micron Technology. Our top sales rep last year was a client at an insurance company, taking an insurance investment account, making them a salesperson just because of that tremendous testimonial that can be provided when they say, "I've used Clearwater, I've selected Clearwater, I've used the competitors. Let me tell you the differences." It's built a great, robust sales team.
To conclude, I would just mention also, Subi said we are a data-driven organization. Data matters. What's the data telling us? What we measure, we achieve. We have a full team that measures where we're going, how we're making progress, and where we need to adjust, as well as you grow, you need a team that enables the individuals in the field to get them the resources, the technology, the data necessary to be successful, and we have full sales ops and enablement teams. But I'm pleased to invite my partner, Susan, up on this stage to talk a little bit about marketing and the great partnership our marketing sales organizations have together. Thanks, everybody.
Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Scott. So pleased to be here today. As, as you guys might know, marketing, it's not hard. It's actually quite easy job, I will say, or I find it easy, but there is no silver bullet in marketing, so you have to do everything right. And that's why I came to this company as a four-time CMO in order to help bring to life some of the great things you've heard about today, our great product, our great sales team, our amazing services team. Without that, we wouldn't be able to do easy marketing, but I actually find it quite easy here. But our biggest point is being lockstep with sales. So we've organized our marketing team to align directly with sales and improve the lead flow and the demand gen that comes their way. Now, we do that through a number of ways.
One is awareness, whether that's our website, our blogs, our social media posts, our LinkedIn posts. Those are going out to organizations who have the potential to buy us and our existing clients, to let them know what we're up to, to let them know what they can learn from us today, to let them know what they can learn from our partners. That builds a trust that turns these people into our advocates and our potential clients. We do this across all of the TAM that we're working towards globally. That means building out international websites, building out an international message, getting placed in international pubs, whether that's Financial Times or Forbes. We are in those publications with our expertise.
We also transition that to product marketing, and that is getting and ensuring that the sales team is selling exactly what Souvik and team have built, and ensuring that they're not overselling or underselling, and that there, there's a feedback loop. So we become that conduit between the R&D team and the sales team. Account-based marketing is really important for those large organizations. Imagine trying to get the CFO of JP Morgan to read your email. They're not going to, but they will see your advertisement on LinkedIn. They'll see what's coming across their Twitter feed. They're gonna know Clearwater's out there. In fact, we've had clients who came to us literally through LinkedIn because they said, "You guys are everywhere.
We're seeing you all over the place." So we know that getting that awareness and being very specific to the account we're trying to target is super important, and that helps us continue that rise from 67- 77 million-dollar-plus clients. We also focus on our overall expertise within the business. We have so much knowledge. We have those 700,000 securities. We know how people settle their accounts. We know how they reconcile their cash. We know what volume they're putting towards cash or pulling out of... You know, after SVB failed, they pulled out of some custodian banks and spread to other custodian banks. We're monitoring that. We're seeing that, and we're reporting on those trends.
So we're keeping our clients current, and that turns to what Sandeep said, and Scott mentioned as well, is that we are using our clients as our biggest sales channel. They are our references. When they move from one business to the other, we notice, and we let them know that as soon as they get settled, we're their best friend again. We also know that they will talk to one another and share their best practices with one another, and that client and executive marketing helps us sell back to the base. It helps us when we drive a roadshow across the country. They want to show up so that they can connect with one another. And as they're connecting with one another, which we will do two weeks from now, we will be in Boise with more than 550 clients connecting and becoming better together.
That's truly what we believe, that we make our clients better because of our network effect, because of our technology, but also because we bring them together as individuals where they can share those best practices. With that, I'd like to turn it back over to Souvik, who's gonna talk about some really exciting technology advances that we're working on.
Thank you, Susan. Hi there. Good morning again. In this session, we're gonna talk a little bit about generative AI. This is personally a very exciting session for me. Over the last few months, the technology world has been taken by a storm by ChatGPT and generative AI technologies. I'm sure all of you have used ChatGPT in your personal lives. Maybe many of you have used ChatGPT and other GenAI technology in your professional lives. So today, in this session, we're gonna talk a little bit from a projection perspective of what we think about ChatGPT and such generative AI technologies, but more importantly, what we have done so far inside Clearwater with these technologies. Okay. You know, over the last 30 years, almost all industries have been transformed by the power of commercial internet.
Companies that haven't adapted to the technology changes have been disrupted. Many have simply disappeared. On the other hand, new companies have emerged that have multi-billion-dollar, and maybe in one case, $1 trillion market cap. With the advent of ChatGPT and generative AI technology, we believe that this is such a watershed moment for the technology industry and frankly, across other industries. We believe that all industries, including ours, will have to use AI technologies in their business processes. AI technologies, specifically Gen AI technologies, we believe, can revolutionize the way we do business, and Sandeep talked a little bit about that in his keynote also. So with that in mind, what have we done? Over the last few months, we have quickly built a team of technologists, engineers, product people, operations personnel, and have pulled them together and made them dedicated towards building our in-house GPT solution.
We have built an in-house generative AI technology that we are calling Clearwater GPT. Obviously, these are early days, you know, things will change. We are iterating every single day. We are building things. Broadly speaking, we think about leveraging this technology in three distinct ways. Number one, speed of innovation. How can we develop software faster? How can we build new products and take those products to the market faster? Secondly, how can we build, using this technology, net new products that genuinely delight our clients? And finally, how can we use this technology to embed inside our existing products so that clients can solve their problems more efficiently and effectively? Now, again, I want to say that these are early days. These are our initial thinking. Things will change almost every single day as we continue to learn and use this technology.
So let's talk, talk a little bit about a few examples from inside Clearwater. The first example that I want to talk about is speed of innovation, specifically talking about a use case like test case automation in our software development life cycle. Over the last few weeks, about three to four weeks, we have built a team. We have experimented a team with a pilot, a set of about 30 engineers, that are using this tool that is generative AI-assisted smart code generator. That team is seeing amazing results from this tool. As you know, as developers write code, they have to write test cases. Test cases writing is oftentimes time-consuming and expensive. So we are using this tool to generate many such test cases, and what we are finding is, in many occasions, several hundred lines of code are being generated in an automated way.
This is leading to our developers to save several hours of coding time every day. We want to continue to use this technology, get more usage out of it, and frankly, at some point of time, very soon, use this technology not only to build test case automation, but also embed it into our software development process, thereby cutting short product development time and therefore improving our time to market. Now, let's talk about the Clearwater Insights product that we are starting to build inside Clearwater. Sandeep talked a little bit about this in his session also. This product is targeted towards corporate CFOs. Let's set this example of Aaron. He's a CFO of Evergreen Tech, public company based out of the Bay Area, wears many hats as all CFOs do, and as Jim would, I'm sure, testify.
His accounting team uses Clearwater on a regular basis, and he meets money managers every quarter to understand his portfolio and how his portfolio is doing. $5 billion market cap company, has about $200 million of assets under management, primarily interested in cash preservation. Mostly invest in fixed equity, fixed instruments. Doesn't really invest in equities. We're gonna look at some initial prototype visuals. This product is being built right now. So what Aaron does when he logs into this tool, is able to see how he is doing, his performance of his portfolio is doing with respect to his peers, the investor sentiment, the duration risk, and so on and so forth. If he wants to dig deep, he can click further and see that his performance quarter to date is 3%, where the cohort's performance is about 5.5%.
He's in the 40th percentile, not doing very well. Obviously, he wants to understand why. He wants to dig further. This tool is able to present information about what is causing the underperformance. It's the fixed equity portion of his portfolio, and this tool is able to also show some attribution analysis. If he wants to go further, the tool is able to also show which of his securities within that portfolio is providing the underperformance for him. Now, keep in mind, this is an extensive computation engine. We are able to do this because of what we discussed earlier in my session about single data store, where we can do cohort-based analysis.
What we think of providing is, on top of this, we're going to overlay a generative AI natural language query interface that is going to interface with the underlying compute engine, where the client, in this case, Aaron, can interact through human-based queries to understand in-depth about how his portfolio is doing, what actions can he take to improve the performance of his portfolio, completely based on data, providing actionable portfolio analysis. We are extremely thrilled about the possibilities here, and we are experimenting this, building it out, and over the next few months, we plan to launch it with a set of customers. Now, I would like to invite Subi again to the stage to talk about how we are thinking about generative AI technology inside our existing products.
Thank you, Souvik. I'll make it quick. We all know reading documents, understanding them, analyzing them, is really, really hard. Let me get rid of Aaron first. And especially when the documents are LPs and thousands of LPs, it just adds. Not only the timeliness and the effort it takes to read them, analyze them, and understand them, and take meaningful insights out of them, they're error-prone. I will interpret it particular way. You'll interpret it particular way, and hence, when we build a data model, it'll have its own challenges. Now, let's discuss a specific example that we've built with Clearwater GPT. We plan to provide this to our customers in LPx product.
LPs have to read, analyze, and understand lengthy, complex documents that discusses interesting things like market trends, past performances across multiple asset classes, and as you know, these all take lots of time and effort and accuracy issues. With Clearwater GPT, LPs can upload multiple documents in our LPx tool. This tool will also read the documents and automatically summarize them. Summarize in form of, this is the market trend, this is the past performance, this is how the fund is doing. This is what, you know, as an eyes and ears of those investment partners. In addition, the tool can also generate meaningful questions that clients can ask to get to more depth in document. What does that mean? What? How does that global entity means? Where does the regional stuff come?
So as you can see, promising one, at Clearwater, a lot of our portfolio is on LPs. So not only will we use this as a system to implement within Clearwater, but we want to enable our clients so that they can upload those documents on their own, and they want to take insights out of them and read and analyze trends. They're empowered to do that. It will provide transparency. It will provide how we can radically transform the way we upload and process LPs. With that, let me invite Joon. Thank you.
Thank you. We will have a short five-minute break. See you in five.
I think I'm losing my mind. Fear became the fentanyl. Hungry like the animal I've been sleeping in. I see you losing your life. Cut you into decimal, drowning out the decibels, screaming in your head. Do you want to find the antidote? Driving with the Holy Ghost. Holy death, the Holy Ghost. And does it start again? I've been drinking from a periscope, trying to watch my obstacles. See how fully I've been broke. Let me start again. Oh, oh, let me start again. Oh, oh. I think I'm losing the light. The altar is inaudible, dense, and pathological, capillary thread. When you run out of time, the soul becomes an article. The weight is now phenomenal, deafening again. I feel like an anecdote, hovering to the hospital, huffing fire and holy smoke. Does it start again? I've been lost beyond the telescope. Goddamn diabolical.
God forgive the prodigal, and let me start again. Oh, oh, let me start again. Oh, oh. Now, I... found my way, my way. Now, I found my way, way, now. Think I finally found the antidote. I've been riding the Holy Ghost. Holy past, the Holy Ghost. Let me start again. I've been sinking in the horoscope. Love is never optional. Holy death and holy smoke. Let me start again. Oh.
I don't want much. I just want to be a better man to my baby. Mm, mm. Give me all good love. I was laying with them Jezebels under perfume sheets. Mm, mm-hmm. Got a golden smile, heart overflowing with honest and love, but it wasn't enough. What can I do? What can I do to get back to your heart? I'd swim the Mississippi River if you would give me another start, girl. All night long, I was out, out 'til the morning. But, baby, your tender love is what I'm longing. Baby, please, I'm down on my knees-
Yeah? Yeah. Okay. Oh, I am. Thank you. Have an impact already.
... All right. Welcome back to our last session. I am Cindy Blendu. I am Clearwater's Chief Transformation Officer and CHRO. As a Boise native, working for Clearwater, it and helping us achieve our potential is very personal to me. However, I have to admit, I never worked in Boise prior to joining Clearwater about 5 years ago. Instead, I spent the first 20 years of my professional career in consulting, half of that or 10 years at BCG, and also in leadership roles, working with companies like Clearwater on their transformation or accelerated change programs.
When I joined Clearwater as Chief Transformation Officer around five years ago, I saw an opportunity to apply my experience and my skills to help us transform a more regional company, where most of our employees, employees in Boise, Idaho, to a global company and now a public company, and also just generally work for an amazing company in, in Boise, Idaho. So I'm very excited today to talk to you about our people and our culture. I truly believe this is our special sauce. As you know, as a tech company, most of our costs are people-related. And so how we hire and train and enable is an important part to ensuring that we have the workforce that we, we need to deliver us on the journey that we have ahead.
As you heard, we talked about the tremendous opportunities that we have thus far in today's session on how we can drive accelerated growth and how we can do that through the investments we make, how we can redeploy our resources, and how we're applying disruptive technologies like GenAI and machine learning. Subi talked about our operations capability and how we service and onboard our clients, and I truly believe how we delight clients is one of our many differentiators. So again, I'm here today to talk about our people and our culture. From my experience, there are four key pillars to driving a high-growth, innovative company. The first pillar is having a defined shared strategy that our employees can really rally upon, as well as have clear goals that are cascaded top-down.
At Clearwater, we regularly and broadly share our mission and our vision with our employees, our annual strategic priorities, as well as how we're doing against them. Also, at Clearwater, all of our most senior leaders are on a scorecard that identifies the top 5-7 metrics and associated targets that they're gonna be accountable for, and all of that's cascaded top-down, starting from Sandeep. Our scorecard program is how we drive alignment to ensuring that we're all rowing in the same direction for how we achieve our goals, provides transparency into how performance will be evaluated and what matters, and ensure that we're driving accountability towards those goals. So the first pillar is having a defined strategy and clear goals. The second pillar is around having a good leading structure and operating model and supporting governance.
This also ensures that we have clear operational parameters, how we're going to achieve our goals. At Clearwater, we spent a lot of time in building a world-class leadership team and operating model, as well as putting in place an effective management system to ensure that we're proactively and regularly checking on how we're doing. So the second is around structure and governance. The third is our people programs. Really making sure that we have leading programs for how we hire, how we onboard, how we train, and how we enable our team. Over the last few years, we've invested heavily.
We believe in a performance-driven culture and a meritocracy at Clearwater, and that starts with having clear expectations as, as well as a data-driven, as you've heard Subi and Scott talk about, a data-driven and objective performance management programs and enabling programs aligned to that philosophy to ensure we're hiring the best talent, growing our next generation of leaders, continuing to onboard and train our employees effectively. I'm really proud of the programs that we've built and the investments we've made in our people programs over the last few years and what we offer to our employees. And last, but definitely not least, is our culture. We would not be successful getting us to here today, nor getting us to where we need to go in the future without our great people and our culture.
To me and all of us on the ELT, this is our special sauce, and this is how we're gonna continue to win. So building a world-class management team to take us on this journey was one of my first priorities when I took over HR four and a half years ago, and when I first joined in 2018, it was just me and three others on the page. We've now built an experienced, diverse leadership team with the right skills and capabilities to take us to the next level.
Except for Sunil, who just joined us from Salesforce, and Emmanuel, who joined us for the JUMP acquisition, everyone on this page has been at Clearwater over two years and are all committed to work as one team in support of where we need to go as a company to achieve the potential that we have in front of us. Also, as part of our structure, we spent a lot of time coming up with that operating model, as Subi shared, specific to operations, but generally across the globe, coming up with that operating model and location blueprint so that we can effectively support our clients and our growth. When I started in 2018, we had less than 10% of our employees outside the U.S., and most of them were in Boise, Idaho.... Today, we have almost 50% of our employees based outside the U.S.
We truly are a global company with three global centers: Boise, Edinburgh, and Noida, and also a fourth center in Poland through a partnership. We've opened centers such as San Jose and Seattle to gain access to high-demand, key-skill talent, and also have, as Scott shared, go-to-market offices in places like New York, London, Singapore, Frankfurt, to ensure that we have close proximity to our clients where we need it. Since our global centers allow us to have access to those talent pools, follow the same capabilities, and lower-cost labor pools wherever possible. So who are we as a company?
One of the things that I actually wanna touch on real quick on, if I go back to the previous slide, is oftentimes when you're growing as fast as we are, hiring as many employees as we are, it's, it's often asked: How are you maintaining your culture? How are you going to ensure a consistency in how we approach our clients, how we approach the work? One of the things I'm really proud of is that 75% of our employees actually operate and work out of one of our three global centers, Boise, Noida, and Edinburgh. We also believe in coming to the office. We've returned to the office four days a week, and only about 10% of our employees, despite the craziness in the tech market and hiring, only about 10% of our employees are remote.
We also heavily lean on what we call our office leader program. In all of our offices, we've identified and named office leaders who are accountable for driving engagement in all of our offices and do that in a way that's aligned to company direction, but also following a global approach. Our office leader program has helped us achieve benefits or programs in D&I, also driven a lot of our Clearwater Cares or our volunteer efforts to have impact in the communities that we operate in, and also are doing various events, holiday parties, to ensure that we're maintaining and improving morale. So that is how we will continue to be successful, in addition to many other mechanisms that we're doing. So who are we as a company?
These seven Clearwater attributes really are our values and what we believe are the ingredients for building a truly special company, and it all starts with attribute number one, and that is about being infectiously passionate about what we do. At Clearwater, we don't believe in being passionate, but we believe in being infectiously passionate, and it's up to all of us to spread the word within ourselves, within our teams, within our clients, that we're truly committed to what we do. Also, as part of our culture and who we are, no one at Clearwater will be successful unless they're intensely committed to our clients and have a focus on execution. We've shared a little bit of a flavor around that.
We've come a long way to have to define shared goals, define metrics such as productivity, and put in place cross-functional collaboration mechanisms so that we can accomplish everything from the daily SLAs, all of us on the ELT get a daily email, to more complex projects like Souvik is leading with the migration to AWS, as well as our company-wide initiative around GenAI and machine learning. All of that is done with an intense commitment to client, a focus on execution, and a one-team mindset. Also, who we are is we're proud. We're proud of our offering and our technologies, and a lot of that does stem from our Boise roots and our Boise heritage.
We still have this scrappy, underdog level of pride that we approach in everything that we do, and that is why we won't give up to continuously improve, innovate, and disrupt the world of investment accounting. So in summary, very proud of who we are. Really feel our people and our culture are our special sauce, and we've continued to do what we can to cultivate that as a company from our investment in people programs, the global assignments that Scott has highlighted, and just generally what we're doing around employee engagement and motivation. So thank you for taking the time to listen to me talk about our people and our culture. Very excited to introduce you or, or pass you off to Jim Cox. So I think you actually all mostly know our CFO, who is going to cover our financials.
Thank you, Cindy. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you.
Mm-hmm.
Thanks. You know, I'm very lucky to be the CFO. And now that you've met here at Clearwater, and now that you've met the rest of the executive team, and honestly, if you meet the folks, the layers below and the layers below that, you'll see just the depth and breadth of the talent at this business, which makes it just a real privilege to be here. So hopefully, you've enjoyed the presentation. I think that it's great for us to be able to go in depth about the technology and our clients, as well as kind of understanding the go-to-market and the special sauce, our people, that we've laid out here. But now let's move to the financial aspects, which we all care so deeply about.
So really what we focus on, right, is the durable, reliable growth. Sandeep spoke about that, and I think that this shows just a great track record of us consistently delivering on that. Now, this is important for a couple reasons. Number one, it's important because this proves we do what we say. So you should think about that as we think about the context. Some of the things that we've talked about and thinking forward into the future and thinking about that. We only do these things standing on the bedrock of kind of the history we've had of being able to deliver on those things. But more importantly, that's important to you as an investor to understand that.
But to our clients and for our business to really drive, what's really important about this track record of reliable growth and really understanding that is it allows us to invest with purpose and with duration and over time. So you have seen a number of those kind of initiatives, those growth initiatives, that are laying out. Some of those we invested in two years ago, three years ago. Some of those are coming to a close, others are starting up. But when you have kind of the visibility into your growth, as we do, it enables us to really invest thoughtfully. And so also, we've lived with durable, reliable, scaling EBITDA. We can do those investments while still continuing to deliver on margin expansion, which we have over the last few years.
So we've spoken about a lot of kind of pieces of the business, and I think it's important when you look at that EBITDA growth that we've had over that period of time, we have not changed our business model. And we have a path to significant non-GAAP margin improvement that does not require any change or differences to our business model. Now, you've heard a lot about, like, kind of at that next level of detail and that granularity, but let's kind of step through and think about, well, what is... Kind of you all care about what's the financial expression of those changes. So you heard Souvik speak about two very large projects that have been going on over the last few years that are coming to conclusion. Number one was kind of building out the gaps across the entire globe, right?
Number two was this incredible work to build scale for the next 20 years of growth for Clearwater. The team has been working on that, and so as we see that come to the end, obviously with international gaps, there's always new regulation, there's always something new, there's always operations around that. But we can see kind of the reduction in that area and the redeployment of those resources to do other growth aspects. What that enables us to do is then not – we don't have to hire incremental people to do all of those growth elements. We can redeploy those. And so in 2019, our R&D was about 22% of revenues. In the last quarter, it was north of 26%, so it's ramped up. And we see through those specific actions over the next few years, the trending of R&D back to 20%.
Now, R&D will always grow. We're committed to growth. We're committed to... That is what differentiates us from the competitive landscape, our lead, our technology platform. We remain committed to that, and we can persist in that lead and extend that lead, but and we don't have to grow it as quickly as we're growing revenue. So we see that that normalizes to that level. You heard Subi speak. So when you back up to kind of a little over a year ago when we said, "Hey, we're gonna change our commercial model, and we're gonna think about things." And we said, "We're gonna do that in a couple of quarters," it, people were pretty skeptical.
But once you've met Subi and you've heard how she talks with clients, how she interacts with clients, how that whole operations team, the closeness that you have, the richness and the importance of what we're doing for those folks, the difficulty of that activity and how we do it seamlessly day to day, you can start to understand how those types of business model changes are achievable in that timeline. Now, we also think about gross margins. So we talked about on the development side, how we had built out and expanded for our European client base. You could see in the numbers that Subi shared across kind of the locations in India and in Edinburgh, how we have expanded on that. And Sandeep even spoke to how in North America, those gross margins are going up while investing in all of that.
And so we continue to see expansion to that 80% gross margin target that we've spoken about as Europe normalizes, as we scale there. And lastly, with respect to public company costs, those are embedded. Much to Sandeep's chagrin, I'm sure they're not going down, but they aren't going up at the same level of our revenue growth rate. And so, as those are stable, we start to see expansion. So we have a number of really material drivers for that. But let me just take a second and say, when we talk about kind of our 2024 and 2025 guidance for kind of margins, this is not in there, okay? Everything you've seen about generative AI, you can understand the opportunities that are related to that. Those aren't in the numbers yet. As Shouvik said, "It's early.
We see all those use cases." Because we believe in delivering on what we tell you, when we know more, we'll start to talk about that. Back to base sales. Scott talked about the methodical, programmatic approach that he took for delivering kind of ever increasingly specificity in the go-to-market in North America. Within back to base, with happy clients, it's just rational that those are more efficient, right? In the sales and marketing motion. We'll wait again to deliver on that. Sales efficiency and international sales. We've had a lot of investment in those new regions that Scott laid out, and not surprisingly, when something's new, it's less efficient than you would overall expect. We expect those teams to continue to build to the models that we have and one day perform equivalently to our teams performing in North America.
And then, obviously, I think it's really compelling, the statistics that Souvik showed, which was 80% revenue growth and about a third of that percent in the number of securities, the number of, connections, right? That is... That - when we talk about the network effect, that is the financial expression of that network effect, and we continue to see that going. So you roll all that up, and you can understand all of these points, right? What we've delivered, how we understand in the future, what's on the horizon, and we'll talk about our operating model. Now, let's start with what - not a lot of numbers on the page. Sorry. Let's start with what hasn't changed. Our guidance for 2023, it's the same, okay? Our long-term targets, 20% top-line growth, 40% EBITDA margins, it's the same. It's exactly what we talked about.
What we're doing right now is on the basis of understanding some of that granularity that we've spent the last couple of hours talking to you about. We're gonna lay out, in detail, the margin expansion path over the next two years. So we talk about gross margins and how we're gonna continue to see the expansion there. We think there's 50 basis points of gross margin expansion in 2024 and an incremental 50 basis points in 2025. Within R&D, we see really significant opportunities for the scale as we, as we're closing down those activities and starting up new ones, and we think that R&D will step down from 2023 levels, down 150 basis points in 2024, and again, an incremental, one hundred and fifty basis points in 2025. Well on our path to 20%.
Still, we will be growing R&D over this period of time. We will be investing, but not at the same rate, and that's where we get the leverage. This will still be higher than it was back in 2019, and but great progress on the targets there. And then within G&A, we expect about 25 basis points of natural margin improvement from that expansion. You roll all that up, and we think from where we end in 2023, we'll improve our EBITDA margins by 200 basis points in 2024, and an incremental 200 basis points in 2025, or a 400 basis point improvement overall. So that's kind of the financial expression of all of the work that everyone's doing along this way, and we have incredible confidence in this because we have the visibility into the top line we're growing.
We're gonna leave this meeting, and we're gonna talk about our investments in 2024 and 2025 as we think about the plan, because we've got the whole executive leadership team here, and we're all aligned around delivering this. And I think this is meaningful for folks, and it's meaningful because it just shows truly, that, like, when you're winning and you are delivering for clients, that these are the opportunities, this is the scale that this business has in front of it. That's margins. We get a ton of questions. We got zero questions in September 2021 about stock-based compensation. We get a lot of questions about equity-based compensation now. It's the topic du jour. Emmanuel, did I say that right? I don't know. I don't know. What should shareholders care about?
What do I care about as a shareholder of Clearwater? I care about dilution. This is our fully diluted share count from our first quarter being public to today. Now, we call this non-GAAP because obviously if we have GAAP losses, then you only show the basic. But, but this is, this is if we were profitable, this is our fully diluted share count. 252, 251, 254, 249, 252, 252, 252. Okay? So if you care about dilution, we care about dilution. We think, and as we think about this, you know, perhaps 1% dilution, 2% dilution in the long run, who, who knows how that would look at some point? But if you just look at what's existed, this is, this is the case. But then surely, you know, you guys aren't idiots, right?
You guys are asking me, "Boy, your stock-based compensation expense is really high." It is very expensive, and it looks unusual in our P&L. So that's why you're asking, and I get it, and you're right, and I agree. It is high, and there are really three reasons why it's high. Number one, we had a number of options that had terms that were really private company option terms. As we went public, we modified all those options to align with public company terms. When you do a modification of an option under U.S. GAAP, not only is that other expense out there, but there's also new expense. You revalue the option at our IPO price, and there's a lot of expense that will flow through and flow away once we move away from those options vesting. That's a part of being public.
Number two, we used equity-based compensation and performance share awards as part of the JUMP acquisition. We think it's the right thing to do because it's aligning Emmanuel and his executive team with the overarching concepts of Clearwater, and there are performance criteria that we all agreed on, and I think it makes sense. So Emmanuel has skin in the game to achieve what we want collectively at Clearwater. And oh, by the way, he's a great partner and doing a tremendous job. When he talks about those cross-sell wins, when he talks about delivering for these things, it is because he's a great human being and because his equity-based compensation is a significant piece of that. Third, and this is the most important thing to understand, is we issue equity in performance... Half of the equity issued is performance based, PSUs, performance share units.
And when you issue equity that vests over three years based on three annual performance tranches, we earn it. Should we achieve our performance targets in year one, a third of the equity issued will vest. Should we achieve those performance targets in year two, another third would vest, and in year three, a third would vest. However, because of the way the GAAP is recording the expense, we end up having 61% of the expense related to that three-year award expensed in year one. So you're seeing a tremendous amount of that. So you look at this, you say 61, 28, hey, what's gonna happen? What's gonna happen going forward with our equity-based compensation? It's gonna go down. It's gonna go down significantly as a percentage of revenues and holistically, right?
This year is the high water mark for stock-based compensation expense, absent some sort of an acquisition where we do those sorts of things. So hopefully that puts to bed any of the concepts around equity-based compensation. I was speaking to some folks beforehand. So today is the first day for public school kids in New York City. So if any of you are from New York. Many of you are from New York, if you sent your kids off to school for the first day today, congrats. I hope that goes well. Last week, I had the privilege of dropping my oldest daughter off at university, and that was a really emotional moment for me last week to see her go. And we've thrown a lot at you over these last couple of hours.
There's a lot of principles. And so as I was driving the six hours to drop her off, I had a lot of suggestions for her in the car on the way down. "You know, don't do this, do this. For goodness sakes, don't do this." All those things, right? But as I went to say goodbye to her, I thought, "Hey, wait a second. You know, what is... What are really the-- Like, what's a key message to come away with you to understand this?" Because Lord knows, she doesn't really listen to her father, but maybe for... So I said this, I said, "You know, occasionally eat a good meal, drink plenty of water, and for goodness sakes, get enough sleep, okay?" So that was what I-- Those were the messages.
So I want to leave you kind of with simple messages. This is why I sleep at night. I don't know whether my daughter sleeps at night... But this is why I sleep at night. And as a public company CFO, there are, there are not many of us that sleep well at night. But I sleep really well at night because we have a 98% gross retention. There's a million reasons, and you've heard them, why that happens, okay? But that's what it is. And we've had it forever. 80% win rate. Again, you've heard how the product is great, how our delivery to our clients is exceptional, how our sales team is on its game. We've had an 80% win rate for years.
In Sandeep's presentation, he showed you in the markets we have, the long runway we have for additional clients, and the huge impact we can increase with our existing clients. From 1 bps, you know, we're at an average of 0.5 bps. What we do is 1 bps. What they spend is 4 bps. We could do 8x as much with our existing clients before we add another client. And by the way, we're going to add a bunch more clients. That's why I'm able to sleep at night. When you have these sorts of trends, it's your back. But you probably don't - You know, I appreciate you all coming, and I'm sure you actually don't want me to lie in bed. So why do I jump out of bed each morning?
What is so great, right, about Clearwater that I do literally leap out of bed every day? It's NRR 115. We've got a lot of work to do. This is a big, hairy goal. We've achieved a lot of those goals. Big, hairy, audacious goal. BHAG, right? It's a big goal, but we, when you look back at history, we have achieved a lot of those goals, and that's why we're, have the privilege of standing in front of you today. What do we have to do? We have the new commercial construct well underway. We have to continue our GTM evolution. Scott's talked to you about how that's worked, proven time and time again. Still work to do there, right? Multiple products, you can see that there's a pipeline there, but still lots to do.
So that you remember this goal of 115 and that you think about... We want you to, like, jump out of bed every day as excited about Clearwater as we are. If you open up your bags, you'll see that you have a night shirt in there. Go ahead, feel free. You can open it up, and you can see. Feel free to wear it out. Feel free to wear it to event. Thank you, Bob. NRR 115, Clearwater Analytics, silky material. If there's one thing you take from this besides your T-shirts, it is this is our goal, we're on this path, and we're headed to do. With that, let me finish us off with Sandeep, who's going to give us a vision for the future, and then we'll wrap it up with Q&A for everybody.
Thank you. Yeah, my daughters dropped me off today, and they had real messages for me. I'm not kidding you. She said, "What are you gonna say right in the beginning?" I'm like, "What the hell? I'll figure this out." She said, "No, talk about the US Open." And if you remember, that's how I opened. So Jim's at the point of his career where he is telling his daughter what to do. I'm at the point where my daughter is telling me what to do. It just sort of all pretty symbiotic. But, what I thought is, just talk about the vision. I did want to say that, look, we have the privilege, Jim and I have the privilege of talking to all of you every quarter, and we do it because of the team you met today.
They have the privilege because of the teams they have built. It really is that. They are the ones who empower us to stand and talk here. I hope you got one other message, which was sort of subtle, which is that it's not running, it's not running famously well for a long period of time. Many of these functions have been built, but this company was exceptional before I got here. But it wasn't a company that was firing on all engines. It wasn't global. It wasn't close to clients. So when you hear Scott talk, he talks about, "Oh, we're all in Boise, and it's on a path of becoming better every day." When Subi spoke to you, we actually had people working in the night.
There was a night shift, which is to look at the data and work on the data, and then we have built that, and we have built that. We talk about marketing. When you talk about the finance functions, I do feel that over the last three, three and a half, four years, we have built out a leadership team which is capable of scaling. We've had these massive investments in R&D since Souvik came in. The first time he came and talked to us, we were like: Oh, my goodness! But the fact is, that is behind us. So today, I feel way differently than I did three years back and five years back. I feel we are an organization which is closer to best in class, but is not at all satisfied with not being best in class.
I don't know one function in a company which sits down and says, "I'm best in class today." They're not. We all are hungry about what we can do, you know, and the culture Cindy spoke about is so important. So you could just very simply say, when we think about Clearwater and what we do well, we always thought about investment, accounting, and analytics. And Jim was right. I was a little bit charitable in saying 1 basis point. But frankly, you can do the math real quick and say $6.7 trillion of assets on your platform, $365 million revenue. Hey, that's 0.5 basis points. And I think he's right. That opportunity is worth 4 basis points. So really, our vision isn't super sophisticated about the future. It is about the entire investment life cycle.
If you want to do investment accounting and analytics better, you don't need to go find a partner like Emmanuel. But if you want to do the entire investment life cycle, then you do need an OMS and a PMS and a performance engine and all of the pieces there. You need to build out Prism. You need to build out something we call Felix. Actually, I'm not supposed to tell you that. Yeah. So but this is MLx. The components of those are. You know, the LP system, the LPx, MLx, and those components, in our company, as a group, we call them Phoenixes. That's how I used it. But the point is, there is a path to get from what we addressed today to what we want to address, and that path is laid by an amazing platform and outstanding operations. You don't win without those two.
I could just pretty much stop here and say: Look, this is what we wanna do. This is how we think about the industry. The other thing is everything Jim spoke about. Yeah, it's without GenAI, so I don't wanna over-correct on the GenAI, but I do think every number you saw could be radically different with GenAI. And it's not like we're not giving up on it, but the point is, I don't think we can quantify it enough in what we say we want to deliver. So that's why you see a little bit of hesitance about what is the impact of GenAI on your business. Now, Jim put up 400 basis points. I think that's exciting enough. But I do think GenAI could improve that. I believe that. How much it can improve, I can't quantify today.
But before you all go, and we sort of break, I do wanna talk about this vision of going from half a basis point to four basis points is interesting, but I did wanna talk about starting to make the case for bringing change to our industry. You know, just to set the context right, we have 1,000+ asset owners on our system today. 1,000. More often than not, in a very, very vast majority of the case, we are the book of record. We are the accounting book of record. And if you're the accounting book of record, you know all the assets they own on a daily basis. What they sold, what they bought, what tax slot in the which country. You can't do accounting without knowing all the details. It's on one database.
When you think about an asset owner on our platform, it's really important to understand we have it, not because, like I said, the accounting book of record is important. It's on one platform. It uses one security master. It uses one instance. These 1,000 clients and the asset managers, they're all in one instance, one database. Ingesting data every day, one time. Today, I could tell you... Not today, I could tell you last evening, what all of our clients, the 1,000 asset owners, what they bought, what they sold, where they sold it, how much they sold for, which country. The power of that. Shall we try to show you something about asset man-- about corporates, and say, "I can help you improve your performance simply by benchmarking"?
You've heard of benchmarking, but benchmarking is usually once a quarter, once in six months, once in a year, and sort of unclear quality of data. Our benchmark is daily. Jim can say, "You got 3.5 today, you got 3.6 tomorrow. What changed? What did he change in his portfolio?" You can drive it at that level because you're seeing it every day. It's not about what assets changed. I could tell you yesterday, this happened, and guess what? People got out of municipal bonds, and they put more money into commodities. I can tell you on a daily basis, assets being moved. Ukraine got invaded, guess what? We could tell you that evening that people were delivering Taiwan. We could tell you that evening, and not just what we think. Tell you how much.
It is a really powerful way to think about performance, and what everyone in the investment community should care about is how do they do against a predefined peer set? In our business, because everything's in one spot, you can define your own peer set. In that example of Jim, that was Aaron, sorry, put it up. You could say: I care about companies which have $200 million-$1 billion, and that's the, my peer set. Or somebody else could say: I've got $1 billion-$500 billion, that's a peer set in North America. You can define your peer set, and we can tell you how you do and how you can get better, what the top decile people do. We didn't show you here, but you could, in that example, very easily say... Jim says, "Oh, I'm not doing well.
What do the top decile people do?" CFOs. Tell you right there. What did they do yesterday? Tell you that. It is super powerful on what this company can do. Look, before we sort of. The last one is, I think we have a super disruptive platform. People did. We do not win deals because everyone said: "Oh, this is in Boise, it must be really good." People did this because it was disruptive. It was proven to be disruptive. You heard from James. When he built it, it was disruptive. I do think we address a real market pain. People are hurting with all of these accounting engines and all over the world and all this regulation, all the rest. They are trying to put all the data together. It's a real market pain.
This is not something which is a good to have, and we win consistently because of it. We win at 80%, and we hope all that translates into building a company we can truly revolutionize the world of investing with. So before I end, look, I want to thank you for your interest in Clearwater. Some of you are investors, others are analysts, and we are deeply, deeply grateful to you for that. And I'm hoping we can build a company you can all be proud to call your own. We wake up about one thing, is can we build a company the executive team is proud to call our own? But really, you're the broader stakeholders in the business, and we hope we can build a company you're proud to call something you sort of started to follow early on.
Thank you all. Thank you very much. What I thought we would do is just... Jim, do you want to come up? And depending on the question, we'll bring in other executive team members, if you would like... Yeah, please.
Come on up. You guys can come.
Yeah.
Go ahead. Yeah. Hey, Kevin.
I'll start with saying thanks so much for just an exceptional event. Jim, I didn't see the year on the 150. A different font.
Hey.
No, I'll get inside.
Very true.
If you think about the delta from the one to the four, can you help us maybe frame... Is that internal, external competitors? And do you have the current bandwidth from a product perspective to deliver that? Just to frame that a little bit. Obviously, there's a ton of optionality, but just maybe how we think about that delta.
Yeah, so if you think about the investment management lifecycle, right? So a lot of that work happens pre-trade. So people doing the research, coming out with models and things like that, and then you've got a portfolio management system that feeds the order management system, and we start after the trade is done. So Clearwater starts in the evening, effectively. Once the trades are done, then we get the feed from the custodians, we get the feed from the market sources, and that's how we begin. So we start from there and go to the other end. Now, when you think about 4 bps, you can move forward. A big part of it is move forward. Now, why do people care, and why are we the right people? Because it's the same data. What you sold is the one we are reconciling to.
So if you have a manual system, and that user think we are the natural consolidators. End of the day, I, I want you to know that we are the book of record. We are the keepers of the truth. We are the ones who finally decide what are the book yield, what are the loss, what. So we feel we have a natural position to move. One other point I'll make is a lot of the technology around us in our industry isn't, is somewhat legacy. I don't want to be sort of pushing on competitors, but the fact is, yes, every other industry has a single instant multi-tenant platform. Every industry. Salesforce, Workday, even Microsoft Outlook. You don't have your own Outlook anymore. It's on the damn cloud. It's single instant multi-tenant.
I feel like it's nothing we are innovating and coming up with, something that it is how the world is going to. We feel we're the natural company to expand across the investment life cycle.
Hey, thanks. Michael Turrin with Wells Fargo. Echo the thanks very much for all the content today. Something you briefly mentioned during the presentation, but I think is important to go back to, is the business model transition that the company has embarked on over the past year or so. I'm just wondering if you can go back to lessons learned there, and if you could talk a little bit about how you think about pricing power and price as a lever towards getting to the 20%+ growth and the 115% retention targets. Thanks.
Yeah, sure.
Sure. So I think the lessons learned. Now that you've met Subi, you can understand just how much easier. So lesson learned number one is make sure that you have an NPS of 60+, right? And that's really... When you have something like that, you have opportunities to think about that. I think we also want to treat people fairly. And I think that when folks on Subi's team asked those questions and folks and the execs spoke to others there, we were very fair about that. Now, the piece that's most strategic about it, which enables that path to the NRR 115%, right, is that we've defined what we've sold you, instead of we used to sell you Clearwater. Now, at least we call it core Clearwater, right? We still kind of sell that.
That was internal. So another lesson learned was, you know, Scott had to stand up in front of his sales team and really talk through: Here's how we're thinking about this. This is what we do differently. This is a different way of doing it. And so there was a lot of evangelism within the organization that was done as well, that helped with the outside. And as soon as you turned it into, "This is fair, this is normal," and when we had more of our employees have repetitions with their clients, where they said, "Great, I understand. There's a price increase. It's great. I understand. If I want to buy more from you, I pay more for you," these are industry, again, industry standard, and just it's the evolution of where we are.
I think I just want to say, look, our commercial model was way subpar. This is not rocket science, right? And none of these things are. It's just that you needed to bring in the leadership and sort of drive it. It takes a little time. It's not super magical to say you should have a core platform, you should have additional modules which are sold separately, you should have an annual price increase. None of this is rocket science. Yeah, Clearwater didn't do that, right? Clearwater was run well, but it was run sort of regionally, as a regional business, and we are just trying to bring in all of these best practices, whether it's ops, commercial, HR, technology, whatever. But we feel as we stand here today, we're in a better spot. Are we at 115? We're not.
But yeah, 115 will make this a different company, and that's why you hear that much discussion about it. Yeah, it just wasn't. We should continue to strive for exception.
Yeah.
... Hey, guys, Jackson Ader at MoffettNathanson. So just following up, Sandeep, on what you just said, just talking about all the things that you've improved in some of the early innings on selling back into the base, multi-product, whatever. You were growing at 20% before all of this. So if these initiatives kind of hit or turn out to, you know, work out as you hope, will that sustain you at 20% growth, or is that something that can take you to north of 20% growth?
Yeah, Scott doesn't do any work, so what do you expect? We will continue to stay at 20. No, I'm just totally kidding. Look, our thinking is we are doing all of these things to have a sustained growth for several years. Do we think that each of these things hit, should we grow faster? Yes. I just don't believe in it. I think that what you do is you put a number of irons in the fire, all of them hit, you grow faster, of course, you should, right? But I don't want to come back here and tell you I grew at 15% because, you know, something happened in the economy. I just don't want to be in that spot. So we want to continue to think about growth, and it starts with TAM. Is your TAM big enough?
Is the TAM coming from new clients or current clients? Current clients is better because we have these 60 NPS and sort of lower cost of acquisition. So you want to think like that, and then you think about, do I have the right infrastructure to address it? And therefore, a global infrastructure is necessary. Do I want, want to grow in Europe? And so I feel like it's, it's a number of irons in the fire with the objective of trying to accelerate growth, but protect 20%. That, that's what this is about. Yeah. That was a trick question. I almost went for it. I sort of held back. I said, "No, I know Jackson well enough to say...
Thanks. Pete Heckman with D.A. Davidson. In terms of your customers in insurance and investment management, you say for the vast majority, you're the accounting book of record. Is it fair to assume that all of those clients also use a back office portfolio accounting system for investment book of record? And is it the intention to continue to enhance JUMP system to then be able to address those real-time needs? And in terms of how do you think about the timeline there? Like, when would JUMP's technology be ready to take on some of the multi-billion-dollar investment book record opportunities in the U.S.?
Well, if you ask Emmanuel, he would say today. Right?
Yeah, but I'll just start by saying that, look, I may have misspoken a little bit, but the book of record, accounting book of record is for asset owners. So those are insurance companies and corporates and pensions, and not the investment manager, right? So that you understand, I'm sure you do. So yeah, when you talk about asset owners, we are the book of record. Many, many asset owners, though, don't manage their own money. They give it out to managers, but they do manage some amount of money. Increasingly, they may manage a tenth of the money or 20% or whatever the number is, and they have to bring in other OMS/PMSs, right?
And our intention as a first step is to address that, is to go to our asset owner community and say, "We want to come out and provide the end-to-end solution to what you asked about. The data will come in. It'll be the same data flow all through." So first line of attack, if you will, is on the asset owner community, which is about two-thirds of our revenue, right? When is it ready? I think it is as sophisticated as you would want today, but I do think there is some translation. Emmanuel obviously was built a system in France, but it was exclusively in France. It was all French. Now, the connectivity here, the custodians here, the EMS support here, are a little bit different because the connector it just is different players in this market.
I don't think it's the technology, but it is the product. Now, the way we have approached it, a little bit, not to, perhaps liking was, we said: Let's get five clients first, get them live. I want to learn if there is something to learn. We did that in Europe, working really well. We started that in the U.S. We want to protect that NPS. What you don't want to do is say, "We got something new, we'll try it," and then it goes out. We do expect to be very aggressive with the OMS and the PMS, but I think some work, but it, it isn't a heavy lift at all. I don't know whether, Scott, you would agree with that or not.
I agree.
Yeah.
Well, he just agreed. I thought he, you know... What else?
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, please.
All right, thanks. Yun Kim from Loop Capital. Seems like you guys will be doing some acquisitions going forward as part of your product expansion portfolio strategy. Can you just talk about any framework that you have around your acquisition strategy? For instance, is there any kind of a limit on the size? Is the JUMP like a typical size that we should expect? And any requirement around, any acquisition needs to be, margin neutral in the first 12 months or 18 months.
I think it's. Look, you know, we have a high bar, you know this, because if I can just be direct, our story is really good. Continuous growth is a way to talk about growth. It cannot accelerate somewhat. There's some story there. Our margin is expanding, the gross profit is expanding, EBITDA is on a really good path. So we don't want to muddy this and make it a whole lot worse. So that is point number one. What would we do this for? I think to move from 1 bit to 4 bit. Everything that can help us grow faster instead of having to develop it ourselves, we would, we would very seriously look at acquisitions. Everything that expands us geographically, so we don't have to go build the office in Singapore and Hong Kong, I think we would do aggressively.
So it is—it's mostly in how can we get to a spot where we're going to get to anyway, but just get there faster… Right? JUMP does that. We could have said, "Let's go build out an OMS and a PMS," and they would have taken us a certain amount of time. Same thing with the French market. I'm sure you cover companies which address the French market. It just takes a long time. Having 100 people in Paris changes that paradigm. So it's about speed, I think, more than anything else. I don't know, Jim, would you add anything to that?
I think that that's exactly right. You had a question about size. I think we're agnostic about size. But I think that when you think about what is it that we wanna do, you have to look at the reasons why we did the JUMP acquisition, right? Geographic footprint, as Sandeep said, 100 people in Paris. Being able to cross-sell back into our base. He's talking about the one versus four. So this is all very consistent along that same theme, and it's the best indicator of future performance is looking at past performance, and that's kind of what we've been able to do there.
Hey, everyone. Thank you. Dylan Becker at William Blair. Maybe, Sandeep, kind of touching on the network effects component and kind of the business evolution, going back to the four basis points, kind of wrapping everything together, how that accounting book of record, where the business has started, really enabled kind of the accelerating innovation cadence, which is also building, again, the durability and the competitive moat within the system. So kind of how that fuels that connected flywheel, and obviously, how we can kind of get to that four basis points, and potentially the opportunity to move beyond that over time as well.
Yeah, look, I think that, when Souvik talked about, you know, the 80% and the 20% and the one-third of it, I think what he did not mention was it was while building out Europe, where the network effect was very, very poor. Obviously, when you go into a market, it's really poor. So I do feel that if you bring on a new insurance client here or a corporate client here, the data connectivity we have built is very, very little. Because really, what custodian don't we have on our platform right now in North America? What really market data source we don't have on our platform? Those are, those are increasingly more and more limited. And so we do expect our margin to just continue to, unidirectionally improve.
We do think Europe is improving on a daily basis, literally, but I do think it'll continue to scale over the next several years, maybe another year or two. But you see the margin improvement now because they're no longer sucking it, right? And right now, when you start a certain market, just everything is built for the first time, and that is super expensive, both from an operations point of view, which we had to build, and really from a dev point of view. So I don't know. We think the network is us. I think when we talk about if you go to the other side, the revenue and the insight, all that is because of the network.
So I think about network for efficiency a little bit, and I think that's really important, but I think the real value of the network is into yield, into talking to a CFO and saying what you should do tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the day after that, and being able to say: "You know what? Insurance companies of this scale, they're investing in mortgages in Europe, and you're not, and that's why your performance is poor." And being able to do that. So the network will provide... To me, the biggest thing is the insight capability. And we don't monetize that at all right now, but we wanna talk about it because it is two, three, four, five years out, you would see that being really powerful.
Thank you for hosting us today. Jake Titleman from Goldman Sachs. There's a lot of momentum building in the business across international, across JUMP, across pensions and sovereign wealth funds. Which of those three do you think will move the needle most in terms of growth over the next year? And then, as we think about getting to 115 NRR, which of those levers do you think will help us get there the fastest?
Yeah, look, that's a really good question. But I—and I'm not trying to be coy about this. I think each of them have the capacity to disruptively change our path. If this company can get to 115, the growth path on the question you had about 20% becomes irrelevant. So can that by itself be enough? I think so. Can you—If you just said, "Forget about everything, can't you just grow in North America?" I think you can just grow for the next five years using just that. Now, could Europe be really huge after the success of Aviva? It could very well be. The deals we are talking about in Europe are completely different, so we have a lot of faith in what Europe could do.
Finally, after having said all of that, I do feel this $1B-$4B is exceptionally important to us as an organization. Just when I thought I was done, I also feel, you know, this data thing I talked about, about asset owners, if you just sort of think about it while going out, if you think about what we could do with that and what our clients, the value they can get from that, it's... I think it is transformative. It could be the company five, seven years from now. You can go back to the S-1 and look at the letter I wrote. Even there, we start to talk about it, but that time, the company was smaller, the amount of assets you had was smaller.
We are up to $6.7 trillion now, in a path to get it to $10 trillion. Yeah, our scale starts to become really relevant, and insight would be super relevant there.
Michael Infante from Morgan Stanley. I just wanted to quickly touch on margins. Jim, I appreciate the color. If my math is correct, I think you know, the incremental Adjusted EBITDA margin expansion in 2023 is roughly low thirties. I think that scales to mid-thirties and then low forties if you go out to 2025. Sort of how do you think about the pace of that scaling and sort of how that may change if the rev growth doesn't accelerate in excess of 20?
Yeah, so I think that's. I think the great thing is we do have the visibility to see that. So these are plans that we have in place, and I think each of those, you know, what we're showing you is at the top level, kind of that, that, you know, those levels, but there are plans underneath each and every one of those. And so I think we have just very high confidence in 2024 or 2025. Yeah.
Hey, one more from me. I think it was Scott who talked about when initially targeting the insurance market, thinking about more of the mid-tier in terms of insurance carriers, in terms of the portfolio of assets. Can you talk about your success within the Top 25 global insurance carriers, where you're at? I guess my impression is that there are a number of whales there that Clearwater's not working with, and those can be material to the overall growth of the company.
Do you wanna, you probably wanna grab the mic from Sheldon.
Yeah, thanks. I, I think you can hear me. Thanks for the question. The, the intent was always to work with the largest insurers. It was similar to the question about what we're doing with Jump right now, which, which is make sure we're delighting clients along the way and that we're learning and adapting as we go. And a big part of Aviva, Aviva didn't join because they were the first whale. They were the first whale in Europe. Then Aegon comes, and Athora comes, and FWD comes, and so forth. So there's, there, there's good success there, but as Sandeep also shared, the runway, there's, there's more runway to come. So we have a lot of clients that are live, that are promoters, but we do have runway to continue in, expansion in North America, large and mega insurers.
Yeah. Yeah. Good, good. I think we're-
Time up?
I mean, happy to, happy to answer questions as long as folks want, but also cognizant that we've gone over, so sorry about that.
We'll be outside then.
Yeah.
Evident that all the questions were directed at Jim and I, because we weren't clear enough, but the rest of them were, it looks like.
Yeah.
But they'll be available to answer other questions, outside here. Thank you all. Thank you all for coming.
Thanks.
Thank you. Thank you.