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Earnings Call: Q3 2019

Jul 31, 2019

Operator

Greetings, and welcome to the Fair Isaac Corporation quarterly earnings call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Afterwards, we will conduct a question and answer session. At that time, if you have a question, please press the one followed by the four on your telephone. Should you require operator assistance at any time, please press star zero. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, Wednesday, July 31st, 2019. I would now like to turn the conference over to Steve Weber, VP, Investor Relations and Treasurer. Please go ahead.

Steve Weber
VP of Investor Relations and Treasurer, Fair Isaac Corporation

Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining FICO's third quarter earnings call. I'm Steve Weber, and I'm joined today by our CEO, Will Lansing, and our CFO, Mike Pung. Today, we issued a press release that describes financial results compared to the prior year. On this call, management will also discuss results in comparison to the prior quarter in order to facilitate understanding of the run rate of our business. Certain statements made in this presentation may be characterized as forward-looking under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Those statements involve many uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Information concerning these uncertainties is contained in the company's filings with the SEC, in particular in the risk factors and forward-looking statements portions of such filings. Copies are available from the SEC, from the FICO website, or from our investor relations team.

This call will also include statements regarding certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the company's earnings release and Regulation G schedule issued today for a reconciliation of each of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measure. The earnings release and Regulation G schedule are available on the investor relations page of the company's website at fico.com or on the SEC's website at sec.gov. A replay of this webcast will be available through July 31st, 2020. With that, I'll turn the call over to Will Lansing.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Thanks, Steve. Thank you everyone for joining us on our third quarter earnings call. I'm pleased to report we delivered a record quarter with some remarkable results. We recorded our highest revenue quarter ever at $314 million, up 23% over last year. It was a good quarter for license sales, but notably, it was also a very good quarter for recurring revenue. All three segments drove double-digit recurring revenue growth, and total company recurring revenue was up 18% over last year. We continue to see the benefits of our business model shift to the cloud. We had another good bookings quarter at $109 million, with many being recurring revenue deals. Year-to-date, our recurring revenue bookings are up 18%.

We delivered $64 million of GAAP net income and GAAP earnings of $2.12 per share, up 116% and 122% respectively. We delivered $76 million of non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP EPS of $2.50. Perhaps most impressive this quarter was the strength of results across our entire portfolio. In applications, revenues were up 19% over the prior year. Much of this is due to some term license renewals, but we also drove double-digit growth in transactional volumes. This, of course, is key to our cloud strategy. As our customers use our products across larger portions of their enterprise, we can drive sustainable recurring revenue growth. We had a particularly strong quarter in our banking fraud solutions business, where we closed some large renewals and also signed some sizable new deals.

We also had a good quarter in our customer communication solutions, where we had nice transactional volume growth. In our Decision Management Software segment, we're seeing significant growth in both bookings and revenue. DMS revenues were a record $33 million, led by sales of our decisioning platform and Blaze. We also had $37 million of new DMS bookings, a record quarter, and up 35% from the previous year. We signed a number of Decision Management Platform deals, steadily gaining more traction. Throughout our software business, we're selling more cloud deals. They accounted for more than 40% of our total bookings this quarter. In the scores business, we had another record quarter at $115 million of revenue, with both volumes and unit pricing up over last year.

B2C revenues were up 8% this quarter. Our B2B revenues were up 36% over the same period last year. The B2B growth was driven by increased Originations and account management volumes, as well as the continuing impact of the pricing initiatives we discussed last quarter. We see strength throughout the various verticals and life cycles in the scores segment and expect it to continue to perform well. We are also making progress on Data Decisions Cloud partnership with Equifax that we announced back in March. Our teams are working together to bring three products to market. First, a connected platform integrating our Decision Management solution with Equifax's extensive data. Second, our suite of AML and KYC technology will use Equifax's differentiated data to offer a full-service, best-in-class compliance offering.

Third, PrescreenCentral integrates FICO's marketing solutions products with Equifax's consumer data to deliver a direct marketing solution. We'll keep you posted on progress we're making with this exciting partnership. We continue to deploy significant resources to our share repurchase program. In the third quarter, we spent $59 million and another $20 million in July for a total so far this fiscal year of $199 million. We exhausted the 2018 board authorization, and today we announced a new $250 million share repurchase authorization. I'll share some summary thoughts later, but now I'd like to turn the call over to Mike to take you through our financial results.

Mike Pung
EVP and CFO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Thanks, Will, and good afternoon, everyone. Today, I'll emphasize three points in my prepared comments. First, we delivered $314 million of revenue, an increase of $59 million or 23% year-over-year. Recurring revenue was $226 million, up 18% from last year.

Second, we delivered $64 million of GAAP net income, which is up 116% year-over-year. Finally, we had $61 million of free cash flow this quarter, and we spent $59 million of it on share repurchases. I'll begin by breaking revenue down into our three segments, starting with Applications where revenues were $166 million, or up 19% versus the same period last year. We had a particularly strong quarter in fraud, which was up 80%, in part due to some term license renewals. We also had a good quarter in our CCS business, which was up 13% compared to last year. We also saw strong volumes throughout the portfolio, with recurring revenues up 10%. We had another good quarter in our Decision Management Software segment, where revenues were at $33 million, up 31% versus the prior year, with strong platform and Blaze sales.

Recurring revenue and DMS were up 14% from the previous year. Bookings were a record $37 million, or up 35% from last year. Finally, of course, in our Score segment, revenues were a record $115 million, up 27% from the same period last year and 10% over last quarter. On the B2B side, we're up 36% versus the same period a year ago, and B2C revenues were up 8% from the same quarter last year. Looking at revenue by region this quarter, 72% of total revenues were derived from the Americas. The EMEA region generated 21%, and the remaining 7% was Asia-Pacific. Recurring revenue derived from transactional and maintenance sources for the quarter represented 72% of total revenue. Consulting and implementation revenues were 14% of total revenue, and license revenues were 14% of total revenue. Cloud revenues were $69 million this quarter, up 19% from last year.

Bookings this quarter were $109 million, down about 9% from the prior year. We generated $16 million of current period revenues on those bookings, for a yield of 15%. The weighted average term of our bookings was 38 months this quarter. We had 19 deals over $1 million, four of which were over $300 million. Cloud bookings were $46 million this quarter and $119 million year-to-date, which is up 24% from last year. While we are pleased with the sixth straight quarter above $100 million in bookings, year-to-date, we are still pacing below our expectations, which is important as bookings generate future revenue. Operating expenses totaled $229 million this quarter, compared to $230 million in the second quarter. We expect to maintain a similar run rate in the fourth quarter while actively investing our resources in our highest strategic priorities.

Our non-GAAP operating margin, as shown in our Reg G schedule, was 34% for the quarter and 29% year-to-date. We expect the full-year operating margin to be around that 29%. GAAP net income this quarter was $64 million or $2.12 a share, non-GAAP net income was $76 million or $2.50 a share, the effective tax rate was about 18% for the quarter. We expect our annual tax rate to be about 14%. The free cash flow for the quarter was $61 million versus $72 million in the prior year. For the trailing 12 months, our free cash flow was around $200 million. Turning to the balance sheet, we had $79 million of cash at the end of the quarter. Our total debt is $828 million, with a weighted average interest rate of about 4.7%.

The ratio of our total net debt to adjusted EBITDA this quarter is down to 2.3 times, which is well below our covenant level of 3 times. During the quarter, we returned $59 million in excess cash to our investors, repurchasing 205,000 shares at an average price of about $289 a share. We also purchased an additional $20 million in July, which exhausted the board authorization from last year. We have repurchased more than 840,000 shares this fiscal year at an average price of $237. We announced earlier today the board has approved a new $250 million authorization and continue to view share repurchases as an attractive use of our cash. We also continue to actively evaluate opportunities to acquire relevant technologies and products that advance our strategy or strengthen our portfolio and competitive position.

Now, with one quarter remaining in our fiscal year, we're reconfirming our guidance that we updated last quarter with revenue of $1.14 billion, GAAP net income of $173 million, and GAAP EPS of $5.75. Of course, non-GAAP net income is $214 million, and non-GAAP EPS is $7.12. Finally, as you know, this is my 60th and last official earnings call. For those of you on the call that cover FICO, I've appreciated the time we've spent discussing our company and getting to know each of you on a personal level. I'd also like to give my heartfelt thanks to all the members of our finance team. Your hard work, dedication, and commitment to operate with the highest standards has given me confidence in reporting our results over the years.

Finally, I'd like to thank our investors for the trust and faith you have placed in me as a steward of these amazing assets. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Will for some final comments.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Thanks, Mike. For now, I'd like to review what we've been able to accomplish in 2019. In scores, we continue to find new ways to extend the analytics in both the B2B and B2C markets. We're working hard to make sure pricing is appropriate given the massive value the FICO Score adds to the financial markets. On the software side, we're steadily growing our cloud business. Our products are well-positioned to serve customers looking to use analytics to make better decisions. As I've often said, these are exciting times at FICO. We have a very strong team helping our customers solve their most difficult problems. We continue to develop and market world-class technology to put advanced analytics into production to make better decisions.

Finally, I would like to thank Mike, who's retiring after nearly 15 years with FICO, the last nine as Chief Financial Officer. During his career at FICO, revenues grew from around $600 million in FY 2010 to this year's guided $1.1 billion. Mike oversaw an ambitious long-term stock buyback program that increased value for shareholders while enabling FICO to advance its innovations in analytics and solution development. Mike has been a great CFO. He distinguished himself with the board and with our investors and guided us through the last recession, driving critical resource allocation decisions that gave FICO the runway to invest again in new products and services. We thank him and wish him well. I'd also like to welcome Mike McLaughlin to FICO as our new CFO. Mike will be joining us from Morgan Stanley, where he was a Managing Director and Head of Technology Corporate Finance.

He brings us a wealth of leadership experience in both financial services and technology. He'll be starting next week and looks forward to meeting with many of you in the coming months. I'll now turn the call back to Steve for Q&A.

Steve Weber
VP of Investor Relations and Treasurer, Fair Isaac Corporation

Thanks, Will. This concludes our prepared remarks, and we're ready now to take your questions. Operator, please open the lines.

Operator

Thank you very much. If you would like to register a question, please press the one followed by the four on your telephone. You will hear a 3-tone prompt to acknowledge your request. If your question has been answered and you would like to withdraw your registration, please press the one followed by the three. Once again, to register a question, it is the one, four on your telephone. Our first question comes from the line of Manav Patnaik from Barclays. Your line is over.

Manav Patnaik
Analyst, Barclays

Thank you. Good evening. Firstly, congratulations, and a big thank you to Mike as well. If I could just start with the bookings comments that you made about it being below expectations. I was just wondering if you could help give a little bit more color on maybe how much below and why you think it is below the expectation.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

I guess I would say I wouldn't put too much stock in it. That number does move around. You know how it is when deals push at the end of the quarter. We've pretty consistently shared with you that we don't do unnatural acts to close deals at the end of the quarter, and so while we have an internal budget that has numbers for each quarter, I wouldn't read too much into it.

Manav Patnaik
Analyst, Barclays

Got it. Then maybe along the same lines, you obviously had a pretty good quarter, and I guess I just wanted to get some sense on maybe why there wasn't a guidance raise involved in there with only a quarter to go. Presumably, there's enough visibility there.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

That cuts both ways. Yes, there's enough visibility, but at the same time, we're one quarter away from closing out the year. I'm not sure what the point would be in raising guidance at this point.

Manav Patnaik
Analyst, Barclays

Okay. Maybe just one last one from me. We obviously heard Equifax talk about these products that you guys are putting out together. Can you just help us with a little bit on, is it a revenue share model or who's going to do most of the heavy lifting on the sales front? Any other color there, please?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Sure. It is a rev share model. We're in it together. We're trying to market the solution as a joint solution and make it easier for the customer to get the end-to-end solution that we have on offer. The sales effort is on both sides, and it depends on who has which relationships and which product and service we're working with. I think that varies.

Manav Patnaik
Analyst, Barclays

Okay. Got it. Thank you, guys.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Bill Warmington with Wells Fargo. Your line's open.

Bill Warmington
Analyst, Wells Fargo

Good afternoon, everyone.

Mike Pung
EVP and CFO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Hey, Bill.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Hey, Bill.

Bill Warmington
Analyst, Wells Fargo

The Scores revenue looked particularly strong this quarter, accelerating from last quarter. Is there any reason why that Scores volume should decline next quarter? It seems like it's pretty much a stairstep in terms of the price increases coming on.

Mike Pung
EVP and CFO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Bill, this quarter we saw, of course, some of the additional feathering in of our auto scores that we described in the last call. We also saw a couple of residual customers start to roll in on the mortgage increase we did just over a year ago. Beyond that, we had a small audit settlement that's a one-timer that was in these numbers. From time to time, we have global FICO® Score deals that are license-oriented, and we had a little bit of that this quarter. Those come and go on a variety of bases. We saw volume increases in the mid-single-digit range and in a couple of cases on the origination side, a little bit better than that.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

With all that as a background, the revenue model could grow, assuming volumes continue to grow strongly over where it was last year in the fourth quarter. That's probably the biggest variable that's uncertain at this point is how much the volumes will look like in our fourth quarter and whether we have any other kind of one-timers that come along.

Bill Warmington
Analyst, Wells Fargo

Okay. Now CCS, there have been some client departures last quarter. This quarter, you guys signaled that one out as being a particularly strong performance. I just wanted to ask about how that business was doing and what had happened with those clients who had left, and whether you've been able to get new clients to replace them. Just a little color on that.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Yeah, I'd say that we have business coming and business going. Some of the business goes when big banks decide that they're going to try to achieve the same thing that our CCS offering does on their own by putting together with a fair bit of systems integration on their side, the components of it. While we have very large banks who are happy with CCS, there's also the ones that choose to go it alone. We are adding business. We're adding business in Asia, we're adding business around the world. We're still very happy with the business.

Bill Warmington
Analyst, Wells Fargo

Yeah. I noticed that the average term of the bookings this quarter went up to 38 months. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that occurrence. Is that a one-off event in terms of some of the deals that you signed, or maybe give us a little color on what's behind that increase?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

It's been trending upward for years.

Bill Warmington
Analyst, Wells Fargo

Yeah.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

I think it's a reflection of the fact that the solutions that we're putting in place are more complex, more comprehensive, and once installed the customer has a desire to lock down a longer term. We're seeing some of that. We don't have tremendous financial incentives for our salespeople to go push long terms. We really want to do just what the customer wants. I would say that the term length is really dictated by the customer, and I think it's largely because they put in our solutions, and they're not quick to take them out, and they feel more comfortable signing up a bigger deal.

Bill Warmington
Analyst, Wells Fargo

How's the rollout of Falcon X doing?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

It's rolling. We're excited about the prospects for getting it out into the marketplace. The early reception to what's coming has been extremely positive. We think we have the right solution coming at the right time. We have a lot of people working on it right now.

Bill Warmington
Analyst, Wells Fargo

The last question from me is on the UltraFICO Score. Experian has been running ads on their Boost product. I wanted to know if that is actually generating revenue for you yet, or is it still pre-revenue?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

With Boost, we actually participate in that. With UltraFICO, not generating revenue yet, we're in test mode still.

Bill Warmington
Analyst, Wells Fargo

Got it. Before I go, I just wanted to say congratulations to Mike on a great run and happy trails.

Mike Pung
EVP and CFO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Thanks, Bill. We'll come out and see you sometime.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Thanks, Bill.

Bill Warmington
Analyst, Wells Fargo

Please do.

Mike Pung
EVP and CFO, Fair Isaac Corporation

All righty.

Operator

All as a brief reminder to register for a question, it is the one followed by the four on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from the line of Brett Huff with Stephens. Your line is open.

Brett Huff
Analyst, Stephens

Hey, guys. Congrats on a nice quarter, thanks for the detail, as always. Mike, sorry to see you go, but hope things go well in the next chapter.

Mike Pung
EVP and CFO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Appreciate that, Brett.

Brett Huff
Analyst, Stephens

Well, thanks for taking the questions, as always. You guys talked a little bit about some of the SaaS products that you're developing, I know that we're midstream on those. I don't know if you mentioned TRIAD or the next gen product that TRIAD is. I think it's Customer Director, if I'm remembering right. Any updates on how that's coming along?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Yeah. It's actually called Strategy Director.

Brett Huff
Analyst, Stephens

Strategy Director

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Which is the successor to TRIAD, and customer management is what it does. It's going really well. There's absolutely appetite in the market for it. For us, Strategy Director is a lot of the TRIAD functionality, but ported over to our decision management platform business. That's becoming increasingly important for us. We're really focused on how do we solve our customers' needs with our platform solution. Although we still sell some things that are not on the platform, increasingly the solutions are on the platform. Originations is on the platform, Strategy Director's now on the platform, FalconX will be on the platform. This idea of getting to a unified, single code-based platform with a tremendous ease of use and ability to manipulate data for different purposes, it's coming together very nicely. With respect to Strategy Director in particular, doing very well.

We're selling it, and we're happy with it.

Brett Huff
Analyst, Stephens

That's a nice segue into my next question. I know a lot of folks look at your business and think there's sort of a margin in there to be realized over time. I know you're investing in demand that you really see coming over the hill. Just you're mentioning centralizing on a more common platform raises that question and maybe highlights that possibility for showing some more margin over time. Is that how we should think about it? Is that sort of a gross margin focus once you get everything centralized, and how do we think about the tenor of that?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Yeah, I would say that's a very astute question because that really is how you should think about it. Today we have a really broad portfolio of software solutions with a lot of customization. It's expensive to not expensive, but it takes a lot of PS resources to install and to customize to our customer satisfaction. With the platform, that's going to be simplified. With the platform, there'll be a much higher level of configuration. There'll be returns to scale for us, there'll be benefits for the customer from the total cost of ownership. As more and more of our new business winds up on the platform, yes, I think it's reasonable to expect that margins will go up. That's not guidance for next year, but that's just a reality that it's in the economics of getting to a platform business.

Brett Huff
Analyst, Stephens

That's helpful. Can you just remind us your view on total scores through the cycle? If I recall, I think it went from maybe $8 billion and we're now at $11 billion, something like that. Is your sense-- first remind us if that's right. The second is, we get a lot of questions. Is the FICO® Score less cyclical now than it was before? I think the answer is yes, but kind of give us your view on that and how, not necessarily revenues will go for scoring, but how the durability of the score usage might be this time around if we have a recession.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Sure. The low point was right after the 2008 reset, and we were about nine billion scores then. The high point was 13.5 billion right before that. Today, we have not yet hit that 13.5 billion.

Brett Huff
Analyst, Stephens

14.5.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

I'm sorry, $14.5 billion today.

Brett Huff
Analyst, Stephens

Yep.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

We've just surpassed that level. The more important part of your question is right, which is, how sensitive are we to economic cycles and what happens in the future? I would say that we have a lot more scores than we used to have. We have more breadth there. We're starting to sell scores internationally, and so there's a little bit of diversification there. We have more flexibility in what we charge. I think that while obviously we're not immune, we would suffer with volumes declining. I don't think it would be anything like what it once was.

Brett Huff
Analyst, Stephens

Okay, last question from me. When we think about DMS and I think about big data and analytics, I think the Equifax partnership looks great. It seems to me that DMS and big data, I'm not sure, is there a killer app for big data out there? I know you kind of have killer apps in Falcon and TRIAD. I know those are all kind of based on the same thing. Are you seeing emerging a use case that we're not seeing yet that you're getting more excited about that might power more consistent DMS growth?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

We definitely expect more consistent DMS growth and a lot more of it. I'm not sure that I would call it a single use case, except at a very high level. I think that the use case is digital transformation. I think what we have is a situation where financial services has run 7%-8% of GDP for quite a long time. Over the coming 10 years, it'll probably get cut in half as those products and services are provided through automation, through using lower cost means. I think that our Decision Management Platform is aimed at providing data-driven decisioning to power those kinds of decisions.

I would say that as banks continue on their digital transformation journey, as they continue to try to look at disparate data to have a more comprehensive view of a customer, the 360-degree view of the customer, as they seek to understand the customer journey better, all those things speak to the value of our Decision Management Platform as a solution. I don't think it's a single use case. I think historically, banks have had a need for a single use, for Originations for some area, for collections and recovery for some area, for fraud for some area. I think increasingly, we're going to see the lines blur there, and banks will be seeking more comprehensive solutions, the likes of which we have in Decision Management Suite.

Brett Huff
Analyst, Stephens

Great. Thanks for taking my questions and good luck again, Mike.

Operator

Next question comes from the line of Adam Klauber with William Blair. Your line is open.

Adam Klauber
Analyst, William Blair

Good afternoon. Thanks. As far as price increases, you've obviously gotten mortgage, auto. How's the dialogue on credit cards? If you could give us an idea, do you think that's likely or unlikely?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

I think that all the scores beyond mortgage and auto is a bigger and more disparate group of scores. There's not a simple answer to that. I think that we always evaluate where there's opportunities, and it's not as clean as saying, "Well, here's the next thing that we're going to go do." I think you can expect that we'll systematically look for opportunities.

Adam Klauber
Analyst, William Blair

Okay. On the scores, what do you think is going to drive B2C revenues going forward, revenue growth going forward? Still growing at a decent pace, somewhat slower than it was in the last year or two.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

I would say more of the same. It'll be some time before UltraFICO and things like that really make an impact. The volumes, we're more of a lagging indicator than a leading indicator, and so the volumes, you have greater visibility into what the volumes are likely to be than, I would say, we do, because we follow interest rates. I think your guess is as good as ours on where it goes. We feel pretty good about things, but you should consult your own crystal ball.

Adam Klauber
Analyst, William Blair

Sure. Okay. As far as Falcon, I know you've had some sales international, I think South America. How's the pipeline for future Falcon sales?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Strong. South America's been really strong.

Adam Klauber
Analyst, William Blair

Okay.

Mike Pung
EVP and CFO, Fair Isaac Corporation

In fact, Adam, some of our biggest deals this quarter were Falcon and Falcon in the cloud. Two of our top 10, as an example, were deals that we signed down in Latin America in the last three months that were tied to Falcon. Despite the fact that we have a pretty big install base, there are pockets of opportunity, especially with the cloud, that are coming along.

Adam Klauber
Analyst, William Blair

Okay. Thanks a lot, guys.

Operator

Gentlemen, there are no further questions at this time. I'll turn the call back to yourselves. Please continue with your presentation or closing remarks.

Mike Pung
EVP and CFO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Thank you very much. That concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining.

Operator

That does conclude the call for today. We thank you for your participation and ask that you please disconnect your line.