Good morning, everyone. We're going live with Intellicheck. I'm going to give it a couple of seconds for the audience to populate before we kick it off. Okay. Welcome to the Sidoti Virtual Conference, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Anja Soderstrom, Senior Equity Analyst here at Sidoti, and as I mentioned, next up we have Intellicheck. It's ticker IDN. We have Bryan Lewis, the CEO, and Adam Sragovicz, CFO. We will start with a presentation, followed by Q&A. If you would like to submit a question, you can do so in the Q&A function on your screen. With that, I'll hand it over to you guys.
Okay, great. Thank you so much. I generally go through these presentations very quickly because I think Q&A is more fun than just going through a prepared presentation. Obviously the whole forward-looking statement thing, this is our investor deck. You can see it, all this stuff you got to say about forward-looking statements. What I'd say is we are the only company out there doing ID validation that has unique and exclusive access to proprietary DMV information, through something anybody on the call can look up. I say, don't trust me. Go look it up. DL/ID Card Verification Program. You all will see what we do with and for the DMVs. We're used a lot of ways from our customers.
A couple of things that I do really like is one of the largest banks in the world said we were one of the top 5 fraud-fighting tools of all time. Before the New York State DMV used us, they ran over 1,000 fakes against us, and we caught each one. Right. I say that day we were batting 1,000, and I think for most of our customers, every day we're batting at or near 1,000. Good stuff from what we do on an accuracy basis. Now, looking back at Q1, record revenue. Usually Q1 is our worst quarter of the year because we do have some seasonality built into what we do because of retail exposure and retail shopping. We had $5.5 million in revenue. That was a 13% increase. Our costs have been cut as we've moved off of old technology and onto Azure.
Our EPS improved to $0.03 per share. Gross profit margin, 91%. Income of $636,000 and an adjusted EBITDA of $935,000, which was, I think, a 5x increase year-over-year. Those numbers shouldn't change. We do not need to add expense to build out the company and bring on new customers. I think just looking at things, year-over-year, you can see the change in both net income and adjusted EBITDA. Adam is much better explaining some of these numbers than I am. We do not expect there's no reason that profitability doesn't increase. Right? Our operating margins will not change. Even if I tripled the revenue of the company, the only thing I'd have to add is some account managers. Nothing really else.
What I like is a very sustainable company with no debt, no ugliness in our cap table, very clean, no reason to raise any money, and we expect to see this trend continue. What are we helping our customers do? I'd say we do two things for them. One is we help them onboard customers faster, while at the same time stopping their fraud. It is a big problem. Generally, I'll tell people that I bum you out when I talk because the ease at which I could steal your identity is insane, right? I have stacks and stacks of fake driver's licenses that our customers have confiscated. This is the most expensive bit about stealing your identity. In bulk, the bad guys, these are going to cost them $40.
For me to go online and buy name, address, Social Security number, phone number, all sorts of other things, is going to be no more than $20. It's getting hit anywhere, everywhere, right? One of my favorite things is just the fact almost 80% of every automotive dealership has had a car lost over fraud, right? We're not talking cheap cars. These are generally expensive cars. We are a fantastic value proposition for those folks. Right? I also think we've got a very big competitive moat, right? We do it really fast. We do not require a photo of the ID. We work with basically the hardware that already exists, right? In a retail store, this thing that rings up the merchandise can read the credit card. In a bank, the thing that can read a check can read the driver's license.
That's what I meant to say before. It reads a driver's license. You scan it, and generally, prior to getting the merchandise in the bag, we've proven who you are and make it real. Now, everybody always asks me about AI. Does AI scare you? No. AI is making it easier for our customer journey. AI cannot break the barcode. There are digital signatures. There are all sorts of things in there that basically are quantum computing proof. There's 250 different formats. If somebody says, "Well, what if your competitor gets one of the formats?" Great. You got 249 to go before you can be as accurate as we are. The other thing that I'd say is that we have about half the states at a state level, their law enforcement is using us to authenticate IDs. Our competitors cannot say the same thing.
They're very hardware intensive because they need a photo of the license to do templating, compare it to a template of what that license should look like. AI should be scaring them because AI makes it really easy to create a very, very accurate license front and back. The thing too is, the reason there's 250 different formats, no state, province, or territory uses the same format. We do scans in American Samoa. They're different than British Columbia, and they're different than South Carolina. We know all those formats. We've got a pretty big moat. No hardware required, and access to data through that DL/ID Card Verification Program that I talked about that nobody has as well. We are completely SaaS-based. Nothing has to be downloaded. We have multiple ways in which we can deliver the product, everything from integrated to non-integrated.
Far, I've yet to see a point-of-sale software system or a bank branch scanner that we cannot integrate with. We also have web applications and a simple app you can download on your phone if you want to check it. Making it really, really simple. Normally, what I'd say is, who's got a credit card at any major big box retailer? In a room, people would almost always raise their hand, and I'd say, "Then you've been through our system, and you never knew it." We're completely white labeled. People don't know who we are, and that's the way we like it. A couple of call-outs on sort of where we've been. People grow with us. When they start with us, a customer, they generally grow. One of the largest banks and credit card providers out there grew 33% over the past year with us.
We've got a leading regional bank in the Southeast that will be doubling their spend with us coming in Q3. First American Title, and I say title because we've got 43% of the title insurance market, I can't wait for interest rates to go down, has implemented us into their AgentNet platform, which means every single time they do a title check, they will be using us. We are now live with Alloy, who provides the core banking software for about 150 banks, if I remember right. A really big growth area for us. We've got one of our credit card providers, who also has a very large buy now, pay later division, is integrating us into that.
In lease-to-own, we now have 2 of the top 4 companies, which makes it easier to get into the rest because, as we know, a lot of people are like, "If my competitors are doing it, I probably should as well." Multiple growth vectors for us going forward. Again, title insurance. Cargo and freight, that's an emerging one for us, which came to us, and I'm loving it. As a truck driver, you generally get hired remotely. You show up with your truck, and you drive off with that tractor trailer, and that's on average a $300,000 a year loss. Banking channel partner, again, really very excited about Alloy, and I think it will lead to others. Background checks is, in my mind, amazing.
We have 2 automotive manufacturers who are requiring everybody who comes into their plant to use us to authenticate themselves, and then also every 1 of their suppliers to authenticate all of their employees. Then, as we said, lease-to-own. I see lease-to-own and buy now, pay later as areas that we'll target and will be growing in. Why do we think we're positioned for success? Because our NRR is positive. 111% in 2025. Really the only customers we lose are the small bars and restaurants that go out of business. 90% plus gross margins consistent for years and years, and we don't see that changing. An absolutely solid balance sheet. $10 million, no debt, no warrants, no ugliness. I think that we've got a really good focus on marketing.
We've outsourced that to a company out of Silicon Valley, and we're spending less and getting an even larger return than we were before. Then again, adjusted positive net income and adjusted EBITDA for 2025, and we don't see that changing at all going forward. 2025 full year highlights, $22.6 million in revenue, $22.4 million in SaaS revenue. Differential there would be fees that we charge for implementations. Again, our focus is really on SaaS revenue. Gross margin of 90.4%. Net income $1.2 million, adjusted EBITDA $2.5 million. I don't know, Adam, anything on those financial highlights you would add to or point out?
I just want to say I think it's important that the company's been GAAP positive now in 2025. That chart that Brian mentioned is probably my favorite chart that shows the profitability going along with the revenue. For us, it's an exciting time and a story that we think that we can grow the revenue, and the gross margins will still stay in the 90s. We're excited to be here.
Cool. That kind of brings into why I think we're a good investment. Record revenue. Diversification is working. A lot of people were under the assumption that we were basically a retail credit card company. We are in multiple different markets now and growing, which I do think takes some seasonality and some exposure to macroeconomic factors out of the game. First year of full operating profitability, basically, in the company's history. Again, a significant competitive moat, 25-plus years working with the DMVs. We know all the barcode formats. They are all proprietary. We get it and we're fast, right? 90% gross profit margins and completely scalable ops. Moving off of the old technology that was here when I started and moving on to a completely containerized system that we can put on any cloud platform. Now we're on AWS.
That has saved us so much money that we are more than offsetting the cost of the GPUs that my data science team is using. We were recognized as a leader in the IDC MarketScape report they put out earlier this year, which you can get from our website if you'd like to read it. I think finally, really good recognition. Then just if anybody cares, these are the folks that are currently covering us. Very, very clean cap table with 60% of the common shares held institutionally. Many of those are held by folks who have been long-term investors, who truly believe and have not sold basically a share. So Adam, anything you want to pull off of this page before we turn it over to questions?
Only thing I'd say is there is one other non-GAAP metric that we started to report, which is adjusted gross margin. That's because we capitalized quite a bit of software development expenses that you're now starting to see come through the income statement. We've sort of added back those non-cash things. You'll see that as well in our filings, that's a relatively new metric for us when you start to look at us. Adjusted EBITDA is kind of a common one, and of course, the main things that we're adding back are the sort of non-cash stock compensation and amortization and depreciation. Those are the main adjustments that we're making for adjusted EBITDA.
Cool. Like I said, I like to be quick, and if there's questions, I'd happily turn it over to any questions anybody has.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Bryan, there's a couple of Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Anja.
Do you want to address the questions directly?
I was just going to say to Bryan, I just saw the first two questions are related to the recent action in the stock after the earnings announcement. There's a couple of people who asked that same question.
Look, I'd say that I think that there was a combination of a slight miss on revenue, not offset by the fact that we certainly beat on income and EPS and other things. We had one analyst who downgraded us. I think that particular analyst did not understand, wrongly interpreted our pipeline. That got in, I think from what we heard from the exchanges, some of the algorithmic traders in, who just started whacking it, and that caused some other people to sell. I personally believe that at these levels, there's a lot of value to be there.
I've told everybody that if it weren't for the fact that I was the seventh largest or so shareholder in the company and my financial advisor said, "You need to change that up." I put a 10b5-1 plan in place last year that had tiers on which I could sell price-wise. Since I sold, I can't buy because I'll be hit by the short swing sale rule. I think that's really what it boiled down to. In my opinion, an overreaction.
Thank you. Again, if you have a question, you can submit it in the Q&A function at the bottom of screen. I'm going to kick off with a couple of questions and also sort of to delve a little bit more into your first earnings results, because I thought they were quite impressive with a 13% growth in both revenue and SaaS revenue. You saw the operating expenses decline year-over-year. What's driving that decline, and what was the main driver for the growth in revenue?
I think the main driver of the decline is we had to put a lot of money into what I would say is updating the tech stack. We were very much tied into basically .NET kind of stuff, and that tied us very heavily into Azure and all the things that Microsoft makes you buy. By changing the tech stack and moving to AWS, we're able to have less people at less cost, even on our per compute charges have dropped significantly. The other thing I think is completely outsourcing our marketing, which I think, and Adam, correct me, I think we're spending about 50% of what we were, but I think we're seeing about a 200% return on the leads and things that we have coming in. They're really good.
Okay. Are there more savings to be made, or is this sort of the new baseline for the first quarter?
Yeah, I think we're probably, Adam Sragovicz, I don't think we've got any other big expenditures coming in. We're always sharpening our pencil, and looking at are we doing things right, and spending the right amount of money, and we'll cut where we see it, but I don't think there'll be anything really as significant as the drop-off on a lot of consultants we hired because moving off of what we were and onto what we are today, I view as sort of like a project, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That's a thing that's good to get outsourced because they're not permanent employees, and you don't need them afterwards. We had a lot of consultants who are now gone, but we are also seeing significant savings between the Azure and AWS platforms.
So it seems like-
I'll just jump in. Sorry, I was going to say that I saw it kind of dovetails with a question someone asked about operating leverage, and then how did the company come to profitability. I just think about the business model as being very high leverage, right? There's 90%-ish margins, and every incremental $1 kind of goes to the bottom line. Once you get to a certain transaction level that revenue crosses a threshold where you cover your fixed costs, then all the growth is that margin expansion. Profitability sort of came, as Bryan said, there was a lot of investment in sort of building all the data and technology advantages and there's a lot of upfront costs, but now it's something that you don't need to sort of redo every year.
Bryan, that question asker also asked the question about how much pricing flexibility that we have, and you've talked about the asymmetry sort of in the cost versus potential loss. Maybe take the rest of that question.
Yeah. I'd say two things. Profitability. Look, when I started, the pricing model was completely wrong. They were basically per location pricing at $16. I looked at the numbers, and revenue had been going from here to here before I came on board, and I changed the pricing model from $16 a location to per transaction. We had to sign new clients. We had to get them going. We had to show that we were a trusted partner. Pricing, we continue to raise prices. It's built into every one of our contracts. New markets we're going into, we're realizing we're going to charge a lot more than we had been historically. Yeah, we definitely have pricing power. How do we sign up new customers?
Sales team getting out there and the marketing team getting us new leads and what I'd say is thought leadership, which they have been doing a very good job with all the webinars and the white papers and the other things that we deal with. New customers, just getting the right people and fighting that battle. Digital wallets and MDLs. Here's about MDLs. There is no standard format. States don't like them. Colorado does their completely own thing. You've got three providers of them. Every state requires that you still have your physical license with you. The uptake of them is ridiculously low. I think in New York State it's 2%, and in California it's 5%. Those are the two most populous states. Nobody's really using them. Part of the reason for that is law enforcement can't stand them. They've got no way to authenticate it.
I always say, "Am I going to hand my unlocked phone to a police officer? Is a police officer going to want to hold my phone that has a broken screen?" Because first thing I'm going to do is say, "He broke my screen." Law enforcement doesn't like it. They've got no way to authenticate them, and they've got no budget to buy anything that can. Can we read MDLs? Absolutely. Most of our customers don't have the capability to do it. That's what it is. If you think about how long it took for the retailers to put in something that could read a chip, it took forever, right? The MDL does not have any uptick. You've got Idaho saying, "We are not going to make you do it," and I expect to see other states do that as well.
There's plenty of states that don't have them yet and won't for years. Until it has a standard way to evaluate it, law enforcement can read it, and every state is involved, I think it's a solution in search of the problem. Okay. Banking. Quick kind of question. Go to market, balancing direct sales against orchestration platforms. I'd say sort of like 50/50. The big guys always want to come in and kick our tires directly. The small guys are happy to have us because they've outsourced their core banking systems to somebody else. They want to oftentimes go through that outsourced core technology company. However, those folks are generally very slow to implement new solutions, which is why I like this new delivery method called desktop, because we can go around them, which then makes them want to work with us. Okay.
Hopefully, that answered that question. How will you use free cash flow? I think mostly putting a goodly chunk of it in the bank, but also spending more on marketing. Okay. Look at trajectory of growth sequences over the next few quarters. I'd say that the question is, are we relying on growth for retail to come back or through new customers? The majority of the growth that we see in the next 3 quarters or so, I'm definitely not a macroeconomic expert. We are looking at new customers and expansion in existing customers. I'm very happy with the pipeline shaping, right? Some new people on the sales team that I would call adults in the room, if you will, in addition to how well marketing is bringing in leads, has me very confident in the pipeline.
How is the potential average deal size in some of the new markets compared to established markets? It really depends. Even within banking, we've got some customers who are $4 million a year and some customers who are, say, $100,000 a year. I will say the $100,000 a year customers are way easier to sign and get on board. If I can get 100 of those in the same time as it takes me to get a giant bank who I've been on calls with when we're doing implementations, and they'll have over 100 on an implementation call. You can imagine that's like dealing with the federal government. Takes forever. The smaller guys, a lot quicker, easier. We're always shooting for the home run, but we're also making sure that we need the small guys who are easy.
Finally, do you see any need to raise capital? Nope. Right? I get 1 million bankers calling me up all the time saying, "Hey, you should put an ATM in place. You should do this. You should do that." I'm like, "Why?" All I'm going to do Great, I raised another $10 million. Who cares? I can't do anything really with it. I've got enough money. No. No plans on raising money at all. We don't see any need for it. I always put the caveat into that. If somebody said, "Hey, Bryan, I found this company that makes a ton of sense for you to buy," then we might have to do it, but that would only be hopefully for something that was accretive. So far, we haven't seen anything like that. We know what we need to build. We have the money to do it.
We have the people to do it. No need to raise outside money.
Sounds good. We're just on time for the conclusion of this. I just want to thank you and the audience for participating. Before we close it, I just want to hand it over to you guys for some closing remarks.
Thank you all for listening to our presentation. I love our company. I love the fact that I feel like we're crime stoppers. That's the way I look at it. One of my favorite things is, yeah, we're validating IDs, but you know what we're doing? We're keeping your family, your neighbors, your friends from being victims of identity theft. Every day when I see the report of how many times we stop that, makes me happy, gets my team excited, and makes us want to be better every day. Thanks for your time. Appreciate it very much.
Great. Thank you. Have a good rest of your day.
You too.