Good morning, everyone. It's Brent Thill with Jefferies. We're here with Sandeep from Intuit. Kim Watkins in the front row. Kim, raise your hand. Thank you so much for coming to Newport and being part of the conference.
Thank you for having us.
Yeah, it's great to have you. Maybe we start from last week. That was a wild quarter for many. The expectations, as everyone kind of worries going into the end of the fourth quarter of the tax season. As Brad Smith told me once, everyone freaks out, and we're Tom Brady and we throw the ball to the right person at the end and wins. You guys pulled it off. It was a great quarter. Maybe we'll just start there. Your thoughts of, you know, what you saw, what surprised you, what maybe didn't surprise you. Give us a quick debrief of how that went.
Sure. Great quarter indeed. I would say, excellent momentum across the business would be the bigger takeaway from the trends you're seeing in the company. For the quarter, I think it's the biggest tax quarter, given the seasonality in that business. It wasn't a surprise because we've been at it. It's one of those things such as, Sasan likes to use the analogy of a bamboo tree. It takes years to spread out its roots and then grows real quickly, once it takes hold. Similarly, when you're trying to disrupt a new market, particularly in this case, the $35 billion assisted tax market, you have learnings and pivots along on that journey. We've been very transparent with you all over the last couple of years.
In particular, the learnings we had, such as local marketing, which we leaned into this year, such as that marketing timing where about 30% of the people who do tax-assisted way make the decision before the end of December, and we will not turn on marketing until January, right? Those tweaks we made in our evolution from going from a DIY platform to an assisted tax platform really took root. I am really proud of how the team executed and the results they delivered. Beyond that, I would open up the aperture. Yes, great consumer group performance. Credit Karma, the momentum continues. It continues to take share in credit cards, in personal loans. That momentum will continue to build on as our partners and the consumers are finding tremendous value in the innovation Credit Karma team is bringing on.
The Global Business Solutions Group continues to be executing well. I'm sure we'll get into that in the next stage of questions.
Yeah. I think, on the assisted side, that clearly kind of is, as Sasan called it, it was a breakout or breakthrough. I forgot the exact word you used, but what triggered this year that was not triggering in the past years at that magnitude? It felt pretty good.
It did feel good. And, you know, 23% customer growth, 47% revenue growth in assisted, compared to our compass of long-term growth in assisted of 15%-20%. It did feel like a breakthrough. What worked were the multiple strategies we had placed in the market. Marketing worked, right? Because the biggest thing is we knew, all along we have the experience because once you get—you're connected to an expert, your conversion goes up multiple times. Once you get your taxes done the assisted way, we had PRS in the 80s, which is like a phenomenal breakthrough level of product recommendation scores. What we needed to do was get people to look at us as a place you can come and get your taxes done the assisted way.
That is where the marketing showing up local, the better together with Credit Karma, all those things contributed, in their own way towards the results that we printed this year. We are just getting started. Our compass remains the 15%-20% durable growth in assisted. The learnings we had and what worked this year, we are going to continue to build on that in the years ahead.
I guess from a tech perspective, did anything change with AI with assisted this year that really kind of put you in a different position? Or are most of these just kind of fine-tunes? I mean, we, Kim was kind enough to host many of us in January. We met with the head of your tax business then. It sounded like the conversation was there were so many technical hurdles to get assisted going. And some, many of those hurdles you've cleared, cleared through, or maybe are just getting easier for users to use the system. What—I think everyone's kind of searching for maybe even, even a couple layers down, like what happened with just the tech enablement side. And maybe it was AI that helped too.
Yeah. Your question more on the AI, but let me zoom out and address it on the AI customer experience, but also on what worked and what likely Mark was referring to when you met earlier in terms of hurdles, if that's the word he used, in terms of the experience. On the experience side, you know, historically, you would come to our website and we would put the—you come to get your tax done the assisted way and we'll put the lineup in front of you. That's a very software way of shopping. That was a hurdle because most people want to talk to a, talk to a live agent and understand better what the offering is, how the pricing works. That was a big change we did.
We started to operate more as a services business as opposed to a software lineup type of a business. That was one change in the experience. In the front of AI, for us, we declared our strategy to be an AI-driven expert platform in 2019, way before AI even became as fashionable as it is today. We have been embedding AI in our experience. We had some really breakthrough experiences this past year. Those of you who get paid through restricted stock would know that just doing that component, getting your tax bases right, what's on your W-4, W-2 versus what, you know, the 1099 you got, could literally take over 90 minutes. When I did my own tax and myself on TurboTax, it would literally take me a couple of hours to go back and find those bases.
We actually built an AI agent that would do it for your behalf. That was a massive time save for folks. That is one example of multiple areas throughout the experience where we are embedding AI and it is just a core part of the fabric and it keeps getting better for the consumer. Also on the expert side, we are embedding AI and we call them AI-empowered experts. Think of it as a combination of artificial intelligence and human intelligence working together to really deliver the differentiated experience. We saw meaningful improvements in their productivity and the ability to answer questions such as, "Hey, my kid's going off to college next year. Can I deduct the mortgage on the house I bought there?" That could take an agent in the past 10 minutes to go research and give an answer.
Now they can use our LLMs and the millions of data points we have across our company to answer that literally in seconds. That is a massive improvement in customer service time and the end customer experience.
That's great. Great to hear. One of the other elephants in the room for me in every meeting I walk into with clients on you has just been the whole federal government, what's going on, DOGE and all this change. I think you've been consistent. Any change in the tax codes is always good for you because we need you as an advisor. You help us do the right thing. Maybe just set the table straight in terms of I've been dealing with a lot of static globally. I realize a lot of investors outside the U.S. don't pay U.S. tax, so it's harder for them to grasp. It just seems like there's this general, "Hey, what's—what's happening?" Your thoughts on that.
Sure. I would say the worries are absolutely overblown. Let me unpack that a bit more around DOGE and where the government and the administration and the Secretary of the Treasury, everyone who's a key decision maker, where their heads are at. They're looking at two things. One is eliminating fraud and two, reducing, eliminating to the extent possible, waste. We think that could be a massively synergistic relationship between public and private sector. On eliminating waste, we all know, and the government has the data, and the new administration taking an objective look at that data, believes that, and they will conclude, I believe, that direct fall is an absolute waste of taxpayer money, and that will be eliminated.
Secondly, they're looking at reducing expenditure, reducing waste in the government, such as providing us possibly APIs or the private sector APIs, not just us, so we can provide a better tax filing experience for our clients. All that is actually synergistical for our business. On top of that, if they were to reduce complexity in the tax code, that is a tailwind for our business because more people would be willing to do the taxes DIY or a blend of our services as opposed to going to CPS. Net-net, I think it's a positive development as opposed to a worry for us.
The natural question now for tax is, how do you keep it going? Everyone said, look, it was—it was a rough couple of years, right? It wasn't perfect. You were finding your way. It looks like we've kind of found our way now. One of the questions I'm getting, and I know it's way too early to say, but what keeps this momentum going? What are the signals that you're seeing and feeling that we shouldn't have this type of concern? Maybe we had this year. I've never—I haven't felt this in a long time covering you guys. It was like.
You know, yeah. I would tell you a little bit about the persona that Sasan and I have. In fact, while we were waiting for coming into this room, Kim and I were just chatting about one of my kids got a 96 on the math exam, and they were like, "Well, gosh, why did I lose those last four points?" We are the same way when it comes to operating a business. Yes, we had a great result, but we are focused on how do we continue to do better, right? How do we continue to build upon this momentum? Yes, many things worked, but I can tell you there are a plethora of things that we could have been a lot better at. We are focused on those learnings.
I think on the call, Sasan mentioned one of the questions you got, like, we did our celebration on April 16th. It's heads down and execute, and what are the plays we want to run next year? That's where our focus is. Our compass remains 15%-20% growth in assisted and learnings across marketing, learnings across how we could be even better in that experience we're delivering to the customer when they're looking to connect to a live agent, how we show up even better in local, where we had some delays in terms of showing up local with, you know, in the Google search and Yelp search. That took us a few months to really nail that, and that could have been nailed at scale earlier.
These are all areas that we have learning and that we are focused on making sure that even if we got an A this year, how we continue, build upon that A and get that into an A plus and not, you know, not, rest on our laurels.
Everyone's going to now ask you, "Okay, tax is great, but what about this little thing called SMB with macro tariffs?" How do you think about, what's happening? My wife runs a small business. I always use this story. We use eight SaaS apps for eight females and a burner doodle. It's an interior design shop. I'm like, "Look, we can consolidate to you on the platform. Why do we need payroll from another vendor? Why do we need all the front office technology from another vendor? Why are we doing it? You go through and I see it because we pay the bills for the small business." There's a huge consolidation play even if things got tough. It seems like there's a lot of different engines that you can ride: new business formation, consolidation.
I think the one thing from being an owner of a small business, my wife doesn't actually even realize how many of these products you have. This kind of awareness build, how do you get that awareness built up and maybe talk through this durability too of SMB over the next year?
Sure. It's a couple of stages. One, thank you for being a customer. I think your wife uses both QuickBooks and Mailchimp, if I remember correctly. Yeah. We'll get the other apps on our platform as well for her to even have a bigger book of business with us. I heard a couple of things in that question. One is the macro, and two is just the continued adoption of our platform. Let me address both of those. On the macro, it's helpful to have the context that we serve nearly 10 million customers across a range of industries and across a range of sizes. 70% of the customers on our platform tend to be services-oriented businesses, meaning they are less directly impacted by tariffs or other things such as what product-based businesses might be used to, might be impacted by.
Now, on the platform, what we are seeing is what I would describe as stability. Yes, there are some businesses such as advertising, warehousing, manufacturing with revenues down, low single digits, particularly in the month of April, but broadly across the platform, we're seeing stability. The couple of leading indicators I look at for the health of the SMB category, one is how much cash do they have? Because cash in bank is their reserve, is their cushion, is a good indication of their ability to survive. Those cash balances are up about 5% year over year. The second aspect I look at is the hours worked by the employees, and those hours worked are flat year over year. All to say we can realize the sentiment is, you know, a bit down in the SMB category, but the data is showing stability.
That's one on the macro. Now let's get to our business and what's really exciting for us is, SMBs, small businesses, mid-sized businesses are over-digitized. Your example absolutely resonates. When we talk to customers, when we talk to accountants, we are finding out that people are using anywhere from three to 10, 15 apps. They're having to sit there and stitch together their view across all these different apps to understand how their business is doing. Many people got into the, went down the entrepreneurial path to run a business as opposed to spend time figuring out what's happening with the business. That's where we come in by having them adopt our platform and have multiple services on our platform.
You have this one place where you can look at your business end to end, have your payroll with us, have your payments with us, have your excess of capital with us. That is what we are focused on, displacing other apps in addition to driving new customer growth. The way we're unlocking that is, through innovation such as we introduce AI agents. Our customer agent, as an example, can scan through, and this is the technology we got from MailChimp, but can scan through your emails, highlight for you which are likely high probability customers to go and provide estimates to, draft up your, the response to those customers, help you get scheduled. Now, that is an area where we could, you know, replace other apps and add value to the customer.
There are a plethora of these kind of examples where we have the opportunity to displace, and we are displacing other apps, and in doing so, continue to drive the ARPC on our SMB side.
For AI, the industry's all, software industry's trying to figure out monetization. Is it embedded at the core? Is it add-on fee? Is it a copilot? Is it priced by the work done? How do you think about monetization of AI?
AI is still in its early innings, and I think the monetization aperture is pretty wide, not just for us, it's across the industry. You know, what we are leaning into is a couple of things. One is pricing for value, and two is, you know, pricing for, as an add-on module, which we will introduce in the coming months. I would encourage everyone in this room to, if they get the opportunity, go check out our announcement we had on our firm of the future last week and the innovation we're rolling out across our agents, our customer agent, accounting agent, finance agent, project management agent. We are embedding these across our lineup and pricing those lineups for the value that these agents would deliver.
We've had these agents in the hands of hundreds of thousands of SMBs, and we've been testing it, and we are seeing uplifts such as folks getting paid faster, their invoices going less unpaid, them saving hours of time. All that is leading into opportunity to price for value. Additionally, we will have an ability to get add-on modules that will also be an opportunity to further monetize. This is a long runway here in the ways we can monetize and how much value we're continuing to create and, over the next multiple years, how we continue to drive monetization through agents.
I think we're all hopeful for your front office strategy to kind of resonate, but it's been a little slower than maybe we would all like, including yourself. What needs to change there to get the front office maybe where you're seeing the back office?
You know, I don't think of it in terms of front office versus back office. I think you're referring to MailChimp, so I'll address that head on. What we are looking at is, and the way the customers we serve, small businesses, mid-sized businesses look at is the range of needs that they have. Help me get a customer, help me manage my customer, help me get paid, help me pay my employees, help me stay compliant, et cetera, help me get my taxes done. That is the holistic one-stop shop. The earlier conversation about displacing multiple other things, that's the one-stop shop we are focused on, executing and becoming and are making tremendous progress towards becoming. With that notion, I am not thrilled about where MailChimp is. No one does an acquisition for it to be, frankly, a drag on your growth rate.
What I'm focused on is making sure that the team has a space measured in quarters, not infinite amount of space, to execute the strategy, to nail the product experience, to nail the discoverability of features and functionalities on a platform, whether you're a small business, whether you're a mid-sized business. They're making pretty solid progress towards that goal. I would say we, one of the surprises was I thought that the fix here would be a one to two-quarter fix. What we have shared on the earnings and what I'll reiterate here is likely a multiple-quarter fix. I'm looking at this exiting fiscal 2026 to be at a double-digit growth rate. This is more of a contributor as we get into fiscal 2027.
I want to make sure as a team iterates on it and works on it that we give them the space to learn, pivot, and have a durable long-term growth strategy.
Speaking of double-digit growth, Credit Karma, 28%, pretty amazing recovery. What’s driving that? What’s the durability for Credit Karma?
Credit Karma, I would say is, 2/3 our execution, 1/3 the macro. Let me unpack that a bit more. What's driving Credit Karma is innovations such as Lightbox. Sometimes can get it confused with a lighthouse program, Lightbox, as well as the AI that we incorporated in terms of the customer being able to better understand why certain offers and certain financial decisions are the right ones for them. That's really resonating. We believe we're taking share of both the credit card and the personal loan spend. We are scaling our insurance business, and that has a lot more runway ahead. That's what is driving Credit Karma, and that's what's giving us the confidence in the durable, as we've shared, the durable long-term growth structure of the business to be in the 10%-15% range.
Capital allocation, $6 million in debt, $6 million in cash, pretty active in buybacks. Anything changing here in terms of your priorities?
We stay disciplined. We have our operating principles such as, you know, making sure we're allocating our capital towards the highest ROI resources and that if we can't invest at the right level, paying it back to our shareholders through dividends and buybacks. We remain committed to that strategy. I think a testament, in addition to the buybacks, in addition to the 16% dividend increase, is 100 basis points of margin increase in a year where we built out the mid-market Salesforce, in a year where we rolled out agents, right, in a year where we made pretty solid progress disrupting the assisted tax category. That's the question I would get from many capital allocators, like, how could you do all this and deliver margin exit, expansion? We just did it this year, and I'm committed to continue to do it, going forward.
You made a lot of noise in international way back when, kind of quieted down. It wasn't, I don't even think it was part of even the discussion at the last analyst day. It's kind of a testament to how big your market is here in the U.S. International's really never cracked double-digit growth or double-digit percent revenue. When you think about where this sits in your strategy, is it, hey, look, Brent, don't ask me about international ever again. The U.S. is so good. We don't even need to discuss it. We'll go to international already. We get the question a lot. How do you think about it?
International is definitely important. Full stop. Let me unpack your answer. I'll zoom out from international to actually talk about the durable growth of the business, of our Global Business Solutions Group. As part of that, I'll address the international question. When I look at that business group, we have tremendous opportunity to continue to scale the business across volume, which is new customer acquisitions, both in the U.S., but particularly internationally, where there's a lot of unaddressed market that we have opportunity with, especially as Mailchimp continues to scale and serves as the tip of the spear, expanding internationally. When I look at volume, there's a massive opportunity internationally. When I look at mix, the three things we look at in terms of durable revenue growth are volume, mix, and price.
You know, we do not have a strong ecosystem outside of the U.S. and Canada, and that is an opportunity to continue to drive that as well internationally through partners and through building it in-house. International totally is a big part of our strategy, but it is one where sometimes gets, for lack of a better term, I would say overshadowed because we have so much tremendous amount of addressable market in the U.S. to go after that I want to make sure that we are addressing international in a healthy way. We, to your point, have had a few fits and starts there. That is an area where I want to make sure that, under the new leadership we have brought in, under the combined QuickBooks and MailChimp internationally, we execute on it properly.
Brent, the one thing I do want to touch on is price as a last component of our growth strategy. I would encourage everyone here to go look at the amazing innovation we rolled out this week. As part of that, how we are pricing our lineup for the value is delivering across the AI agents, which we've had in the hands of our customers and which are really resonating in those tests and giving us the confidence to launch them at scale. Expect continued strong pricing power for our business. That is a pricing power we will continue to take over the next multiple years. As you look across the next year, we want, you know, most of our growth to come from volume and mix. That will continue to be the case.
In fact, next year on a points of revenue growth, price will be a smaller contributor to GBSG's revenue growth than it was this year.
Terrific. We're out of time.
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Good morning, everyone. It's Brent Thill with Jefferies. We're here with Sandeep from Intuit. Kim Watkins in the front row. Kim, raise your hand. Thank you so much for coming to Newport and being part of the.