Right. Hello, everyone. I'm Siti Panigrahi, Software Analyst here at Mizuho. It's my great pleasure to welcome Marianna Tessel. She's Executive Vice President, General Manager of Intuit Global Business Solutions Group. Mainly, it's all QuickBooks, which is like 60% of revenue now. Marianna, I would say you've been with Intuit now more than eight years.
Correct.
Your role initially was a CTO, Chief Product Officer. Then you've been leading QuickBooks for now a couple of years.
Yeah.
Help us understand how technology investment that Intuit did and the platform build-out, how it positions now Intuit to be continuing to innovate and add more features. How are you positioned there?
Yeah. Yeah, a little bit kind of maybe I can go through the background. I actually started leading engineering inside what now is known as the Global Business Solutions Group, so leading that, then eventually being a CTO, and now coming back and leading the business for almost a couple of years. When I was a CTO, I had an opportunity to really think about how we're setting up Intuit for success and for velocity and for developing with innovation with speed. We have actually declared a strategy of being an AI-driven expert platform. We created a platform. We outlined the different capabilities we need.
We moved to the, I mean, things that seem like very basic now, moved to the cloud, increased the level of automation, moved to DevOps, and just kind of constantly increasing the speed of development, developing capabilities that are really important for us today, like identity, getting data in, and importantly, obviously, AI, both in terms of talent in AI, but also developing something we announced a couple of years ago called GenOS. As soon as the innovation started happening with generative AI, we got very early on this. We announced something called Generative AI Operating System, in short, GenOS, which allows our developers to develop and deploy GenAI experiences rapidly and at scale. For example, one of the capabilities that we find super useful today is our developers are using something called GenStudio to develop experiences.
We can connect whatever LLM we want to GenOS, and they can benefit from that and use the right LLM for the right task. They do not have to worry about choosing an LLM. We have our own trained LLM that we can provide developers. That really is paying its dividends now.
Yeah. So when you think about Intuit, I remember that cloud transitioning QuickBooks from desktop to cloud back in fiscal 2014. I think, Kim, you can correct me. That phase, I remember, 2014– 2018, it was all about driving subscriber growth. Then I've seen that after 2018, fiscal 2018 until now, it was all about platform expansion, like expanding ARPC. What's your next phase of growth? How are you thinking? What's going to be the driver going forward? You're innovating a lot. What's the next phase of growth for QuickBooks?
Yeah. By the way, these anchors of driving subscribers and driving ARPC are still like important anchors for us in general. We want to continue getting new subscribers. When we think about our market, we think about all kinds of businesses. They can start super small, or what we call solopreneurs, all the way to mid-market. We are interested in all of the above, all of these customers. Increasingly, we're actually going upmarket. One of our biggest bets is go and disrupt the mid-market. As we do that, by the way, the number of subscribers is less critical for us as we want to go after bigger users.
Of course, ARPC, both in terms of how we think what our base software is capable for and how we price that, but also like what we call services and attaching more and more of our services. One way to think about this is when we look at our vision is to be an end-to-end platform on which small businesses run and grow their business every single day, in which they can grow their revenue, grow their profitability. When we think about that and we think about small businesses being in business because of passion they have, maybe it's to sell flour, maybe it's to open a coffee shop, maybe it's even to write software. What we want to be is that platform that enables kind of this backbone of running your business.
When we think about that, what we have done is we actually looked at the different jobs small businesses will need to do. We mapped it on what we call a product map, which has a list of the different jobs small businesses are doing. Like, for example, get customer, a very important job that customers have. Pay employees, a very important job customers have. Of course, staying compliant and organized with accounting. We have a pretty good understanding of the different jobs. What we've been doing is increasing our ARPC by going after these end-to-end jobs.
Definitely. Still, you think there's opportunity on the core side, but two areas is moving upmarket, mid-market. Definitely, we'll want to go deep into that. The other part, you said AI, that also we'll cover. Let me start with the mid-market opportunity. I mean, that is one area you guys have been talking about. Of course, started with QuickBooks Advanced. Last year, you launched Intuit Enterprise Suite. Help us understand, how do you differentiate when you think about the opportunity for Advanced, preview Advanced versus IES?
Yeah. In general, when we look at mid-market, we are thinking about businesses that have higher revenue. These businesses will tend to have $2.5 million in annual revenue or more. We start further segmenting them. For example, we start thinking about the mid-market customers that are $2.5 million–$10 million of revenue. We think these are great candidates for our QuickBooks Advanced SKU. Our goal with these customers is to make sure that we can move them to the QuickBooks Advanced SKU, and that we can have them consume services as part of that. For our bigger customers, which are $10 million plus in revenue, our thinking is that IES is going to be a great product for them. IES is our Intuit Enterprise Suite.
We released that just last September, so it hasn't been even a year. It's a new product. You can think about it as a ERP-ish type of features. It is for more sophisticated customers. Often, they will have multi-entity and other more sophisticated features, dimensions, projects that they will need. We are targeting our $10 million revenue plus customers to go to this SKU across different verticals. I can elaborate on that. As they do that, importantly, we call it Intuit Enterprise, hinting kind of the bigger customers' suite, which means that we actually want to sell them more of a platform as opposed to just FMS. What you see us do is also thinking about selling to customers more full solution. IES, we are selling as a suite to our customers.
What has been learning so far? It's been a year now since you launched. It's almost.
Almost a year. Don't shortcut.
Yeah.
There's a lot of learnings. As you can imagine, every new product you bring to market, there's a lot of learning. We are relatively new, so there's a lot of learning. I would say the few learnings that we have, I would probably bucket them in two categories: on the product side and then on the go-to-market. On the product side, we have learned a lot about just features we need to continue to develop. By the way, interestingly, we also learned that quickly we were able to get to market with what we had and gain traction with what we have because we have a robust platform already. It was about enabling some features to get traction, and we were able to do that. That's the first thing. We went to market really rapidly. We were able to get traction.
Our customers that are on it are actually quite delighted from what they're seeing and are asking us for more features. That's the one learning on the product side. We were able to get to market fast. We have a list of features that we need to continue to develop. Examples would be when we talk about multi-entity, it needs to traverse through our products more. Like, now you want to have payroll multi-entity. Now you want to have money multi-entity. There's more that we needed to do. Multi-currency is another thing that came up more strongly for these customers. We added project management, very suitable for construction companies, but it asked for more sophistication. We keep developing the number of features that we keep hearing for more features. Another thing that we learned on the product side is our customers said, wait, wait, wait.
Don't release so frequently to us. We want to know ahead of what you're releasing. We want to move more slowly to a new release. We are batching our releases more into bigger releases and that we're doing quarterly, roughly quarterly. That's another thing that we have learned on the product side. On the go-to-market, we had to really reinvent some of the go-to-market. It's bigger customers. They want to have more human touch points. They go through a sales process. If we don't do it, some other companies will do that. We actually created a sales force that is focused on these customers. We also learned that these customers want to be spoken in their language. If they're construction companies, we ended up creating a vertical-specific collateral. They want to be talked to as construction companies. They want to hear from other companies like them.
We developed testimonials and ROI calculators and all the things you would do to really be able to sell. We're still learning how to sell the platform in these types of scenarios. We're learning how to increase our sales productivity and things like that. We've been learning quite a bit. We've been improving. I would say every week, there is progress that we're making compared to the previous week and all of the above.
Quick follow-up to that. If I heard correctly, different vertical industry. Are you trying to go for the product, make it more verticalized kind of solution, like construction industry, you said, or different industry? Are you thinking that way? Or is it the same platform but more customized that solution so that some of the outbound sales guys can target those customers?
Yeah. I would say it's lightweight verticalization is the way to think about this. One is, like we said in the go-to-market, they want to be spoken to as a, let's say, a construction company, as a field service company. They want to see a collateral that they're like, yeah, that's me. That's kind of one. Second, we want to make sure that as we look at flows, particularly quote to cash, that we actually, those flows work really well for those verticals. We have some basic things. For example, like construction, since we started there, might want to apply to a particular project. We want to be able, for our solution, to be able to apply something to a particular project, see the cost of a particular project. Some of them use specialized software.
We do not want to necessarily be niche and start specializing for a relatively small segment of customers. We do want to integrate with some key third parties. We have been doing that as well, which would be another example of how we are going to go vertical without going really deep into these verticals.
I mean, in the same context, recently, you guys talked about now Ashley still joining. I heard like she's going to start soon or join. She's going to lead the mid-market General Manager. It looks like now bigger emphasis on mid-market. How is the role going to be between you and Ashley? Are you still going to focus on product? Or should we think about, should investors think about this is going to be like two different segments for you, mid-market and another one is small business?
Yeah. Let me start from the end. GBSG is still going to be reported and think through as one segment. However, we actually, if you listen to our last call, we did say that we want to focus in three areas, in particular, done- for- your experiences, Platform AI. The second one is mid-market. The third one is money. We wanted to make sure we have enough focus in these priorities, dedicated focus, and dedicated investment. Those areas have been growing really rapidly. We want to make sure we double down on them and we enable even further growth there. That is a way to think about it. We are going to report it as one segment. We are not going to break it down.
Yeah. Now going back to the core QBO, you have 7 million subscribers globally. If we start with the U.S., how penetrated are you domestically right now? Where do you see the opportunity on the core side? How much to drive subscriber growth? That's probably the first one. In the same context, how big is the international opportunity for you on the core, the part that you're going to focus on?
Yeah. We still see an opportunity to grow our subscribers. Like I mentioned, we focus on the pyramid all the way from solopreneurs to SMBs to mid-market. We want to grow across all three. Again, we're less focused on the number of subscribers as we go towards mid-market. We are concentrating more and more on bigger customers, more consumption of services. It is not just about making sure that we have more subscribers. It is important for us that they land on what we call the right SKU and that they use more services. That is another area that we are focused on, not just the sheer number of subscribers. Think about it that way. We still see opportunity for growth in number of subscribers. We're still leaning in across solopreneurs, across SMBs, across mid-market.
Again, like expanding services internationally, we are, again, opportunity for growth there. There are three countries in which we have, I would say, a fuller QuickBooks implementation, which is UK, Australia, Canada. In those countries, we are leaning in, making sure that our QuickBooks implementation is more complete so we can go after, compete there effectively, go after more share of wallet in these markets. In other markets, we're leaning on Mailchimp. 50% of Mailchimp subscribers are actually outside of the U.S. We see an opportunity to lean on Mailchimp and bring some of the other jobs. Remember, we talked about different jobs that a customer would do, a small business would do. We want to tie it to other jobs in other markets. Maybe where QuickBooks accounting, it's less applicable today.
OK. Now I want to dig deep into the services. One part is payroll. You've done a phenomenal job when you launched full-service payroll in 2018. I think, if I see, I think you are the second largest payroll vendor after ADP. Now you recently acquired GoCo, which is, again, more HR. How are you planning to integrate that? What is the opportunity? Is that how we should think about your M&A strategy more, find a gap, and plug it into the platform?
Yes. Let me just, again, take back to end-to-end. We want to be the end-to-end platform, mapping the different jobs and businesses we do, then actually mapping those jobs in more detail of what is the tasks. Like, for example, you mentioned payroll. We call it workforce management, pay employees, human capital management, hiring, whatever those jobs are. We would map those different jobs. We decide which jobs are core for us to play in, which are we want to partner with. From there, we go and say, do we want to build it organically or is an M&A as an opportunity? In the case of GoCo and HCM, human capital management, we observed that this is really accretive for customers, particularly mid-market. We decided to specifically lean in and look for an acquisition in that area.
We found GoCo, which we are very excited about. We are working hard. They are already part of the company. We are working hard to integrate that and to offer it to our customers. Going back to what you said about M&A, you are right that from like big acquisitions, I would say we have all the ingredients. The last really big acquisition we have done is Mailchimp. Right now, we are more looking at these kind of different jobs and say, wait, we are missing here, we are missing there. We are thinking about this as more of a tuck-in when it comes for other partnership or M&A.
GoCo already integrated with your platform payroll?
It's in the process of being integrated. No, it's not integrated. We have not offered it yet to our customers. We are integrating it.
The plan is in fiscal 2026?
The plan is doing it in the coming year.
OK. OK. That sounds good. Now on the money platform, you recently talked about that's one of the growth areas. In fact, again, you have another general manager or somebody who reports to CEO there. That is another big opportunity. Help us understand where do you see the opportunity on the money platform side, your payments and Bill Pay. Also, if you could cover how Bill Pay has been doing. You launched it last couple of years.
Yeah. Our money offerings grew 40% year to date. It has been a really impressive growth for us. That is kind of something we are really leaning in. In fact, the guy who is leading it now, he is going to be the GM of that. We are excited about that. He joined us about a year ago. Several areas where we have growth for money are first Payments, second Bill Pay, and the third one is Capital. All of them are growing. All of them are exciting. On payments, we have been focusing on things like making sure that more of our invoices are payment-enabled.
In fact, we have this effort that we say that we actually have an acronym for, which is Make All Invoices Pay Enabled or MAPE in short, which is the idea is making sure that merchants are easily enabled on payment, making sure that if our customer does not want to necessarily pay, let's say, the credit card fee, they can transition it to our customers. Or the customer themselves can raise their hand and say, I want to pay it. And I do not mind paying the fee, enabling ACH and things like that. Bill Pay, you asked. We launched it less than two years ago. If you look at it now, it has actually changed quite a bit. It was a new product.
We now have a lot more robustness in the product, all the way from making it easier for customers to onboard to have more like their vendors easily onboarded, pay more easily, pay faster, things like that. Importantly, we're actually focused on the high volume, high value billers, many of them mid-market, and making sure we understand what makes a difference there. An example would be batch bill pays or things where they have a bigger volume. They want to be able to do it faster, different things they're trying to check. We've really been listening to our customers that are a little bit more of the high value billers. We go after that. Last, Capital is another area that's of growth for us, both in our normal Capital business, but also we introduced recently in line of credit. That's been very good for our customers.
They love that rapid access to money. That's been another growth vector for us.
One more service that I want to cover before we go, how we do that done for experience, Mailchimp, which has been under pressure. That is one area I would say probably facing some challenges. How are you trying to address that? How should we think about Mailchimp, bouncing back?
Yeah. Mailchimp, you're right. We are constructively dissatisfied of where Mailchimp is. It doesn't grow as rapidly as we want. Yeah, we did not buy it to be delivered to our business. We are kind of focused on that. One of the things we do with Mailchimp is understanding what is happening there. Just to unpack, as we pushed for more of the when we acquired Mailchimp, we really wanted to go after bigger companies. We did that. We increased the number of features in the product. We also noticed that we have higher churn across smaller companies on our Mailchimp platform. One of the things we realized is that we overcomplicated the product for the really smaller customers. We go back to basic.
We are simplifying the product for the small businesses, as well as making sure it is performant, both in terms of performance as well as delivering the value on the bigger mid-market size businesses. That is kind of with Mailchimp. We added a lot of new features. Some that we see gaining traction are SMS. Customers are really starting to use that. We are adding WhatsApp. We are adding more segmentation and more performance marketing. We actually hired multiple talent that really understand that space, particularly from Meta, people that worked on WhatsApp and other areas. Very excited about some of the things we are doing there. We established a sales team around Mailchimp mid-market. We see the growth in that area. We will continue doubling down on that as well. There are multiple areas.
Another area where we need to invest in is how it connects to QuickBooks, both on the foundational layer. We moved it to AWS. We still need to work on some of the foundational connections with SSO, with the data being integrated, with all the way to the bills being integrated, how customers pay the bills. We have some still work to do there, as well as integrating the features with CRM and other areas that we are working on.
OK. Now we kind of covered all the services. Let's see how you're thinking about AI, using AI to bring that done for experience for each of the services. Recently, you talked about agents. How, first of all, what's your vision about bringing those agents for all the services? Second part, how are you going to monetize that?
Yeah. I think about AI every single day. We all think about AI because it is very revolutionary. It is revolutionary for our customers. Luckily, some of the investment we made in making sure we have different services and APIs and making sure we have GenOS really enables us to rapidly develop for our customers. We actually announced May 27 a new release of our product. It has more of a platform experience, which means customers coming to the product. You can see it in our blog post to have a visual of that. When you come in, you should be able to see more of these jobs. Like, for example, you should be able to see payroll as an option. You should be able to see Mailchimp as an option. It has more of a platform look.
Importantly, it has agents technology that we're introducing. It is not just AI, but agentic AI. We are introducing six agents in July across the different SKUs and across the different jobs. How we chose these agents, by the way, is we asked our customers what are the most important areas to automate and what's going to be most accretive. We chose these agents. We worked rapidly to implement them. We worked rapidly to test them with customers to make sure that they're there and introduce it across the lineup. Really quickly, an example would be our hero agent, which is an accounting agent, starts from a very low SKU of being able to just categorize transactions, then maybe a higher SKU, anomaly detection, and getting insights, all the way to being able to reconcile the books automatically.
Those are the we're kind of spanned those capabilities across the SKUs. There are other agents, like payroll agents, does the payroll, much of the payroll job, running a payroll automatically for you. Payment agents optimize your payment terms, introduces you to the idea that you can pay enable your invoices and other agents. Like I said, we put those agents across the SKUs. In our philosophy of pricing to value, we actually introduced new pricing that we announced to our customers at the end of May across the SKUs based on the value that we are delivering with AI and with this new platform experience. We're very excited about that.
I also want to share with you that even though this is new and we're releasing it in July, it's actually already in the hands of many of our customers, many of these experiences, because we wanted to be confident in what we're releasing. We did extensive beta, including this being in the hands of many of these experiences of over 200,000 customers that are already playing with this, giving us feedback, relearning from it, et cetera, which gives us high confidence around the value we're going to deliver.
In the future, you're going to have a separate price SKU for agents.
Yeah. For AI, we want to make sure we use it to gain more customers, to make sure that there's higher discovery of services and ARPC, to make sure that they can connect to live is another angle of monetization. Yes, we're also thinking about separate monetization for our agents in the future, not the ones that we're releasing, but other agents that we're thinking about or more advanced versions of these current agents.
That's how you're using AI for your customer done experience. Now, how is AI doing the work for you internally? How are you leveraging AI internally to your product development or even go-to-market? How are you doing that?
Yeah. We are using AI extensively internally. It's something top of mind for us. This is starting from probably where it's most advanced is our development tools. AI is very much part of what our developers are doing. They're utilizing some of the GenAI tools to really speed up development. We use it, obviously, in our expert services, in our customer success, in sales everywhere. We're using AI. We're increasing our usage every day. I want to share with you, I use AI daily myself. I encourage all of you to do so. It's actually quite mind-blowing.
We heard from some health men today. It's going to revolutionize the whole industry.
Absolutely.
Yeah. I mean, I want to add a plug here. We did a deep dive on your QuickBooks business recently. So anyone interested, you can reach out to me or our Mizuho Sales team. With that, thank you so much. Marianna, I appreciate your time today. Thank you, Kim.
Thank you. Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you, Siti.