Okay, we're here with Dushyant Sharma, CEO of Paymentus, and Sanjay Kalra, CFO. Thanks for being back. Kicking things off with just a quick look at 2024, Dushyant, we'll start with you. Fantastic growth, great execution. I feel like accelerating growth throughout the year as well. Can we just dig into what's driving that, how the business is scaling, and what's ahead?
First of all, Andrew, thank you for having us here. I really appreciate it. I would say it's a combination of three things. First is innovation. The second is moat. Third is momentum. I think what we wanted to design is a platform and the ecosystem that allows us to scale to any vertical or any size of the biller. Combining that with our IPN ecosystem, the combination of modern next-gen platform combining with a next-gen network, IPN, provides a competitive moat for us. When you combine that with our go-to-market strategy of a phenomenal direct sales team, as well as the channel partner ecosystem, it's leading to tremendous momentum for the business. Those are the three key factors.
What that is transpiring into is, if you look at our scale today, at midpoint, we are already guiding over $1 billion in revenue, which means we'll be processing hundreds of millions of transactions, hundreds of billions of dollars on our platform. At this scale, and combining with our growth, which you thank you for pointing that out last year, all of the from the front end of the business, from the pipeline converting to bookings, from bookings converting to backlog, and backlog converting to onboarded revenue, all of those aspects are driving the success we have had.
Great. Okay, Sanjay, over to you. I mean, as Dushyant mentioned, wrapped up with high 30s growth, similar growth on the EBITDA side as well, strong acceleration. Looking back, can you just talk about some of the key drivers?
Following the reasons for the growth in the business, as Dushyant pointed out, what we are seeing is the revenues are up. Primarily, that's our primary metric. There are a couple of reasons for that. Number one, the new implementations are happening at a good pace. The new implementations are happening for customers which are not only mid-size or small size, but even large size as well. It's a mix of consortium of different sizes of customers, different verticals. We've seen growth in same-store sales as well of our existing customers. All these factors combined together are giving us a very good revenue growth. All that's converting to profitability because our operating leverage is very high. Contribution profits are coming very well as well.
Great. Okay. Maybe just on the concept of building the business, Dushyant, you built this business from the ground up. Looking at the broader just biller ecosystem today, how has your perspective evolved over 21 years?
A long time, actually. I would say we used to think that there are certain billing companies, especially on the large end of the market, they would be out of reach for most of the third-party providers. I mentioned at the top of the call, we designed an innovative approach to create a competitive moat, which was focused on creating a technology platform and the ecosystem, which would be very hard for anyone to replicate, including in-house teams, regardless of the size of the company. As a result of that, what we are seeing now is that no company is too large to be onboarded on our platform. Likewise, since we have designed the platform in a very scalable manner, no company or no vertical is too far or too small as well. That is what has evolved my views now.
We used to think that mid-size and the upper mid-size would be a pretty good sweet spot, which has been the case for us for a long time. Now seeing momentum in the large end of the market, where folks were used to doing in-house, is also leading to tremendous excitement on our side.
I know early on you gained traction in utilities in particular. What was unique about that entry point, and how has the platform evolved to serve different verticals and industries?
I think that was a very calculated approach from our side. We felt that utilities are one of the best fine-tuned systems out there, meaning they had to take, because of the lack of margins, they had to figure out how to service their customers at the best possible cost, how to send the bills at the lowest cost. We felt that if we can actually build and drive that customer base onto our platform and make money at it, demonstrate profitability, and then retention, growth, all of those aspects which you will want in a great business, if we could do that successfully for utility vertical, we could easily do it in other verticals. What you're seeing now is a pretty interesting change.
People used to think that you need verticalized software where a company dedicated to healthcare, a company dedicated to insurance, a company dedicated to utilities, and so on. That is the name of the game. We never believed that. We believed that actually the goal is for a platform, not an integrated software company. A platform company is to be available to all sizes of customers, all verticals. That is one of the key changes we are noticing as well, that customers of all sizes, they want to be at a platform that they know consumers who might be using other providers of other industries on the same platform because they want the experience to be consistent.
Interesting. On the value add for the biller, can you talk about from the biller's perspective now, from this horizontal approach, what's the value add to them and the biggest advantages that they achieve from adopting Paymentus?
I think it comes down to two fundamental principles, I think, from our perspective. One is each billing company is looking perpetually at how can they lower their cost to serve. It's not about lowering the cost of payment processing alone. That's not the key driver. It is all the unwieldy processes which are around the payment process, which is what is a key factor for them. They want to make sure their processes are streamlined, they're efficient, and they're able to reduce their cost to serve as a result of that. The second is, in so doing, you want to be able to, as a billing company, you want to be able to improve the customer experience as well, that it is uniform across all channels. That's the point I was making earlier.
If I'm making my own household payment, I'm the treasurer or the CFO of an insurance company, for example, or a government agency, but I paid my own utility bill using the Paymentus platform, I'm able to now see how that will work in my own ecosystem. That actually plays a big role for us from that perspective.
Great. Okay. On the topic of implementations and kind of customer mix, any particular verticals you're seeing more momentum? Sort of what's driving that success into the larger kind of enterprise biller ecosystem?
I think we are vertical agnostic. From that perspective, I think we feel great about being able to grow each of our verticals. All our existing verticals, including our oldest vertical, utilities, and then government services and insurance and others, they all continue to do well. Some of the nascent verticals as well, you saw we announced that we signed deals in education and telecommunication, healthcare, and some of those types of things. They are all growing for us.
Great. Okay. Just on the revenue model and pricing, how should we think about just the shifts in revenue per transaction, contribution profit, overall transaction margins as that dynamic has sort of evolved over time, Sanjay?
Yeah, this evolution has happened since the last, I would say, one and a half years or so since we started onboarding large-sized customers. The mix shifts. The large-sized customers generally have a higher average payment amount. The average revenue for us increases per transaction. Although that is not the focus of the business. The focus of the business is whatever the revenue per transaction is, how profitable that is, how much is it going to add to the company's bottom line. Given the operating leverage is very high, we do not evaluate each customer agreement or each pricing in a very similar way. They are different depending upon the OPEX we will have.
The evolution which you have seen in average pricing in the last one year, it could continue, it could change, it could evolve in a different direction as well as far as it's profitable and it makes sense for the shareholders as providing the right return to the shareholders. I would say per transaction metric is more of an output of the business rather than an input which drives our business.
Great.
I think that's very well said. I think what I would say is that is one of the key messages we have been trying to communicate to the investor community, that look at the business from the way that how we are making what the operating leverage of the business is, because we are a decently scaled business at this point. Our ability to size a customer is more around how profitable that customer is going to be for us from the bottom line. We are past that stage where we are still making investments on the platform huge, where we are just we are entering a new vertical. We are now building massive systems and infrastructure. We are past that stage where we are now able to focus on how do we drive profitability from a given client.
Do you feel on that topic that there's a lot of incremental investment on the R&D side or more so on the sales and marketing and kind of go-to-market engine to continue to scale?
I think the way we look at it, from our clients' standpoint, our clients want us to continue to maintain the innovative edge we have in the market. We want to continue to make investments and continue to improve. AI is a great example. We are making investments there as well. At the same time, from our internal investment priorities perspective, our main focus remains the go-to-market, the sales and marketing, and how do we convert that booking into the revenues of onboarding there as well.
That's a great kind of segue, I guess, into streamlining the onboarding. Can you just talk about what is the kind of newer level of speed implementing customers that you're experiencing and if that's sustainable? Obviously, there's been some bottlenecks in the past post-COVID. I’d love to talk about that evolution.
Yeah, I would say the COVID presented a challenge, which, let me take a step back on this particular point, that if you think about our business, it is serving the non-discretionary side of the household economy. You still have to pay the bills. We saw growth even during COVID for our business, existing clients as well as new clients we were onboarding. What we observed in addition to that was that onboarding requires collaboration with our clients, especially on the larger end of the market. Since the boardrooms were closed, it affected our ability to have the face-to-face interactions, the whiteboard solutions. We are a pretty simple platform to implement, but pretty sophisticated in terms of the workflows it automates. When you look at it from that perspective, you needed more interactions. Since that is behind us, that's a tailwind for us now.
On top of that, during the process, we started to realize all the different breakage points and how do we make sure that we can make even our onboarding process more streamlined in terms of product enhancements, onboarding enhancements, as well as all the processes which go along with it, and hiring. We have done all of that. I think this is a continuously improving process because onboarding will remain a very important part of our business, the only way we recognize revenue. We will continue to make improvements there.
I guess then on the topic of backlog broadly, can you talk about the mix and how relatively attractive it appears today versus a year ago? I think we talked a bit earlier in the week about just the mix of it that gives you confidence in the growth throughout 2025 trickling in, so.
Yeah, the mix of backlog, I would say, if you see the trends, the composition of backlog is becoming very good. It's much more diversified. It's across multiple verticals. Earlier, it was more dominated, I would say, by utilities, as that's the backbone of the business, and it still is. Now we are seeing it spread out across a lot of verticals, even the nascent verticals, which Dushyant mentioned earlier. At the same time, it's a mix of various sizes of the clients as well, not just the verticals, but we'll have small size, mid-size, large size. We are seeing a lot of diversity from every perspective. We feel very good about the size of the backlog and how it's getting better and diversified over time. Together with the backlog, I would say the second leg which we have is the pipeline.
That also is getting better and better, and that's also very much diversified. We feel very good about the momentum which we are getting in the marketplace. I think our platform is resonating very well in where we stand.
Great. Okay. That makes me, I guess, want to ask about the topic of organic customer acquisition versus inbounds and outbounds. How do you think about just the reach of the customer and where that is coming from today versus perhaps a year ago?
I think that name is definitely becoming more recognizable. I'll share an anecdote that we recently were in a conversation with a client who basically said that, "Hey, I used to pay my utility bills with a third-party service provider who we also use internally here. Now that has moved to Paymentus, and the process is more streamlined, and we can see it." It is becoming a lot more prominent. You can imagine how that conversation turns into a lot more sales discussion as opposed to trying to market the capability because they've already seen our platform. We are becoming more pervasive as a company. As a result of that, and that was our goal. Our goal was anyone who's making a decision about thinking of modernizing their customer experience, their billing or payments, they think of Paymentus.
Once they think of Paymentus or we are on the table, we like our chances. That was one of our goals. I think the combination of our financial footprint, our strong balance sheet, our technology platform, our IPN ecosystem, and if you look at all of that combined with our size and scale, different verticals we are present in, it becomes very attractive to the customers. They want to consider Paymentus, so they are reaching out to us. We get leads through our website. We are getting calls into our call center as well. You'd be surprised that it's not just one would think that when I say some of this, that it's small companies reaching out or mid-market companies reaching out. That's changing.
As Sanjay talked about in our prepared remarks, that we're getting inbound leads that even are the large enterprise clients as well. We're very actually proud of that. Frankly, our public company profile helps there as well.
Great. Okay. I guess that's also a good segue into this kind of guidance framework of 20%-30% EBITDA growth, 20%-30% revenue growth. What kind of led up to the confidence in providing that target and what gives you confidence in it sustaining?
The biggest confidence comes from the momentum we are seeing every day in our sales and the pipeline and the backlog. That has been our ammunition for what we have performed last year and what we will be delivering in 2025 as well. That has been the charge for everything. That confidence is there. Hence, we are very openly talking about the long-term CAGR model, that 20% top line and 20%-30% adjusted EBITDA growth. I think they are our primary metrics, and we remain committed to them. This also comes from not only just the backlog pipeline. I would say overall, how our platform is viewed in the marketplace and what kind of leads we are getting, what kind of customers we are getting now. Because the customers we are getting now are also evolving. They are themselves growing.
If they grow, inherently, we get the growth as well. Because our business is mainly dependent on a number of transactions, and that's coming better. Our same-store sales is coming better. Everything added together gives us the confidence that these numbers we can get.
If I may add to that, actually, in this highly chaotic macroeconomic environment we are seeing, I think we wanted to be a stabilizing entity. First, our business model is focused on the non-discretionary side of the economy. People still have to pay their bills.
Second, we wanted to be very transparent with our investors that our guidance, the top end of our guidance, could be achieved without signing a new client, provided we continue to onboard our clients, the backlog we have, so that when you're resting your head on the pillow after making investment in Paymentus, you know that the company actually has a chance, a decent chance of success relative to the guidance it has provided.
Okay. Great. I mean, so what's kind of driving the end market growth? Is it customers paying more bills at said biller, or is it the biller scaling its customer base? What's driving the end market growth that is clearly not mature?
Both of those, and some more. Number one, as Sanjay pointed out, our same-store sales themselves are doing very well. At our scale, that means a lot. That is one. The second point is the adoption of the billing companies, especially at the large end of the market, is actually helping with our momentum. The third is our IPN ecosystem, where you also have the technology companies or banks and credit unions participating at an increasing pace. There is a little bit of a flywheel effect because the more endpoints we have on the originating side, the more attractive we are becoming on the biller side. This is a modern ecosystem, not the old school. That is part of the reason why all of this is actually up for grab in our mind for us.
I see. Okay. On the topic of IPN, I mean, I remember talking about this three or four years ago. I feel like it's lost its focus point by its focal point by people. I'd love to revisit just the topic of the IPN ecosystem and how you would view it, describe it, and talk about the opportunity.
Yeah, I think IPN is really a phenomenal companion to our technology platform. The combination of the two leads to a tremendous, very hard-to-replicate moat for our business. From our standpoint, when you look at, or actually, let me speak from a billing company standpoint, I as a billing company want all of my customers across all of my channels. Whether you're walking into a store, whether you are making a payment on the web, or you're using your cell phone, you're calling call center, or you're using a mobile app of your bank, you want the experience to be identical. That is what we have been trying to achieve. That is sort of the Nirvana state because as a billing company, then you're more likely to get less calls to your call center about, "Hey, where is my payment?
What happened to my payment?" If you can believe it, each of those calls to the call center to a billing company erodes the entire margin for that year formed from that particular relationship with that particular customer. It is very important that the best call is the one which never took place. That is one of the key drivers. We are seeing all of those aspects play out in combination with IPN. That is a catalyzing force for us to turn leads into pipeline, pipeline to bookings.
That's going to partnership ecosystem as well?
Exactly. Partnership ecosystem as well, where partners look at us as one of the hardest things to do in payments and has always been is simplifying workflows as part of the payments. Everyone can actually take a Visa or Mastercard payment, generally speaking, but getting all the workflows lined up so that by the time you get to that screen to take the payment and all the processes, which downline processes have to take place, they have to be simplified. From our perspective, all of that turns our partner ecosystem on the IPN side, whether it's the fintechs or banks and so on, they look at us as a potential partner who can convert their own opportunities into real sales dollars.
I see. Okay. On the recent earnings call, you talked about the concept of interchange being a cost today, a revenue opportunity in the future. Can you just elaborate on that as a topic?
Yeah, I think this is we thought about whether we want to this is a long-term strategy for the company, not today, not tomorrow, not next year. We felt that I think taking the same transparent approach we have taken on guidance, we felt that if we could actually explain our strategy to our investors, that this is the long-term plan we are pursuing. Our execution strategy could be well understood, and our P&L could be well understood, that this could be a pretty significant business, maybe even a unique business than any other company out there, fintech or technology all involved. Meaning, could Paymentus be this company which transforms this SaaS model where you're hearing DOGE talking about companies buying a whole bunch of licenses and not even using, converting that to a company like Paymentus, which only gets paid per transaction.
Paymentus gets paid when you use our platform, not before, not after. From that perspective, could we be that company which changes all of that? When I look at it from that perspective, we felt that our investors should get to appreciate what we are actually building towards. Interchange is one of the biggest cost centers for us, in fact, the biggest cost center. We think of it that way. What we are looking at is how do we convert that vendor cost, if you will, into a revenue center for us. The best way to do that is to participate in that economy. That is what we were saying, that what we will do is long-term. It is not an immediate play. Long-term, we will look at production solutions that actually help us get there, participate in the interchange dynamic.
Secondly, if we have the interchange flowing through our system, it gives us tremendous opportunity to see what payment is being made and how and which cards and what the opportunities of monetization or reduction of costs there are. We can have better tie-in with our partners in that. We can also look at how can we bring more partners into the ecosystem with the size and scale of Paymentus. There are a lot of companies who may benefit by participating in our ecosystem and getting their payment methods presented a certain way. We feel like that there is a partnership opportunity there as well. Fourth is some of it is already taking place in our business is on the outbound side of the payment world where interchange could be monetized.
We feel that all of these combinations would lead to part of the interchange converting into revenue as opposed to just remaining as a cost center for us. We want investors to look at this as a long-term opportunity, not immediate, but you're banking on a company that over the last 10 years had grown 30-fold, what the next 10 years look like, and what the different accelerant could be in the business, or at least areas where our profitability will continue to increase with the scale. That is one of the areas.
I feel like historically there's some seasonality in that metric just based on how much you're paying out in certain periods of the year. I feel like that's been more subdued in the last 18 months, two years. Can you just talk about that dynamic and how it's evolved?
Yeah, I think that still remains. Sanjay talked about it as well in our earnings call that what happens is when you bring in a large client in different industries, one of the easiest ones to explain is like property taxes. They come in two times. Premium payments might be three or four times a year in bulk, but then they also have monthly payments, just like property taxes could be paid monthly as well. There is some seasonality, inherent seasonality involved in our business. The best way to look at us is the overall throughout the year, not a specific month to month or quarter to quarter. You're absolutely right. In certain quarters, we might have a specific cohort of billers which may actually drive a lot more volume.
To your point, it hasn't been as noticeable for the last little while, but it can happen. That is part of the reason why we are actually always very thoughtful when we are providing the future guidance. We are thinking through, well, what if the seasonality doesn't play out? We'd rather delight as opposed to apologize.
Understood. Okay. I guess maybe taking a step back on the competitive landscape, just how would you describe it today? Are you seeing direct billers be more aggressive? Sort of where are you taking the most market share?
I think we think of the competitive landscape for us actually in a pretty sweet spot because of our moat. Even I started this company. Even I can't replicate what we have built here at Paymentus. It's pretty remarkable. It is the technology platform and the ecosystem. Combination of that actually makes it a little bit easier for billing companies to make a decision many times in our favor. In terms of the competitive landscape, nothing really major has changed. The biggest positive momentum or positive change is that even the in-house legacy install base is also the one which we think of as the competitor. That is one of the key reasons why I think when you're looking at our business, you should think of it as a very differentiated, different business.
Even though bill payment has this aspect to it that it is not the sexiest thing, if I may use the word. At the same time, if done right, and we are trying to do it right, and it's a huge market opportunity, it could be a very disruptive growth engine for the business, for the industry.
Correct. Okay. Great. I know that reminds me you made some acquisitions in the last few years kind of getting into the financial institution space in particular. Can you talk about those transactions that have been made?
Yeah. Sanjay, feel free to jump in. I was going to say that on the M&A side, we feel like we do not have any gaps. We got everything we needed. We have it. We are very fortunate that way. We have a very strong balance sheet. We are generating cash and growing. As a result of that, I think we are in a very fortunate situation that we can take a look at. We can be very selective. That is why we have not done any acquisition so far, or at least in the recent times. There are more books available now than there used to be. We are seeing some change, especially for the last little while. We will see how that goes. In terms of the transactions, like the acquisition we did do, the banking ones and so on, they are doing phenomenally well.
Great. Okay. The balance sheet in general is very clean. You have a lot of cash. How do you think about just deploying that and balancing internal investments versus returning capital versus M&A?
I think you laid all the three out in the order of priority, I would say. The most important aspect for us is to grow business organically. That is where we will spend more, and that is where we have been spending more. If you look at our last two years of our cash flow statement, you will see the majority of the cash is spent actually invested within the business itself. We are growing, and hence we need cash for working capital. That is the right place to put the cash in. It is sitting in accounts receivable. It is sitting in prepaids. It is sitting in receivables and different kinds of receivables and accounts payable as well. Working capital is our investment. In fact, last year in 2024, we put in approximately $26 million in working capital itself.
That is the best place for it to be because that is what is giving us growth. As we get larger customers, we would expect the AR to go up. We are not very much inflexible with our customers. We are okay to get payments in 30 days or 40 days because all of our customers are really good, high quality. We really do not have any bad debt risks. We feel very good about investment in working capital. The second order of priority to spend the cash would be if we have a good opportunity in front of us, any M&A, as far as it makes sense, as the return on investment is good, and we think we can add value to the shareholders, that is where we will go in. We will be very, very selective and opportunistic in that, not something which we are hard-pressed to do.
Understood. Great. We'll take some questions from the audience. While they're thinking about that, I mean, this stock's done phenomenally well in a very challenging market. What's gone well? Is there any particular message you would like to get out to investors that we haven't conveyed today?
Yeah, I think Dushyant covered it. I had to just highlight one key thing which distinguishes us from, I would say, maybe others or overall why we have such an important place in this industry is we deal with non-discretionary payments. That just sets us apart and keeps us, not convert. Every decision is kind of a different decision. I think we are very well-equipped to deal with more challenges than what other companies may be. I think being in this environment, especially what we are seeing in the current marketplace, what's happening, I think we stand apart because everybody has to pay their bills. People may or may not spend more on dinners or travel as much, but they definitely will have to pay their bills.
I think that is one of the reasons, Andrew, to your first question which you asked, what gives us so much confidence in our long-term CAGR? That is one of the reasons as well that this aspect of our business distinguishes us. I would say that is the backbone of our confidence here.
Great. Okay. This is a great chat. Sanjay, Dushyant.