All right, good morning, everyone. My name is Alex Sklar. I'm one of the application software analysts here at Raymond James. Very pleased to have Workiva with us back this year. We have Jill Klindt here, EVP and Chief Financial Officer, and Mike Rost, who recently newly titled Chief Strategy Officer. So really thankful for you all joining us here. This is going to be a full fireside chat. I'm going to ask some really high-level stuff at the outset just to kind of help frame the story for those newer in the room, and then we'll get into some more questions on the business. If there's time at the end, I'll open it up for questions as well. So thank you all. So I think just as an intro, given the kind of generalists in the audience, and can you maybe just talk about Workiva?
Specifically, you talk about this Assured Integrated Reporting platform. So what is Assured Integrated Reporting? What does the platform do for your clients?
I think a good way to think about it is that we help companies coordinate and bring together their financial and non-financial information, whether they're needing to report on regulatory or non-regulatory management reporting, or whether it would be sustainability management. They can bring all this information together from multiple different sources and combine it together in report charts, graphs, presentations. Alongside of that, also the assured piece of it is being able to build a control environment around that data as well. In that, setting it up so that auditors and your internal audit staff can manage the data and easily audit and ensure that the data is transparent and correct, period over period. The way that we do this is within our common platform.
That functionality is also connecting the information by linking, so linking the data from one source throughout all of those different outputs, whether it's regulatory reporting, again, internal presentations, external presentations, that sort of thing.
Okay. And just kind of framing for the audience, the financial profile of Workiva today, how big are you in terms of revenue? You've got some medium and long-term targets out there. Maybe just help kind of frame what Workiva looks like today. What's Workiva going to look like in the next three or five years? Part of those targets.
Absolutely. So we came in last year just over $700 million in revenue. We have over 6,000 customers, over 6,300 customers. And as far as sizing this year, we did talk about continued expansion within our revenue. We expect to grow 20% on our subscription revenue in 2025. And we are a company that's focused on growth. And through our investments and through our execution, focused on growth throughout our solution areas. Some of the tenets and the structure and platform that we grow from are focusing on our broad-based solution portfolio, on our platform, on our geographic growth, and then also on our partner network. So those are the areas that are the pillars of our growth.
Okay. Maybe just one more high-level one here. Just in terms of the kind of core solutions that make up the platform, SEC reporting, you all disclose, is still kind of the largest piece of the pie, but it's a really broad suite of solutions that make it up. Can you just kind of talk about some of the other big solutions that you offer? What's been kind of the most in demand the last several quarters as you think about kind of the platform today?
Yeah, I mean, just at a high level, when you look at Workiva, especially for those of you new to the story, right? We're selling into a $35 billion TAM. We have a couple dozen different solutions all on this pure SaaS platform. And those solutions, as Jill kind of highlighted earlier, cover the broad categories of financial reporting, governance, risk, and compliance, and sustainability. When we look at the driving solutions, some were highlighted in our earnings call last week. Yeah, sustainability, we've talked about over the last year as being one of our fastest-growing solutions, but there is so much more to the story, right? So for example, financial services has been a strong driver recently. So for that is selling to the banks, insurance companies, investment firms.
On the investment firm side, for example, we help organizations with public fund reporting and broader fund reporting to manage, which is a use case that's very similar when you think about it to a Q or a K filed by a corporation, right? It's a complex and composite document, something that's regulated, something that has to be disclosed. Insurance companies, it's state regulations and all the filings they have to do from a state basis. And for banks, it's broader regulatory reporting. Think about Dodd-Frank type of regulations that banks have to do from a risk profile perspective. We also sell into private companies. We talk a lot about SEC reporting, but we sell into private companies for their broader financial reporting requirements. And a lot of different vertical use cases as well.
Think about us as a large platform, a couple dozen solutions, very large TAM that we have to address.
Perfect. So maybe switching gears, you just kind of alluded to the fourth quarter call. You reported earnings last week. I think some of the things we saw, top-line growth accelerating. We had an outlook for subscription growth for 2025, 20%. What were really impressive kind of RPO and bookings growth? So what were some of the highlights from your seats coming out of the fourth quarter? And kind of what have kind of the investor conversations been like the past week or so?
They've been generally positive. Our Q4 execution was strong, and we were very pleased with the results. You mentioned RPO. That is one thing I wanted to call out, our RPO growth. We crossed the $1 billion threshold, and in our K, it ended up being rounded. So we did add some precision. If you check out our investor presentation on our website, we added a bit more precision to that number. So it was $1.2 billion rounded on the K, and we added some precision. It's $1.175 billion. So in case you needed that, wanted to call it out, thank you for the ability to say that in this form. But the growth that we saw within our RPO and in filed bookings were strong, and it did set us up nicely for 2025.
We have not seen, we've heard a bit in some of the market about potentially companies have been running into slower deal cycles, extended deal cycles. We have not seen that yet. We're watching very closely into this year. But we had a strong Q4, capping off a strong run of a few quarters. And we're feeling very positive about our ability to continue to address the white space in our TAM that we have that Mike mentioned. And we're feeling like we have a lot of opportunity to do that across our solution portfolio. Again, not only within sustainability management and everything underneath that group, but throughout financial reporting, regulatory reporting, all with assurance. So it's back to that original story of Assured Integrated Reporting.
Yeah, so the $1.175, still, I think, accelerating growth on the RPO this past year. Really impressive on the full year basis. I appreciate that call out there. Just on sustainability, I think this is kind of probably, and you all, I'm curious if you hear it differently, but this dominates kind of the conversations with investors. It's a smaller piece of revenue, but it's been a top booking solution the last 10 quarters, I think you've called out. I'm just kind of curious if you could talk about sustainability reporting in aggregate. What are you all offering the market here? Obviously, there's a lot of different sustainability rules by geo. How big of an opportunity do you see sustainability? And where is Workiva fitting into that?
Yeah, I mean, I think from a broader perspective, first off, just as a note, it is roughly about 21% of our TAM. If you just look at the TAM on our investor deck, it's probably been dominating about 90% of our conversations from current administration, some things that happened in Europe last week, or actually over the last three months in Europe. And just to kind of level set where we're at is the largest corporations across the world are reporting on non-financial information. That is just a fact. You can go pull up the disclosures. In Europe, there's a ton of companies that are doing that right now. And we believe that's going to continue. This is a very tight integrated supply chain of information that is going to supersede any sort of political cycles out there. This is not us being a climate activist.
This is us talking to hundreds and hundreds of corporations across the world and trying to support what they do. So if you look at the most recent filings in Europe for large companies, their integrated financial statements, what you're going to find is these integrated statements are several hundred pages. On average, at least the first 80 that have reported in Europe on this, their sustainability information is averaging well over 75 pages of the disclosure. So you put yourself in the seat of a corporate, you have to go and report against a lot of information you haven't reported against before. This information is being overseen or having assurance by an auditor. And it is disclosing a whole bunch of different things relative to the operations of the business around a structured taxonomy, around a structured set of regulations. So that's the requirement that's out there.
Now, the other interesting thing is you think about if you're a multinational that's U.S.-based, even though you might not be subject to a regulation, you are trying to address the needs of your customers. So this gets back to the integrated nature. It doesn't matter whether or not you're necessarily subject to the regulation. If you want to keep customers, if you want to win new customers, and they have regulatory requirements as it relates to sustainability, there's a high likelihood that you will then also put further investment into your own internal processes to capture and report this information.
The other piece to highlight in the U.S., although the SEC Climate Disclosure Rule is likely not going to happen with the new administration, you do have the State of California, which has a law on the books that's going to require organizations a billion dollars and greater to report on sustainability information, even if you're not headquartered there. So if you have a tax ID in California, if you are paying taxes, paying payroll taxes, paying state taxes, and you are a billion dollars and over in the U.S., you will be subject to the State of California rule. But again, that is currently on the books. The State of New York, State of Colorado have things in process from a bill perspective. So we see a lot of activity still in the sustainability area.
There's probably not many billion-dollar companies not doing business in California. So you alluded to the Omnibus. It actually hit. It's been talked about since November on what the changes might be. Hits on Wednesday. How did it compare versus kind of what you had been hearing in the market, what you kind of baked into kind of the outlook? What were the thoughts on the Omnibus report?
Yeah, so the EU, for what he's referring to, is the EU last November came out and said, you know, we have three different regulations that are all kind of coming into play. We need to simplify these and align them better. So they called that their Omnibus simplification package. This is all about Europe trying to become more competitive and trying to do that. So the publication of that simplification happened last Wednesday. So the EU headline was 80% of companies that had to report no longer have to report. They're going to be exempt. The Workiva headline was the 20% of the market that we really cared about, the larger enterprises, remain fairly much the same. So we can go into very granular detail on all aspects of that regulation.
But for the most part, the target market that we've been talking about since the outset remains unchanged, which is the largest companies in Europe. This is publicly traded companies or what they refer to as systemically important enterprises, which are banks, insurance companies, energy companies, things like that, if they were private as well.
Yeah, so double materiality still included, XBRL tagging still included, limited assurance still included. I kind of, at least from our seat, I thought that it was kind of better than some of the things that could have been reported out there. Okay, so switching gears, we obviously started on sustainability like 90% of your conversations you talked about. But I think one of the highlights the last couple of years now has been this kind of multi-solution wins, these larger deal sizes you've been talking about, new metric of $500,000 ACV plus customers. So can you just talk about these multi-solutions, what's driving the multi-solution kind of platform wins? What is kind of what are the bundles that you're kind of selling together? What are some of the common ones that are in the pipeline today?
So I'll start and kick it over to you. But I think that what's driving the success that we're seeing in those large solution deals is really what we've been talking about in the way that we're selling. We're specifically ensuring that we're hiring reps that can sell the platform. We're specifically training our salesforce and enabling them to be able to have the conversation that is a platform conversation rather than selling an individual solution. We focus them on selling the platform, selling larger deals rather than a single solution sale. And so I think that it starts at that core tenet that we're now building into our sales teams and into the enablement and the way that we're setting them out into the market and that we're structuring those teams within the sales team as well.
And then, as far as the structure is, what we're seeing from some of those, if you want to go into that.
Yeah, I mean, it's multi-solution, right? And there's a lot of different triggers of event for us selling into a company, right? A couple we highlighted on our most recent earnings call. At times, we'll see an ERP migration as a trigger. For example, we had a Fortune 50 company that as part of an ERP migration, they ended up swapping out their old SEC filing solution, their GRC system, and ended up purchasing sustainability. At times, it might be a finance transformation they're doing just in conjunction of working with a large advisory firm. It could just be timing out of their old solutions, right? There is still a lot, a lot of old software out there. There's still surprisingly a lot of on-prem software and moving to the cloud, moving to more modern, investing in technology to supplement maybe the efforts of the staff they have.
One of the things that we also see in our industry, especially selling the financial reporting, is it's been widely reported there is a shortage of accountants, so a lot of organizations are rethinking their processes, knowing well enough they might not be able to hire the talent they want to, and that is leading into technology, and we've seen that trend over the last several years.
Okay, great. So just kind of staying on the platform and multi-solution, you've stood up a lot of new products over the past few years. You've grown that TAM nicely. You've got an interesting the way the platform's architected, microservices. I think you've talked about like 80% of our solutions have a shared kind of infrastructure across the platform. So you're working on a lot of new AI products now. So maybe talk about what's next for kind of the products that you've got in flights. What are some of the things on the AI front you're doing and how should investors think about the kind of potential monetization curve of those?
Yeah, a couple of things on AI. First off, we've had AI as part of our platform for nearly two years now. If you think of the activities that our user base goes through, one of them is content creation. Again, think of a 10-K, right? There's a lot of narrative in a 10-K. And we have the capabilities in context of the platform through our trust layer and security, where organizations, even with their pre-released financial information, can leverage the power of the LLMs for content creation, summarization, improvement, those sorts of things. So we look as more of a table stake type of thing. Another area that we help our clients today with is all of their Workiva data, their files inside of Workiva, their document files can be accessed by the LLM.
So, simple use case even for us as we went through our process over the last several weeks. One, in writing our earnings transcript, I'll go and do a sentiment analysis multiple times over the top of that earnings transcript, utilizing the LLM to figure out once we give our earnings, how are you going to interpret it through all the tools that you utilize as investors? Multiple times, I interrogated our 10-K and looked for areas inside of our 10-K that did we have the right language? Do we have some anomalies and things? Think about it as quality control for our users, right? Those are just kind of core use cases around that. We believe for our audience, it's about the trusted data sources. This is not about going out and searching the internet. This is about searching the trusted data sources that our clients have.
Those are the use cases that we're focused on and working with our clients to make sure that those trusted data sources they have will be part of our future ideas for what we're doing around AI. Now, on monetization, it's interesting for us. We made the transition to metric-based pricing back in 2018. Although we're not monetizing yet, we believe we have the packaging and the pricing model right now that will be able to leverage AI in the future. As I've been talking to other software companies, those that are seat-based are having some, maybe a little more, challenge on pricing AI. We believe the metric-based model we already have in play will be a launch point for us once we get to that point of monetizing AI.
That's a good flag on the monetization. And you did make that switch. It was a fairly successful switch. I don't think we saw gross retention tick down really at all over that kind of two-year period. But yeah, it shows some of the pricing power in the platform for sure and excitement around potentially monetizing a new SKU like AI. So, okay, Jill, switching gears to profitability. We have a new kind of outlook for 2025. You have your medium-term targets for 2027 and beyond. Can you just talk about some of the areas you're investing in this year? And so for investors kind of looking at kind of the investment posturing, spending on growth, I think you talked about growth first and foremost. How should we expect some of those growth investments to actually lead to growth in 2026 and 2027?
So similar to the message that we had in 2024, we are investing within our go-to-market activities in order to drive that growth. If you look at our 2027 midterm targets, we're pretty well on top of where we need to be for sales and marketing. Where we will continue to get leverage within our model will be within the other areas of the business. But a lot of our investments and a lot of those investments come in the form of hiring are happening within sales and go-to-market reps. And like we were talking about, ensuring that we hire reps that can sell the platform, that can sell multi-solution, that know how to do that process and how to form those relationships with our customers. Throughout the rest of the business, we'll focus on productivity, efficiency.
To Mike's comment on AI, we absolutely are looking for ways to be more efficient even within our business. How can we do that with tools? How can we do that with our processes? How can we, as we continue to mature and grow as a company, how can we stop doing things that aren't really providing value to us internally or to any internal stakeholders or external stakeholders? And all of those things we're focusing on in order to make progress. Within our CPX, our customer success teams, and our services teams, we've talked about that we're moving some of these low-margin services over to our partners. And that helps to get better leverage in our gross margin.
In R&D, how can we ensure that our R&D teams have the right tools to be able to code more efficiently throughout G&A within my team and the rest of our G&A organization? Again, using software to ensure that we are using the most efficient tools and having processes that can ensure that those people can have more efficient ways to do their work, stop doing manual things, those sorts of things. So throughout the rest of the business, we have a clear path as to how we're going to be able to achieve those 2027 margins.
Perfect. And you kind of just alluded to the partners. And I think that's been one of the highlights the last year plus in terms of the number of partner-led bookings. And so maybe, Mike, first part for you on the partners and then Jill, a second part on kind of the efficiency you can get from it. But it's been amazing because historically, partners couldn't make some of the big SI, global SI partners couldn't make a lot of money working with Workiva. Now it's kind of the platform's opened up. There's a lot more opportunity for them. So what kind of work went in kind of the last three to five years to standing up that partner channel? Where do you think we stand today now in terms of that being a force multiplier for Workiva? And then, Jill, kind of what's the long-term?
You talked about it on the customer success side, but what's the long-term kind of on the sales and marketing side from having a much more mature partner channel impact on kind of the growth and the profitability outlook?
Yeah, so when we think about partners in the Workiva context, it is typically the Big Four and regional advisory firms, typically that more lean into the accounting side of it. Our primary buyer is the Office of the CFO, whether it's the CFO, the controller, Chief Audit Executive. And the trusted advisors for those personas are the Big Four. The way we work with the Big Four is they work with us in both a co-sell or a deal sourcing structure. And what they get out of it in their business model is billable service hours, right? Their projects are very or the business model is fairly simple, right? They're looking for billable hours of people. There is no referral fee typically on the Big Four side. Sometimes for regional partners, it is a one-year low percentage referral fee that they're engaged with.
What's in it for the Big Four is not only to do the work on the setup and consulting side, but with a lot of Workiva projects, they get to wrap their higher margin advisory services around that. For example, if you were to do a sustainability project today, yes, they're set up and consulting with implementing the Workiva platform, but there's also the advisory work of doing a materiality assessment or doing a broader conversation with senior leadership and the board on exactly what you need to be disclosing in and around this, which is high margin work for them. Part of our model and why it's become so successful is we've really keyed into working with our partners to make sure that they are successful business-wise in working with us.
And it's been tough in advisory land the last several quarters and actually several years now. And Workiva is one of those shining spots in a lot of the advisory firms of high-growing practices and also high-margin work for them.
And the second part of that question around how our partners are helping to enable production within our sales team, so we have a co-sell model. Our salespeople do go in alongside of those partners because we want the relationship with the customer from a software standpoint because that's nothing but opportunity for us to continue to sell additional solutions and work with our customers over time. Now, what we see, though, is when a partner is involved, we have generally higher close rates, larger deal sizes, and shorter deal cycles, so it is to a benefit for our productivity and our sales rep productivity to work with those partners and making sure that those reps know how to build the story and build the message and work alongside of a partner is another piece of that enablement that we've continued to focus on throughout our sales organization.
Great. Just kind of getting to the end of time here, a couple of last questions. Uses of capital. I'm not sure who wants to take this one, but you've made a number of small, I'd call tuck-ins the last four or five years. You're sitting on a good deal of cash, no real maturities on the convert anytime soon. How should investors think about uses of capital here? Anything different going to 2025 in terms of interest level, either regarding M&A or return of capital to shareholders?
I want to take it. Yeah. I mean, from an M&A standpoint, yes, we are constantly looking at what is out there to help us accelerate our strategy. The way we look at it, we don't have to go out and buy TAM, right? This is not going out and buying some new revenue stream for the sake of we don't have the demand in and around our business. So for us, historically, yes, it's been tuck-ins to accelerate our strategy. We look at everything. I speak to bankers weekly, and we take both inbounds. We do outbounds. And yeah, it is part of our broader strategy, but we will be very thorough and thoughtful of looking for the right asset and things such as Workiva Carbon that we bought last year. We bought a company called Sustain.Life.
We, within a matter of weeks, launched that as Workiva Carbon, the last two quarters of the year. It significantly changed how we went and sold into sustainability. And we believe it is a great model for an acquisition that we want to pursue.
Great. IPO activity. It's kind of. It's not a totally recurring piece of the business, but it's a nice pipeline for new logos. And then it does lead to kind of longer-term SEC reporting revenue, SOX kind of revenue. So what are you seeing from IPO activity sitting here today, potential outlook for 2025? Anything different baked into the outlook versus last year?
We really built Capital Markets, our Capital Markets business at a pretty steady rate going into 2025. We're not into timing that kind of a market. It's a small piece of our overall revenue. We talked about even at its peak in 2021, it was less than 5% of total revenue, and we've been consistently building relationships with the law firms and potential companies that might want to become public over the past few years and working on secondary offerings and the IPO here and there. Mike talked a little bit about working with private companies, so we have developed relationships with companies that might like to go public. It's a pretty high bar now, and so you do need to be more advanced. You need to be more mature, and you need to have better processes in place if you are to become public now.
And so we do work with them ahead of that. But as far as the Capital Markets component of our revenue and of our business, we've kept it pretty steady going into 2025.
If we were to see a broader snapback, do you think your share based on all the work you've done on the private side, the private-to-public journey that you started several years ago, do you think we could see your share of those kind of pick up? I know you pick up most of them after the fact once they are public and start reporting, but anything different you think this go around on the next cycle?
We think that it certainly can be a tailwind for us and would hope that the results of our efforts would end up being a good market share.
Okay. Well, just kind of maybe one last wrap-up here. You reported earnings last week. You've talked to dozens of investors, I imagine, dozens more here the next day or so. But what do you think is still the most underappreciated part of Workiva in the story as you sit here coming out of this past week's earnings and from an investor standpoint that maybe is misunderstood by the end of the year? I think people will have a greater appreciation for it.
I think one part of that is the, I mean, you even mentioned that it's the large unaddressed TAM, and it's our broad portfolio of solutions. We win across all of our solutions. We're not just SEC. We're not just sustainability management or ESG or GRC and risk and controls. We have a very broad portfolio of solutions, and we do win across those solutions. And our platform drives that business. Anything else?
Yeah. I mean, I think, and you had it earlier, right? I mean, I think just understanding the story behind the headlines, right? At times, the one-liner that might come across your Bloomberg Terminal might be the thing you react to. But if you click through and actually understand some of the details, I think that differentiates those that truly understand the story and might take opportunity of that. And there's various aspects to our story. I know there's a few existing investors in the room here. And we have seasonality. Those that understand the seasonality, those that understand other aspects of the story from a complexity standpoint, I think end up doing better than those that don't. So do a little extra research with us. And we're happy to answer any questions. Please reach out. And look forward to speaking to more of you today. Yeah. Thank you, Jill.
Thank you, Mike. Thanks, everyone in the audience for joining us. We're going to be going downstairs after this.
Thanks, Alex.