John Rettig
Analyst · Needham. Your line is open
Thank you, Christine. Welcome to Bill.com's fiscal fourth quarter and year-end 2020 earnings conference call. We issued our earnings press release a short time ago and furnished the related Form 8-K to the SEC. The press release can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website. With me on the call today is René Lacerte, Chairman, CEO and Founder of Bill.com. Before we begin, please remember that during the course of this call, we may make forward-looking statements about the operations and future results of Bill.com that involve many assumptions, risks and uncertainties. If any of these risks or uncertainties develop, or if any of the assumptions prove incorrect, actual results could differ materially from those expressed or implied by our forward-looking statements. For a discussion of the risk factors associated with our forward-looking statements, please refer to the text in the company's press release issued today and to our periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our Form 10-Q dated May 8, 2020. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements. On today's call, we will refer to both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. The non-revenue financial figures discussed today are non-GAAP, unless stated that the measure is a GAAP number. Please refer to today's press release for the reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial performance and additional disclosures regarding these measures. Now, I'll turn the call over to René. René?
René Lacerte: Thanks, John, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to review our fourth quarter and fiscal 2020 results. Despite the challenging economic environment as a result of COVID, Bill.com delivered very strong financial performance. I'm thankful for all of our dedicated employees for their efforts. First, a quick recap of our financial results for the quarter. Core revenue, which we define as subscription plus transaction revenue, grew by 54% year-over-year to $38.8 million. Total revenue in the quarter grew by 33% year-over-year to $42.1 million. We also delivered a strong non-GAAP gross margin of 78.6% in the quarter. For the full fiscal year, core revenue was $136.4 million, an increase of 59% from the prior year. Total revenue was $157.6 million, an increase of 45% from the prior year. Non-GAAP gross profit was 78.2%, an increase from 75.8% in fiscal 2019. John will review our financials in more detail later, but first let me give you an update on our overall progress and execution efforts. Bill.com enables SMBs to digitally transform how they manage their cash flows and outflows, making manual paper-based processes obsolete. Customers use our platform anytime anywhere to generate and process invoices, streamline approvals, send and receive payments and sync their accounting system. Over the years, we have built sophisticated integrations with popular accounting software solutions, financial institutions and payment processors, enabling our customers to manage their back office finance functions on our cloud platform. The current work-from-home environment reinforces our vision that now is the time for SMBs to automate their financial operations and Bill.com is ready to lead the way. At the end of the fourth quarter, we had over 98,000 customers, representing 28% year-over-year growth. These 98,000-plus customers trust our platform to manage their financial workflows and process their payments, which total billions of dollars annually. Our platform extends well beyond our customers to our network members. Network members include our customers, suppliers and clients that exchange electronic payments and collaborate on our platform. As we increase our network members, it helps us to fulfill our mission of making it simple to connect and do business. At the end of the fourth quarter, Bill.com had over 2.5 million network members, an increase of 39% over the 1.8 million members we had at the end of the last fiscal year. During the quarter we processed $25.4 billion in total payment volume, or TPV, an increase of 26% over Q4 of the prior year. Despite the significant slowdown in the economy this past quarter, we were very pleased that our TPV surpassed $100 billion on an annualized basis. This demonstrates both the strong customer need for our solution and our ability to scale our operations by adding and expanding new payment capabilities in the last year. Now I'd like to share a few other highlights of this past fiscal year. Starting with cross-border payments. According to McKinsey's 2019 global payments report, worldwide B2B cross-border flows exceeded $133 trillion in 2018. We believe that Bill.com has a large opportunity to capture the portion of these flows that represent U.S.-based SMBs paying their international suppliers. In fiscal 2020, we disbursed over $2.3 billion to international suppliers on behalf of our U.S. customers, up 300% from approximately $570 million in fiscal 2019. We launched this offering in late 2018 after doing the analysis of foreign supplier payments recorded on our platform and receiving requests from customers who wanted a more efficient way to pay offshore vendors. We attribute the strong early growth in TPV to our success in marketing the cross-border service to our installed customer base. We monetize these payments as follows: if our AP customer mix the payment in U.S. dollars, we assess a flat fee which is priced at a premium over our domestic transaction prices. If the disbursement is made in foreign currency Bill.com performs the FX conversion based upon the payment amount. For these payments our revenue is ad valorem that is based on the size of the transaction. We believe it is still early in the evolution of our cross-border offering and that there remains a significant growth opportunity. One of the initiatives we focused on is increasing the volume of payments made in foreign currency. Today, approximately 75% of our cross-border payments are made in U.S. dollars and moving more of this volume to local currency allows us to generate more FX revenue. To reach this goal, we recently piloted new product functionality for international suppliers to choose to receive local currency even if their invoices were issued in U.S. dollars. The response we have received to date is encouraging. The other part of our transaction revenue that varies based on the TPV is our virtual card offering. We continue to believe this product represents a significant opportunity for us. In its Business Payments 2022 Report, Mastercard projected the virtual card market to grow at a 5-year CAGR of 19.2% from 2017 to 2021. Mastercard states that 6% of B2B check volume has already moved to card payments and that there's an opportunity to ship another 2% to 5% in the next few years. Our experience supports this strength. We've had success in converting a portion of our check payments to virtual cards which required building in-house capabilities to handle supplier enablement and payment exception handling. We will continue to make investments in this area as we expand our efforts to convert not just checks, but also ACH transactions to virtual cards. Let me give you an example. Through our machine learning capabilities and our access to supplier invoices, we are working to automatically determine which vendors accept cards. At scale, this will make the supplier enablement process faster and less labor-intensive. For Q4, our virtual card volume represented approximately 1% of our total TPV and we believe there is room to grow from there. We will keep you apprised of our progress in this important initiative as we expand our AI capabilities to improve our operational efficiencies and both the customer and supplier experience. Turning now to our go-to-market strategies. We leveraged four distinct channels. Financial institutions, accounting software companies, accountants and our own direct response marketing efforts. On this call, we'll be briefly highlighting our progress with each. First, let's discuss our partnerships with financial institutions. Our platform is or will soon be the go-to-market solution for the commercial customer segments as the top three largest banks in the U.S. as well as five other major financial institutions. By working with Bill.com, our financial institution partners can provide their customers with many of the benefits realized by our direct customers. However, these partnerships take time to secure, build and launch. Once a bank selects Bill.com, we begin a development phase where we integrate our platform with the bank's online experience. Simultaneously, the bank develops its go-to-market strategy. Next, we do a targeted rollout of the integrated platform to fine-tune the experience with a pilot customer set. Finally, the white label service is offered to the bank's customer base with ongoing marketing and sales initiatives to promote activation and usage. As an example of this, I'd like to highlight our partnership with the First National Bank of Omaha or FNBO. FNBO has proudly served its customers for more than 160 years and we were thrilled when the bank selected us as a strategic partner in 2018. FNBO launched PayMaker powered by Bill.com in 2019. PayMaker FNBO's Small business accounts payable and receivable solution is the bank's default cash management offering for business banking. Both FNBO and Bill.com has been happy with the result of the bank's decision to offer a single comprehensive solution for this segment and we have seen strong adoption of the offering. And just today, we announced that Bill.com and KeyBank have joined forces to introduce Key CashFlow, an online banking solution that streamlines payment workflow for KeyBank customer segments, including both their small business and commercial customers, enabling them to scale their use of the platform as they grow. Customers can easily manage their cash flow and end-to-end payments powered by Bill.com's AI technology. KeyBank is currently rolling out Key CashFlow on a pilot basis and we expect it to be generally available in late calendar 2020. Continuing on the theme of financial institution channel momentum, let me update you on the status of the partnership we announced last quarter with Wells Fargo Bank. Wells Fargo is planning to power a new digital AP and AR solution for its treasury management clients by integrating Bill.com into its Commercial Electronic Office or CEO online portal. This relationship reinforces Bill.com's market position as a leading provider of business AP and AR workflow solutions for major financial institutions. We expect to launch the service later this calendar year. Finally regarding our financial institution partners, we filed a Form 8-K in late May disclosing that Bill.com had expanded an existing agreement with one of the top three small business banks in the U.S. The expanded partnership will open the door for us to provide a bank branded version of Bill.com to the bank's small business clients. We're excited that this bank will enable the new offering as their default bill pay and receivable solution for all of their new SMB banking customers. This significant expansion of our existing relationship represents the largest deal in our financial institution channel to date and includes revenue commitments over a five-year term from the launch date, which is anticipated in calendar 2021. John will discuss how we're investing in support of our financial institution partners later. Another way we reach customers is through our partnerships with the leading accounting software providers for SMBs including Intuit's QuickBooks. Earlier this month, we announced that we've extended our long-standing partnership with Intuit to support one of their important initiatives QuickBooks Online Advanced. QuickBooks Online Advanced customers are larger, have more users and process more transaction volume. They are also a better fit for our platforms than the smaller QuickBooks customers we serve today through the Simple Bill Pay offering. As a result, we expect the economics of serving this segment will result in a significantly higher ARPU than what we've experienced with the Simple Bill Pay segment. We will jointly market and promote our existing direct offering, which includes payment and workflow automation capabilities to Intuit's larger QuickBooks Online Advanced customers as part of its application ecosystem. We will continue to support our existing Simple Bill Pay customers. Though starting in Q2 we expect the customers we acquired through this partnership to be primarily the mid-sized customers of QuickBooks Online Advanced. According to Intuit, there are an estimated 1.5 million mid-sized businesses that could benefit from our combined solutions enhanced control over cash flow, streamlined payments and associated workflows. We are excited to be one of a select group of partners that Intuit has chosen to help further penetrate this market. Turning now to our accounting channel. Since the company's early days, we have focused on accounting firms as part of our go-to-market strategy. Accountants are critically important advisers to SMBs. Our account specific tools help accounting firms grow their client advisory practice, establish a competitive advantage and retain their SMB clients. With our platform the same accounting firm staff can serve their clients more strategically and generate incremental revenue streams for their practice. Our attention to this market segment has made us a leading provider among accounting firms when it comes to automating financial operations. We ended fiscal 2020 with 80 of the top 100 accounting firms in the U.S., up from 70 at the end of the last fiscal year. In total Bill.com now enables approximately 5,000 accounting firms, up from 4,000 at the end of fiscal 2019 to deliver more value to their customers every day. We believe that Bill.com's penetration of the accounting channel represents just a fraction of the overall opportunity. According to CPA.com, an accounting industry trade group there are over 45,000 accounting firms in the U.S. that are members of its association and there are over 100,000 bookkeeping firms who are looking for cloud-based tools to help them become more efficient. We are excited about this channel given the strong penetration we have today and the significant runway ahead. Finally, we acquire customers directly through our own sales and marketing efforts. As we've shared with you previously we have begun making investments to also target larger SMBs what we call mid-market. These mid-market businesses are already using our platform and they are attractive in that they purchase more seats and process more payments including cross-border. The profile of these mid-market businesses are those that have a larger number of employees and have revenue typically between $10 million and $100 million. They also use more advanced software programs such as Oracle NetSuite and Sage Intacct and others. With the increased need for digital solutions to facilitate remote work, we saw increased demand in fiscal Q4 from this customer segment. One terrific example of a new mid-market win in Q4 is Coravin a global technology company with over 100 employees focused on wine preservation. Coravin's decision to move to Bill.com was driven by a combination of needs and their desire for overall control, visibility and efficiency. Their new CFO, Jeffrey Lasher quickly assessed the need for better processes and systems as the company did not have an automated payable solution when he joined. Jeffrey described the benefits of Bill.com by saying and I quote "Bill.com creates a level of transparency and workflow that we lacked. Before using Bill.com all of our invoice approvals were done through e-mail. And as a result there was a lack of timeliness and follow-up. Our AP Department spent time chasing approvals and this was difficult to manage with a geographically distributed workforce. Importantly, Coravin was up and running with Bill.com in a matter of weeks. I can't imagine going back to the prior complex and error prone process." Coravin's ability to transform its business in a matter of weeks illustrates how COVID is accelerating digital transformation adoption. In closing, I'm happy with the focused execution we demonstrated this quarter and even happier with the progress we made toward our long-term goal of meeting the needs of the six million SMBs in the U.S. I'd also like to thank our more than 600 dedicated employees for all their efforts this past fiscal year. These past few months have been exceptionally challenging. And with their hard work and enthusiasm we didn't miss a beat in helping our customers. And as a result we delivered a very strong end to our fiscal year. Now I'll turn the call over to John to review our financials. John?