Barry McCarthy
Analyst · CJS. Please go ahead
Thanks, Jane, and good afternoon. First, I’d like to welcome Heather Davis to Deluxe as our new Head of Investor Relations. Some of you may know her from her IR role at tech-driven companies like Groupon and Lawson Software and from Buffalo Wild Wings. Keith, Jane and I look forward to working with her. We’re pleased to have delivered improved third quarter results despite continued pandemic-related economic pressures, including nearly a 300 basis point improvement in adjusted EBITDA margin. We continue to make meaningful progress on executing our overall transformation to One Deluxe. As discussed last quarter, we began to see an improvement in the latter part of our second quarter, which continued into the third quarter. We see our sequential improvement in top line revenue, GAAP and adjusted EBITDA margins as clear evidence of our continued momentum. By our estimates, we delivered sales-driven growth, excluding COVID-related impacts, for the third consecutive quarter. We continue to win new business at an accelerated rate, and we’re successfully cross-selling our products and services. We’re pleased to have the financial strength and flexibility to support the long-term growth potential of the business. We’ve restored some of our investments in the company’s overall infrastructure, including technology upgrades, continued real estate consolidations, streamlined organization design, talent enhancements and more after slowing a bit in Q2. Importantly, we remain confident in our financial strength, as demonstrated by declaring our regular quarterly dividend. Our net debt is now at its lowest in more than two years. I continue to believe this is all compelling evidence our One Deluxe strategy is working. Here are some specifics. We delivered 23.3% adjusted EBITDA margins, a 290 basis point sequential improvement from last quarter, better improvement than we expected. We reported revenue of $439 million, improving over 600 basis points sequentially over second quarter with revenue down 11% or $54 million versus last year, also better improvement than we expected. Our sales-driven performance continues. We built cash reserves from operations. Our Q3 net debt is now the lowest level in more than two years. We fully repaid our COVID-related draw on the revolver in October, demonstrating the strength of our business. Over the last seven months of the pandemic, we continued to generate cash from operations, naturally improving our liquidity and eliminating the need for any additional cushion. Our financial position continues to serve as a competitive advantage, helping us win across all our segments. Adjusting for decisions we made to slow progress of the pandemic, we’re on path and on budget in our technology infrastructure upgrade and renewal. We closed nearly 50 of more than 80 sites, representing nearly a 60% reduction in the number of our locations over the last 18 months, including seven additional site closures in Q3. We’re particularly pleased with a future operating savings and significant capital avoidance we’re going to achieve by relocating both our Minneapolis headquarters and Atlanta technology facilities to more efficient spaces. Now on to sales. We continue to make progress in becoming a sales-driven revenue growth company. Everyone sells at Deluxe. Our One Deluxe approach works, bringing the best of Deluxe to our customers to solve their problems rather than simply paddling one solution at a time. We continue to outperform our pre-pandemic sales plan and have closed over 1,000 deals with multiyear contracts year-to-date, including six of our top 25 targets. We signed significant wins in each of our four businesses during the third quarter. It will take time to onboard these wins, and the pandemic environment lengthens implementation time lines as our clients work through sequencing their own priorities. However, we’re very proud to be expanding our pipeline and closing new business at record rates, giving us confidence that we’ll exit 2020 with a strong backlog for us to focus our efforts on converting to revenue. Some of our key wins for the quarter include securing a contract with M&T bank, for our treasury management services. We expanded our relationship with RE/MAX to provide national marketing, branded print and promotional solutions to their 65,000 agents. This is an excellent example of us growing share and moving from a transactional vendor to a recurring revenue managed services partner. And our MPX and VPX Solutions added Delta Dental and Albertsons as customers, too. Our tele sales centers continue to cross-sell, delivering record average order value. Combined with our enterprise efforts, we signed more than 175 cross-sell deals, totaling $11 million in total contract value. The results are clear even amidst the COVID fog. We’re winning new business across all our divisions, delivering record cross-sell performance selling our existing solutions to existing customers, while adding new customers and distribution partners. This continued success gives us confidence that we’ll be able to deliver sales-driven revenue growth in the low to mid-single digits with adjusted EBITDA margins of 20% or more over the long term. Now on to some segment details. Our Payments business continues to perform well and delivered 15.6% revenue growth over prior year. We are well positioned in our receivables, payables and SMB cash management businesses, where we’re winning new clients and market share and benefiting from positive secular outsourcing trends as firms focus on speed and efficiency in accounts receivables. We continue to see new and long-standing customers shifting volume to the safety of Deluxe due to our strong balance sheet and trusted service levels. Our Cloud and Promotional Solutions divisions continue to experience the greatest COVID-related impacts. And accordingly, we expect revenue and profit growth to lag the recovery due to reduced discretionary spending. In Cloud, this impact is visible in data-driven marketing revenue, where mainly financial institutions have deferred campaign spend. We believe the financial institution spend will return. And in fact, we saw increased demand in Q3 versus last year’s quarter. We’ve also signed new financial institution customers as well. While our incorporation and website services have experienced weakened demand, we continue to focus on adding new relationships to deliver our incorporation and website services, including the Hartford and NFIB. Our Promotional Solutions delivered sequential quarterly improvement in revenue while driving significant benefit to adjusted EBITDA margins. While we did not repeat the benefit we saw from PPE in Q3, we did experience positive sequential growth and what we call our business essentials product area forms and more that businesses used to operate. We also signed several new customers focused on our managed brand services program, giving us more confidence in our future profitable growth. Now on to Checks. As anticipated, the secular decline in the Checks business sequentially improved during the third quarter, consistent with the pattern of previous economic downturns. We continue to see an increase in new check customers resulting from new business start-up. We’re encouraged to see self-service and digital order volume acceleration in the third quarter, proving our digital strategy works. Competitively, we’re winning new check customers at a rate faster than before, and we renewed a top five check customer. Our financial strength is a key factor here, too, just like in Payments. The uncertainty of the pandemic continues. And as such, we will not provide detailed outlook for the fourth quarter or full year 2021 today. Keith will provide some detail on our future expectations, which reflect today’s environment. The macro environment remains challenged as we’re in the midst of a second wave of COVID. Most importantly, given the work we’ve accomplished and the results we’ve delivered despite the ongoing challenges, I feel good about our relative position in the market, and we continue to believe total company adjusted EBITDA margins will remain at our long-term target of 20% or better. Lastly, I want to emphasize our team has delivered better-than-expected performance, again, despite the pandemic. Deluxe remains financially sound. We expanded margins almost 300 basis points, paid our dividend, paid our revolver down to the pre-COVID level, have the lowest net debt in more than two years, and our sales engine is working. Here’s Keith.