Earnings Labs

Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO)

Q1 2016 Earnings Call· Thu, Jan 28, 2016

$1,015.44

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Caitlyn and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Fair Isaac Corporation's Quarterly Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. Thank you. Steve Weber, you may begin your conference. Steven P. Weber - Vice President, Treasurer & Investor Relations: Thank you, Caitlyn. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining today's FICO first quarter earnings call. I'm Steve Weber, Vice President of Investor Relations, and I'm joined today by our CEO, Will Lansing; and our CFO, Mike Pung. Today we issued a press release that describes financial results compared to the prior year. On this call, management will also discuss results in comparison to prior quarter, in order to facilitate understanding of the run rate of our business. Certain statements made in this presentation may be characterized as forward-looking under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Those statements involve many uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Information concerning these uncertainties is contained in the company's filings with the SEC, in particular in the Risk Factors and Forward-looking Statements portions of such filings. Copies are available from the SEC, from the FICO website, or from our Investor Relations team. This call will also include statements regarding certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the company's earnings release and Regulation G schedule issued today for a reconciliation of each of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measure. The earnings release and Regulation G schedule are available on the Investor Relations page of the company's website at fico.com or on the SEC's website at sec.gov. A replay of this webcast will be available…

Operator

Operator

Your first question comes from the line of Manav Patnaik from Barclays. Your line is open.

Manav Patnaik - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Yeah. Hi, good evening, gentlemen. My first question was going to be around sort of what you guys were hearing in the economy but I think you sort of answered it with your comments around origination activity. I was hoping if you could give us a little bit more color maybe by the different origination lending areas, like what was driving the growth? Was it broad based? And also when you said the account management score pulls were increasing, just curious, what drove that because it sounded like the pulls in account management were already increasing for quite some time because of just the increased risk management by the banks? Michael J. Pung - Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President & Investor Relations: Yeah, Manav, what was driving originations this quarter is a lot of what we've seen leading up to this quarter, which is the auto scores that are being pulled for auto sales, along with more credit card pulls, that are starting to appear within the underlying numbers. As it relates to account management, we have been seeing a trend of an increase in scores pulled; in fact, this quarter was one of the largest we've seen in a number of years. And what's been driving that in part is enhanced credit risk management going on within the banks, as well as more and more banks who are rolling out open access programs, are beginning to pull scores more frequently in order to provide that to their customers in the form of a monthly report.

Manav Patnaik - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. And then just stick on Scores, and it seems like obviously everyone is pulling the FICO Score more and more. I was hoping you could provide some of your thoughts on – we've seen in the recent press obviously you've had someone like SoFi take pretty aggressive stabs in the marketing of the FICO Score. And then there's also been some noise around making sure FICO is not mandated to be used, or however you want to phrase it, in the mortgage market? I was hoping we could hear your views on that. William J. Lansing - Chief Executive Officer, President & Director: Sure. The very short answer to your question is the FICO Score franchise has never been stronger. It's very healthy and what we're seeing is more and more customers coming to FICO, not customers departing from FICO. As you know, in the U.S. we have a 90% share in credit decisioning in situations where scores are used. And what we're seeing is, in the 10% we don't have, we're seeing customers come back rather than departures. I'm glad you raised the question because it's worth commenting on some of these recent articles and the discussion with the alternative lenders. When we put together a FICO Score, our goal is to provide precision credit decisioning with the most predictive power possible across as large a population as we can, an actionable population for our clients. And so the FICO Score that we're all familiar with is designed to do that. It's designed to provide a high level of prediction across a large population. There are always situations where you can take a very narrow population and find some dataset that has high predictive power for a credit decision for a very narrow population. And that's not a…

Manav Patnaik - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. And then just last one. Thank you. That was really helpful. Just the Experian contract looks like it's going pretty well. I just wanted an update, I think last time you had said that you had a few other sort of things in the pipeline with respect to D2C, any updates there for us? William J. Lansing - Chief Executive Officer, President & Director: We do have things in the pipeline but we don't have updates for you at this time. We continue to have bigger prospects there and we have very strong partnership with Experian but nothing to announce right now.

Manav Patnaik - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Okay, fair enough. Thank you, guys.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Bill Warmington from Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

William A. Warmington - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Good afternoon, everyone. William J. Lansing - Chief Executive Officer, President & Director: Hi, Bill.

William A. Warmington - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

So congratulations on a solid quarter. William J. Lansing - Chief Executive Officer, President & Director: Thanks.

William A. Warmington - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

So one of the themes that seems to be coming across in the number of different segments is new customers and you mentioned that for Falcon. You mentioned it for Collection and Recovery. You mentioned it for B2B. And I was hoping if you could just go to those segments and talk about what is it that suddenly in what's perceived to be a relatively mature market, highly penetrated, you're actually bringing in new customers? William J. Lansing - Chief Executive Officer, President & Director: Yeah, absolutely. Some of it is increasing capability and additional features around our core offering. Some of it there is some amount of international expansion that's going on. With questions on recovery what started out as being a bit more of a focus on third-party collections has really broadened so that we believe we have the premier offering for both banks and third party. So there's a broadening there and an expansion of our Collections and Recovery franchise. And then B2B Scores, we touched on it earlier. You're seeing some activity that just comes from the economy picking up and more attention to risk management from the banks but also we believe that banks are pulling the scores much more frequently to support their communication of the scores to consumers. And so as they put FICO Scores on to bank statements, they're reaching out for scores on a more frequent basis and sometimes for more accounts than they were pulling before.

William A. Warmington - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay. So question for you on DMS. You mentioned that you'd added 23 quota-carrying sales people, what's your total up to now? Michael J. Pung - Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President & Investor Relations: Our total, Bill, I got to check. Give me a second to check.

William A. Warmington - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay. While you're checking – my question is going to be, you were selling previously. It sounded like average sale was running about $0.5 million. You were seeing some of your existing customers come back and buy more. What have been the trends there? Are you adding new customers? Are you able to – are the existing customers coming back and buying more? William J. Lansing - Chief Executive Officer, President & Director: We're adding new customers and we're seeing existing customers buy more. Although we don't position DMS as a platform when we sell it, and we position it as a solution to a problem, the fact is the way it's architected, we're putting in a lot of platform capability when we sell the very first solution. And so the ability to expand on that, and to broaden the solution and to move into adjacent areas for our customers is pretty high, flexible and fast. And so we are seeing initial DMS sales followed by follow-up sales.

William A. Warmington - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

So on the Tools side, what was the size of the one-time royalty settlement? I'm just trying to get at a normalized growth rate for Tools? William J. Lansing - Chief Executive Officer, President & Director: It was just under $6 million a year ago.

William A. Warmington - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Got you. So that was the onetime royalty settlement? William J. Lansing - Chief Executive Officer, President & Director: Yes, so if you pull that out, you'll get a sense for where we are.

William A. Warmington - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Got it. And what was driving the increase in the transactional and maintenance revenue on a year-over-year basis from 69% to 74%? Michael J. Pung - Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President & Investor Relations: A lot of it, Bill, was the myFICO Scores and the B2B Scores business, along with the Experian revenue as well as fraud and TRIAD revenue that comes through our channels on a transactional license basis. So it's kind of the big products.

William A. Warmington - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

And I wanted to ask about your – you mentioned potentially using your free cash for repurchases and M&A. I wanted to ask, given the pullback in the share price, what your leanings were now and whether you guys have been out in the market in January. William J. Lansing - Chief Executive Officer, President & Director: We have been in the market and we continue to view our stock as just a terrific opportunity especially at these levels. And so you can imagine and expect that we'll continue to participate in stock repurchase at these levels in a fairly aggressive way. Michael J. Pung - Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President & Investor Relations: We are, though, Bill, just as a remainder, blacked out during the period leading up to our call, but beyond that we're in the market.

William A. Warmington - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Got it. Thank you very much. Michael J. Pung - Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President & Investor Relations: And Bill, just to close off on your first question on sales, at the end of this last week, we have roughly 345 people in all of sales and roughly 190 of them are field sales quota-bearing reps.

William A. Warmington - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Got it. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Brett Huff from Stephens, Incorporated. Your line is open.

James Rutherford - Stephens, Inc.

Analyst

Hey, this is James Rutherford in for Brett. Congratulations on the quarter. I just want to ask on Affinity, and I apologize if you talked about this for the first couple of minutes that I was actually absent from the call. But have you guys made any kind of headway in those discussions you've been having with financial institutions on Affinity? William J. Lansing - Chief Executive Officer, President & Director: Headway, yes, but we have nothing to announce.

James Rutherford - Stephens, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. Are there any expectations in the guidance for the year in terms of Affinity acceleration? I'm trying to get kind of a feel for how your expectations are on that? William J. Lansing - Chief Executive Officer, President & Director: No. No, we did not build Affinity into our guidance.

James Rutherford - Stephens, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. And then I wanted to follow-up on Bill's question on Tools, if we take out that settlement benefit last year of $6 million, growth would have been... William J. Lansing - Chief Executive Officer, President & Director: It was closer to $5 million, it was under $6 million. Just around $5 million.

James Rutherford - Stephens, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. So growth would have been roughly flat, I think by my math. I just wanted to clarify what the expectations are going to be for the remainder of the year? I assume we're still expecting growth but kind of what's going to drive that change? Michael J. Pung - Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President & Investor Relations: Yeah. So James, we built into our guidance, which is the number we reconfirmed today, for Tools high single digit, and we still expect to get there through a combination of license deals and any SaaS offerings that we sell through the DMS.

James Rutherford - Stephens, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. That's helpful. Thank you. I was actually going to ask about SaaS next. You guys won couple of Falcon deals; that's a nice sign. Were those SaaS, and even if not, can you give us an update on kind of how the sales in the SaaS business are going in general? Michael J. Pung - Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President & Investor Relations: Yeah. So on the Falcon deals, those were on premise deals with some European customers. So they were not SaaS. They were sold under the classic Falcon model. Though on a SaaS basis, we had another strong quarter. We had almost $8 million of booked deals across a variety of our products, including the Collections and Recovery products and the Debt Manager products, and of course the Adeptra product line which is all SaaS basis.

James Rutherford - Stephens, Inc.

Analyst

Okay, excellent. And then just a question on Scores, very, very nice growth on the B2C side. I was curious, are you guys breaking out sort of what the growth would have been excluding the Experian contract, just to kind of get a flavor for how to model that once that sort of lapse? Michael J. Pung - Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President & Investor Relations: Yeah, it lapsed. What we did is we built into our guidance the run rate exiting the year our fourth quarter. That's what we built into the guidance. It essentially lapsed in our quarter ending in June which is when we had almost the first full rollout of all of the Experian subscriber base. And let's see, the other part of your question was do we break that out separately? We don't but I will tell you that our myFICO business grew at very high double-digit rates this quarter compared to last year.

James Rutherford - Stephens, Inc.

Analyst

Great, okay. I just had one more quick one, if I may. Are there any quarters this year that have a hard licensed comp in Applications or in Tools that might make growth outsized in one direction or another, so we can get an expectation for how that might flow through? Michael J. Pung - Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President & Investor Relations: Yeah, well our fourth quarter last year the one ending in September was a record quarter where we had I think it was roughly $40 million, $45 million of license revenue. So if there is a tough comp that'd be it.

James Rutherford - Stephens, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. That's very helpful. Thank you so much.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Matthew Galinko from Sidoti. Your line is open. Matthew Galinko - Sidoti & Company, LLC: Hey, guys. Good afternoon. My question is, are you actively marketing myFICO at this point, or is it simply benefiting from some of the other promotional activities like Open Access or Experian's efforts? William J. Lansing - Chief Executive Officer, President & Director: We do actively market it but as you can imagine, we don't have anything like the war chest that our competitor have for marketing their offerings. And so you don't see us on television for example. We're footing the tab for the advertising costs but we do market it. It's not a hobby, it's a business. Matthew Galinko - Sidoti & Company, LLC: Sure, fair enough. And in terms of your goals on hiring out the quota-carrying sales force, how far along are you in that process? Are you still looking to hire? Are you satisfied with the pace that you've been able to bring people on board to push your Applications strategy? William J. Lansing - Chief Executive Officer, President & Director: We're not quite satisfied with the pace and we are pushing to hire and we'll continue to hire. What's happened is we're getting traction with the products and the services. We've got this terrific offering. And we're really in the mode now hiring – hiring confidence sales people to sell this kind of stuff as quickly as we can and we still have openings. Matthew Galinko - Sidoti & Company, LLC: Got you. All right. That's all for me. Thank you. Michael J. Pung - Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President & Investor Relations: Thanks, Matt.

Operator

Operator

We have no further questions at this time. I turn the call back over to the presenters. William J. Lansing - Chief Executive Officer, President & Director: Thank you. This concludes today's call. We'd like to thank you all for joining.