Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Fair Isaac Corporation Quarterly Earnings Call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Afterwards, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, Wednesday, November 1, 2017. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Steve Weber, Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasurer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Colin. Good afternoon and thank you for joining FICO's fourth 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 the 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 feature statements including 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 the 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 through November 1, 2018. And now, I'll turn the call over to Will Lansing.

Thanks, Steve, and thank you, everyone, for joining us for our fourth quarter earnings call. I'll summarize our financial results for the quarter and full fiscal year and talk about the progress we've made this year on several fronts. Finally, I'll discuss the momentum we have going into 2018 and beyond. In our fourth quarter, we reported revenues of $253 million, a record quarter for us, and an increase of 7% over the same period last year. We delivered $40 million of GAAP net income and GAAP earnings of $1.25 per share, both up 25% from last year. And we delivered $53 million of non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP EPS of $1.65 per share, up 27% and 29%, respectively. The revenue and earnings growth is particularly impressive given our transition to cloud-based revenues. The 6% full year revenue growth comes in spite of our cloud transition. We have moved to a cloud-first strategy in development, sales and delivery. More and more, our customers are thinking cloud-first when they look to us for help to analyze and automate their decisioning processes. We began to see this demand nearly two years ago in originations where the dominant ask was for an originations platform in the cloud. In the last fiscal year, that cloud preference has moved to collections and recovery, account management, and fraud products as well. We made the important strategic decision several years ago to cloud-enable all of our technology, invest in our FICO Analytic Cloud, and make our products available through public clouds like AWS. Because of this, we now have well over $100 million of pipeline for our cloud products. This is enabling us to significantly build our recurring revenue base, which will mean predictable, profitable growth going forward. For other software companies, this sometimes means a disruption…

Thanks, Will, and good afternoon, everyone. Today, I'll emphasize three points in my comments. First, we delivered $253 million of revenue this quarter, up 7% over the same period last year and a total of $932 million for the year, up 6% from the prior year. Second, we delivered $40 million in net income this quarter. Net income for the full year was $128 million. Finally, we delivered $49 million of free cash flow in the quarter and $205 million for the fiscal year. We repurchased 1.5 million shares during the year or about 5% of our outstanding shares. I'll begin by reviewing the results in each of our three reporting segments. Our Applications revenue were $150 million, up 12% from last quarter and up 1% versus the same period last year. Full year revenues for Applications were $553 million, up 4% from last year. The increase in revenue was driven from our recurring businesses, primarily our originations management cloud solutions, our Customer Communication Services and our compliance solutions. In our Decision Management Software segment, revenues were $31 million, up 12% from last quarter and up 29% versus the same period last year. Full year DMS revenues were $113 million, up 5% from last year. DMS bookings were $22 million this quarter, up 44% from the previous year, and our full year DMS bookings were $92 million, up 32% from last year. Finally, in our Scores segment, revenues were a record $72 million, up 4% from last quarter and 15% from the same period last year. B2B was up 13% over the same period last year, driven by strong consumer lending, and B2C revenues were up 17% from the same period last year. For the full year, Scores revenues were $266 million, up 10% from last year. Looking at our…

As I said in my opening remarks, I believe we have significant momentum as we move into 2018. Our FICO Score brand is stronger than ever. We have significant opportunities in both the Scores' B2C and B2B markets. On the software side, we'll continue to pursue our DMS strategy. It's the core of our R&D efforts and the core of how we're going to market. We continue to make progress, release new innovation and most importantly, book new business. We're diversifying beyond financial institutions. We're making progress in telco, auto and a number of other verticals. We're still a trusted partner to our financial services clients. But now, we also have so many opportunities in other industries. And we're continuing our cloud-first strategy. I believe 2018 will be the biggest cloud year for FICO ever. We've gone beyond making products cloud ready, we're now designing with a view of cloud-first as we're seeing more demand from both our existing and prospective customers. Our strong bookings in fiscal 2017 give us confidence that as we move into 2018, we're building predictable, reliable backlog that will deliver recurring revenue well into the future. With all this in mind, we're providing the following guidance for fiscal 2018. We're guiding revenues of approximately $990 million, an increase of about 6% versus fiscal 2017. We are guiding GAAP net income of approximately $139 million, up 9% over 2017. We expect an Excess Tax Benefit of $20 million in fiscal 2018 compared to $25 million in fiscal 2017. GAAP earnings per share of approximately $4.33, non-GAAP net income of $171 million and non-GAAP EPS of $5.32. I'll now turn the call back to Steve for Q&A.

Thanks, Will. This concludes our prepared remarks and we will now take questions. Colin, please open the lines.

Certainly. Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Manav Patnaik with Barclays. Your line is open, please go ahead.

Thank you. Good evening, gentlemen. My first question is just around your top line guidance of $990 million or 6% growth. Could you maybe walk us through your – or give us some high level guidance around the assumptions by the different segments?

Yeah. I'll be happy to, Manav. This is Mike. Good afternoon. We're building our $990 million, I would say, as follows; in our software businesses, we're building an assumption in for Applications of roughly mid-single-digit growing, something very comparable to what we did this year. We're building our guidance around our DMS business in the double-digit range, slightly ahead of what we did this year. And our total Scores business, we have built into roughly mid-single-digit range with relatively flat on the B2B side and high-single-digit growth on the B2C side.

Okay. And maybe just honing in on that B2C side, because I know on the B2B, you always do flat which is conservative, but, I guess, the 17% growth this quarter for B2C, I mean, should we be thinking of that as the right run rate, or maybe asked differently, actually, like was the growth there driven – any incremental drivers from the lead-gen business that you started partnering with Experian, or is this still just the legacy base contract you had with them?

No, this is the legacy business that we've had. There was very little from the lead-gen, it's starting to kick up, but, frankly, very immaterial at this point. The timing of how quickly the lead-gen business ramps up is still uncertain for us, and it's tied to the marketing efforts at Experian. And so, we've taken a pretty cautious approach to how we build that into these numbers that I'm providing. And so, what you're looking at is the run rate with some of the deals that we described with respect to Affinity and several others beginning to go online.

Okay. And then on the costs side, could you maybe call out the – maybe the major buckets of investment? You're guiding to basically another flat margin year. Just curious what the main areas therefore, I know Will called out cyber, but anything else?

No, I would say what we're seeing certainly in the fourth quarter and what we see in the pipeline for next year is a pretty significant amount of cloud deals. In fact, in the fourth quarter, we had $146 million of bookings, and not quite, but almost half of that were cloud deals and in that, $60 million to $70 million of cloud bookings in our quarter four are going to be implemented throughout the earlier and the middle part of 2018. And that requires people, it requires costs and revenue, obviously, follows that thereafter. So, I would say the mix, because of our fourth quarter bookings, is probably a factor in our margin, certainly, in the first part of next year. And, in addition, as Will mentioned, we've put some extra money aside probably above and beyond what we had done in the past for security and infrastructure in order to build the walls further in terms of our data security and protection.

Okay. And on that, again, maybe just my last question, any broad thoughts on if the Equifax breach has or had any impact to your business?

No. It really hasn't had any impact to our business. Of course, like everyone, we do a gut check and we take a deep look at ourselves to think about whether we're vulnerable and whether we're doing everything that we can to be secure. And, frankly, it was a bit of an impetus for us to increase our budget for our own security. And we were feeling pretty good before and we thought why not feel a little bit better, and that's why we put the extra investment in.

Got it. Thank you, guys.

Our next question comes from the line of Matthew Galinko with Sidoti. Your line is open, please go ahead. Matthew E. Galinko - Sidoti & Co. LLC: Hey. Good afternoon, guys.

Hi. Matthew E. Galinko - Sidoti & Co. LLC: So, I guess, just a point of clarification in terms of increased investment in cyber security, is that internal use or is that also including building out your products?

The increase in investment that we're referencing was internal use. Now that said, we are also increasing the R&D in our cyber products because they're starting to get a little bit of traction. So, things like the Enterprise Security Score is now up and available. And, so, yeah, there's definitely investment that's going in there, also, on the distribution side for that Score. Matthew E. Galinko - Sidoti & Co. LLC: Got you. All right. Appreciate that. And then in terms of the cloud-first and just traction you're getting in the cloud, is it coming more from kind of the non-traditional verticals you outlined, or is it really broad based?

I would say that last year, 2016, and even the beginning of 2017, as expected, the appetite for cloud was in the non-financial services verticals initially, and we expected that, and so, we were seeing appetite in telecom and in other verticals. This year, we've started to see the demand in financial services as well, which for us is a really welcome sign. We always expected this to occur, we never knew what timeframe we'd see our customers move into the cloud in, and to see it actually happening is extremely encouraging. So, I would say, now, it's across the board, it's not just the non-financial services verticals. Matthew E. Galinko - Sidoti & Co. LLC: Got it. Appreciate it.

Our next question comes from the line of Brett Huff with Stephens. Your line is open, please go ahead.

Hi. This is Blake on for Brett. Thanks for taking my questions. Just wondering, if you could talk a little bit more about the very strong bookings, I know you said about half were cloud, and you said there are no whales in there. So, should we assume this is – how should we think about the run rate for 2018 with such a large increase this quarter? And then, maybe, are these taking a little longer on average to implement given the revenue growth of 6% would maybe imply these hitting the P&L next year?

Well, so, we don't really give guidance on bookings. But I think if you were to extrapolate from this quarter and annualize it, you wouldn't be far off and that wouldn't be too optimistic an assumption. We really are feeling very strong about the trend in bookings. And we're at a point now where we've made some efforts to really make our sales people neutral on doing cloud deals versus upfront license deals. We really want to do what the customer wants, and so, there's no – much as we love revenue, we do not have a bias in the system towards revenue. And so, what's happening is through a combination of being even-handed in the way we incent our sales people, coupled with genuine demand from the marketplace, we're really seeing that strong cloud appetite, and we expect that to only increase. And, yes, we absolutely expect that to be reflected in bookings. And it is at the expense of upfront revenue. There's clearly a difference and I think our revenue run rate would be different and higher, if we weren't doing as much cloud business as we are, but we're quite comfortable with that.

All right. And then on the margins, I know you talked about your investments a little bit. And last quarter, you had talked about going through the decision of how much to expand margins this year. Can you just elaborate a little more on that decision for the 26.5% to 28.5% margin? I guess, it's a fairly wide range. What are the drivers of that uncertainty right now?

Well, I think, if you take a step back and you look at the broad strategic direction for our business, we've gone from – we're in the midst of this transformation from a license revenue business to a cloud business. And, initially, if you go back three years, it took the form of cloud-enabling our products, making our products available in the cloud. And what that really meant was, we took our license revenue products and we installed them in our own data centers and made them available on a hosted basis to our customers, and we called that cloud and it is cloud. But that's not the SaaS business, that's not the multi-tenant, highly configurable, standardized, high returns to scale cloud business that we all love. And so, over the last couple of years and especially this year, and especially going into next year, we're making tremendous investments in, not just the infrastructure, the infrastructure is a part of it, making sure that we have the infrastructure to support it, but also the products themselves, rebuilding, retooling, reengineering the products, so that they can be more standardized and highly configurable, which we think is going to reduce the time to go live, reduce the cost of operation, shorten up implementation times and, generally, be a hit with our customers, and that's really where the investment is going. And so, we're – I won't say we're sparing no expense because we still are mindful of making our commitments, but we're very focused on positioning the software business for a future cloud business with much more standardized, highly configurable, scalable products. That's where the investment is going.

All right. That's helpful. And then last one for me would be the FICO Score XD sounds like a good opportunity over time. Any more color you can give on the timing and the size of that revenue growth opportunity? And then, how much competition do you see for that since that's kind of a newer market? Do you think you could take a dominant position in that?

So, it's not meaningful revenue today and we have not yet announced any big partners who have gone to production with it. But this is definitely the year in which partners will go public with it. It's been in test for quite some time with good results and so, we should be in a position to announce some big partnerships shortly. It is our proprietary Score, we do it with in conjunction with Equifax and the NCTUE data and LexisNexis. And there's – it's not easily replicable by others. Now, there's a lot of efforts in the market to score the unscorable, to use alternative data to score populations that are – have hitherto been difficult to score. But this one has been in development for years and is really robust, really does the job, scores new people, is highly predictive. And from the standpoint of lenders, it's going to result in new business for lenders that they otherwise wouldn't have had. And so, it's pretty strong value proposition, we feel pretty good about it. How big will it be in 2018? I don't know that it'll be tremendously meaningful. It all depends on kind of how quickly the lenders ramp up with it.

Great. Thanks a lot.

Our next question comes from the line of Bill Warmington with Wells Fargo. Your line is open, please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone.

Hi, Bill.

Hi, Bill.

So, I want to start out by asking about the Enterprise Education programs that you had announced last quarter. You mentioned you had two large clients that had signed up for those. Are those starting to ramp, are we seeing some of the benefit in this quarter? Are there any additional takers in the pipeline?

They are starting to ramp and there are additional takers in the pipeline.

It's part of what drove the quarter four growth in the B2C, Bill.

Got it. Okay. And then, on the Enterprise Security Score, last quarter, you talked about having your first large seven-figure deal for that healthcare IT reseller. It doesn't seem like that's much revenue for you now. How has demand been for that product? It would seem post-Equifax breach that that would be a source of – a product with a lot of demand, but I just wanted to see if you're actually seeing that.

We're just starting to see it, so we've gotten three deals. There's no question that the – the product does what it's supposed to do. And it's – I don't want to say it's totally unique in the marketplace, but it's a highly credible offering, there's no reason why we couldn't dominate that market. I do think that this is a first-mover kind of a situation, I think it's important for us to invest in that right now to kind of build a franchise. And it will be a scramble over the next 24 months to distinguish our Score from some of the competitors out there. I think, from a predictive standpoint, we have a product that really works and we understand scores and how to make sure the score means something, and we have the brand trust. We have to work on the sales and the distribution to make sure that it gets out there ahead of some of the competition. Again, we're nearly $1 billion revenue business, and so it's not going to be a tremendously meaningful event in 2018. But does it have long-term potential as a very strong franchise? It does.

Yeah. And speaking of the Equifax breach, TransUnion had mentioned on their call that they saw a bit of a spike in business in September following the breach. Did you guys see any benefits from that? And if so, did it continue or what are your thoughts there?

We saw a little bit in myFICO. The activity in myFICO was a little bit up. But, as you know, that's a very small part of our business, so it doesn't have a meaningful impact.

Good point. I wanted to go back to the margin guidance that you guys have. You've given color on some of the different drivers on the expense side that are causing the margins to be down on a year-over-year basis and I thought it'd be helpful if maybe you could give some additional quantification of that, meaning you could talk about how 100 basis points is coming from X, 150 basis points is coming from this, if you could give that kind of insight.

Sure, Bill. This is Mike. That's a good question. There is close to 100 basis points of margin incremental expense going into the company that relates to the IT security that we described earlier. So, absent that additional investment above and beyond what we've been doing, call it, 50 basis points to 100 basis points higher in terms of the margin, in terms of the guidelines that we gave you. The bigger driver though, frankly, and the reason why there's such a large range, 26.5% to 28.5%, is really the same reason that we had in fiscal 2017 which is, if our mix of business continues to be very heavily kind of oriented or dominated by cloud business, it takes money to put that business in place and get it up and running before the revenue begins to flow. And despite the fact that we had such a large booking year in cloud, probably bigger than we expected, we still kind of landed in the middle of the guidance we gave in 2017, we guided 26% to 28% and we delivered just over 27%. So, it's really the same reasons that are driving the larger size of the range. And then on the margin, there's maybe 50 basis points here and there for some things that are just prudent considering what's happening in the environment around us.

Yeah. Another question for you on the debt structure. You have some relatively high-priced debt coming to maturity. In the past, you've talked about the pros and cons of potentially prepaying some of that. Maybe you could review for us where we are in that, how much is refinancing, what the delta is versus current rates?

Yeah, I'd be happy to. So, in our notes – these are tied up in our insurance notes. We have about $240-ish million in insurance notes that are sitting on the balance sheet right now. About $130 million of that matures in May and that has over 7% coupon on it. And so, we're going to off board that 7% coupon in May. And it'll get replaced by either our revolver, which is in the 2% to 2.5% rate, or it will end up in some other form of refinancing which is quite possible by the time May comes. The next year after that, we have $28 million due, and the rates are somewhere in the 6% to 6.5% range, I don't remember the exact number. And then, the final coupon of $85 million is due in 2020. That one still has a relatively large May call on it. And so, we're just going to let that one probably sit where it is rather than incur the penalty on the May call. But it's only $85 million out of $600 million. So, we're going to take care a big chunk of this, I think, in May. And we're in the process of thinking through and looking at the best foot forward on that. We ought to see a little bit of improvement on our interest rate as a result.

Got it. So, final question, just wanted to ask about, essentially, the Chinese FICO Score, you guys had – you made some progress in terms of helping to develop a Score in China and then also helping to develop a Score for the unbanked population in China, just see if we could get an update on that.

Yeah. So, it's moving along actually quite well. It isn't really tipping the needle in terms of the big picture, but it's helping push that B2B growth to the levels that it has been. We're not quite generating seven figures yet, but next year, we should be well over seven-figures revenue at least if the momentum that we see right now continues through the year. So, we might have a couple of million dollar product in China under current rate and pace. And we're working hard to see if we can improve on that, but it's moving along actually quite well in a country where things don't move very fast.

Got it. Thank you very much.

And Mr. Weber, there appear to be no further questions on the phone lines. I'll now turn the call back to you. You may continue with your presentation or closing remarks.

Thank you. This concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining.