Earnings Labs

Mitek Systems, Inc. (MITK)

Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Sat, Nov 8, 2014

$13.64

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day and welcome to the Mitek Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2014 Earnings Results Conference. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Peter Salkowski, Mitek Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Peter Salkowski

Investor Relations

Thank you, Elizabeth. Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us. With me on today’s call are Mitek’s CEO Jim DeBello and CFO, Russ Clark. Before I turn the call over to Jim and Russ, I’d like to cover a few quick things. This afternoon, Mitek issued a press release announcing its fourth quarter of fiscal 2014 financial results. That release is available on the company's website at www.miteksystems.com. This call is being broadcast live over the Internet for all of the interested parties, and the webcast will be archived on the Investor Relations page of the company's website. On today's call, we will discuss certain factors that are likely to influence the business going forward. Any factors discussed today that are not historical facts, particularly comments regarding our long-term prospects and market opportunities, should be considered forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements may include comments about our plans and expectations of future performance. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual results to differ materially. We encourage all of our listeners to review our SEC filings, including our most recent 10-K for a more complete description of these risks. Our statements on this call are made as of today, November 6, 2014, and the company undertakes no obligation to revise or update publicly any of the forward-looking statements contained herein, whether as a result of new information, future events, changes in expectations or otherwise, for any reason. Additionally, throughout this call, we will be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures. Today’s earnings release and the related current report on Form 8-K describe the differences between our non-GAAP and GAAP reporting and present the reconciliation between the two for the periods reported in the release. Now I’ll turn the call over to Mitek’s CEO Jim DeBello. Jim?

James B. DeBello

Management

Well thanks Peter, and hello everyone. We ended fiscal 2014 with our best revenue quarter ever, resulting in the full fiscal year becoming our highest revenue year ever. We now have 3026 financial institutions signed and 2521 deploying Mitek’s breakthrough and patented Mobile Deposit solution that will be used by over 33 million consumers. All top 10 U.S. retail banks and nearly all of the top 50 banks are Mitek Mobile Deposit customers. Within this exciting market, we see three key drivers to growth. First, expanding the number of banks offering Mobile Deposit; second, growing the number of consumers using Mobile Deposit, and lastly increasing the number of transactions by those consumers. With Mitek’s Mobile Deposit deployed by all of the top banks in the U.S. and 100% customer retention, we already accomplished the first growth driver making Mitek the clear industry leader. Our attention is now focused on growing the number of consumers using Mobile Deposit within these institutions and increasing their frequency of use. We are working to ignite the second and third growth drivers by adding risk management capabilities enabling banks to increase deposit limits and by adding features like MiSnap to enhance the consumer experience. Mitek’s global deposit provides a great platform for growth. Having a trusted brand with all of the top U.S. banks is a natural springboard allowing Mitek to offer new products, such as mobile imaging for identity capture, used for account opening and enrollment. Turning now to our fourth quarter and full year results, I’m very delighted to report that Mitek achieved record fourth quarter revenue of $5.5 million, an increase of 26% year-over-year, marking another solid quarter of revenue performance. In addition, the fourth quarter results represented the second sequential quarter in which Mitek achieved non-GAAP profitability, and the first quarter…

Russell C. Clark

Management

Thanks, Jim and thank you to every one joining us on today’s call. As a reminder all financial figures I cite today will be on a GAAP basis unless I specifically call out a number as non-GAAP. Our earnings release includes a reconciliation between the two measures. We believe that excluding non-cash stock compensation and IP litigation expenses from non-GAAP earnings provides the useful measure of the company’s operating results. Also any quarters or years that I discuss will be based on our fiscal year-end of September 30. During Q4, we saw our top-line growth sequentially and year-over-year to a record $5.5 million resulting in non-GAAP net income of $1.9 million. Total Q4 revenue increased 26% year-over-year from total revenue of $4.4 million in the year-ago period. Q4 software revenue of $3.8 million included 10 Mobile Deposit reorders and increased 17%, compared to year earlier software revenue of $3.3 million. Mobile Deposit reorders continue to drive the lion’s share of our license revenue growth. Our installed base of Mobile Deposit providers has continued to grow reaching over 2500 financial institutions live at year-end. Although the scrolling user base has provided us increasing visibility in the quarterly revenue and allowed us to report consistent and improving quarterly revenue results. It’s important to note that the predictability of our quarterly revenue is still highly dependent on the closing of Mobile Deposit reorders and new orders. We are continuing to address this issue by offering more predictable, multiyear subscription pricing models for our Mobile Photo Bill Pay, payments, account opening and identity products. Q4 maintenance and PS revenue of $1.7 million increased 53% over last year’s Q4 maintenance and PS revenue of $1.1 million. We’ve seen nice year-over-year and sequential growth in this line item and had a particularly strong PS quarter, generating…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. (Operator Instructions) And we do have question from Bhavan Suri from William Blair.

Alper Tuken

Management

Hi, guys, can you hear me? - William Blair & Company: Hi, guys, can you hear me?

James B. DeBello

Management

Yes, Bhavan, hello.

Alper Tuken

Management

Hi, this is actually Alper Tuken in for Bhavan here. - William Blair & Company: Hi, this is actually Alper Tuken in for Bhavan here.

James B. DeBello

Management

Hello, Alper.

Alper Tuken

Management

Congrats on the quarter. So I see that Mobile Deposit was -- well got you guys over on your top-line revenue for software and I was wondering how the cross-sell opportunities from your Mobile Deposit customers are progressing, I know you said you signed a top five insurance company, but I was just wondering just how the general cross-sell environment is with your Mobile Deposit customers. - William Blair & Company: Congrats on the quarter. So I see that Mobile Deposit was -- well got you guys over on your top-line revenue for software and I was wondering how the cross-sell opportunities from your Mobile Deposit customers are progressing, I know you said you signed a top five insurance company, but I was just wondering just how the general cross-sell environment is with your Mobile Deposit customers.

Peter Salkowski

Investor Relations

Well Alper, I think as we’ve discussed previously it’s good, we are using our presence in all of those banks that we’ve discussed here and are working with our channel partners, with our account opening and identity products and payments and Bill Pay products as well. So many of the wins that we discussed on the call here in those areas are really based on a foundation that was created by our successful Mobile Deposit and our customer base is satisfaction with those products.

James B. DeBello

Management

We have several customers, Alper, and this is Jim responding, that have multiple solutions licensed from Mitek either directly or indirectly to our partners and we expect that many of our distributors would pick up our additional new products as we continue to grow, very positive.

Alper Tuken

Management

And when you said the average number of products per customer is trending upward? - William Blair & Company: And when you said the average number of products per customer is trending upward?

James B. DeBello

Management

By definition it is because every quarter we’re adding customers with multiple solutions from Mitek, and I think what’s the customers are responding to is the consumer habit that I had referenced in my remarks, the consumers are comfortable using the camera for not only the selfies that I mentioned but for financial transactions and we expect that to continue into grow and that’s going to spur more adaption of our technology and cross-selling other products.

Alper Tuken

Management

Thank you. And then if I could ask another follow up, on the expense side, I know you said that with the sales and marketing and R&D spend that those would normalize back to prior levels due to the kind of timing of your marketing spend in some contractors. How should we kind of view those into 2015? Do you see them going down by a couple hundred basis points, or maintaining kind of average levels at 2014 or so? - William Blair & Company: Thank you. And then if I could ask another follow up, on the expense side, I know you said that with the sales and marketing and R&D spend that those would normalize back to prior levels due to the kind of timing of your marketing spend in some contractors. How should we kind of view those into 2015? Do you see them going down by a couple hundred basis points, or maintaining kind of average levels at 2014 or so?

James B. DeBello

Management

Yes, Alper, as you mentioned I’ll point you back to the guidance I provided for total OpEx of five in a quarter to five in three quarters for Q1 and I think you are pretty familiar with our cost structure, with around 50 employees total at the end of the fiscal year in terms of hiring and so forth, we probably are looking for dozen employees or so throughout the course of the fiscal year to add to the staff and the engineering area primarily in a little bit lesser extent than sales and marketing.

Alper Tuken

Management

All right, thank you guys for taking my questions. - William Blair & Company: All right, thank you guys for taking my questions.

James B. DeBello

Management

Sure.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) And our next question will come from Andrew Boyce (ph) with Piper Jaffray.

Unidentified Analyst

Management

Hey guys, this is Andrew here stepping in for Mike, first of, thanks for taking my questions. I guess first of, could you talk a little bit more about that development network, how is that kind of progressing, are you guys seeing some good results from that?

James B. DeBello

Management

Hi, well, this is Jim and I appreciate the question. The mobile developer network is a way to expose our imaging platform through an open API to qualify third-party developers, and this is the way we can plus our products into other industries, which we aren’t directly approaching. There are so many opportunities and that present themselves for mobile imaging in healthcare, in ticketing and other industries that we couldn’t possibly begin to approach with the limited staff that we have today. We are focused on financial services including insurance as verticals and we will continue to do that. But as a result, we’re seeing a lot more effort with regard to technology adoption in areas such as underserved bank participants. There is a company that we have been beginning to partner with that provides a Airbnb equivalent for check cashing that allows you to actually receive your cash by a country head who greets you at a shopping mall after you deposit a check on your low cost smartphone and to get it cashed. We have another one that’s working on providing exchange of seats for supporting events by validating the information from the ticket and the image of the ticket and then providing an easy exchange and they are just getting launched as well. And we have a third in the real-estate business that’s already beginning to see some traction with regard to being able to deposit earnest money using our technology from realtors who received deposits on new house purchases. So, we’re seeing a variety of applications in used cases that are tangentially involved in financial services, but primarily also in adjacent markets and we expect that to continue. We are spending a fair amount of energy in social media to promote that, but not a lot of hard cash with regard to advertising that, so it is by definition what I would consider a Petri dish, an experimental opportunity to use imaging and other applications and we see that to -- beginning to proliferate.

Unidentified Analyst

Management

Okay, awesome, thank you very much for all the light, and I guess also in past quarters, you guys have said you were about little over 75% of the top 50 banks, are you above 80% to 85%, now could you give us kind of a number on how many top 50 banks you are in.

James B. DeBello

Management

Yeah, I think most recent update in that is that we’re in nearly all, so that’s somewhere in the mid-40s of 50 in the list tends to change every quarter that’s depending on which bank bought which one.

Unidentified Analyst

Management

Okay, awesome, thank you very much and I congrats on the quarter again and that’s all I had for you.

James B. DeBello

Management

Great, thank you.

Unidentified Analyst

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) And that does conclude our question-and-answer session for today. I’d like to turn the conference back over to Peter Salkowski for any closing or additional remarks.

Peter Salkowski

Investor Relations

Thank you very much. Before closing the earnings call, I’d like to inform everyone that Mitek will be participating in the Susquehanna Payments Forum on November 18 in San Francisco. Thank you for joining us today for Mitek’s fiscal fourth quarter earnings call. We appreciate your interest in the company. Have a good day.

Operator

Operator

That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your participation.