Derek Dubner
Analyst · Jeff Parks from Venator. Your line is now open
Thank you, Camilo and good afternoon to those joining us today to discuss our second quarter 2020 results. We hope that you and your loved ones are staying safe and healthy during these challenging times. We are pleased to report a very solid quarter, which demonstrated the resilience and operational leverage of our business model through this unprecedented period. I would like to first provide some detail around the circumstances that we faced as the effects of the pandemic set in and our approach throughout the quarter. Coming off with one of the most robust periods in economic history in the first quarter, pandemic-related events, including government’s stay-at-home orders and social distancing measures, caused significant business interruption in the United States, starting in the back half of March and bottoming in the second quarter. As would be expected, small to medium-sized businesses, many of which being customers, were disproportionately impacted early in the crisis. Not surprisingly, as a result of these impacts, in the beginning of the second quarter, which in hindsight, turned out to be for us a bottoming out in April, we saw reduced transactional volumes. Many of our customers just did not have the infrastructure or contingency planning to be forced home. Adding to that, in our collections market, for example, government imposed moratoria on certain collections activity, a collections-industry pause to not aggravate the crisis and certain forbearance programs reduced overall activity. When faced with these challenges, we maintained our long-term view and implemented a multi-pronged strategy to ensure the success of our business. That strategy consisted of helping our customers, ensuring the health and financial well-being of our team members, gaining market share, continuing advancements in our technology and products and fortifying our balance sheet. I am pleased to report that due to our next generation technology platform, mission-critical product suite, differentiated data assets, and incredible team, we delivered sequentially improving financial and business results from the economic troughs that occurred early in the second quarter. Moreover, we continue to experience improving conditions in our business, which are continuing here in the third quarter. And given the present economic and secular tailwinds that we expect to continue, we believe we are well-positioned for the second half of the year and throughout 2021. I want to personally thank our team members for their dedication and hard work. Faced with adversity, they performed at the highest level, knowing the durability of our business model and that with great challenges come great opportunities, it was vital that we not only protect our employees’ health, but also their financial well-being and the strength of the teams collectively, so that we are not only intact when conditions improve, but optimally positioned for better times ahead. We took significant pandemic related precautions at our headquarters, including UVC lighting in our HVAC systems and daily temperature checks to ensure a safe return to office of our Florida employees. Our Seattle team is still working remotely. All team members across the organization have performed well without any loss to productivity. We did not reduce any compensation or eliminate any positions as a result of the pandemic and in fact are strategically adding to the team to capitalize on opportunities. Our customers are also of the most important group of stakeholders in our business. We committed early on to support them through this time to demonstrate our goodwill and our commitment to the viability and success of their businesses and to solidify enduring relationships. This involved temporarily granting requests for reductions or eliminations where applicable of minimum monthly contractual commitments on a month-to-month basis during the second quarter. We are pleased to report that concessions we may have granted both in number of customers and dollar value have decreased month over month since April. We have heard much positive feedback from appreciative customers about our partnership approach. As I previously mentioned, with great challenges come great opportunities. Priding ourselves on our ability to deliver mission-critical solutions with greater efficiency and ROIs in the competition, due to among other things our cloud-native construct, we have recognized that organizations would now more than ever need these efficiencies within their workflow to counter the negative impacts to their businesses caused by the pandemic. We identified a cohort of customers, who for one reason or another, expressed resistance in the past to the idea of switching away from competitor products, perhaps just out of the burden of doing so who were now open to hearing about how we can meet their needs and more efficiently. As a result of our efforts, new customer applications in June exceeded pre-pandemic levels and July exceeded June. This metric is a leading indicator of revenue in the next several quarters. We continue to invest in the advancement of our technology and the enhancement of existing products and commercialization of new products. As I have said before, our customer-centric approach always has us engaging with customers to better understand and solve for their complex challenges. By way of example, we recently announced our geospatial search and information retrieval technology within our leading idiCORE investigative platform. This intuitive way to engage with data enables users to explore people, businesses, assets and interrelationships using a map-based specification of a geographic area and filtering searches based on a period of time and/or geographic region. We believe this functionality will give greater intelligence to not only our existing customer base, but especially law enforcement, insurance investigators and other investigative industries. We are very excited as these are markets that we have only just begun to scratch the surface. Additionally, our strategy demands that we protect and fortify our balance sheet. Today, we have as strong of a balance sheet as we ever have. Exhibiting the operational leverage of our business model, we more than doubled our adjusted EBITDA on less revenue, generating a record $1.8 million in positive cash flow from operations. A metric that I am very excited about and that Dan will discuss in detail is that our high margin platform revenue, which makes up the core of our business, was up 11% over prior year, notwithstanding the pandemic impacts. In sum, I am very pleased with our continued improved performance throughout the second quarter, including revenue growth, cash flow generation, increasing margins and new customer applications and transaction volumes increasing over pre-COVID levels with positive trends that continue here in the third quarter. In July, we saw another strong month of revenue growth. At this point, August is tracking to not only be the strongest month-over-month revenue growth in our history, but also a record month for revenue. I am even more excited about our positioning given not only the improving economic conditions, but the secular tailwinds that I mentioned that present themselves in the short and long-term. The pandemic has accelerated the pace of digital transformation for virtually every business. Businesses of all kinds must transition their businesses online. To do so, these businesses will increasingly demand the efficiency and scale of solutions that are already delivered via the cloud and not a traditional IT infrastructure. The move to e-commerce will see increasing online transactions requiring the collection of consumer information in disparate ways and in varying forms. This will inevitably lead to even greater data fragmentation. In other words, consumer data that is both structured and unstructured and spread across the enterprise. And with such data fragmentation comes increased need for transforming this data into intelligence as we say, for purposes, including fraud mitigation and consumer modeling. All of these factors, the rapid adoption of e-commerce, demand for cloud efficiency, increased need to identify fraud, the necessity of solving for data fragmentation and the need for enhanced understanding of consumer risk and financial profiles are creating a confluence of micro and macro trends that we believe will provide strong momentum for our business for years to come. With that, I will turn it over to Dan to discuss the financials.