4/1/2025

speaker
Operator

and welcome to Encino's fourth quarter fiscal 2025 earnings call. With me on today's call are Sean Desmond, Encino's chief executive officer, and Greg Orenstein, Encino's chief financial officer. During the course of this conference call, we will make forward-looking statements regarding trends, strategies, and the anticipated performance of our business. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current views and expectations, entail certain assumptions made as of today's date, and are subject to various risks and uncertainties described in our SEC filings and other publicly available documents, the financial services industry, and global economic conditions. NCNO disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. Further, on today's call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP metrics that we believe aid in the understanding of our financial results. A reconciliation to comparable gap metrics can be found in today's earnings release, which is available on our website and is an exhibit to the form 8K furnished with the SEC just before this call, as well as the earnings presentation on our investor relations website at investor.ensino.com. With that, I will turn the call over to Sean.

speaker
Sean Desmond

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to discuss Ensino's fourth quarter and fiscal 2025 financial results. As many of you know, this is my first time addressing you as CEO, and I want to start by saying how honored and excited I am to take on this responsibility. Encino is a remarkable company, one that pioneered and built a strong foundation in cloud banking software. Now, my focus is on taking this great company and making sure it is a great long-term business. one that executes with urgency and precision, delivers sustainable and profitable growth, and fully capitalizes on the sizable opportunities ahead to deliver strong returns to all of our stakeholders. As we delivered on the promise of being the worldwide leader in cloud banking in the company's first chapter, I am here to lead Encino's evolution to be the worldwide leader in AI banking. We are marshalling the energy of the company to capitalize on the vertical AI opportunity to drive efficiency into the financials of our customers, as well as into our own bottom line. For those of you who have been following the company, you are aware that we have been very focused on leveraging data, analytics, and AI for the past five years. In addition to our commercial pricing and profitability, auto-spreading, and portfolio monitoring solutions, we have been steadily developing Banking Advisor functionality and plan to launch numerous new capabilities at our Insight User Conference in May. For those of you joining us at Insight, you will hear directly from early Banking Advisor customers about the meaningful efficiency gains they are already realizing with this AI technology. Being the market catch up to our strategic vision is very exciting and reinforces the unique competitive position we have. I know firsthand just how significant this opportunity is. I have spent almost 30 years in the software industry and nearly 12 at Encino. Most recently as chief product officer and before that as chief customer success officer. During that tenure, I've had approximately two-thirds of the company's employees in my reporting chain and have worked closely with every function of our global business. I've also worked alongside our customers, including sponsorship of sales opportunities, ensuring successful project deliveries, compliance with our SLAs, adoption of our user experiences, and realization of our committed business outcomes. I understand exactly what our diverse customer base, which includes banks, credit unions, independent mortgage bankers, and non-bank lenders, needs to run their business more efficiently and effectively. I have also overseen the development of the very products that serve as the system of record for our customers' banking operations. Over the past two quarters, I've spent time in our offices in Wilmington, North Carolina, Lehigh, Utah, london england sydney and melbourne australia auckland new zealand and johannesburg and cape town south africa on each of these visits i've spent time not only with our employees but with our customers and partners in our ecosystem listening intently these experiences give me deep conviction in our strategy the strength of our platform and the product portfolio and the highly differentiated value we provide to financial institutions. I firmly believe that the next decade holds far more growth and opportunity for Encino to innovate and transform the financial services industry than the previous decade. There is no doubt that financial institutions across the globe continue to struggle with inefficiencies caused by legacy infrastructure. Too many of them still rely on fragmented tech stacks and siloed data, making critical processes far too slow and cumbersome. We are reimagining these processes and delivering world-class experiences. To name just a few, onboarding complex commercial clients, proactively and continuously monitoring small business and commercial loan portfolios, providing frictionless account opening experiences, and efficiently scaling mortgage lending with AI-powered document validation and processing. Encino is uniquely positioned to solve all of these problems. We are the only cloud-based SaaS provider that enables financial institutions around the world to seamlessly manage lending, onboarding, account opening, and portfolio management across multiple lines of business connected on a scalable platform powered by AI. We are the enabler of our customers' most critical operations, and we have a broad, diverse, and sizable customer base across more than 20 countries. This global reach, combined with our broad and deep product capabilities, provides us with a competitive moat that nobody can match. Since our IPO in 2020, we have delivered strong revenue growth, significantly increased our operating margin, expanded our customer base, extended our geographic presence and built out the breadth and depth of our solutions but while our scale has increased i don't believe our execution has kept pace with the full extent of the market opportunity i think it's important not only to be a cheerleader for encino but also to be pragmatic and realistic importantly We need to consistently execute at a level that reflects the strength of our market position and the ambitions we have for this business. Of course, our ability to execute over the past couple of years was significantly impacted by macroeconomic headwinds beyond our control. The rapid rise in interest rates in 2022 caused banks to pull back on spending. And the liquidity crisis in early 2023 led to even greater caution around large-scale technology investments. These external factors certainly dampened our sales momentum and new bookings growth. But there were also challenges within our control. As we expanded beyond our commercial banking roots into consumer lending, we ultimately brought to market a product capable of leapfrogging our competitors, but not as quickly as we originally planned. We also saw customers pause their onboarding buying decisions this past year until we completed our highly anticipated platform integration of the intellectual property we acquired in our acquisition from DocFox. With the benefit of hindsight, we were also too optimistic in expecting a drop in interest rates to drive an increase in mortgage activity. Additionally, our sales execution and sense of urgency in certain international markets most notably Europe, was not as crisp as it needed to be. Some of these challenges created compounding headwinds that further impacted our new bookings momentum in fiscal 25 and our chief contributors to our fiscal 26 revenue outlook, which is below our expectations. The good news is that we have already taken decisive action to address these challenges that have impacted us. and I am confident they are squarely behind us. During my tenure as Chief Product Officer, we did bring to market a best-in-breed consumer lending product last year, which helped us outperform our internal expectations for sales of that solution in fiscal 25. Leveraging our best-in-breed digital mortgage technology, we are bringing to market full omni-channel capabilities across our consumer solutions at Insight. This consistent experience for bankers and their customers alike, whether digital or in branch, will help us further accelerate bookings of our products in fiscal 26 and beyond. In addition, we plan to release our fully integrated onboarding solution that leverages the technology acquired in the DocBox acquisition in the second quarter, unlocking numerous pent-up opportunities. On the personnel front, we have made key leadership changes in our European operations with the hiring of Joaquin de Valenzuela, a seasoned software sales executive with a great track record on the European continent as our EMEA general manager to sharpen our execution. Joaquin has been aggressively assembling his go-to-market team to capture the full potential of the EMEA SAM. beyond just the UKI, where we've had a strong presence to date. We have also added several other key leaders across our sales and marketing organizations, hardening our product marketing and credit union posture, and we just appointed an AI Catalyst Chief Technology Officer, Will Jung, to our product development and engineering organization. All of our new leaders and restructured teams are laser focused on increasing and accelerating our sales momentum and gross bookings. Operating with a keen sense of urgency and purpose, we are well positioned to re-accelerate new bookings growth, although we expect it will take a few quarters for consistent momentum to build. As Greg will discuss when he reviews the financials, we expect improved gross bookings growth as the year progresses. This will result in subscription revenue growth re-acceleration in fiscal 27 as we get back on track to achieving our double-digit long-term growth ambitions. Not surprisingly, one of the most exciting areas of opportunity ahead for Encino is our ability to help financial institutions better connect their data so they can meaningfully harness AI. Specifically, we continue to build generative and agentic AI-powered solutions and embed them throughout the Encino platform. Because Encino serves as a system of record for our customers' banking operations, we sit at the heart of their most critical financial processes. That means we are in a unique position to help them leverage their data to operationalize AI efficiently, automate and eliminate workflows and deliver better customer experiences. I touched upon Banking Advisor earlier in my comments, but it's worth reinforcing that the capabilities within our AI-driven Banking Advisor suite of skills have already reduced complex banking processes from days to seconds. And this is just the beginning. Take, for example, document validation in U.S. Mortgage, which with AI verifies that customers have uploaded the correct documentation avoiding an approval delay for the borrower and saving the loan officer about 40 minutes per loan. Our continuous credit monitoring functionality eliminates hours of manual work, gathering data to assess a client's borrowing position. And Tax Statements 3.0 uses a large language model trained in-house to process tax statements, avoiding 15 to 20 minutes of manual work per statement. As we lead this charge, our customers are validating that they ultimately prefer agentic capabilities embedded in a platform they already trust with their data. The data is fundamental to our strategy, and we are leaning into our acquisition of Sandbox Banking to complete a unified API layer that becomes the access point or gateway for financial institutions globally. Thus, our AI strategy is to deepen our moat by expanding banking advisor skills, mobilize agents, and manage the gateway. Clearly, we believe that AI, both generative and agentic, and the unique data set we have to fuel AI will be key drivers of growth for Encino. Powerful differentiators across our entire platform that will further enhance our market leadership position and accelerate platform adoption as we continue to evolve the company and lead the vertical AI movement in banks. Beyond AI, we have been hard at work strengthening our core business, and we believe these improvements will drive solid bookings trends in the quarters and years ahead. One of the most powerful aspects of our competitive moat is the reputation we have built through our success in commercial banking. We are recognized as the gold standard in this space. And that credibility is opening doors as we drive deeper into consumer, small business, and mortgage opportunities. As a reminder, over 70% of our global SAM is outside of commercial lending, and more than half of our bookings in fiscal 25 came from solutions other than commercial lending. We are leveraging our reputation and track record of success to demonstrate our solutions to new customers and to deepen our existing relationships with current customers as the Encino ecosystem adopts more of our products. Turning Encino from a great company into a great long-term business requires discipline, focus, and relentless execution. That means making sure our product roadmap aligns tightly with market needs driving strong top line growth while maintaining financial discipline and making thoughtful capital allocation decisions. It means being sharp in how we position ourselves in the market and ensuring that every experience we serve up to customers is truly best in class. I am maniacally focused on these execution tasks and firmly believe the team will exceed my expectations. To that end, we are seeing signs that the changes we have made are driving results. Our fiscal 25 ACV growth accelerated to 9% organically from 8% in fiscal 24 on a constant currency basis. On a reported basis, this ACV year-over-year growth was 8% organically or 13%, including ACV from acquisitions. Our expansion on the European continent is seeing signs of traction as well, with our largest new logo by ACV and Q4 coming from CSOB, a top three bank in the Czech Republic. And we also had another major win in Japan. And while it took longer than we originally expected, our consumer lending business is seeing momentum. The 200 billion asset bank we discussed winning in late fiscal 24 is now live on Encino Consumer Lending. And we added over 20 new consumer lending deals in Q4, including two large banks with 80 billion and 50 billion in assets, respectively. On the M&A front, we are very excited about the four acquisitions we closed over the past year, and expect each of them to be strong, positive contributors to our future financial performance. Our DocFox and Full Circle acquisitions expanded our SAM in the onboarding arena and provided our sales teams unique and highly desirable solutions to cross-sell to a very happy customer base. Allegro is an important addition to our consumer lending offerings. delivering on the need for indirect lending functionality, particularly as we expand more aggressively into credit unions. In fact, leveraging Encino's established market-leading portfolio analytics solution, which serves up approximately 40% of the United States credit union market, we have visibility into over $600 billion in assets across more than 800 credit union customers. We are leaning into this unique and powerful data set and our acquisition of Allegro and have launched a dedicated credit union go-to-market team and are developing new solutions to bring to this market, including financial product performance and pricing models and peer analysis products for competitor insights. Finally, on the M&A integration front, sandbox banking is a highly strategic acquisition that reaches far beyond core integration capabilities. Encino customers will quickly realize the benefit of customer data alignment and system operability with a unified API layer and integration hub for the platform. I am also energized by the AI-first culture and DNA of the talent that accompanies these acquisitions. That said, while we of course remain alert to potential future M&A where we see compelling value in accelerating our technology, profitable growth, or addressable market, we expect our focus for fiscal 26 will be on realizing the planned synergies and expected investment returns from these completed transactions as opposed to pursuing any additional M&A. In summary, this is an extraordinary time for Encino, and with the vertical AI opportunity, there has never been more excitement in this intersection of technology and banking. The secular growth in front of us, which is helping financial institutions truly modernize their operations, is massive. The ability to accelerate this transformation through our scalable, tested and trusted platform with intelligence embedded throughout our solutions makes it even more exciting. And the improvements we have made in our product functionality and international operations sets us up for success. Additionally, While there is currently volatility in the financial markets, the macro headwinds that specifically challenged us and our customer base over the past couple of years have eased quite a bit. Our customers, by and large, have healthy balance sheets and are forecasting growth in their loan portfolios, deposit positions, and earnings per share. Our US customers are also telling us that the potential for deregulation could free up capital, streamline decision-making, and enable them to further adopt best-in-class technology solutions. Our sales teams are aggressively pursuing bookings in fiscal 26 that we expect will drive re-acceleration and subscription revenue growth in fiscal 27, and we are investing accordingly with a plan to drive sustainable long-term revenue growth and further margin expansion. While Greg will walk you through our financial guidance in more detail, Just a reminder that our revenue growth is a lagging indicator of our bookings growth. While we are forecasting lower year-over-year revenue growth in the second half of the year, we believe this is temporary and due to trailing factors that have now been addressed, as well as to difficult year-over-year second half comparisons that Greg will elaborate on. I have tremendous confidence in our team, our technology, and our market position. This confidence is supported by the $100 million stock repurchase program our board of directors authorized that we announced this afternoon. The foundation is in place, and now it's all about execution. Pierre was the visionary who built this company, and I deeply respect the impact he had. My role is to take that vision and turn it into durable, scalable, and long-term profitable growth. We are not selling a dream in Encino. We are committing to execution. To that end, the metrics I am laser focused on are growth in gross bookings, achieving our rule of targets, and over time, free cash flow. On behalf of the entire Encino team, I want to thank you for your continued support. I am incredibly energized by what lies ahead and look forward to delivering results and building credibility with our shareholders. With that, I'll turn it over to Greg to walk through the details of our quarter and output.

speaker
Pierre

Thanks, Sean, and thank you all for joining us today. Please note that all numbers referenced in my remarks are on a non-GAAP basis unless otherwise stated. A reconciliation to comparable GAAP metrics can be found in today's earnings release, which is available on our website and as an exhibit to the form 8K, furnished with the SEC just before this call. Turning to our fourth quarter results, total revenues were $141.4 million in the fourth quarter, an increase of 14% year over year, and $540.7 million for fiscal 25, an increase of 13% over fiscal 24. Subscription revenues were $125 million in the fourth quarter, an increase of 16% year-over-year, and $469.2 million for the full year, an increase of 15% year-over-year. Organic subscription revenues were $118.3 million in the fourth quarter, an increase of 10%, and $456.9 million for fiscal 25, an increase of 12% year-over-year. Professional services revenue were $16.4 million in the fourth quarter, an increase of 1% year-over-year. Full-year professional services revenues were $71.5 million, an increase of 7% year-over-year. Non-U.S. total revenues were $33.3 million in the fourth quarter, up 34% year-over-year, or 38% in constant currency. Non-U.S. total revenues were $116.2 million in fiscal 25, up 30% year over year, and also up 30% in constant currency. Full circle contributed approximately $4.3 million to both the fourth quarter and full year non-U.S. total revenues. Non-GAAP operating income was $24.4 million, or 17% of total revenues, compared with $19.3 million or 16% of total revenues in the fourth quarter of fiscal 24. Year-over-year non-GAAP operating margin expansion was muted in the fourth quarter by $3.2 million of incremental operating expenses contributed by Full Circle as integration activities began. Our non-GAAP operating income for fiscal 25 was $96.2 million or 18% of total revenues compared with $61.8 million or 13% of total revenues in fiscal 24. Non-GAAP net income attributable to Encino for the fourth quarter of fiscal 25 was $13.9 million or 12 cents per diluted share compared to $23.8 million or 21 cents per diluted share in the fourth quarter of fiscal 24. Non-GAAP net income attributable to Encino for fiscal 25 was $76.1 million or 66 cents per diluted share compared to $58 million or 51 cents per diluted share in fiscal 24. Fiscal 25 non-GAAP net income attributable to Encino included $3 million of interest expense on our credit facility in the fourth quarter and $5.7 million for the full year. Fiscal 25 non-GAAP net income attributable to Encino also included other non-operating predominantly non-cash expenses from fluctuations in foreign currency on intercompany loans of approximately $10.3 million in the fourth quarter and $10.5 million for the full year. Free cash flow is negative $10.4 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 25, down from $7.7 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 24 due to acquisition-related costs of $2.8 million, $3 million of additional interest expense, and timing-related fluctuations in net working capital. Free cash flow for fiscal 25 was $53.4 million compared to $53.8 million in fiscal 24, with growth in this metric temporarily impacted by acquisition-related costs of $12.2 million and $4.8 million of additional interest expense as we drew on our line of credit to complete the acquisition of Full Circle. Subsequent to the end of the quarter, we closed the acquisition of Sandbox Banking for a purchase price of $52.5 million in cash, subject to customary adjustments, and an additional earn-out opportunity of up to $10 million. The transaction was financed with our revolving credit facility. Sandbox provides middleware that has become critical to our integration strategy for connecting Encino with our customers' core processing and other third-party systems. This transaction immediately yields costs of goods sold savings of approximately $1 million annually that we would otherwise have incurred under our former partnership agreement with Sandbox, and is expected to deliver accretive subscription revenue growth and reduce implementation timelines, thereby helping to improve professional services gross margins. We ended fiscal 25 with 549 customers that contributed greater than $100,000 to fiscal 25 subscription revenues, an increase of 10% from fiscal 24. Of these, 105 contributed more than $1 million to fiscal 25 subscription revenues, an increase of 22% from fiscal 24. And 14 contributed more than $5 million to fiscal 25 subscription revenues, an increase of 27% from fiscal 24. Our remaining performance obligation, or RPO, was $1.2 billion as of January 31, 2025, up 15% over $1 billion as of January 31, 2024, with $797 million expected to be recognized in the next 24 months, up 18% from $675 million as of January 31, 2024. Acquisitions completed in fiscal 25 contributed approximately $24 million to total RPO and $22 million in less than 24 months RPO. Before turning to our fiscal 26 guidance, I wanted to provide an update on our new pricing framework, as well as on the new KPIs we are providing to assist you in better understanding our business and measuring our progress. On our new pricing framework, recall that in fiscal 24, we began implementing platform pricing for our mortgage customers and for consumer lending customers. And this year, we began implementing platform pricing for all of our other solutions. As of January 31, 2025, approximately 15% of our ACV is on platform pricing, and we expect to complete the transition of remaining ACV over the next four years. Due specifically to the pricing transition, we are modeling an approximately 1% subscription revenue growth benefit from the pro rata contribution of deals signed in fiscal 26 relative to how we would have recognized subscription revenues on our legacy seat-based model. This benefit, along with that of renewals where we are targeting an appropriate price uplift to reflect the meaningful innovation we have added to our product portfolio, including from Banking Advisor, will be larger in subsequent years as more of our customer base is converted to new pricing. Please reference slide 18 in the appendix of our earnings presentation for an illustrative example of subscription revenue recognition for both new and renewal agreements under platform pricing. We look forward to discussing the new pricing model in more detail at our upcoming Investor Day at our Insight User Conference in May, including the benefits we expect to realize from the shift and the anticipated impact to our reported metrics. Turning to the new KPIs, please refer to slide four in our earnings presentation to reference these updated disclosures. Going forward, we will be guiding to and reporting ACV annually as of the end of our fiscal years. We define ACV as the highest annualized subscription fee obligation under customer contracts in effect at the end of a reporting period. Note that ACV does not include any fees generated from consumption above contracted minimums for our mortgage or banking advisor solutions. ACV is management's preferred KPI for sales achievement, including for determining variable compensation for employees on sales commission plans. Our customers sign large multi-year agreements some of which ramp over time, and we expect high retention rates. So optimizing the fees at the end of a contract term is what we emphasize and incent for our sales force. On a reported basis, ACV as of January 31, 2025 was $516.4 million, an increase of 13% year over year, or 8% on an organic basis, reflecting an improving gross bookings trend versus the prior fiscal year, most notably in the U.S. community and regional and enterprise markets, both of which exceeded their gross bookings targets in fiscal 25, while international and mortgage gross bookings were below plan. On a constant currency basis, ACV grew 14% in total and 9% on an organic basis in fiscal 25. We are also introducing another new disclosure, ACV net retention rate, which increased to 106% in fiscal 25 versus 102% in the prior year. We define ACV net retention rate as total ACV at the end of a fiscal year from customers with ACV as of the end of the prior fiscal year, expressed as a percentage of AC as of the end of the prior fiscal year, converted to U.S. dollars with foreign exchange rates in effect as of the end of the applicable period. We believe this improvement is indicative of growing demand from our existing customers to more broadly adopt our platform and of churn beginning to normalize as market-driven headwinds subside. I note that we are aligning the definition of our subscription revenue net retention rate with the details disclosed in our quarterly SEC filings regarding changes in subscription revenues from new versus existing customers based upon when a customer first contributes to subscription revenues. A comparison to the prior reported metric is available in our Form 10-K. Subscription revenue net retention rate moderated to 110%, down from 116% in fiscal 24. Like subscription revenues, we believe this is a lagging indicator, and its decline was primarily an output of the elevated churn in fiscal 24 that impacted subscription revenues in fiscal 25. Total churn in fiscal 25 ended up at $26 million of annualized subscription revenues, down from $31 million in fiscal 24. Of this amount, mortgage churn was $9 million in fiscal 25, down from $13 million in fiscal 24. As we expect churn to continue moderating towards our historic norms, going forward, we will quantify and discuss retention on a net basis with our new disclosure framework. As Sean noted, we are very excited about the future and we are absolutely leaning in on the growth opportunities we see ahead of us so that we can leverage our leading position in this market. This involves making certain investments, particularly in international sales and in marketing, to capitalize on this opportunity. Despite these investments, we expect steady operating margin expansion beginning in the second half of this year, And while we are not ready to provide specific guidance beyond fiscal 26, we are focused on achieving the rule of 40 milestone and are confident in our trajectory to accomplish this somewhere around the fourth quarter of next year. We believe the returns on our investments in sales and marketing and the product innovation we are bringing to market this year, coupled with the cost efficiencies we expect to achieve in our R&D organization by leveraging AI and through other organizational efficiency initiatives, will be instrumental in achieving this. While the exact timing may vary by a quarter or two based on market conditions and investment opportunities, you should be confident that we are laser focused on ensuring that we achieve the rule of 40 in a sustainable and disciplined manner. Turning to fiscal 26 guidance, we take our commitments to the street very seriously and recognize that our prior revenue guidance philosophy could have been more conservative to leave us greater flexibility in operating the business. Recognizing this, we have adjusted our guidance framework and have attempted to de-risk our guidance as much as possible. With that in mind, I'd like to provide some additional details to help you contextualize the fiscal 26 guidance, and in particular, the year-over-year growth trajectory throughout the year. Note that we are giving these additional data points to help you more clearly understand how we built our model and developed our guidance for fiscal 26. While we will, of course, address general trends in our guidance on each earnings call, we do not plan on going through and updating each of these assumptions on a quarterly basis. First, we expect the approximately 1% currency headwind to ACC growth in fiscal 25 to have a commensurate negative impact on fiscal 26 subscription revenues. Second, We expect to have DocFox integration complete by Insight, and our expectation is that bookings for this product will increase meaningfully in the second half of the year. We continue to believe that the onboarding opportunity for Encino on a global basis is significant. With that said, as Sean mentioned, bookings for this solution were below plan in fiscal 25 as product integration activities were prioritized, and as a result, there is a lagging effect that impacts our subscription revenue growth in fiscal 26. We expect the anticipated bookings rebound for onboarding in the second half of fiscal 26 will contribute to accelerating subscription revenue growth in fiscal 27. Third, our US mortgage business grew 8% in fiscal 25 in what remained a difficult market. Despite this growth and the many opportunities we see for our mortgage solution in the market, including taking it more upmarket to regional and enterprise banks, as well as to more and more credit unions. In light of the uncertainty around the path of mortgage rates in the U.S., our guidance for fiscal 26 assumes no year-over-year increase in U.S. mortgage subscription revenues. Any growth in this business, including growth in loan volume overages, would be upside to our numbers. Finally, our second half year-over-year subscription revenue comparisons will be negatively impacted by approximately 3% in both the third and fourth quarters of fiscal 26 as a result of one-time subscription revenues that occurred in the second half of fiscal 25, affecting our U.S. mortgage and international businesses as a result of one-time revenues that occurred in the second half of fiscal 25. These revenues primarily related to one-time catch-up mortgage revenues, as noted on our Q3 earnings call, and a contract buyout by a customer that, following management changes at the bank and internal restructuring in the business that had sponsored our program, decided that now was not the right time to move forward with their implementation. For the first quarter of fiscal 26, we expect total revenues of $138.75 million to $140.75 million, with subscription revenues of $121.75 million to $123.75 million, an increase of 9% and 11%, respectively, at the midpoint of the ranges. Beginning this quarter, our guidance for and reported non-GAAP net income attributable to Infino per share will exclude any impact from currency exchange on intercompany transactions. Non-GAAP operating income in the first quarter is expected to be $22.5 million to $24.5 million, and non-GAAP net income attributable to Encino per share to be 15 cents to 16 cents. This guidance assumes interest expense incurred under our credit facility of approximately $3.5 million. This is based upon a weighted average of approximately 119 million diluted shares outstanding before any share repurchases. For fiscal 26, we expect to add $48 million to $51 million to ACV on a constant currency basis, including approximately 4.5 million from the acquisition of Sandbox. This represents 19% organic net ACV bookings growth at the midpoint of the range, which should accelerate subscription revenue growth in fiscal 27. For fiscal 26, we expect total revenues of $574.5 million to $578.5 million, with subscription revenues of $503 to $507 million, representing growth rates of 7% and 8%, respectively, at the midpoints of the ranges. Excluding the impact of the one-time items noted above and currency fluctuations, our organic subscription revenue growth rate in fiscal 26 is expected to be approximately 7% at the midpoint of the range. In light of the specific headwinds I highlighted earlier, we expect subscription revenue growth to be approximately six points lower in the second half of the year versus the first half before re-accelerating in fiscal 27. We expect full circle will contribute approximately $13.3 million to subscription revenues through the first nine months of fiscal 26, including approximately $4.3 million in the first quarter. And that sandbox banking will contribute approximately $4.2 million to subscription revenues for the full year, including approximately 750,000 in the first quarter. For fiscal 26, We will refer to the nine-month contribution of full circle and the 12-month contribution of sandbox as inorganic as these periods compared to the prior year periods which preceded each acquisition. We expect non-GAAP operating income for fiscal 26 to be $107 million to $111 million, a 13% increase over fiscal 25 at the midpoint. After playing defense for the better part of the past two-plus years in light of the macro difficulties impacting financial institutions around the world, we are going on the offensive and investing in areas of high growth. To that end, our guidance assumes an increase in sales and marketing expense related to additional quota-carrying sales representatives to cover the U.S. credit union market, emerging geographies in EMEA and Japan, and investments in digital marketing initiatives amounting to approximately $10 million for the full year. These investments reflect the sizable opportunity we see in front of us. Our guidance assumes approximately 100 basis points of operating margin expansion at the midpoint of the range for the full year, with the first half of the year flat to that of last year. We expect the second half of the year will yield approximately 200 basis points of expansion as we leverage the sales and marketing investments made at the start of the year, get beyond our annual user conference in May, and realize additional operating efficiencies in our R&D organization. We expect additional margin expansion in fiscal 27 and beyond as we generate scale and efficiency from these investments and efficiency gains. Non-GAAP net income attributable to Encino per share is expected to be 66 cents to 69 cents excluding the impact of currency fluctuations and is based upon a weighted average of approximately 120 million diluted shares outstanding before any share repurchases. This guidance also assumes interest expense incurred under our credit facility of approximately 14 million dollars. In closing, I appreciate that we have provided you with a lot of information today and we will do our best to make ourselves available over the coming days to answer your questions and provide clarity about the disclosures made. I also look forward to seeing many of you at Insight next month in Charlotte, North Carolina, where you will be able to see firsthand the unique and exciting product innovation we are bringing to market and where we will go into more detail about the business, our financials, and the opportunities we have in front of us. With that, I will open the line for questions.

speaker
Sandbox

As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. To remove yourself from the queue, you may press star 1-1 again. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up to allow everyone the opportunity to participate. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Saket Kalia of Barclays. please go ahead and sack it.

speaker
Saket Kalia of Barclays

Okay, great. Hey guys, thanks for taking my questions here and congrats Sean on, on your promotion to CEO. Very, very well deserved. Thank you for that. Absolutely. Sean, maybe, maybe for you. I'm curious what you're hearing back from your customers. Just as, as you, and I know you spend a lot of time with customers. What are you hearing back from them as, as, as they think about their willingness to invest here in 2025, particularly as we look at sort of the implied organic growth here in fiscal 26?

speaker
Sean Desmond

Yeah, I appreciate the question, Saget. And, yes, we've got customers coming through our headquarters and global offices on a regular basis. And what we hear from executives across our customer base is that although they acknowledge the volatility in the markets currently, they're also – turning the corner on some of the headwinds that we've experienced in the previous years, past the liquidity crisis, past the longest inverted yield curve we've had in the past 46 years, a good thing for banks specifically. And by and large, they're telling us their balance sheets are healthy and they're expecting growth in their loan portfolios, in their deposit positions, and as well as their own EPS. So These are all good signals for them to focus internally on how they can improve their efficiency, which plays exactly to our value proposition.

speaker
Saket Kalia of Barclays

Got it, got it. Greg, maybe for you, appreciate the additional disclosure, but I was wondering, could you just maybe dig into the difference between sort of the growth rates between ACV and revenue in fiscal 26? I think the ACV growth at the midpoint Because I don't know, high single digits, I think the revenue growth is a couple points lower than that. How do you sort of think about those two things differently?

speaker
Pierre

Thank you for the question, Sackett. As Sean noted on the call, revenue growth is a lagging indicator or a metric of where we've been, while bookings or ACV growth is a leading indication of the future and where we're going. So as noted, our ACV accelerated a percent on a constant currency basis in fiscal 25. And we look forward to updating you on our bookings progress throughout the year. From a revenue perspective, I'm going to point you to slide 16 in the presentation that we posted, which walks you through the bridge between fiscal 25 and fiscal 26. Specifically, you'll note from a Headwinds perspective, you know, 1% for FX, about 1% the mortgage business, dilutive in light of the conservative nature we took around our guidance with mortgage this year. There's a 2% headwind on the one-time revenues that I commented on in my prepared remarks. And then finally, there's a 6%, if you exclude mortgage, organic headwind. And that's really a combination of a couple things. One is gross bookings, which we're a little shy of where we expect it to end the year, mainly because of international and mortgages we've been talking about in the second half of last year, as well as a little bit higher churn. Again, referring back to my prepared comments in terms of the one-time nature of a customer in Q4. And then two other things I'd point you to. One is just from a linearity of fiscal 26 bookings. You know, as part of our modeling this year, we did go more conservative in terms of forecasting bookings more back-end weighted than normal. And that really, I think, touches probably upon the biggest point, Sackett, is just a change in the guidance philosophy, as I noted on the call. Um, you know, I think last year we got a lot of feedback in terms of the guidance that we gave and how the year progressed. And ultimately our goal this year was to be much more conservative in the guidance and try to de-risk it as much as we possibly could. And as we see momentum building through the, through the year, you know, our goal and expectation is to be able to update you on that progress and ultimately, um, you know, see that momentum, you know, with the business and ultimately with our, with our guidance going forward.

speaker
Sackett

Got it. That's super helpful. Thanks, guys. Thank you, Sackett.

speaker
Sandbox

Thank you. Our next question comes from Terry Tillman of Truist Securities. Your question, please, Terry.

speaker
Terry Tillman

Yeah, thanks. It kind of broke up there, but I think it was for me. So I'll just ask a single question. I know it's going to be a lot of questions. Just a heads up, it's a multi-parter, though. I think in your all-prepared remarks, you all talked about going on the offensive and mentioning increased go-to-market investments. I mean, the results on the gross booking side are definitely underwhelming. But is this signifying you all don't have enough sales capacity? Is it an up-tearing of the sales force? So first, I'd just like to know kind of what's informing kind of the go-to-market investments and then add a second part of the question.

speaker
Sean Desmond

Yeah, thank you, Terry. Appreciate it. A couple things. First and foremost, we are leaning into the go-to-market motion here. and solidifying our internal team here across sales, product, marketing, and CS, and making sure that we have solid investments layered down in the organization. So specifically, we brought in a new head of product marketing to lead that organization. We've put leadership in place in EMEA specifically where, as you all know from the prepared remarks, we were not satisfied with the year-over-year growth this past year. And those two appointments, as well as launching a go-to-market team in the credit union space to focus specifically on an area where we think we have a lot of upside. And beyond that, we have put new mortgage leadership in place as well. So there have been a lot of intentional moves for reacceleration of growth in sales leadership, as well as in the marketing functions. And those teams are collaborating really well together out of the gate. driving with a sense of urgency gives us a real confidence this year in growth in bookings.

speaker
Pierre

And Terry, the other thing that I would add is, as I noted, you know, we have been playing defense in light of the macro and, you know, ultimately putting salespeople in the field when you appreciate what the buying environment is, or maybe what it's not, you know, is not very productive or efficient. And so in terms of adding capacity, I think you should take that as a sign of the opportunities that we see. and ultimately the market and some of the headwinds that we've had to navigate easing, again, getting back to the health in general of our customer base, which, again, comes out of a couple years of some difficulties. And so it really is a reflection more on the market opportunity that we see right now versus, frankly, where we were a year or two ago.

speaker
Terry Tillman

Yeah, got it on that. Thanks, Greg. And, Sean, also, yeah, congrats on the new appointment. To the CEO, the second part of the question just relates to I was surprised by the idea of operating leverage in the second half after some go-to-market investments. Is maybe that apples and oranges? And actually, the leverage you see in the second half is just from normal course of business bookings improving? Or why would we get leverage that fast if you're making investments in the first half of the year? Thank you.

speaker
Pierre

Terry, I think it's a combination of improved bookings activity ultimately. But again, I think we're continuing to see opportunities from an efficiency standpoint. as we constantly are looking at the organization and seeing, you know, challenging ourselves where we should invest and ultimately where we should may redirect investment. And so that's a constant activity for us. And I think we see continued opportunities, you know, also add that with, with AI, you know, it certainly brings, uh, opportunities in terms of leverage. And, um, you know, we have been, as Sean noted in our prepared remarks, we have been, you know, focusing on data analytics and AI for quite some time. And we think that presents opportunities for us as the year progresses as well.

speaker
Terry

All right. Thank you. Thanks, Terry.

speaker
Sandbox

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Alex Sklar of Raymond James. Please go ahead, Alex.

speaker
Terry Tillman

Great, thank you. Sean or Greg, just on the ACV guidance, I appreciate the new disclosure there. In the prepared remarks, you talked about easing macro, improving international activity, better growth retention, and then the more strategic products with commercial onboarding from the AI solutions. I'm just curious with all that kind of being factored, can you talk about the puts and takes that are embedded in that ACV growth outlook, why that wouldn't be better than the kind of 9% constant currency you saw in FY25? Thanks.

speaker
Sean Desmond

Yeah, I will remind that the revenue has a lagging indicator of bookings, right? And so we do believe that we have good upside opportunities with the maturity of our solutions, hardening of our onboarding solution. And we've added a lot of SAM through our acquisitions the past year of DocFox and Full Circle, capitalizing on those opportunities. We will believe what will be good upside for us. and our consumer lending solution where we signed up 20 new customers in q4 including two banks north of 50 billion in assets and attacking the credit union market with that solution will be another good opportunity for us all that said those will show up in re-acceleration in fy27 due to some of the revenue lag we talked about earlier and then of course the personnel changes and the momentum we see in international opportunity would be a good year-over-year growth in our bookings.

speaker
Pierre

Yeah, and Alex, the only other thing to add, again, I'd go back to the guidance philosophy that I touched upon, you know, in response to Sackett's comment, as well as my prepared remarks. Again, I think we're, you know, took a step back. We took a whole bunch of feedback from investors last year, particularly after our Q3 call. And again, I think, you know, our focus is on, again, building momentum throughout the year and setting ourselves up for success. And so, again, I would just note that as you think about the differences between what we're talking about now, you know, versus what we spoke about, you know, last year at this time.

speaker
Terry Tillman

Okay, great. Thank you both. Greg, maybe just a quick follow-up for you. The $10 million of higher sales and marketing investments this year, can you just talk about how comprehensive those are versus the opportunity that you see? Is this part one of kind of a multi-year sales and marketing investment cycle? Is this a one-time step up this year to cover some green shoot demand areas and then we see leverage there? How are you thinking about sales and marketing over a multi-year period?

speaker
Pierre

Yeah, Alex, I don't think it's a multi-year issue versus, again, with us seeing some thawing of the market and us seeing opportunity out there. I think paired with the maturation of our products, and we talked about Insight, where we're going to be coming out with a whole bunch of new products and innovation. It's really just trying to reflect the opportunity that we see. And so some of it is in sales capacity, as we noted. Other is in digital marketing software and activities in terms of pipe and things like that. And so, again, from our perspective, it's a specific investment that we're making this year and, again, reflects, as I said, the opportunity and, frankly, the thawing nature of the end market that we serve and have been navigating the headwinds of over the last couple years.

speaker
Sackett

All right, great. Thank you both for the color.

speaker
Pierre

Thanks, Alex.

speaker
Sandbox

Thank you. Our next question comes from James Fawcett of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead, James.

speaker
James Fawcett

Thank you so much. Filling in for Mike Linfante here this afternoon. Wanted to ask kind of a positioning or market positioning question just as a reminder. A lot of the commentary from the Treasury and Commerce Secretaries in the new administration have indicated a lot of the deregulation focus has been concentrated on stratifying capital requirements based on bank size, complexity, et cetera. which I think should disproportionately benefit small and community banks more than regional enterprise. But can you remind us of your exposure to that smaller cohort and if you're seeing any of that sentiment reflected in your RFP or engagement activity yet?

speaker
Sean Desmond

Yeah, sure. Specifically in terms of the platform scalability, it is a unique position that we have to serve enterprise clients as well as community banks and everybody in between and that goes beyond banking into the credit union as well as imb space but overall the community bank market for us remains one of our major portfolios we have a significant percentage of our customer base specifically doing commercial lending in that community bank space And this past year we had over 50% of our overall bookings outside of the commercial space in community banking.

speaker
James Fawcett

Great. That's really helpful nuance there. And then just I wanted to circle back on Pierre's commentary about magnitude of pricing benefit. It sounds like if we're interpreting what you're saying correctly, it could be low single-digit benefit. But curious if we're in the right range and what that will be in fiscal year 26 given the phased rollout.

speaker
Pierre

James, if you wouldn't mind repeating that, I think you referred to a comment from Pierre. Are you talking about a prior call or?

speaker
James Fawcett

Yeah, yeah, just like just generally, yeah, just generally the magnitude of pricing benefit. I know that you guys are changing pricing and just wondering if it sounds like you're expecting some of that, those pricing changes. could be a low single-digit benefit this year. But just wondering what that, if we're understanding that correctly for fiscal year 26, given the phased rollout.

speaker
Pierre

Yeah, sure, James. Got it. Thank you for the clarification. So noted that we expect a 1% uplift this year based on deals signed this year. And again, that's just the pro rata benefit that we would expect from the new platform pricing. Again, and I also will comment that We were more back half weighted bookings expectations consistent with our conservative philosophy on guidance. And we also commented that you should expect that not only to get the full benefit next year, which would be an increase, but that to continue as we cycle through the remaining 85% of customers as we migrate them to new pricing. So we do see that as an opportunity. And I think that it reflects the innovation, the investments that we've made. the new products that we have come out with and are coming out with, and ultimately specifically the banking advisor opportunity, which we think is quite exciting, recognizing that it's early in that rollout, the product and the adoption of AI.

speaker
Sean Desmond

And James, circling back to your previous question on market segmentation, about two-thirds of our overall business is in the community and regional market in the U.S. specifically.

speaker
James Fawcett

Oh, great. I appreciate that. Thanks so much, everybody.

speaker
Sackett

Thanks, James.

speaker
Sandbox

Thank you. Our next question comes from Koji Akita of Bank of America. Please go ahead, Koji.

speaker
Koji Akita

Yeah, thanks, guys, for taking the questions. So in the prepared remarks, you guys mentioned that it's going to take several quarters to see the progress in the sixes. And it did seem like you alluded to that there's some confidence there that you're going to be able to achieve that improvement in the execution in the next couple of quarters. So maybe can you go deeper in some of the things that you've done internally or maybe pipeline build trends since the changes were made internally that's giving you that confidence to make that statement?

speaker
Sean Desmond

Yeah, absolutely. And again, the revenue being a lagging indicator of bookings, we are seeing bookings momentum and growth now that we're excited that will show up in the revenue side of the equation, um, later, but specifically some of the maturity and the follow through on the commitments we've made to our customers, um, that we've resolved is, is exciting. And we're hearing that feedback from our customers, um, specifically the onboarding solution. that when we acquired DocFox last year, there was an expectation that a certain amount of customers would take that solution standalone as we integrated that fully with the platform. They confirmed that they'd prefer us to go ahead and fully integrate that with the platform, and we expect to see that realized and momentum on that in the second half of this year. So onboarding is one key contributor to our confidence in the back half of this year. The EMEA leadership changes we've alluded to, We put Joaquin in place in November as I mentioned. He's building out his go-to-market team. That's largely in place now And as they do both go through the pipeline quantitatively and qualitatively That seems to be trending in the right direction in all areas and then on the mortgage side of the house here in the US we have a hardened that and matured the mortgage solution in terms of readiness for the enterprise. We had several key initiatives last year underway, being ready for a secure multi-tenant environment for enterprise-grade customers, rounding out our APIs with Encompass and some of our AUS integration, those all converging on completion now, give us cause for excitement to back half the year with mortgage. And then finally, as we change our guidance philosophy, that shows up over time.

speaker
Koji Akita

Got it. No, thank you for that. And maybe a follow up here. I do understand you guys are targeting, you know, kind of a reacceleration and growth in fiscal 27. But I guess the question here is what if what if the growth continues to be constrained for longer than expected into 27? You know, how should we be thinking about balancing the growth and profitability profile in that sort of scenario? Thanks, guys.

speaker
Pierre

Thanks, Koji. Ultimately, I'd refer back to the Rule 40 commentary that I had in my prepared remarks. And again, we targeted around the fourth quarter of next year, and we didn't specify that that would be solely contingent on growth. So that's what I'd point you to and our focus on that and achieving that target.

speaker
Sackett

Got it. Thanks, Greg. Thank you, guys. Thank you.

speaker
Sandbox

Thank you. Our next question comes from Ryan Tomasello. of KBW. Please go ahead, Ryan.

speaker
Ryan

Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. Wanted to start with U.S. mortgage. You know, one of your U.S. mortgage competitors, I think, recently announced a more formal move into the IMB space and also alluded to some competitive gains. So I was hoping you could provide just, you know, more context on how you view the competitive positioning there. And, you know, any elaboration on where win rates have been running and how you feel about that position of that business for 26? Thanks.

speaker
Pierre

Ryan, thanks for the question. I think we feel really good about where we are from a mortgage standpoint. Again, you know, aside from the guidance philosophy, you know, Sean just highlighted investments that we made last year in terms of being more aggressive going up market, which is a space that that business is not historically focused on. But obviously, with our customer base and the large number of enterprise customers we have, we think that that's a nice opportunity for us, particularly as we talk about the platform and that being part of our platform. And so we haven't really seen a change in the competitive dynamics. We continue to win, I think, market share and logos. If you look at the presentation, you'll see that we added 24 new IMB customers last year. And so from our perspective, it's, you know, it remains the same from a competitive standpoint. And I think we continue to feel very good about our positioning, our technology, and, you know, our ability to continue to grab market share as we have done, you know, over the last couple of years in what's been a very difficult market.

speaker
Ryan

Thanks for that. And then in the past, I think, you know, I think specifically last year, you talked about The visibility you tend to have entering the year on what's already fully baked into the subscription guide. I guess, you know, given the new guidance philosophy here and what sounds like the addict and conservatism you're baking in, you know, is that visibility higher than usual in any way to kind of quantify that relative to the organic growth targets you have, guidance you have set on the subscription revenue for this year? Thanks.

speaker
Pierre

Yeah, thanks, Ryan. Yeah, consistent with the guidance philosophy, you can assume that as it relates to the midpoint of our guidance, we are in a better position than we were last year or the year before. And so that would be consistent with our approach this year for guidance.

speaker
Sackett

Thanks for taking the questions. Thanks, Ryan.

speaker
Sandbox

Thank you. Our next question comes from Chris Kennedy of William Blair. Your line is open, Chris.

speaker
Chris Kennedy

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question and squeezing me in here. Sean, given your former role, can you just provide some perspective on the evolution of your consumer lending product? You guys have been working at it for a long time. We understand bookings, it was over 50% of bookings last year, but just talk about that evolution, please.

speaker
Sean Desmond

Yeah. And so, again, we were proud of the accomplishments we've had the back half of last year, specifically in the momentum we have with consumer lending. And I would attribute that to the maturity and hardening of that solution, taking customer feedback and iterating with some of our early day customers on that journey. Specifically, I think we've really rounded out a robust integration set. There were key integrations that we needed to develop over the course of the past 18 months that we did commit to around stock prep and certain other areas, as well as just time to market and speed of the overall solution. That's a space where people expect a seamless and very quick turnaround time, specifically in the consumer lending market where we're measuring velocity every day by minutes versus hours and days. And we're really trending well in tracking some of those metrics and KPIs. I'm proud of our teams, the leadership and the consumer lending side of the house for challenging the product managers and engineers on those metrics. And I think that's a big part of why we've been successful in our turning corner here. Additionally, I would say that targeting the credit union market specifically intensifies our focus for consumer lending. and gives us feedback loop from a broader set of customers that is helping us harden the solution as well.

speaker
Chris Kennedy

Got it. Thank you for that. And then if you think about, and maybe you'll give this at the investor day, but when you think about the mix of your business over the next three to five years between the commercial, the mortgage, Nick, consumer, any way to think about how that

speaker
Sackett

how you think that business will evolve over time. Thank you.

speaker
Pierre

Thanks, Chris. I think I noted that 70% of our SAM is outside of commercial lending. And this past year, more bookings were outside of commercial lending. And I think that that's really a massive opportunity for us. Not only are we going to be able to continue to sell commercial, which we've had great success with But again, it's leveraging the success we've had, the customer relationships that we've built with that product, and the confidence they have in us across the bank. And so we expect great things from consumer. It did take longer to get where we are than we wanted and expected. But ultimately, I think we feel really good about where we are. And again, that's reinforced by not only the $200 billion bank that we took live, I know everyone's been waiting to see that success, and I think we feel really good about where that customer is. But also, again, adding an over $50 billion bank and an over $80 billion bank in Q4, I think, again, reinforces the nature of that product, which from our perspective is the only net new multi-tenant SaaS product out in the marketplace for consumer lending.

speaker
Sackett

Got it. Thank you. Thanks, Chris. Thank you.

speaker
Sandbox

Our next question comes from Aaron Kimson of Citizens. Please go ahead, Aaron.

speaker
Aaron Kimson

Thank you. As a follow-up on that question, a lot of investors see the Sun Encino as driven around the best-in-class commercial functionality, but it seems like a lot of your focus is on the consumer opportunity, where you guys just mentioned, again, over 70% of the SAMs that What would you say to a skeptical investor who says there might be a SAM issue at Encino, particularly on the commercial side, where the consensus is your motive is deepest?

speaker
Sean Desmond

Yeah, thanks for the question. First and foremost, I would say we are committed to following through on the promises we make to our existing customers. And, you know, the platform value proposition that we actually do onboarding We do a portfolio management. We do account opening and we do loan origination. We do that across commercial, consumer, small business, and mortgage is a key differentiator for Encino. But we do point back to following through on the commitments to delivering on the omni-channel consistent experience for our customers and their customers, whether digital in branch. And that has shown up first in our core commercial customer base. When you think about the investments we've made in AI, and banking advisor capabilities and the current effort to wrap agents around current workflow, that's showing up first in commercial. So I think we're going to have significant opportunities to cross-sell into the commercial customer base opportunities to get those even more efficient through AI. And we will continue to point back to our flagship customers in terms of how we innovate and drive thoughtful innovation throughout the platform.

speaker
Pierre

Aaron, I would also add that one of the unique things about Encino is the global nature of our business. And so you can just look at our logo accounts, which again are in the presentation that we posted. I mean, there's plenty of runway and room in just the U.S., both community banks as well as upmarket for commercial. And again, I think we are by far the gold standard. And so we see plenty of opportunity there. And then also on a global basis, it's still early for a lot of countries to in terms of adopting, you know, still cloud and SaaS, but ultimately, again, commercial and making those investments. And I think we are unique in our ability to go serve a global market. And I think that there's plenty of greenfield opportunity out there, you know, across the world. And so not only do we feel like just purely with commercial lending is there plenty of opportunity, but also to Sean's point, we have now added products, whether it's through AI, whether it's through some of the acquisitions that we've done, as well as internal development. like continuous credit monitoring, to go to those customers that are very happy and sell them more product. And so we view our commercial lending base as an asset, and we think there's plenty of runway left for us to continue to grow that base.

speaker
Aaron Kimson

Thank you. And then as a follow-up, can you remind us how you compete directly or I assume more indirectly with Rocket on the Encino Mortgage side? And do you see any potential implications for Encino Mortgage from Rocket's two recently announced deals for Redfin and Mr. Cooper if they end up closing? Thank you.

speaker
Sean Desmond

Yeah, we understand they've been busy on the acquisition front of recents, and there may be some consolidation in that space indicating that people are preparing for good news on the rate side over time, but we believe that we're firmly entrenched in the IMB space serving that market and very focused with our mortgage solution and don't see that as an impediment to to our market share.

speaker
Pierre

Yeah, I think to Sean's point, it's interesting, again, as people prepare for opportunity in that space after emerging from the last couple of years, you know, historically M&A has been a leading indicator of, you know, perceived better times ahead. And so from an acquisition perspective, you know, as we sit and look at that, I mean, that's what crosses our mind. In terms of those transactions as it competes with our mortgage solution, you know, we're not competitive with Mr. Cooper in the servicing space. And so from that perspective, you know, I wouldn't say it's a net new competitive, you know, challenge for us.

speaker
Sandbox

Thank you. Our next question comes from Alex Markgraf of KBCM. Please go ahead, Alex.

speaker
Alex Markgraf

Hey, thanks for the commentary on retention rates. Obviously, them headwinds in the past couple of years. Just curious, maybe, Greg, what your view is of sort of a normalized or appropriate retention rate for this business?

speaker
Sackett

Yeah, subs revs, as we noted, will moderate this year. And I think we expect ACV to improve and to continue to improve.

speaker
Pierre

And again, highlighting that metric, again, as we think about the business and measuring our performance, as we took feedback on KPIs, that was one of the reasons why we wanted to bring that to you guys so you can track it along with us. But we think that's a good metric for you guys to follow.

speaker
Alex Markgraf

Thanks. And then maybe just one follow up on some of the recent headcount additions. Can you just remind us on sort of the ramp for quota carrying reps? And then as you think about the geo and product and segment leads across mortgage, EMEA and credit union, just sort of the expected ramp timeline to productivity from those folks. Thank you.

speaker
Pierre

Sure. Thanks for the question, Alex. Yeah, it really depends on the rep in terms of where they're coming from and their knowledge of the industry. But ultimately, we assume about a six-month ramp time period.

speaker
Sackett

Thanks. Thank you.

speaker
Sandbox

Thank you. Our next question comes from Brent Breslin of Piper Sandler. Please go ahead, Brent.

speaker
Terry

Great. Thanks for taking the question. This is Jay Aron. maybe building a bit more on competition on the AI front specifically. Do you see any banks looking to experiment more with custom AI-powered workflows, or is customer interest largely revolving around prepackaged solutions?

speaker
Sean Desmond

I'm sorry. It was a little garbled, but I believe the question was, are customers experimenting with custom AI solutions versus prepackaged? Is that right?

speaker
Terry

That's right.

speaker
Sean Desmond

Thank you. Yeah. So listen, there's a frenetic pace in the market, obviously around innovation and AI, and we're all tracking that closely and having our own fun here at Encino on that journey. What I would tell you is our customers continue to validate that how they think about AI is they would prefer that their trusted partner and vendor who's been with them and housed their data be the one to help them on that journey. and while they understand there are opportunities to imagine experiences, they're really encouraging us to lean into the opportunity to wrap agents around our existing workflow, continue to develop out our banking advisor capabilities, and lean into our acquisition of Sandbox Banking to build a unified API layer that would be our data access or gateway for those customers. We've been encouraged by the fact that a big fork Bank in the U.S. enterprise market is heavily using our banking advisor capabilities, and you'll hear more about that at our Insight User Conference here in just a few short weeks. So I think they're confirming that the partner they've been with for a while, they're willing to be a bit patient and get the experience right in a highly regulated environment rather than rushing in to the first experience they hear about on LinkedIn.

speaker
Terry

Makes sense. And maybe a quick follow-up. Any new feedback to know from larger customers around the shift away from seats to asset-based pricing?

speaker
Sean Desmond

Overall, it's been positive. You know, I think that the customers are appreciative that we're willing to go on the journey of outcomes with them and correlate the value that they derive to what they pay. And so we would assume that over time, You know, their asset, their increase in assets under management would benefit everybody. And their usage of Bank eAdvisor and the outcomes they get and the efficiency they get from our AI would also correlate to what they pay in CNN.

speaker
Terry

Got it. Helpful color. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks.

speaker
Sandbox

Thank you. Our next question comes from Ken Suchowski of Autonomous Research. Please go ahead, Ken.

speaker
Chris Kennedy

Hey, good afternoon, guys. Thanks for taking the question. I know it's getting late. I'll ask maybe just about international. I think you highlighted international as a contributor to that six percentage point impact on subscription revenue growth in fiscal year 26. I think you guys had a good slide on the guidance assumptions. Is international the entire six percentage point impact? So that was, I guess, one question. And then I think you mentioned some leadership changes in Europe. Any additional detail in terms of what's happening in in the region and is it only Europe where you're seeing some issues or are there other markets that are contributing to that six percentage points? Thank you.

speaker
Pierre

Thanks, Ken. Yeah, the six percentage points, again, I'd say is a combination of four things. One is gross bookings falling a little short of our expectations last year, but the two specific areas that we've noted were international and mortgage. And so international got off to a slow start last year, as I think we talked about throughout the year. And while they had some nice wins, and when we talk about international, this is more specifically EMEA. And we talked about some success in Japan, for example, but from an EMEA perspective, got off to a slow start and they just weren't able to catch up. And so that's that. We did talk about the churn being a little bit higher as a result of one customer deciding now wasn't the time to move forward. And then the other two points were, again, linearity of fiscal 26 bookings, which from a modeling perspective, again, we were more back-end weighted than normal. We see opportunities to accelerate those, but, again, consistent with the last point being our guidance philosophy and we need to be more conservative and trying to de-risk the year as much as possible. You know, all of that contributed to us coming up with that 6%. decrease, but those would be the factors. Maybe I'll turn it over to Sean to talk about EMEA and the opportunities that we're seeing there.

speaker
Sean Desmond

Yes, on the leadership front in EMEA, I will point back to the early and continued success we've had specifically in the UK and Ireland markets in EMEA, where we've been a little bit slower in terms of the expectation we have for ourselves is on the continent and the mainland, Europe specifically. And so our new leadership structure based in Madrid from an operator at scale who's run over $100 million business across Europe and has a network and, you know, connections to banks across the continent we believe is powerful. As we build out that go-to-market team, that will be our focus, to continue the momentum we have in UKI but then grow aggressively on the continent. Specifically, we think there's good opportunity in Spain and the Nordics But obviously, we just signed a big bank in the Czech Republic in Q4 as well. Okay. Thank you both.

speaker
Sandbox

Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference back to Sean Desmond for closing remarks. Sir?

speaker
Sean Desmond

Thank you all for being with us this afternoon. We hope to see as many of you as we possibly can at our Insight User Conference here in May. And we appreciate your time.

speaker
Sandbox

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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