Paya Holdings Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Paya Holdings, Inc. Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star and then zero on your telephone. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Matt Humphreys, Head of Investor Relations at Paya. You may begin.

Good morning and welcome to the PIA third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Before we begin, let me remind everyone today that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements based on our current assumptions, expectations, and beliefs, including financial guidance, the growth of PIA's business, our objectives and business strategies, as well as other forward-looking statements. Please refer to the disclosure at the end of the company's earnings press release and form 8K filed with the SEC today for information about forward-looking statements that will be made or discussed on this call. All statements made today reflect our current expectations only, and we undertake no obligation to update any statements to reflect the events that will occur after this call. You can learn more about the specific risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from today's discussion in the risk factors section of the company's form 10-K filed with the SEC on March 8, 2021, and in subsequent periodic reports that the company files with the SEC. Also during this call, we'll discuss certain non-GAAP measures of our performance. GAAP to non-GAAP financial reconciliations and supplemental financial information are provided in the earnings press release in the 8-K filed with the SEC. This call is also available via webcast. You can find all the information I've just described on the investor relations section of PIA's website, including a supplemental third quarter 2021 presentation. Now joining us on the call today are PIA's CEO, Jeff Hack, and CFO, Glen Renzulli. Following their prepared remarks, we will open the call to your questions. With that, let me turn the call over to Jeff.

Thank you, Matt, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today as we review PIA's third quarter 2021 financial results and discuss highlights from the quarter. We delivered solid year-over-year growth across our KPIs. Payment volume grew 28% to a record $11.1 billion, driven by card volume growth of 14% and ACH volume growth of 54%. Total revenue grew 22% to $63 million, led by growth in card and ACH, as well as a full quarter's contribution from Paragon. Gross profit grew 26 percent to 33 million and adjusted EBITDA grew 21 percent to 16.3 million. And compared to the same period in 2019, total revenue growth was 25 percent and adjusted EBITDA growth 34 percent. These results continue to demonstrate the inherent growth and leverage that we see in the business and in the markets and verticals that we serve. Glenn will review the key drivers of performance in the quarter and our full year expectation. I'm now going to review what underpins these financial results and gives us confidence over the medium term. First is our ability to attract and sign new partners and clients. We recently signed some great new software partners and ISVs within our growing B2B vertical. Through our recently announced partnership with Paradigm, a leading software company focused on the construction and building industry, We are providing the commerce engine within their core software offering, enabling payment acceptance while enhancing the operational and administrative processes within front and back offices of their clients. We also recently partnered with Encompass Technologies, a leading cloud-based distribution ERP provider focused on the beverage industry. Key drivers of our win with Encompass were not only Paya's integrated payments experience and customer support, but also the payment agnostic approach we take. By offering a wide variety of payment types, including ACH, our solutions are able to support and enable growth across a diverse set of ISVs and merchants in industries where payment flexibility is a requirement, not an option. We are currently standing up the partnership and look forward to launching in the coming months. I thought it would be useful to reference another partnership while early in its progression that helps to highlight our focus on expanding our addressable market while embedding Paya within large scaled operating platforms on the front end of customer business processes. We recently signed a new partnership with Othea, a leading provider of digital invoicing solutions within the B2B vertical. This partnership allows Paya to bring our full suite of integrated payment capabilities to Othea's business management software. The combined offering comes pre-integrated into Salesforce via AuthVIA's application and can enable ISVs who leverage Salesforce as their front-end platform to quickly enable payment functionality, both card and ACH, while expanding payment acceptance through such features as e-invoicing and text-to-pay. This happens within the broader Salesforce ecosystem, allowing for reconciliation and reporting that's centralized, while giving a holistic and detailed view of all business and payment data for reporting and analytic uses. Also worth highlighting are the great results and new customer wins we are seeing within our government vertical. Specifically, through a large existing government software partner, we signed multiple new contracts in the quarter, with municipalities located primarily in the southern United States, including Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. The momentum we're seeing in our government vertical remains strong, and we'll look to continue to invest resources into growing this channel further through both organic and inorganic means. Wins such as these set the stage for Pai's future growth, especially within our integrated solutions that software-led integrated commerce is the natural progression in the markets and verticals that we serve. And while all of these wins are great to see, It's continuous innovation across our products and solutions that enhances our competitive positioning, expands our addressable market, and enables Paya to win. Our focus on developing, building, and delivering value-added enhancements and offerings to our flagship Paya Connect solution remains key to our future growth. Notably, we deliver robust e-invoicing enhancements to meet the growing needs of our deeply integrated software partners, including our key integrations with Acumatica and Sage. The data we provide our partners and customers, which is a core part of integrated payments, is vital to improving customers' back office efficiency. As such, we strengthen the user experience with the release of new customer-facing portals and reporting interfaces, providing modern, efficient, and useful functionality in order to support our partners and customers as they grow. Our targeted middle market partners demand improved solutions which enable the migration of their existing customers onto Pius platform quickly and seamlessly. Pius customer import services enable large software partners to migrate to Pius platform with little to no disruption of service, ensuring continuation of payment acceptance, including the secure and encrypted transfer of all card and ACH data. Unlike migrations or conversions, which can render payment functionality unavailable for a period of days or weeks, Paya provides and supports a seamless implementation experience. This experience is highly valued in today's market and critical to be able to launch partners quickly or transition new partners from legacy providers without disrupting their day-to-day operations. As you may recall, we recently announced some key additions to Paya's leadership team. Michelle Shepard joined us recently as our Chief Commercial Officer. In this role, Michelle is focused on the development and execution of forward-thinking, vertically-tailored customer engagement strategies across sales, marketing, and customer success. Michelle has a track record of success at high-growth vertical software companies in Surety and Vertifor, as well as at Gartner, and we're excited to have her at Paya. Additionally, we recently welcomed Bology Deborah Seti as our Chief Technology Officer. Bology is focused on accelerating innovation at Paya through product and platform development, enabling us to extend our leadership within integrated payments. Bology's deep expertise and track record includes technology leadership in both large-scale integrated payments and fast-growing digital commerce businesses. Needless to say, we're excited to have both Michelle and Balaji here at Paya leading our efforts to expand distribution of our innovative commerce solutions. On capital allocation, our priorities have not changed. We remain focused on organic growth through the continued and ongoing investment into our people and solutions in order to extend our market leadership while expanding our addressable market. Strategic M&A continues to be a top priority for us as well and complements the organic growth profile of the business. Our pipeline of acquisition opportunities remains robust, and our teams continue to proactively engage with opportunities across the markets and verticals we serve. In summary, these recent updates demonstrate Pai's continued momentum in high-growth end markets coupled with our continued investments in talent and technology to further accelerate our growth. With that, I'll turn it over to Glenn to walk you through the financials. Glenn?