Paya Holdings Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the PIA Holdings, Inc. First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star, then zero on your touchtone telephone. A question and answer session will follow the form of 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 PIA. You may begin.

Good morning, and welcome to the PIA first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Before we begin, let me remind everyone 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 yesterday 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 in March of 2022 and in subsequent periodic reports that the company files with the SEC. Also during this call, we will be discussing certain non-GAAP measures of our performance. Gap-to-non-gap financial reconciliations and supplemental financial information are provided in the earnings press release and the 8-K filed at the SEC. This call is also available via webcast. You can find all the information I have just described, including the supplemental first quarter 2022 presentation, on the Investor Relations section of PIA's website. Now joining us on the call today are PIA's CEO, Jeff Hack, and TFO, Glenn Renzulli. Following their prepared remarks, we'll open the call to your questions. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Jeff.

Thank you, Matt, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today as we review PIA's first quarter 2022 financial results and the efforts underway to further accelerate our growth. At the conclusion of my remarks, Glenn will cover our detailed financial results, and then we'll take questions. PIA reported strong financial results again this quarter, led by our integrated solution segment and our proprietary ACH offerings. These two growth engines, which continue to capitalize on the secular shift in our market towards payment agnostic software-led commerce, represented nearly 80% of total PIA revenue in the quarter. For some perspective, four years ago, integrated payments in ACH represented just over two-thirds of total revenue. Our investments in technology, product, and people underpin focused growth objectives, which are all geared towards capitalizing on the digital transformation middle market companies continue to undertake. Integrated solutions and ACH performance through a variety of market cycles gives us high confidence in the ability to capture even stronger growth in the periods ahead. In the first quarter, payment volume grew 24% to nearly $12 billion. driven by car volume growth of 15 percent and ACH volume growth of 32 percent. Total revenue grew over 19 percent to 66 million, with gross profit growing 19 percent to 34.8 million. Adjusted EBITDA grew 11 percent to 16.4 million, in line with our expectations as we ramped our planned investments in go-to-market and innovation efforts in the first quarter. We are leveraging these incremental investments to accelerate growth in key areas that will allow us to continue to capture a strong share of a multi-trillion dollar fast-growing TAM. I will provide some additional color on these initiatives by stepping through the lifecycle of new revenue. First, we have significantly expanded our marketing efforts. While early days we are already seeing a strong increase in our pipeline with both more qualified opportunities and importantly, larger opportunities, which dramatically improves program ROI. In addition, the return of in-person user conferences across all channels is providing an excellent opportunity for highly targeted and substantive dialogue with prospects. Second, we have added considerable support to our hunters through additional technical sales and customer success resources, as well as sharper sales process disciplines. Bringing in these resources earlier in the sales process not only drives improved win rates, but also quicker speed to revenue and greatly improves client satisfaction. In fact, in the first quarter, we witnessed one of our fastest large partner implementations on record, thanks to the additional rigor conducted during our sales process. Further, we saw some great new wins this quarter across a variety of markets and verticals. In our government vertical, We added Stockton, California, and Marietta, Georgia, both very large cities, which is a key focus for Paya. In healthcare, we signed a new partnership with Opus, a leading behavioral health ISV, and we signed Remote Landlord, a growing property management ISV. These new wins demonstrate our ability to drive results on the back of organic investments we make. Third, we continue to add resources to capitalize on the massive penetration opportunity with our existing partners. Most exciting here is that we have multiple levers to accelerate progress for both Paya and our partners. Examples include our expanded vertically focused marketing capabilities, our client success talent, who help broaden partner offerings and end-to-end client experience, and, of course, our sales talent, who train our partner sales forces, thus significantly extending our reach. The common thread in these three pillars is PIA's continued ability to attract exceptional and proven talent to drive these growth initiatives. As we've said consistently, winning in these markets is a combination of great talent and great technology, which leads me to an update on our technology innovation agenda. Having laid a strong foundation for our multi-year investments in PIA Connect, we continually invest in innovative solutions and services to extend Paya's value proposition. These efforts are a combination of additional tools and features, as well as completely new offerings, which add value to our partners and clients while also strategically expanding into new markets. One great example here is continuing enhancements in our funding engine to support customized payout capabilities for our clients. Expanding our integration library is a continuous part of these efforts, especially for our larger B2B partners across the Acumatica, Sage, and QuickBooks ecosystems. Additional enhancements such as enhanced boarding solution and portal and UI upgrades add tangible value to our partners and enable them to grow and expand their business efficiently with market leading support as they scale their businesses. Finally, Our recent Transcard partnership enables us to deliver a new accounts payable solution to clients, thus accelerating digital transformation for middle market businesses. Payables commercially launches in Q2, and this AP module will allow clients to automate their AP workflows within a single unified portal integrated across a variety of accounting software solutions, ERP applications, and originating bank accounts. Our initial go-to-market efforts for this solution is focused on our existing clients across our larger ERP partners with plans to further scale the offering as we progress through this year and next. This is a prime opportunity to add additional value to the partners and clients we work with every single day while providing Paya with another vector of revenue growth. Simply said, Paya is already a trusted and deeply integrated technology partner in AR, and our partners are excited to extend these deep partnerships to the AP side. We expect that the organic investments we're making will enhance our attractive growth profile for years to come. Layering in further inorganic opportunities will serve to bolster this even further and remains a key component of our capital allocation strategy. As we touched on last quarter, we acquired Velocity in January, and we couldn't be more pleased with the results thus far. While small in size, the technology and team from Velocity are already adding strong value to Paya, especially in our B2B-focused ERP channel. The additional capabilities and solutions this acquisition provided expands our competitive positioning and will deliver accretive results for Paya as we leverage the market-leading solutions, talent, and client relationships that Velocity provides. As you would expect, we are very busy sourcing and conducting due diligence on a variety of deals across the markets we serve and in some natural adjacencies. Our enthusiasm to acquire great businesses that can grow faster as part of PIA has not wavered. In fact, quite the opposite. Our strong balance sheet and great free cash flow generation gives us tremendous flexibility to act where we see opportunity, provided, of course, that they make sense strategically and financially. All in, we see attractive opportunities ahead to capitalize on inorganic opportunities, and you should expect us to act on these without hesitation. With that, I'll turn it over to Glenn to walk you through the financials in a bit more detail.