Dayforce, Inc.

As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. On the call today, we have Ceridian Chair and CEO David Ossip and CFO Noemi Hewlett. Before I hand the call over to David for some brief remarks, allow me to please provide a disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements. This call may include forward-looking statements about our current and future outlook, guidance, plans, expectations, and intentions, results, levels of activities, performance, goals, or achievements, or any other future events or developments. These statements are based on management's reasonable assumptions and beliefs in light of information currently available to us. Listeners are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such statements. Each forward-looking statement is subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ material from those set forth in such statements. We refer you to our previous filings in the SEC for information regarding the significant assumptions underlying forward-looking statements. and certain risks and other factors that could affect our future performance and ability to deliver these statements. We undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements made on this call, except for those that may be required by law. The third quarter stockholder letter, earnings release, and form 10-Q have been furnished or filed with the SEC and will be available on the SEC's EDGAR database in the U.S. and the CDAR database in Canada. as well as on Ceridian Investor Relations website and investors.ceridian.com. With that, I will turn the call over to David.

Thank you, Eric, and welcome, everyone, to our Q3 earnings call. Let me say a few quick words about the quarter before we open it up for general Q&A. We had a very solid quarter with continued great execution across the entire business. Day-force recurring revenue, ex-float, grew on a gap basis by 33% or on a constant currency basis by 31%. Total revenue increased on a gap basis by 26% or 24% on a constant currency basis. For the fiscal year of 2021, we slightly increased the guidance and we narrowed the range to $1.14 billion to $1.19 billion. On the gross cloud margin, we saw an improvement of the gross cloud margin to 72.7%, which is up to 90 basis points on a constant currency basis and up 70 basis points on a quarter-over-quarter basis. Customer accounts increased by about 11% year over year, and the average size of the customers also increased about 11%. On a 12-month basis, we have taken live about 523 customers. Float balances also increased by about 25%, but float income was negatively impacted by a slight decline in the yield by 36 basis points. Adjusted EBITDA. was 39.4, which is up 20 basis points on an ex-float basis. On the Dayforce wallet, we continue to see very strong metrics. The number of customers live on Dayforce wallet is now above 290 customers. We have sold over 800 accounts at this point in time. We saw registration rates across the eligible employees who have access to the wallets grow to above 29%. And when we look at the top quartile of tenured customers, we see registration rates above 50%. Usage of the wallets continues to be very healthy with an average number of transactions of above 25 transactions per month. In early October, we closed on an acquisition of Data Fusion, which further increases our compliance advantage and gives us specific capabilities for certified payroll reporting, prevailing wage rate calculations, incentive payments, union rate calculations, and very complex general ledger reporting. This technology is immediately available and will be integrated into Dayforce. This acquisition will obviously help accelerate our growth in construction, government contracting, manufacturing, unionized environments, the public sector, and not-for-profit. Also in the first week of October, we held our first in-person customer event in over two years with the first stop of the Cerulean World Tour in Las Vegas. At the CWT event, we shared our vision for Dayforce to deliver the Always on People platform for the global workforce, which is anchored by our brand promise of making work life better. A few highlights of the event. We had some product announcements, including the announcement of streaming pay, which is the automatic delivery of earnings and net earnings to employees' day-force wallets. We announced the HR service delivery, which is an end-to-end employee solution that provides an always-on HR compliance support. And we also discussed Dayfall's Talent Intelligent, a suite of new transformative talent management solutions empowered by AI and data. We plan to build on success with our next CWT tour stop in New York. This event, which is primarily focused on customers, will also feature an investor track, including a session with the civilian executive team starting at 3.30 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, November the 11th. That portion will be webcast, so please join us. You can find the information on our investor website on how to register the event or join this session via live webcast. I'm also very pleased to share that Ceridian was once again named a leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Human Capital Management Suites for enterprises above 1,000 employees. We believe this report further validates our vision the innovation of the default product, and our commitment to delivering quantifiable value for our customers. Before I hand it back to Eric, I would like to close by saying how proud I am of our Ceridian team across the globe. Our engagement metrics are up. Our culture remains vibrant. As we, alongside our customers, transition to a new hybrid work environment, and our purpose and our brand promise to make work life better has never been more clear and relevant. Eric, back to you.

Thanks, David. As we go through the Q&A portion of the call, I will announce the name. And at that point, we ask you to please unmute your line and ask your question and then re-mute your line. We will also ask you to please limit your time to one question and one follow-up. And thank you in advance for that. Today, the first question comes from the line of Alex Zukin of Wolf. Alex, please go ahead.

Thank you, Eric. And congrats to the team on a solid quarter. I guess I wanted to start out, David, by asking the question, around the narrowing of the guidance range and particularly in the shareholder letter you called out seeing some employment headwinds in your customer base of them not being able to hire at the pace or rehire at the pace that they wanted to. And it impacted the quarter. I'm assuming it impacted the guide somewhat. I wanted to ask a broader question, which is how long do you anticipate this to be a headwind for the business and Are we, you know, if we step back and from a big picture perspective, look at the business, you're seeing clearly tailwinds around the work for talent necessitating a modernization initiative of many HR organizations and tools. But at the same time, you know, you get paid per employee per month. And if you can't hire, then you can't pay, you know, more. So, you know, work work. Talk to us about. those two dynamics, are they balancing out? Because new bookings are well ahead of where you thought you were going to be, and we can't see those numbers. We can only see the PEPM stuff. But that would be very helpful, I think.

Sure. So, Alex, great series of questions. So I'll try to break it down into different pieces. So for Q4, we had expected last time we spoke a $1.5 million improvement in Q4. the headwind from employee counts. As we pointed out in the shareholder letter, we're seeing that it's taking slightly longer for our customers to fill their open job requisitions. So we have decreased what we expect the improvement of day force to be down by about half a minute. And that is the tightness that we've actually taken. So we've widened the Q4 guidance by corresponding by that amount. However, we have taken the beat that we had in Q3 to the full-year guidance, if you like, so that gave us the increase in the actual guidance. In terms of the business, obviously, I do believe we have been executing tremendously well, that if I look at it from a pipeline perspective, it still remains very strong And we are forecasting for the second half of the year that sales will come in quite favorable to last year and to the year before that, which speaks obviously to the sales execution of the actual business. On the implementation, projects continue to be implemented, a lot of activity with our customers. And I'm actually seeing some tremendous feedback from our customers in terms of the NPS or the customer satisfaction levels as well. In terms of the tightness of the, if you like, the hiring market, I wish I had a magic mirror or something. But at this point, just looking at what we know, given the employment numbers that we did see in September, which, remember, do give us October, and what we believe we saw in October, which gives us visibility into November, and what we're currently seeing in November, which will give us visibility into December. I would believe our guidance range is pretty good.

Got it. And I guess is this, should we start thinking as we model, as we adjust our models for next year, should we start moderating our assumptions for an employee tailwind in general based on these early indications? And then maybe for Noemi, also walk us through some of the adjustments around the adjust the EBITDA guide. It implies that you are spending a little bit more I'm assuming on marketing and sales, either hiring or activities. And then also, I apologize for the multiple questions, but we do track job postings, and it did look like Ceridian's job postings declined quite a bit over the past couple of weeks. That could be great because you hit all of your hiring targets, but I just wanted to double-check that.

Yeah, just on the hiring side, we have been hiring very aggressively throughout the year. What I will say is that we haven't really been struggling in finding fantastic candidates across the organization. In terms of the adjusted EBITDA, I'll hand it over to Naomi for all the fun and goodness in that conversation. So Naomi, all over to you.

Yeah, sure. So our adjusted EBITDA for Q3, as you saw, was 39.4 or 15.3% of total revenue. For the full year, we continue to expect our adjusted EBITDA margin in the range of 15.4 to 15.9% of total revenue. This is pretty consistent with what we've said before. We're continuing to invest in our product and technology. You saw we made some exciting product announcements recently. In your comment about hiring, we're actually very successful in attracting top talents in a tight labor market, which shows our brand is strong and our reputation is strong as well. We've made some significant investments in our R&D, as you saw. Our cash spent on R&D went up from less than 10% of our total revenue in Q3 last year to above 13.6% this quarter. We've ramped up our services delivery capacity, which is kind of the timing thing that you see from Q3 to Q4. We're ramping up to service our customers to go live in Q4, which is our largest go-live quarter. There's a lot of very large customers going live in Q4. And we're also focused on integrating the data fusion technology into the Dayforce platform. The other thing I would say is we've also reopened our offices throughout the summer in North America. We've returned to in-person meetings as well, which is very important for our people after having spent even two years apart. And our sales rep are traveling to meet our customers and prospects throughout the fourth quarter. We've seen a lot of benefits, obviously, from digital selling, and we continue to invest in digital sales capability. That's not going to go away, and that was a great learning from the pandemic times. But we also want our sales and marketing team to be meeting customers and prospects on-site, and we've done so quite successfully in Vegas, as an example, and we continue to do that for our Q4. So that explains a little bit the timing between Q3 and Q4. But overall, our four-year adjusted EBITDA guidance range hasn't changed, and our investments priority remains consistent.

Perfect. Thank you so much, guys. Thanks, Alex. Up next, we've got Jared Levine from Cowen.

Thank you. It's a day for Salesforce productivity. Where do we stand versus pre-pandemic? If below, when do you expect a full recovery? And if we're above, what's driven that improvement?

Sorry, Jerry, are you talking about sales productivity prior to pre-COVID? That's a difficult number to answer because I don't know if we've actually measured it pre-COVID, post-COVID. But what I would say is that we were quite pleased with our sales productivity numbers. And when I look towards next year, I think we'll expect to get even more productivity out of the actual group. As you know, this year we invested very heavily in building out the actual sales team. We did that for a number of reasons. One, obviously, to move into the enterprise space faster. to build out muscle in working with the system integrated relationships that we put in place, and also to build out our capabilities to focus on the full HCM platform, not only on the compliance modules. And I would say all of that has been going very well, not only in North America, but on a global basis. Naomi, anything that you would add to that?

No, I think you covered it all. We've invested also in the sales support organization with value advisors, solution advisors, and people who can sell alongside system integrators and upmarket with large customers. But you covered most of the points, David.

Okay, great. And then in terms of the pace of Dayforce Go lives in 3Q, can you kind of dig into what weighed on that pace there, and do you anticipate an uptick in 4Q?

Q4 is always the bigger quarter. Q3 is normally a lighter quarter. So, yes, we are expecting many more accounts to go live in Q4 over the Q3, which is typical for the actual period. In terms of the number of accounts, it's largely being driven by the size of the accounts going live. So if we take live, for example, a 50,000 employee account, if I compare that to historical trends where we're taking live, say, 1,000 employee accounts, the 50,000 would count for effectively 50. So we look at it more on an LTM basis now, which gives us more of an average type of trend for the actual business.

Perfect.

Thank you. Great. Thanks, Jared. Next up, we've got Sidi Panagrahi from Mizuho. Sidi?

Hey, guys. Congratulations. That's a solid quarter. I wanted to, David, dig into the international market. That used to be one of your growth drivers, international expansion. You talked about a couple of years back. Now, as you're expanding your payroll, you know, and also you talked about some of these global wins as well. Tell us, like, what you're seeing and when do you think it will be a major contributor to your revenue, you know, from international market?

So, look, our goal, I would say, in probably about a three-year basis, we'll push about 25% of our revenue onto a global basis. It might come quicker, it might take a bit longer, but we generally are moving in that direction. We definitely have. advanced relative to all of the other players in the market in terms of global payroll and global core HR. Obviously, a lot of success in market with companies that are headquartered outside of North America as well as companies inside North America that have global operations. At CWT, we actually discussed with the client base the nine additional countries that we're adding in 2022. in terms of native payroll capability. And, again, I think that just positions us very well in market when these global accounts. We definitely are seeing an increase in demand for core HR systems and talent suites and compliance modules that cut across the globe to give organizations that single experience for all of their employees, regardless of where they live and work. That's great.

And then I'll follow up to, you know, Dayforce Wallet, it's good to see the acceleration in new customer sign as well as go live this quarter versus last quarter. But then you talked about streaming day introduced in October and also this CWT, all the event. How should we think about the ramp in Dayforce Wallet, you know, next few quarters? And when do you think it will be reasonable for you to start disclosing, you know, other metrics like revenue or any other revenue contributions?

I think we'll probably start late next year on the revenue contribution. As you know, it's still a new business for us. What I can say, if I look at the business on a quarter-over-quarter basis, it's effectively doubling every quarter. So we're still going through kind of the early stages of what I'd call hyper-growth of it. Some of the metrics that I'll point you to, I believe last quarter we spoke about the average registration across all eligible employees to be about 25%. It's now over 29%. And when we look at customers that have been live over a year, we're seeing registration rates in the top portal well above 50% with a very strong usage metrics that we discussed. There's 25 transactions that people are doing on everyday living. It's fast food, grocery, convenience, gas, ATM withdrawals, and the like. So that excites us quite nicely. In the quarter as well, we released up to two-day early deposits, which means that if you're a day-force wallet user, you can get paid when you want. And say you take out a third of your net earnings during the period, you'll remain in two-thirds. You can get up to two days early as well. And, again, the whole model is predicated on no direct fees to the employees, no membership fees, no fees to the organization, and every payment is a true deposit. payroll, which means it's fully compliant. You get an earnings slip for every type of transfer. The streaming of pay will come online, as we mentioned, in 2022. We believe that will obviously accelerate because the idea over there is instead of doing an on-demand pay or having to wait for direct deposit, as I work, the pay automatically streams into my wallet. And we're talking about making access to your earnings completely instantaneous. And that will obviously be paired with quite a very rich financial wellness offering set inside the actual product. So we are quite excited with it. Dayforce Wallet, by the way, also has given us a tremendous advantage in market. We're still seeing attachment rates across new business well across 80%. And in every conversation that I have with clients, with early clients, the Dayforce Wallet is top of mind.

That's great. Thanks, David. Thank you.

Thanks, Siddy. Next up is Mark Marcon with Baird. Mark?

Hey, good afternoon, everybody, and congratulations on the great day force results. You had a number of significant wins. I'm just wondering if you could characterize a little bit, you know, who you ended up winning from. Like you mentioned, luxury global automotive companies, largest car rental organization. I mean, those are all really large enterprises. They have a number of international ones. Who are you replacing? How is the scope of the opportunities changing in terms of the pipeline? And how's the, you know, the recognition from Gartner impacting your ability to sell?

So, Mark, the first thing I would say is we're seeing more and more customers, larger customers, buy the full HCM suite. I believe the number is 36% of clients today buy a full HCM suite. And so the takeaway from that is that we are now being seen not only as a compliance player, compliance being payroll benefits time and workforce management, but also a leader in talent intelligence, core HR, data analytics, and all of the other pieces that comprise a very rich and robust and engaging system for employees. As we've gone upmarket, we obviously are seeing more at-bats against the ERPs, and I'm quite proud of our success over there. We do also compete, as you know, against the more traditional human capital management and payroll customers, and obviously our win rates over there are quite nicely matched. In terms of the wins, usually we're replacing a more legacy type of payroll or time solution, either client-server or mainframe-based. We're also seeing replacement of more legacy-based ERP systems that might be RAM or not through cloud. And, obviously, we replace a lot of different point solutions when it comes to the various types of talent modules.

That's great. And then you've got a lot of different growth opportunities. government, international, digital wallet. How is that going to impact, you know, your investment perspective for next year? How should we think about EBITDA margins in the short term relative to, you know, all of the investment opportunities that you have?

Yeah, look, our focus is on growth. We still have a relatively small market share, whether it be in North America or on a global basis. So we believe what's right for the company is to invest more on growth than on increasing the actual EBITDA. We are going to continue investing in product and technology, sales and marketing. In terms of our five growth factors, which we always speak about, number one, acquiring new customers. We're obviously doing very well, still have a long way to go, a lot of white space. Two, increasing the actual platform. Joe spoke about some really tremendous innovations in terms of what we bring into market, and that allows us to expand the platform, go back to the base. And remember, add-ons remain at around 25% every single quarter. Moving into the enterprise space, I've spoken about that, but it's not only moving into the enterprise space on a payroll benefit and time perspective. We really are talking about moving into the enterprise space on a full HCM basis. Again, 36% of customers are now buying the full HCM suite. We've spoken a lot about the global opportunity, and in a number of years, I expect about 25% of our revenue to come from the global basis. And then, of course, we have the adjacent markets, which is the day-four swallowed, which there's a lot of excitement and the metrics look very good. So in terms of long-term growth for the company, we're obviously very excited. And as you mentioned, when it comes down to the annual budget, there are a lot of considerations and tradeoffs as to which of the five different growth factors we emphasize. Should we just –

Something I would add is we're also looking at the cloud recurring gross margin, which is one of the key indicators for us, because that's really what's going to fuel, you know, the long-term sustainability and profitability of the business. And that indicator keeps going up. It was up 290 basis point, excluding float this quarter. So that's really what we're looking at as we scale as well.

So investors should probably de-emphasize looking at EBITDA margin from the short-term perspective over the next year, just given all the investment opportunities and really focus on the on the recurring cloud gross margin.

I think, you know, Naomi has emphasized a very important point. It's one that we have continued to talk about from the time we went public, that it's a metric that we look at internally, which is whether or not the growth, the cloud recurring gross margin is expanding alongside revenue. And I would say that it's going up very nicely. As Naomi mentioned, it's up 290 basis points, so almost 3%. on a constant currency basis year over year, even given the headwinds that we still have from the employment headwinds.

Great. Thank you.

Great. Thank you, Mark. Next up is Matthew Pfau from William Blair. Matt?

Yeah, great. Thanks, guys. David, at the World Tour, you discussed the elastic workforce and some functionality that Ceridian was potentially working on in that area in terms of connecting employers with employees. Maybe you can just provide some more comments on your vision in that area and how you think about that market opportunity.

Yeah, thanks, Matthew. I've spoken about this for quite some time. I always spoke about the technology having three sequential steps of delivery. The first step was to build out the continuous engine that would allow us to calculate net earnings as someone worked. And that's obviously quite a difficult thing to do, and we believe we have quite a competitive motor around us in that we can do that and the others can't. The second step was creating the payment rails so that not only would we calculate net earnings in real time, but we could also pay people in real time. And that came down to the day of false wallets, and we've seen great traction. The third part was, well, if I download the Dayforce wallet, and we know who you are, the KYC process, we know you have the right to work, we know what your certifications are, we know that you're a safe person. We also know inside the Dayforce application what all the local jurisdictional rules are for things like overtime, minimum wages, premium pay, and the like. And we also have the capability through the Dayforce app to allow you to clock in and clock out via geolocations. In that case, what we can do is we can make it very easy for organizations to publish their vacancies. And a vacancy could be a number of hours, say a shift that has to be worked. It could be a task such as a delivery or could be a longer-term assignment, say a three-, four-week programming assignment. And along with the vacancy, the organization could publish the competencies required and possibly even some learning management content. We can then allow all of the Dayforce Wallet users to look at their app, and much like they'll be looking for rewards around them, they'll be able to see the vacancies for which they have the right competencies. They could learn about the vacancy through the learning management content, apply, get matched, and when they actually show up, they would show a QR code to clock in and clock out, and as soon as their hours were approved, they would actually get paid. And us as Ceridian would be responsible for doing all the necessary remittances, for doing all of the year-end filings, all of the different types of money movement. And you would go now from just not only having instant access to your earnings, but you would have the ability to actually find work, work and get paid in real time, which we believe matches where the workforce is going. So we're quite excited with that opportunity. We've started the actual research and the build-ups and the partnerships that I think will enable us to do that, obviously leveraging the great stuff that we already have through the DAFOS continuous calculation engine and the DAFOS wallet payment rails.

Got it, got it. And then just to follow up on some other features that you discussed at the World Tour, specifically around some of the AI and self-service features, how do you think about those from an ROI perspective when you're selling to prospective customers? And is that an important point of the conversation?

So, Matthew, everything we build, we tie back down to a KPI that we can impact at a customer. And as we've always said, that KPI needs to be measurable. and convertible into a money saver. For us, we use the term quantifiable value, and I believe we're ranked number one in industry in terms of delivering strong ROI. When we talk about the Dayforce wallet, we talk about some very strong metrics that show basically the decrease in attrition rates, the decrease in the first 90-day attrition rates, the quicker time to actually hire someone. So as we actually build it out, it's always along the same lines. In terms of the talent intelligence, what we would say today is the market operates in something called talent 1.0. And at a high level, to me, it's really people operating this list management framework. If I'm doing recruiting, I look at a list of candidates for a particular job requisition. I sort or I filter that list accordingly. I find the candidate that I'd like to act on, and then I go through a number of sequential steps, usually manually driven. In Talent 2.0 that we're beginning to release now, we're moving more to a recommendation and prediction type of model, very similar to, for instance, when you go onto Amazon or Netflix, and those systems recommend either products that you would like or movie shows or TV shows that meet your requirements. We're doing the same now on the talent side. So when I go to that List of candidates. It's not a list, but a set of recommended candidates that the system has predicted will be a good match based on who the hiring manager is and who the recruiter. And then even once we have that, we can go and use a lot of automation, like allowing the candidate to self-schedule. When the candidate interacts with the system, we can engage with bot technology. So if the candidate is applying for one particular type of job, based on the candidate who's applying and the available job requisitions, we can recommend back to the candidate where they may be a good fit for other opportunities and at that point in time get them to engage or even complete the application for them. So it's effectively using ML models and AI models to go and look at what's being done currently in talent in order to engage with people in a much more natural manner that they would typically expect. In terms of the service desk over there, there's a lot of information that the Dayfall system has. As you know, we've already moved into natural workspaces, so you can now engage with the system through Teams or through Slack in a very natural way. We can now allow the employee to ask questions about policy. What is the vacation policy as opposed to just how many days do I have? Am I eligible for something? And by doing that, we can take a lot of load off the HR department. And, again, given it's driven off an ML type of model, it continually evolves, continually learns, and becomes more of a natural way of interacting with this system. So, obviously, a lot of excitement, again, around intelligence and data. If you do come to the Serenity World Tour, which obviously came in Vegas, but for others, you'll see Joe talk about that, and we'll actually have a few demonstrations of the technology, which is really exciting.

Perfect. Thanks, David.

Thanks, Matthew. Up next, we've got Samad Samana from Jefferies.

Samad? Hey, good evening. Thanks for taking my questions. I appreciate it, as always. So maybe, David, first for you, just as I think about the international side, the company's done M&A around that, and clearly the commentary this quarter was positive around traction. How should we think about maybe international bookings or new book dollars in this quarter versus prior quarters? And maybe how should we think about international as a percentage of new book dollars going forward?

I don't think we've actually included that in the actual numbers. I don't have them offhand. But obviously, the global business continues to do very well, not only on the sales side, but if I look at global implementations. We're seeing a lot of success both in EMEA and across APJs in terms of getting customers live and referenceable. As we go into the upmarket space, it's almost a certainty that we're always selling global systems, whether, as I mentioned, they are globally headquartered companies or whether they're based in North America. In some instances, we actually see both. If you look at the shareholder letter, we actually speak about a automotive company headquartered out of Germany. There were actually two separate processes we went through. One was for the dealers that they have across Germany, and the other one was for their kind of more global manufacturing operations. So we're sort of a benefit from having both of those. And obviously, as you go through the risk profile and become a vendor for the overall organization, there's a lot of benefit and a lot of growth we see across the globe. Great.

And then, you know, on the Canadian federal government deal, you know, it was great to see that that's been brought back now as the world reopens. Is that included in the guidance for the fourth quarter? Is there any revenue contribution from that? And then just how should we think about the impact of that on maybe the near term EBITDA outlook, maybe even into 2022? Or just how should we think about the margins, the margin impact from that?

So there's a little bit of service revenue and a small amount of subscription revenue inside the actual quarter, but I wouldn't call it as being material. Where we are with the government of Canada, we're in the midst of the planning phases for the experimental pilot for the first department inside the government. Obviously, the majority of that work effort in terms of executing across the pilot will happen in 2022. It's also obviously that the GOC will require more departments to be included in the pilot to test the various elements of the actual system. So it's likely that the number of departments will be expanded more thoroughly as we move forward as well.

Great. And maybe just if I could squeeze in a third one, which is just, I know I heard the question about the employment recovery. I wanted to ask a different way, given just how many companies you're exposed to so regularly as the CEO of a large HR payroll company, is when you think about the hiring within the base, is it a safe assumption just so everybody will get back to the same levels where they were all else equal before the pandemic? I mean, I guess I'm just curious how much, if there's automation or if there's hiring plans have shifted where they're more efficient and don't need to get back to those levels? Is that something we should think about as well as far as same-store sales growth goes within the install base?

If you ask me, Samad, I actually think that they'll land up with employment levels above where they were pre-pandemic. There are a number of factors. I do think the economy is growing very, very quickly. And so companies are not hiring back to their previous levels but are hiring above their levels. The second part is I do think there are a lot of new companies that have entered the economy that didn't exist pre the pandemic. And those companies are actually hiring as well. So I do think we'll move back to very full employment inside the economy as we go into 2022.

Great.

Thanks so much, David. Thank you, Samad. Up next, we've got Arvind Ramnani with Piper Sandler. Hi.

Thanks, Eric. You know, David, I want to ask a bit more about the DAFOS wallet. You know, you provided a lot of color on Citi's question on DAFOS wallet. But a couple of questions on the DAFOS wallet. One is, you know, what are some of the second derivative benefits of DAFOS wallet? I mean, I think the revenue portion is going to be interesting when you start to provide it next year. But can you talk about some of the second derivative, like impact on win rates, ability to charge clients more, engagement? Just some of the second derivative benefits would be great.

Look, the first is obviously our win rate goes up because what we are allowing companies to do is to move to paying people immediately without them having to change the way that they fund their payroll and without any cost to them in terms of subscription fees or fees to their employees. So it's a tremendous benefit to both the organization and to their employees. In fact, an organization could go from a weekly or biweekly payroll to a monthly payroll and get a one-time lift of working capital as well. They want an additional benefit. So I think that's becoming very important. The second is what I would say is that The desire to get paid immediately is becoming a requirement in business today. It's no longer optional. So the economy is moving there, and we have better tech than I think anyone else in the market in that every time we move the money, we do a true payroll that is fully compliant at a federal and the state or provincial basis in Canada. And I think that's very, very strong as well. When we're going through some deals, we actually are seeing them very focused on the dayfalls wallet. There have been some cases where that has allowed us to maintain or actually increase pricing just based on the advantage that we have inside the market. And the last piece as well is that I do believe it does help our brand with the employees of our customers. And so I would expect over time that we become the preferred choice of HCM solution, not only for the organizations, but for the worker as well. Terrific.

And then, you know, getting back to the first derivative impact, you know, what is the sort of revenue model? I mean, I, you know, from what I've understood it, it's like maybe like an interchange or something. So two questions. One is what is the business model? And I understand there's an interchange fee associated with you know, when they use the debit card to pay for it. But in the situation where someone, you know, pulls, let's say $1,000 and they say, you know, $800 is going to go into my bank account, $200 will stay on my debit card. Is there revenue to be gained even from that $800 that goes into the bank account?

So first of all, currently we don't see many transfers of the actual cards. What we're actually seeing is day-to-day spending from the cards. And as you mentioned, it's about 25 transactions per month. They average probably about $30 per transaction, usually on day-to-day living. When someone does an ACH transfer, which, again, we don't see much of that, there isn't any fee to the actual employee. Next year, we will move into what they call OCT transfers or instant transfers. And over there, there is an ability to charge for that. Usually it is 50 basis points up to a small cap. that is charged with that particular type of transfer. What we are seeing in terms of usage of the wallet is becoming quite disruptive to the credit card industry. So instead of using the credit card, we're seeing a lot of the employees are now using their day force card instead. And that way they obviously are more on top of their finances and they don't get into a situation where they are paying the 22% on the balance of the actual statement at the end of the month. It's a big benefit for them. In terms of additional revenue opportunities, as we move into next year, we start moving into things like rewards. We'll probably move into areas like buy now, pay later. And all of those types of opportunities give us the ability to increase our take rate. For example, on the rewards, we would expect to get about 90 basis points on the actual spend for that particular type of item that was covered by the reward and the buy now, pay later item. there would obviously be a revenue share with the partner over that.

Yeah, that's terrific. Appreciate it. And I'm looking forward to next week's event that you're hosting.

That's great. Thank you. Thanks, Arvind. Next up is Michael Turin from Wells Fargo.

Hey there. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. I know there was one here earlier already and appreciate the seasonal dynamics in the model. But the net go live number does look a little lighter than what we were expecting. And I'm wondering if that's at all tied to labor constraints, either on services or the partner side, or if it is truly reflective of a move up market and towards partners. And if so, if that suggests that maybe you're likely to see even more of a Q4 seasonal weighting in the model, either this year or just on a go forward basis.

My course largely tied to just the size of customers. Okay, so I wouldn't really do anything to it. And, you know, last year we used to say look at it on a half-year basis because it evens out between quarters. Typically, you always have the Q4 as being the biggest quarter because in the U.S., customers want to avoid the first quarter reconciliation. So the Q4, we're expecting, obviously, a very healthy go-live. Quite honestly, internally, we track it at a dollar value of go-live. So we look at the pep and go-lives in a quarter. We don't really focus on on the actual number. The other part about that, the number isn't really what I'd call a pure number because when you have a customer that goes live in a different country, if they have contracted through a different type of entity, it could be viewed as from finance as a go live, second go live. Whereas from a system perspective, we would actually view it as one system. So again, I would encourage you to look at the LTM basis more than anything else. I wouldn't read too much into it.

If you want to give us the pep and go live metric, David, we'll take that too. But maybe you can talk.

You know what? That's a question for now, Amy. I'm just a customer over here.

Maybe you could talk about just the incremental day force metric that's now above 200K. So I'm just wondering if there's a ceiling at all there or if you think that continues to trend higher? given you are just hitting new thresholds and milestones there as well?

No, look, the way I look at it, it's a rectangle. And on the X axis, you have the number of employees, which obviously is growing all the time. And then on the Y axis is the PEPM, the pricing that we get for those. And as we increase the number of modules that we have at the customer, we go up on that Y axis as well. And so I would expect it to continue going up.

Great. Thank you very much.

Great. Thank you, Michael. Next up, we've got Brad Clark from BMO. Brad.

Hi. Thank you guys for taking my question. I want to focus on the payroll strategy. You announced a lot of new countries to build up for 2022. Looks like a lot focused on the Asia path. And so on a broader level, just want to see if you can discuss your strategy around payroll rollout and where and how Do you expect to see the impact of the new payrolls on winning Dave Boyce customers? Thank you.

Sure. So, Brad, a great question. Currently we're actually focused, I would say, on three regions. The first region would be North America, and obviously you'll probably see us moving to Mexico in the short term as well to cover and complete the North America rollout. That obviously will have impact on manufacturing customers inside North America. Okay. The second area we're quite focused is on EMEA. We've got a very good presence, as you know, in the UK and Ireland. I've seen really tremendous traction in Germany, and we're launching the native payroll solution for Germany next year as well, and we're seeing quite a lot of interest in that. Once we have Germany, we obviously are going to expand into the other dark countries surrounding Germany to get a broader footprint across EMEA. The third area, as you pointed out, is across APJ. Obviously, the reason we're doing that is that we do have a lot of what we call bureau customers, so customers through the acquisitions of Accender and Accelity and Ritech. And as we build out the native capabilities for those regions, that gives us an opportunity to go back to the base and not only move their payroll assets, onto dayfalls, but also add on things like time and attendance, workforce management, core HR, and all of the talent modules, which obviously is a very large revenue opportunity for us. Also within APJ, we've got quite well kind of integrated go-to markets. So we have sales and marketing across the region, a big presence across areas like Singapore and A&D and other areas across. We also have service and implementation capabilities in market, which means we can get to market quite quickly. And as we move into 2022, you'll start to see us focus more on what we call the migration and the upsell of the incumbent base, which is about 1,500 customers in region. Noemi, anything that you would add to that?

No, you covered it all.

Great, thank you.

Thank you, Brad. Next up is Robert Simmons from DA Davidson. Welcome to the call, Robert.

Hi, thanks for taking the questions. So you talked about wallet monetization, but for streaming pay, as money isn't going into wallet, and you said there's not going to be any charges simply, what is the revenue model there?

It's the same model, Robert. It is streaming pay comes on board next year. It's effectively the same as on-demand pay. So the current experience at the moment is I – Look at my mobile device. It tells me how much net earnings I have earned. So that is what is my growth, all of my taxes and deductions. And then I can elect, say I'd like $50 added to my day-fourth wallet or card. When I do that, I wait for about five to ten seconds. And then five to ten seconds, we do a calculation going back about a year. We're actually creating an earnings slip, and we're actually funding the card immediately. But it's about a 10-second wait, and the user needs to look at the balance before they spend. With streaming pay, I elect to stream my pay, and as I earn, the money flows onto my wallet at the end of every day. I don't have to do the on-demand transaction. When it goes onto the card, we still get exactly the same interchange when they go off and spend or through the other types of transactions on the card.

Got it. Okay. So I thought I was going directly into the bank account, but I guess that's not correct.

No, it goes on to the dayfalls wallet.

Got it. Okay. And then do you have any preview of what you're going to be giving us next week at the investor track?

Well, the investor track, what we actually want to do is provide an opportunity for the investors to meet the executive team. So in the executive track, we'll have it moderated by Lee Turner. Lee will also have Joe Korngabel, our chief products and technology officer. We'll have Chris Armstrong, our chief customer officer. Obviously, we'll have Naomi. We'll have Eric. We'll have Seth Ross, who heads up our consumer group. Eric and Naomi, who else am I missing in the group? I think we wanted to allow people to have a dialogue with the broader set of the executive team.

Yeah, that's right. There's a couple other executives. And then what we've done is we've curated the actual customer sessions earlier and kind of selected a few that we think will be most applicable to investors.

Great. Thank you very much.

Great. Thank you, Robert. And for our last question of the night, Bhavin Shah from Deutsche Bank.

Great. Thanks for taking my question. I mean, just maybe focusing on the SI partnerships, can you just provide us an update? and what you're seeing in terms of these guys adding more to the pipeline opportunities, is this something that we should expect as we go into next year once we start priming more deals?

Yeah, it's actually a great question on that. Obviously, we're seeing the number of opportunities brought to us by the SIs go up sizable, you know, a large margin. Obviously, we started off at a base of zero, so – You can expect to see very rapid increases on a percentage basis, but we're very happy with the growth of the pipeline that has been influenced by the SIs. So that's the first piece we're seeing. Second piece is we have got more SIs priming, day force implementations, which allows us to continue growing, especially on a global basis. without having to necessarily continue to build out our own services group internally. It allows us to focus on really doing what we do great, which is build great software and deliver great software and obviously service the great software. In terms of the partner network, we are well above 20 SI partners who have resources, who are trained. At CWT in Vegas, we had a very good showing by them, and I believe we'll see quite a few of them at the New York event as well.

Got it. Super helpful. Just a quick follow up on wallet. I mean, nice to see the continued growth in terms of go lives and the adoption from the employee base. But maybe can you provide any information on what you're seeing in terms of your customers providing more of a employee's paycheck available to in terms of on an on demand basis, whether you're seeing them increase it from 30 percent to 50 percent or 50 to 70. And like, what's that trend been like?

Yeah. You know, I'm. The two types of companies, those that put guardrails, say they're limited to 50%, and others that give full access. When I look at the overall population, it appears about 30% of individuals who use the wallet move their wages onto the wallet before the end of the pay period. If they use it for direct deposit, and we've seen the direct deposit business actually go up quite nicely, they get access to those funds two days earlier than they normally would as well. So to answer your question, I don't think it actually has been driven by the organization, just given that your natural amount of movement onto the wallet seems to be about 30% of the actual wages. Once we start doing the streaming of pay, I would expect that to go higher. And we're also starting to emphasize now the direct deposit side. And so if you get the direct deposit, you effectively get all of it at the end of the actual period as well. Got it. Super helpful. Congrats on the strong quarter. Thanks very much. Appreciate it. Eric, just to pass it back to you.

Yeah. Thanks, David. And with that question, that concludes our call for tonight. So on behalf of Noemi, David, and the rest of the Ceridian executive team, we thank you very much for your time this evening. And we look forward to continuing the conversation throughout the quarter.

Great. Thank you, everyone. And I look forward to speaking to many of you tonight and tomorrow. And I hope to see a lot of you next week as well. Thank you very much.