MeridianLink, Inc.

Head of Investor Relations. Eric, please go ahead.

Good afternoon and welcome to MeridianLink's second quarter 2021 earnings call. We will be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after the market closed today. With me are MeridianLink's Chief Executive Officer, Nicholas Block, and Chief Financial Officer, Chad Martin. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that today's conference call will include forward-looking statements based on the company's current expectations. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ materially. For a discussion of factors that could affect our future financial results and business, please refer to the disclosure in today's earnings release and the other reports and filings we file from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All our statements are made based on information available to us as of today and, except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update any such statements. During the call, we will also refer to both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. you can find the reconciliation of our gap to non-gap measures included in our press release, which is posted to the investor relations section of our website. With that, let me turn the call over to Nicolas.

Thank you, Eric, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining us on our first earnings call as a public company. During today's call, Chad and I will provide details on our Q2 results, as well as our Q3 and 2021 guidance. We will also spend time covering the business, market, and opportunity, since many of you may be newer to the Meridian Link story. But first, I'll kick this off with a few of the highlights of our financial results. As you can see, Meridian Link exhibited strong performance in Q2. which exceeded our previously communicated guidance, driven by continued growth in consumer lending volumes for our customers and high levels of mortgage activity driven by still historically low interest rates. I am pleased to report that Q2 gap revenue was $68.5 million, up 38% year-over-year, and we delivered this impressive growth while continuing to demonstrate our high levels of profitability with adjusted EBITDA margin in the quarter of 49%. I couldn't be prouder of these results, which showcase both our strong growth and best in class margins. I'm honored to be part of such a strong organization and leadership team. One of MeridianLink's clear differentiators is the passion and commitment of our people and our dynamic culture of acceleration and inclusion. Many of our employees have 10 or more years in the lending marketplace, and it's their domain expertise that powers our industry-leading innovation and product development. I would like to acknowledge all Meridian Link employees for their performance in the first half of the year. Meridian Link is a leading provider of a cloud-based consumer lending platform for financial institutions, including banks, credit unions, mortgage lenders, speciality lending providers, and consumer reporting agencies, and our platform is an important revenue and growth engine for our customers. We are well positioned in our markets and have a strong growth trajectory. Our lending solutions include cloud-based consumer and mortgage loan origination, point of sale, account opening, collection, and analytic software that simplify the transfer of capital between consumers and financial institutions. Our solution is a leader in mid-market financial institutions. Our key customers are consumer lenders, mortgage lenders, and consumer reporting agencies, or CRAs. Our target financial institution customer has between $100 million and $10 billion of assets under management. In total, We work with over 1,900 customers, including 63 of the leading 100 credit unions and over 50% of Forbes' 2020 best credit unions and banks. Our data verification software solutions include cloud-based platforms for powering credit reporting, employment and income verification, asset verification, fraud detection, and background screening. Our mortgage credit link and TaskWorks data verification products empower CRAs with an operational platform and data, and we are leaders within the CRA software market. We have a history of providing measurable ROI to our customers in the areas of revenue growth, cost reductions, efficiency improvements, and risk reduction decisioning. Together, Our suite of mission-critical software solutions allows our customers to successfully compete against Tier 1 banks and large financial institutions. We are a critical revenue and growth engine for our customers, and as our customers continue to grow and succeed, we do so alongside them. The financial services industry is in relatively early stages of digital transformation. The global pandemic accelerated financial institutions' investment in digital lending software, and we believe our industry still has five to ten years of digitalization ahead. The United States is the largest consumer debt market in the world, and financial institutions in the U.S. are currently investing billions in software to compete for business. Cornerstone Advisors independently estimates our domestic total addressable market at over $10 billion, An international data corporation estimates that SaaS spend from the banking sector will nearly double to $19 billion by 2024. Our platform replaces outdated legacy products and less capable point solutions to enable more efficient account opening, loan origination, reporting, and risk management from anywhere and at any time. We expect Meridian Link to continue to win in the market for three key reasons. First, our platform is comprehensive. Today, too many financial institutions struggle to keep up with increasing consumer experience expectations because they rely on numerous disparate legacy technologies that still permeate the industry. In contrast, Meridian Link helps our customers compete and win by addressing nearly all consumer lending categories, including mortgage, credit card, personal, auto, home equity, and small business loans. By serving all these loan types, we accelerate our customers' digital transformation, and we remain the only mid-market complete unified lending solution originating consumer and mortgage loans. Second, our platform is efficient. Speed and intelligence matter, and our platform enables real-time decisioning and rapid access to data in a deeply complex market plagued with this organization. Because our platform integrates a suite of solutions that span the digital lending journey, we can drive more meaningful and personalized interactions. This is essential as consumers increasingly expect a more thoughtful and customized experience across their lending needs. Third, our platform is modular. Our clients can select one or many of our integrated products to facilitate growth, as well as streamline processes. The extensive Meridian Link marketplace is a game changer for our customers, as it allows our customers to extend our platform to meet their specific strategic requirements. Several key initiatives drove the company's solid performance in Q2. Our 2021 virtual user forum for our lending clients took place in May, and had a total of 80 sessions over three days. There were more than 2,100 unique attendees and over 13,000 cumulative attendees for all sessions to engage with and learn more about Meridian Link's offerings. And when it comes to offerings, the company continues to expand. In fact, in April, the organization completed the acquisition of Salent, Salient contributes key data and marketing capabilities to our Meridian Link One platform, which we will continue to enhance and integrate. And finally, the company had another strong quarter of new logo wins, including key signings and speciality lending, continued bank and credit union expansion, and also several new customers for data verification solutions. We are proud of our recent growth and accomplishments. and even more excited about executing further on several key growth opportunities. We believe consumer lending will continue to grow, and as the volume of our customers' lending increases, we expect to share in that growth. Given our position in the market, our operational execution, and the positive market dynamics, we are confident in our growth trajectory. We see multiple growth vectors. First, expanding our target market. We have historically focused on the middle market, regional banks, community banks, credit unions, speciality lending providers. However, our solutions also resonate well with larger and smaller financial institutions, and we believe we can successfully expand our target market to include both. Our newly packaged offering targeting smaller prospective customers has quickly gained traction. Second, adding new logos. Our high-powered sales capabilities are built to acquire high-value new logo ones. We are making investments in sales and marketing to continue securing new clients, particularly as financial institutions seek to digitally transform by purchasing more effective and scalable technologies, and our go-to-market team continues to win new customers in our target market. Third, continuing to land and expand. The critical nature of our solutions facilitates exceptional retention and embedded cross-sell growth within our existing client base. We have a demonstrated ability to both retain customers and to upsell and cross-sell more of the features and functionality we offer inside their existing installed products and new products. As demonstrated by record attendance at our recent user forum, there remains strong interest in our customer base to learn more about our additional integrated products and services. Fourth, monetizing our partner network. Our vibrant partner marketplace provides our customers with the vendors and solutions of their choosing and offers us a substantial, actionable monetization opportunity. Our solutions act as the gateway for our extensive network of third-party partners to access our financial institution and CRA customers. We are able to capitalize on one-time service fees, annual integration fees, and transaction-based revenue share income via the MeridianLink marketplace. We expect to work with current and new partners to enhance the opportunities for our customers to optimally position themselves in the market, and when our customers win, we win. Finally, strategic M&A. In addition to developing our own solutions organically, we will continue to selectively pursue acquisitions that provide additional capabilities or customers or both. M&A continues to be a significant area of opportunity for growth, consolidation, and technology enhancement. In the past 12 months, we have increased platform adoption and capabilities through three acquisitions. TCI, which improved our indirect lending offering, TaskWorks, which established the leading position in adjacent areas of the CRA market, and Salent, which brings data analytics and marketing capabilities in-house for our clients. I will now turn the call over to Chad to talk about our financial results.