MeridianLink, Inc.

We had a great point in time in the history of the platform. Where I believe the market is going, we've been positioning ourselves for that for a long time. And I feel where we're at today and where we're going, we have a very strong competitive position to compete in the market, in the market that we've defined as that $100 million to $10 billion of assets under management.

And then, sorry, just quickly one more follow-up. You mentioned that in the growing trend here that people are going to the branch less, and some of those interactions are there. Are there any areas of kind of a data verification component that are maybe becoming more incremental? You know, obviously you guys added the tenancy screening. through acquisition, but are there other types of data sources or ways that lending institutions are looking to be a little smarter but cast a wider net, especially if the mortgage market continues to contract?

I would point you back to fraud. I think at this point in time, when I speak to CEOs of alliance, one of the top of mind items, especially kind of in The world of digital acceleration is fraud and fraud prevention and management around that. And we are very focused on enabling additional functionality through our partner marketplace, through integrations, as well as continue to build our platform in that regard. So from my standpoint, I feel digitalization is a great tailwind. bringing significant new opportunities to us and others in the marketplace. The fact that our platform is so broad and so well integrated to consume data and make sure that the data is vetted as part of the decisioning and fraud is managed, I view that as kind of the next frontier in analytics and how you think through decisioning as part of that. And personally, I believe that we're going to look back five years from now in this industry and maybe 10 years looking back, we're looking at very much a digital revolution taking place in the consumer lending landscape. What you've seen kind of with mortgage in the last decade or so as the whole mortgage process digitalized, that's coming on a broad basis for consumer lending and probably in a more meaningful way than what we've even anticipated a year or two ago.

Very great. Thank you. Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Tom Roderick with Stifel. Please go ahead.

Yeah. Hi, gentlemen. Thank you for taking my question. So apologies. I think everyone's juggling a few calls today, so I hope this wasn't already asked, but I know investors and we in particular were pretty interested in the update on the Meridian Lake portal that you had more recently. I think you talked about the 60 customers upgrading in the quarter. What I'd love to understand from that in terms of what that means to your customers that are selecting that, talk a little bit more about what the financial impact is to you and then also from the perspective of does it change the competitive landscape out there in terms of who you might bump into in the financial space. services technology world, you know, sort of more of the same typical competition or is that changing at all as you kind of push your way into a broader, you know, digital footprint on the customer portal front?

Let me kind of respond to it from a market standpoint and I'll hand it to Chad to kind of respond to the financial part of this. Our portal is the innovation that took place over the last 18 months, two years, on specifically creating an omni-channel experience for our customers, clients, and members. And it is the enablement of – and this strategy played out before there was a pandemic. Meridian Link's team and – board stacked hands on really building the platform to be a digital enabler and moving the mid-market financial institutions we serve to be competitive with larger banks and larger financial institutions. And our positioning has always been invest in the omni-channel, invest in the digital experience, create the single sign-on, That's why we started investing over two years moving to the cloud is creating that scalable platform and ecosystem that we invest in and we have partners participating in it. And the portal is that front end where the consumer touches our platform, that engagement point that they experience our clients' interaction with them. And it's driven by Meridian Link. So it's a pretty important investment for us and something that we're really excited about bringing further to market. From a positioning standpoint, today it's very focused on the consumer lending landscape. You can clearly see it's a point of sale that can be more if we choose to go there. But today we want to be the best portal, the best access point for our clients. into the Meridian Link platform that enables the experience across the platform and being integrated with our partner ecosystem. Chad, I don't know if you want to speak to kind of the subscription part of it, how this plays into the platform and the financials.

Yeah, Tom. So the portal is one of the modules, one of the kind of dozen modules we sell in the consumer lending category. It's rapidly growing, and it's subscription rather than application-based. But I would say... we do also get the benefit if our customers are using a portal solution if they're attracting additional applications by having that kind of customer friendly application we do kind of get the benefit of seeing additional volume in the other modules that they have on the consumer side yeah perfect i'm glad you clarified that chat and is that subscription just driven by

you know, number of end consumers on the platform, so it's not transactionally or application-driven. It's just, you know, number of customers that the financial institution has that would drive that price point.

We do price it more on size of the institution, not necessarily tagging customers, but pricey assets.

Okay. And then, you know, one quick follow-up. I was interested in your answer there just to Matt's last question on additive solutions. You were highlighting fraud as one solution that sort of seems to be catching on. And, you know, when you combine that with some of the data verification, the analytics, and the BI, it seems like perhaps, you know, the market is ready to move beyond just the automation of paper processes to really investing in artificial intelligence and and, you know, machine learning and a lot of the intelligence at the edge of the network there. Maybe you could just go one step further and talk about, you know, high level, what your customers are doing to lean in on that theme and, you know, is there additive money around the horn? Should we expect to hear a lot more of the, you know, the AI, the fraud and some of these sort of newer solutions that are, you know, a step up in intelligence?

It's an area of interest for us. It's an area that we are investing in, in our own capabilities as well as partner integrations and partner capabilities as evidenced in example by the Plaid integration. And it's also an area that we are looking through the lens of M&A. And it's certainly an opportunity that We would like to capture value from if there's value to be captured. But more importantly, if there's value to be captured in driving growth for our customers and helping our customers kind of differentiate, make faster, better decisions, have a better risk management process integrated into decisioning, We are highly interested in building out that capability over time, and I believe it's also to the benefit of the greater market, not just our existing or future customers.

Yeah, really helpful. Thank you. I'll jump back in here. I appreciate it.

Thank you. And that concludes our question and answer session for today. I will now turn the call back to our CEO, Nicholas Buck, for final comments.

So thank you, everybody, for joining us on our second quarter as a public company where we're reporting our results. And I think you may have picked that up from both Chad and my discussions today that We've never been more optimistic about the health of the business and the opportunity ahead of us. We have numerous growth levers at Meridian Link and the demand for our products is strong and I would even venture wanting to say unprecedented. For me, as the holidays approach, I feel fortunate that the biggest thing that's keeping me up at night right now is how we can get our toys into the hands of our clients faster here. We're sitting on a great opportunity. There's great tailwinds in this market, and I'm very excited to be part of that journey in the digital consumer lending landscape. And I would also like to finish on a personal note. This is an incredible journey, and I want to send my sincere gratitude to all of our employees, our clients, and our partners for getting us here. Thank you all for your interest in MeridianLink, and we look forward to talking to you on our next earnings call where we will discuss Q4. Thank you for joining today, operator.

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