MeridianLink, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, take your standby and welcome to Meridian Link's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the conference over to your first speaker today, Eric Schneider, Head of Investor Relations. Eric, please go ahead.

Good afternoon and welcome to MeridianLink's fourth quarter and fiscal year 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 in 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 GAAP to non-GAAP 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 for our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2021 earnings call. 2021 was a very successful year with strong growth and Q4 continued to show strong momentum outside the expected slowing in mortgage-related revenues. As a result, Meridian Link exceeded guidance again in Q4, with GAAP revenue up 19% year-over-year to $64 million and 38% adjusted EBITDA margins. In a few minutes, Chad will provide additional details on these results and provide 2022 guidance. But first, I will provide some details on what we are seeing in the macro backdrop and on key areas of strength during the quarter. We continue to see notable strength in the consumer lending side of our business with strong momentum in the fourth quarter, up 23% year over year. This strength has been driven in part by the reinvestment of our mortgage related upside into the rest of our lending business. In line with our guidance, the impact of mortgage on both our lending software and data verification software revenue types declined in the fourth quarter. Mortgage came in at approximately 27% of revenues during the quarter, and we expect this percentage to decline further in 2022 due to both the expected weakening of mortgage volumes and to the continued outperformance of our consumer lending solutions. As you know, Meridian Link One is a comprehensive, consolidated, all-in-one cloud platform that supports all consumer loan and account types, including mortgage. We believe Meridian Link is outperforming in our market due to our diversified portfolio of products offered in our integrated platform and the continuing strong digitalization tailwinds. Moving on to key areas of strength, there are three things I would like to talk about. One, our increasingly robust go-to-market engine and how that is driving continued momentum in both new logo ones and cross-sell. Two, Innovation, including product suite integration, modernization, and expansion, and how this is driving wins. And thirdly, reduced implementation times and how these are driving faster go-lives and helping us to invoice sooner. So let's talk about these three in more detail. Q4 was a record booking scorer for us, with new logo wins the highest ever. driven by continued investment in our go-to-market engine. We now have nearly 50 quota carrying reps in the field, and digitalization is top of mind for customers and prospects. Our return on this investment has been tremendous, generating high demand from potential clients. We will continue to invest both in strengthening our position in our sweet spot and extending beyond it, unlocking new market opportunities. One large Q4 opportunity was a win from a fast-growing digital mortgage platform designed exclusively for small to mid-sized mortgage lenders with more than $150 billion funded in working with more than 300 lenders. They invested more than $1 million in Meridian Link Mortgage in year one, and we're confident enhanced messaging of Meridian Link's open API technology, multi-tenant architecture, and collaborative approach to growing clients' businesses will continue to drive larger lands. Conversely, Meridian Link Entry has enabled wins of institutions smaller than our typical customer through a wholly templatized implementation. These are smaller dollar contracts than our typical customer, but it further extends our market-leading capabilities to institutions of all sizes who are committed to providing the best capabilities in the market. In addition, cross-selling is accelerating. In Q4, a $500 million-plus national credit union added MeridianLink Opening to their portfolio of MeridianLink products, which now includes MeridianLink Consumer, MeridianLink Portal, and MeridianLink Consulting. Secondly, our commitment to delivering innovation that is meaningful to our customers is also driving momentum. When new logos or current clients select Meridian Link, they repeatedly say they trust Meridian Link to help grow their business because of our market leadership and innovation. We continuously improve solutions for all clients. Most recently, for CRA clients, we combined the leading independent credit, background, and tenant screening platforms. In lending, we brought together leading independent products for credit unions and community banks across consumer point of sale, account opening, deposit taking, direct lending, and indirect lending. We also launched MarineLink Engage in beta in Q4 and expanded to general availability in January. Engage is a unique and comprehensive end-to-end consumer lending, account, and card marketing automation solution and we are seeing good initial engagement from prospects at the top of our sales funnel. Our engineering team also migrated MeridianLink portal for consumer lending from our hosting environment to the public cloud in Q4. This is our largest migration to date, and it allows us to offer increased scalability and higher speed to clients while improving our ability to iterate and improve the underlying product technology. In 2022, We will complete the Meridian Link One platform rollout, providing the full breadth of our lending solution in a public cloud with a unified user experience. Thirdly, organic and inorganic investments in both solutions and go-to-market activities have meaningful increased our booking site. And on the last call, I told you client demand for our capabilities exceeded our ability to implement them. COVID-19 increased customer demand for integrated, comprehensive digital processes, but slowed implementation since portions of the go-live process need to be performed synchronously to accomplish these best outcomes. As mentioned previously, we have developed and launched standardized product and service packages that bring smaller clients live more quickly and using up to two-thirds less effort from our professional services team. We also invested in process improvements that accelerate the portion of the implementation timeline we control. This helped us close the year with an accelerating number of go-lives across four products. We expect investments completed and underway in our services team to reduce total time from signing to go-live by about 30%. These investments are necessary to work down our backlog and keep up with the ongoing growth in bookings. We expect a very strong return on the spend, bringing clients online faster as a meaningful financial impact. Before I turn the call over to Chad, I want to give you some high-level thoughts on 2022. When we think about 2022, we are more confident than ever in our go-to market and innovation engines. We are penetrating more of our TAM as we continue to win opportunistically outside our sales sweet spot. Our cross-sell muscle is building. and we are increasingly monetizing our partner marketplace. Meridian Link will also remain a disciplined company in 2022. We've been able to deliver consistent double digit top line growth along with profitability levels well above those of our public FinTech peers. None of this is new. This is what you have come to expect of Meridian Link. The big story for 2022 will be bringing customers online more quickly. I mentioned the investment we are making and will continue to make in our go to market organization. This is what we have guided for, but candidly, we have been more successful than we anticipated in generating demand and have proven that adding to our go to market organization produces very high returns. We will continue to ramp up our sales and marketing team to leverage our already strong position and create further distance between us and the competition. As a result, we are increasing investments to accelerate implementation capacity. As we increase hiring, we expect shorter margin pressure, but this investment will allow us to bring recurring revenue online more quickly and improve the go-live experience for our customers. As we close out the last quarter of our first year as a public company, I'm pleased to see our strong execution on key growth initiatives, and I'm confident this success will continue. As always, I'd like to thank our employees. It is their dedication to and collaboration with our customers that drives our momentum. We also want to thank our new and existing customers for their trust in us to drive outcomes for their clients and communities. I will now turn the call over to Chad to talk about our financial results.