MeridianLink, Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Meridian Links fourth quarter 2022 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 would now like to turn the conference over to your first speaker today, Eric Schneider. Eric, please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Good afternoon. and welcome to MeridianLink's first quarter fiscal year 2023 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, Chief Financial Officer, Sean Blitchock, and President Go-To-Market, Chris Maloof. 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 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 of 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. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining us for our first quarter 2023 earnings call. I want to thank the entire MeridianLink team for helping us achieve another solid quarter. Total lending software solutions revenue grew 18% year over year, which is a fantastic achievement given current market conditions. Let's take a look at our focus areas and business highlights that led to these results. We remain hyper-focused on being the most trusted financial services technology platform, helping customers best position their businesses for success, especially in uncertain economic times. We are continuously improving our platform capabilities through product innovation and value-added partner integrations. And for another quarter, the powerful capabilities of the MeridianLink One platform continued to drive new logo and cross-sell momentum. As a result, Meridian Link exceeded top-line guidance again in Q1, with GAAP revenue up 6% year-over-year to $77.1 million and demonstrated solid operating performance. Our business model remains resilient and our customers continue to win, especially our mid-market customers that provide personalized insights in real-time, frictionless lending solutions to meet the changing needs of consumers. As the leading provider of a modern digital lending platform, we see customers continuing to choose MeridianLink One to best position and transform their businesses for future growth. The health of our pipeline and the fact that sales cycles have not slowed reinforces this view. We continue to pay close attention to external conditions and market expectations. Because our customers are retail-focused, we have seen no material impact from the recent failure of several regional banks in the United States. The risk highlighted by these events was related to financial institutions with a large concentration of commercial deposits, which is not common in our target market. Irrespective of the economic cycle, the market is undergoing increased digitalization, and Meridian Link is at the forefront of that. Whether it's more competition, consolidation or regulation, there will be pressure on financial institutions to automate their lending processes. In each of these scenarios, the search and digital transactions will accrue to our benefit because of our volume-based business model. In the meantime, we remain laser focused on capturing new market opportunities and assessing our customers in serving their communities. In a few minutes, Sean will speak about our Q1 financial performance and provide 2023 second quarter guidance and full year guidance. Before that, I would like to recognize the leadership we have gained to fuel our go-to-market engine. And then I will give several updates on our three areas of growth acceleration. We are proud of the evolution of our go-to-market capabilities. As part of Meridian Link's development over the year, we have created and deployed a comprehensive scalable strategy to accelerate growth and strengthen market position. As part of entering our next phase of growth as a public company, we have added the following leadership expertise across our go-to-market organization. First, we welcomed our new Chief Sales Officer, Richard Shaik, late summer of last year. Since joining the MeridianLink team, Richard has been instrumental in structuring our sales team to win more customers and increase cross-sell momentum. We also welcome Suresh Balasubramanian to the team as our new Chief Marketing Officer at the end of February. With the added benefit of Suresh's software experience and focus on the mom generation, we are bolstering our ability to capture more share in the market. And finally, we are excited to add Dean Gurmeier to our leadership team Meridian Link's new chief customer officer. Dean's holistic go-to-market experience combined with his customer centering approach makes him a strong leader to accelerate productivity and engagement across our support, services, and customer success teams. Our investment in the team has built an efficient and high-performing go-to-market motion, resulting in a consistent, robust pipeline. On that note, Let's turn to a few go-to-market wins in the first quarter that represent our dedication to the first area of growth acceleration, which is engaging more deeply with our customers. As evidence of continued demand for the MeridianLink One platform, we are happy to report an approximately 60% year-over-year increase in lending software solutions cross-sell bookings in Q1. These three examples are fantastic signals that our platform strategy and go-to market is accelerating. With the new leadership on board, we are well positioned to further penetrate the market and help more customers achieve their growth objectives. With that, let's turn to our second area of growth acceleration, expanding the capabilities of our platform and our revenue opportunity. With the completion of the public cloud migration last year, we are excited to allocate existing resources to our product roadmap, which is focused on meeting the needs of our customers. Critical to our sales motion, we are focused on creating value through the connective capabilities of our multi-product platform. For example, our Meridian Link consulting team is dedicated to maximizing the customer's credit portfolio performance and overall benefit from the Meridian Link One platform. levering each depth of experience from past engagements this team has been providing alternative decisioning rules to customers a capability that is imperative for quickly capturing credit worthy customers in an economic downturn turning to our partner network we would like to highlight the enhancements made to our meridian link collections integration with swbc this expanded integration increases efficiency automation of payments and improves the user's experience with the SWBC products launched from within the MarineLink One platform. Our customers and their borrowers can now leverage this improved functionality, strengthening their collection strategy in the midst of demanding financial conditions. A final example of expansion can be seen through our ability to capitalize on partner relationships to win new logos. In Q1, we worked closely with one of our global FinTech partners in developing a large-scale credit card origination solution. Meridian Link won the deal on our ability to configure a Meridian Link consumer to meet the lending needs of the customer's extensive network of banks and sublenders. Turning to our third area of focus, Meridian Link empowers customers to compete, grow, and succeed in the markets in which they participate. We have a track record of enabling customers to win more clients and capture a greater share of the client's debt wallet. In Q1, we launched a new Grow Your Deposits initiative to address the evolving needs of our customers who are shifting focus to increasing liquidity in response to the current lending environment. The integration of Meridian Link Engage and Meridian Link Opening provides a comprehensive deposit growth solution that enables customers to capture more deposit opportunities through frictionless account opening and relevant personalized communications. Finally, we are looking forward to hosting a user forum on May 8th through the 11th at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim. There is nothing more empowering than bringing together existing and prospective customers to discuss how the innovative capabilities of the MeridianLink One platform can enable their growth journey. As we are on track for a record-breaking year in attendance, we can't wait to engage with our customers face-to-face and dive deeper on how Meridian Link can provide both immediate and long-term value to the market. I want to emphasize again how Meridian Link continues to deliver consistent growth and healthy profitability levels while investing in strategic initiatives. We benefit from having a high-quality, resilient customer base whose mission to create the best borrower experiences is directly aligned with ours. In the face of uncertain macroeconomic conditions this year, we will continue executing well on what we can control, staying highly focused on our three areas of growth acceleration as demonstrated in Q1. We will continue engaging with customers to meet and exceed their digital lending needs, in part by expanding our platform capabilities and revenue opportunity. Our flywheel starts with empowering our customers to grow and better serve their clients and communities. We strive to be the most trusted financial services technology platform that positions our customers to succeed in any economic climate. With that, I will now turn the call over to Sean to talk about our financial results and provide guidance.