Paymentus Holdings, Inc.

you can do so by dialing star 1 on your telephone. At this time, I will now turn the call over to David Hanover, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Paymenta's fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings call. Joining me today on the call is Dushan Sharma, our founder and CEO, and Sanjay Kalra, our CFO. Following our prepared remarks, we'll take questions. Our press release was issued after the close of market today and is posted on our website where this call is being simultaneously webcast. The webcast replay of this call and the supplemental slides accompanying this presentation will be available on our company's website under the Investorations link at ir.pinentis.com. Statements made on this webcast include forward-looking statements within the meaning of this Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements use words such as will, believe, expect, anticipate, and similar phrases that denote future expectation or intent regarding our financial results and guidance, the impact of, and our ability to address continued economic uncertainty, our market opportunities, business strategies, implementation timing, product enhancements, impact from acquisitions, and other matters. These forward-looking statements speak as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update them. These statements are subject to risk, uncertainties, and assumptions that may cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in such statements, including the risk and uncertainty set forth under the captions, special note regarding forward-looking statements and risk factors in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2022, and our subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2023, which we expect to file with the SEC shortly. and elsewhere in our other filings with the SEC. We encourage you to review these detailed forward-looking statements, safe harbor, and risk factor disclosures. In addition, during today's call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, specifically contribution profit, adjusted gross profit, non-GAAP operating expenses, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, and non-GAAP net income and earnings per share. These non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are useful in measuring our performance and liquidity, should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from GAAP results. We encourage you to review additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations of the most directly comparable GAAP measures in our earnings press release issued today and the supplemental slides to this webcast, each available on the investor relations page of our website. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Dushant Sharma, our founder and CEO.

Thank you, David. We had a great quarter and a great year, and we are looking forward to carrying our momentum into 2024. Even more exciting to me is my view that our 2023 financial performance reflects only a subset of the opportunities arising out of the innovation framework we have built over the years. Therefore, we are excited about our long-term future and believe we are just getting started. Now I'll cover our fourth quarter and the full year 2023 highlights. In the fourth quarter of 2023, Paymentus again delivered results that were well ahead of our initial expectations. Fourth quarter revenue was $164.8 million, up 24.7% year over year. Adjusted EBITDA, which as many of you know, is a significant financial metric for us. was $19.9 million for the quarter, up 95.4% year over year. Fourth quarter contribution profit was $66.3 million, up 22.7% year over year. In addition to these results, we also exited 2023 with a strong bookings and a strong backlog that we believe puts us in a position to achieve the top end of our guidance without signing any new clients. But of course, timely completing our expected 2024 implementations. As you may recall, we shared the same sentiment last year around this time. For the full year 2023, revenue increased 23.6% over the last year to $614.5 million beating our long-term target of 20% top line growth. Adjusted EBITDA increased 103.1% to $58.1 million, far ahead of our long-term target of 20 to 30%. And contribution profit was $240.9 million, growing 19.7%. In Q4, We added $12.2 million in contribution profit over the same period last year, while dropping $9.7 million of that to adjusted EBITDA. So for the past few quarters, we have continued to demonstrate an ability to drop the majority of the incremental contribution profit dollars to the bottom line. We believe this highlights one of the key strengths of our operating strategy, our proven ability to expand our operating leverage without sacrificing growth or innovation. As we have shared before, at Paymentus, our goal remains to continue delivering high-quality earnings alongside solid top-line growth. We are proud of what we have achieved to date, and we expect to continue delivering long-term growth in both of these areas in the years to come. Now I'll review some of our key fourth quarter business highlights and accomplishments. As I mentioned earlier, we finished 2023 with a strong backlog and are very pleased with our year-over-year growth. Of course, all of this continues to be driven by the strength of our technology platform and our IP and ecosystem, which enables our clients to participate in a broad and diverse network by merely integrating onto our platform. Turning specifically to new client activity during the fourth quarter, we signed several notable and large clients. We signed multiple large insurance companies, large utilities, and large government agencies. We also signed a large property management company in the real estate sector and a large business in the retail sector. In addition, we signed several clients across various other verticals. We believe this broad mix of customer signings demonstrates the diversity of the businesses and verticals our platform can support. And as always, one of our key focus areas continues to be onboarding our strong backlog in order to drive further growth. We are making incremental targeted investments in this area and believe these investments, as well as the continually improving post-pandemic conditions that allows for a more in-person collaborative process continues to be a tailwind for us in this regard. As part of this effort, we have continued to ramp up hirings. We have made significant progress onboarding new clients since the start of 2023, including the launch of several large clients during the fourth quarter across various verticals, including multiple utilities, insurance companies, commercial entities, property management companies, government agencies, and financial institutions. Of course, we expect to make further progress throughout 2024 consistent with our growth plans and internal targets. As we reflect on our platform and the ecosystem, we believe we are increasingly becoming a central hub to the entire bill payment ecosystem. When I step back and reflect on our product capabilities and who we currently serve, With product offerings, it drives a strong personal belief that we are setting a foundation to become a large global fintech provider. First, we serve businesses of various sizes and industry verticals, engaging with their consumer and business customers and getting their bills paid through our platform. Second, we have banks and credit unions of various sizes sending payments from their customers to the billers using our platform and our ever-expanding IP and ecosystem. Third, we have millions of consumers and small businesses interacting on our platform and the ecosystem. And finally, we have clients who are disbursing and paying our millions of dollars using our payout and disbursement platforms. These billers, businesses, banks, credit unions, and SMBs all engage our direct product offerings that uniquely address their specific business and payment workflows. So if you're an investor like me in this business, I hope you're as excited as I am about where the business is headed with ever-expanding TAM, along with our growth and profitability. In other words, I believe this is a long-term sustainable growth business with innovative platform and the company DNA. In closing, we are proud to report another period of results that were ahead of our original expectations, both for the fourth quarter and the full year 2023. At the same time, we continue to prove our ability to increase operating leverage without sacrificing revenue growth. We ended the year with a strong backlog and solid sales momentum going into 2024. And of course, we intend to remain focused and disciplined in onboarding our strong backlog, which we expect to fuel our future growth. Now let me turn it over to Sanjay to review our financial results in greater detail. Sanjay?