Paymentus Holdings, Inc.

Holdings Earnings Conference call. This call is being recorded. All participants are currently in listen mode only. There will be an opportunity to ask questions following management's prepared remarks. At this time, I will now turn the call over to Scott Eckstein, Investor Relations.

Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon. Welcome and thank you for joining the webcast to review our first quarter 2025 results. Our earnings release documents are available on the investor relations section of the paymentthis.com website. They include the earnings presentation that we'll make reference to during this webcast. This webcast is being recorded. I hope everyone's had a chance to review those documents. Our founder and CEO, Dushant Sharma, will make some opening comments before Sanjay Kalra Our CFO discusses the details of the first quarter of 2025 and our guidance. Following our prepared remarks, we'll take questions. Let me just remind you that we may make forward-looking statements in the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, and we refer to non-GAAP financial measures during the webcast. Forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risk and uncertainties. Factors that may cause our actual results and material difficulty from those expectations are detailed in our earnings materials and our SEC filings that are available on both the SECs and our websites. Information about non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations due at GAAP, can also be found in our earnings materials that are available on our website. With that, I'd like to turn the webcast over to Dushant Sharma. Dushant?

Thanks, Scott. Paymentus has started 2025 on a strong footing with excellent results, including year-over-year growth in revenue, contribution profit, and adjusted EBITDA. This performance continues to be driven by our strong sales momentum and higher transaction activity from both new and existing clients. Based on our outperformance in the first quarter, our strong pipeline, bookings and backlog at the end of the quarter, and the continued momentum in all growth areas of our business, we are feeling good about the remainder of 2025 and beyond. Despite the macro environment, we find ourselves in a very fortunate situation where we are serving an important part of the non-discretionary, essential domestic economy. Let me provide a real-world example. For a typical household, just to be able to cook You need water, electricity, and gas. These bills are fundamental and you need to pay for these services. They're not optional. Just this segment alone gets us to about half of our business. Similarly, you need to pay for a phone, for your rent, mortgage, and taxes. Likewise, if you have a home, car, or life insurance, To maintain coverage, you need to pay for those bills. And you can go down the line of our verticals and realize that it is a privilege to be serving an essential side of the domestic economy with a differentiated and a scaled technology platform and ecosystem like Paymentus. And from a go-to-market standpoint, we could not ask for a better value proposition that our platform and ecosystem provides our clients. which is reducing their cost to serve while helping them improve the experience for their customers. This value proposition resonates in all economic cycles, particularly because we are a critical service for revenue collections for the businesses we serve. Taking into consideration our value proposition, resulting in a continued market momentum, Along with the enormous stem of non-discretionary bills, I continue to believe that our best is yet to come, and we are indeed just getting started. Turning now to our first quarter results, revenue was $275.2 million, an increase of 48.9% year-over-year, driven largely by increased clients and transactions. Contribution profit was $87.6 million, up 26.3 percent year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA, which is a significant financial metric for us, was $30 million, an increase of 51.3 percent year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 34.2 percent in the quarter. It's a new record. You will note that over 50 percent of our year-over-year growth in contribution profit dropped over bottom line. This is a key aspect of our business model that we have pointed out on previous calls, which is our proven ability to consistently expand our operating leverage without sacrificing growth or innovation. As we sit here today, it feels great to reaffirm our CAGR model for our primary matrix of 20% top line revenue growth and 20 to 30% bottom line adjusted EBITDA growth. As is evident from our first quarter results, we outperformed our CAGR model by a wide margin for both top line and the bottom line. This is reflected in our updated guidance that Sanjay will cover shortly. As a reminder, This CAGR model is for our primary matrix of revenue and adjusted EBITDA only and should not be confused with the secondary matrix such as contribution profit and OPEX. As we have been doing quite successfully to date, we will continue to use our strong operating leverage to calibrate contribution profit and OPEX as necessary to achieve these longer-term targets. In addition to these results, we exited the first quarter with a strong bookings and a solid implementation backlog. The multi-year commitments under our typical agreements from these bookings continue to give us confidence in our ability to achieve our CAGR model beyond 2025. Our solid execution during the quarter once again allowed us to surpass the rule of 40 and doing so by a wide margin at 61. As we have shared previously, at Paymentus, our goal remains to continue delivering high quality earnings alongside solid top line growth. Now I'll review some of our key first quarter business highlights and accomplishments. During the first quarter, we find clients in various industry verticals, including utilities, government agencies, telecommunications, banking and credit unions, insurance, and educational institutions, among others. We believe this broad mix of new clients shows the diversity of the businesses and the multiple industry verticals our platform can support. In addition, we signed several new channel partners in various industry verticals to deepen our partner ecosystem. These verticals include property management, education, banking, and credit unions. Our diverse and ever-expanding partner network continues to complement our direct go-to-market strategy. At the same time, we continue to focus on onboarding our considerable backlog. Our onboarding enhancements, incremental investments, as well as constantly improving face-to-face client engagement continue to drive these efforts. During the quarter, we onboarded clients across multiple verticals, namely utilities, healthcare, telecommunications, property management, insurance, government services, banking and credit unions. With that, let me turn it over to Sanjay to review our financial results in greater detail.