Marpai, Inc.

Good morning, and welcome to the MARPAY fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Steve Johnson, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, and welcome to the MarPay fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings release webcast. With me this morning is Damian Lamandola, CEO and Director of MarPay, and John Powers, President of MarPay. Please see the required safe harbor and forward-looking statement disclosures showing up on your screen. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to Mr. Landmendola.

Thanks, Steve. In a short span, Markway's team engineered an exceptional turnaround, dramatically reducing losses. Now, we're investing in the company to achieve high growth and profitability. Our key strategic initiatives remain consistent. revenue growth, best-in-customer experience, and profitability. We continue to streamline costs by deploying innovative services, including our recently announced APARA Member Engagement Portal. Looking ahead, we'll introduce high-impact pharmacy benefit management services in the second half of 2025. These actions will fuel growth and position marketplace profitability in 2025. Let's turn it over now to John.

Like Damien and everyone on our leadership team, I'm a large shareholder of Marpay and committed to profitable growth aligned with our shareholders. As we transition from riding the ship to a high-performing TPA, we have increased our focus on revenue growth. We are actively recruiting high-caliber sales executives and expect to add at least one or two within the next quarter. Our MARPAGE SAVES approach is resonating with not only our existing clients, but also our potential clients, especially as healthcare costs continue to rise in the low double digits. As we have discussed in earlier calls, we have seen great success in focusing our sales attention to a few targeted industries where there are high labor costs and tight margins. For example, we recently brought in a large Northeast hospital system that needed a TPA partner that could deliver cost savings right away. One other success that we have been experiencing is leveraging strategic partners that refer business to us throughout the year and not just on the typical January 1 benefits plan year. Finally, recall that Damien has over 30 years' experience in the pharmacy benefit management, or PBM, industry and remains tightly aligned with fellow industry executives. Under Damien's leadership and expertise, we are launching MARPAIRX in the second half of 2025, which we anticipate will reduce prescription costs for our clients while offering innovative solutions for high-cost specialty drugs. In fact, we're evaluating the potential to expand that program to other sales channels outside of our current book of business. In addition to driving lower costs of healthcare, Marpay is differentiating ourselves by executing a superior member experience. We recently announced a collaboration with Ampara and their healthcare engagement platform, reducing the multiple portals and apps to just one and providing world-class service. We've begun the rollout of that project and expect it to be complete by the end of June. Another key lever for improving the member experience is their strategy to drive continuous improvement in our operational KPIs. In our call center, we have gotten our average speed to answer to less than 10 seconds when handling member calls. On our claims team, we've gotten the average claims processing turnaround time for a claim to just seven business days. As we mentioned previously, we're utilizing our AI skills to assist in our member improvement of our operations. Finally, we continue to build out our MARPE Saves program, providing value-added services to drive the cost of healthcare down for our clients, their employees, and their families. Cost savings continues to be the number one reason clients choose an independent TPA such as MARPE. With that, I would like to turn it back over to Damian.

Thanks, John. Marketplace's mission to reduce health care costs is essential, and as a large shareholder, I'm fully committed to it. However, we must also deliver financial success. Steve will discuss our progress on that front, and I want to emphasize our strategic focus on achieving profitability in 2025 and rapidly maximizing profitability going forward. We're balancing purpose with profit and we're moving forward with urgency. Team is streamlining tools and vendors. Marpay currently offers too many choices for services. We've created a core package of services and the client wants additional customization. Marpay will certainly accommodate at the right price. We have a continuous improvement mindset and we'll make targeted reductions as operating efficiencies are realized. I'm very excited about our new Marpay Rx program that I've been personally leading. You may remember in 2017 that I successfully sold a PBM to the Carlisle Group and in bringing my deep knowledge of PBM insight to Marpay. We anticipate solid revenue growth and profitability with a total systems approach and data analytics in combination with our artificial intelligence capabilities under one roof. We're implementing an early alert program to drive savings through better medical management. Finally, I'm not happy with our stock price. The market education is underway in Marpe. I'm personally presenting, along with our CFO, Steve Johnson, at the Planet Michael Capp Showcase in Las Vegas, April 22nd through the 24th. This exclusive investor conference is attended by sophisticated investors seeking high-potential companies. With that, I'm going to hand it over to Steve to cover the financial highlights. Thank you, Damien.

Please refer to our SEC File 10-K for details. I will review the highlights of the following achievements that we achieved in the fourth quarter and 2024. We ended the quarter with about $800,000 in cash on hand. While revenue declined by approximately 6% from Q3, we cut operating expenses by 5%, saving approximately 300,000 and we will continue to review our client portfolio to focus on more profitable clients. Our operating loss was reduced from approximately 3.1 million to approximately 2.7 million for the fourth quarter. And our net loss was 1.2 million down from 2.4 million from Q3 to and even more significantly down from Q4 of 2023. Earnings per share were a loss of just eight cents, which was an improvement of 22 cents from Q3 in 2024. One of the key things is we had a lot of activity in 2024, and we thought it'd be good to provide some additional commentary around and present an adjusted EBITDA metric. So our adjusted EBITDA is calculated as earnings before interest taxes, depreciation and amortization, excluding non-recurring transactions and stock-based compensation. The adjusted EBITDA loss for the year ended December 31st, 2024 was 9.1 million as compared to a loss of 20.2 million for the year ended December 31st, 2023. Massive improvement year over year. The improved adjusted EBITDA loss was due to the actions taken throughout 2023 and 2024 to better utilize our resources and reduce our expenses, as we shared on our quarterly calls. Please note that we provide net loss to adjust the EBITDA reconciliation table highlighted on your screen, as well in our press release and 10-K filing. With that, I'd like to turn it back over to Damian. Thanks, Steve.

I'm demanding results. As CEO and larger shareholder, I'm driving our leadership team to aggressively pursue shareholder value. We're cultivating a culture of high performance from the highest levels of management to every team member. We're united in our dedication to our shareholders, customers, and partners. We're innovating, we're executing, and we're delivering real results. We're pioneering solutions and delivering tangible value. We're not waiting for opportunities, we're creating them. Your continued confidence and support are deeply appreciated.

Thank you, Dane. At this time, we will be opening up the conference call for questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then 2. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Your first question comes from Ian Castle with IFCM. Your line is now open.

Congrats on the progress throughout 2024. I have a few different questions, and I'll just ask two or three of them, then I'll jump back in the queue and then maybe ask the remainder if there aren't any more. But 2024 definitely seems like a turnaround year. type of year and it's a little bit of shaking the tree with the current customer base. I think you probably had some customers that were kind of unprofitable and you're glad to see them go and also replacing them with new profitable customers. You know, just thinking about churn for 2024 and going into 2025, is a lot of the churn now behind us or do you still think we'll have some more of the tree that needs shaking?

Thanks, Ian. John, you want to take that one? All right. I'll go ahead and take it. I got it.

Sorry. Oh, sorry about that. I was on mute. I didn't realize that. My bad. Yeah. We definitely continue to focus our attention on our most profitable clients. I believe our overall attrition rate is definitely within line with industry average. In early 2025, we'll see some of that attrition flow through early in the year, but we have closed a significant amount of business throughout the first quarter and and have a very strong pipeline for the remainder of the year. So we remain extremely optimistic.

That's great to hear. Another question I had would be, you know, your cash position. I think you drew down $5 million to support the company. How do you think about the cash position and the planned growth looking ahead?

Yeah, Ian, we ended the year with approximately $800,000 in cash. Of course, all our actions have greatly reduced our cash burn, and certainly the additional $5 million from our strategic financial partner, JGB Capital, was very, very helpful, especially driving our growth in 2025. And we have plans in place to cover our requirements until the company's cash flow positive in 2025.

Okay, I appreciate that color. Another question I would have would be, and you mentioned strategic partnerships in your prepared remarks. I was wondering if you could kind of provide a little bit more color on some of those strategic partnerships you have or ones that you expect to bring on to help accelerate the growth.

Sure. This is John. We recently announced two significant collaborations with Health & Tech and Ampara. Those both are two-way streets where we drive revenue for each organization and bring leads to one another. We have two additional ones that we're extremely optimistic about, but at this point in time, we're not at liberty to share, so keep an eye for announcements on those. These collaborations supercharge our sales cycle and definitely allow us to close blocks of business, not just a one-Z, two-Z approach leveraging our alliances.

Thanks for that, Keller. How should people think about Marpay's value proposition compared to the competitors that are out there?

Great question. We focus definitely on driving significant savings to bend that healthcare employee benefits trend with a best-in-class, valid member experience. I recently met with a broker that I thought would share some of their feedback. And what they said was Marpe is solid in all aspects of the TPA business. Many in this space top the fluff and supposed features. Marpe is focused on the basics and getting good results. So we're going to continue to drive that drive savings and best in class member experience. And those are the two main reasons why anyone choose an independent TPA, such as Marpe. So we're extremely optimistic. We're going to continue to drive those home for the remainder of the year.

Okay. Well, I lied. I'm just going to ask all the questions I had. I know you guys seem to be really excited about BarPay Rx, and I'm just curious if you can maybe provide a little bit more color on why that product or additional product is so important and crucial to the growth of the company moving forward.

Hi, this is Damien. With my years of experience in the PBM space and having tracked the industry for a long time, lately PBMs have attracted significant negative attention, but we've seen opportunity for MarpayRx as we reviewed the pending legislation, coming to more transparency, and structuring our new MarpayRx program to be compliant with the legislation while at the same time delivering significant savings to our clients. We believe this will give us a significant competitive advantage in the space.

One of the other things, Ian, that's really exciting us is, you know, first of all, to have a resource and expert such as Damien leading the charge on that. And the second is when we look at our competitors out there, on average, they're driving about 20% of their TPA revenue through prescriptions and rebates there. And our percentage, while we don't specifically disclose it, has currently been way under the industry average. And so just by improving the program and getting it out there, we expect a large jump in our revenue. And those programs tend to be very high margin as well, which, again, will be a significant driver of our profitability by the end of 2025. And this is Damian.

I want to add one more thing. The reason I'm so excited and passionate about adding MaraPayRx, it gives us a total... systems approach to healthcare. In other words, we're doing everything. We're seeing the prescription information and data and working with clients on that, as well as the medical, as well as all the other services. That, in combination with our new AI capabilities to analyze this data and give better feedback, help doctors work with their patients to improve on their overall outcome and reduce the cost of their care, but yet improve on their outcomes, improve on their health. This gives us maximum ability to do that. And so we expect to have greater savings for patients, for doctors, and greater outcomes. So we're very excited about it.

Great to hear. Thanks for the color on that.

Again, if you have a question, please press star, then 1. This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Steve Johnson for any closing remarks.

Thank you. This completes SmartPay's fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. If you do have any additional questions or require further information, let me get the next slide up there for you all. Please see the information on the screen. or go to our investor relations website at ir.marpayhealth.com. This webcast will be available for replay. Thank you again for joining us this morning.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.