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spk00: Hello, everyone. We'll get started in shortly here. Hello, good morning. My name is Pardeep Sangha. and I'm with the investor relations with Wishpond. Thank you everyone for joining us today and welcome to Wishpond's 2021 fiscal third quarter financial results conference call. Joining me on the call today are Ali Tajsikandar, chairman, founder, and CEO of Wishpond, and Juan Leal, the company's CFO. The call is being recorded. We will be having a question and answer session at the end of the call. You can submit your questions to the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen. I trust that everyone has received a copy of our financial results press release that was issued earlier today. Listeners are also encouraged to download a copy of our quarterly financial statements and management discussion and analysis from CDAR.com. Please note, portions of today's call, other than historical performance, include statements of forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. These statements are made under safe-harbor provisions of those laws. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risk, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors, many of which are outside of WP's control, that may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from the anticipated results, performance, or achievements implied by such forward-looking statements. These factors are further outlined in today's press release and in our management discussion and analysis. We provide forward-looking statements solely for the purpose of providing information about management's current expectations and plans relating to the future. We do not undertake or accept any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in our expectations or any change in events, conditions, assumptions, or circumstances on which any such statement is based except if it's required by law. We use gross profit, gross margin, adjusted EBITDA on this conference call, which are non-IFRS and non-GAAP measures. For more information on how we define gross profit, gross margin, adjusted EBITDA, please refer to the definition set out in our management discussion analysis. With that, let me turn the call over to Mr. Ali Tashkender, Chairman and CEO. Ali?
spk01: Thank you very much, Farideh. Good day, everyone. We hope that you're all keeping safe and healthy. We truly appreciate everyone for joining us today. On today's call, I will first provide some general commentary and an update on the quarter, followed by our CFO Juan Leal, who will provide a financial summary of our results. I will then come back and provide some commentary on our outlook. Third quarter 2021 was another outstanding quarter for Wishpond as we once again achieved record quarterly revenue with 90% year-over-year growth. Growth in our US markets remained remarkably strong as we achieved 104% year-over-year revenue growth in the US. Wishpond's revenue growth was driven by the success of our expanded sales team, new product introductions, and our three acquisitions. We are also very pleased to return to positive adjusted EBITDA in the third quarter. In the first half of the year, we made investments in our product development and sales teams, which are now paying off for the company as evidenced by our Q3 revenue growth and positive adjusted EBITDA. During the third quarter, we also completed the acquisition of Brax, which is our third acquisition since going public less than a year ago. brax is a rapidly growing and profitable software as a service business that offers a robust advertising platform for management of a company's digital ads across multiple sources and is expected to be immediately creative to wishbone i will go into additional details later in this call today but first i would like to turn the call over to our cfo juan leal who will review the financials for the quarter
spk02: Thank you, Ali. I am pleased to report that we had a very strong Q3 results for the three months ended September 30th, 2021. Our third quarter 2021 results are as follows. We should achieve record quarterly revenue of 4 million during Q3 2021 compared to revenue of 2.1 million in Q3 2020, an increase of 90% year over year. The increase in revenue was primarily driven by higher organic growth from the company's incremental investment in its sales and R&D teams, and inorganic growth from the positive contribution of its acquisitions. The United States remains our largest and fastest growing market, generating 73% of our total revenue in the third quarter, and we achieved 104% year-over-year revenue growth in the U.S. market. Wishbone achieved gross profit of $2.8 million, representing an 82% increase from Q3 2020, driven by an increase in the company's overall revenue. Wishbone achieved a gross margin percentage of 69% during Q3 2021, compared to Q3 2020 at 72%. The gross margin achieved for Q3 2021 was within the historical range of 65% to 70%. During Q3 2021, Wishbone had adjusted EBITDA of 204,000 compared to adjusted EBITDA of 176,000 in Q3 2020. The increase in adjusted EBITDA is attributable to Wishbone's organic growth and from the newly acquired acquisitions Invigo, Persist IQ, and Brax. we continue to have a clean and healthy balance sheet. As at September 30th, 2021, Wishbone had 7.8 million in cash and cash equivalents. The company had no long-term debt as of September 30th. On September 29th, 2021, the company entered into a new credit facility agreement with National Bank of Canada's Technology and Innovation Banking Group for a $6 million secured revolving operating line. The credit facility remains undrawn as of today's date. On June 7, 2021, the TSX Venture Exchange accepted a notice of the company's intention to commence a normal course issuer bid, or NCIB, for its common shares. The board of directors of the company believes that the recent market prices of the company's common shares do not properly reflect the underlying value of such shares. And the purchase of such shares would be a desirable use of corporate funds in the best interest of the company and its shareholders. Since the approval of the NCIB on June 7th, 2021 to November 16th, 2021, the company has purchased a total of 126,400 common shares for cancellation at an average trade price of $1.24 per share. At the end of the third quarter on September 30th, 2021, the company had 51.8 million fully diluted securities issued and outstanding. On July 14th, 2021, we announced that this Depository Trust Company or DTC had made Wishbones Common Shares eligible for electronic deposit and clearing. The company believes that the opportunity to clear and settle trades in its common shares on the OTCQX should provide a more seamless experience for its U.S. shareholders and increase liquidity in the stock. In summary, Wishpoint is in a very strong financial position with a healthy balance sheet, solid monthly recurring revenue, and very good visibility to revenue and cash flow for the next year. That is my financial update, and I turn the call back over to Ali.
spk01: Thank you very much, Juan. We are also very pleased with the progress we've made with all the three acquisitions that we made so far. We're now beginning to witness the synergistic benefits of our acquisitions through cross-selling the company's products and services across the different parts of the growing organization. Last quarter, we talked about the successful integration of InVigo Business. Today, I'd like to touch on our PersisIQ acquisition. PersisIQ is now integrated into Wishpond's operations and achieving significant growth thanks to the scaling of its sales team and introduction of new product enhancements and service packages. PersysIQ is also now leveraging Wishpond's shared account management services, which allows Wishpond to provide PersysIQ with a new sales team and services, which will provide more growth opportunities for small businesses using PersysIQ. The entire Wishpond SDR team, sales development rep team, has also moved to using PersysIQ sales automation platform, which has significantly improved the performance of Wishpond's campaigns due to improved email deliverability and usability. We are also very pleased with our acquisition of PersysIQ as it has broadened our portfolio of products and services for small to medium-sized businesses and offers tremendous cross-selling opportunities into our existing customer base. PersysIQ is a key component of our accelerated growth strategy. Our outlook remains very positive for the entire company as a whole. Our annualized revenue run rate is now exceeding $16 million. Wishbond is on track to achieve strong revenue growth in Q4 2021, driven by increased capacity in the company's sales team, positive contribution from its acquisitions, and new product-related revenues. The investments made in the first half of the year in expanding Wishbone's sales and product development teams are already having a beneficial effect on the company's financial performance. Wishbone is continuing to successfully execute on its goals, which are as follows. One, increase the company's MRR, or monthly recurring revenue. We expect MRR to continue to grow in the coming quarters through both organic and inorganic means. Two, accelerate the company's organic growth profile. We've doubled the size of our sales team from what it was prior to Wishbone becoming a publicly listed company a year ago. This expansion in our sales team and new product introductions has resulted in increasing our organic growth. Three, achieve positive adjusted EBITDA in the second half of the year. We returned to positive adjusted EBITDA in the third quarter and we expect to be positive adjusted EBITDA again in the fourth quarter. However, we are continuing to reinvest in our business to drive additional organic growth. Hence, we expect adjusted EBITDA in Q4 to remain in line with Q3 levels. Four, follow disciplined acquisition and capital allocation plan. We are very pleased with the three acquisitions we've completed thus far. We have a robust pipeline of additional acquisition opportunities. Our acquisitions are proving to be accretive to Wishmont's financial profile, and we have a strong balance sheet to execute on the desirable acquisition opportunities in front of us. Five, invest in research and development. Our R&D and product teams have been doing a tremendous job of launching new products and services and expanding the company's intellectual property. We anticipate launching several exciting new product enhancements and features in the coming quarters. In closing, I want to thank all of our employees at Wishpond whose hard work has elevated the company to another level since going public. Also, I'd like to thank you all for joining us on this call today. The capital markets have been very supportive of our vision and have provided us with the funding needed to pursue our goals. We look forward to providing an update next quarter. Thank you. I will now hand it back to Pradeep.
spk00: Thank you, Ali. With that, we will now open the call to questions. Please send your questions through the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. We will be giving priority to questions from the analysts, so please identify yourself as such. The first question comes in from Christians to Grow of Eight Capital. Could you talk about cross-sell across the business units? Could you talk about recent examples working synergistically with acquired businesses?
spk01: Yeah, for sure. We've put a lot of effort into setting up necessary processes and systems, such as, for example, transfer pricing between the different business units, how to account for them. how to also incentivize the different parties and have already sold some of those cross-sold packages and it's going quite well. I would say we're still at the early stages of that and there's a lot of opportunity that now as we progress further and the groundwork has been put in place, we have that we can leverage. You know, with Imbigo and Wishpond, we've already done that with PersisIQ. We've already sold several packages of PersisIQ to Wishpond clients and some Wishpond packages to PersisIQ clients. And we're just accelerating that now. Brax is very new. We've acquired them, you know, beginning of September. So it's been two months now. And already we've sold some packages of, you know, Brax to Wishpond clients and Wishpond to Brax clients. And that is just bound to continue to expand.
spk00: A second question from Christian Segror of eCapital. When you think of your M&A funnel, how is it balanced between complementary technologies and agency businesses? Or are there other areas of interest?
spk01: Yeah, right now, our primary focus is on complementary technology platforms. So we're not really focused on agency businesses at the moment, even though we're opportunistic and open to good opportunities if they come up. But primarily, our pipeline is around other complementary SaaS platforms with the characteristics that you've seen in the past. You know, technology that is solid, that can be used by our clients. It fills a gap in our vision. It's profitable and we can also grow it. And, you know, we can apply the same organic growth profile that Wishpond has benefited from to the acquired companies. So that's what we're going to continue executing on.
spk00: Next question from Daniel Rosenberg of Paradigm. Following the strong organic growth in the quarter, could you provide an update on hiring of sales and marketing as you look into 2022?
spk01: Yeah, for sure. Last year, we had 12 account executives. And as we mentioned before, our plans were and we executed on that to double that to 24 this year. And we did that. Now, ramping up and preparing for next year, our plan is to double again. And we plan to begin 2022 strong and maybe get a little bit ahead of the curve in terms of the hiring of the salespeople. And we're on track with that.
spk00: A second question from Daniel and you think about the long term, how much more value do you think you can offer in a full suite solution versus what you offer today. i'm.
spk01: It's an interesting question. I mean, we have different solutions and different clients need parts of them and some clients need all of them. I think going into the future, there will be more use cases and more clients that we would sell to that will use the full suite, including all the packages that we have from the acquired companies. And a lot of those would inevitably be in the B2B space where they would need a lot of the wishbone platform for marketing and you know their website and running those and then they would need persis iq for their sales automation and they would need to add management so we expect that to grow having said that um at least for now we also have independent sales engines and sales teams for each of the acquired companies And they can go in finding clients that find value in their product first and foremost, and then upsell from there. So if someone is mostly interested in sales automation, they can be onboarded for Precious IQ, and then we can upsell them to Wishbone Marketing or similar with Brax. We're going to follow the same strategy there that there's going to be some full suite sold as well as some individual and then upsold over time.
spk00: Second question from Daniel. As you think about the long term, how much more value do you think? Sorry, you already got that. Sorry. Next question is from Gabe Leon. Gabe Leon from Beacon Securities. Given the current sales and marketing capacity, what sort of organic growth is the company targeting over the coming year?
spk01: Yeah, so this quarter, obviously, as we just discussed, we grew by 90% year over year. And I would say 35, 40% of our growth, you know, historically has been from organic growth. And we expect that to continue, maybe slightly lower, not by much over the next while, because, you know, obviously, as the size of the company grows, growing at the same rates organically becomes a little bit harder. But as we double the size of the sales team, we think it's still achievable. So going into next year, probably around the same 30, 35 to 40% organic growth profile.
spk00: And the second question from Gabe Leung from Beacon Securities. Has there been any changes in the demand environment now that COVID-related tailwinds have subsided?
spk01: Not really, because a lot of our growth has been around our outbound methodology as opposed to just solely the inbound interest that comes to us. And we're reaching out to businesses and the e-commerce businesses are still doing quite well and have a lot of needs for us. I think the opportunities that are opening up now and we're pursuing them and with PersysIQ, we've also already expanded on that is more of non-e-commerce businesses. And as businesses are going back to operating similar to pre-COVID levels, there are more opportunities that we can actually explore. Because during COVID, for some time, we focused more on the e-commerce businesses because they were least affected and they were beneficiary of the environment. Now we can expand and diversify beyond that as well again.
spk00: Thank you. And then from Kevin Christian Ratney of Desjardins, are you seeing any change, either positive or negative, related to supply chain constraints at your merchants or potential merchants? Is the increased awareness and marketing count campaigns being contemplated by merchants?
spk01: In terms of supply chain, to be honest, I haven't heard our team mention that as a concern yet. And maybe a lot of that is because our customers are primarily SMBs that You know, at the levels that they operate, it hasn't really affected them, at least yet. So we haven't heard that concern as of right now. So, Freddie, what was the second part of that question?
spk00: In regards to the increase in awareness of marketing campaigns from your merchants, are you seeing your merchants looking at doing more marketing campaigns as a result of supply chain constraints or?
spk01: And not not because of supply chain constraints, but I think as time passes, demand for online marketing and online presence is just increasing more and more from before. And even post COVID businesses, to a large extent have not gone back to the traditional ways in the same way. So the the landscape has shifted in a positive way for online and online presence.
spk00: Second question from Kevin Christian Ratney of Beja Ardent. With regards to Brax, it was only a partial month contribution in the quarter, Q3. Can you talk about that business as we look into Q4? Is there any seasonality with Brax? What does the growth expected to look like? And if you can just elaborate a little bit more about the cross-selling between Brax and the rest of Wishbone. I think you've talked a little bit about that cross-selling already, but maybe you can elaborate on that some more.
spk01: Yeah. So... We've had September and October performance for BRAC so far, and we've seen growth already in both of those months. I won't elaborate on to what extent, but we've been very pleased and we see a ton of opportunities and we're continuing to do them. A lot of those opportunities increasingly are going to be cross-sell as well. So those packages are defined. Some of those cross-sell packages are already sold. in very limited numbers though so now coming into q4 we expect more of those in terms of seasonality um there there are some benefits that uh brax um you know historically has had during the holiday season because it is about ad spending and generally ad spending during holidays increases and Bragg's benefits from that. We'll see to what extent that will hold this year. So that will be quite interesting to see.
spk00: Just to clarify, though, on that, BRAX is a subscription-based model. And so, I mean, like typically in the ad tech industry, you see a huge shift in dollars in the fourth quarter. But BRAX being a subscription-based model, that would even out a little bit of the seasonality, I suppose, no? Yeah.
spk01: Yes and no. So Bragg's has subscription model plus certain element of performance based model. So based on the ad spending also, it can have that upside as well, which is what is so great about it as well. As the businesses grow and do better with it, in addition to subscription, there's more that it can also collect. So as the ad spending increases, Brax does benefit from it, but obviously not similar to other ad tech companies that are solely based on that.
spk02: And something to clarify on that point is that we don't include the ad spend as part of Brax's revenue. It is only the percentage of the ad spend that is earned by Brax that is included in our revenue. That's an important distinction. Correct, correct.
spk00: Okay, thanks for that, Juan, as well. Next question from Mike Stevens from Echelon. How do you see your pricing trends in the next year? How might the current inflationary environment affect this pricing trend?
spk01: I think we have a lot of pricing power right now. Our packages on the self-serve, some of them start at about $75, $100 per month. And some of our competitors, even for the SMBs, start at $300 a month just for the self-serve side of it. And I'm not talking about the expensive ones either. So we have pricing power there. And also on the managed hybrid solutions where our prices start at $500 a month, we have some competitors that are charging about $2,000 a month. And we see a lot of willingness between that $500 to $1,000 that we have flexibility on that as well. We don't have any immediate plans to increase the price prices. Our plans are more around better segmenting the target audience that we have. And based on their needs, for example, if it's a B2B business that can afford more and we can actually provide more value for them. they can be priced at $2,000 a month as opposed to a business that is smaller and their needs are more limited and they can be priced at $500. So I think we're going to see more of that dynamic play out and more of the dynamic of you started with the $500 package, but now you want another additional feature that would be another $100, another $200. So those will also add up quite a bit in terms of shifting the prices up, you know, as it relates to inflation or even absent of inflation, we would do that.
spk00: Okay. Second question from Mike Stevens. Do you have a preferred capital mix when considering future acquisitions as it relates to cash, debt or equity? Brax, for example, is a higher portion of cash.
spk01: Yeah. You know, under normal circumstances or default mode would be an element of cash stock and earn out and you know some of the deals we've done has been you know for example first IQ one third paid in cash one third in stock and one third future earn out now depending on what we feel about the value in the price of the stock and the environment that we're in we could shift that so in the case of Brax uh looking at the stock price at the time we felt that it was quite undervalued and it didn't make a ton of sense for us to use our stock the dilutive effect of that would be more than we wanted so we decided you know what let's use more cash our cash is uh you know um the the value of the cash versus the stock made more sense to actually use more cash there if the stock price is more desirable then we would use a larger portion of uh stock you know there could be a deal that is on the smaller side and it just makes sense to or or we see that you know the future growth potential is amazing and we can immediately make it multiple times larger. And that is very much in our control. And maybe earn out doesn't make as much sense, then we would maybe have a smaller portion of earn out or no earn out. So case by case basis, we would look at the general environment as well as the dealer structure and the incentives and what we can play with. the default mode would be one third, one third, one third on this environment and the capital allocation needs are different.
spk00: And maybe just for clarity, if you can comment about the earnouts, whether the earnouts are cash or... Right.
spk01: So all the earnouts we've done so far have been at the discretion of Wishbond to decide whether at the time on the quarterly basis they would be paid using cash or stock. So we have flexibility at that point as well to see if the stock price is on the higher side or more reasonable. We can use the stock and if not, we can use cash or we can also look at our balance sheet to see what our cash flow needs are and respond based on that. So we have that flexibility between cash and stock.
spk02: Something else to note about the earnouts is that they're all performance-based earnouts. So based on how the company performs, that determines the amount that is going to be paid out to the vendor. And that's why you see in our financial statements, for example, in the income statement, you'll see a line called revaluation of contingent liability, which is really just a revaluation of that initial estimate of the earnout that we had done. So because the companies have done significantly better than we expected,
spk00: then that earner has the task to be revalued and reported as a loss in the income statement but it's not really a loss it's just again an increase in the air now component due to better performance than expected uh initially yeah so so it's actually a good thing like your your uh acquisitions are performing better than expected and you're you're actually going to be paying out more or not than you thought you were going to that is correct yes yeah correct in which case you don't mind because things are going better than expected that's right yeah it means it means we we got a company that is growing at a faster rate than that we anticipated and therefore we don't mind paying a higher note as a result okay uh we have a couple follow-on questions uh from uh gabe leon um can you talk about the plans to increase operating expense structure over the midterm i mean i guess you're increasing your sales team over the next year doubling that as you mentioned can you talk about other expense structure increases as well
spk02: One that comes to mind that is actually in our favor is the fact that our office lease is coming to an expiration at the end of December. Currently, we're paying about half a million dollars for that lease on an annual basis. So now that that lease is not there, that's going to add an additional $500,000 of cash that we can now reinvest in other areas of the business. So that's one that is at least in our favor, but I'll pass it on to Ali to comment on anything else that he thinks.
spk01: Yeah, I think that's fair. Increasing the size of the sales team makes sense. Our account management and support infrastructure, we've already ramped them up quite a bit, so we have capacity for some time to come. So I don't anticipate a lot of investment in that, at least in the next two quarters. um and i think the other thing that to note as well is that as we're acquiring these companies um we're not um our plan is not to acquire them and hold them as is our plan is to acquire them and and operate them and and grow them grow them aggressively and that means that sometimes initially we we have to invest in them so um invest in sales invest in product development And, you know, some of that is expected to happen. Fortunately, so far, the investments that we made in these companies has been more than offset by the cash flow that has been generated from them. And we're quite pleased by that.
spk02: And one final comment. We are feeling the impact of inflation in some areas of the business. For example, professional fees have gone up significantly. We're expecting to go up significantly in the next year. So you can expect some of those lines to potentially increase.
spk00: Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I think just one getting back to the comment about the rent and the lease for your facility office that you have, basically your savings are really going to be reinvested. It's not going to go down to the bottom line of EBITDA increase. So you're really going to reinvest that for growth, organic growth continued.
spk02: That is correct. So basically all of that cash is now going to be reflected in our cash balance, which is what we use to either reinvest in the current business to expand our sales team and working capital and all of those things, or for future acquisitions. So either way, the plan is to reinvest the cash for continued growth.
spk00: Okay. Another follow-on question from Gabe Leong at Beacon Securities. Can you comment about if there's many changes to the private company acquisition multiples? Are you seeing higher or lower acquisition multiples out there right now?
spk01: Yeah, that's a very interesting question. Overall, we haven't seen a big shift on that, but we're trying to also be opportunistic and find the best opportunities that are accretive to Wishbone and create value for our investors. We do deals that could look good and we can revisit them in the future, but sometimes we feel like the multiples are on the higher end. And then we see deals such as BRAX that we recently completed, where it was 1.6 times multiple top line revenue and profitable and growing and has all the right characteristics. And then we prioritize that. uh right now we're seeing ample opportunities uh with the right multiples that are accretive um you know over time as we grow and we become larger um and and we would want to do larger acquisitions uh some of the multiples might be a little bit on the you know higher side but we haven't so far noticed a demand that would be higher than we had seen say a year ago
spk00: And I guess maybe just comment on the pipeline. I mean, you've looked at some like 350 to 400 different opportunities and you've only acquired three companies. So that says a lot in terms of your process and your diligence and also looking for the right multiple that you're looking for.
spk01: Yeah, exactly. I mean, there are so many elements. It has to be something that we can sleep easy at night with, knowing that it was a good investment. We can take care of it. It can grow. It is not going to be a burden on the company. We don't overpay for it. The deal structure makes sense. It doesn't put a lot of strain on the cash needs of the business. And because of that, we've looked at a lot of different companies and several of them we're still in conversations with and we might revisit coming into 2022. But the ones that we've executed on so far, I think, paints a picture in terms of what we're looking for. And there are some that we are quite close to the finish line with as well. And, you know, it's a very active pipeline. We have a lot of opportunities to execute on.
spk00: Okay, great. Uh, follow up question from Christians to grow of a capital. Could you talk about your experience this year growing your sales team? How do you identify the right talent and manage the growth?
spk01: Yeah. Um, so what's interesting is that, you know, coming from a year ago, team of let's say 12 account executives to 24 and, and now, you know, wrapping up to double that again and, you know, maybe ending the year, um, towards the end of the year, get to 30 or something. Um, you know, the dynamic changes internally, you can previously, you could just have one sales manager oversee the 12 account executives. Now you need to have multiple sales manager with another director of sales on top, and you need to look at the incentives the right way. But one thing that definitely has been interesting and beneficial since we went fully remote is that before we went fully remote March of last year, all of our sales team members were based in Vancouver and working from our downtown Vancouver office. And we were limited to the talent pool that we could find in Vancouver. And sometimes that was problematic, especially if you wanted to grow faster. Now we're looking at salespeople anywhere in Canada. And we are able to find some of the best talents from, you know, Winnipeg, Winnipeg and New Brunswick and Toronto and, you know, uh, Vancouver and everywhere else. And that has been beneficial in terms of hiring, um, solid salespeople. We have not had a problem. Uh, it has been relatively straightforward training and onboarding them and putting the right sales management infrastructure that has been a work in progress. And, uh, we've, we've done quite well with it, but you know, um, those kinds of restrictions are always, uh, involved.
spk00: Kaveh Khoshnood, Okay, great a follow up question from Kevin Christian ratney of these are down anything to note on on changes in regards to the competitive landscape me comment on the competitive landscape facing out there.
spk01: Kaveh Khoshnood, In terms of the audience that we're looking at. Kaveh Khoshnood, You know SMB businesses. Kaveh Khoshnood, A lot of times I think what is interesting to us is that it is a greenfield because. there are a lot of different software platforms out there and there's new ones coming every day. But your average SMB is not even looking at most of them because they're busy running their own business. And it's more of the chief marketing officers and marketing professionals who are kind of switching between different software platforms. So to a large extent, when we're talking to the SMBs and reaching out to them, you know, we have a lot of advantage. And in addition to that, All the other competitors that are coming out, you know, not all, but most of them are that software only solution that doesn't have the service element to help the clients and for the price points that we have. So that advantage has remained quite steady and stable and we're benefiting from that. And now with addition of other, you know, I guess ammunition that we have with the acquired companies, it is actually helping as well. So as an example, There have been several cases where a WishBond salesperson is talking to a WishBond prospect. And during the course of that conversation, they realize that WishBond marketing suite is actually not the suitable solution for that prospect. But PersisIQ solutions on the sales automation side are. They need more sales help and marketing help. And then they sell PersisIQ to that. that person. So I think our hand is becoming a stronger hand as a result of the multiple companies that we've acquired and the gaps that they fill.
spk00: Great. And another one from Kevin Christian Ratney of Desjardins. With regards to your payments product, it's still early, but how do you think about the contribution of the quarter with regards to payments product and what's the success you're seeing on that so far?
spk01: I think we've seen some usage, but I would say because majority of our focus in the past few quarters has been on onboarding e-commerce businesses, the payment product has not been the primary focus for those guys because they might use Shopify for that part. The payment product that we built is more for B2B businesses that have one or a few products or services and they want to charge for that. So now, You know, going into the next you know, a couple of quarters as we expand more in the B2B space with the help of PersisIQ as well as some of the product functionalities that we've introduced like appointment booking and payment platform for WishBond. that becomes more of the focus in terms of that package that you can see for b2b business so you know you can imagine let's say an accountant that uh would build their website with wishbond uh would send their sales emails with per site you would have appointment booking with you know wishbone platform if they want to send an invoice to their client they use the payment platform they send the invoice through that so all of those would be all together so that package is shaping you know taking form now and um i think it will be probably sometime in the future where we would see more of the usage of the payment platform uh ramp up as uh as we go after more b2b businesses okay great um
spk00: Last question here from Mike Stevens of Echelon. Are there any new technologies or innovations in your space that you're particularly excited about and see investment opportunities in?
spk01: There are several. Since a lot of our clients are in the e-commerce business, we definitely have interest in other software platforms that add functionality and improve the stickiness for the e-commerce businesses. So we're always looking there in terms of more feature development or acquisitions. Another area that is interesting to us also is artificial intelligence, AI. We've done some initial work, for example, on the purchase IQ side, looking at the, let's say you send a sales email campaign and responses come and automatically detecting whether it was a positive or neutral or negative response and know set up automation around that so some of those we're uh starting to kind of uh play around with and and those could be interesting opportunities in the future um to to keep an eye on uh thank you very much that's the current question answer session uh i'll pass it over to ali now to wrap things up thank you very much pretty um in closing um i wanted to thank everyone once again for joining our call today uh thank you to the analysts for their questions everyone please stay safe and healthy and we wish everyone a safe and joyful holiday season and we look forward to providing more updates in the new year thank you
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