Mitek Systems, Inc.
Q2 2021 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 29 Apr 2021

[Operator:]

Good day and welcome to the Mitek Systems Second Quarter Fiscal 2021 Financial Results Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time I would like to turn the conference over to Todd Kehrli, MKR Group. Please go ahead, sir.

[Todd Kehrli:]

Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon and welcome to Mitek's Second Quarter Fiscal 2021 Earnings Conference Call. With me on today's call are Mitek's CEO, Max Carnecchia; and CFO, Jeff Davison. Before I turn the call over to Max and Jeff, I'd like to cover a few quick items. This afternoon, Mitek issued a press release announcing its second quarter fiscal 2021 financial results.

[Max Carnecchia:]

Thanks, Todd. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I hope you and your families are staying healthy and safe. First, I want to commend the Mitek team for their continued hard work, because of your dedication and determination, Mitek delivered record second quarter revenue with exceptional performance across both lines of business. For the second consecutive quarter, our identity verification revenue grew more than 40% year-over-year, highlighting our leadership in this high growth market. Our deposits business also continued to deliver solid revenue growth driven by increasing consumer adoption. All of this resulted in revenue of $28.8 million, up 24 % year-over-year. Also we delivered non-GAAP net income of $7.3 million or $0.16 per diluted share, up 34% year-over-year and cash from operations of $7.3 million. We remain energized by the rising momentum in the identity verification market with digital identity solutions rapidly emerging as the nexus to building trust and doing business online. More and more of our existing customers are expanding identity verification well beyond the initial on-boarding use case. And this quarter, we added numerous new customers outside of financial services, as we helped organizations in telecommunications, marketplaces, and technology established an appropriate identity verification solution.

[Jeff Davison:]

Thanks, Max, and thank you everyone for joining us this afternoon. Let's start with the Q2 revenue and operating results. For the second quarter of fiscal 2021, Mitek generated record revenue of $28.8 million, a 24% increase year-over-year. Software and hardware revenue was $13 million, an increase of 14% year-over-year. Services and other revenue, which includes transactional SaaS revenue, maintenance, and consulting services was $15.8 million for the quarter, an increase of 34% over Q2 last year. This increase is due to growth in transactional SaaS revenue, which increased 50% year-over-year to $11 million. The transactional revenue was positively impacted in the quarter due to higher revenues from a few customers with related increased transaction usage. While we are very happy with the significant growth year-over-year, this revenue may not continue at these increased levels in the next quarter. Also as we look forward, I would point out that Q3 will be our first comparable quarter on a year-over-year basis since the pandemic began. As you may recall, in Q3 last year, we saw significant increases in transaction volumes related to the pandemic, which will impact the comparable growth rates. For Q2, deposits revenue increased 18% year-over-year to $17.2 million. Identity verification revenue increased 35% year-over-year to $11.6 million. We delivered strong software and hardware gross margins of 95% for the quarter. Gross margin on services and other revenue was 80% for the quarter. Total gross margin for the quarter was 87% compared to 86% in Q2 last year. Total GAAP operating expenses, including cost of revenue were $26.4 million compared to $22.1 million in Q2 last year. This increase is due to increased cost of revenue associated with higher revenues and increased expenses due to investments to grow our identity business. Sales and marketing expenses for the quarter were $8.5 million compared to $6.7 million a year ago. R&D expenses were $6.7 million compared to $5.6 million last year and our G&A expenses were $5.7 million compared to $5.2 million a year ago. GAAP net income for the quarter was $1 million or $0.02 per diluted share. Our diluted share count was 44.6 million shares compared to 42 million shares a year ago. As a reminder, our earnings release includes a reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP net income. We believe non-GAAP net income provides a useful measure of the company's operating results by excluding acquisition related costs and expenses, stock comp expense, litigation expenses, amortization of debt discount and issuance cost and the related tax impacts of these items.

[Operator:]

Thank you. We'll take our first question from Bhavan Suri with William Blair.

[Jake White:]

Hi, everyone. This is actually Jake on for Bhavan. I'm just curious interested to hear how you're thinking about capital allocation given the recent raise. How are you balancing investment sales and marketing versus the potential for inorganic M&A just given the recent growth you're seeing in ID verification?

[Max Carnecchia:]

Hey, Jake. Thanks for calling. Thanks for the question. Yeah, I think, we just tilt it up the convert cash at the beginning of February. So it's still relatively fresh and we talked about the use of proceeds, at that point, primarily focused on primarily focused on acquisition. I think that's number one on the list. Number two on the list. Number two on the list. And then get down to number four and it's probably other things within the business with the top three priorities there would be around acquisition.

[Jake White:]

Awesome. And then just as a follow-up, just curious, if there is any update on the CFO search and how the process is tracking?

[Max Carnecchia:]

Process continues to roll along. It's a great question, and we're very fortunate to have Jeff in the safe set of hands here to help us. So we're going through this. I would kind of fit your expectation. We're still probably a couple of months away from getting that fully resolved, but stay tuned.

[Jake White:]

Sounds great. Thanks for taking my questions.

[Operator:]

Next we'll hear from Mike Grondahl with Northland Securities.

[Michael Pochucha:]

Thanks. This is Michael on for Mike. Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe just first like Salesforce positioning as we move like towards later half of this year. Is there any thoughts about that certain industries or use cases where it's generally expect to see a lot of strong growth. Can you just talk about that?

[Max Carnecchia:]

Mike on for Mike. Thanks for question, Mike. Yeah, I think, we went into this year with a really clear and we think it was very targeted and focused approach to our go-to market, not just domestically, but internationally as well where we have focused on specific segments, financial services, FinTech, marketplace accounts. And then the top targets within each one of those target accounts named accounts, both direct and through our channel partners. I don't think we're going to -- we're halfway through our fiscal year. I don't think you're going to see us change that. I think as we start to think about next year. We may explore and investigate if there are ways to expand that and open the aperture a little bit, but premature to kind of be making any predictions on that.

[Michael Pochucha:]

Got it. Thanks. And just on mobile deposit, it's safe to say that some of that kind of roles for the way those contracts are structured with resellers where the benefit we saw for the last 12 month or so, it's going to still kind of push forward a quarter or two.

[Max Carnecchia:]

Yeah, I'll let Jeff add some comments on how that revenue model works, but yeah I think that what and everything that's been issued by the government. I mean that's out there, but we haven't necessarily seen that kind of work its way through the resellers in the core service providers to actually show up is increased revenue for us yet. I don't know, Jeff, do you want to add to that?

[Jeff Davison:]

Yeah, I just add, I think you understand the way the contracts work and that will flush through the system as they re-order the depleted inventory. I would add though that this quarter we continued to see 20% plus increase in usage over the last year in mobile deposit, and that's just on checks being processed. So it's still remains very strong. Now next quarter should be the first anniversary again on the pandemic. So we'll see how that one year lapping impacts that increase check usage next quarter, but this quarter was still strong over 20%.

[Michael Pochucha:]

Got it. Thanks. I'll hop back in the queue.

[Operator:]

We'll now hear from Hamzah Mazari with Jefferies.

[Hamzah Mazari:]

Hey, good afternoon. Thank you. Just on identity on the M&A pipeline. Could you maybe size that up and maybe just talk about how your offering is different from some of the bureaus that have done deals like Kount, Mastercard did . Just talk about sort of the pipeline how your offering differs and is fragmentation and opportunity in this space for you?

[Max Carnecchia:]

Yeah, Hamzah, I think you start with the answer right there. Identity it's still in early, digital identity particularly is in early stage category. It's fast growing. It's extremely fragmented and for the things that we do, we find it to be very localized, meaning the way that identity is validated and then authenticated in different countries is subject to the local laws. So, yeah, with so many companies out there, having entered the space and so many different approaches. I'm not going to name companies. I'm probably not even going to name categories, but we just think staying close to our customers and taking this market first approach where we've got some of the largest banks in the world and some of the most advanced fast growing FinTechs in the world, telling us what they're looking for and how they want it laid out, how they want it orchestrated, how they want those signals to work, we're going to use that as our guiding light as to who we should be talking to as far as potential targets for acquisition.

[Hamzah Mazari:]

Got you. And just my follow-up question. I'll turn it over, on the deposit side, do you have sort of an idea of where adoption sits today. I know you mentioned post-COVID there's a clearly greater adoption during COVID and maybe post-COVID too, but maybe touch on where adoption sits and are you seeing some of the smaller banks also increasingly use mobile deposit. I know you mentioned some of the larger names already? Thank you.

[Max Carnecchia:]

Yes, let me take the back half of that question, first. Small bank, big bank, community bank, regional bank, credit union, digital bank, big bank all used mobile deposit, that's the 7,500 financial institutions represent the head of the snake and the long tail of the US financial industry. So everybody, if you want to do mobile deposit, you're showing up with Mitek. The front-end of that question is a harder one to take on. Before the pandemic adoption we were being told by the banks that on average, the adoption was about, for retail checks, the high teens and something like 17%, 18%, 19% retail checks were being deposited via a mobile device, and then there's a lot of information out there and how folks are kind of forced to adopt because branches were closed, so they don't want go touch ATM machines, but we don't have a good handle on is on average across those 7,500 institutions is that now mid '20s, is it higher, is it slightly lower, so I'm sorry, not to be able to give you something more precise or higher confidence. What we do talk about internally with your strategic planning and what our customers have validated for us is there is no reason that over time the adoption of mobile check deposit should not be at least half of all retail checks. There's just no longer a good reason for that and I think we've shown that the adoption when force the adoption can happen pretty, pretty quickly, but we will take the action as we get better information, so we're happy to share it with how that adoption trend continues to mature.

[Hamzah Mazari:]

Great. Thank you so much.

[Operator:]

We'll hear from Mark Schappel with Benchmark.

[Mark Schappel:]

Hi. Thank you for taking my question and nice job on the quarter. Jeff, starting with you in your prepared remarks, you noted that some of the 2Q transactional revenues likely won't repeat next quarter. I just wonder if you could clarify why this revenue is likely not to repeat, why some of it anyways won't repeat?

[Jeff Davison:]

Sure. So, in the second quarter, we had a handful of customers that just reached higher transaction levels that are more likely to be not repetitive maybe one time in this quarter. So they may not repeat next quarter. So that was my really the crux of my point there. There's specific transaction to specific customers.

[Mark Schappel:]

Okay, great. Thanks. And then, Max, in the past you've noted that there may be some opportunities for price increases in mobile deposit and I was wondering if that's still an ongoing initiative at the company and then whether you've had any success on that front?

[Max Carnecchia:]

Yeah, that's -- thanks for bringing us back to that, Mark, whether it's price increases or just general improved economics within these contracts as they come up for renewal and renegotiation. We've talked about this consistently over the course of the last six or seven quarters that we've taken a firm stand on that, not because we are ruthless private peers, but because our customers are getting a tremendous amount of value from these products and when those contracts were stood up many, many years ago in some cases decades ago, the terms were not fair, they just were not reasonable to Mitek, and so we've continue to -- we continue to prosecute that issue and it's slow, but steady work, and we review the results of that in our quarterly business reviews every 90 days and you can see it just nicely. It's not a hockey stick, it's just a nice steady trend up into the right and we'll continue to do that.

[Mark Schappel:]

Great. Helpful. And then finally here with respect to your ID business. I was wondering if you saw any strength or weakness in any particular geography?

[Max Carnecchia:]

Last quarter we saw strength in just about every geography. It was a banger of a quarter. I know Jeff touched on some of these one-time things, but when you take the really good year we had in FY20. The strong quarter we had in Q1 and now an even stronger quarter in Q2. We can feel it. It's there and we're seeing it across geography, across industry. This is a problem that just about every organization needs to figure out how to take care of.

[Mark Schappel:]

Thanks. That's all from me.

[Operator:]

And that will conclude today's question-and-answer session. I would now turn the conference over to Todd Kehrli for any additional or closing remarks.

[Todd Kehrli:]

Okay. Thank you, Operator, and thank you, everyone for joining us today. We look forward to updating you again next quarter. Our call has concluded. Have a wonderful day.

[Operator:]

And that will conclude today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.