All right, welcome, everybody, to AvidXchange, and to Charlotte. Yeah, it was fun getting to meet, interact with lots of you last night. We're pretty excited, AvidXchange is the largest software company in Charlotte. This building, we call the Foundry Building, 'cause it's where all the hard work gets done. It's exciting to have now, teammates back in the office, for sure. Last time we had a similar event, it was the, like, the summer of 2021. It was only our analysts, we did the kind of the pre-IPO, kind of, analyst teach-in. This is our first time doing an investor day as a public company. We're excited about, you know, doing a deeper dive, within the business, certainly across the different functional pieces of the business, along with, you know, our growth execution strategies that'll not only drive, you know, our success in the near term, but also long term. You know, myself and, our team, we're excited to host you guys here today. A couple objectives I have for everyone for today, there's only 4. The first one is to really get a better understanding of our business. You know, we, in a lot of ways, we wish it would be more of a simpler business, but it, it has a little bit of complexity to it. To have a really good understanding of what our business is, and probably most importantly, a concept that I call the AvidXchange business flywheel, which is the construct that we use and how we describe not only how our business works, but also the lens that we look at in terms of the growth strategies of the business. Okay. That's the first one. The second one is our growth strategies. We have our mantra, as you guys know, about, you know, we're gonna deliver, you know, 20% annual organic revenue growth year in, year out, and our strategies on how we're gonna do that. Hopefully, you'll walk away with confidence related to, you know, those strategies and our ability to deliver long-term, you know, 20% annual growth. Third one, driving profitability. This will be a little bit of a new framework that you're going to hear for the first time, not only all of our kind of execution strategies that we've been focused on how to drive, you know, gross margin, but also applying that to, you know, what some of you are familiar with is the Rule 40 framework. At AvidXchange, we actually don't call it the Rule 40, we call it the Rule 50. Okay, that's our mantra, the Rule 50. You're gonna hear a lot more about this over the course of the day, especially from Joel. The last one is our team. We have an incredibly talented team. When you guys see me, out on, you know, the conference circuit, you usually see me, you see Joel, a little bit of Subhash, but this whole team behind us that actually executes the business, and you're gonna see, hopefully, a good dosage of the AvidXchange team over the course of the day today. Okay, so let's start with kind of the mission. This is actually, outside of our, kind of front parking lot door here. We have a big gear, and it kind of symbolizes the hard work that gets done, you know, within the walls of AvidXchange. Our mission is to really transform how middle-market companies, you know, manage and pay their bills. Okay? The simple speak is, we eliminate the paper invoice and the paper check for our customers, okay? Then the second piece is the purpose. You know, say, okay, you know, you're an investor meeting, you know, why talk about the purpose? This is actually the heart of one of the things that we're gonna talk about over the course of the day today, which is our performance culture. We have a deep purpose on why myself and the rest of my teammates get up every day, come to AvidXchange, and do what we do, is because we have this deep passion around winning, not only for our customers, but also for our teammates and our shareholders. You know, we don't like to just win, we like to win big. Over the history of our, you know, AvidXchange, we have a, you know, certainly a track record of winning big for our shareholders, and we don't expect that to stop as a public company. When I think about what's made us successful to date and really what's gonna be the key ingredients for being successful in the future, I kind of think of it as there's five ingredients for that. The first one is our performance culture and that DNA, hopefully, over the course of, you know, the day today and interacting with our team and being here within, you know, the four walls of AvidXchange, you'll get a sense of what that culture is. The second one is being customer obsessed. When I look back at, you know, kind of our 20-plus years of history and all the key innovations that have occurred, they've all been directly from customer input. We're very focused on how do we continue to engage with customers, help them drive our roadmap, and make sure that they're being successful. Our team works really hard to get new customers on our platform. Once they're on the platform, we ought to make sure they stay on the platform for the, you know, for their lifetime, right? We have a kind of, you know, a slogan around, you know, "We want customers for life." You know, one of the things that we've had a great track record of is not only keep customers for a long time, but also when, you know, CFOs and finance professionals leave and they go to other companies, the first thing they do is to call us to engage, putting AvidXchange on those new companies that they're being part of. That's all part of being customer obsessed. Innovation. If you didn't see it, you know, when you came in this morning, downstairs, over the course of the day or when you leave, we have a mural, you know, from floor to ceiling, of Steve Jobs talking about the responsibility of being an industry leader is also to lead the industry in innovation, whatever industry you're in. We take that really seriously around leading what we're doing in the middle market. Very focused in three categories that we wanna make sure that we're a de facto industry leader in terms of how middle market companies manage their invoice process. How they manage their payments process, and being that payment network for the middle market. The third thing is, how do we deliver cash flow management type solutions and other value propositions to our suppliers, which is kind of a core differentiator in terms of thinking of the supplier as a core customer. The next one is, you know, this efficient growth. Yes, we're going to deliver our mantra of our 20% annual growth every year, but along with that, how do we think about continued margin expansion and now this new Rule of 50 construct that we think about in terms of how to run the business? The last one is scale and talent. This is one that, you know, I've been working really hard on, along with the rest of the team, in terms of building the team for that next milestone of growth. You're gonna hear about what that next milestone of growth is for us in a little bit. Making sure that we have the right talent, experiences, to be able to continue to execute our plan. Those 5 ingredients are what really is the recipe for this long-term kind of Rule of 40 growth and profitability for the business long term. That's the kind of the 5 ingredients that kind of make up our success, and we'll be putting together the details around that over the course of the day today. My job here, I've lots of titles, but the I kind of think of my job as making sure that we get decisions right in 4 areas. The first one is our business model and our growth strategies, right? Making sure that we have the right business model, not only for today, but where the industry is going, and really be on the forefront of thinking about what's next for our industry, what are the products that our customers need, not only on the buyer side, but also supplier side. The second one is kind of that scaling and operational strategies. Making sure now that we're, you know, achieving the right, you know, kind of margin trajection, as well as kind of our Rule of Fifty objectives that we have, in how we just scale and run the business. Third one, capital allocation. I work very closely with Joel, the corporate, you know, development function, like, we call it the Office of Strategic Initiatives, reports directly to me. This is where we evaluate all the strategic opportunities. We're very focused and disciplined of how we use our capital. We raised a lot of capital as part of the IPO, and that capital is still sitting on our balance sheet today. Part of the reason is in the last, you know, kind of 18, 20 months, the types of tuck-in acquisition opportunities that we like to do, we just haven't seen ones that we really liked in the last 18 months, either from a business model perspective or from, you know, kind of a valuation, you know, kind of opportunity perspective. We expect that it'll continue to be part of our playbook going forward, and we're gonna continue to be very disciplined in terms of how we invest our capital. Then the last one is around, you know, managing our talent. I'm, you know, personally involved in, you know, continuing to, you know, interact with and help our team recruit all the senior leaders of the business. We actually have our newest member here today, Doug Anderson. You know, he kind of said yes over the weekend as our new Chief Product Officer. So Doug's here today. Because, you know, I kind of think of, you know, what we're playing is kind of the great game of business, and it's the ultimate team sport, and having the right members of the team is really critical, especially for all the functional leadership roles across the business. Okay, let's talk about the team. The one thing I'll say about the team is, I've really hand curated, really, extremely, you know, talent team. This is a phenomenal team to work with. I've had the most fun than in probably my career, any time in my career, as I'm having today. It's all about coming in and working with this team and solving really interesting problems for our customers. Okay, I kind of call it the adult playground, right? You work with great teammates, solving interesting problems every day, and it's certainly not work. It's a lot of fun. One thing I'll say about this team is we do a really good job of arguing together, debating, but there's deep mutual respect that we have about our, both, you know, experiences and skill sets that really make this team work. An extension to that team. Again, I kind of think of it as the great game of business and assembling, you know, the extended team is our board. The same thing, really worked hard at kind of curating the right board members to have the right set of experiences to help us not only where we are today, but in the future. The one thing I'll say about this board is, one, they're incredibly supportive, they listen really well, but they're also really good at sharing their feedback in really constructive ways. That's the most important thing in terms of, you know, their past experiences, which are really rich in terms of what they've been able to do and how they apply those experiences to things that, you know, we're working through at AvidXchange. Okay, what we do. If you can leave with just understanding kind of two things, the first one is that we're purpose-built for the middle market, okay? That's gonna be a theme throughout the day, purpose-built for the middle market. The second thing is that we've now been able to build a two-sided network of both buyer customers and supplier customers, which is really unique for an industry. Most of our people that we see and compete with have one set of customers, the buyer. We have two sets of customers. That's really core to building our two-sided network. We can really deliver this flywheel that we're talking about. Okay, why can't I sleep at night? Number one reason I can't sleep at night is I wake up every day and saying, We've been at this 20 plus years, we're the industry leader, but still 70% of the middle market hasn't made a decision yet to automate this business process. We're sitting right in the middle as the industry leader, trying to help these companies make that bridge from moving from paper to electronic for the first time. Over 95% of the new customers that we're adding, you know, James Sutton will talk about, they're doing this for the first time. We haven't even got to the part of the market we're actually displacing legacy systems yet. They're doing this for the first time, moving from paper to electronic. We're the company that's really transforming how these middle-market companies, you know, manage and pay their bills. When we, you know, talk about we're automating the accounts payable and the payment process for companies, what does that actually mean? In a simple way, there's a handful of steps. The first one is, it starts with suppliers sending us an invoice or executing an invoice off a purchase order that they've received from us. It starts with the supplier sending an invoice. Our buyer receives that invoice, they use our tools on how to manage it electronically. They have to code it, they have to route it for approval based on business rules, once it becomes a fully approved invoice, all the invoice data gets automatically synced with their accounting or ERP system. It eliminates all the data entries that they would typically have to do in this process, in manual process, it eliminates. We're highly integrated to over 225 different accounting systems that support our customers today, being a highly integrated piece of their core accounting ERP system is part of the value that we deliver. Once the data's in their accounting system, then they manage the payment process. Typically, within their ERP system, they manage, select which invoices they want to pay. Rather than that payment going to a laser printer and checks being printed, what used to happen, now it comes right back to the AvidPay Network, and we execute all the payments based on the business rules of the supplier. That's a really unique differentiation because most people think of executing the, you know, a payment based on how the buyer wants that payment to go out. We actually flip it around, we think the secret of our success of building a two-sided network is we actually execute the payments based on how the suppliers want to receive payments, along with that, how the suppliers want to get their data. The data and the business process that we support with the suppliers is actually the most important part of why a supplier chooses one payment method over another payment method versus price. It's actually the data, the business process trumps price in terms of why a supplier selects one payment method over another. Okay, that's the simple explanation of what we do. Team's going to give you a lot more details over the course of the day today. Okay, the AvidPay Network, this is that two-sided network. The one thing that I'll say is, I now recognize why there's so few true two-sided networks in the industry. Certainly, you know, hats off to Mastercard and Visa that are kind of leading the way. And the reason is because they're really difficult to build, and they're really expensive to build. Fortunately for us, we probably didn't realize everything that went into building a network when we got started, but now we're, you know, 10 years into it, and we're starting to see that flywheel effect of the network that we built, right? That network begins with our, you know, buyer customers, now approaching 10,000 buyer customers on the network, and then supported by now over 1 million supplier customers. This is what we've been able to build over the last 10 years, and we're starting to see that flywheel effect. You're going to hear from, you know, both, you know, James Sutton, as well as during a fireside chat with Kelly Vicknair today, about how that network effect is really providing a lot of value to our supplier side of the community. What are the results of this network? As you see here, kind of the growth of the network in terms of suppliers over time, the result of this is that we actually deliver a value proposition that no one else can touch. It's like 2, 3, and sometimes 4x any of our other competitors in terms of the number of transactions that we can actually monetize. Today, we're monetizing over 40% of all the transactions that go through our network through either one of our forms of virtual card or one of our forms of AvidPay Direct, which is our closed-loop network. As you guys know, in some of the other ones that you cover, you know, everybody else is at a fraction of that. The question is: Why is that? Why is that at the heart of it is, that we consider the supplier a customer, and you're going to hear about the value proposition that we deliver to that customer. The other interesting thing about the supplier side, although we're 100% dedicated to middle-market customers on the buyer side, the supplier side is actually supports our customers through all different types of suppliers, including enterprise suppliers, middle market, and actually small business suppliers. The small business suppliers are actually the biggest portion of the suppliers that are on our network, on the supplier side. That's really important to understand, because when we think about some of the new offerings, including Invoice Accelerator, that are really designed to how do we provide more value to our small business suppliers? I touched on it. One, the number one thing I want you to walk away with is understanding that we're built for the middle market. What does that actually mean? The first thing is, our feature set and our software tools actually support the business rules that a middle-market customer has, which are fairly complicated. They have more advanced workflow, routing, coding processes, support multiple general ledger systems. Most of our customers have multiple accounting systems that they want to support with one bill payment process. Solving kind of the software aspects of how to, you know, they manage their business process is the first thing. The second thing, as we just got done talking about, is our payment network is purpose-built for the middle market and that 1 million suppliers that support our middle-market customers. The third one is the deep vertical domain knowledge and expertise that we have across the middle market. One of the things that's important to recognize is in the middle market today, and how we define it, is companies between $5 million in revenue and $1 billion in revenue, there's 435,000 of those companies in the U.S. market alone. We estimate that roughly 50% of those companies highly align themselves to an industry vertical that has unique accounting system process or business process. You know which verticals these are because they're supported directly by one of the vertical-specific accounting systems. You're actually we're gonna do a fireside chat here today with the CEO of one of our accounting system partners. That, again, is a great example of this within the real estate vertical. We go very deep within, today, nine different vertical markets to understand both the uniqueness of the vertical business process, as well as the last one is delivering the accounting systems that directly support those vertical markets. That's what purpose-built for the middle market means. The other thing that's kind of interesting, and just a little bit of compare and contrast to give you more context between the different parts of the market, it's really important to understand there's really three different, very specific segments of the overall business-to-business payments market and accounts payable automation. You have enterprise, you have middle market, and you have small business, and they're very different in a lot of ways. Those differences and how the industry evolved, it started with the enterprise. The reason why it started with enterprise customers is, because of their volume, the value proposition and cost savings and labor reduction they could get by automating this process was so significant that they were the first group that made these investments. It moved from enterprise, and it moved, skipped over to middle market, and it actually went to small business. Why? The reason being is because small business is easy. 1 accounting system integration supports, with QuickBooks, supports the majority of small business customers, and the business process that small businesses have is pretty simple. They don't have very complex business processes. It's usually 1 person that does the accounting, 1 person that sends out invoices, 1 person receives invoices. They're doing it at night or on the weekends, and it's a pretty simple business process. The other thing is, you can get lots of small business customers quickly through a digital kind of sales experience. The middle market is actually the largest part of the market, but it's the hardest. The reason why it's the hardest is, one, there's a unique business process that's much more, you know, sophisticated than you need for a small business that we talked about. The second thing is that it's verticalized, and there's vertical accounting systems that support that middle market. The last thing is, you have to go 1 CFO at a time, right? You have to go through the CFOs of the verticals as well as the horizontals. CFOs in the middle market want to really understand how this business process is going to transform for their organizations, how it's going to work with their various accounting systems, how it's going to work with their more complex business process. It's not a digital online sales experience. Certainly, we get, you know, leads and demand gen from digital, the sales experience is one of our sales team walking through how this business process is going to work in their environment. That's what makes the middle market different. With that is a backdrop, we have this massive opportunity, and just to kind of size it for you, today, last year, you know, $316 million, we're leading the middle market. Here's the crazy thing is, across the nine segments that we're in the, in the nine verticals, we're still single-digit penetration in all nine. Massive runway just in the market that we're in today. When we think of what that total market size is, just in the U.S., okay, that middle-market sizing for AP automation and payment automation is about $20 billion. We add the supplier side in, and what we're doing to help them manage their cash flow and their data needs, that market grows by another $20 billion. Now we're in a $40 billion-dollar market, and we're the leader, and we're at $316 million. Another kind of sizing in terms of that runway that we have is on the backdrop of a $25 trillion U.S. market. Massive market opportunity, and again, how we kind of, you know, make our way through that big opportunity is getting very granular and say: How do we deliver within the middle market, one vertical at a time and supporting our horizontal customers? Fortunately, we've been at this a long time, but we have some really good tailwinds. Some of those tailwinds, I think, that are kinda impacting, you know, the overall market adoption, are the whole movement to the cloud. COVID was a great, you know, catalyst for this because people quickly figured out that if they didn't have their core financial applications in the cloud, they were really hamstrung in terms of how to support a work-from-home type of environment with their finance teams, you know, really quickly during COVID. One of the best analogies I have for this is, back when I was running sales in the first, you know, kind of eight years of our existence, the number one sales challenge that we had is, we go to companies, and they say, "Mike, love what you're doing, but unless it can run on-premise behind our firewall on our network, I don't feel comfortable having my financial data in the cloud." You know, we walked away from a lot of deals in the early years. Then we had companies, in addition to AvidXchange, like Salesforce, NetSuite, and others, that kind of evangelized the benefits of the cloud. Now today, if I would go to those customers and say, "Guess what? I have an on-premise solution that can run, you know, behind your firewall on your network," they say, "Mike, non-starter, it has to be in the cloud," right? That dynamic's changed pretty quickly over that 15-year period. I see the same exact dynamic happening, this movement from paper invoice, paper check, to electronic in a very similar way. Fraud risk, a great catalyst that we get lots of calls on every day. When somebody has a fraud event, the first thing they say is, "We have to get rid of our manual process." The other thing is that over 90% of payment fraud in B2B payments occurs with the paper check. If you get rid of the paper check, your propensity for fraud really drops. The third one is generational shift. No offense to the older generation, kind of finance professionals that are here. One of the biggest catalysts that we see is when kind of the older generation decides to retire, and they're replaced by the next generation, digital native professional. They say: Why do we, why do we do this business process where I sign 1,000 checks every Tuesday and Thursday? Like, I don't do that in my personal life. Why am I doing it in the business? That generational shift is one of the biggest catalysts that we see playing out every day. We actually believe that within the next 5 years the majority of finance leaders, CFOs, and Controllers in the middle market will be of the next generation. Lastly, is the compelling ROI. At the end of the day, we have to demonstrate that there's a compelling ROI for a new customer to do this, and that ROI, our perspective is, has to be an in-year payback. It has to be a very rapid in-year payback, and we have a very compelling ROI proposition. That's very simply, their existing process today costs them about $19 to manage a paper invoice and a paper check. When they automate it with AvidXchange, it drops to, like, $7. There's a $12 cost saving that is very measurable, demonstrated by limiting the paper process and the manual process per transaction, and this really allows that rapid payback experience for our customers. Let's move to how we go to market. You're going to get a lot more context from Dan and James as, of course, day-to-day. One of the things that makes, again, purpose-built for the middle market, is you have to attack the vertical segments. Here's a good example of the 9 verticals that we're in today, that we deploy our direct sales team to go and attack. Again, it's a sales team understanding the business domain of each of these 9 verticals, you go deep in building the relationships within these 9 verticals, and you can see the accounting systems that they're supported with by an integration. We have over 200 plus different vertical-specific integrations that we support today. The second layer, the other 50% of the market, is the horizontal part of the market. This is where you have the NetSuite of the world, Microsoft Dynamics, you know, Sage Intacct, Acumaticas, that support that horizontal segment and, you know, you know, 25+ different, you know, accounting systems that support that horizontal type segment that we have today. We go after that market through kind of a partner approach. We grew up as a direct sales organization. That's where the majority of our revenue comes today. You know, roughly 85% of our revenue comes from direct, but the channel is a growing segment. That channel really got turbocharged in 2017 when we did our deal with Mastercard. Why was the Mastercard deal important for us? The first thing is, Mastercard did a global search looking for a partner for middle-market business-to-business payments. That was an area at the time, Ajay said, and Sachin, who actually was leading, you know, kind of the North American, you know, kind of, you know, B2B practice at the time before becoming CFO, said: We need help here because this is a massive market, and we don't have a lot of traction in the middle market. They did a global search, actually diligenced about 40 companies and selected AvidXchange. We're their exclusive long-term partner for business-to-business payments for the middle market, and they actually white label our product, and then they take it. With Mastercard, we've been able to create the bank channel. In addition to creating the bank channel, the Mastercard relationship is really strategic because it gives massive credibility with actually customers as well as with other partners, and even discussions with ERP and accounting system partners, to say that we're the Mastercard partner with a lot of credibility. Our whole partner program really accelerated once we did the Mastercard deal. That partner program today is focused on two areas. One is the bank channel, and we have, you know, really three flavors of bank partners: referral bank partners, resellers, and white label partners. White label partners are the ones that actually put their brand, and they actually sell it to their customers. Those include banks like KeyBank, Fifth Third, and most recently, Bank of America. On the same side, we have software partners, accounting system partners, and other software partners, where we have resellers, referral partners, as well as white label partners, and including today, you're going to hear from Pat Ghilani from MRI Software, which is one of those white label partners that we have within the real estate segment. Our growth strategies. This is one that I'm pretty passionate about. We think of that overall market opportunity as $40 billion. You know, our objectives over the next five years is actually grow that to have 20,000 customers. You know, over double size the customers that we have today within the next five years. That would then generally put us at our next growth milestone of $1 billion of revenue. Okay, that's the backdrop. What are our strategies and how we're going to do this? I go back to thinking about our organic growth strategy of our mantra of 20% annual organic growth, and it's through the lens of the AvidXchange flywheel. It starts by, how do we deliver a great software experience to our buyer customer and extend that value proposition from our buyer customer, you know, prior to invoice, through purchase order management, maybe extend it, you know, into, you know, additional services, you know, like potential, you know, marketplace, other, you know, functionality like we launched today, which is the lien waiver management for construction, is another example of how we're extending that value proposition for the buyer, in terms of how they use our software. and James are going to provide much more context to all the exciting things that we're working on related to extending that value proposition. The second thing is maximizing the transactions under management. This is where today we have lots of strategies on how do we get all the customers' transactions. Today, we do a really good job of getting all their transactions that relate to an invoice. What about the transactions that don't relate to an invoice, like T&E type transactions and others? How do we, over time, get those transactions on our platform as well? Because customers tell us every day they want one system to manage all their expenses. We're the system of record and highly integrated to their general ledger for all their invoice transactions. They say, "Avid, I want all my expense transactions to go through the same process." Third one is around our strategies, around how do we convert paper check, paper invoices to electronic. This is a massive opportunity. Yes, we're monetizing 40% of all the transactions that go through our network. Still, roughly over 50% of our suppliers are still paper check suppliers, right? We have a massive built-in opportunity to do that conversion from paper check to electronic. Then the last one is around data, and how we're using data to not only increase the value proposition to customers, as well as create new offerings altogether. A great example of that is Invoice Accelerator, where we take a data and AI, actually, artificial intelligence approach to how we underwrite these transactions by using the data model of all the history of the FFG transactions have had between the buyer and supplier. That's the framework that we think about in terms of how we're working to create, you know, growth strategies in each of the four years of the flywheel to give not only ourselves, but you confidence in our 20% growth mantra. Inorganic growth. This has been an important part of our overall business model. We haven't done any since being a public company, but doing tuck-in acquisitions is a really effective way for us to continue to grow the business as well. We think about this as being additive to our 20% growth. There's kind of five lenses that we look at as part of our corporate development focus, but I'll say there's really three that are the sweet spot for us that we really focus on. That is where we have pockets of, you know, buyer-customer acquisition in verticals that we're already in. The second one is around vertical market expansion, how we use M&A to get into new verticals that we want to be in. This has been a great part of our playbook historically. Then the third is typically, these are software companies that have not yet monetized payments for their customers, and we can bring the AvidPay Network and create really fast synergies by now monetizing those transactions for those customers. If we look at, you know, the acquisitions that we've done to date, you can see kind of how they fit across the different strategies. Again, thinking about the customer, the vertical, and how we can create spending to these customers, and monetize their payments is kind of the core focus for our M&A strategies. All right. Kind of in summary here, before I turn it over to the rest of the team, we have, you know, what I kind of think is kind of the lens on how I think about our kind of growth I guess, you know, kind of formula in terms of kind of three waves. The first one was, the first wave that we had was, I call it the AP automation software wave that got us to be a $10 million company, right? We got really good at developing software solutions to solve the business problems of the middle market, and we continued to add functionality on this best-in-class platform for our middle market customers. The second wave was the launch of the AvidPay Network and becoming a software-enabled payments company. That really gets us, you know, to be, you know, roughly a $400 million business. We continue to kind of expand, add different payment modalities, and create more of a value proposition around the payment network. The third wave of growth is around what I call kind of a purchase to cash network that we now incorporate Invoice Accelerator, supplier financing services. You're going to hear about some of the new product innovations around T&E, marketplace services. It's just some examples of things that we're going to be working on, you know, not only this year, but in the year to come. When I think of kind of those three waves, that's why I think we have a lot of confidence in having visibility to that next milestone of $1 billion in revenue. And the different gears you can see in the bottom of what they're designed to the impact. When you like, think of, you know, the market opportunity we have, massive greenfield market, combined by our industry-leading position, the ready, the dominant player in the middle market, especially across the nine verticals that we're in, and then deploy, you know, the future kind of strategies that we're working on in products, I'm pretty excited about, you know, the future of AvidXchange and what we're gonna be able to do over the next five years. With that, I think it's a good segue to turn it over to my partner, Dan Drees. One of the things that for Dan, I elevated Dan, the President, earlier this year, and he's been phenomenal in terms of, you know, driving our business and working closely with me, not only on business execution, but also on the strategies of the business. Dan, I'll turn it over to you. Thanks for having me. Good morning. Thank you, Mike. Appreciate that. Thanks to the Praegers as well for that night last night, Cindy, Mike, that was awesome. I just really enjoyed all the conversations. If I said it once, I probably said it 50 times. We're gonna talk more about that later. We're gonna talk more about it tomorrow. I probably said it 50 times. Now is that time. Excited to go deep with you all. Before we get going, let me just kind of orient you. You kind of see on the run of show there, we're gonna go through some of the frameworks in depth that Mike just shared with you. We're gonna go through the growth flywheel. We're gonna spend time on go-to-market. You're gonna hear about operations. We've got some fireside chats. We've got a demo. I just note the blocks of time for questions, so we wanna make sure that we're making time to do that. I know you have questions based on all of our dialogue last night. By the way, if there's something that's unclear immediately that is helping or it's hurting you from understanding what we're talking about, just shout it out. That's fine. We'll save the big dialogue questions for the Q&A sections. To get going, I think it might help just to do a little bit about my background. I started my career at GE. Spent 13 years. I guess, you would say that I had my 10,000 hours there in really in sales, technical sales and product management, product marketing. In the early 2000s, I made a really big pivot. I jumped into banking, quickly found my way into payments, for the last 20 years, I've spent all my time really in the payment space in two different forms: large banks, really in the treasury organization, leading treasury functions for companies like Bank of America and Capital One, really the last 8 years in software, the last 5, here at AvidXchange. My role is probably best summarized in operationalizing all the vision you just heard from Mike. That's really it. Scaling growth, scaling profitability, scaling the talent, I think about that in a couple of ways. It's really bringing the people in that can take us to that next level. I got here, $75 million-$80 million. We had a plan to get to $350 million. Here we are. We got to go to $750 million and $1 billion. Bring the people in. Then number two, just the processes, getting those to scale as well. That's really my role. Let's jump in. I think I'd probably just walk you through a little bit of the organization and my team as in this role of president. About 1,200 teammates, they're on six teams. First group, everything starts with strategy and business planning. Small group, helping us run really the enterprise processes, including, you know, really important, big things like the strategic planning process, along with our finance partners. Our marketing organization, kind of classic marketing, brand, communications, internal and external, events, et cetera. The revenue team, buyer, supplier, sales. You've got demand gen in there. You're gonna hear a lot more from that team because that's one of the groups that we're gonna really double-click on. The Product Organization, which is organized by domain. Think about, you know, software front-end and the various product platforms, a big pay team, a supplier team, a platform team. Those groups make up Product. Last but not least, Operations. This is everything in our back office that make things work, that process payments, that take care of customers, that onboard them, et cetera, et cetera. Those last three groups are the three areas that we wanna go deep on. I'm actually gonna be back up here to talk about product, and I'm gonna go through every single gear of the flywheel that Mike talked about, and I'm gonna unpack the growth strategies associated with each one of those. Joel Feldman's gonna come up and talk about ops just a little bit before lunch, I believe. Right now, we thought we'd jump in with the revenue team to really give you a kind of a double-click on go-to-market on both sides. Mike's referenced him a couple of times. I want to introduce James Sutton. James joined us about six months ago. He's got an amazing background, Google, Salesforce, some other chief revenue jobs at some really cool SaaS companies. He might be able to fill in the blanks a little more, but I just wanna share a little bit about what we like so much about having James on the team. There's a lot of people who've scaled companies from maybe 0 to 50, right? 0 to 30. There's fewer people who've gone from 80 to 350. It's very rare to have folks who've gone from 3 to 700, even to 1 billion. James is one of those people, and it's one of the reasons why we're really excited about having him here. James, why don't you come up and share some go-to-market stuff with us? That was nice. All right. Good to see you all. Nice to meet you. Yeah, for those I didn't meet yesterday, my name is James Sutton, Chief Revenue Officer with AvidXchange, and have been at AvidXchange for over 6 months now. In terms of, like, the story of AvidXchange, I'd like to actually start with why I decided to join AvidXchange. There's 3 main components: It's the leadership, the culture, and the opportunity. To explain a little more about why I decided to join AvidXchange from those components, I'll break down where I'm from. I'm Canadian, played hockey, classic, and I played hockey at a competitive level and then, you know, tried to figure out my path. Started in advertising. One day, the CEO was like: "You're a salesperson, go into sales." That's what I did. Found the first sales job I could. It was at Pitney Bowes, pounding the pavement door to door, selling mail machines and photocopiers. Then one day, Salesforce reached out. At that time, it was selling SaaS before it was called SaaS. I remember telling my friends and family, like, "I'm gonna join this company, Salesforce. Like, I completely believe in it." They're like, "What are you doing? Like, this is just a small thing. Like, I don't know where this is going." Luckily, you know that it turned out well, and for me, that was a ride from millions to billions in revenue, where I was just a sponge, picking up all the operational rigor that has really helped me scale businesses since. I then was lucky enough to find a spot at Google, early days of Google Enterprise. This is, you know, felt like a start-up within Google that we could be shuttered at any time. This was selling Google Apps and then Chrome, and then multiple other solutions and scaling into Google Cloud. Again, that was just one of these amazing journeys of going from millions to billions in revenue and really feeling like you had a seat on the rocket ship. From there, I decided to go into, you know, pre-IPO unicorns and help unicorns scale to decacorns. That's when I found AvidXchange and decided to join the team. From those experiences, what I took away was that it's not just about great product and economics, but it's also about the interpersonal skills that are necessary to go from good to great when you scale businesses long term. That was a key component that I found here. This is an experienced leadership team. They know how to work through not just the good, but the bad together. I believe heavily in that for our future success. The next component is around culture. We'll speak more about our performance culture. This is something where we need to make sure that we're in service to our shareholders, our customers, and our business, and our people in that order. It's important for us to have that sustained growth of having that North Star in mind. The last component is the opportunity. Through my time at Salesforce and Google, I helped scale mid-market. At Google, I really focused on scaling the business, both locally and internationally. Also built out channel flywheels for different departments within that business and saw that success. These are the areas that we have opportunity within AvidXchange, and I'm really confident about scaling those for our future. That's why I'm so excited about this. Let me jump into where we're going now. In terms of the revenue vision, you all know we're on the path to a $1 billion+. My objective in that is to build a world-class revenue organization to achieve that. In my first 90 days here, I focused on our people, our process, our performance, and dove deep within each. On the people side, I wanted to earn the hearts and minds, really focusing on building relationships, gathering trust, and from there, starting to learn the business. That's going into the process component, of both on the product side and on the analytics side, how we operate. The third piece, in terms of components, or in terms of performance, the best piece there that I could do was learn from our customers. I met with 100 customers in our first 90 days. I wanted to meet with the good, the bad, and the ugly through each stage of the customer life cycle with AvidXchange. What I took away from that, especially for the customers who really just wanted to tell me about the ugly, was at the end of them letting me have it, I would ask them: Can you score AvidXchange for me? Like, how would you rate us as a vendor? The worst score I got was 8 out of 10, which is phenomenal. What that speaks to is the value of AvidXchange as a product in connecting the back office in a way that every company needs, and at the same time, speaks to the opportunity that we have ahead. On the people side, we can focus more in terms of being customer obsessed. We have a team that is passionate today. They care deeply about this, and at the same time, this is what we're breeding internally to continue to scale our business. For processes, this is about connecting standardized operations through our business to drive more efficiency and predictability. On the performance side, it's around growth mindset, continuing to understand that there's new heights that we're gonna reach, and we're gonna achieve those together. This is what builds a performance culture, and for me, culture eats strategy for breakfast, and I'm confident in our winning culture. Here's the organization. After my first 90 days, we decided to pull more revenue together under one roof, really focusing on the complete customer experience to drive what's necessary from early stage life cycle of a customer through to continuous retention. We've got our go-to-market strategy, product marketing, business development, sales, both on the buyer and supplier side of the two-sided network, and deeper investment in customer success. To go a little deeper into this is the revenue component of the AvidXchange flywheel. This is a virtuous cycle that we have to be meticulous in investing in. Customer experience, at the end of the day, is what drives the most valuable businesses. We have to consistently deliver the best product and the best services for customers to choose AvidXchange and stay with AvidXchange, and that's at the heart of what this business is doing. On the education side, this is about making sure through sales and marketing, that we're attracting customers by providing them with the solutions they need when they need them. It then moves into deployment, where we ensure that technically and on a relationship level, we're providing the customer with the services that they purchased. It goes into adoption. This is a part of both software and payments, which many leave behind. It's about ensuring that the customer is recognizing the full value that they purchased through our solution. That starts on day one after the contract is signed, through the longevity of our time together. That sets us up for the final component of this virtuous cycle, which is growth. On the growth side, we wanna make sure that we're continuing to retain as well as market for future products and use cases as the customer grows with us. Let me break this down a little further. As you've heard, this is a complex business. It's not that complex, but you've got to definitely take a moment to understand the two-sided network, and from that, you see a wealth of opportunity, which I'm really excited about. What we've been speaking about is the middle of this, right? We have almost 9,000 buyers and almost 1 million suppliers, and this virtuous cycle is growing every day. On the left-hand side in blue is the buyer network. That is one where there's a rich TAM. We have a healthy, continuous pipeline, and we have good win rates. Then on the supplier side, this is a machine. This is flowing every single day at a high velocity to engage with our suppliers and monetize them to continuously grow this two-sided network. This is a massive competitive moat. This takes decades to build, and it's why we're the best within the mid-market, because we provide the strongest network for our buyers and suppliers to play with it. You know what? I think I have time. I want to share one story with you. This one customer is a great example, and through meeting with 100 customers, this is one of the stories that I heard. Asset Living. They're a large real estate provider in the U.S., and years ago, they weighed AvidXchange against a competitor. They chose the competitor because the competitor offered better pricing. Years into their experience with that competitor, they're only actually recognizing 30% of the value that they thought they would gain through the solution because the network wasn't as rich as it needed to be to provide the full value. They'd made the decision to evaluate AvidXchange, they chose to come with us, and 6 months into their relationship with us, they were recognizing the full value of our network. This speaks to what we offer, which is a differentiation to all of the competition, and it's why we're in a position to continue to grow within this marketplace. From here, there's 3 main channels that we go to market with, and each we're consistently developing. There's direct, bank channel, and partner channel. In terms of demand generation, the direct side has multiple components, where we focus on our own marketing, as well as partnering with referral partners on the bank and partner side. For the bank channel, this is run by their teams, and for the partner channels, this is run by their teams as well. MRI is a great example that you'll hear more from later with Pat. Thank you, Pat. It goes into sales. We have nine specialized vertical teams. This is because for ERPs and the solutions that are necessary for the different industries in the mid-market, you need to have expertise. This is one of our competitive advantages that others don't provide to the same level. We have technical solution consultants to really dive deep into the needs to connect to their ERPs and other platforms. In bank channel and partner channel, this is done through their sales teams, and we co-pilot as needed. It then all comes together on onboarding, where both on a technical side and a relationship side, AvidXchange leans in. Let me now go deeper through this funnel to understand some of the secret sauce and how AvidXchange is making this work so successfully, as well as seeing the opportunities for efficiency and productivity gains through this funnel. This is an image of the partner funnel on the right-hand side. This is because we partner with our customers and ERPs to connect the solution to give the customer oversized value. We have over 200 integrations today, which is a huge competitive moat to those ERPs. We deepen our relationships through people and process with AvidXchange and get to exclusive partnerships, which is the best solution for the customer, because then the customer is having a seamless experience through their ERP with AP connected through AvidXchange. On the left-hand side are the drivers of this. I believe it's highly in driver-based planning and simplifying the critical units of economics that we need to improve to get where we want to achieve. The first component of this is around operation or opportunity growth. You can see a healthy CAGR there. This has a number of factors like each of these into how we're gonna achieve it. A key one here is product evolution, as well as marketing and our partnerships. This then drives into a healthier channel mix. In terms of the channel mix, we are gonna see a better increase in the partner side and on the bank channel side because we're leaning heavily in there with more strategy and focus to realize better economics. With that, we will also get larger deals from the channels because that's the pipeline that we recognize within them. The third component is then around conversion rate. Conversion rate is healthy and will continue to get stronger. This is with the partner referral mix, and this provides the customers with a better customer experience, which makes it easier for them to say yes, from us offering the best solution. The last component, which is obviously critical, is LTV to CAC. We see significant gains on this side through channel efficiency, as well as focusing more on upsell, cross-sell, and retention within our customer base that's consistently growing. From there, now I'm moving to the other side, the purple side of the funnel, for our two-sided network, and focusing on what our supplier enrollment looks like. Once we sign a buyer, they approve the payment file. From there, we are engaging the suppliers. The clicker works? Next slide, please. We planned this. Don't worry about it. All right. The next piece of this is in terms of the payments being guaranteed. Once the buyer approves a payment file, to engage the suppliers, there's three ways to work with the suppliers. We can pay them through VCC, virtual card, which is ideal. It's the fastest, it's the easiest time to money for them. We have AvidXchange Pay Direct, and we have Check, which is antiquated. From there, 70% of our suppliers are currently in-network. This is part of the magic sauce and the competitive mode that AvidXchange provides, where when a buyer signs up, they know that the majority of their payments are gonna already be established in our network, and that's the monetization that everyone's looking for. We also, at the same time, engage that 30% of suppliers generally that are not in-network, and we start to sell them and educate them on the opportunities to choose one of these three options. All of them work. What we're doing for those individuals that are not on check today or are on check today, is we're moving them to educate the value of VCC and APD. I'll provide an example of one of those. Alsco is a uniform company. They provide uniforms to businesses across the country. They have 65 locations. They've been on check for years with us, within our network, and what happened is the owner and the finance team recognized that checks were costing more time to operate and just work through the processes with them, as well as, they were losing checks, and it was actually costing them money. They decided to move to VCC with us. Their feedback has been that we've saved them time, we've given them confidence, and we've given them the opportunity to focus on more valuable areas within what finance is capable of doing. This is 1 of the almost million stories of suppliers that are leveraging AvidXchange to simplify their business and grow our two-sided network. The last component of this is our customer growth strategy. We're over 100% today in net transactional retention. There's multiple components that we see to continue to scale this. The first is investing in strategic customer success. Today, a lot of this is around being just glorified care. The opportunity is to become strategic advisors. To do that, we're investing more in subject matter expertise by vertical, to make sure that individuals within the customer bases that we serve can recognize the value that we see in the market from serving those industries, to help all of them grow and accomplish their goals. We will layer this with new product features to continuously scale and be the best in the offerings for our market. I see huge opportunities within generative AI. Some of those we've already applied today, such as in within business development and content creation. We also see opportunities in velocity sales for automation in those areas and for customer success. The last component is scaling to new markets, where we see the opportunity to continue to penetrate deeper into our TAM. That's it for me. I wanna thank you very much. As you can see, I'm really excited about this opportunity, and I appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you, James. I think I've seen that talk two or three times now. Every time I get more excited, 'cause, again, I just use this word scale. Every one of those opportunities, just spot on, and when I think about taking that to the next level, it's just the right recipe. Speaking of scale, last night, you've been introduced now to Doug Anderson, our new Chief Product Officer. Last night I said: Hey, do you wanna present the product growth story tomorrow? He said, "Sure," just to give you an idea of where his energy level is. We're gonna let him off the hook, and I'm gonna spend a little time now going deeper on the flywheel, double-clicking into kinda each of the areas to kinda unpack where the growth is coming from. Let's just kinda jump in. Mike's already given you the overview, and I know some of you probably could do this talk on the flywheel, but let me just start by reminding you, year one. Year one is just about building great AP software, right? Invoice and payment automation software that solves a problem for a buyer, right? We wanna solve a problem for a buyer. That's year one. The way we measure our effectiveness in year one is total sales value. We get a contract signed for TSV. That's our internal metric for sales. Year one is gonna make up about a fourth of our sales growth over the next three years. As a baseline, just to kind of give you an idea, over the next three years, we expect for our total sales value metric to grow at about 15% a year, compounded. In that growth component, we're expecting a quarter of that to come from specific year one actions. I wanna take you through those themes in more depth right now. Here's kind of the big three areas, and I think it would be good for me to just use a little bit of a now, next-... framework for where each one of these things are. The first theme is around purchase automation, and I think you've probably seen us in the marketplace, press releases, et cetera, with new launches around PO management. This is our ability to ingest POs to automate them, the matching, either 2-way or 3-way matching, of those POs to receipts, invoices, as well as purchase order, making that 2- and/or 3-way match work. That's all happening right now. We've got that on Titanium, we've got it on Strongroom, we've got it on Suite. What's next would be what we're doing with line item capture. This is us actually getting detailed line-level data off of invoices and allowing our customers to do 2-way matches, perhaps even 3-way matches, to those, to line-level detail. That's super important for job cost. Entire invoices show up. They've got lots of costing on it. We're always working on partials, especially in construction. Line item capture plus job cost functionality, those two being in the next category, can really open things up. All of these things pull us into new verticals. They allow us to extend to more ERPs, and they allow us to handle more complex, oftentimes, even larger customers. We're super optimistic about that. The last one in the purchase automation category is lien waiver. I'm not sure if you've been watching the wire, but we just did a press release. We are live now with our lien waiver product. This is super important for construction. It helps facilitate that exchange between, as an example, a general contractor and a subcontractor. A subcontractor says, "Hey, I release you from a lien. I'm not gonna put a lien on this property because you're paying me." Avid facilitates that transaction, makes it safe. We're the trusted partner. That's now live in Titanium. We think it's gonna be a game changer for what we do in construction. That's theme 1. Just call it purchase automation. It's getting us deeper and deeper into the purchase-to-invoice flow, more complicated workflows, 2- and 3-way match, extends us into our current verticals where they need that functionality, and also facilitates us going deeper in new verticals. That's number 1. Second 1 is invoice automation. I think you all have heard a lot about AvidConnect. It's also been called our invoice capture platform, IDC. This capability has lots and lots of upside for us. Number 1, for a customer in gear one and being able to sell more to a buyer, solve more problems, this allows us to ingest invoices faster, read them more accurately, and that speeds up the entire workflow. This platform is all based on machine learning and AI. We're gonna talk a little bit more about it when we go deeper on the AI side. As a processing module now, we can go to ERPs and say, "Hey, if you don't need a really complex workflow from AvidInvoice, would you be interested in us ingesting all your invoices for your customers with IDC?" We're actually taking capabilities for Avid, modularizing them, and offering them as platform services to our ERP partners. Really taking the capabilities that we built for ourselves and offering those up to ERPs. That's a huge opportunity. That's happening next, okay? Now would be Avid Capture, the improved quality, the improved speed. What would be next would be our invoicing processing module. In addition to that, what the IDC and Avid Capture platform are doing for us is giving us better resolution into what we can pull off of an invoice. I've got a couple terms up there, due date capture and terms capture. On every invoice, there's always a due date. It usually takes 2 or 3 forms, or when you're late, when we'd like it, all those things are very complicated. Having Avid Capture intelligently pull those dates, creates opportunities for us to offer new products in the future. We'll talk about this a little bit more later, but think about going to a supplier and saying, "Hey, we understand because we have all the data, we watch these transactions. We understand that this particular buyer always pays you late, very late, and the ticket size is very high. Would you be interested in an approach where we pay all of these on time for approved invoices? What fee would you be interested in paying for that?" Those kinds of offers can happen, when we're capturing those due dates, especially the nuances of the different due dates. Let's bucket all of that into invoice automation as a theme. Last theme is Next Gen Pay, and Mike talked a little bit about this when he talked about capturing more of our buyer customers' pay file. That's really our objective. We want their entire pay file. Everything that's outgoing, we wanna help them automate. Right now, we have a significant opportunity in their time-sensitive payments. What are time-sensitive payments? Think about utility bills, where if they're not paid off on time, you know, factories can shut down. Think about insurance payments that are very similar. Think about maybe payments to service loans. Anything that is a highly critical payment that they might be reluctant to offer up into the AvidPay Network. Us being able to provide assurance, consistency, reliability, that those payments go, and they go on time, and that we're aware of them. Including putting in a fast track for AvidXchange is what that's all about. We're also looking forward to expanding our currencies for our cross-border payments. We think that makes us even more competitive in that space. We always are looking to improve workflow automation. That's a now item. Avid Analytics, we launched last year. This is the ability for the buyer to really understand where their money's going, where invoices sit. That's an important part. Last but not least, we believe there is a significant opportunity to integrate spend management, travel, virtual card, mobile, physical plastic card management in with AvidInvoice and in with our Suite products. Allowing our CFOs to be able to go to one place to see everything and leveraging the many integrations that we already have, we think is an incredible competitive advantage in that space. Can you just real quickly quantify how much of the pay file you're not capturing, just as you think about quantifying that next opportunity? Yeah, I mean, from a next opportunity or the whole thing? That whole Next Gen Pay seems like it's a big incremental. I don't know. If we're. Incremental or- We have some really good views of kinda the entire spend wheel of different industry segments for middle market. The kinda high, you know, not direct cost, kinda middle market customers that we tend to gravitate towards, we're probably getting 25%-30% of the current total spend file. Think about that as like, you know, you got tax payments, you've got payroll, you've got, you know, lots of other kinda categories of spend. This gets us into kinda that next chunk, and I don't know if that's five more points of the total pie or not, but that would be kinda how I would think about it. Okay, that kinda makes up year one. I hope you get an idea of the themes. I hope I did a good job of, like, what's happening right now. I think the lien waiver is probably the best example of the press release just went out today. A lot on the horizon for what's next as well. Let's move now to year two. As a reminder, I gotta keep reminding all of us, including myself, year two now is about us taking that great software that we've built, that solve problems for buyers. We're trying to connect it to as many ERPs and as many partners as we possibly can, right? We've got great software. We're extending ourselves by integrating it. Similarly, we would measure year two with that same TSV effectiveness. Just by matter of ratios, we expect three-quarters of our growth in the next 2.5 years to come really from this category, the integrations. That usually has 3 flavors. You've heard a lot about it already, so I won't bore you. There's accounting systems, our ERP partners, we've got our bank channel growth, and we've got kind of an all other strategic. Kind of the list there, which I won't go through, would be those categories that I would say are those partners and ERPs that are all in growth mode right now. Those are all kind of like now mode. There's 2 really, really important things that are enabling year 2 for us, and I wanna double-click on them. To just set up the first one, and Mike did a great job of this, I'll dovetail on it. Remember, our software doesn't work if it's not integrated to the ERP. I mean, our mission is to give the CFO real-time understanding of what's outstanding, they can close the books in an accurate way. Integrations are vital to the software performing the way we want it to perform. Second little backdrop item is that the middle market is not like anything else. We're not small business. We don't get the convenience of having one dominant ERP, like a QuickBooks. We have 350. What's been really a moat for us, having multiple integrations to kind of a highly fragmented ERP, that's been a moat for us, 'cause to come after AvidXchange, you would have to begin to integrate to all of these. In order to scale, we have to really get good at connecting to 350 ERPs, and that's where AvidConnect comes in. This is new. 2 years ago, AvidConnect did not exist. We were building it. We were talking about it with you. AvidConnect today is live. At the center of AvidConnect is a brand-new set of next gen APIs and middleware, and we, with that architecture, we're then able to make a single connection to all of our products. Now, here's why that's important. In the past, historically, and you think about how we grew up, we've been highly entrepreneurial. We've been wanting to learn deeply about these individual vertical markets, and as soon as we got one that was interested where we delivered value, we said, "Yes," and we connected it point to point. You can't do that times 350. Now with Avid Connect, we make a single change to Avid Suite or Avid Pay or any of our other products, and that particular feature gets extended to all of our ERPs, to all of our partnerships. It's an absolute game changer. Today, we have about 30% of our classic integrations. We've been migrating since the beginning of this year. By the end of the year, we should probably be at 80%. I think the tail will be a little bit longer. What that does for us is it creates a ton of productivity. The maintenance of those integrations goes way down. We can take those engineering teams, we can redeploy them to building out new front-end connectors for new verticals. I should talk about the head-end. Another huge feature of AvidConnect is a really simple way to configure both API-driven connections to ERPs, but also file-based connectors to individual customers. We've got drag and drop, we've got menu-driven. It also is attached to a portal, so our customers and our onboarding teams can see exactly how those APIs or file-based connectors are performing. That's a game changer for us. I think it'll come out even more why this is so important when I talk about really enabler number 2. In summary, AvidConnect for us has been on the drawing board. It's probably been an idea for three or four years, and someone would probably tell me, "No, Dan, I thought of it seven years ago." Two and a half years ago, Angelique was instrumental at pushing this kind of architecture, and today, we're leveraging it, and it's gonna dramatically change our speed in which we can connect to new ERPs and extend ourselves into new verticals. That's enabler number one. Now, let's talk about number two. This one, I had some really good discussions about this, and you've heard about partners and bank channels and things like that. I wanna, I wanna kind of demystify this, and hopefully, it helps you understand really the progression of how we take partners from really a single point to, like, these really strategic partnerships that we're even gonna go deep with Pat here in a second. I thought I'd just walk you through this life cycle. For the most part, we meet up with customers who are responding to our outbound marketing. Most of the time, they will show up in our shop and say, "I'm sure you don't have an integration for my obscure ERP," 'cause there's 350 of them, "but we're interested in invoice automation." For those customers, we're gonna build a file-based connector, and that's a super important zero to one event for us. What happens in there is we start to learn more and more about that customer. We learn more and more about that ERP, if they have specific features that we believe we can deliver or not. Once we get that one customer, we begin to learn as quickly as possible, and then we do our best to make that pivot to start to market directly to similar type customers, okay? This is really that first phase, that value demonstration. We're deciding to ourselves, "Hey, is this somebody we can really take care of? Is this an ERP that's got a data model that we really like?" If we do it well, we move to step two, which is like a repeatable build. We're still in a file-based mode. Think back to the AvidConnect example. You have to be able to do file-based integrations in a really good way to begin to build this kind of momentum. We add a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth customer. If we do our job well with more targeted marketing, being able to benchmark existing customers, explain to those ERP customers that, like, you know, someone's been there before you, that's kind of the motion. Think about it that way. At 30, 40, 50 customers, we begin to start to get the attention of the ERP. We have 50 of your customers. They like it. We'd like to work with you. What about direct marketing? Would you like to refer people to us? If you do, there's an opportunity for rev share. That really takes us into phase three. This is where things usually accelerate very, very quickly. With the power of that ERP and us working together, you know, think about joint trade shows, think about joint marketing, joint landing pages, we begin to build traction. This is where the ERP say, "Wait a second, we now have 200, we now have 300 customers. These are all file-based. Why wouldn't we build an API together?" We start talking about that architecture, and that leads into the strategic partner realm. This is where the long-term rev share partnerships happen. This is often where a full reseller, kind of arrangement might exist, where the ERP says, "We know how to sell it. We'll sell it for you." Oftentimes, it's built inside, could be white label. Those are. All those things would be great attributes of, you know, what I would call the strategic partner phase. The outcome of all of that is just a ton of long-term value for the ERPs, and that's really part of what we're about in this year, too. When you think about all of that, so you've got 350 ERPs in the middle market. We've got it on a Ouija board in an office down here, and we're thinking about how we're gonna market to each of them at the stage they're in, so that when they finally say, "Hey, I wanna go after invoice automation and payment automation, and I need a partner," that we're ready for it. You think about how value grows across those four phases. The customer experience is gonna get better, the joint marketing and go-to-market is gonna get better, and the, just the overall value for both parties get better. At any one of those stages, our partners can go from just kind of a bystander to a referral partner, to perhaps a reseller or a built-inside white label. There's a continuum there. Depending on the ERP and their strategy, we're gonna be really flexible to work and deliver value. I hope that gives you a kind of overview and maybe takes out some of the questions around how all that evolves. I hope you're connecting the dots on that with AvidConnect. Because to do all those file-based integrations times 350, and then turn them into APIs and do that at scale, cannot happen unless you have great technology. Again, that's something that we're really excited about. What I thought I'd do now, just to kind of bring all this home, is let you hear more directly from one of our partners who's kind of been through that journey. Do me a favor and welcome up, Pat Ghilani from MRI. Thank you, Dan. Good to see you as well. Let me get my. Where's the fire? It's supposed to be a fireside chat. I don't know. Where are you gonna put it, right here? We should have, like, a little monitor with a fire on it. Nice. Let me get my specs out. Pat, it's good to have you, by the way. It's just- Pleased to be here. Oh, man, it's awesome. I, it was fun catching up last night. I think it would be good for me to just start with a little background. First of all, I've been studying up on Pat. First of all, he's a Michigan State Spartan, and so- Go green. Our CPO is a Spartan as well. I noticed in your early days, you were with EY, and I saw, like, you helped do major ERP. Yep I ntegrations, which I can't think of a better, you know, a better experience for what you're doing now. You immediately went to PropTech, or back then, it was just SaaS software. Now we call it PropTech, and you've been doing that 20-25 years. You've been the CEO of MRI now for, since 2014? Nine. 6, 7, 8 years. 9? Wow, this is going so fast. Getting old. During the last five years, you've been on an absolute terror. 45 acquisitions. You're a three-time recipient of Inc.'s fastest-growing companies. You guys are up to, like, 45,000 customers. Yep. So congratulations- Thank you. O n all the awesome work. It's just great to have you here. Thank you. Glad to be here. How about a warm-up? We're always interested in, especially this group, what's going on in the market. How, you know, real estate's big for us, it's big for you. Like, maybe give us a sense for how our customers are doing kind of in this? Sure. You know, I think most of you, when you open up whatever periodical you read, you know, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, anything on the internet, all you hear these days is kind of the doom and gloom around real estate, right? People aren't going back to work, offices are empty. Obviously, there's truth to that. When you think about the vertical itself, real estate has never had a 10-year period where it wasn't a growing market. Mm. Real estate globally, you know, you can say, "What's the total addressable market for real estate?" It's almost uncalculatable because it's every brick-and-mortar building on the planet, right? From a church to a retailer to skyscrapers. The interesting thing about the vertical is that they have historically been laggards in adoption of technology. One of the reasons for that is a little bit of that generational dynamics that Mr. Praeger was talking about. You have what was quintessentially the good old boys network that owns the major real estate on the planet. These are your... You know, and I'm very much stereotyping, but it's, you know, it's just stodgy. I'm gonna build this building. I sign every check. I do everything myself. You know, it's the blood, sweat, and tears. We've met a lot of those folks. There you go. Yeah. Exactly. What we found, and our company's been around for 50 years, MRI is not magnetic resonance imaging. It's actually management reports. In 1971, we were a services bureau. We went to mainframe computer systems run by punch cards, DOS, Windows, web. Essentially, we created what today you would call ERP for people that owned and operated large-scale real estate, both commercial and residential. When we thought of AP, it was, guess what? Automation was 10 fingers on a keyboard, creating a purchase order, mailing it, having them send in the mail an invoice with the right purchase order in, undoing the invoice, typing the invoice in, putting it in one of those yellow folders with the string around it, interoffice mail, getting it approved, sending it over to Jane. She does her thing, then Bill writes the check, puts it in the mail, and two months later, you get paid. That's what we did. When I think of how the journey of our company got to where it is today, we went about 40 years using what I just described. Mm. AvidXchange, really, I've known Mike since probably 2006, AvidXchange was really the first company that we partnered with, and the reason is, we had no idea how to do this next-generation automation. Look, I would say this: Today, you know, real estate is going through a modification, but the great thing, especially in software, I don't get paid based on occupancy. I get paid if the building's there. If there is space and there is a lease, we get paid. PropTech is still holding its own, and more than ever, the automation is huge. For those of you that have anything to do with the financials of your business, we knew in the first couple of weeks of COVID who was using automation and who wasn't. We would get people saying: "Hey, you know what? Look, please don't shut off our system because Joe hasn't been to the office in three weeks to write the check." This is a fact. This is the truth, right? Real estate being a technology laggard is why we've survived for 50 years, and real estate, like MRI with AvidXchange, is one of the reasons why we've grown 30% CAGR over the last five years, and today we're a $700 million company, and in 2014, we were only a $90 million company. There you go. That is really taking, you know, companies like AvidXchange help teach old dog new tricks, right? Then I don't have to pay for it, too. It's nice because Prager's invested 20 years of this. I can't build it. That's a great backdrop. My gut tells me you might have flashed back a couple of times when I was trying to explain all the stages of these partnerships. Maybe take us back to those times when you were making those decisions. What went into it? I think it would be really good for the group here to understand what's in that decisioning process for any ERP when they're deciding to, you know, take functionality and really rely on a partner like AvidXchange. You figure if you're a software company, every day you're deciding, okay, is this gonna be buy, build, or partner? Historically, ERP companies were one box, right? Single stack. That was the claim to fame, right? The SAPs and Oracles, they built everything, one database, they built it, everybody else sucked, right? That's just how it was, right? Then you started to think, okay, but how can I be great at everything? As software started to answer all these problems, it wasn't possible to get an A in each class. For us, you know, looking back, I mean, it took us, and we're still modifying it, right? It's taken us 50 years to build a financial system that is completely trustworthy, completely auditable, completely secure, and that allows, you know, the 90-year-old real estate owner who still shows up in the office to trust it, or the 22-year-old whippersnapper right out of college to want to use it. To build those financial systems, we did some naive things. We were like, "Hey, we'll build this." Then you realize how difficult it is, the testing, the iterations, the money, the time. Ultimately, to earn trust, you can't just go to a CFO and be like, "Hey, I got 2 customers on it." They want hundreds, thousands of customers. Essentially, AvidXchange was there at the right time, the right place, in the sense that we didn't even know automated invoicing, that, you know, the AvidXchange invoice product was the start of our relationship. Essentially, we weren't a reseller of it. We would tell our clients, "We don't do that. Call the good folks over at AvidXchange." That's really how it started. Is there maybe take that one notch, 'cause in that strategic partner category that I described before, not only is there an opportunity to work together for a long period of time, just as you've described, but then there's even another step where there's white labeling, which you all do now. Yes. Maybe take us deeper into that decision. Sure. You know, again, at the time, I wasn't even the CEO, I was the COO most of the time when we were getting started. I always looked up to Mike, like, "Someday I'd like to be the CEO." He's like, "Yeah." I didn't realize how much smaller you guys were then, right? 'Cause I was always impressed, right? Still am, Mike. Anyway, it became this peanut butter and jelly thing, right? Where it's like, okay, we can't sell our software without having the answer to automated invoicing. 'Cause even the people that aren't gonna use it, they want to know you have it, right? Even today, we have, you know, 50% of these people still do not use automation, let alone automated payments. The market is still huge and ripe, in the U.S. here as well, for sure. The long story short is we got really close with, "Hey, guess what? Our software works together and creates an answer for not just a nice-to-have relationship, but a must-have relationship." As we kind of kept gaining steam, I remember when you guys came and started the AvidXchange. Pay. Pay, AvidXchange Pay. We sat down in my conference room in Cleveland, and Mike's telling me about this, I'm like: Okay. I said, "You know what? Let's do something different. Like, what if we brought it to market? What if it was, I don't know, like MRI Vendor Pay?" I looked at him, and I go, "It's like MVP, like it's the best." Today, we call it MVP. The science of product- Right. That's exactly right. We named it, like, over coffee before the meeting started, right? Today, it's MVP, MRI Vendor Pay. We said: You know what? Let's do this one different. Half of our relationship has been a referral on the invoicing side, and then the other half has been us as a reseller. Both models are working great now at the exact same time. Interestingly enough, when I look at the financial contribution of the partnership, it is literally 50/50. Mm-hmm. The second 50, the vendor pay side, has grown substantially faster in the last few years. Yep. Right? No, that's great. Yes. I think it also gives us a sense for even, you know, the complexity that, like, in one side of the product suite, we're doing a referral relationship, and then you've got white label. I think the group has a good idea now of where we come from together, white label built inside. Maybe just an overview, 'cause I know you guys have this really cool architecture. I think you were, you know, a big proponent of, in its early days, of an open architecture. It requires coordination of our selling teams, you know, compensation, all that stuff. Maybe give the group an idea of how that works on the white label side and maybe even the referral side, how you align your selling teams, how they face off with AvidXchange, et cetera, how it all works. For sure. First of all, technologically, the biggest advantage that we have with our partnership with AvidXchange is that for the user, you don't feel like you're using 2 different systems. Hugely important, because on 1 hand, buyers say, "You know, I want the freedom to be able to use different products, but also, I want 1 throat to choke, 1 user experience, 1 contract." We had to try to solve for that. We did it on the technology side. On the sales side, the big thing was, how do you take my 500 salespeople, 250 of which are in the United States, and how do I incent them to make this just as important as our own products? We commission, and we allow them to deplete their quota when they sell AvidXchange. The fact is, and this is no joke, I'm not just saying this because I'm on here, up here. We have plenty of people that do much better making their numbers selling AvidXchange than our products. We like them. I know you do. Teamwork. That's the only way it works. You've got to make sure that the point of the arrow, the feet on the street, are looking at this as a value add to the client, and that there's no disparity between saying, you know, "MRI Vendor Pay is kind of special, there's an asterisk." Well, it's special because it's great, but it's not special because they get paid less, or they talk about it less. It's just in there, right? Mm-hmm. You know, I always say it's, you know, for us, you know, you go to Dairy Queen, you buy a Blizzard, right? If you get it with HEATH Bar, HEATH Bar Blizzard, it's one thing. It's just in there. You don't pay two different people. It's just one thing, and it's better together. Yeah. That's kind of how we market it. I'm thinking about that, and I know you're saying really nice things about us, but you've got a lot of partners. 400. Yeah, in the mix. Where does AvidXchange stack up? Maybe more importantly, like, what makes a great partner? Mm-hmm. like one of your top tiers? I hope AvidXchange's in that top tier. Yep. versus maybe what Absolutely. where the others are at. Again, I'll go back to, you know, when we were partnering with AvidXchange, I would not have considered us an open and connected platform. We were an old school, single stack, ERP system that desperately needed an AvidXchange invoice type solution, and it was just out of necessity that we did it. One of the reasons for the meteoric growth of the company from 2014, I like to say it's because I became CEO, but it's not that. It has nothing to do with that. In fact, it was the strategic decision to say, this open, connected platform model. Instead of being SAP, we decided we wanted to be more like the Salesforce, salesforce.com, right? Platform-centric. That was a huge differentiator for us. Today, we have 400 partners across the planet. AvidXchange is a platinum partner. Absolutely, the number 1 reason why it works in the market side is that, again, it's peanut butter and jelly. I do nothing that AvidXchange does, so there's no overlap. It's extremely complementary. Yes, there's a financial benefit to partnering with AvidXchange. The halo effect of having it is way more important to me to be able to sell and retain than it is the actual money itself. It would be like you trying to sell a car and not having a radio or a sunroof, things that people think are compulsory to buying the car today. AvidXchange's literally number 1 on the most required need, because I made a pretty aggressive decision that we weren't gonna build it. Now that I've waited so long, there's no freaking way I'd catch up. Right, there's no. You know, I should have bought this company years ago, but I always told her, if I could have bought a company, it was this one, but we could never afford it. All right. I'm thinking I've got time maybe for one or two. Any, like, Mike talks a lot about, we all talk a lot about the fact that 70% of the universe hasn't figured out that automation is for them yet. Mike also talks about kind of that generational shift, when our younger, you know, professionals show up and say, "I've never seen paper before. What are we doing?" What do you think is on the horizon for us in terms of driving penetration of, you know, SaaS-integrated products like that? Absolutely. It's 100% the generational change. It's already happening, right? I talk about this good old people's club, you know, their kids are taking over. The younger generation's coming in, like: No way am I doing this! I have to teach, you know, I have three sons, and they don't even understand what a check register is. Like, why would I have that? Why does mom carry this thing in her purse? What is that? They don't even balance the checkbook. They don't even know what balancing means. This is strict, right? Problem. It is a problem. It is a problem. I definitely think that generational thing, I think things like COVID, I think the remote model, I think the global centricity of, things having to be done everywhere all the time like that, it's just going to be a requirement. Again, why do I feel really good about real estate? Because we're doing really good things together in real estate, yet it is still a ridiculously laggard market, compared to other industries. Really, the sky's the limit. No, I love that. Good perspective. Mm-hmm. All right, let's bring it home. Companies like MRI, you're providing mission-critical software to, you know, thousands of customers globally. You got a lot on your mind. It's not always an invoice workflow. Maybe just describe, what's the value that MRI ends up getting on a broader scale on a partnership like AvidXchange and MRI? First and foremost, our competitive differentiator to our competitors is that we are a platform that we say is of freedom. Meaning you can buy everything from us, or you can buy the best of the best solutions and tie them together. In the ERP world, there's been this single stack, best of breed circle that goes around about every 10 years. What happens is, you know, everyone does everything for a while, and it's like, "I want everything together, everything together." Guess when they don't want it together? When inside the together no longer does the fun, special stuff of the innovative companies. That, to me, is why I will not create my own automation system, my own payments network, because on my best day, I'd be a C player. Mm. It requires the full-time focus. The value is, when we go into our clients and our prospects, and we compete against our competitors, we're bringing them a payment network, a two-sided network that none of our competitors, they don't even know those words, right? They literally just have a few automation buttons and, you know, connect to a bank, and they just do their thing. Our ability to come in and be like: Guess what? It's not just toffee, it's HEATH bar, right? Which is why I use that example, right? MRI, powered by AvidXchange, is special, and that is a premium product. That's awesome. Pat, thank you so much for for sharing some time with us. We really appreciate you. All right. I think with that, yes, we have a break, so we're gonna give you about 10 minutes to go have a HEATH bar and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and maybe a coffee and- Quick thing. I know we're running a little bit behind, but we will call back that time. Do not worry. Okay. On track? We're far behind? Okay. Mike was minus 5. Okay. I thought I was on... I thought I got longer, but... I think. B uyers. Our goal now in gear three is to drive the maximum amount of e-payment adoption. We know that drives yield. Our measure of our effectiveness in gear three is e-pay adoption. That's what most directly correlates to our TPV yield. In 2022, we finished right at 42% on the e-payment adoption, transactional scale. As Mike said before, this is 2 times, often 3 times, that of our competitors. James talked about how this is a significant advantage in driving value for our buyer customers. Despite that significant advantage, though, the fact that we're still at 58% check, for me, represents the single biggest short-term revenue opportunity, perhaps long-term opportunity, in the company. The difference between us and our competitors today is largely about go-to-market, and we're gonna bring Kelly Vicknair up in a minute. She's been in a tremendous add, another one of these scaling adds to the leadership team. We're gonna talk more deeply about go-to-market and how that process works, that James kind of introed a little bit. We're gonna go deeper with her on a fireside chat. What I wanna talk about really is the product side of cracking the code and driving to 50%, 60%, 70% e-pay adoption. To me, that's about product and product positioning. Mike said it really, really well. We flipped the script on how we think about this. Other payment networks ask the buyer how they want the payment to go. We don't listen to the buyer. We're making the payment. We ask the suppliers how they want it to go. When you think about it that way, you can begin to think about how the supplier thinks. I want to just give you a really simple, kind of one-on-one product management positioning view. Just to kind of give you the decoder ring here, the x-axis is really price or net cost to a supplier. Kind of dimension 1, always going to be a factor, sometimes less sensitive, sometimes more sensitive, depending on the particular supplier. We see that every day. The y-axis here, the vertical axis, is speed. Very important dimension of value attribution for that supplier. The last one, the one that frankly doesn't get talked about enough, is what I would just call the accounts receivable or reconciliation and data dimension. I've tried to represent that here in this view just by the size of the bubbles, okay? Let's just try to understand where our current, in a really simplified way, because we have lots of dimensions to these products, but in a really simplified way, where do the existing products sit? Virtual card is our fastest. It's got the highest amount of data in terms of reconciliation, especially in our straight-through processing, kind of delivery mode. It's also at the highest end in terms of pricing. This is the Cadillac, it's the premium. It clears in real time. It's got integrated data, either through the merchant terminal or what we send, and in straight-through processing, they don't even touch it. That's virtual card. Far upper right. APG has been really our biggest innovation over the last 5 years. It's where we take ACH rails, we bundle data, they get it in three days, it clears in three days. It's delivered immediately, but the money cash clears in three days, so it's a little bit slower, so we price it down market around 100 basis points as a target. If you haven't noticed, the distance between APG, where, you know, we've had a lot of innovation on in the last three, four, or five years, all the way down to the check, there is a ton of white space, and this is the product opportunity for us in the future. This is where the opportunity is to go from 42% to 50%-60%, hopefully someday to 70%. I kinda got that broken down into four buckets just to share, like, what's on the horizon for AvidXchange Exchange. First of all, real-time payment rails, which I know lots and lots of people are trying to figure out where that fits. There is no company better positioned to leverage that technology than AvidXchange, because remember, we make the payment, we set it up. We can set up the pricing, we can wrap the data around it, we can sell that effectively, configure that for our buyers. We believe it has a very unique opportunity in high value or high ticket items, right? This is often places where the virtual card as a delivery modality will kind of top out. I've got a $30,000 ticket. I don't want to spend X dollars for that individual unit. People begin to get sensitized to that. Real-time payments can come in underneath that. We can deliver it and have it clear immediately and leverage these really new and exciting rails for future options for our suppliers. That's kind of number one. Second one is around just expanding our reach with APD. What I mean by that is, we still are in the early innings of positioning our 3 dimensions: price, data, and frankly, with certain suppliers, frequency, and making very unique offers to groups of suppliers to extend the reach of AvidXchange Pay Direct. We believe that platform and our ability to capture suppliers for APD is just beginning in terms of the amount of flexibility we can offer and the different options we can offer to different suppliers based on what they need. How they want the data, whether it's API right to their QuickBooks, whether it's discrete email, whether they want it aggregated, what their frequency of use is. We can create new price packages for them, and we believe drive significant adoption with APD. Item number three is about just transaction-based payments for suppliers. This comes in a couple different forms. Believe it or not, today, we have a lot of suppliers who are moving money from East Coast to West Coast, operating units and local banks via check. That's just a, you know, low-hanging fruit opportunity. We've also got specific use cases where buyers are paying individuals or perhaps investors. The disbursements use case is a definite opportunity for us. We also are investigating very heavily options for eCheck. eCheck, just kind of at a high level, would be where our suppliers are actually having to do work. It's not passive, it's not just showing up in their, in their inbox, in their mailbox, or coming to them. They're actively going somewhere, they're authenticating, they're bringing money down. The moves work for us, for our lowest-end suppliers, that might be fine for them. They might actually want to do work, and so, for that, we're thinking about eCheck. Last but not least, just the data. This is a dimension that, like, in every one of these payment modalities, offering them flexibility and customizable ways to get their data can help us augment this product offering and really fill in the gap around, you know, this white space that I kind of described. How would I summarize this? Early innings for product innovation to the supplier. To date, we've really leveraged, with the exception of APD and very recently, STP, we've leveraged a very differentiated go-to-market for our suppliers to really win and get that 2x, 3x adoption rate. We believe that these products, these permutations of these products are gonna increase that lead even more, and we're really excited about it. What I thought I'd do now is go back and talk a little bit more about go-to-market. To do that, I wanna, I wanna bring up Kelly Vicknair. Kelly, why don't you come on up? Kelly's joined us. Yeah, give it up for Kelly. Kelly joined us a little under or over two years ago. She's got a tremendous background. I'm gonna ask her to share more detail of it in a second here. again, another one of those leaders who just had scaled before. Kelly, welcome to the Fireside Chat. Thank you. Just to reference, we don't have a fire, you're here. Why don't you tell the group a little bit about yourself and your background? Sure. Kelly Vicknair, been here at AvidXchange a little over two years. I've got about 20 years in sales and operations. For 10 of those, I joke around, I tell people I got my real-life MBA at School of Xerox, doing PPO work. That's what put the gray hair on my head. That's where that came from. It'll do it. But really, my time at Xerox, I covered the Citibank contract, a lot of telecoms, Verizon, Sprint, and that's really where I got the bulk of my experience around redesigning platforms, finding areas that we can really retool and how we become more efficient. There's lots of opportunity. In the BPO space, if you're familiar with it, the margins are very small, so you don't have a whole lot to work with in terms of cash flow there. You really have to be mindful on what your process look like and how you design it to be most efficient. The other thing that you need to know about Kelly, she's really humble. One of the things I noticed about Kelly almost instantly was the culture she brought, just the mood on the floor, the energy, the optimism, even the leaders you brought in. We're excited to have you, and we're really appreciative of your leadership. Do me a favor. James kind of did this a little bit, but I'd love for you to maybe go just slightly deeper. Connect the dots, for the group here on where you and the supplier sales team kind of comes into the process, and just at a high level, how that all works from kind of start to finish, so they have an idea before we start asking some other questions about what that looks like. Absolutely. James' team goes out and brings in a new buyer, and that new buyer onboards in about six months, right? What happens is, we receive a payment file from that buyer, we digest that payment file, and it goes through a series of networks, and we identify those suppliers who are already on network, which James talked about a little bit earlier, and it's about 70%. Of those suppliers that are on our network, we've already spoken with them, and we already understand how they want to receive and digest their payment. The other 30% goes to what we call a JIT team, a just-in-time. We take that opportunity, that 30% comes in, we make a real-time call to them, we start asking questions to understand who they are, what size company are they, or what ERP system are they on? When we make that phone call, we have a payment in hand, the way that call goes is: We've got a $5,000 check, payment ready to be sent to you. How do you want it? Do you want it today? If so, we can get it to you in a card, or do you want us to mail you a check? Of course, APD is in there as well. You know, that's one of our biggest differentiators, is how quickly we've developed the process to get in front of those new suppliers and get their information put into our system. You know, it's critical for us to understand what their ERP system is as well, so that, like, long term, how do we want to digest data to them later on through automation and potentially API integration? Love that. James cooks them and fries them, comes to you, 70% go, payment happens, 30%, essentially, you're talking to, you're running through that onboarding process and either get them set up on their, on their preferred choice. You kind of referenced this. 42% e-payment adoption. Mike talks about it as 2, 3, sometimes even more X. How do we get that? Like, from your, from your chair, how do you see that we are differentiated and able to get that level of improvement? Well, I think it boils down to, well, number one, the talent on the team, but it's having that payment in hand and reaching out to them real time. That process is critical. You know, it took us 10 years to get to where we are today, right? Where we are today versus where we were just simply 2 years ago, was a little bit different. We took a process that was a little I don't want to call it disjointed, it was just a little cumbersome, in that we were making 1 phone call to drive card, and if the supplier said, I don't think I want card. Well, can I interest you in APD? Yeah, I'd like to talk to someone about AvidPay Direct. Then we made a second call. It was a little clunky, and instead of making two calls, we condensed it down to one. Now, when we're making a front-end call to that new supplier, we have, we're pitching more products, like straight-through processing, which we launched a year ago, right? It's really getting its legs under it now as well. We've now got about 120 suppliers on straight-through processing. On straight through. Yeah, on straight-through processing. It doesn't, that doesn't just drive revenue, it also saves us costs from a, you know, labor perspective. All right, I heard kind of that just-in-time process. I'm sure that helps with, like, connection rates, like suppliers willing to pick up the phone when they know you have their money. The multiple products, that makes sense. What happens over time? I mean, I know the supplier world kind of changes, people come and go, things kind of decay. How do you keep it, like, current? Yeah. We have two separate teams, right? We have our brand new suppliers that are coming in, and those are our JITs, right? We have 25 reps that are dedicated, or 30 reps that are dedicated to just that group. We also have our existing checks team. All of those suppliers that, who have been on our network and they have been on check, we've got them reaching out to that group as well. We also have an innovation team who is dedicated to marketing outreach. When you talk about, you know, what are we doing to sustain or make sure this is ongoing, we use all three of those groups to do outreach to, "Okay, we noticed you didn't swipe a card. What's going on? What has changed in your business? Mm. A lot of times, you know, when, let's say a small company grows to become a mid-market or a mid-market grows to become an enterprise supplier, their needs change. From an enterprise supplier perspective, just because they accept card, doesn't necessarily mean that they want to accept card for all of their B2B payments. Mike talked about this a little bit earlier on, business rules. Many times, those business rules have changed, so we need to find out from that supplier, how do they wanna digest their data? How do they wanna digest their payments as well? That's awesome. Thank you. Let me shift gears a little bit. I'm gonna brag on you a little bit again. Since you've been here, I think even in this moment, our output, so kind of the ARR that's captured per unit of input is up dramatically. It's the scale word that we've been talking about a lot. What, what's enabled that? Maybe just at a high level. There are a few factors. Number 1, it boils down to culture. Mm. I have really high expectations of our leadership team and our teammates. We've built a culture around accountability on what, you know, what you are accountable for, you're going to deliver on. We've made very clear targets. We redesigned the commission platform for this team. We upskilled our leadership talent. We brought in some new leaders from the outside, and really kind of hit the gas pedal on training and development. That's a big part of what's the driving factor for this team. I talked a little bit about process. I wanna know how the sausage is made. I wanna get in there and understand, like, how are things working today, and what are the areas we need to improve on? I don't know if you remember the conversation we had. It was about 6 months in. When I first joined the team, you told me, you said: "Listen, we don't need you to come in here and tell us everything is fine. You need to go out, don't make any drastic changes right now, but go figure it out." Do you remember the conversation we had 6 months later? I think I do. I said, "Get your checkbook out." He did, and he delivered. I said, "Dan, if we're gonna take this to the next level, there are some things that we have to do differently in terms of speech analytics, data analytics, predictive indexing." Right now, the team today is using predictive indexing to categorize or put into a workflow our I don't wanna call it low-hanging fruit, but our biggest pieces of fruit that we can go after. We're spending more time- Mm. on, using things like predictive indexing to understand who our suppliers are that will have the most likelihood to convert. We're still getting to all of the opportunities, but we're focusing on those biggest drivers. That's awesome. Great summary of kinda how you made that function. You know, since I, you know, I delivered the check and got you all the technology, I'm sure you're not done yet with scaling. Tell me what you're most jazzed about for the future. What's to come? Or are you not done, 'cause James has got high expectations, too, so. He does. How much time do we have? actually, one minute. Okay. I'll see, I'll see if I can squeeze it all in. I talked a little bit about what we've already done from using technology to increase our yield right now. What I'm really jazzed about is how we're going to start using data analytics, ChatGPT, AI, to catapulting us into the future. Our goal is to get to $1 billion, right? When we get to $1 billion, not if, when, that means we're gonna have a supplier network of 4+ million in the network. That technology is going to be critical for us to spend 0 time on the low-hanging fruit, if you will. Mm And scale this team, to more, you know, add teammates to what we have now, to focus on those higher value suppliers. I think, you know, when I think, 2 years from now, maybe even a year from now, how we can use pay transformation, to so Add it can position itself as more of a concierge-type service, where API integrations become part of the package. On the supplier side, too. On the supplier side. Very cool. Very cool. Thank you so much for spending time with us. Great summary. We appreciate you a ton. Good to be here. All right. Okay, that was gear 3. I hope that gave you a sense for not only what's to come as it relates to that product discussion we had, but also just to go-to-market. While our next speaker is getting micd up, I'm just gonna talk a little bit about gear 4 as an introduction. I want us all to think about a future, because gear 4 is probably our least developed kind of revenue generation engine at this time. We're kind of in that next S-curve that Mike talked about, where we're beginning to lean into gear 4. The way I usually think about this is when I think about as we achieve the vision that Mike laid out, and we're at 20,000 suppliers, and we start to begin to really get at scale with volume, and I think about the millions of invoices and the millions of payments. The amount of data that we amass when you think about all those invoices, all those line items, all those unit costs, all those volumes, all those geographies, all those connections between buyers and suppliers, the opportunity to take that data and turn it into value to deliver back to both our buyers and suppliers is absolutely immense, something we haven't even started on until now. Which brings us to the Gear4 discussion around Invoice Accelerator. Invoice Accelerator is that, really that first at scale moment where we're taking the data that we understand about both buyer and supplier, and we're creating value to deliver for our suppliers and buyers in a different way. To kind of give you a tour as well as a brief demo of Invoice Accelerator 2.0, I would like to welcome Becky Hughes. Becky? Thank you. Thank you. I am live. Okay. I have approximately 5 minutes to impress you. I'm going to do my best. Becky Hughes, 2 seconds about myself, a little bit of background. I am one of the few people who've had the extraordinary privilege of being part of AvidXchange's journey over the last 15 years. I joined as a part-time invoice scanning girl, inside of the AvidBill Network Services, part-time, $8 an hour. We don't publish that, do we? Over the following months and years, I had the opportunity to move into servicing our customers, then implementing our customers, and I had the extraordinary honor of standing by Mike's side as we launched AvidPay. I got the chance, knowing everything I knew about suppliers and just being passionate about suppliers, to start our very first supplier growth teams. I was in his office as we defined our JIT discovery model together. We did our very first AvidPay Direct calls together in that same office. We launched the AvidPay Direct offering, in 2019, I shifted my career into product and technology, where since then, I've had the opportunity to support the launch of our virtual card straight-through processing. More recently, our brand new modern supplier portal. Now I get to stand in front of you and talk to you about Invoice Accelerator. The 2 things that I think are most important that I hope everyone just takes away from getting to know me is when you hear us talk about our background and just our cultural belief in investing in our talent and investing in our teammates, those stories are my story. That's important to me. The second thing you need to know is that Kelly and I rival for second most passionate person when it comes to suppliers in AvidXchange, second only to Mike. Let's go ahead and jump into it. As you've heard Mike mention before, we see our supplier financing opportunity, market opportunity, to be a $20 billion market opportunity. Super excited about that. As part of our 5-year strategic growth objectives, we expect to watch that product offering grow to a 75%+ gross margin, Yes, gross margin, and achieve 5% of our total revenues as an organization. I'm going to go into, in just a few minutes, how we're going to make that happen. First, I wanted to share a little bit about what that customer's experience might feel like. Instead of talking you through that, I thought it would be better if we would just show you. If you're wondering, I do have that soundtrack on my Spotify playlist. I just play it every morning as I'm rocking my way into the office. Let's touch a little bit on how we're gonna help those growth objectives occur. First and foremost, you've heard so far that we've had an Invoice Accelerator offering, limited offering, inside the market over the last few years. You've heard Mike share before, there are three key strategic advantages that we found, learnings from having that product offering in the market. First and foremost, it has a very high repeat business. The moment these suppliers feel the value of receiving their funds as quickly and early as possible, they get addicted. They stay with it, and they absorb the cost as just a natural cost of doing business. Let's play with that. The second thing is that AvidXchange's ability to understand our network transaction data makes us uniquely positioned to be able to discreetly underwrite risk and understand risk analysis in a way most other external funding sources can't. The third is that with our AvidPay services and AvidPay payment network, we're strategically positioned to be able to intercept payments without buyers having to change any aspect of their processes. Through their natural course of payment processing, we can simply recoup the funds and continue opening up new opportunities out to suppliers. We took those three key learnings, and we turned them into the product offering's key strengths, and we doubled down. First, let's start at the top. We are introducing a modern self-service digital experience. With 24/7 access, suppliers will be able to enroll anytime on their schedule, setting up their notifications, setting up their preferences, and significantly scaling our sales capabilities for growth and adoption. Speaking of preferences, the second thing is we built on top of the set and forget in that repeat business behavior, and we've created configurable set and forget capabilities and default settings during the enrollment and throughout the experience of the process to build on repeat business behavior that comes already natural to our supplier businesses. This allows them to be able to create settings in order to maximize the adoption of or the advancement of their eligible invoices without having to do anything more, and also improves our conversion rates. This is all only possible because of the investment that we've made in better understanding our buyer behaviors and our invoice, approval, and workflow transaction behavior inside of our network. Using machine learning and real-time risk analysis, we've applied those risk analysis capabilities across our ecosystem to a broader population of our supplier market, opening up more available market, more eligible invoices, and strengthening our ability to intercept the payment when the payments are coming back in through the network. That reduction of losses is what's gonna help drive our margin improvement. Finally, when you pair those capabilities together with enhancements, such as instant and real-time payments, as well as data enhancements, data gathering, and integration capabilities, you get an absolute recipe for success. We'll have the best opportunity to extract value for ourselves, for our customers, and we'll do it all through a fantastic customer experience. All right, that's my time. I hope you are impressed. Dan Drees, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. Let me just wrap. I've got just a minute. I said before, gear four is probably our most nascent category of growth opportunity. Invoice Accelerator 2.0 is gonna be the kind of the flagship, but there's more that's coming behind it, and I thought I would just reference in that same kind of framework, what's next and what's later. AvidAnalytics is live now. That's now 1 year old. We're really getting to open up the aperture. We've got some priced versions of AvidAnalytics. You've already heard about Invoice Accelerator. I'll just hit on a couple others that I think are gonna be really, really interesting. One of them is called Discount Optimizer. Today, many suppliers offer standard discount terms. On an invoice, it'll say, "If you pay me in 10 days, take 1% off the bill." If you're a buyer, you would love to take advantage of that, but it creates an accounting nightmare. Is the invoice $100, or is it $99? Which one do I put in? What AvidXchange can do is we can actually optimize that. We can actually pay that invoice ahead on behalf of the buyer, capture that discount, deliver some of it back to them, and then optimize and automate the accounting for them, so they don't have to do the cross-tabbing. That's Discount Optimizer. We think that's in our future in a short time. The second one is Due Date Manager. I kind of referenced it before. Remember, we were talking about invoice automation, capturing due dates? The concept of going to suppliers and saying, for a particular buyer or for your whole book of business, what if you got every single invoice paid on time, and we just made that happen, being able to price that into an offering for suppliers is definitely in our on our roadmap for next. Then, you know, kind of the later, and this is us always thinking about the future, we know at scale, gear four has tons of opportunities for marketplace services. Some of the first use cases are really, really simple. It's just us simply saying, "Hey, there are other suppliers in your geography or that fulfill the need that you have that are preferred by AvidXchange." Maybe that's a particular relationship we have with that supplier. Maybe they're an STP, straight-through processing, virtual card vendor. We can begin to offer up those suggestions to buyers for them, you know, take that same concept, that single use case, and expand that into broader marketplace services, which we know is in our future long term. A little bit on gear 4. I would just wrap it up before we go to a little bit of Q&A to say, lots and lots of opportunity happening right now and next in each of these gears. I hope you've got a good flavor for what we're all about in each one of those areas, happy to answer any more questions, either now in this section or at the breaks. Thanks for your time on this product tour. With that, I think we're gonna do some Q&A, right, Mike? You're coming up? Yeah. We got Darren. Please repeat the question once again. Yeah, I will repeat. And we got- Darren was pretty quick to put up his hand. How did, how did Darren jump the line so fast? That's amazing. Guys, thanks for the time. I just had 1 quick one on the supplier side. I'm trying to just better understand how well you understand your suppliers. I mean, we think of your buyers as your primary customers as of so far. However, the supplier side looks like a big monetization opportunity. Number 1, when we think about whether it's Invoice Accelerator or other products you're alluding to, whether it's the marketplace, et cetera, how tangible really is that, number 1? Number 2, it's a huge number, right? You have, what, almost 1 million suppliers. Maybe give us a little context of who you know of that million, really know. The second piece of that is, you know, Mike, you talked earlier about the suppliers choosing a payment based on data and experience, or effectively... Yeah Y ou know, payment and not price. Can you just expand on that a little bit, of what kind of data they get and. I'll take the first one. experiences of different, in terms of that payment worth their while? Dan and I will tag team this a little bit. The first one, the question is, and you said 2 parts, but I think you had, like, a 4-part question. You know, analysts are good at that. The first one is, you know, how well do we know our suppliers? I would say, we know them pretty well from the standpoint of, for all our suppliers, in front of that front engagement process, we're capturing their business rules. That even goes to, you know, paper check suppliers. When you get to, you know, electronic payment suppliers, for virtual card, we're getting very specific around, you know, how they want us to deliver the data and the reconciliation data to them, and the mechanisms to do that. It could be through our straight-through process. In cases where we're doing that, there's, you know, agreements involved, as well as on AvidPay Direct, they're signing an agreement with us to be in our closed-loop network in AvidPay Direct. We actually settle through ACH+, but it's an electronic payment that bundles your admin's data, delivered in the format that they want it, and there's an agreement that governs that. In, you know, a big chunk of those, they are actually executing agreements with them. In all cases, we're capturing business rules for them, and then giving them an opportunity through Cash Flow Manager to manage their business rules over time as well. That, I'd say, you know, I'd say is kind of the customer engagement side. Maybe Dan, you know, talk about kind of within Invoice Accelerator, the how big of an opportunity across our million suppliers? Yeah, I think, maybe just to underline the first one. I think, Darren, if we're answering your question in the right angle, I think about the dimensions of knowing them are: what's their ERP? Because we know that's going to be material when delivering data. What's their, what's their preferred delivery mode for their payments? Then what are, if any rules they might have, restrictions around delivering that. Like, if we know those three things, we also have an idea already of who their buyers are and how those relationships are going. That kind of comprises it. When I think about, when I think about Invoice Accelerator and segmentation, is that kind of like where is it really going to fit and where isn't it? You know, there's definitely a continuum on sophistication. If you look at where our kind of MVP product really played, it was smaller entities. There's some vertical concentrations that I think, you know, are interesting to us. I think as you go up the level of sophistication, we're going to need to begin to adjust things like price, because, you know, our CFOs at the higher level of sophistication might have more of a cost of funds model that they're trying to trade off. I think in the short term, you know, 20%, 30%, 40% of our market is going to be really interested in a product that works as well as Invoice Accelerator 2.0. I think after that, as we just kind of test and learn, and we start to begin to, you know, offer different bits of functionality and features along with the price point, I think we'll kind of figure it out. Okay. Russ, go ahead. Two questions. I'll start with one and then ask the second one, if I could. Let me read it here. I wanted to go back to this near-term opportunity you referenced, right? Going from, what, 42% ePay- Mm-hmm 50, 60, 70. One of the biggest barriers there is trying to motivate folks to move off of check. Your competitors, again. Yeah the buyer, they can motivate the buyer to move away from check by charging. Right. You're, though, not necessarily charging the buyer. How do you motivate a supplier? Yeah to move away from check? That's the confusing thing. I kind of recognized as you were asking your question, Darren, was like: "Well, Mike, you left off my last question that I asked." I'll work, the answer is really the same one. Yeah. That is, the biggest learning for probably, you know, Becky and I, when we were sitting in my office making those phone calls, originally, because we thought price would drive the decision. When we offered, started offering our AvidPay Direct, we're like, 'Okay, this is going to become the majority of the enrollments.' Then, you know, at the time, like, you know, two-thirds of suppliers, so about 70%, were still selecting AvidXchange, you know, our virtual card offering. We're like, 'This doesn't make sense,' because it's priced at twice the amount of our AvidPay Direct. Then, what we came to understand was, the first kind of lens that they use is where they've automated a process on their side. For example, if they have a lot of retail traffic, they've probably then really gotten good at accepting card-based payments, and they've really automated that. Then, like, their first reaction is, "Oh, we have a dedicated process for that. We don't really have a process for your AvidPay Direct, we'd rather do a payment method that we have a dedicated process for. That's actually more important to us than saving a little bit on the price." That's, you know, kind of what we came to understand, as well as the data. The most expensive transaction a supplier has is one where they get the payment in, we know about this because it drives our internal team here, you know, Joel's team, crazy. When we get paid, you know, by, say, an ACH transaction, and the supplier has, you know, 5 invoices outstanding, they're paying 2 of the 5, and then we can't figure out which 2 they're paying, right? Then we have to call the supplier, and then call our customer back, and we have to go back and forth, and that becomes a really expensive transaction, right? If getting the data, then they can do auto reconciliation, is really important for them. Business process, data, and then price, are kind of those three, are really kind of part of that mix. Still today, you know, I look at the numbers every, you know I get a data pack every Friday afternoon. It's the best weekend reading we have. Every Friday, I'm just like, you know, still two-thirds of suppliers are selecting virtual card, you know, still today, and it's because of those reasons. Go ahead. Wel come back to you, number 2. Okay. You'll have to repeat the question again. Go ahead. Yep. As you kind of get more into, more capital management type products, you know, where's your risk appetite in terms of actually incurring settlement risk or credit risk on behalf of your customers? Is there a threshold that you're not kind of willing to cross, or are you willing to kind of leverage your balance sheet to kind of step in a little bit more to expedite some of these processes? Well, maybe I'll just start. I think the question is, as we're delivering Invoice Accelerator, some of these cash flow products, what's our risk appetite? One is, one of the reasons why we've been in the market for a couple of years with our kind of Invoice Accelerator, you know, version 1 off, is that we wanted to really get right the data science. One of the things that we came to recognize, actually, the data science is much more, right than the financial underwriting piece. Really understanding the relationship between the buyer and supplier. Although we're technically underwriting the supplier from a, you know, that's who we're buying the invoice from, we actually care more about the financial wherewithal of the buyer who's paying the invoice, because all the money's flowing through our network, and so we can just recapture it as it gets paid. It's a little bit like, yes, we're buying the invoice from the supplier, but we really care a lot about the financial payment dynamics of the buyer, and we have all the data science to support that. We feel really good about, you know, that, you know, eligibility underwriting, to have, you know, to execute this at scale at very little risk. Having said that, we're also planning to take this off balance sheet. We've had, you know, all our, you know, existing bank partners, KeyBank, Fifth Third, Bank of America, you know, here seeing me, it's like, you know, it's like every four or five months, it's, I'm on a follow-up list. Like, "Mike, how's Invoice Accelerator going? Are you ready to take it off balance sheet yet?" The reality is we have to, you know, maybe get those balances up to about $50 million or so before it really makes sense for us to set up a wholesale line with one of our bank partners, but we will be taking it off balance sheet. Okay, we have time for one more question. Go ahead, and then we'll do further Q&A with Joel again. Thank you. I guess my question, kind of a nerdy math question, but if we move from 42% to 55%, let's say, in the next 3 years, that's roughly 420,000 suppliers of the 550,000 suppliers, right? Just if we take the roughly million, that's about 3,000 a month. I guess the question is, are you seeing evidence today of about 3,000 suppliers a month kind of shifting to ePayment? I guess, you know, what's the evidence that you can kind of do that? Dan's going to have probably a little different perspective. One thing I'll say is all suppliers aren't created equal. Different suppliers have different volume levels. Certainly, you know, as Kelly said, you know, we're focused on our predictive indexing, you know, where the highest value suppliers are based on volume levels as well. That's, you know, that's number one. We are enrolling, you know, high volumes of suppliers today for that perspective. The ultimate piece of it is, that pool isn't static because James and the sales team keep bringing in lots of buyer customers that are bringing thousands. Every customer brings, you know, more and more suppliers with them that make up that 30%. When we go into new verticals, well, we don't have the benefit of the 70% that's on our you know, our network already, that starts at a lower level. We're constantly adding to the pool. I would say that we have a lot of confidence in that engine to deliver, you know, thousands of enrollments a month, for sure. All right. All right, we're going to have to take more questions with Joel again. I mean, you guys will want to, I'm sorry. Yeah. We're switching gears? Yeah. We'll introduce our next one. All right. Thanks for that time. All right. You're going to introduce, Joe. All right, while our next presenter is getting mic'd up, I'll tell a story about him to stall. Same theme around scale. About 2.5 years ago, I've known Joel Feldman for longer than I probably should share, 20 years. We spent time together at Bank of America in payment operations, and I was selling lots of things. Since that time, we've run into each other from time to time. His last role was Chief Operating Officer of Capital One's retail bank. John and I got to talking one day, he thought it would be really fun to figure out how to help a fintech scale to the level that he's been at other large firms, and we're super thankful to have him on board. Welcome, Joel Feldman. Thanks, Dan. Can you do that? Yes. Thank you. That's yours. That's actually Mr. President. Thanks. I'm really excited to be here. I lead the service and fulfillment organization. A brief bio on myself. I have been in financial services, almost 40 years. Started with Bank of America, had a long run there before going to Capital One, and then joined here three years ago. Hopefully, what you take away from that is, he doesn't look that old. Anyway, primarily my roles have been really operations, product management around payments. The last 20 years has really been focused on payment transformation. When I spoke with Dan, the opportunity to come and actually capture lightning in a bottle one more time, it was just too exciting to pass up. Why are we talking about operations today? I'm hopefully going to leave with you really three important topics around how operations impacts our added teammates, our customers, and our shareholders. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go through and do a double click on our buyer life cycle and how SFO engages our customer throughout that process end to end. I'm going to talk about our baselining, our financial span of control, and how we impact the cost of revenue, which is something I think you all care a lot about. The last thing I want to talk about is really our guiding principles around modernization, and then how we are tactically executing against that now and in the future, and what the results that we expect to see from that standpoint. The life cycle of the buyer customer, you have seen this a few times today. We begin the process at the conclusion of James and his team's sales process. Our customer engages with our onboarding team. We have, on average, 175 customers in the onboarding process at any given time, and it ranges from the simple processes or tasks around education and training, end user testing, to things that are more complicated, as we've talked about earlier, around ERP testing, and the like. The timetable tends to be about 30 days for simple pay deals, upwards to 90 days for more complex ERP types of transactions. When a customer goes live with us and we start receiving invoices from the suppliers, based on our customer's AP cycle, we'll receive anywhere from 100,000 to 225,000 invoices a day. They will come to us through 5 different set of ingestion rails, primarily electronic. 92% of them are electronic, primarily email. The other 8% still come to us snail mail, that we scan and upload into our indexing platform. You've heard a lot about AvidCapture today, IDC, Intelligent Data Capture. 85% of our invoices go through that platform, reducing the amount of keystrokes that we have. The other 15% go directly to offshore resources. We have a follow the sun model around our indexing, which creates tremendous value to our buyer customers, because if we get the invoice today, it will be ready to be uploaded and payments generated tomorrow. A 24-hour cycle time. Moving on to payments. Once the buyer approves the payments, we will run it through the business rules that Mike and Dan have talked about. We have 12 different dimensions within our 3 modalities of virtual card, APD, and check. When that process concludes, we go through our treasury funding process, where we originate an ACH transaction against our buyer's bank account with the offsetting credit that comes to our funding account. We then begin the execution process. We will start post our card creation process. We will distribute the cards. 80% of the cards are handled in an automated manner, 20% are handled manually. Both file and secure email are pure automation. Online keying and IVR dialing is a mix between human intervention and RPA. Last but not least, we will still pick up the phone and call a supplier, give them their virtual card number for them to be able to process it against their merchant account. The last two modalities, APD and check, are automatically generated out of AvidPay at the end of the night with APD ACH file that we clear through our clearing bank partner, and then check files that we send to several check printers that are located geographically across the United States, that will print the checks overnight and then be put in the US Post Office tomorrow morning. Now that I hit the last 2 things, we have 2 horizontal teams, one around customer service. Part of that is the technical support side of the organization that handles more of the ERP support and our software support. The other pieces are around what I'll call simple service requests. I need a copy of a check, stop payment, what's my pay status? The last swim lane is the enablement functions within my team that are helping us drive our modernization processes around data analytics, process and change delivery, our operational risk team, and quality assurance. Span of control of the operations team. We are 72% of the cost of revenue within the company. The other 28% is a mix of technology, some of the recent purchases of the company and IA. Primarily, it sits in my world with, three-quarters of that cost pool. I'm going to walk you through quickly just the process we went through earlier. Our buyer onboarding, we have 100 AvidXers, that, are part of our implementation process, and, you know, that is a very manual process today, and I'll touch on this later, how we're looking to automate it, going forward. Invoice operations, 14%. This is a mix. We have 100 FTE, but that's only 20% of our, cost pool within invoice operations. The other 80% is leveraging offshore resources, again, to follow the sun model and allow us to accelerate speed of, getting the invoices processed. Our treasury and back office, operations, 24%. I don't want you to, get bowled over by that number. 17% of that expense is our bank fees, our clearing, ACH clearing charges, and this is where our check printing and postage is. The lion's share of that cost pool is check. Well, we print the check and mail the check, and the majority of it, believe it or not, is postage. Mail's just getting slower, and we make up for it by having it actually be more expensive. Last but not least, virtual card operations at the end of 2022, we were total, AvidX, staffed. As we are today, a third of our resources are offshore, and by the end of the year, we will flip the model. A third of it'll be onshore, and two-thirds of it'll be offshore. The horizontal functions, customer service, 25% of it's our technical support function. The other 75% around service, and then 5% is the enablement and change functions of the team that's helping us generate and attack the other cost pools. Let me now go on to how we are modernizing our shop and the guiding principles for us to drive scale. When I joined nearly 3 years ago, the first thing we did was look at our process health. We did a health assessment across all of our operational processes. We did process maps and other Lean Six Sigma tools to look at our processes, reduce variation, and by doing that, we were able to create centers of excellence. As we went through that process, obviously, we began to think, all right, what do we need to do to take friction out of the process? What do we need to do to automate? What do we need to do to digitize? In areas where we're not able to automate right away on our roadmap, what can we do to offshore in a follow the sun type of manner to extract speed and cost benefits by leveraging the offshore model? We use all three of these in a very complementary manner, the way we pull the levers. As I mentioned earlier, we're at 80% virtual card automation. We were at 60% the end of 2020, and through RPA and other technology tools, we've been able to grow it, and we're looking... we're slightly over 80% today and hope to be at 90% over the next couple of years. IDC, we've mentioned that earlier, 85% of our invoices are going through the IDC platform. We will be at 100% by the end of the year, that's not the end of the process. It's really the beginning because, as Ann mentioned, once we get all those invoices into the system, we will be further tuning our models to improve the hit rate, further reducing human keystrokes in our indexing process, which, of course, increases speed, reduces costs, better quality. Eliminate paper. I don't know if we need to say anything more about check. I think we're good on check. Obviously, invoices that still come in to us that we scan from our suppliers, we continue to work with them to send it to us in digital manners. Follow the sun, the ability to leverage strategic partners, and how we do that. I mentioned teammates earlier. You're all probably wondering, how do we manage morale as we're doing offshoring and automation? First of all, it helps to work for a really growing company. Unlike other companies that are flat or declining, and then offshoring and people are losing their jobs, we're actually able to do this model through automation and follow the sun, leveraging attrition. Associates that are in operations, we are still progressing them through higher kind of level jobs as they advance in their career. We are very transparent as we talk about our outsourcing model. What are our results? The left side of this chart, you'll see we have a $0.23 reduction in our cost per transaction. This is all cost of revenue, not just my world. We also are able to convert more of our cost pool to a variable status, which we view as costs that change based on the transaction fluctuation. It's what we pay our offshore partners, it's the bank fees, it's the check printing costs, Azure, Microsoft. It also is our hourly employees because they're much more kind of a transactional type of role within. Then, our fixed pool is really roles that don't fluctuate based on volume, or we don't add based on volume. Let me take you quickly through where we are in our process. In invoice, we are in the or I'm sorry, we're in the late innings of invoice. It's our most mature operational work stream with the technology and the sourcing. We still have more levers to pull. I talked about how we will tune the models in IDC, then we're also bringing additional suppliers into the mix. Needless to say, anytime you bring more competition into the process, you will see reduced costs. We're introducing a champion challenger model, we're already beginning to see some improvements there. Around pay, continuing to drive the virtual card automation, as I spoke about earlier. We're also moving to the champion challenger model, which we're seeing some very positive results. Then we've talked about earlier significant revenue upside by moving from check to e-payments, significant cost reductions. It is my biggest cost pool, is the printing and mailing of checks. Services, early innings here. We're with the opportunity to look at our servicing environment, both on onboarding and our servicing, to be able to use a follow-the-sun model, especially around case resolution and whatnot, where we can use the time zones in our favor, to be able to take care of our customers. Again, generative AI tools, we think there's significant opportunity around knowledge management and self-service and things of that nature, to be able to take care of our customers. Those are the things that we're doing in SFA to improve quality, cost, speed, and risk. With that, I am taking you guys to a break. All right, let's go ahead and come back together. All right, welcome back from break. Let me pull this down. My name is Todd Cunningham. I'm I'm the Chief People Officer here at AvidXchange Exchange. I'll spend about 10 minutes double-clicking on how we think about our culture and its linkage to performance. Quick background. I've got 35 years of experience in human capital, public, private companies, different industries, different sizes. Thank you very much. I could use that. Most recently, before AvidXchange Exchange, I spent 10 years at Bank of America, in different leadership roles in the consumer bank, as well as the investment bank, and also in the global technology and operations function. I've been at AvidXchange nine years now, through all of that experience, my main focus and passion has always been around culture and driving performance through culture. It's not the soft stuff, it's the hard stuff, few companies figure it out. Let me tee it up first by talking about what differentiates AvidXchange from other companies. There's really three things. First, it's our experienced leadership. You all got a chance to engage many of you last night with different leaders. You're seeing today our leaders at different levels. You're getting a chance to engage with them there's nothing that gives me more happiness than seeing our folks in action. Beyond the content and experience and the knowledge, I feel pretty confident that you're sensing the energy, the commitment, and the passion. We've built a phenomenal leadership team that understands growth stages of different companies, and that's what we're applying in the journey of AvidXchange. The second way we differentiate ourselves is we're winning the war for talent. If you go back to 2018, 2019, it was a red-hot job market, right? It was a war for talent. We had unemployment at 50-year lows, and it was a grind. Now, fast-forward through COVID and post-COVID, it's moderated some, but what hasn't changed is it is a red-hot market for technology skills. We still have a global shortage of tech talent, and we're winning that war. We've doubled the size of our tech team during that period, and I'll share a little bit more data-wise on that. The other way we win the war for talent is, quite frankly, all of us sitting right here in Charlotte, North Carolina. 23 years ago, when Mike made the decision to make this our home, we have leveraged not only becoming the premier employer here and leveraging the talent base that's here, but we have 25% lower labor rates than other key regions of the country, when it comes to tech talent, and we use that to our advantage. Third differentiator is our industry-leading teammate, engagement. We'll talk a little bit more about this, but if you look at just even last year's Gartner benchmarks for high engagement, we're well past that. That's been consistent before COVID, it's consistent after. Actually, just last week, Gallup came out with their latest study on last year worldwide companies on engagement, and most found themselves dipping on engagement as they came out of COVID. We found ourselves continuing to increase. We see that also as a competitive advantage. Highly engaged teammates across the board are committed, and they deliver, and they perform. Quick snapshot of my team that delivers the performance and teammate strategy for the business. From the left-hand side, talent acquisition. Obviously, their job is to hire great talent, but also their job is to onboard that talent as quickly as possible. We want people ramping and performing quickly here at AvidXchange. Secondly, talent development. We don't want to hit a plateau on performance, you heard it from our own people, and you heard Becky talk about her own personal experience around development. We want people who are hungry to develop and grow, to keep getting to different higher levels of performance. Total rewards is all about making sure that we acknowledge and reward performance. Top talent, high performers expect it, and we want to differentiate it here. Then finally, we've got talent business partners on the front end of the business, partners with our leaders, embedded with our businesses, making sure that we're getting the most out of our talent to drive our business strategies. Really, what I'll spend a little bit of time is just here: What's our talent strategy at AvidXchange? As I said, summarized, probably the best is one word, performance. The objective of our talent strategy is around the individual performance, team, and organizational performance. The way we do that is focusing on our culture. Again, I think you experienced it last night and today. There's a couple of dimensions I want to talk about here. One is the authentic part of our culture. A lot of companies talk about an aspirational cart culture. They talk about where they want to be in terms of behaviors and who they want to become in terms of their culture. That doesn't work. Teammates sniff that out fast as inauthentic. What we talk about is our DNA and who we've always been, and that's the authentic part of who we are. It's our behaviors that we bring out every day, and we live by those behaviors that were true back in 2020, and they're just as true today in 2023. Through that, people experience who we are, and they experience it as candidates, they experience it as teammates. The second part of our culture is deep connections. The way we think about that is, if you want performance and accountability, which is what we all want, you've got to start at the bottom then, with deep connections among your people. The best way for me to describe that is for each of you to think about your own deep connections, right? We all have connections, whether it's family, friends, coworkers, but we have deep connections with those people, and in those relationships, you have high levels of trust. In those relationships, you've been through some good times, you've been through some bad times. You get through on the other side, stronger together, right? You challenge, you debate, you argue, but you come out and you have high expectations of one another. You perform together, you win together. That's the easiest way for me to describe the culture at AvidXchange: true, deep connections in order to drive performance. We do that with candor as well. That's why you see the care plus candor. If you're gonna care for somebody, again, in our closest relationships, that's where it gets uncomfortable. That's where that person shines a light on the parts of us that maybe doesn't show up great every day, right? Those deep connections rely on the candor and the care to drive performance. The outcomes are listed. We want teammates that join AvidXchange because they're making a buy decision for our culture. That's really the product. When teammates go to a company, they're buying the product of the culture. When teammates stay at a company, they're rebuying it every day. It's the teammate experience, it's the culture that they're purchasing. We want highly engaged teammates. We want teammates developing their performance over time, and we also want to keep those teammates. Now, the thread through all of this, and you saw it in the video, you heard it today, whether you realized it or not, in some of the words. The thread through all this is our shared mindsets. Those three mindsets describe best, again, who we've always been. Connected as people, and I've already talked about that. Growth-minded, this insatiable need to get better, both personally, we focus on it as a team, we focus on it as an organization. Just this need to win. This, you know, we don't win it every day, but the competition, the competition of business, the game of business, is part of being growth-minded. Just customer obsessed and really being passionate about solving big problems. We know when customers win, we win. Those behaviors are what we hire for, what we recognize and pay for, and then ultimately, it's what makes the best of our best stay. That's how we think about our culture. If you're part of a performance culture, the next question you should be asking yourself is, "All right, so what? Does it matter?" How do you know whether that gets you what you say you want it to get? What I thought I would do is share a little bit on how we ended 2022 last year from a technology teammate perspective. Key group of teammates for us. Just to share a few proof points. Number one, we hired tech talent in 2022, 32% faster than the tech industry as a whole, and we had 13% higher quality of tech hires than the industry as a whole as well. We're not giving up speed for quality. We're hiring people 41 days faster than the average in the United States in the tech industry. That's a competitive advantage. That's what I mean by winning the war for talent. Those tech teammates have 28% higher engagement than industry benchmarks in the tech industry. Those tech teammates make a rebuy decision every day to stay at AvidXchange Exchange. 32% lower turnover of our tech teammates than, again, the Gartner industry average for technology. Those are the benchmarks we hold ourselves to. That's the outcomes of our strategy around people. Final thing I'd say, because I can't talk about performance without all of the parts of performance. Performance to us doesn't end at the doors of AvidXchange. Performance we take into our communities, and we help our communities grow and perform at higher levels as well. A couple of quick things on this slide as I wrap it up. On the right, when we went public in 2021, we joined a group of companies. Right now, it's around 3,000 companies across 60 countries, who have pledged 1% of their issued and outstanding shares to be donated back, and invested in their communities over the next 10 years. We're proud to say that we did that as well when we went public, and we're investing that across the communities we serve. A great example of the work we're doing is on the left. One of the major issues that we have in Charlotte, but we have it across the country and as a nation, is the growing technical divide. We still have too many pockets of people, families, who do not have access to good computers or computers at all, and do not have access to great internet. Obviously, the school systems and the workplace, you're gonna be at an economic disadvantage, and that's one of the major hindrances of economic mobility. AvidXchange is proud to be one of the leaders with other partners in Charlotte to help provide refurbished laptops that companies provide to give to the school systems here, to give to underprivileged youth and families. We've also provided over 10,000 brand new laptops as well. In fact, across the street right over here in space we provide, is a nonprofit who is right now today refurbishing laptops for the community in Charlotte. The people refurbishing it are underprivileged teenagers who are learning how to work with computers and refurbish computers. Lastly, 2 years ago, we put an internet antenna up on top of our headquarters to provide free internet to the local community. We've got a grade school just down the street. We've got some underserved communities close by, and those are communities who are leveraging our free Wi-Fi through that antenna. Again, another way we think about performance is helping our communities perform at higher levels. With that, it's my privilege to introduce Angelic Gibson. She's the Chief Information Officer. It's perfect that she joins me now because Angelique is the leader responsible for the results I just shared from a teammate perspective in technology. Angelic? Thanks, Bob. Very thoughtful. It's a total team effort. I have an incredible leadership team that works with me, as well as my amazing peers that you've been hearing from today. Good morning. It's still the morning. Can you believe it? Are you awake? Yes. This is the most exciting part of your day. You get to hear about technology. Are you excited? Yes. Okay, good. I love energy. Yes, I'm Angelique Gibson. I have had the opportunity to serve Avid for 4 and a half years, leading technology. That includes all the technology that we build and take to market, as well as all the technology that we deliver to our teammates to run our business every day. Prior to joining AvidXchange, I've served in technology at large for almost over 25 years. I've worked for organizations including Sleepy, now known as Mattress Firm, leading digital transformation, helping them go from $150 million in revenue up to $1 billion in revenue, having systems to scale. I've had the privilege of running global manufacturing systems for Estée Lauder. I've worked for American Tire Distributors, the largest tire distributor in North America, all in which I served in the capacity of leading digital transformations and driving high-paced innovation. The last decade of my career, I've been focused in building SaaS platforms that can scale for Fortune 100 companies, and now AvidXchange for the last 4 and a half years. It's super exciting to be here. Clearly, you understand why I'm excited to be here. You've heard about a lot of the product innovations that are taking place. My organization is the delivery engine that makes that happen. When we talk about technology today, I'm going to peel back the covers a little bit and show you how strong the engine of technology delivery is. Starting with, what is our vision for technology? It starts with innovation. If we are not innovating, our competitors will eat our lunch. This is number 1. All the innovation that you've seen us deliver to market to date, and our future innovation has to be delivered. It has to be delivered with predictability and high quality. I'm stuck on tape right now. Okay, automation. You've heard from Joel Feldman. We are all about increasing our gross margin. That is going to come through increased scale through automation. Recognition. We want to be known as a company that is a thought leader, not just in the world of accounts payable automation, but also leveraging emerging technologies and building world-class technology that can scale. This is happening. Many of my colleagues in technology, we are invited into some of the best platforms in the world to actually share how we are building and deploying technology that scales. It's super exciting. Our talent, we want to be known as the best place to work in Charlotte from a tech perspective. Not only Charlotte, we want to be known as the best place on the East Coast and every market that we have presence in, as well as every home in America, because why? We have hybrid working now. We know that we can do well. This is really starting to come to reality. We are known in Charlotte as a curator of great talent, and the good news is, we get to not only curate great talent, but they stay with us. That's amazing. Lastly, this is all underpinned by driving performance. Again, our saving ratio in technology has to be high. We have to do what we say we're going to do because our commitments drive the gross margin improvement and revenue opportunities that we have been talking about all day long. With that, what is the structure of the team that makes the magic happen? Starting on the left-hand side, you have your traditional architecture and engineering teams. These are the teams that are designing, architecting our systems for today and the future, and building those systems to get into market. Platform delivery and operations is the team that's supporting the production systems once they're ready and deployed in production. They're also building automated infrastructure for self-servicing to the engineering teams. What do I mean by that? It used to be that we would physically stand up hardware so you could deploy technology, too. Those days are gone. It's all through automation now, so our engineering teams save a lot of time by having self-service infrastructure capability to help them go further, faster. Our teammates across the organization, we service them in technology through teammate solutions. Lastly, all of our processes are undergirded by a process efficiency team that really helps remove friction from the system, making us go further, faster, while protecting quality. How are we doing when we talk about that performance? If you look at 2019 to 2022, we have had marked productivity improvement in the world of technology. The 4 key metrics that are on this screen, delivery lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and mean time to restore, are the 4 critical measurements that DORA, DevOps Research and Assessment, puts out as the most 4 critical metrics to look at to see if you're a high productivity organization. You will see in 2019, we had some work to do. We were low to medium performing. We are now in high, we're in the high productivity of benchmarking, which is phenomenal. I want to call out that with the delivery lead time being medium, we actually choose to control that throttle. What is delivery lead time? When something is actually built and ready to go to production, how fast can we get it to production? We choose to slow that cycle intentionally. Why? Because we are in B2B. Every time we push change, we could have an indirect impact on our customers. We want to be sure that our customers can actually handle the change that we're getting ready to push. We're super pleased with where we see ourselves from a performance perspective today. R&D breakdown. R&D is obviously the heart of... It's the fuel that makes innovation happen. How are we doing with that? We know that teammates want to be innovating. If you're a software engineer, you don't want to be spending the majority of your day keeping the lights on. You want to be able to work on new products that are going to create future value for the organization. Here we are sitting at 64% of our R&D time is spent in innovation. That is a really good target to be hovering around. With 21% focused on maintenance, keeping the lights on, an additional 15% in the world of making sure that our teammates are educated to do their jobs, and also adopting the new capabilities, like self-service infrastructure that we're building and putting into place. All the innovation that we do is undergirded by the best-in-class technology partners that we have in place. We do believe in partnership. We don't need to build everything, but we partner through strategic relationships and ensure that we have a world-class tech ecosystem. Lastly, I will close with AI. Who's thinking about AI these days? Is everyone thinking about AI? I know we are. AI is not a new topic when it comes to AvidXchange. We've actually been working in AI for quite some time. You've seen this show up in products that we talk about, AvidCapture. Dan mentioned it earlier. It's about how we ingest our invoices, and we use artificial intelligence to actually take the data off the invoices. You're hearing us talk about leveraging AI in Invoice Accelerator, as an example. De-risking our, you know, acceleration of a payment, AI is there. Now, we're in this world where AI is showing up in every conversation with the explosion of generative AI. This is where it gets really exciting, because this is just a sample set of the different use cases across our business, where we can really create value by leveraging technology like AI. The real thing is generative AI is simply this: if you have a human being and you have a piece of technology that can run alongside that human being to generate content, it's a copilot. You can pretty much imagine every role across the ecosystem of AvidXchange, to some degree, will have a positive impact through the use of AI. We're super excited about it. We have multiple use cases already in production using generative AI, and that will continue to grow over time. With that, I think that we are going to pause and actually. Sorry, yeah. Yeah. Actually, we're going to actually fast forward to lunch. What we'll do is when we come back from lunch at 12:20 P.M., we'll have Joe present, and then we'll, and then we're going to do actually a Q&A for you, okay? Great. Cool. All right, great. Thanks. We're going to fast forward. Yes. With that, for those who didn't hear Subhash, we're cutting the fireside chat for now because we want to create more opportunity at the end of our day for Q&A. We're going to pause now and break for lunch. Thank you. Get all your AI questions done for sure. Yes, bring your AI questions. Thank you very much. I have tape all over my shoes. Yeah, I was curious because I don't know. Let it be known that you have tape. I got a battery problem? Testing, testing. Can you hear me? We'll give it a sec. All right, Mike, we're gonna jump in. Mike, doesn't feel like we're coming through? That's what they were saying, too. Hey, Kevin, Now it is, and it's not. It's real, very low. Let's see if, once you guys pipe down, whether you can hear me. Can you hear me? Exactly. Don't pay attention to what's going on behind. Hi, everybody. Trust me. All right, we can get started here in a minute. Subhaash, Mike, it's really the Avid team. Hey, are you with me? All right. Thank you for your attention, most of you. Okay, close to all, almost all, and now all. First, announcement from Meryl. Yes. Okay, if you checked your luggage, we are going to start pulling luggage around 12:30. If you wrap up at 1:00 P.M., wherever you checked in to get your badges this morning, your luggage will be there. We also have transportation- First floor. First floor. Thank you. We also have transportation arriving at 1:00 P.M. to the airport. If you need transportation, we have confirmed that we're going to leave around 1:15. They will be down there starting at 1:00. Yeah, right. The hard stop is at 1 o'clock? Yes, correct. Just the shuttle is going to leave by 1:15 P.M. Okay, thank you. Excellent. How's the mic? Can you guys hear me okay? Great. Okay, 'cause all your voices competing with the mic. All right, we're in the home stretch, and as your food coma sets in, now we're gonna get into the numbers. As Subhas said, we're gonna do 1 P.M. hard stop. I'm gonna go call it 20, plus or minus, and then we're gonna Mike, and Dan, and others, we're gonna come to the front, and we're gonna finish with Q&A. All right, sound like a plan? I know many of you, but I will still introduce myself, Joel Wilhite, CFO. I've been with AvidXchange for about 6 and a half years. A long career, but the last 20 of which, helping fast-growing mid-sized companies build, grow, scale, and go from private to public company. This one, by far, the biggest opportunity and the most fun team. Really pleased with the opportunity just to be here in front of you guys. Let me jump in without really covering these numbers, just kind of a look back of the overall financial profile. By now, hopefully, you have a better sense, a little deeper sense of how the business works. You certainly have an idea of this isn't the Joel and Mike show. We have a really deep, experienced management team leading this company and delivering these results. By now, hopefully, you have a deeper appreciation for that. By the time I'm done with you will hopefully have a better sense of our midterm targets, long-term targets. It's been a couple of years since we've talked about that, so we're gonna click into that for you. I'm gonna spend a few slides on revenue, starting with fairly simple and just reminding the model, and then I'll move through gross margin, operating expense, and profitability. I'm gonna do all this through the lens of a Rule of 40, as Mike suggested I might at the beginning of the presentation. All right, sound like a plan? First, let me talk about our revenue model, but just connect it to the flywheel. Mike and Dan spent a good bit of time on the flywheel. Hopefully, that's landing and clear. I wanted to use our sort of, P&L, you know, line item and link that back to the flywheel just briefly. Obviously, we are, about a 70% mix of payments revenue, 70/30, payments and software. It's really important to understand that you don't have the payments opportunity without year one and year two to start with. Providing great AP automation software, having a ton of integrations across ERPs, across the middle market, gives us that payment revenue opportunity. Those two line items obviously work together. Software revenue, quite simply, is transactions processed, so all the transactions across the buyer's AP automation platform, all the invoices, all the payments, times a fee per that transaction. We enter into long-term contracts with buyers. Standard contract duration is roughly three years. On average, it's just shy of two. I bet James is gonna help that average get right back to closer to three. Multi-year contracts with buyers on a usage-based model constitutes our software revenue. All right. Hopefully, that's fairly straightforward. Think software revenue, year 1 and year 2. Payments revenue is really the monetization of the TPV. That's the sum of all the AP files at the end of, you know, 9,000 and growing buyers, AP automation process, and that's the TPV moving from buyers to their suppliers. The degree to which a subset of that, 42%, I think it was in 2022, with the belief of sort of meaningful growth over the next few years, in terms of e-payment penetration, yields, payment revenue, and you can sort of, you know, back into TPV yield. A couple things just to point out as reminders, our interest revenue, float revenue associated with funds moving between buyers and suppliers is also included in payments revenue. Finally, Invoice Accelerator, you know, today, 1% of revenue, over time, 5% of revenue, that also lands in payments revenue from a geography standpoint. Finally, the reason why we, and you have heard me many times point back to transaction yield, because it's really of all the metrics we report and talk about, it's really the most important when we think about really monetizing and we think about the power, and the future, and the value we offer to both buyers and suppliers, we think that, you know, taking that, you know, looking at that transaction yield, is really the most important all-encompassing metric. Hopefully, you have a little bit of sense in how the model works, how that connects to the flywheel. Before I go much further, let's just take a look at the historical trends of those key metrics over time before we get into looking forward. Total transactions processed from 2019 to 2022, 16% CAGR, $70 million last year. Total payment volume over that same period of time, about a 34% CAGR to $68 billion in 2022. Keep in mind that the total transaction number is all the transactions on the platform, all the invoices, all the payments. Payments number is a bigger number. We were a software company for 10 years before we introduced payments. We've also made a couple of acquisitions that give us the opportunity to sell payments back to an install base. While a smaller subset of the total transactions, payments constitutes a faster-growing portion of those transactions and correlates to the TPV growth. Net transaction retention. We've talked about our sort of health and expansion of our platform. Net retention is a measure that's important to us. It's simply measured as transactions that existed a year ago, the degree to which they still exist today. It's basically, you know, organic growth, net of any natural churn that's happening on the platform. 4% last year, we've talked about, you know, 3%-5% is roughly kinda normal. Finally, transaction yield. From, you know, low $3 back in 2019 to mid-$4 last year, and obviously, we saw that continue to expand in Q1. In fact, even stripping out float revenue, which was also a meaningful contribution in Q1. Hopefully, that gives you a little bit of sense in the history and the progression across our key metrics in the business. What I wanna do is hit a couple points on revenue before I move through the rest of the P&L. Just a reminder, and really, you probably absorbed this in Dan's conversation, we have really strong visibility. It's a usage-based model for sure, but the consistency across thousands of AP processes and payment files gives us really good forward visibility in the base business, and our selling and adoption cycle also gives us visibility as well. By now, what we're selling today really doesn't impact revenue this year all that much. It's we're building revenue for 2024 and going forward. Hopefully, you get a sense of that. When we sell a contract to a buyer, Dan talked about this notion of total sales value. We think about it as roughly a proxy for an annual or really a monthly value capture. From the point of time we close that contract to 60-90 days later, after we implement the buyer's processes, map their workflows, and then following a period of sort of bringing all those payments on and maximizing the adoption, not just bringing all the buyer's transactions on, payments on, but also sort of recruiting and optimizing the supplier e-payment penetration, it's about, you know, 4 quarters out from the time of that contract being sold to the time we're at sort of full adoption of revenue. Good visibility, from a revenue standpoint, very quickly, also very good diversification across our revenue base, both from a customer and a vertical perspective. Obviously, we got started in real estate, but I would say about real estate is you really have to think about that in terms of 5 subverticals. Corporate real estate, corporate, retail, multifamily, student housing, and also sort of industrial warehouse type real estate. Very different real estate markets, so diversified even within that base. And then increasing diversification as you move through to 2022 and beyond. You see that, you know, the acquisition of the media vertical 2 years ago, 1 or 2 years before that, financial services with the BankTEL acquisition. You can see real estate as a percentage is shrinking, but overall, and also now with the hospitality vertical added, as we announced in the first quarter. Good vertical diversification. From a customer standpoint, top 30 customers represent right around 10%, so really, strong diversification. What I'm doing now is pulling together some of what you saw in the presentations that we've given already, and wanna connect the dots for sort of a first introduction of some medium-term targets for us, right? We've been clicking along, giving guidance for the year. Haven't really shared beyond that since the IPO process. What we're sort of proud and confident to do with you guys today is talk about a medium-term horizon of the 2025 year, and share with you guys some targets. Again, over that 19-22 period of time, we've grown about 28%, 6.5 of which is from acquisitions, but otherwise, a solid base of underlying organic growth to 20%. Just leveraging all the gears on the flywheel, the sort of the delivery that you've seen coming through the R&D organization, the acceleration that you heard about from a sales perspective from James's vantage point, and continued opportunities to drive that yield, we have a lot of conviction and confidence around that 20% growth target for 2025. Obviously, that's half of our Rule of 40 story that we'll keep going and get to the punchline as well. Gross margin. We've been talking for... Mike and I have been talking probably 5 quarters about the path to profitability, maybe 6 quarters, not far out of the IPO shoot. What we said... Since the IPO, whenever it comes, it was a bad idea. I'm just gonna keep going. What we said when we started that conversation was, as we approach the 70% ZIP code of gross margin, at that time, we'll begin to see leverage in some of the OpEx lines, which we'll get to in a minute. With that 70% gross margin number was really important for us. We were very proud to deliver our first profitable quarter in Q1, 67% non-GAAP gross margin. Good progress over time, but we know we have headroom, both in unit costs and opportunity from a yield perspective, to get to a 72%-75%. You might imagine Mike has some very specific recommendations about what that point target should be, but a range will suffice that we think we're in that kind of low 70s, approaching mid-70s range by 2025. Together with operating leverage, we're on our way to that Rule of 40 profile by the time we get to 25. Specifically, if you sort of break down the elements of operating leverage, you know, again, James talked about really bringing a lens, like we've been at it for 20 years, and, you know, as a private company, what I hope you see is really moving into a focus on really efficiency at scale. You saw the CAC to LTV view that James provided. I think we really have an opportunity to continue to fuel the growth engine, take advantage of the partnerships that we see in front of us, and also move that sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue into kind of the high teens. All right? From an R&D perspective as well, we're on the back end of a multiyear meaningful investment in some of our platform modernization together with an acceleration in the product delivery that we've experienced already and that we see ahead of us. Together with the efficiency metrics that Angelique shared, gives us confidence that we are gonna bring R&D into that kinda maybe high teens or, you know, maybe a point or so lower than what I mentioned for sales and marketing. Finally, G&A, we're already seeing it now. We expect to gain significant leverage in G&A over time. Altogether, moving from approaching 80% of revenue in 2019, 50%-55% in our medium term, targets for 2025. Okay? Simply put, if you put all that stuff together, we have conviction around the 20% revenue goal. What I will say is, as we commented in the first quarter, we are in a little bit of a macro season of moderation by buyer spending. We expect that that exists for the rest of 2023. My projections assume that we come out of that in 2024, full disclosure. Otherwise, we see, really, you know, good confidence in that 20% organic growth rate over the next few years. Continued gross margin expansion, the operating leverage that I mentioned, and we go from a Rule of 40 of, you know, 0 in 2022 to 40 in our medium-term kind of time horizon of 2025. Following that, we've sort of managed expectations and communicated, hopefully already, that 3 or 4 quarters post-EBITDA profitability, we see free cash flow turning positive. By 2025, we see about a 10% free cash flow, 10% of revenue. As a reminder, the bridge is basically including facilities, lease interest, of course, all the interest income below the line, and our capital spending, you know, normal CapEx plus capitalized software and obviously working capital as well. Just to sort of bring it home and, hopefully making some time for some Q&A here at the end, I wanted to sort of refresh our long-term targets. The last time we did this was a couple of years ago. We're sticking with and high conviction, and this business generates 75+% gross margins. Again, I'm moving now, just to be clear, from the 2025 year to a 5-year out, I think 2028. 75+% gross margins with upside potential there. We think we're at least an EBITDA margin of 30% and consistent revenue growth over that period of time. A huge opportunity ahead of us to capitalize on growing our volume, increasing our yield through all the strategies we talked about today, resulting in a Rule of 50 business five years out. I actually motored through that to create a little space, knowing we have a hard stop and an appetite for some Q&A. I might invite- I'll have the team manage it. Yeah. Dan. All right, we'll go with James Sutton first, and then we'll go with Brian. Okay. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Don't forget to repeat the question, please. Sure. I wanted to ask a couple of follow-up questions on the financials. First, can you talk a little bit about this compounding growth of 20%? I think you guys had that as a target for a long time, but there tends to be, like, some volatility, particularly around, like, political cycles, it seems like. How should we think about that on a year-to-year basis? I've got to imagine that tamps down, basically, that becomes a smaller part of overall revenue, but over what time frame? Yeah, I'll take that one. Yes, that's the answer to the very last question you asked, but going all the way back to the beginning, what we've talked about over the course of our earnings calls is, like, what's that growth algorithm? How do you What are the components of that 20%? How does that happen over time? What we've said I'm sorry. Can you please repeat the question? All right. Sure, Josh, I'll repeat the question. How about that? The question was, help me understand how you get the growth that you've described, the components of that growth, and what's the impact of things that are more cyclical, for example, political revenue, over that period of time. We've talked about our growth algorithm as simply three dimensions. One, you know, not just retain, but expand the transactions that we have on the platform. Number two, adding volume to the platform, selling new logos, executing year one and year two, and growing that way. Finally, seeing yield expansion, right? We've talked about whether it's ePay penetration, whether it's the contribution of Invoice Accelerator. Dan talked about other year four ideas that really add monetization opportunity to volume that already exists on the platform, so immediate yield enhancement. Those three things work together in an organic way to give us confidence that it's a 20% grower over time. What I will say is, political is a component of the business. You know, it's a subset of our media, our media business, and I think we generated something like $8 million-$9 million of political revenue in 2022, largely nothing this year, and then expecting a really big, you know, political cycle next year. That's factored in. You know, we account for the ups and downs there. I think over time, as a percentage, it begins to become less, less impactful. Just to be clear, we should be thinking about the in those political up years, that could be moving growth rates around 2%, 3%, 0 to- It could. It could. Every other year, and then over time, it gets diminished. Right. Right. Right. Right. Yep. The follow-up question is on profitability, EBITDA expansion, obviously is really attractive. How do you think, though, about, like, the rank ordering, the leverage you need to pull? Because you've had a lot of benefit from flow, and you've got to imagine that flow improvement going forward is probably a lot less than what we've seen in the last year to year and a half. Yeah, here's the way I would answer that question, two parts. One, I'm open-minded about. The question, please. Right. You'd think I would learn that. Yeah, now I'll repeat the question. The question is, to what extent do we factor... Sorry, stupid. Yeah. I'll just say, how do you rank order the levers. In light of flow. EBITDA to compensate for lower flow growth? Yeah, yeah, good one. What threw me off, is I wanted to start with flow, because I think it's reasonable to get out there. It's been a meaningful contribution to our revenue. It will for the rest of the year, in a high-rate environment, it's a nice feature in our revenue model. Our midterm and long-term projections do not you know assume that there's continued high interest rates. We haven't modeled it with settling out in the high 2s, around 3 from a Fed funds perspective. That, you know, in the grand scheme of things, that's a, that's a headwind as that turns around. Rank order of operating expense and how we think about that. I think I would just go back to, you know, we're seeing it already from a G&A perspective. A lot of the build and investment to, you know, we're a money, you know, we're a regulated business. We're now a public company. The investments in the control infrastructure and the PCI support and the leadership structure have largely been made, a lot of confidence, and we're seeing that leverage already from a G&A perspective. I think the next place I go is, we're really seeing. I think Angelique pointed the way to sort of seeing the opportunity there from an R&D perspective, what we talked about with Cat. Honestly, I don't know if I would rank order any of those. We believe all of those will occur in good time, we're comfortable with those sort of supporting the projections that we're sharing. Sorry, can I just want to ask for clarification? Your assumption on flow, though, is a Fed funds rate of, like, 2.5%, even into the medium term? Did I understand that right? High twos. Like, think about it as high twos. Okay. Yeah. Brian? Yeah, just, maybe a two-part question. Obviously, as an analyst, I got to ask a two-part question. Just first, maybe an update on economic volumes, what you're seeing in volume spend, and how could that potentially, if things get worse or if things are moderating, could that impact the guidance this year? Just the sensitivity on that. The second thing is, as we increase the penetration rate we talked about today, is that gonna be more VCC, or will it be more on the APD side? I'll start. Yeah, just Brian, your first question is, update us, update us on the overall economic environment, the impact, the total payment volumes. Really what I would do is repeat what we said on our last call. We observed this choppiness that began late in the year. We've experienced it kind of month to month, and we've called out specifically moderation in discretionary spending across all of our buyer verticals. That hasn't meaningfully changed our guidance for the year, presumes it continues as is and doesn't get meaningfully better or meaningfully worse, and we'll keep you updated on our quarterly calls. Yeah. I mean, you know, I have the benefit of living through a number of these cycles, you know, in the past with AvidXchange. I think we're seeing this cycle play out very similar to past cycles, where you have some headwinds on discretionary spend through volume. At the same time, it becomes a really fruitful environment to add new customers. The customers are very focused on how they can be more efficient, how they do more with less, and getting the attention of CFO is a lot easier today than it actually, frankly, was, you know, a year or two ago, to automate, you know, key processes. The second question was on the mix. Yeah, the second question was on the mix, where we see the growth. What I'd say is, you know, the benefit of Mastercard, you know, kind of partnership, is it allows us to do a lot of unique things. In a lot of ways, we operate like a bank in terms of being able to really configure our interchange for different subsets of suppliers with different data packages. We have multiple forms of virtual card as well as multiple forms of AvidPay Direct. We see, actually, frankly, both payment modalities continuing to really, you know, kind of grow nicely as we see solving for, you know, different value propositions for different subsets of suppliers. Yeah, I think every one of those modalities that we kind of shared, the new real-time rails, STP, you'll see a more kind of off a smaller base, a bigger chunk of the growth, and then a transaction-based. M odalities as well. I'm not sure I could really pick a dominant one. I don't think, as Mike said, I don't think virtual card's slowing down at all, but I think kind of based on a smaller base, you're gonna get a lot of new penetration from those new modalities. Let's go to Craig, and then we'll go to Will, and then we'll go to the team. Yeah. I only have one more question. In the five-year plan, I believe you talked about impacting less than 20,000 buyer customers. That would mean material acceleration in annual growth in buyer customers versus what we saw last year. What's the plan to drive that acceleration? Yeah, I think what you heard regarding gear one-. Can you repeat the question? Yeah. primary drivers, question was, maybe a drill down on the primary drivers to achieve that higher rate of buyer customer logo growth. just going back to gear one and gear two. those new features that take us into new verticals, those new ERP integrations, that's the fuel to bring more buyers on. Great. Well. I wanted to ask a question. It seems like, you know, when you look across the P&L and the targets for 2025, you know, OpEx seems pretty straightforward. The biggest driver seems to be the increase in payment monetization and the efficiencies on operations. I guess, specifically on the payment side, 'cause I've heard a couple questions asked, could you talk about, you know, the levers and confidence that drive an acceleration of increased payment adoption over the next several years? I think that number has been around 40% for several years. What kind of causes that inflection into the mid-50s over time? You know, can you maybe talk about any initiatives that you have to really drive the inflection starting next couple years? Yeah, maybe I'll start with that. Yeah. Repeat the question. Yeah. The question is, you know, what are the levers that we have to increase that kind of payment monetization, that 40%, as we look forward to, you know, the next, say, several years, in the medium-term timeframe? One of the things it's important to recognize is that that number is kind of a gross number. As, you know, that number stayed in the 40% range for a couple of years, we've been adding massive amounts of new suppliers to the pool. If you actually look on a cohort basis, you see that number growing nicely, you know, 40%, 50%+ in the cohorts. We have a lot of confidence from, you know, that perspective. We're really starting to see that, the density of the flywheel occurring in those vertical markets, where we're getting much higher kind of penetration levels, is one. The second thing, we're really excited about some of the new levers that we have related to even Invoice Accelerator being applied to our entire supplier pool. In order to get access to Invoice Accelerator, you have to be on electronic payment with Ali. It's a great incentive for suppliers to make that shift. We also have the generational, you know, tailwinds that, you know, every day that goes by, there's more suppliers that now make the decision, "Okay, we should start, you know, accepting different forms of electronic payment," and that's only going to accelerate. You may have Yeah, no, I retweet all of that. I would zoom in on... I love the way the question was phrased: Where's your confidence? The same confidence that is derived from the fact that 2 years ago, we were talking about AvidConnect, and by the end of this year, we'll have 80%, 90% of our integrations on AvidConnect. The same way when we talked about building an AI-driven, you know, invoice ingestion system, that was 3 years ago. I feel the exact same way about how Next Gen Pay gives us the flexibility to position new payment rails, real-time payments, be more flexible with APD, and that's something we've never been able to do. We've had kind of this 3-product, you know, platform for suppliers. To me, you know, it's just like those other two platforms. Next Gen Pay gives us the flexibility to drive it. That's where my confidence is. Appreciate it. I guess just a quick follow-up to Joel on, just on the free cash flow guidance, the 50% cash flow conversion, how do you think about the scalability of that delta between, you know, cash flow margin and free cash flow margins, as you look farther out into the 5-year plan? Yeah, good question, I'm gonna repeat it. The question was, how do I think about that bridge, the scalability of the bridge between EBITDA and free cash flow? I'm really glad you asked the question because I think it really scales nicely. I think the degree of, you know, cap software that we add over time really stabilizes as revenue and earnings grow. I think that becomes, that bridge, becomes less and less prominent as a percentage. Tien-Tsin. Thanks. Thanks for hosting. I know the ERP integrations, I know we've talked about this before, it's important about for Avid, but a lot of the ERP companies are also looking to capitalize or monetize payments, including financing and working capital. I know, I think people have thought that they bought Taulia, right, as an example. I know that's above market. I think my question is that, is there tension as you're working with ERPs? I know that AvidConnect platform is a way to maybe soften that conflict, to help enable and drive revenue share, but is there a risk also that some of these ERP players are gonna wanna also swim in that same water and go after that market? How do you see that playing out? We're all like, "Who gets to go first? Yeah. across- Maybe we should bring Pat back up. Yeah, Pat, you want to tell him? Of course, when you have 350 ERPs, we're gonna run into pockets where those potential partners believe they can go on their own. We have a lot of those now. We've figured out ways to serve their customers as well. We know they're all on a journey, and at some point, as they remain or try to remain to be competitive, they're gonna look to other sources of people, companies like AvidX, where we can add value to their customer, just as Pat described. Do I think there's gonna be tension? Do I think there's some of that? Yes, I do. When you have a pool this big of 350, there's gonna be tension. I think the vast majority are gonna look to the innovators, just like Pat said, and we're always gonna be that innovator. As long as we're doing it better, they're gonna need us on the team. Yeah, I think, Pat, I articulated this, but when you're in ERP, you have lots of different modules, right? you're trying to serve lots of, you know, solve lots of different individual business processes. it's really hard to be, you know, best in class in one of those, when you have, you know, dozens of different modules that you try to be really good at. I think, you know, what we've seen the trend line is that, you know, accounting systems, ERP companies, they want to partner with us to provide that innovation to these business processes, because they know they're never going to be as good in one of those processes as we are with an entire dedicated company to one business process. Okay, let's go with Josh and then Tim. Thank you for this. A lot of great info. I wanted to ask a little bit about Invoice Accelerator 2.0. If you have that going to come mid-single digit% of your revenue, is that something within your long-term model, kind of back-end loaded, where you really need to get maybe some more volume before it really starts to ramp? Just want to understand a little bit, the shape there. Obviously, we get a lot of questions on B2B, right? It's a newer sector versus consumer, where there's tons of updated sources. You know, how would you help characterize maybe the discretionary mix, is really how we should think about the macro sensitivity, just because there's a lot of uncertainty. Maybe I'll take the AI question first. The AI question was, if we're going from 1% to 5% or, you know, mid-single digits over the course of this 5-year horizon, what's the pattern of that? I think the one thing that to point out is we did speak about that in terms of the 5 years, so we didn't speak about 25. I would say that, look, without being too specific, I think there's a little bit of a build, right? We'll come out of this year, in market, and, it may be that proportion of mid-single digit percentage by the 5-year out may be a little bit back-ended. You know, we're gonna, we're gonna ramp it as we see that it delivers on what we see it, its potential. I don't know if you'd add anything to that. I think it was well said on the Invoice Accelerator question. Regarding the macro, you know, kind of impact on discretionary spend, I think, you know, the way we look at it is these are middle-market companies. They're running their business every day. They're substantial businesses. Yes, maybe there's some headwinds on some of that discretionary spend, but, you know, when you look at the 9 verticals that we're in, these aren't verticals where discretionary spend's a big part of the cost structure. A A big part of the cost structure are, you know, kind of direct, contracted, you know, type of, you know, services and spending that they have. Discretionary spend's a relatively small amount across the 9 sectors that we're in. And I think we've seen, you know, that also play true in past cycles. That gives us, you know, some of that, you know, confidence that, you know, we're kind of seeing what we expected to see, you know, across how our verticals are behaving related to that, you know, kind of B2B discretionary spend guidance, which may be different, significantly different than, say, small business, where, you know, small business may think very differently related to turning off and on some of those spending spigots. You know, bigger companies, middle-market companies, it's more about, you know, they're running the business every day. It's just cutting back on some of those discretionary spend buckets. Tim? Great, thank you. A question is for Dan, and maybe Kelly as well, but when you were talking about the differences between virtual card and AvidPay Direct, you said virtual card is fastest and has the most data. Fastest part, we completely follow, right? 0 days right now versus 3 days. Could you just dig into the data part? What's the key to the difference? The question was, differentiate the virtual card data from APD data. At Exchange, we have a couple of different variations, but we'll deliver them data slightly differently between virtual card, but it's relatively the same. What I was referring to there, what we were referring to, is the fact that they also have their merchant data interchange. The merchant processor is also providing them data to their merchant interface, their portal. They actually kind of get it 2 ways. Depending on the customer, the supplier customer, they may standardize 1 way or another. They may just leverage the data coming through their merchant portal, or they'll leverage it from us. We give them a choice. Is that helpful? Yeah, definitely. Thank you. Ramsey? AI has come up a couple of times. It's very topical. I wanted to just ask you guys to drill down a little bit and help us think of it. It's been a part of your business for a while, but there's obviously a lot of talk about generative AI, maybe making that function change and capabilities. Where precisely does it help you? Could it help you? Where, how do you see an impact? I was surprised that some of the questions went by without the AI question. Just not to confuse people, because we've been talking about AI a lot today, which stands for accelerator. AI is artificial intelligence, right? you know, what we've been leaning into it for a couple of years. What's the question? The question is, how, maybe provide some insight on, you know, how we're currently thinking about leveraging AI and maybe some use cases and how we're already doing it, and some of the planned use cases for it. Did I get it right, Ramsey? You got it. Okay. We've been, you know, leaning into this, as Angelique indicated, for a number of years, both in, you know, in terms of Intelligent Data Capture, IDC offering on the front-end invoice, as well as how we deliver payments to customers using kind of bots and robotics. I challenged the team about 60 days ago as part of our executive team off-site on really how we develop all the use cases, you know, across all the different functions of our business. Angelique, you've been on the forefront of leading that charge, and I think you can provide some really good insights. Specifically, it's around generative AI. When we think about AI, just to clarify, I think about three critical things. One is human capital reduction, so the number of teammates it takes to actually do work. We use AI to automate keystrokes, human work, and that shows up in our business operations through bots. It shows up in indexing reduction through AvidCapture, et cetera. The next theme of AI that we have in production is critical decision-making, effective critical decision-making, where typically it would take a human to make decisions, we now have AI that can start coming in to make decisions for us. Examples of that is in the product Invoice Accelerator. Who do we actually advance payment to? The third category, where there's a lot of energy and passion and conversation in the market, is around generative AI, and this is where AI can actually did I say? No, I said AI. Yeah. Okay, I mixed it. Where AI can actually start to generate content on behalf of a teammate. What does that mean? If I'm an engineer, we're now using enterprise-class technology for generative AI called GitHub Copilot, which is where you can basically use natural language to talk to the copilot, which is an engineer, right? To say, "Hey, build me this service that does A, B, and C," it actually generates a foundational base of code. It literally starts to automate what engineers are doing. Same thing is true in testing. You think about automation. Am I building high quality code that my customers are going to expect? We actually can use AI to determine where we're gonna get caught up with quality issues. It's reducing our cycle times for quality assurance. You can take it through every teammate who is generating content, from a job description to marketing campaigns and demand generation, you know, increasing the efficacy of our marketing campaigns. You know, on open click rate, how do we start to drive higher and higher so we're more effective in our campaigns? We are literally, every function across AvidXchange has different use cases already in production. What we're doing right now, that Mike has charged us to do, is to get very intentional about challenging ourselves through every function, what are the various use cases, and then we're prioritizing stack rating, stack ranking based on value creation to the business to get after it in a very intentional way. Okay, we got time for one more question, Brent, and then we have to wrap it up. You had my question on the list a lot today. Yeah. We are absorbing T&E expense management, the AvidXchange Exchange card. How should we think about that new product potential, a catalyst in 2024, potentially before 2024? Walk us through the priority around a potential card. Yes. The question is: How should we think about future potential for spend management, travel, card, virtual card, mobile, et cetera? I clearly have it in the next category, so I don't know how far back in time we have to go to give an example of when we said next and then when things showed up. It's not a 23 thing. The conceptualization and the build and the resources are happening right now, and we believe that product is gonna have a significant differentiation in that it's already integrated into AvidInvoice, which means it's already integrated into the ERP, which means coding happens. That's the real key differentiator versus potential competitors, and we're excited about working on it. Cool. With that, in the last, you know, minute, I'll do a quick wrap up. I started today by saying we have four objectives for you guys. The first one was around better understanding of our business and business model, right? Hopefully, one thing you took away, again, purpose-built for the middle market, combined with the two-sided network that are building and have built to some degree, is really powerful. We're starting to see the flywheel impact of it, and it's showing up in that, you know, industry-leading best, you know, best-of-class monetization that we're getting, and we're only getting started. The second piece is around growth strategies, right? Hopefully, we gave you a number of things to kind of think about, including the last question on the T&E card was awesome. In terms of, you know, not only, you know, the things that we, you know, are delivering today, what's coming with Invoice Accelerator and the future products, that we certainly have a lot of energy around delivering, and how we have a lot of confidence around that continued, you know, 20% organic growth mantra. Not to forget that we have a massive amount of paper check suppliers that still haven't been converted, which not only adds to that monetization of driving revenue, but also nice gross margin expansion. The third being, you know, kind of the operational excellence side of the business. I thought Joel Feldman and team did a great job of kind of the nuts and bolts of the operations, and hopefully, there's not, like, one silver bullet that drives gross margin. There's, like, you know, dozens of smaller projects, and they all contribute to, you know, chipping away, but give us a lot of confidence around that long-term, not only gross margin, but also that Rule of 50 metric that we'll be using to, you know, as a scorecard of running the business. Lastly, the team. You guys see us, see me a lot, you know, probably too much on the kind of analyst circuit along with, you know, Joel and Subhash. You guys, there's an incredibly talented team that's behind us here executing the business, so hopefully you took away, you know, some of the insights from the rest of the team. With that, thank you for coming to Charlotte.