Last one of the conference, so save the best for last. Thank you everyone for joining. My name is Andrew Bauch, the lead analyst covering payments, processors, and FinTech here at Wells Fargo, and we are happy to be joined today by CEO Michael Praeger of AvidXchange. AvidXchange is one of the few B2B pure plays in the public markets today, and a name that we've followed for a very long time, even on the private side. And Mike's a guy I've known him for some time, and great to be here, and maybe it's- Yeah, that's right. I have a quick overview of AvidXchange and have you. Yeah. So first of all, I've been talking about this resort for, like, years, and as a friend, I've never had a reason to come here. So this is a great reason to be here. So, it was a pleasant surprise. So yeah, so those that aren't familiar with the AvidXchange story, I kind of describe AvidXchange as a software-enabled payments business, and we're a software company that automates the accounts payable and payment process for middle-market customers. And so that's really, you know, an operative word, that we're purpose-built for the middle market. We define the middle market as companies between $5 million of revenue up to north of $1 billion of revenue, and that's our sandbox that we play in. And so in addition to be built for the middle market, we also have various go-to-market strategies that are very vertical market focused, because about half the vertical market highly aligns themselves to an industry vertical that has unique either accounting process or business process to that vertical, that requires, you know, a unique industry-specific accounting system to support it. And so we like those type of vertical markets 'cause we can develop a very strong value proposition, and go very deep within those vertical markets. The second biggest difference that makes AvidXchange unique is I call the secret sauce of... We have a true two-sided network in which we consider both the supplier a core customer, as well as the buyer that uses our software. That's a really important differentiation because most people in our industry only think that they have buyers as customers, and the suppliers really come to receive a payment. We focus very heavily on providing an overall value proposition to the supplier around software tools, you know, helping them with their cash flow management, managing their business rules on the network, all those type of things. So it's an expanded value proposition, not just to come to receive a payment. We have about 1,700 teammates and headquartered in Charlotte. Great. So, I think we should probably just get the macro question- Yeah .. out of the way. You know, last quarter, one of your competitors had mentioned the middle market as being, you know, showing them certain signs of weakness, but then we didn't really see it in your results. So can you give us a sense on what you are seeing from the macro side? Yeah. And what has made, you know, your cohort of customers- Yeah more resilient than some others would suggest? Yeah. Well, so first of all, I think, you know, lots of different people have different definitions of what middle market is, what small business is. You know, as I said, we define it as companies between $5 million in revenue and over up to $1 billion of revenue as our- Established businesses. Established businesses. A lot of these are industry leaders. What we find in, you know, with our customer base, and again, we've been at this for 23 years, so we've lived through a handful of cycles in the p.st. This cycle is, you know, operating pretty much like the past, you know, kind of down cycles have operated, where middle market companies in a down cycle don't go out of business. They, you know, cut back in discretionary spend to some degree, and then when they have confidence on the other side of the cycle, that discretionary spend comes back pretty quickly. That's what we're seeing in this cycle. Where it shows up in our numbers is we have a kind of a metric that we, you know, publish every quarter, that's the transactions retained on the network, and we think in normalized times, you know, that number is kind of 104%-105%, and this year it's being closer to probably 100% because of that macro impact on kind of discretionary spend. We're in nine different verticals, so highly diversified, and people ask me all the time, "Well, which verticals are worse or better than others?" The reality is, we're kind of seeing discretionary spend kind of pretty, you know, evenly across all verticals. Mm-hmm. We wouldn't point to, you know, one particular vertical as being measurably outsized, necessarily. So, we're seeing it, you know, kind of across all verticals, but, you know, pretty much operating, you know, kind of, like we expect it to do. The other just, you know, kind of point I'll make is the current environment is both a kind of a headwind and a tailwind. So the tailwind, or the headwind, I should say, is what we just talked about, is some pressure in discretionary spend. But at the same time, the current economic environment is actually really good to add new customers. Mm. And we, you know, you know, just simply, it's a lot easier to get the attention of a CFO or controller around making their back office more efficient in today's market than it was two years ago, when it was more about, you know, revenue growth, and they weren't necessarily concerned about adding back office staff. Nobody wants to add back office staff today. They want to grow their revenue, but they don't want to add team, right? So how do you make it more efficient? So we play into that theme, and it kind of results where, you know, our top of funnel, you know, demand gen, you know, sales opportunities are up 12%-13% over a year ago. And we're seeing, you know, that continue strongly in the fourth quarter as well. Mm-hmm. Maybe we can think about the growth of this business. I mean, since the IPO, you've kind of pounded the drum as we are a 20% growth business. Yep. This year, you're going to come in slightly below, you know, partially due- Maybe. Partially due... Maybe, yes. We still have time. Partially due to com-... and, you know, some of the media elements that were in 2022. But thinking about the building blocks and your confidence in returning to 20% growth over time, maybe just remind us of those things that... Yeah - Maybe investors have forgotten about that will get you back there. Yeah. So first of all, you know, go to just, you know, start with the market opportunity, right? You know, just in the middle market segment, which is our sandbox, we're an industry leader, and 70% of the market has not yet made a decision about automating this business process. They're still processing paper invoices, paper checks. So, you know, we're still in the, you know, I don't know, bottom of the first, top of the second inning of the overall market opportunity, right? So then let's focus on the things that we can control, and those are gonna growth levers. I kind of think of our business in terms of a flywheel. When you know, the reason why we have so much confidence around, you know, not only 2024, but also delivering, you know, kind of, you know, the next three years is, you know, one is, you know, we have this unique element about our business that we're the industry leader also in political payments. That kind of dynamic happens every other year. Mm-hmm. Right? So we had it last year. We, you know, generated $8-$9 million of political payment revenue. This year, we don't have that revenue, right? Next year, we will, and we can argue or debate, you know, how much of an increase it's gonna be, depending on kind of how, you know, the political cycle plays out. That's one dynamic. The second one is on the sales side. You know, we're seeing really strong kind of top-of-funnel activity. I also think, you know, we have the benefit of really, you know, kind of when I say, building our sales engine and leadership to be a billion-dollar business. About a year ago, I recruited James Sutton. He was the Chief Revenue Officer at Gusto. Previously, that he ran, Google Enterprise, he was a sales leader at Google Enterprise, and, his mission was to build me, you know, the sales engine to be a billion-dollar business- Mm-hmm ... in the next four or five years. And he's done exactly that. The talent that he's brought in, we recently added the senior leader from Salesforce to be our head of sales or revenue operations. Mm. We're really, you know, executing well on the kind of go-to-market sales front. And so that's certainly gonna continue. We have some, you know, great new partnerships that are just launching. Yeah. I think today, actually, we announced the M3 partnership that now has gone live. We talked about it a couple of quarters ago in terms of our growth into the hospitality vertical as our ninth vertical, if we have for the business. One of our, you know, playbooks is, in launching a new vertical, we wanna align ourselves strategically with the top or the leading accounting system, or a couple of accounting systems that support that vertical. M3 is the leader for middle market, you know, kind of hotels and hospitality, so that's a great, you know, kind of partnership that we have that is going live, you know, as we speak. And then, I most recently talked about our partnership with AppFolio. Mm-hmm. And that's probably gonna be one of the biggest, most impactful partnerships that we have from the standpoint that they have 19,000 customers, of which we believe that about 50% are right in our kind of sweet spot that we look for as customers, and they're an industry vertical that we know extremely well, and, you know, literally every one of their competitors has already partnered with AvidXchange. Mm-hmm. We know that business really well, and we already have, you know, a good flow of AppFolio customers that already come to us, even without the partnership being announced. Mm-hmm. So, so we really feel really good about what that's gonna mean in the coming years. That's on the sales side, and then, let's get the product side, right? Because I'm sure it's on your list, Mm ... talk about Invoice Accelerator. If I could just cut you off, though- Yeah ... real quick. Did that 19,000 number for AppFolio, call it 50%- Yeah ... did you segment it out? I mean, that's a big opportunity relative to the 8,500 that are on your platform today. Massive opportunity. Yeah. Massive opportunity. Yep. Does that kind of play itself out in 2024? Do we see the benefits of that? Yeah. Or is that a 2025 type? I mean, see, here's what I'd say is, you know, kind of the experience that we've seen with other similar partnerships is the first year is a big educational year, training their sales force, you know, getting the marketing message out there, begin introducing it to their customer set. And the real growth, we see in kind of years two, three, and four. Mm-hmm. And then it becomes, you know, kind of more steady state growth, you know, kind of year five plus- Mm-hmm ... in a new partnership. So, so I think that's the baseline. I think there's lots of reasons why, you know, this could be accelerated just because it's in a vertical that we know so well. Mm. You know, but certainly, the sales team's pretty excited about it. I know James Sutton's really excited about it. Is the go-to-market motion any different for a big partner like that, relative to, you know, your, your standard? No. Where it becomes different is, we have kind of three different flavors of partnership. One is a kind of referral partnership, another one's a reseller, and the third one is white label. White label is probably the one that's the most different, where it's really dependent that our partner owns... They put their brand on it. They own the kind of the go-to-market sales motion, and we kind of more support them. In this case, AppFolio, it's a reseller. It's in the middle, which means that we are going to market jointly with them. Mm-hmm. And so that gives me, you know, more confidence, because the more we control of the sales process, we, you know, have a lot more confidence in. Mm-hmm. Some of the most, you know, probably more frustrating, you know, partnerships we have from my perspective is the white label ones, just because you're one step removed from- Mm ... the sales process, and, you're one step removed from, you know, how they do their sales forecasting- Mm-hmm ... and all those kind of things. So, we like, you know, kind of being in more control and kind of driving the narrative with any of our partners. You get some efficiency benefits from that, that joint effort, right? Yeah. So it's kind of like in the happy medium between the two worlds. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so, you know, certainly being in a vertical that we know really well- Mm - is gonna give us a lot of benefit. Great. I'm gonna lead you- The product ... lead you into the product side. Okay. One of the aspects of the story that I'm most excited about into 2024 is the launch of the new next gen payment platform. Yeah. I don't, I don't think a lot of investors really understand the benefits there. And we've been talking in the past about how- Yeah to be able to real-time price and some of those elements could speed up that, that- Yep acceleration of cash to digital conversion or check to digital conversion. Yep. But I'll let you kind of take the floor and- Yeah and highlight it. You know, so what Andrew is really referring to is, we call it a next generation kind of payment platform. But maybe a step back, kind of one step to, you know, kind of realize the importance of it. And so today, we're leading the industry in terms of payment monetization. Roughly 40% of all the transactions- Mm flowing through our platform, we're monetizing through either one of our forms of virtual card or what we call Avid Pay Direct, which is we settle through ACH, but we wrap the data layer, a remittance data around the transaction that we get compensated for. And that 40% is usually 2x, 3x, sometimes 4x what we see with any other competitor. So we're already at, you know, what I'd say, you know, kind of leading the industry in our monetization, but we kind of talked about at our Investor Day that we see that 40% going to 50%, 60%, up to, excuse me, 70% over time. And so how do we do that? And what we believe is, unlike in this consumer side, where you have kind of, you know, one or two different payment modalities that drive the majority of all the volume, that strategy doesn't really work in business-to-business. And what business-to-business, you know, I think the winning formula is solving very particular use cases for different segments of, you know, suppliers and how they want to receive their payments. A combination of pricing with automation, with the remittance data, and timing. Mm-hmm. And the kind of those, you know, four buckets or four categories, I think, you know, create different types of payment modalities for suppliers. To be able to configure those real time is what our next generation payment platform is able to allow us to do. Just, you know, with that, what, you know, things that we do is really unique on virtual card is because of our partnership with Mastercard, we're able to really set our own interchange- Mm-hmm - and create our own interchange structures within some guardrails that- Mm You know, Mastercard provides us. And so today, we're up to about 12 different levels of different forms of virtual card that combine those four elements. Mm. Versus mostly everybody else in the industry today has one form, which is kind of the, you know, standard Mastercard or Visa, you know, Virtual Card product that clears off rack rate interchange. That works for a portion of suppliers, but there's a big portion of suppliers where they need, you know, a different form of Virtual Card, whether it be priced differently, different levels of automation, different levels of remittance data. Mm-hmm. And so the opportunities that you could have had in the past were not necessarily lost, but didn't flow through the funnel as, as quickly as you'd like because of that human intervention element that would be required to bundle that pricing. Is that, is that the right way to characterize? Yeah. And frankly, because a lot of it was so... It would require such manual process, we actually didn't do it. Mm-hmm. You know, so now, to be able to, you know, kind of, you know, provide, you know, that type of optionality in terms of product pricing, as well as automation for suppliers, you know, we're seeing, you know... We believe that'll be kind of part of the recipe for, you know, success. You know, a good example- Mm-hmm Of that, you know, playing out is last quarter, we talked about a new payment modality in construction, where we solved the kind of the chicken and the egg issue with general contractors and subcontractors with lien waivers, and to be able to provide a real-time set, you know, payment settlement method that both sides had confidence in the process. Mm-hmm. Well, that's a very specific payment modality that was designed for the construction industry, and continue to create those type of use cases across all nine of our verticals, we think is kind of the winning formula. Mm-hmm. And so is it safe to assume that we see an acceleration of that digital conversion in 2024? And maybe if you could just remind us the, you know, the operational, buckets, that you have a savings element, right? Yeah. On the gross margin side. Plus, you have the higher monetization opportunity. Maybe if you could walk us through those two pieces. Yeah. So, so, you know, so I think it's, it certainly levers, like, you know, all these things where, you know, I think, we expect that there's gonna be, you know, kind of, you know, incremental, you know, kind of adoption growth, you know, kind of every year. I don't know, you know... We're certainly not gonna forecast any kind of, you know, you know, you know, kind of, you know, outsized kind of, you know, growth or any hockey sticks, you know, relates to this type of adoption. But I think it's gonna be kind of slow and steady, in terms of some of these adoption curves. But one of the things just to kind of remind people of is, on the supplier side, we have over 1 million suppliers on our network, and still today, 50%, so 500,000 suppliers, are still paper check. With a paper check, so on every transaction, we generate software revenue from the buyer, but on a paper check transaction on the payment network, we get zero revenue on the payment network, and we have relatively high expense. Mm. On average, say we've got $0.90 to get a paper check out the door, postage, printing, all the handling that it requires. When we flip that supplier from paper check to electronic, the $0.90 goes to $0.02, and the revenue goes from zero to $7-$10 per transaction. Mm-hmm. It's a massive lever for, you know, continued gross margin expansion, revenue growth, and obviously, profitability. I guess the natural offset is that when you have new customers coming onto the platform, you know, they're essentially 100% paper or, or- It keeps adding to the pool. Yeah. Right, yeah. So it kind of dilutes it on the- Right, exactly .. on the top side. Staying with product, Invoice Accelerator is always one that, that- Absolutely ... gets discussed. We have 2.0 version. I think it's already live, if I'm not mistaken. Yep, it's gone live in October. The question I get from investors often is, you know, how does it differentiate versus Invoice Accelerator- Yeah ... 1.0? And, you know, that remind us that pool that you kind of identified- Yeah ... where this could be addressable. Because it's a really interesting offering, as you said before, addressing the supplier side of the world as customers. Absolutely. So first of all, you know, when I think of our business, you know, kind of longer term, at scale, I think there's really three legs to our revenue model. One being software, which we have today, one being the payment network, which we have today, and the other one being supplier financing, which is at the cornerstone of Invoice Accelerator. And to me, it's our next $100 million business. So we've been in the market the last couple of years, and kind of maybe back up, you know, back in 2015, when we did our first kind of institutional kind of capital raise that Bain Capital Ventures led, we also came in a firm called QED, which is Nigel Morris's firm. Nigel was the former founder of Capital One, you know, with Rich Fairbank. Mm-hmm. What Nigel immediately said is, "Mike, you're sitting on a gold mine here in terms of providing, you know, financing to the supplier base, because what we struggle with at Capital One is it's really hard to do the financial credit underwriting of these small business suppliers. Mm-hmm. The second thing is it's really hard to collect the money because you're chasing all these small business suppliers, and in your model, both of them are on your network. You have perfect data and visibility into the history of these transactions, and all the money flows through you. Mm-hmm. So that was the cornerstone to launch, you know, our first version of Invoice Accelerator. What the 2.0 version does differently is, we've been working on perfecting the data science around what qualifies an eligible invoice to be accelerated. The second thing is our ability to recapture those payments as they're flowing through our network, so we can get, you know, reimbursed for those that we had advanced. And then the third one is make sure the user experience is, you know, what we want it to be. So, we believe that we got that right in our 2.0 offering. We're currently in the market, you know, kind of doing a slow rollout with customers to validate that- Mm-hmm ... and then looking forward to rolling out to all 1 million suppliers, you know, next year. Now, if you look at our 1 million suppliers, we think about 60% of them are kind of eligible for Invoice Accelerator, because about 10% of our suppliers are enterprise, maybe, you know, about 30% are middle market, and then 60% are small business. So we think this is a core 60%, you know, core offering for that 60% of our suppliers. Those economics are accretive to your business? They're very accretive. In a big way. I mean, I think, you know, we, you know, generate incrementally, you know, 250 basis points, you know, for an acceleration, and the average acceleration is outstanding for 23 days. Mm-hmm. Thinking about take rate, I mean, obviously, if, if Invoice Accelerator does take off the way you anticipate, you know, the take rate will expand over time. You know, you said 40-50 basis points is kind of near, like, the long-term, kind of terminal, resting place for take rate. But what about the other puts and takes other than Invoice Accelerator, should we be thinking about in 2024 and beyond? Yeah. So I mean, I think, you know, when we think of our kind of pipeline of innovation, you know, it starts by, you know, kind of what—how can we continue to increase the value proposition, you know, to our customers? And, and so, you know, one of the things that, you know, we, within the last, you know, 60 days, we had both our customer advisory board meetings for both our buyers and suppliers, right? So, you know, so a lot of their feedback is fresh for us. What buyers continue to tell us is, in terms of kind of new product innovation, is today, "Mike, we have about, you know, 85% of all our expenses in your platform, and really, 100% of all our invoice expenses are in your platform, but yet we have, like, 10% or 15% of our expenses that are, you know, travel, entertainment, expenses, employee reimbursables, that are, you know, in other systems like Concur or maybe like a Brex or Ramp. And, how can we get those expenses all in your platform so we can do, you know, more easily do expense reporting? Mm-hmm. So we can, you know... It's hard to kind of feed those into our general ledger, all those type of things, have everything in one platform." And so that's what we're, you know, designing in terms of in the market right now, is the Avid Spend platform, to be kind of the Divvy, Brex, Ramp, you know, for the AvidXchange customer base. The big difference is, those, they lead with a credit offering. Mm-hmm. You know, it's really geared towards small business, and offering kind of 30-day terms, like a standard credit card. Mm-hmm. Well, in the middle market, our customers don't need credit from AvidXchange. They have... You know, we're here at the Wells conference. They have, you know, large credit facilities from Wells and from other banks, and so they don't need credit from AvidXchange. They need more, a more, a better way to kind of manage their business processes and get all their transactions in one platform. So ours is more geared towards, just like our payment offering works, as they make a payment, we're getting compensated, we're pulling the funds real time. Mm-hmm. And so, we don't have that, you know, kind of credit element to kind of our platform, which we, again, believe is more attributed to the middle market. So that's certainly one of them. And then the second one that's also kind of, you know, in the kind of the research phase that we're formulating the business around, is actually creating vertical marketplaces. And what our suppliers tell us is, you know, the one thing that we could do to really help them, is help them sell more products and services to, you know, their existing, as well as new customers. And then, today, we have over $500 billion plus annually of transactions, of purchases going through our platform, but we're not actually originating those purchases. We're seeing it at the invoice stage. Mm-hmm. So why can't we create kind of that Amazon-like purchasing experience on the front end of our purchase order process? So not only can we capture the invoice, but then we're actually you know, capturing the original purchase. Mm-hmm. And so those are the things we're working on, that'll kind of, you know, be the next innovations after Invoice Accelerator. So it's, I guess if we could rank order the take rate tailwinds, so to speak, into 2024 and 2025, it'd be, number one, that conversion element, right? Mm-hmm. From, from- Paper check to electronic. Paper check to electronic. Yeah. And then Invoice Accelerator being the second, and then the longer-term opportunities, which you referenced. Absolutely. I guess thinking about the operating leverage and margins in this business, you said 70%-75% longer term on the gross side, and then you have the Rule of 40 algorithm that you're shooting for. Yep. 20% adjusted EBITDA margins in the longer term. We've always kind of well, thought of that, that longer-term targets, as the gross margin and EBITDA margin kind of gliding together in that, that rode up. Is that still the way we should be thinking about it? Yeah, I mean- Is there a reason why that would diverge? Well, one, I do think that we're probably gonna get more leverage out of our, you know, kind of operating expense infrastructure than, you know, probably people are thinking, and You made incremental investments this year, too, right? Yeah, I mean, what I would say is that, you know, we've been investing heavily in our platform. When Matt Harris from Bain Capital Ventures, you know, and led our 2015 round, you know, the first thing he said is, "Mike, this is gonna be a billion-dollar business. Let's get started on building the infrastructure, team, people, process, to be a billion-dollar business over time." And so we've been making those investments, and we kind of feel, in a lot of ways, we're on the other side of that. And I think, you know, for example, this quarter, we started seeing some of that leverage- Mm-hmm ... in terms of, you know, you know, probably surprised some people in the profitability side, as well as breaking through our kind of 70% gross margin threshold. And, you know, our next kind of milestone is 75% gross margins, and we certainly believe at, you know, scale, this is north of an 80% gross margin business. Mm-hmm. And then on the fixed expense base- Yep ... any kind of planned investments we should be thinking about that are in the cards for 2024? Yeah. Or twenty-five? I think, you know, it's all, you know, kind of, you know, part of our plan. There's nothing, you know, outsized that we're investing in, and I think, you know, what we're seeing is, you know, as a percentage of revenue, that these, you know, kind of investments are gonna continue to kind of trend down as our, you know, revenue base grows. Mm-hmm. But that's why I think we're starting to see some of that leverage in our model. Mm-hmm. Maybe if we could talk about competition quickly. You know, it's a name that it's hard to kind of spot who your direct competitors are. Yeah. You know, your closest peer is obviously playing in a different side of- Right, exactly ... of the market, and they're receiving a lot of competitive questions from, you know, be it the Intuit and the like. Yeah. But maybe you can kind of, like, level set. Yeah ... what, who you're going up against. In the middle market, one of the things is that we don't really have any competitors that cross over multiple verticals. So when we think of our competitors, you kind of have to go one vertical at a time because we have unique competitors that are, you know, in each of these verticals. For the most part, our competitors, they're not like one company. It may be, you know, kind of software automation companies. They're providing kind of the software automation and the AP automation within a vertical, and then you have a bank that may be providing kind of payments. And what we do is we bring both of those together in one platform that's highly integrated to their core accounting, you know, system. And so that's why we win. Mm-hmm. But I can't really think of a single example where we have a competitor there that, you know, crosses over multiple verticals. So it's kind of each vertical has its own competitive, you know, type dynamics. Typically, on average, about 50% of our opportunities, we don't compete with anybody. Mm-hmm. And then the other 50%, we do. You know, one of the names, you know, just, you know, headed off that we, you know, sometimes, you know, I get asked about a lot is a company like Tipalti. Mm-hmm. They're unique in a sense where, you know, they are very focused on international. Where we see them is where the company's usually headquartered outside the U.S.- Mm-hmm ... and they have a high degree of international payments. If they're U.S. domestic, and their majority of their payments are U.S. domestic, we typically don't see them as a competitor. Mm. You know, some very kind of uniqueness related to market. We also have less competition today than we did even when we were public, because some of the M&A, you know, activity that's happened has taken people out of the market. You know, Global Pay is a good example, about MineralTree. Mm-hmm. They used to be... We used to compete with them maybe 10%-15% of our opportunities. Now we, you know, we don't see them at all anymore. Really? I think they've just mainly focused on kind of the merchants of the GlobalPay business- Mm-hmm ... is where they focus. And so we have a handful of those other, you know, types of examples. Certainly Coupa, since they've gone private, has even reentrenched, you know, out of the top end of the middle market, more focused on just enterprise. Mm-hmm. That's a good segue to think about M&A. Are there capabilities that are not in your product stack today that you could see, Yeah buying versus building? And, and are those, are any of those competitors that are like, you know, adjacent or- Yeah somewhat competitive, competitive with you on the margin, are they, kind of in your, in your plans? So the answer is yes. You know, we've part of our, you know, playbook has always been, you know, tuck-in acquisitions. You haven't done it a lot. We haven't done anything since we went public, right? Yeah. But it hasn't been because we haven't been trying. Mm. It's just, you know, the market's been tough. You know, valuations have been a little bit upside down. But, you know, when we think of M&A, the playbook for us is very specific, and it's one that we've been very successful at executing. And that's we learned, you know, a number of years ago, that it's really hard buying small companies for product capabilities because, they're not built for scale, and so after we buy them, we have to rebuild product, and we're like: "Well, why don't we just build it from scratch to begin with," right? And so we've kind of migrated towards we like building our own products. However, we think, for vertical market expansion, it's a great playbook. So the ones that we've been focusing on is, you know, software companies that maybe probably haven't incorporated payments yet- Mm-hmm ... that are in a particular industry vertical that we like, and we can develop a beachhead of customers really quickly, bring our payment capabilities to it, and grow that segment really quickly. Mm. We've done that, you know, in a handful of examples, to date. Media. Media being one. You know, construction with the Core Associates, example being another. And then, you know, even BankTel in the financial services area. Mm. We're now up to, you know, over 2,000 banks actually use AvidXchange as their core AP and payment, you know, engine for the bank, so, for their internal payments. You know, we've been really successful with that kind of strategy. That's the, you know, kind of our playbook is really geared towards your vertical market expansion versus product capability. Mm-hmm. Maybe to backtrack a little bit, you brought up media. That's a vertical where you're at, I think it was 90% electronic payment penetration? Yep. What have you learned in media that you can apply to some of these other verticals who may be a little bit more stubborn to convert? Yeah as fast as you would probably like to run? Well, you know, it's a really interesting dynamic, and so, you know, kind of why is, you know, media such a high acceptor of electronic payments? And I think the underlying reason is because in media, across our nine verticals, it has the longest days outstanding of any vertical. You know, the average is over 90 days. Well, when you're dealing with, like, a 90-day days outstanding of an invoice, people are really focused on getting paid as fast as possible. Mm-hmm. Right? So if it's going to be paid in 90 days, they don't want another 10 days for a check to come, and they'll say, "Okay, I'll take a 90- I'll take an electronic payment, so I can get this thing paid," right? In our other verticals, we see the average days outstanding are more like 30 days. Mm-hmm. So you don't have as much of that, you know, that cash flow pressure, which I think is one of the best catalysts on reasons to move from paper check to electronic, is because, you know, just by moving from paper check to electronic, you probably gain an average of seven to 10 days of cash flow. Mm-hmm. But that's on average. In the media vertical, you know, they're gaining, like, 80 days of cash flow. Mm. So it's really more meaningful. Mm-hmm. We're kind of up against it here. So I guess the stock's been working pretty well since Investor Day, and so it was a great event, and the mess- Well, it's been up, like, 5% since I've been at the Wells Conference. The message- You know, can you guys have this, like, once a month? I would love to come back here once a month. But I guess for some of the investors that you talk to, I mean, what's the misunderstanding you think that you hear most commonly, or what's the question that you- Yeah get asked that you're surprised that they decide to ask? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, when I, when I look at kind of the top of our cap table and investors, you know, it's not surprising. It's actually the guys, you know, and, and, you know, the investors that have done deep work in the, in the, on the company. And I think what... You know, we're not a simple business, and once you start peeling back the onion, you start, you know, realizing, some of those structural differences. Because the headline, it's like, you know, B2B payments. Okay, well, there's lots of people that have the same headline. Mm. But once you kind of peel back the onion in terms of what is AvidXchange doing, you start realizing: Oh, they're really purpose-built for the middle market. What does that mean? How is that different, right? Oh, they consider the supplier a customer. What does that mean- Mm - and how is that different, you know? And when the people start understanding that, they're saying: "Oh, you know, AvidXchange is really building a really unique moat around this middle market segment that people don't realize, and this is going to be, you know, a 20%+ organic growth business for a very long period of time- Mm-hmm is the conclusion I think most people come from, or come to, once they do the work. Well, we are out of time, and so because we have to go back to New York and 30-degree weather- Yeah. Tomorrow, let's soak up our last bit of time. Exactly, and... No, and, thanks for hosting, and, it's always great to be back here. Great. Great to see you. Yep. Thank you.