All right, great. Welcome, everyone, to the UBS Global Technology and AI Conference. We're very, very happy to have with us, I think now for the third year in a row, I want to say, but we have AvidXchange, we have Mike Praeger, the CEO, we have Joel Wilhite, who is the CFO, so both the CEO and the CFO on stage, so first, I just want to say a special thank you to being in our conference each year. It's a pleasure hosting you. Yeah, we're excited to be here. And in fact, this conference in 2021 was the first conference that we did as a public company. So we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. And we had a dinner that night. And so it was the first conference, first investor conference, first dinner. And like, you know, I think three quarters of the attendees stood up with laptops and opened them up, started taking notes during dinner. And I said, "What in the world did I get myself into?" But. Fair question. I remember that dinner, Mike. All right, great. Let's get into the topic. So let's kind of run through. We have some kind of macro, kind of near-term trends type of questions. We have some topics around the vertical approach. We'll get into gross margins, roughly in that 75% range today. We'll talk about operating leverage. We'll talk about new products. We'll talk about M&A, and then if we have some time at the end, we'll hit a few more kind of modeling type topics, tax rates, NOL, stuff like that. All right, let's start it off with the metric that gets a lot of attention from investors, and you talk about it on the earnings calls, but the retention, the transactions retained on network. So typically that's been sort of in the 104%-105% range. And it's been a little bit lower there. But there was some encouraging, a little bit of an uptick this past quarter. So maybe just talk about those trends over the longer term and what you've seen more recently or in the recent past. Oh. Maybe. Well, how about this? I'll start with the longer-term kind of perspective. And Joel can talk about what we've seen in most recent term. But typically that, you know, it's kind of a proxy. We think of it as same-store sales. So it's the transactions that we retain on our network from one period to another. In normalized times for over the course of years, it's ranged in a very narrow band between 104%-105%. That really represents four or five percentage points of growth that we get from our customer install base each year in terms of that transaction volume. And so we see it being that neighborhood for a long period of time. And in the current environment with the macro impact, we've seen customers cut back on their discretionary spending. That transaction retained on network last year dropped to 101%. As we said, this year has been kind of running sub- 100. Certainly we're looking forward to having customers have the confidence in kind of the general macro economy, in the rate structures to bring their discretionary spend back on the platform. That discretionary spend usually is in areas of what is it that we've seen have that type of pressure. It's kind of marketing-related expenses, professional services, consulting, preventive maintenance type projects, capital projects are kind of the categories that we've seen spending being curtailed in the middle market. Maybe Joel, you can provide kind of the current context. Yeah, so that obviously is an important metric for us. And that net transaction retention number is a metric we publish on an annual basis. But what we do disclose on a quarterly basis is our overall total transaction growth rate. And so early in 2023, we began experiencing some suppression in particularly discretionary transactions. We attribute that to kind of the macro environment that our buyers are navigating and have been navigating since that period of time. That reduction in volume and reduction in discretionary transactions has been fairly broad-based across our verticals and has shown up in that overall total transaction growth rate. So for example, it was in the, call it sevens and eights in 2023. And in the first quarter, I think we were at about 5.8% overall growth. That ticked down to 4.8% in the second quarter. For the first time in the third quarter, we saw that growth rate inflect. So 4.8% became 5.2% growth in the third quarter. We are encouraged by that. We're clear, though, to say that one quarter doesn't necessarily make a trend, but what we did see in the retention rates in the quarter was some improvement. Still sub- 100%, but some improvement in the invoices and the payments being processed on the platform, so encouraging in that regard in Q3. All right, excellent. Thank you, Joel. Thank you, Mike. The next one we're going to talk about is a little bit of the underlying, the core business growth. So one of the line items that we have in our model is we have the underlying revenue growth on an ex-political contribution and an ex-float basis. This is something we often discuss with investors. Now, I understand there's some nuance there because the float portion is kind of a part of your business, right? But it is a little bit more volatile. So we like to sometimes back that out. That metric is trending in sort of the maybe high single digit to low double digit revenue growth in the second half of the year, but clearly impacted by the first topic we mentioned, right? So I think what investors are looking to see is can we expect and is it possible to see that metric get back into the mid-teens as the same-store sales starts to recover? Yeah, I think that's our hope and expectation as well. I think, you know, again, we are encouraged by the dynamics in Q3. And while not a trend, we're hopeful that this is an indicator that the beginning of the resumption of normal activity, including that discretionary spending, is occurring. We do think that that pattern will be sort of slow and steady and not abrupt or sharp when you think about maybe what a consumer or a small business dynamic might be. You know, these are middle market businesses with CFOs and controllers setting budgets and planning and running a business. But we do expect that as that growth rate, that transaction growth rate turns around and the underlying retention dynamics turn around, then we should see the benefit of that in our revenue growth. All right, perfect. Joel, and you really just kind of tackled this next one, so maybe if there's anything more to elaborate, but sometimes investors ask, well, what about merchant churn, and to your point, there isn't a lot of that. These are mid-market customers. This is not SMB, so we shouldn't be worried about that as a meaningful contributor one way or the other to the growth algo. Correct. All right, let's get into the vertical approach. So AvidXchange has currently nine verticals. And when you show some of the estimated penetration rates, I mean, they're all low. Some are lower than others, but they're all pretty low, right? Single digits are basically across all of them. Perfect. All right, well, maybe if you could just highlight a few that are maybe jumping off the page at you that maybe have a little bit of an opportunity for inflection, and I'll just note that on the last earnings call, you did mention healthcare facilities as one, but I'm sure there are others to highlight. Yeah, exactly. So maybe I'll highlight maybe one of our longest-standing verticals combined with one of our newest verticals. In kind of the longest-standing category, the first vertical that we started in real estate continues to perform really well for us. Now, the first thing to say about real estate is you really have to kind of peel back the onion because it's really probably five sub-verticals. Like multifamily housing, industrial, retail, student housing, and commercial office. What we've currently seen in the current environment is multifamily housing doing extremely well for us. Also, from a top-of-funnel lead generation standpoint, new partnerships that we've launched in the last year, like AppFolio, have really contributed nicely and created strong demand within that vertical. I'll compare that to another new vertical, which is in the hospitality side. One of the things that I kind of highlighted during our last call was kind of a growing population of DSOs or dental service organizations that have come and adopted our platform organically. That continues to be kind of a growth area for us, whether it be dental service organizations, long-term care centers, cardiology centers, any kind of healthcare-related modality that has multiple locations is a prime target for us related to that particular vertical. Those are some examples of kind of verticals that we're both of them that we're really excited about, one being a really long-standing vertical and the other one being a new one. Excited about both of them and still hard to believe, but single-digit penetration in both. Excellent. All right, Mike, well, thank you for touching on that vertical topic. Another topic that's been coming up a lot on a few of the earnings calls and investor discussions is around the shift that you made to higher quality leads. So simply stated, it's fewer of them, but they're higher quality. Maybe you could just talk a little bit more about that change that you decided to make. Yeah, so first of all, I think it's a little bit of maturing as a business and also just doing good investment, kind of capital allocation. What we saw start emerging kind of early in the year was several of our kind of channels, including our partner channel, starting to really outperform other channels in terms of just quality of leads. That, compared to, at the same time, we saw some probably more kind of challenge in some of the digital channels that just weren't performing as well, and so we made a decision that we were going to kind of dial back investment spend that we had allocated towards some of the digital channels and reallocate that spend towards the partner channels, and it's really kind of over the course of the year, that decision has played out as we kind of expected it or hoped it would. That is that we have higher quality leads measured by we took out over the course of the year, on average, about 20 business days of the average sales cycle, taking it from historically about 75 business days down to about 55 days. Significant improvement in sales cycle, strong close rates combined with our logo growth is up over a year ago. We're pleased with kind of the impact of that strategy. Again, it's just if you think about it from this perspective, if you're a CFO, say, of a multifamily real estate company and using AppFolio as your core accounting system to run your whole business, and now you raise your hand and say, "Okay, I want to extend my core ERP system to also automate my accounts payable and my payments," that's a significantly higher qualified lead than a random Google search coming in, right, so that's where we made that decision to reprioritize some of those go-to-market dollars and pleased with the results. All right, excellent. You touched on this a little bit there, Mike, because it was a good segue, but bank distribution partners, so you've highlighted some really notable partners, KeyBank, Bank of America, and some community banks as well. But maybe you could just talk a little bit about the importance of working with banks and the various ways that you work with banks, and maybe if you can touch on a little bit about the unit economics associated with that. Yeah, so first of all, we are a big believer that we want to be associated with both the ERP systems and accounting systems that our customers are using, as well as the banks that they may be using across their business. If you think about it, if you're a CFO or a controller at a company and you want to explore automating your accounts payable and moving from paper invoices to electronic paper checks to electronic payments, where are you going to go? Well, you're probably going to either call your accounting system and ask them if they have a partner solution they recommend, or you're going to call your bank and ask them if there's a solution that they have to help you, or you're going to talk to your peer group in the industry. And so we really want to be in all those places within each one of our vertical markets. So as Tim indicated, kind of the FI or banking channel is an important one for us. We have relations with roughly about 30 banks now. A couple of them are white label partners like Bank of America, KeyBank, Fifth Third. But the one that we actually really enjoy and like are more of the referral channel partners. I just talked on our last call about a couple of new ones there, like Orange Bank and Trust and Cadence Bank as examples, where we really control the sales process for the bank. Their treasury account team introduces that lead to us. Our sales team manages the sales process. We really like that when we can control the sales process. We think that we're the best at what we do in terms of selling our solutions, and we can get the best results for our partner banks. So we expect that to kind of be a growing segment for us, along with certainly the accounting systems that we've leaned into historically. All right, excellent. Thank you, Mike. And for those in the audience, there is a chance that we might have a minute or two at the end to take questions from the audience. So just raise your hand, and I'll prompt you. But just as a heads up, in case you would like to ask a question. Okay, let's move to the next topic, which is gross margins. So at the investor day, you talked about getting gross margins to 75%, but you basically already did it, 74.5% this past quarter. So we're pretty much there. Longer term, you said you could get to maybe 80% or so in that gross profit margin. So maybe just talk about how did you get there so quickly? What are the drivers that got us to here? And then the incremental kind of leverage within COGS that gets us to the 80? Yep, great question, and really proud of the work that the team has done. Maybe just to go back and set context, when we set those targets of 75% gross margin, we talked about it as we see gross margin expansion through both yield improvement and unit cost reduction, and our plans then, basically what we've been doing for two years or a year plus is executing the plans that we laid out at investor day. One thing that we really focus on, it's great that we've achieved the overall 75% gross margin for Q3, but we also remove float and payables when we look at that core gross margin. That was about a 70% number for us in Q3, so we still have a ways to go, we have opportunities to continue to expand yield. We have opportunities, even though we've really made great progress on unit costs. We have opportunities to continue to chip away at that unit cost. We're basically over the past two years. We're up about 10 full points, five points year over year, both with and without the float and P&L. So really proud of that. Again, we've got. We know we've still got wood to chop, right? And so when we think about the automation, standardization, and outsourcing that we're doing across the business, both on the buyer experience from receipt of that invoice all the way through the process to a payment and then the payment execution, we've seen unit costs sort of come out on both of those sides through doing automation standardization, as I mentioned before. So proud of where we've gotten to, a little bit ahead of the game, even on a softer sort of macro environment, but we still have a ways to go. All right, great. On this topic of margins, why don't we just hit on the longer-term EBITDA margin target also from the investor day of the 30% there and just talk about some of the areas of operating leverage that could help you achieve that? Yeah, yeah. Again, it's just kind of delivering what we said we would do. Obviously, it starts with gross margin expansion, right? And the yield improvement, unit cost reduction. But we also sort of pointed to the operating expense leverage that we were really on the cusp of seeing and now for the past several quarters really begun to see. So an easy one and an obvious one is the G&A structure that was built to shoulder a much larger business. That build was complete, the public company costs kind of fully built in the run rate. And so we're going to see that continue to decline as a percentage of revenue. And more recently, and similarly in the R&D structure, I think we're just able to operate in a more efficient capacity, but still kind of invest in the growth that's ahead of us. The combination of gross margin expansion and the leverage we're seeing in operating expenses. We're seeing that fall through. We were GAAP profitable in the second quarter, again, GAAP profitable in the third quarter, meaningful profit, even excluding from an EBITDA perspective, even excluding the benefit of float and political. We're really just, it's early days on that profitability journey. We think as the business continues to scale, we think there's some really meaningful margins and cash flow generation in the business. Excellent. Thank you, Joel. All right, we're going to move to a couple of more kind of product-related topics, I guess you could say. So Payment Accelerator 2.0 was formerly known as Invoice Accelerator 2.0. The anniversary of that was about a year ago. So it was about October of last year. And what you mentioned was that in the first one to two years or so, you'd have some customer learnings. And given it's been about a year or so, we were hoping you could just recap some of those initial learnings. Yeah, so first of all, this is one of the new kind of product offerings that I believe is going to be our next kind of $100 million business and really the third leg of our overall revenue model. When you think of AvidXchange, it's software, it's payments, and then it's our version of supplier-type financing by accelerating invoices to be paid faster. And so we're excited about, we released it, as you said, about a year ago. We said we're going to kind of take it slow to make sure that we have the right user experiences. We're focused on really three areas. One is the overall user experience and onboarding process for suppliers so we can do it rapidly at scale. And the reason why that's important is because in the old version of the product, it took us about three days to add a new supplier to the platform and three or four different functional teams at AvidXchange had to touch it. We now have new suppliers get added in minutes and seconds to the platform in a very automated way. And so that was one thing that was important for us to accomplish. The second one is to continue to validate our credit underwriting algorithms and what determines an eligible invoice for advancement at different levels of scale. And so we feel really good about that aspect of it. And then the third element of it is our ability to intercept payments as they flow through our network so we can get repaid and the money movement process associated with that. That in our Invoice Accelerator 1.0 days, that was probably the biggest learnings we've had and was the most kind of complicated to figure out. The reason being is because you have all different types of configurations around how a customer pays an invoice by bundling it with another payment. The behavior is, say, "Okay, a customer is paying 10 invoices to a particular supplier, but we only advanced two of those 10. And how do we identify that our two are included in that one payment and kind of bifurcate it to get repaid on those two?" And so that actually was the catalyst for us to create an entire different money movement process related to suppliers that are in the Payment Accelerator program, where we can get down to a one-to-one basis for a payment to an invoice and really kind of perfect that part of the process. And then the last element is to have this all work at scale. And why that's important to us is because we have today 1.2 million suppliers that are on our network, and we believe that 700,000-800,000 of those are small businesses that would be great profiles for this offering. So as we make it available to them, we want to make sure that scalability really works. And so this year has been around kind of introducing different levels of scale to the offering, as well as one of the things that I'm really super excited about, like the execution of any new product is highly dependent on the talent of the team that's behind it. And the team that we've built over the last year to run Payment Accelerator and take it to the next level is really exciting to see. Some great talent that we've added across the industry. And it gives me the confidence that this will become our next $100 million business over time. All right, that's a great rundown. We appreciate that, Mike. We're going to move into M&A. So over the years, you've done some M&A, BankTEL, Core Associates, FastPay. Can you just talk a little bit about the success of the M&A approach that you've taken and some of the things that you're often looking for when evaluating candidates? Yeah, so obviously, everything we've been talking about up until this moment is around our organic growth engine to the business, and that's where it starts for us. But we do believe that there's an important inorganic mechanism lever that we can pull that further adds to kind of our growth rate dynamic. And it's been one that we've utilized historically, really focused around the profile has been smaller tuck-in acquisitions within different verticals to either give us a bigger beachhead of customers within the vertical or actually expand into new verticals. And so we have lots of examples. We have seven of these examples historically. Now, we haven't done anything since 2021. And the main reason is because we haven't found anything that's been really super compelling over the last couple of years or that's been at the right kind of sweet spot of price. However, that is changing. Our kind of acquisition pipeline is like 2X what it was a year ago. And so I expect that we'll get back to adding kind of some tuck-in acquisitions year in, year out as we go forward, which again, our playbook is around bringing the assets of the business, which is led by our payment network, and creating some synergy related to the payment side of the business really quickly with any of these acquisitions. And that's what we've seen in the past and what we expect to be as a playbook in the future. All right, thank you, Mike. All right, I want to take a pause to see if anyone from the audience would like to ask a question. If you would, just raise your hand. We'll bring you a microphone. Anyone want to hop in? All right, we'll circle back once more later. If anyone wants to raise their hand, just let me know. But we'll move on to the next question. So capital allocation. So yeah, we just hit on M&A, but also we started to see the execution on your $100 million share repurchase program. Maybe just talk to us a little bit about how you view buybacks and how it is an important part of your capital allocation. Yeah, great question. So I think the first thing I would say is kind of we manage capital allocation in a way that we think about all options around the table, right? And so M&A has been an important part of the growth of the business in the past, but as Mike mentioned, it's been less active recently. We did announce the buyback program, and it was our intent to put a program in place to kind of manage that sort of 2% dilution on a routine basis. But then also in light of kind of where we saw our stock price and our belief about its sort of underlying value, we put the $100 million plan in place, completed $25 million of that in Q3. That $100 million is between when we put it in place and the end of 2025. We're still sort of actively looking at opportunities to optimize that. All right, excellent. All right, the next one, I said we would get to this if we have time. Looks like we're going to be able to just barely squeeze it in. But sometimes we get this question just around tax rate and NOLs, and it's usually a good conversation because investors are looking to value the company on EPS. So can you just talk a little bit about the NOLs you have, the impact currently on your cash tax expense, and when we could start to see some changes, what tax rate we should be thinking about? Yeah, good question. I'll just kind of pick it apart a couple of different ways. First of all, we flip to GAAP profitable. We report sort of a non-GAAP net income, and we use a tax rate of roughly 25%. That's kind of our sort of statutory federal and state rates. But we do have, I think, a sum total of upwards of $700 million in NOLs, $400 federal, and the rest being state. From a cash perspective, we don't expect to be a cash taxpayer for some time, and we think that obviously has some meaningful value. But our non-GAAP earnings will be sort of net of that statutory rate of 25%. All right, excellent. Okay, well, I want to say again, thank you to Mike and Joel for being with us and making the trip here to Arizona. I hope you had a great day of meetings, and it's a pleasure hosting you guys here.