Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to MeridianLink's third quarter 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentations, there will be a question-and-answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your first speaker today, Erik Schneider, Head of Investor Relations. Erik, please go ahead. Good afternoon, and welcome to MeridianLink's third quarter 2021 earnings call. We will be discussing the results announced on our press release issued after the market closed today. With me are MeridianLink's Chief Executive Officer, Nicolaas Vlok, and Chief Financial Officer, Chad Martin. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that today's conference call will include forward-looking statements based on the company's current expectations. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ materially. For a discussion of factors that could affect our future financial results and the business, please refer to the disclosure in today's earnings release and the other reports and filings we file from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All of our statements are made based on information available to us as of today, and except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update any such statements. During the call, we will refer to both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. You can find a reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP measures included in our press release, which is posted to the investor relations section of our website. With that, let me turn the call over to Nicolaas. Thank you, Erik, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining us for our third quarter 2021 earnings call. It's been another great quarter, and I want to recognize our employees for helping our clients make a positive impact on the consumers, businesses, and communities they serve. Our commitment to our clients and the trust they place in our platforms drives our culture, our innovation, and our optimism for the future. Thanks again to the MeridianLink team for making a difference. During today's call, Chad and I will provide details on our third quarter results and give an update on 2021 guidance. As you can see, MeridianLink exhibited strong performance in Q3, which exceeded our previously communicated guidance. Third quarter GAAP revenue was $67.4 million, up 29% year-over-year, and we delivered this growth while continuing to demonstrate high levels of profitability with 46% Adjusted EBITDA margins in the quarter. Our strong Q3 results were driven by continued growth in consumer lending volumes for our clients and higher than expected levels of mortgage activity. I couldn't be prouder of these results, which showcase our commitment to growth while maintaining best-in-class margins. We are well-positioned in our markets, have a strong growth trajectory, and with a TAM of over $10 billion, we are excited about our future growth prospects. Before we dive further into our third quarter results, I'd like to congratulate our clients who made Forbes' 2021 Best Banks and Best Credit Unions list. This elite list honors the top 3%-4% of the country's financial institutions, and we are humbled that a majority of the honorees are MeridianLink clients. Their customer-centric philosophy, digital-first focus, and commitment to excellence inspires us and fuels our strategic growth initiatives. I want to talk about wins on four of our strategic growth initiatives today. First, innovation. Second, cross-sell. Third, expanding our target market. Fourth, monetizing our partner network. I will also provide an update on strategic M&A. First, our innovation continues to drive growth. Product innovation has been and will continue to be a hallmark of MeridianLink. Innovation drives our clients' success. They face increasing consumer demand for more digital-first solutions and need to modernize their digital lending processes and offerings. In fact, most new and cross-sell clients cite our innovative offerings and integrated platform as a key driver in selecting MeridianLink to accelerate their digitalization efforts. In Q3, we announced new data verification enhancements that enable our consumer reporting agency clients to expand their portfolio of data services, including recurring background checks that reduce risk and new features in our Advanced QuickApp tool that enable them to serve customers more robustly. Clients shared their enthusiasm about these enhancements during our annual TazWorks user group client event in September. For consumer reporting agencies using Mortgage Credit Link, we also expanded verification of employment offerings to mortgage lenders through a key new LOS integration. The feedback we receive from clients will continue to drive our product innovation, especially in areas that support the ongoing digital transformation. Second, the synergies of combining products on MeridianLink One is helping to drive cross-sell. MeridianLink One is our platform of products which spans the digital consumer lending journey from account opening through loan origination and data collection, decisioning, and funding. In Q3, we added more than 60 new MeridianLink Portal instances and enhancement upgrades to new and existing clients. MeridianLink Portal is our consumer lending digital point of sale solution and supports the industry's digital transformation while broadening our MeridianLink One footprint. MeridianLink Portal integrates seamlessly with our MeridianLink Consumer and MeridianLink Opening solutions to empower our clients to deliver access and convenience to their customers by allowing them to apply anywhere and anytime for a consumer loan, mortgage or savings account. Further, in early 2021, one of the largest privately owned banks in its state with $4 billion in assets and more than 30 locations selected MeridianLink Consumer as the consumer lending platform. We cross-sold MeridianLink Mortgage in Q3, displacing a long-time legacy system. The bank was impressed with the possibilities of the integrated platform, the vast network of mortgage service partners integrated with MeridianLink Mortgage and our rich reporting capabilities. There are many other stories highlighting how MeridianLink is driving value and differentiation for our existing clients and new logo prospects and how their trust and partnership drive our growth. We are honored that clients continue to cite our industry leadership position and trust in our long-standing innovation as the key reasons they work with us. Third, we continue to win new logos both in our sweet spot and beyond, expanding our target market. As you know, our typical client is a financial institution with $100 million-$10 billion in assets. During the third quarter, we brought on many new banks and credit unions that fit this profile. One of these, which has offices throughout the country, chose MeridianLink over competitors due to our well-rounded system, ease of application, decisioning tools, integrations and automation. These same factors allow us to expand our target market and we continue to win with larger clients and beyond our traditional end markets. During the quarter, we added a Federal Reserve Board top 100 commercial bank with more than $20 billion in assets, more than twice the size of our typical client. We also added a specialty consumer finance company with nationwide operations and several regional finance companies. We will continue to focus on our primary target market, but these two recent successes add yet another growth opportunity for us and prove that our innovative solutions compete and win as we continue to expand. Fourth, we continue to monetize our partner network with increasingly high-profile integrations. Our vibrant partner marketplace provides our clients with the vendors and solutions of their choosing and offers us a substantial monetization opportunity through one-time service fees, annual integration fees and transaction-based revenue share income. We continue to cultivate and optimize our partner marketplace and in the third quarter we welcomed several new partners, including Plaid. Plaid provides instant account verification for account funding for MeridianLink Portal. It is an add-on product that can be used to replace ACH micro deposits for verifying account ownership. Plaid's integration into our marketplace offers clients a faster and premium alternative to more labor-intensive options. Plaid is already generating value for our clients and we are seeing stronger interest for Q4. We continue to be excited at the breadth of our offerings in our partner marketplace and happy to see clients turn to our trusted partners to fuel their growth. Finally, I want to update you on strategic M&A, specifically the progress we have made integrating Saylent. In addition to developing our own solutions organically, we will continue to selectively pursue acquisitions that provide additional capabilities or clients or both, and we pride ourselves on our ability to efficiently integrate acquisitions. I'm pleased to report that in Q3 we made great progress integrating Saylent and building on its capabilities. We completed the development of a new marketing automation beta product to offer a more personalized digital lending experience for our clients' members and customers. We are excited by the rapid progress we're making, and we will continue to provide updates on the integration of Saylent and other M&A activities when it occurs. Before I close, I'd like to end as I started and highlight another important industry recognition. In September, our Co-Founder, Chief Strategy Officer and a partner in the business that I respect and admire greatly, Tim Nguyen, received the 2021 Innovator of the Year Awards from Orange County Business Journal. His initial inspiration and drive sparked this company and we are pleased that his continuing innovation and business acumen received well-deserved recognition. Congratulations, Tim. I will now turn the call over to Chad to talk about our financial results. Thanks, Nicolaas, and thanks again to everyone for joining us today. Since this is only our second earnings call, I'll start by providing the highlights for the quarter, give a brief recap of our financial model, and then I'll go through our third quarter results in more detail before moving on to guidance for the fourth quarter and full year 2021. As Nicolaas mentioned, in the third quarter we generated total revenue of $67.4 million, up 29% year-over-year. 88% of our third quarter revenues were subscription fees with the balance coming from professional services and other. Our operating loss was $8.8 million, but our non-GAAP operating income was $17.1 million and Adjusted EBITDA was $30.1 million. Our IPO was completed in the third quarter and the corporate conversion and accelerated vesting of pre-IPO equity, combined with the equity incentives granted to employees as of the IPO, drove a substantial increase in our stock-based compensation. Please note that in our earnings release, we present our operating expenses net of the impact of stock-based compensation for comparability. We have a usage-based SaaS recurring revenue model. Our customers sign long-term contracts, usually three years, that are not cancelable without penalty and which auto-renew at the end of term. Typically, customers commit to annual fees and monthly purchases of applications. In exchange for higher monthly commitments, they receive lower per-application pricing, and any transaction over the monthly minimum commitment is an incremental charge. Our platform's ability to make our customers more efficient and effective at lending naturally drives more volume once it's installed and used. We can grow with our customers, and we are aligned with their success. We provide both Lending Software Solutions and Data Verification Software Solutions. In the third quarter, Lending Software Solutions revenues accounted for approximately 2/3 of our total revenue and grew 34% year-over-year. The other 1/3 of our revenues comes from Data Verification Software Solutions, which increased 20% year-over-year. Third quarter revenues from the mortgage loan market generated 29% of our overall revenues. Specifically, 9% of our Lending Software Solutions revenues and 70% of our Data Verification Software Solutions revenues were tied to our mortgage-focused products. Of our 29 points of year-over-year revenue growth in the third quarter, 23 points were contributed by the acquisitions of TCI and TazWorks, while the remaining 6 points came primarily through the addition of new customers, increased module penetration of existing customers, and increased volume from our customers. As expected, organic growth from Data Verification Software Solutions trended lower year- over- year, but organic growth from Lending Software Solutions remained robust, growing double digits versus the prior year period. Gross margin in Q3 was 60%, but adjusted for stock-based compensation, it was 73%. We continue to invest in our sales and marketing and R&D efforts to drive organic growth acceleration. We are investing significantly to build robust sales and marketing capabilities. Compared to the third quarter last year, we spent 87% more in sales and marketing and 64% more in research and development, adjusted for stock-based compensation. Even with this additional spend, our Adjusted EBITDA margin was 46% and our Adjusted EBITDA grew by approximately $2 million - $31 million. While we intend to continue investing to drive growth, we will also carefully control expenses and are focused on the conversion of incremental revenue into profits and free cash flow. Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow statement, we ended the third quarter with $93 million in unrestricted cash and cash equivalents, up $63.8 million from the end of the second quarter. In the quarter, we used $200 million of our IPO proceeds to pay down debt, extinguishing our second lien debt and reducing the first lien by $75 million and reducing our quarterly interest expense to around $5.9 million. As a part of this pay down of debt in Q3, we incurred a debt extinguishment charge of $4.4 million. We are currently in the process of refinancing our existing credit facility and expect that process to be completed shortly. Current indications are we expect to be able to reduce our base interest rate by 75 basis points in addition to extending the duration of our loans and increasing the size of our revolving credit facility. Operating cash flow in the third quarter was $19.1 million, and free cash flow was $17.6 million, or a 26% free cash flow margin. We continue to generate funds that can be used to invest in the business, pursue acquisitions, or deleverage. I will now conclude my prepared remarks by providing guidance for Q4 and for the full year of 2021. Overall, we continue to see strong business momentum and our pipeline remains robust. Given the seasonal nature of our business, I would like to remind everyone that Q4's financial results are typically lower than Q3. For the fourth quarter, estimated total revenue is expected to be between $59.5 million and $60.5 million, compared to $53.9 million for the same period in 2020. This represents an estimated increase of 10%-12% year-over-year. On a non-GAAP basis, our fourth quarter estimated Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $21 million and $22 million, representing EBITDA margins of approximately 36% at the midpoint of the range. For the full year 2021, estimated total revenue is expected to be between $263.2 million and $264.2 million, compared to $199.3 million for the same period in 2020. This represents an estimated increase of 32%-33% year-over-year. On a non-GAAP basis, our full year 2021 estimated Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $119.7 million and $120.7 million, representing EBITDA margins of approximately 46% at the midpoint of the range. We continue to be pleased with the performance of TCI and TazWorks, which are expected to continue contributing at levels in line with recent results. Lending Software Solutions is expected to suffer a modest drag from slowing mortgage lending activity, and Data Verification Software Solutions will face difficult comps in the quarters ahead given the elevated mortgage refinance activity in the year- ago quarters. Overall, we expect the mortgage-related percentage of our revenue in Q4 to be in the low 20s versus 29% realized in Q3. This expected reduction in mortgage contribution will continue to re-weight the MeridianLink business toward its faster-growing areas, which support continued double-digit underlying growth. With that, Nicolaas and I are happy to take any of your questions. Operator? Sure, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question at this time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If your question has been answered or you wish to remove yourself from the queue, press the pound key. Your first question comes from the line of Koji Ikeda with Bank of America. Please go ahead. Hey, guys. Hey, Nicolaas. Hey, Chad. Thanks for taking my question. I guess first question either for you, Nicolaas or Chad. You know, you talked about these two. Actually, a lot of wins here. I wanted to focus on the consumer specialty lending and the top 100 bank. I think this is pretty important. You know, how did those conversations start with these customers? Then how do we think about the initial land at that top 100 bank and the potential expand from here? Just given, you know, these are pretty big wins for you, I think, are you gonna be leaning in harder to the higher end of the market from here? Thank you for the question, great question. Our lens remains very focused on the $100 million to, call it $ 10 billion of assets under management. We have seen success where larger institutions and this large bank in this case are totally interested and supportive of our configurable approach to the platform, as well as the enablement of functionality through our partner marketplace with our partners that's integrated into our partner marketplace. Koji, I think there's a big difference between trying to highlight customization. We're not a platform that goes out and say we are highly customizable, and you spend years implementing the platform. We are very focused on that mid-market, but we've seen success in the upper end of the market, and we continue to invest in our platform and our product. For example, there's going to be a work being done, and we've spoken about this in the past, where there's investments being made in an enhanced decisioning engine, which I think naturally opens up that market for us to go to bigger clients and also enhance POS over time, where we're making investments. But it's not us expanding the lens, it's us getting the introduction, getting the call, or speaking to the right folks. There's so much opportunity for us left in our mid-market approach in that $100 million-$10 billion that we've seen strong demand. We've seen great success with our portal in that marketplace and some great wins up market. At the same time, we've been working on pricing and repackaging strategies to help us also go further down market with good momentum. I would say pleased with the outcome, very proud of what the team did in landing such a large opportunity in the business. I would not want to position it as the next growth lever and kind of move everybody to focus on up-market. It's an opportunity that we're pursuing, but it's not refocusing our lens. Got it. Thanks for that. Maybe one follow-up here for Chad. You know, thank you for the color on the mortgage percentage of lending and mortgage percentage of data revenue. You know, I wanted to just double-click on that a little bit more here. If we punch in the guidance and those assumptions here of low 20s, that does imply some pretty steep declines in the mortgage loan market-related revenue. You know, I guess with interest rates staying pretty low here and the nice performance that you had in that segment in the third quarter, I mean, how should we be thinking about that segment? You know, are you guys seeing something different out there? You know, is this just a level of conservatism for the mortgage side? Koji, thanks for the question. We're still leveraging kind of the market view on where, you know, Mortgage Bankers Association, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, for where the market will go. Certainly if, you know, the market had stayed stronger longer, which helped with our Q3 results, and if we see that continue into Q4, then there may be some benefit to the numbers as well. You know, we're expecting that the guidance we gave incorporates that 20% drop, and you're seeing that in the Q4 numbers. I also want to just circle back, right, we don't take away from the growth we're seeing on the consumer side, where we also came in above expectations. The fact that we're seeing this benefit to the mortgage-related business is just, you know, giving us more ability to continue to invest in sales and marketing and R&D and really drive the business forward. Got it. Thanks, Nicolaas. Thanks, Chad. Appreciate the time. Oh, you're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Timothy Chiodo with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead. Great. Thanks a lot. This is Timothy. A question on the partner marketplace. We often think about it as a good leading indicator of some of the ancillary services, if you will, that are attractive to some of the banks and credit unions that you work with. The recent announcement with Plaid is obviously of great interest. In general, aside from that partnership, maybe you could just shed some light on some of those ancillary services that seem to really be gaining traction, and what are the ones that are sort of picking up share, if you will, within usage of the partner marketplace. That's a great question. I don't wanna highlight specific partners. Probably speak more in general because we have multiples of partners in some cases doing the same. We let clients choose or partners kind of engage and we enable what's being selected. I would say Yeah, I think categories is probably a fair way, right? Yeah. Yeah, I would say one area that I continue to see interest in is fraud and the prevention of fraud. Specifically, I think over the last 12-18 months with so much moving out of branch and moving digital, that there's certainly a higher alert for kind of prevention of fraud and how can you weed through what's out there. That's of interest for pretty much every MeridianLink client one way or another. Plaid's a good example of that, but there are numbers of other partners which is part of our partner marketplace and integrated into the MeridianLink platform as well. Okay, excellent. Thank you. Just real quick for the Q4, should we still think about TCI and TazWorks as just being sort of down sequentially in Q4, those two businesses, relative to their contribution on an absolute dollar basis in Q3? I believe the seasonality is a little bit weaker in Q4. Yeah. Chad, do you want to take that one? Sure. We'll expect to see the same seasonal impact on the TCI and TazWorks businesses that we're modeling into the base business. We still, as Nicolaas mentioned, and we've mentioned, you know, we're still seeing good results from those acquisitions. They're exceeding what we had in our original business case when we did them. We're still very pleased with how they're performing relative to their original business case. All right. Excellent. Thank you so much for all the help. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Schmidt with Citi. Please go ahead. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions here. I wanted to dig in on the enhanced decisioning engine. The way I understand it, you know, historically, N FI would give you some parameters for a credit profile of a customer they go after, and, you know, you could filter your loan decision that way. Obviously in the market, we've seen the development of, you know, many different types of loan decisioning, alternative data, machine learning applications, and things like that to kind of, you know, improve underwriting processes. Just curious, you know, when we talk about enhanced decisioning, you know, what type of opportunity are we talking about here? Thanks. Sure. Our goal with our enhanced decisioning is to be more flexible, enable more inputs, and also the ability to incorporate more third-party data into the decisioning and the structure in which the decisioning kind of ends up functioning. The goal would be to make it faster, allow more criteria to be inserted, and I would also believe ultimately opens up a more robust up-market opportunity. The goal is for us is to strengthen our decisioning engine with kind of an approach to be smarter and more digitally connected and aware of the ecosystem. Got it. Thank you for that, Nicolaas. Just in the third quarter, the non-mortgage consumer LOS side, actually, I just wanna confirm this. I have kind of estimating that growing in the upper teens range. Just wanna confirm whether that's correct or incorrect. Is there a way to break that down between sort of what's called, like, net new logos versus cross-sell versus volume activity? Any detail there would be helpful. Thanks. Yeah, Andrew, thanks for the question. I think your analytics there are accurate. What I would point to is just we still see the same kind of growth characteristics that we talked about. We don't break it out in the numbers themselves, but still seeing the same growth characteristics of new customers driving growth in that number, as well as seeing the cross-sell, up-sell and the volume increases per customer included in the kind of quarter-over-quarter or quarter-over-year quarter-over-year-ago quarter growth. Got it. Maybe if I could sneak one more related question in. Just if you could talk about, since it's a large focus for people, just talk about just your visibility as it pertains to that growth sort of sustaining or accelerating into 2022 based on implementation pipeline, sales pipeline, backlog, et cetera. Any color around that would be helpful. Thanks a lot. Yeah, thanks, Andrew. We won't give 2022 guidance until we report early next year. There's no change to, on the consumer side, the trends that we've outlined around the double-digit growth coming from the new logos, cross-sell, up-sell, volume increases going forward. No intention that that will be, that the long-range growth and the volume and drivers of growth that we've communicated will have changed. Understood. Thank you very much, Chad. Appreciate the comments. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Alex Sklar with Raymond James. Please go ahead. Hi, this is Jessica Wang on for Alex Sklar. I just have a quick question. There's a lot of moving pieces going on with the consumer debt wallet right now, and auto is also a bit under pressure around industry. Credit cards and personal loans seem to have been strengthening. What can you tell us about how the mix of volume is impacting your guidance? Thanks. Let me respond to kind of it from a higher level, and I'll hand it over to Chad if he wants to respond to the model and guidance. I think the fact of the matter is we've been living what you've seen and kind of highlighted here in the question over the last six, nine, 12 months, even from kind of a shift and also even touching on supply chain. I think we've seen whatever the headwinds and tailwinds. Headwinds call it on the auto and maybe new home side, sales side, and kind of the tailwinds in other areas of the business. I strongly believe that the business is extremely well-positioned, and it's probably going to be like a coiled spring at some point in time, I believe, from a consumer standpoint when the supply chain issues are easing up and getting resolved. My viewpoint is, we can't really pinpoint timing, and we don't include that in our guidance. From a consumer standpoint, I know that there's a heavy focus on digitalization from our clients. We've seen really strong demand kind of building that footprint out. I believe we're gonna see a bigger benefit when we see some of the headwinds become more tailwinds in the business. In the meantime, the business is performing really well, even with kind of what you're seeing and kind of highlighting out there. I believe the best thing we as a company can do is to stay laser focused on managing what's in our control, executing on our strategic growth vectors, which I've highlighted earlier in my prepared remarks. To me, the bottom line is a great third quarter. We've given you our best guidance for fourth quarter, and I continue to believe we're going to drive strong growth even despite some of the headwinds and tailwinds that we see and we've seen over the last nine, 12 months. Chad, if you wanna comment on model, you're more than welcome to, yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Nicolaas. Thanks, Alex, for the question. I think Nicolaas hit on it, right? We're not making any really radical predictions or changes in the expected mix of the business we're expected to see in the Q4 guidance we've provided, other than we've been explicit in our expectation around one of what has been, you know, the tailwinds, which has been mortgage and where we expect to see that revenue go. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Bob Napoli with William Blair. Please go ahead. Thank you. Good afternoon, Nicolaas and Chad. On the long term, looking at your net revenue retention rate and cross-sell, assuming you know once mortgage normalizes, what would be your target for a net revenue retention rate? We've talked about when we look at our kind of ARR year-over-year growth, which we Mm-hmm. Which last year we reported 20%, 120% with some of the tailwinds that Nicolaas talked about in mortgage. Those tailwinds may turn into headwinds at some point, as Nicolaas talked about, and the headwinds may turn into tailwinds. Long term, we continue to think that that part of the growth will be roughly 10%. As we look for both the cross-sell, up-sell, volume, price increase, partner marketplace. Driving growth, in that range for our consumer part of our business. Okay. Maybe for Erik. On the M&A front, you know, Chad or Nicolaas, I guess. I guess, you know, any update on the market environment for the opportunities that you're seeing in the market, you know, the types of acquisitions you might be looking for, but, you know, how active are you? How active is the pipeline? And what types of deals are you looking for? Bob, great question, and good hearing your voice again. I think Chad mentioned earlier that pretty much every acquisition we completed, we anticipated to be one that is value add to the platform, brings growth opportunities to our clients from an internal tracking standpoint, are exceeding our expectations. The point I'm making is we continue to be discerning around strategic fit and value creation here. While we see good deal flow, we tend to be very specific in our focus. We do wanna build out our competitive differentiator stronger, but we also are looking at adjacent spaces that appear to be of interest to us. You've seen us move with Saylent into a technology acquisition that we are integrating into our platform, that will be integrated into our data and our analytics and drive real value for our clients. We continue to look at plays around that that's strengthening the platform, would strengthen our offerings, would drive growth for our clients. We've assembled a team, Erik and another individual. The team is focused. It's part of our strategic growth initiatives. We've outlined five growth vectors, and M&A is certainly getting the attention it should. Excited about what M&A can contribute here in 2022 for us as we continue to evaluate M&A opportunities. Great. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. Again, that's star one to ask a question. Your next question comes from the line of Matt VanVliet with BTIG. Please go ahead. Yeah, thanks for taking the question, guys. Nice job on the quarter. I guess as you look at where maybe the incremental sales and marketing investments are gonna be more focused moving ahead, realizing that the recent ones have given you pretty good returns. Have some of the newer deals, whether it's the larger bank or the specialty lending company, are you allocating more resources to be a little more prospective in some of those areas of the market? How should we think about kind of what some of the incremental heads are gonna be focused on moving ahead? That's a good question, Matt. I don't think we're gonna change the mix that we are investing in between new and cross-sell, upsell in 2022 and beyond. We've found good momentum in our new logo and go-to-market motion. We are expanding in specific markets and focus on certain segments with marketing plays, sales plays that sets up growth for us in 2022. No real significant change is contemplated between, as a reminder, having our new logo teams, our cross-sell, upsell team, our channel team, and then our partner marketplace. I would say expect more of the same type of investments. We've invested heavily over the last 12, 18 months in tech stack as well. We're coming out of that cycle where in 2022, I would like to see us continue to build out and gain efficiency with our tech stack and our go-to-market organization. Personally, I'm pretty excited from where we came from, where we're at, and where we're going with our go-to-market. I'm a big believer in the investments we're making in the sales and marketing organization. As you look at kinda what the MeridianLink One platform ultimately sort of offers along with the partner marketplace, you know, does that give you enough of a sort of competitive barrier, as we see some of the, you know, alt-fi companies or really even some of the fintech companies trying to get into kind of lightweight loan pricing and offering, or do you have to continue to sort of push the envelope on the development side to make sure you're kinda staying ahead of and including all of the necessary functionality, to not let some of these other providers kinda sneak in? We don't rest on our laurels, but we do know we've got a very defensible moat in our partner marketplace and the integrations that we've built over more than a decade into the platform. From my perspective, the positioning we have in the marketplace is strong. We are in a market leading position. We will need to continue to invest in digitalization, in data and analytics, in enhanced decisioning, the touch points as the market continues to shift into enabling the consumer where the consumer is moving away from pure branch interaction to an omni-channel experience and the supporting infrastructure behind that. I do not believe that there's any company better positioned with a platform and an ecosystem and integrated into the greater consumer lending landscape than MeridianLink. While we need to continue to invest, it's the culmination of two decades of knowledge and the investments we've been making over the last, call it, more than two years into technology, moving our platform to the cloud here and getting that ready for 2022 in a meaningful way. We're at a great point in time in the history of the platform. I believe where the market is going, we've been positioning ourselves for that for a long time. I feel where we at today and where we're going, we have a very strong competitive position to compete in the market that we've defined as that $100 million-$10 billion of assets under management. Sorry, just quickly, one more follow-up. You mentioned that in the growing trend here, that people are going to the branch less and some of those interactions are there. Are there any areas of kind of a data verification component that are maybe becoming more incremental? You know, obviously you guys added the tenant screening through acquisition, but are there other types of data sources or ways that lending institutions are looking to be a little smarter but cast a wider net, especially if the mortgage market continues to contract? I would point you back to fraud. I think at this point in time, when I speak to CEOs of alliances, one of the top-of-mind items, especially kind of in the world of digital acceleration, is fraud and fraud prevention and management around that. We are very focused on enabling additional functionality through our partner marketplace, through integrations, as well as continue to build our platform in that regard. From my standpoint, I feel digitalization is a great tailwind. It's bringing significant new opportunities to us and others in the marketplace. The fact that our platform is so broad and so well integrated to consume data and make sure that the data is vetted as part of the decisioning and fraud is managed, I view that as kind of the next frontier in analytics and how you think through decisioning as part of that. Personally, I believe if we're gonna look back five years from now in this industry and maybe ten years looking back, we're looking at very much a digital revolution taking place in the consumer lending landscape. What you've seen kind of with mortgage in the last decade or so, as the whole mortgage process digitalized, that's coming on a broad basis for consumer lending and probably in a more meaningful way than what we've even anticipated a year or two ago. Very great. Thank you. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Tom Roderick with Stifel. Please go ahead. Yeah. Hi, gentlemen. Thank you for taking my question. Apologies, I think everyone's juggling a few calls today, so I hope this wasn't already asked. I know investors and we in particular were pretty interested in the update on the MeridianLink Portal that you had more recently. I think you had said you talked about some 60 customers upgrading in the quarter. What I'd love to understand from that in terms of, you know, what that means to your customers that are selecting that. Talk a little bit more about what the financial impact is to you, and then also from, you know, from the perspective of does it change the competitive landscape out there in terms of who you might bump into in the financial services technology world? You know, sort of more of the same typical competition? Or is that changing at all as you kind of push your way into a broader, you know, digital footprint on the customer portal front? Let me kind of respond to it from a market standpoint, and I'll hand it to Chad to kind of respond to the financial part of this. Our portal is the innovation that took place over the last 18 months, two years, on specifically creating an omni-channel experience for our customers, clients and members. It is the enablement of this strategy played out before there was a pandemic. MeridianLink's team and board shook hands on really building the platform to be a digital enabler and moving the mid-market financial institutions we serve to be competitive with larger banks and larger financial institutions. Our positioning has always been invest in the omni-channel, invest in the digital experience, create the single sign-on. That's why we started investing over two years moving to the cloud is creating that scalable platform and ecosystem that we invest in, and we have partners participating in it. The portal is that front end where the consumer touches our platform, that engagement point that they experience our clients' interaction with them, and it's driven by MeridianLink. It's a pretty important investment for us and something that we're really excited about bringing further to market. From a positioning standpoint, today, it's very focused on the consumer lending landscape. You can clearly see it's a point of sale that can be more if we choose to go there. Today, we wanna be the best portal, the best access point for our clients into the MeridianLink platform that enables the experience across the platform and being integrated with our partner ecosystem. Chad, I don't know if you wanna speak to kind of the subscription part of it, how this plays into, the platform and the financials. Yeah, Tom. The portal is one of the modules, one of the kind of dozen modules we sell in the consumer lending category. It's rapidly growing, and it's subscription rather than application-based. But I would say we do also get the benefit if our customers are using a portal solution, if they're attracting additional applications by having that kind of customer-friendly application, we do kinda get the benefit of seeing additional volume in the other modules that they have on the consumer side. Yeah, perfect. I'm glad you clarified that, Chad. Is that subscription just driven by, you know, number of end consumers on the platform, so it's not transactionally or application driven? It's just, you know, number of customers that the financial institution has, is that what drives that price point? We do price it more on size of the institution, not necessarily tied to customers, but tied to assets. Okay. You know, one quick follow-up. I was interested in your answer there just to Matt's last question on additive solutions. You were highlighting fraud as one solution that sort of seems to be catching on. You know, when you combine that with some of the data verification, the analytics and the BI, it seems like perhaps, you know, the market is ready to move beyond just the automation of paper processes to really investing in artificial intelligence and, you know, machine learning and a lot of the intelligence at the edge of the network there. Maybe you could just go one step further and talk about, you know, high level, what your customers are doing to lean in on that theme. You know, is there additive money around the horn? Should we expect to hear a lot more of the, you know, the AI, the fraud and some of these sort of newer solutions that are, you know, a step up in intelligence? It's an area of interest for us. It's an area that we are investing in our own capabilities as well as partner integrations and partner capabilities as evidenced by an example, the Plaid integration. It's also an area that we are looking through the lens of M&A. It's certainly an opportunity that we would like to capture value from if there's value to be captured. More importantly, if there's value to be captured in driving growth for our customers and helping our customers kind of differentiate, make faster, better decisions, have a better risk management process integrated into decisioning, we are highly interested in building out that capability over time, and I believe it's also to the benefit of the greater market, not just our existing or new, future customers. Yeah. Really helpful. Thank you. I'll jump back in queue. I appreciate it. Thank you. That concludes our question-and-answer session for today. I will now turn the call back to our CEO, Nicolaas Vlok, for final comments. Thank you, everybody, for joining us on our second quarter as a public company where we're reporting our results. I think you may have picked that up from both Chad and my discussions today that we've never been more optimistic about the health of the business and the opportunity ahead of us. We have numerous growth levers at MeridianLink, and the demand for our products is strong, and I would say I would even venture wanting to say unprecedented. For me, as the holidays approach, I feel fortunate that the biggest thing that's keeping me up at night right now is how we can get our toys into the hands of our clients faster here. We're sitting on a great opportunity. There're great tailwinds in this market, and very excited to be part of that journey in the digital consumer lending landscape. I would also like to finish on a personal note. This is an incredible journey, and I wanna send my sincere gratitude to all of our employees, our clients, and our partners for getting us here. Thank you all for your interest in MeridianLink, and we look forward to talking to you on our next earnings call, where we will discuss Q4. Thank you for joining today. Operator? Thank you, sir. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.