Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the MeridianLink's fourth quarter 2022 Earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, 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. Erik, please go ahead. Good afternoon, and welcome to MeridianLink's first quarter fiscal year 2023 earnings call. We will be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after the market closed today. With me are MeridianLink's Chief Executive Officer, Nicolaas Vlok, Chief Financial Officer, Sean Blitchok, and President Go-To-Market, Chris Maloof. 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 in 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 also refer to both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. You can find the reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP measures included in our press release, which is posted to the investor relations section on our website. With that, let me turn the call over to Nicolaas. Thank you, Erik. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining us for our first quarter 2023 earnings call. I want to thank the entire MeridianLink team for helping us achieve another solid quarter. Total lending software solutions revenue grew 18% year-over-year, which is a fantastic achievement given current market conditions. Let's take a look at our focus areas and business highlights that led to these results. We remain hyper-focused on being the most trusted financial services technology platform, helping customers best position their businesses for success, especially in uncertain economic times. We are continuously improving our platform capabilities through product innovation and value-added partner integrations. For another quarter, the powerful capabilities of the MeridianLink One platform continue to drive new logo and cross-sell momentum. As a result, MeridianLink exceeded top-line guidance again in Q1, with GAAP revenue up 6% year-over-year to $77.1 million and demonstrated solid operating performance. Our business model remains resilient and our customers continue to win, especially our mid-market customers that provide personalized insights and real-time frictionless lending solutions to meet the changing needs of consumers. As the leading provider of a modern digital lending platform, we see customers continuing to choose MeridianLink One to best position and transform their businesses for future growth. The health of our pipeline and the fact that sales cycles have not slowed reinforces this view. We continue to pay close attention to external conditions and market expectations. Because our customers are retail-focused, we have seen no material impact from the recent failure of several regional banks in the U.S. The risk highlighted by these events was related to financial institutions with a large concentration of commercial deposits, which is not common in our target market. Irrespective of the economic cycle, the market is undergoing increased digitalization and MeridianLink is at the forefront of that. Whether it's more competition, consolidation or regulation, there will be pressure on financial institutions to automate their lending processes. In each of these scenarios, the surge in digital transactions will accrue to our benefit because of our volume-based business model. In the meantime, we remain laser-focused on capturing new market opportunities and assisting our customers in serving their communities. In a few minutes, Sean will speak about our Q1 financial performance and provide 2023 second quarter guidance and full year guidance. Before that, I would like to recognize the leadership we have gained to fuel our go-to-market engine, and then I will give several updates on our three areas of growth acceleration. We are proud of the evolution of our go-to-market capabilities. As part of MeridianLink's development over the years, we have created and deployed a comprehensive, scalable strategy to accelerate growth and strengthen market position. As part of entering our next phase of growth as a public company, we have added the following leadership expertise across our go-to-market organization. First, we welcomed our new Chief Sales Officer, Richard Scheig, late summer of last year. Since joining the MeridianLink team, Richard has been instrumental in structuring our sales team to win more customers and increase cross-sell momentum. We also welcome Suresh Balasubramanian to the team as our new Chief Marketing Officer at the end of February. With the added benefit of Suresh's software experience and focus on demand generation, we are bolstering our ability to capture more share in the market. Finally, we are excited to add Dean Germeyer to our leadership team as MeridianLink's new Chief Customer Officer. Dean's holistic go-to-market experience, combined with his customer-centering approach, makes him a strong leader to accelerate productivity and engagement across our support, services, and customer success teams.. Our investment in the team has built an efficient and high-performing go-to-market motion, resulting in a consistent, robust pipeline. On that note, let's turn to a few go-to-market wins in the first quarter that represent our dedication to the first area of growth acceleration, which is engaging more deeply with our customers. As evidence of continued demand for the MeridianLink One platform, we are happy to report an approximately 60% year-over-year increase in lending software solutions cross-sell bookings in Q1. These three examples are fantastic signals that our platform strategy and go-to-market is accelerating. With the new leadership on board, we are well-positioned to further penetrate the market and help more customers achieve their growth objectives. With that, let's turn to our second area of growth acceleration, expanding the capabilities of our platform and our revenue opportunity. With the completion of the public cloud migration last year, we are excited to allocate existing resources to our product roadmap, which is focused on meeting the needs of our customers. Critical to our sales motion, we are focused on creating value through the connective capabilities of our multi-product platform. For example, our MeridianLink consulting team is dedicated to maximizing the customer's credit portfolio performance and overall benefit from the MeridianLink One platform. Leveraging its depth of experience from past engagements, this team has been providing alternative decisioning rules to customers, a capability that is imperative for quickly capturing creditworthy customers in an economic downturn. Turning to our partner network, we would like to highlight the enhancements made to our MeridianLink Collections integration with SWBC. This expanded integration increases efficiency, automation of payments, and improves the user's experience with the SWBC products launched from within MeridianLink One platform. Our customers and their borrowers can now leverage this improved functionality, strengthening their collection strategy in the midst of demanding financial conditions. A final example of expansion can be seen through our ability to capitalize on partner relationships to win new logos. In Q1, we worked closely with one of our global fintech partners in developing a large-scale credit card origination solution. MeridianLink won the deal on our ability to configure MeridianLink Consumer to meet the lending needs of the customer's extensive network of banks and sub-lenders. Turning to our third area of focus, MeridianLink empowers customers to compete, grow, and succeed in the markets in which they participate. We have a track record of enabling customers to win more clients and capture a greater share of their clients' debt wallet. In Q1, we launched a new Grow Your Deposits initiative to address the evolving needs of our customers who are shifting focus to increasing liquidity in response to the current lending environment. The integration of MeridianLink Engage and MeridianLink Opening provides a comprehensive deposit growth solution that enables customers to capture more deposit opportunities through frictionless account opening and relevant personalized communications. Finally, we are looking forward to hosting our user forum on May eighth through the eleventh at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim. There is nothing more empowering than bringing together existing and prospective customers to discuss how the innovative capabilities of the MeridianLink One platform can enable their growth journey. As we are on track for a record-breaking year in attendance, we can't wait to engage with our customers face-to-face and dive deeper on how MeridianLink can provide both immediate and long-term value to the market. I want to emphasize again how MeridianLink continues to deliver consistent growth and healthy profitability levels while investing in strategic initiatives. We benefit from having a high-quality, resilient customer base whose mission to create the best borrower experiences is directly aligned with ours. In the face of uncertain macroeconomic conditions this year, we will continue executing well on what we can control, staying highly focused on our three areas of growth acceleration as demonstrated in Q1. We will continue engaging with customers to meet and exceed their digital lending needs, in part by expanding our platform capabilities and revenue opportunity. Our flywheel starts with empowering our customers to grow and better serve their clients and communities. We strive to be the most trusted financial services technology platform that positions our customers to succeed in any economic climate. I will now turn the call over to Sean to talk about our financial results and provide guidance. Thank you, Nicholas, and I'd like to thank everyone for joining on the call today. Before reviewing our financial results and guidance, I'd like to emphasize how impressed I am with the achievements in the first quarter. Our results continue to reflect an impressive team effort and culture, and for that, I want to again share my gratitude with the entire MeridianLink team. In the face of challenging compares year-over-year, we finished the quarter strong, exceeding top line revenue guidance. We continue to see the impact of macroeconomic headwinds, but likewise, we continue to perform, remaining insulated by our customer mix, contract structure, and ongoing customer growth. For two decades now, we've benefited from the resilience of our business model and the capabilities of our industry-leading solution that enable customers to perform through the economic cycle. As we monitor external conditions, we continue to execute well on what we can control, balancing cost discipline and strategic investments to accelerate growth. Turning to our first quarter financials. We generated total revenue of $77.1 million, up 6% year-over-year, driven primarily by growth in consumer lending transaction volumes. We continue to see the MeridianLink One platform empower the customer's growth journey with the capabilities that meet the evolving needs of consumers. Let's first look at how our software solutions break down. As the primary driver of software solutions, consumer lending revenue contributed 88% and grew 13% year-over-year. Mortgage-related revenue within lending software solutions, inclusive of open-close, accounted for the remaining 12% of the total. Combining mortgage and consumer, total lending software revenue accounted for nearly 75% of total revenue and grew 18% year-over-year. Turning to data verification software solutions, revenue accounted for nearly 25% of total revenue and declined 19% year-over-year. This was driven by the 28% decrease in mortgage-related revenue, which represents 61% of total data verification software solutions. Let me focus on mortgage in total for a minute. Although total mortgage-related revenue was down 8% from last year and generated 24% of overall MeridianLink revenue, this is an improvement in total mortgage sequentially for a second straight quarter. Despite market headwinds, we remain focused on our mortgage lending strategy. We continue to outperform in a declining market as we are taking more share, cross-selling through MeridianLink One, and adding capabilities that enable customers to win. The other 76% of our business continues to outperform, which is majority led by consumer lending. While we are seeing the anticipated deceleration in secured lending, other transaction types such as home equity, personal loans, and account opening continue to grow. This brings me back to the point that our platform enables customers to provide a frictionless lending process to consumers. No matter the loan type or preferred channel for accessing credit, MeridianLink One meets the lending needs of its customers and their clients. With our healthy pipeline, as demonstrated by the wins in the quarter and the inevitable normalization of the mortgage market, the momentum in our business remains strong. Moving to profitability. Accounting for stock-based compensation, GAAP gross margin was 64%. Adjusted gross margin in Q1 was 71%. Before turning to operating performance in the quarter, I'd like to break down the year-over-year increase in our operating expenses. In addition to our strategic investments, we're also calling out specific costs associated with recent acquisitions that are one time in nature to help investors better understand the true increase in operating expenses. Compared to the first quarter of last year, G&A increased 24% on a GAAP basis and 39% on a non-GAAP basis. Adjusted for $0.2 million of one-time bad debt expense associated with customers from past acquisitions, G&A increased 36% compared to the first quarter of last year. R&D increased 64% on a GAAP basis and 65% on a non-GAAP basis compared to the first quarter of last year. Adjusted for a onetime $0.6 million retention bonus associated with the past acquisition, R&D increased 57% compared to the first quarter of last year. On a GAAP basis, sales and marketing increased 73%, while on a non-GAAP basis, sales and marketing increased 82% compared to the first quarter of last year. These investments represent our commitment to engage more deeply with our customers through go-to-market and to expand our platform capabilities. We expect a long-term return on these investments and will continue to examine each expenditure on its individual merits. Turning now to our overall operating performance. GAAP operating income was $1.7 million, and non-GAAP operating income was $9.6 million. On a GAAP basis, net loss was $5.7 million or 7% of revenue, and adjusted EBITDA was $24.9 million, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 32%. Highlighting the true operating performance of the business, adding back the $0.8 million of one-time costs, adjusted EBITDA was $25.7 million, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 33% and in line with our guide. Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow statement. We ended the first quarter with $77.8 million in unrestricted cash and cash equivalents, an increase of $22 million from the end of the fourth quarter. Operating cash flow in the first quarter was $28.1 million, or a 36% cash flow margin, and free cash flow was $26 million or a 34% cash flow margin. In the last 12-month period ending in the first quarter, operating cash flow was $67.8 million or a 25% cash flow margin, and free cash flow was $58.3 million or a 21% free cash flow margin. We repurchased $3.5 million worth of shares as part of our use of cash flow in the quarter. MeridianLink's ongoing cash generation provides protection in this period of uncertainty while enabling strategic capital allocation for us to build value for our customers and shareholders. I'll now pivot to guidance for Q2 and update guidance for the full year of 2023. Entering the year, we anticipated deceleration in consumer lending volumes due to less aggressive lending in our customer base as excess deposits decrease. We also expected a continued decline in mortgage-related revenue in the first half of the year, as the previous sharp increase in mortgage interest rates occurred during the second quarter of 2022. Our view on these dynamics has not changed over the last quarter. We expect to continue adding new customers and increasing module penetration at a level that more than offsets these headwinds. For the second quarter, estimated total revenue is expected to be between $76 million and $79 million, compared to $73 million for the same period in 2022. This represents an estimated year-over-year change of 4%-8%. For the full year 2023, we are raising total revenue to be between $307 million and $313 million, compared to $288 million for the same period in 2022. This represents an estimated increase of 7%-9% year-over-year. For the mortgage-related revenue, we expect the mortgage market to contribute approximately 25% of revenue for the second quarter in 2023, compared to 24% for the second quarter of 2022. We anticipate our contribution in Q1 to continue throughout the year. To provide more color around the growth drivers in our total revenue, the mortgage-related revenue guide implies a continued decline in data verification revenue given the impact of a tough comparable in 2022. However, we expect that the pickup from our mortgage lending capabilities winning in the market, both organically and through open-close, will more than offset the data verification drag in 2023. On the non-mortgage side, we expect data verification revenue to be flat year-over-year as a result of headwinds in the employment screening market coming off post-pandemic hiring highs. Understanding these dynamics, we expect consumer lending will continue momentum in 2023, as demonstrated in the first quarter. Consumer lending is the largest part of our business and is at the heart of our value proposition. MeridianLink exists to enable the customer's growth journey by providing a frictionless digital lending experience that exceeds consumer expectations. Over the years, we have thrived in providing premier lending capabilities, which are now enhanced through MeridianLink One. In 2023, there's ample opportunity to equip more customers with the capabilities that differentiate them against the competition in today's demanding environment. Our Q1 highlights today demonstrate how the configurability, cross-sell momentum, and access to hundreds of partners through MeridianLink One can and will empower further volume growth for customers and for MeridianLink as a whole. Turning to the adjusted EBITDA guide. On a non-GAAP basis, second quarter estimated adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $27 million and $30 million, representing adjusted EBITDA margins of approximately 37% at the midpoint. For the full year 2023, we are reiterating our adjusted EBITDA range of $109 million and $115 million, representing adjusted EBITDA margins of approximately 36% at the midpoint. Our EBITDA guide reflects the continued operating discipline in areas that do not contribute meaningfully to growth acceleration. Our guide also anticipates an increase in legal costs associated with third-party litigation that we expect will be largely completed this year. We will be focused on managing our cost structure to make up for an estimated $1.5 million of expenses from the one-time costs incurred in the first quarter and the increase in legal costs anticipated in the year. Moving forward, we continue to align our forecasting and accounting as part of the broader maturation as a public company. As CFO, I'm dedicated to organizing our processes and cost structure to best position MeridianLink for its next phase of growth. I'd like to end by reiterating the company's track record of consistent profitability and growth. These are two proof points demonstrating the resilience of our business model and superior quality of our customer base. At the end of the day, customers now more than ever need an efficient digital solution that's designed to accelerate growth. We've been the leader in providing that solution for decades. We will continue to deliver and capitalize on that promise as the market embraces an accelerated digitalization. With that, Nicholas, Chris, and I are happy to take any of your questions, and I'll turn it back over to the operator. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. Should you have a question, please press star followed by the one on your touch-tone phone. You will hear a three tone prompt acknowledging your request, and your questions will be pulled in the order they are received. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please Press Star followed by two. If you are using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. One moment please, for your first question. Your first question comes from Bob Napoli with William Blair. Please go ahead. Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you for the question. Good results in a tough environment. I guess, just given, you know, the all the concerns about credit crunch and what we're seeing in the stock market with the regional banking market, why are you as confident as you are in the guidance for consumer lending? It seems like, you know, there is higher risk of potential significant slowdown. Hey, Bob. Sean, Hey, Sean. I think a couple of quick ones. One is, you know, this hasn't just popped up out of nowhere. There's been continued pressure, if you will, in the market for a couple of quarters now, if not longer. We, you know, we're not doing anything out of the ordinary. We continue to see strong demand, strong volumes. Volumes have held up nicely. There really isn't even though the growth in the consumer has decelerated, it is, it's still material, and I think it'll continue throughout the year. That's number one is just historically, we see no pattern of a slowdown outside of our guide. I think the other is just around what I said in my prepared remarks, which is just the quality of our customer base. You know, I was up very early this morning and was listening to hours upon hours of credit tightening and fiscal policy and what will the Fed do. You know, we look at our customer base, and they are lending to very high-quality customers. You know, it's because of the mid-market, it's because of the credit union making up 2/3 of our depository base. There's multiple factors for it, but our customers lend to a very high-quality base, and it shows up in our volumes. You know, where you have kind of the at-risk institutions are typically where you see high, high proportions of commercial or at-risk lending. We just don't see that in our base. There, you know, we have anticipated the deceleration. It's built into our guidance. But we're very confident in the top line as it stands today. Thank you. As a follow-up, the credit union portion of your business, two-thirds, as you said, of the base, are you seeing differences out of credit union versus, you know, regional banking market? No. If anything, just, you know, credit unions operate fundamentally different, right? They don't have customers. They have partners. They have members. I, you know, if anything, the balance sheet of a credit union, the liquidity of a credit union, is more stable. I don't take any escalation calls from credit unions. As a matter of fact, I would say the volumes are not only steady, but we're looking at how do we obtain more with Richard and the go-to-market team, how do we obtain more of that credit union population going forward? Thank you. Appreciate it. Yep. Your next question comes from Nick Cremo with Crédit Suisse. Please go ahead. Hey, guys. Congrats on the strong results. Thanks for taking my question. It's nice to hear that the sales cycles have not slowed down. First, can you provide an update on the trends that you saw in April from a lending volume perspective and how that's factored into the Q2 guide? At the midpoint of the guide, it looks like flat quarter-over-quarter for lending volume being up seasonally in Q2 normally. Is that just more conservatism, or are you seeing lending volumes taper off a little bit in April? Hey, Nick, it's Sean. We don't use conservatism around here. We did see slight volume decreases in April. Nothing to be concerned about, but I think it's just what I talked about earlier, the natural deceleration of growth from 2022. You know, I can speak to the specific lines of business inside of consumer, but in general, we saw growth across the board, a little bit less growth in non-secured assets, a little bit more growth in personal loans, credit cards, et cetera. Nothing remarkable is what I would say. The numbers were strong in terms of volumes. The numbers were strong in terms of rate, which is, which was why the beat. Got it. No, thanks very much for all the color. For my follow-up, I was hoping just to get an update on the traction you guys are having with your MeridianLink Business business lending product that was launched last quarter. Yeah, great question. This is Chris. We remain on track with our integration thesis. Remember that this was an IP buy. We successfully integrated that into the product over Q4 and Q1. Now we're selling it as part of the overall platform value proposition to our customers and having some great conversations in the market around that. Great. Thank you. The next question comes from Koji Ikeda with Bank of America. Please go ahead. Hey, guys, thanks for taking the questions. I wanted to ask you, if we could dig in a little bit more on the cross-sell bookings. You know, you mentioned in the prepared remarks 60% increase in the, in the cross-sell bookings. If you could maybe talk about what products or, you know, what is it about the platform or what is it about the end market is that is driving the cross-sell booking strength and, you know, what would... I guess it's easy to assume that it would have been a tough quarter to sell cross-sell, but it sounds like it's going pretty good for you guys. Any sort of color there would be helpful. Thank you. This is Chris, and this really ties back to the year-over-year sales and marketing investment that we've been making. We have made a concerted effort to expand our capability, both on a messaging and customer contact perspective, on increasing our penetration in our base. Remember that our average customer has 4- 5 of our 13 modules, so a lot of runway there. We recognized that last year. From a R&D perspective to support that, what we've been focused on is where do each of these solutions add more value together than apart, and then tying that directly to the market need. Being more specific on where we're seeing some of that impact is a lot of our institutions are looking to grow their deposits, which is something we've been very successful from, an account opening perspective. With the group, we've really invested in the seamlessness of the integration between our marketing automation, account opening, and then ultimately our consumer LOS. We're seeing that resonate across our customer base, both from an ROI perspective as well as a selling motion perspective. That's just one example. That's central to our thesis from a platform selling motion. Koji, this is Sean. I would say that, you know, I've said in past quarters, the kind of the first wave of our go-to-market motion will be focused on cross-sell just because the opportunities are there. 70% of our bookings this quarter were cross-sell intentionally. It's almost a natural progression where we're going to see cross-sell as the beginning phases of our go-to-market, new logo almost catching up in future quarters. Very successful, very pleased with the 70% cross-sell inside the quarter. Got it. No, thank you for that. Sean, maybe just a follow-up for you. You know, you mentioned, I think in the guidance, assume 25% of total revenue coming from the mortgage loan market. It sounds like also the commentary for the full year. It feels like maybe, and correct me if I'm wrong here, it sounds like the first quarter mortgage performance, you know, kind of down year-over-year is gonna be the bottom from a seasonal basis, and maybe mortgage loan market is turning to growth for the rest, you know, just kind of going forward. Is that the right way to think about, you know, kind of this mortgage loan segment? I think in general, yes. You know, we countercyclically bought Open Close in Q4 for a good reason. We saw good results for mortgage lending, better results than anticipated. DVS, we talked about in our prepared remarks. We saw 28% down from a year-over-year perspective, but that is. Beating the market considerably. DVS being down 28%, if you even exclude kind of the inorganic piece, open closed piece, we're still only down in the mortgage lending component 2%, or roughly 2%. We're beating the market. I think 25% is consistent throughout the year in our forecast, and That did turn a little bit of a corner in Q1. We said this in our last quarterly call, you know, for us, with our contract structure, with our minimums in place, we thought it was the trough, and we're hoping that was the case and that this is gonna come out positive going forward. Got it. Thank you so much for taking the question. Yep. Thanks, Koji. Your next question comes from William McNamara with BTIG. Please go ahead. Hi. Thank you for taking my question. Just kind of wanted to know if there have been, you know, any major changes with the go-to-market strategy, given the new leadership in sales and marketing. This is Chris. The strategy remains consistent over the last three quarters, where we've been messaging, how we bring a comprehensive platform to our customers to ultimately enable them to out-compete for consumers. This team is being brought in to help us on that journey as we look to double the company again. Great. Thank you. Your next question comes from Alex Sklar with Raymond James. Please go ahead. Hi, this is Jessica Wang for Alex. I just got one quick question. With the completion of your cloud move, you freed up a lot of R&D resources. What are big areas you're looking to address now on a product roadmap? How should we think about product velocity now that you're in the cloud? Thanks. This is Chris. Very excited about our move to the cloud, and we've discussed the host of benefits that come with that. Now that those resources are rolling off, we maintain our investment and extending our advantage in terms of enabling our customers to out-compete for consumers and thus outgrow their competitors in the market. The way we're doing that is a fewfold. One is enabling our customers to maximize their auto decisioning, so meeting consumers' expectations around how fast they can get a loan. Expanding the number leveraging technology, including our own technology as well as marketplace, to expand the percentage of the population base that they can auto decision and decision profitably. The third and final one is ensuring that they have the best-in-class digital tools to make that successful. We're going to accelerate down that path with those additional resources. Your next question comes from Andrew Schmitt with Citi. Please go ahead. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. I know there's been a few questions on just the assumptions regarding loan volumes. Maybe you could put a finer point on that. If, if we, you know, if we did see, you know, a sharper contraction just in the overall credit environment, could you just kind of remind us, you know, what the sensitivity is, how to think about that and, you know, how, you know, the scenarios that you're kind of positioning for today? It sounds like it's more of a kind of a gradual decel with, you know, as savings kind of get spent down. Just curious, you know, on that front. Any, any comments there will be helpful. Thanks a lot. Hey, Andrew, this is Nicolaas. Thank you for joining in the question. I think what you need to take a look at is the MeridianLink and the history of the company too. Over the last two decades, even in the Great Recession, the company's consumer lending business continued to grow at slower rates during the narrow window around the Great Recession. The company still grew. We've spent considerable time thinking through how to model this year and what the year looks like. If you compare what we've looked at from prior years and kind of this year, I think the team did a remarkably good job at staying ahead of the curve and expectations. Maybe to some extent, we have the benefit of the past that we can draw from on history and trends. What we've put forward into our guide at the beginning of this year's fiscal cycle, we're not moving off from that because we've already accounted in our viewpoint some of the slowdown and headwinds. We've operated in kind of a headwind-constrained environment for the better part of 18 months or a little longer. Now, a few interesting dynamics that's in play, and we've seen this in past times as well, where the consumer would be entering a buying cycle or kind of a lending cycle for, call it an asset, a vehicle, with the hopes of acquiring a certain class of vehicle, think, let's say, call it a BMW. Unfortunately, in a tightening credit environment, the BMW doesn't get approved, and it moves to a different brand and a different lower-cost model. You see kind of the same Social Security number showing up a little later somewhere else, where a second application is run through our system, and which in that case may get approved. I would leave you with that thought as this, it's not That total negative for us is a consumer who's on a cycle with a vehicle every three, four or three years needs to interact with the system and have multiple touch points due to failure of first approval. What I will also add into the mix here is and Sean touched on it very well in his early commentary on in a question asked by somebody. Our customer base typically functions well in a certain demographic, and that's kind of a demographic of folks who rarely have a deposit account of over $250,000. Folks who get their bi-monthly salary paid in, and it goes to a mortgage, a couple of car payments, it goes to a personal loan and credit cards, and a very stable members of a credit union or a retail bank or a bank with a retail focus. What we've seen in the past is, yes, there have been contractions. There's been the Great Recession. We've seen kind of the early stages of COVID, and we've kind of looked at the trends in our business. What we have done so far this year and how we've looked at the business and the modeling. From my perspective, our business is in good shape. There's a ton of interest in the market for digitalization in our customer base. Our traditional customer base is trailing. They're not ahead of the curve right now. Their members and clients are demanding more touchless interactions, touchless lending interactions. The need for MeridianLink's offering and solutions and platform is growing, it's not receding. From a need in the market standpoint, I believe if you look at a 10-year cycle, those who are investing today and will do so in the near medium-term future, will be the ones best positioned to gain new clients, new members. They will be the ones who's most likely going to be the driving force in future consolidation if they have the right technology, the right platform, the right ways to interact with clients. Those who are lacking investment, lacking integration, will ultimately be consumed in. We've kind of debated a lot of this internally over the last few months, and the conclusion that we've reached is maybe out of the whole banking kind of merry-go-round and the swings and the go-arounds here, you see, regulation tightening, kind of lesser depository-taking institutions. Our expectations, it's gonna be more on the banking side than the credit union side. Maybe there's a smaller number of those. The number of consumers that's interacting with the system is growing, it's not shrinking. The consumer drives the U.S. economy, and the consumer is also in play more and more, where every meaningful interaction for an asset purchase is some form of loan application, and it becomes more and more digital. There was a pretty decent jump in the cycle of COVID initially, and that momentum is continuing and accelerating. My take is maybe if you think of it in a quarter or two, there may be a little bit more headwinds. Overall, on this whole cycle, and if you look at the MeridianLink business over two decades, I don't see this business going through a significant change in business model or anything, because we have natural tailwinds that tends to be stronger in better times and the headwinds we've accounted for in the times we're in right now. I'm pretty confident I'm with Sean in how we view the business for 2023 here and our guidance. Sean alluded to April volumes here. We kind of see strength and in some areas, a little weakness, but there's nothing to call out that is out of the ordinary for us based on the April volumes that will lead us to have a different view on Q2 or the year to date from the view that we started the year with. I've said a lot. Sean, I don't know if you wanna add anything to what I've said. I think to say anything would be, would be idiotic. That was a perfect answer. Agreed. Very, very comprehensive. Thanks for that, Nicolaas. I agree, some of those nuances do need to be better understood in terms of the particular segments of the end market. The, yeah, on the cross-sell, obviously, you know, there's a very positive momentum there. Clearly that's been a focus from a go-to-market perspective. You know, it seems to me that MeridianLink One may also be helping as well, just having things on a single platform may sort of incentivize more cross-sell. To what extent is MeridianLink One a contributor, as well as the kind of the improved go-to-market? Obviously, it's not one thing, but just curious specifically on the MeridianLink One component. Thanks a lot. Yeah. This is Chris, and I very much view the R&D through sales and marketing alignment is central to the success. Being a little bit more specific, it really comes down to extending our value prop to the customers to encourage them to buy more than one solution from us, right? As we look to extend the platform through a build/buy partner approach, everything we add has to add more value together than apart. One item I discussed a little bit less when we was asked about what we would do with the cloud migration resources. Is it's really looking at that interconnective tissue and how do we extend that capability? yeah. MeridianLink One is the center and associated value prop is the center of our cross-sell strategy, and the rest of the organization supports that. Got it. Thank you very much. Then just one more quick one if I could sneak in. I know, implementation efficiency and, you know, reducing time to revenue has been a focus. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that in terms of how that's trending and how we should expect that to progress over the coming quarters and years. Thanks. Andrew, I apologize, but the audio on my end was a little shaky on this last question. Was the question about- I can repeat that if that's helpful. the backlog being worked down? That would be great. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Sorry about that. It was about implementation efficiency and backlog absorption. I know that's been a focus, so just curious kinda how that's trending and how should we expect that to evolve over the coming quarters and years. Hopefully that came through clearly. It came through clearly. Thank you, and I appreciate you repeating that. It's trending well. We continue to work the backlog down and release ACV in the business. I think overall, if you look at our results, that's part of the story. We're also very excited to have had Dean Germeyer join us as our Chief Customer Officer. Dean brings a ton of experience in the scaling of services enablement, kind of building a very repeatable, scalable, predictable services organization. Where we're at, I think we've done remarkably well in how we've accelerated the business over the last three years or so from where we were to where we at. I really think that the focus and ideas and playbook that Dean is gonna help us and his leadership team to move things to the next level. I'm pretty excited as we go into 23, and we'll be doing planning for 24, how the business will continue to scale and expand. Having Dean join the team, and driving a new focus on that organization, I think it's gonna even pick up more pace than what we've seen to date. Andrew, I think we've talked about this before, but I just one more point on that. I agree wholeheartedly with Nicholas. I'd like to see us, I think the even working the backlog as a phrase, we're kind of turning the corner internally, to be more around ACV release, right? It means the same thing but has a little bit different connotation. I think there's an equilibrium that has to be struck between bookings, services velocity, and that ACV release over time. I have full intention on reporting that in due time. Right now, I would say I agree with Nicholas. It's more manageable than it has been. We have line of sight to the backlog that we do have, and we have a good, an improved cycle time around the services implementation specific to ProServ that will provide us the ACV release that's in our guidance. Perfect. Thank you very much, guys. Appreciate all the comments. Yep. Thank you, Andrew. Your next question comes from Scott Wurtzel with Wolfe Research. Please go ahead. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Just one from me. Going back to sort of the topic on cross-selling, was just wondering if there was any noticeable shift in demand from your existing customers as a result of the banking turmoil that we saw in March. Maybe if we sort of bifurcate January, February versus March and April, was there any noticeable shift in demand, you know, by product from your customers? What we did see, and it was in line with our overall go-to-market motion, was an increase in interest in our account opening solution tied to our marketing automation solution, which we had recently enhanced the integration of specifically around that account opening. One thing that's great about the overall MeridianLink One value proposition is depending on the different economic cycles, we can leverage points of our platform together to help them accomplish their outcome. In this case, they want to grow deposits, they can leverage a combination of our solutions to extend that capability. Great. Great. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Scott. Your next question comes from Saket Kalia with Barclays. Please go ahead. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions here. Sean, maybe just start with you, and apologies I joined late, so apologies if this was asked. Great to see the improving net retention in the lending solutions business. By the way, appreciate the disclosure. Wonder if you could just talk about sort of what products you feel like are having the most success in driving up that NRR, or if that's more of sort of a volume-driven expansion. Any color on sort of what's driving that improvement in net retention one level deeper would be helpful. Well, hi, Saket, first. Second, you know, in the. In the disclosure supplement, I think it calls out clearly lending software versus data verification, right? Clearly a very big difference between 111% NRR on our lending software versus DVS at 83.7%. The DVS component, we've continued to see a mortgage drag for a long period of time. The balance of DVS is flat year-over-year. You know, I don't expect a huge improvement in that line. Really it's inside of lending that we really see the benefit from an NRR perspective. 111% in total, the numbers are skewed towards consumer even at a higher rate. Mortgage is even above 100% at this point. I think, I don't know if you had a chance to review the supplement, but that provides I think the added color that you're looking for. Yeah. Very helpful. I saw the difference between those two. I was kind of more wondering what's sort of driving that improvement? The 111 in lending, I mean, if we look at this back a year ago, was about 101%. Clearly just a lot of success in either volume or kind of new products. That's really the crux of the question. Is this sort of coming from one or the other and kind of You know, if it's from new products, which of those products that are the ones that are driving it? Does that make sense? Yeah. I mean, it's a combination of things. I do wanna make sure that we take note that the cross sell was a big component of that, and that is now being included in the number in the overall NRR% calculation where it wasn't before. That's a correction and is now part of the footnote. Inside of the cross sell motion, I think you're kind of seeing the opposite of what you saw last year, right? Which was mortgage was driving a larger percentage, and consumer at a slower pace. Inside a consumer, we have the opposite now. Inside of consumer, Like I said, with volumes, you're kind of seeing it across the board with consumer. I don't think it's one product or another. I can't point to auto, I can't point to personal loans, I can't point to credit cards. It's kind of a stabilization and a sell-through of the entire consumer product. Got it. Got it. That's helpful. Nicolaas, maybe for the follow-up for you. You know, I think it was in another question you alluded to share gains, a little bit. I was wondering where you feel like you're taking. Chris, feel free to chime in on this as well. Where do you feel like you're taking share more, right? Is it from the core providers? Is it from other software providers? Is it from in-house solutions? A little bit more color and qualitatively, of course, where do you feel like you're getting some of those share gains? I think I'll go with option D, Zach, and say all of the above. Right. Because there's not one area where we executing in a way where we stand out. I would tell you, smaller mid-market deposit retaking institutions, at least my perspective is, have underinvested on a percentage basis over the last decade against larger peers who invested more in digital readiness, who invested more in auto decisioning. My sense right now is there's pretty much a thirst for a solution that isn't a kind of single point offering, that is a broad platform offering. It's not that we compete with. What I would rather say is our conversations with customers today is about the differences what we have on offer. You have access to your information across our platform. You have the ability to do analytics across our platform. You have the ability to do enhanced marketing automation and other automations across our platform. It's less about, at that point, competing with a single vendor. It's more about where we choose to compete, and we choose not to be at the high end of the market. We are pretty focused on where we are and where we win at a higher percentage than average. We are replacing legacy solutions, single point solutions, kind of more workflow-driven solutions. That cuts across more of, on my definition, legacy offerings, who's not as enabled as we are, who doesn't offer the integrations into a partner marketplace with APIs, with everything else. I think we have moved the needle over the last 3, 4 years with R&D and innovation, that it's not we compare us against a single offering and we win more there or more over here. It's either you buy MeridianLink's platform with all the integrations and the ability to do everything so well across the platform, from account opening, to all the loan types, to analytics, to automation, to auto decisioning, to the integrations into the partner marketplace enablement. Collections, if there's a workout room where somebody needs to go into. You can't really put your finger on a single competitor out there who MeridianLink goes and competes with the same thing. That's why I would pick option D, say all of the above, because we literally see it coming from all of the above sources and then some. Got it. Very helpful, guys. Thank you. Thank you, Sket. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, should you have a question, please press star followed by 1. Your next question comes from Bob Napoli with William Blair. Please go ahead. Hi. Thank you for the follow-up. I just, You touched on it in the last answer, but MeridianLink Insight, the data analytics platform, any update on that or demand for that product, outlook for that product? This is Chris. The MeridianLink Insight and the associated report cards we can provide our clients is central to our business review process going forward. Specifically what it enables is for our customers to see how they're benchmarked against key performance factors across the origination cycle, so they can get data from us that they can't get anywhere else due to our scale. We leverage that as a cornerstone as we work with them to plan their 3-5year technology roadmap. That the Insight product is a way for them to drill deeper on that data on a day-to-day basis. As such, through that change, we're seeing uptake and demand. Great. Thank you. Then you did repurchase 3 million shares in the quarter, I think I read. Was that planned or was that opportunistic? From a capital perspective, do you have more capital return plans? That's $3 million, not. Okay. Shares. Right. Okay. It seems like a lot. Okay. Forget the question. Yeah. Okay. Just to quickly touch on it, that is part of our structured repurchase plan, that's tiered based on price, where we see value in the market, we're a participant, on repurchase, and where stocks have just in general been, we've been a buyer. Great. Thank you very much. Yep. There are no further questions at this time. Please proceed. Thank you, operator. As we close today's earnings call, I'd like to welcome our new customers and partners to the MeridianLink family. Our dedicated team strives to create the best experiences for everyone who works with us. As we grow, we maintain our customer-centric approach, and I'm grateful to the hundreds of employees whose commitment inspires me on a daily basis. Our partners and customers benefit from their expertise. Speaking of customers, I look forward to sharing the insights we will gather from our 2023 user forum when we speak again. This event wouldn't happen without our staff and supportive partners. Last year's user forum was a resounding success and provided incredibly valuable moments of engagement and feedback that enriched our strategy and relationships. It played a key role in where we are today, and I look forward to another successful event. Again, thank you for joining, and have a great afternoon, evening. Back to you, operator. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.