Good day, and welcome to Paymentus's first quarter 2022 earnings call. This call is being recorded. All participants are currently in a listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity for your questions following management's prepared remarks. To ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. At this time, I would like to hand the call over to Paul Seamon, VP of Finance and Strategy, for some introductory comments. Please go ahead. Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to Paymentus's first quarter 2022 earnings call. Joining me on the call today are Dushyant Sharma, our Founder and CEO, and Matt Parson, our CFO. Following our prepared remarks, we'll take questions. Our press release was issued after the close of market today and is posted on our website where the call is being simultaneously webcast. The webcast replay of this call and the supplemental slides accompanying this presentation will be available on our company's website under the Investor Relations link at ir.paymentus.com. Statements made on this call include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements use words such as will, believe, expect, anticipate, and similar phrases that denote future expectations or intents regarding our financial results and guidance, market opportunity, business strategies, impact from acquisitions, and other matters. These forward-looking statements speak as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update them. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that may cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in such statements, including the risks and uncertainties set forth under the caption Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements and Risk Factors in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, which we filed with the SEC on March 3, 2022. Our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2022, which we expect to file with the SEC in early May 2022, and elsewhere with our other filings with the SEC. We encourage you to review these detailed safe harbor and risk factor disclosures. In addition, during today's call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, specifically contribution profit, adjusted gross profit, Adjusted EBITDA, and Adjusted EBITDA margin, which are non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are useful in measuring our performance and liquidity, should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for or in isolation from, GAAP results. We encourage you to review additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations with the most directly comparable GAAP measures in our earnings press release issued today and the supplemental slides for this webcast, each available on the Investor Relations page of our website and in our filings with the SEC. With that, I'd like to turn this call over to Dushyant Sharma, our founder and CEO. Thanks, Paul. We started 2022 with a very strong quarter across all KPIs and saw little to no impact from the geopolitical and economic events that occurred, including events in Ukraine and inflation. We believe we have a clear view of the business and are optimistic about the outlook for the remainder of 2022, as well as the foundation it sets for 2023. We believe one great aspect of our business is that it is extremely resilient because consumers and businesses have to pay their bills, essential bills, regardless of world events or whether the economy enters a recession or not. On a quick personal note, this is our fourth quarterly update since the IPO as we approach our first anniversary. I'm having a lot of fun building the business, so is my team. I know because based on where the markets have been, one would think that we could be distracted, but we are not. We are laser-focused on executing our business strategies as we seek to build a long-term successful and high-growth business. We all understand and remain focused on the effect of long-term compounding growth. As a new public company and where I sit today, despite our scale, I view us as a starter public company and believe we are just getting started. I welcome each and every one of you on our journey and to share in our long-term success. Let me now discuss our financial performance, which demonstrates that we are executing and performing well. In the first quarter, contribution profit grew 35%, driven by a 40.9% increase in transactions. From the sales booking perspective, we signed over 60 clients in the quarter, which is about 50% more than the same period last year. These sales numbers are inclusive of direct, partner, and JPMorgan migrations, which require some sales support to complete. Relative to the comparable quarter of 2021, our sales were more diverse with less than 40% from the MC42. The largest areas of increase were city services, insurance, and mortgage payments. We also signed clients as unique as a leading home design company. We crossed an annual run rate of $100 billion in payments volume during the quarter. We believe very few companies in the U.S. are processing at this scale, which is nearly $250 million per day on average. As we have said before, the scale creates opportunities to strengthen our network and foster relationships because of the unique value we bring in underpenetrated segments for digital payments. We continue to work to establish additional relationships in our newer segments. In past quarters, we have talked about the extension of our telecom partnerships. This quarter we have signed the healthcare division of one of the top five US banks to expand our footprint in that industry. We expect the partnership to provide us with expanded access to practice management systems. Adding partners in areas such as healthcare, telecom, and other under-penetrated verticals help our sales efforts and complements our direct selling process. Let's look at our ability to increase our share of the total addressable market. In the quarter, we went live with one of the largest owners of apartments in the country. Real estate is outside of the core six verticals that we talk about, but represents a significant opportunity on its own. As you can imagine, rent payments fall in our sweet spot for both non-discretionary and recurring. We believe this implementation shows the flexibility and the breadth of our platform, which powers industries as diverse as real estate, B2B logistics, and home security providers, not to mention our existing core verticals. We are making progress migrating the JPMorgan Chase client base. We completed our first implementations in the quarter, and many more are in flight and scheduled to go live throughout the year. While this added revenue isn't material yet, we expect it to build over time. In addition, the new deal sales channel from JPMorgan Chase continues to build, and the relationship continues to be more and more beneficial for both parties. A quick note on our IPN ecosystem. We continue to expand the network and add more and more endpoints, including DFIs. As a reminder, IPN is symbiotic with Biller Direct. IPN helps us win more Biller Direct deals, and Biller Direct wins help us add more IPN partners in volume. I'll now turn the call over to Matt to discuss our financial results in more detail. Thanks, Dushyant. As a reminder, today's discussion includes non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the tables in our press release and supplemental slides for a reconciliation of non-GAAP items to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure. In the first quarter, we processed 87.9 million transactions, which equates to a year-over-year increase of 40.9%. Transaction volume continues to be driven by strong execution as well as additional IPN transactions, in particular the Payveris payment transaction as well as business-to-business transactions. This transaction growth drove a revenue increase of 26.5% over Q1 of 2021, which resulted in revenue of $116.7 million in the quarter. Q1 contribution profit was $47.4 million, representing a 35% increase over the same period last year. Consistent with the last several quarters, contribution profit grew faster than revenue, primarily due to an increased mix of transactions without interchange, specifically IPN transactions, cash-based payout transactions, and certain B2B transactions. Contribution profit per transaction was in line with Q4 of 2021 at $0.54, which was consistent with our expectations in previous communications. Contribution profit for the quarter was ahead of expectations due to certain customers going live earlier in the quarter than was anticipated, as well as some favorable mix of payment types. While these items provided a tailwind in Q1, we do not anticipate that tailwind to carry forward in the subsequent quarters. Adjusted EBITDA was $5.4 million for the first quarter, which represents an 11.3% Adjusted EBITDA margin, which was slightly above our internal expectations for the quarter. We only provide guidance for the full year, but we never expected the Adjusted EBITDA to be spread evenly throughout the year as we ramped up hiring to end in 2021 and had additional fees for completing the 2021 audit. We expected Q1 Adjusted EBITDA to be the low point for the year for these and other reasons, and we are on track to slightly ahead of what we expected. Operating expenses rose $13.5 million to $36.2 million for Q1 of 2022 from the same period last year. Overall, the increase in operating expenses from last year was driven by investments in staff as well as additional operating expenses associated with Payveris and Finovera, the amortization of identified intangible assets from the acquisitions, and stock-based compensation. Specifically, R&D expense increased $2.7 million or 34.4% from the first quarter in 2021 as we continue to innovate with and for our customers and partners. Sales and marketing expense increased $8 million driven by the Payveris acquisition, continued expansion of the sales team, adding partnerships to capture our sizable market opportunity, and an increase in stock-based compensation. Also, travel and marketing events continue to ramp up relative to Q1 2021, particularly with the impact of COVID fading. We experienced an increase in G&A expense of 43.1% or $2.9 million due to our acquisitions, multi-fold increases in the cost of corporate insurance and ongoing investment in public company infrastructure. Our GAAP net income was $1.7 million, and EPS for Q1 was $0.01. Non-GAAP net income was $3.7 million, and non-GAAP EPS was $0.03 for the quarter. We had a large tax benefit in Q1, driven by our small loss on pre-tax income, as well as a discrete benefit of $2.6 million that we recorded related to excess tax benefits on stock-based compensation. As of March 31, 2022, we had $163.4 million of cash and cash equivalents on our balance sheet. Cash decreased primarily due to the timing of certain customer payments, as well as increased operating expenses due to the acquisitions. At quarter end, we had approximately 121 million shares of common stock outstanding. Now, turning to our 2022 full year outlook. We're increasing our 2022 revenue outlook to a range of $492 million-$497 million, which represents growth between 24.5% and 26% year-over-year. We're increasing our contribution profit guidance to be between $206 million and $208 million for the year, which is approximately 30%-31% growth. Our Adjusted EBITDA outlook is in the range of $30 million-$33 million, with an Adjusted EBITDA margin of 14.5%-16%. We've indicated previously, we do not believe the current inflationary environment will have a negative impact on our top line. Our current guidance reflects some assumptions around continued inflation and potential for increasing wage pressure. However, if inflation continues at higher levels than we have assumed, it could have a higher impact on our margins going forward. As you can see from the updated guidance, the high end of our contribution profit guidance implies growth in the same range as 2021. We believe this level would give us a top decile performance of technology companies on Rule of 40 for the past couple of years. We are not slowing down and remain excited about how the business is performing. Finally, as we said last quarter, we anticipate our full year effective tax rate to be around 30%. However, due to the amortization of intangibles associated with the acquisitions, the closer we are to break even on pre-tax book income, the more variation we could see on our tax rate. I'll now turn the call back over to Dushyant for some closing comments. Thanks, Matt. To close, I'd like to provide a brief reminder of what we believe makes us different and positions us to win a significant share of the massive payment pie. Our platform was designed to be flexible and meet the billing and payment needs of virtually any industry. This creates a massive addressable market that's both recurring and non-discretionary in the U.S. and beyond. It estimates this at nearly 16 billion bill payments, payment transactions annually in the U.S. alone, and we believe we have the ability to address a sizable portion of them. With our acquisition of Payveris, we also opened up access to bank-based payments, and we believe it extends our reach to virtually any channel or consumer a consumer wants to pay through. Our platform is known for B2C, but also runs large scale B2B invoicing and payments clients. B2B is outside of the $16 billion number I just mentioned. Our platform is known for pay-ins, meaning bill payments, but can also provide payouts for insurance companies and other industries that need disbursement capabilities. Payouts is also incremental to the $16 billion payment number I talked about. This is why I continue to be extremely bullish on the business and this year continue to invest in long-term growth rather than dropping incremental dollars to the bottom line. I'd like to thank our 1,000+ employees for their hard work and dedication that makes all this possible. With that, I'll now turn the call over to the operator for questions. Absolutely. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your phone's keypad. If for any reason you would like to remove that question, please press star followed by two. Again, to ask a question, press star one. As a reminder, if you're using a speakerphone, please remember to pick up your handset before asking your question to avoid. Excuse me. Our first question goes to Will Nance with Goldman Sachs. Will, your line is open. Please proceed. Hey, guys. Good afternoon. How are you? Good. How are you? Good. I wanted to follow up on the full year guidance. I think last quarter you guys signaled that in the back half of the year you guys could dip below that 30%. I think for you it was a combination of some comps from the prior year and some conservatism around the pace of onboarding. It sounds like you were a little bit more successful in bringing new clients on board this quarter. I'm wondering, as we've gotten, you know, three months later, have you gotten any incremental line of sight on pace of onboarding? And is that still your expectation in the back half of the year? And what would it take? You know, what would need to happen for that not to occur? Yeah. Thanks, Will. This is Matt. Great question. You know, it's early in the year. I would say, you know, we still have nothing fundamental has changed in kind of our view with respect to our guidance and modeling the forecast for the year. We did have a very good result in Q1 in being able to get things live sooner than we had anticipated and modeled. We're gonna continue to work for that as we go through the rest of the year. It's something we've always done and will continue to do. It's a definite focus of Dushyant, I, and the rest of the team. It's early in the year, and I think, you know, we're kind of maintaining our view on the rest of the year for at this point in time, and we'll continue to work on it as we go through the year. Got it. That's helpful. Maybe one for Dushyant is nice to hear about the referral agreement with the healthcare vertical, the large bank. If we take a step back, you guys have done a lot of expansion in your go-to-market channel since the IPO. I guess when you put together the JPMorgan relationship, Payveris, the new healthcare deal, how are you thinking about the tailwinds that drive to the top line and I guess even higher levels? Would you consider these partnerships as being potentially additive to that type of bank growth rates that you've done in the past? Well, good question, Will. Thank you. I was smiling because of your last part of your question. Look, we are very proud of what we have been able to accomplish here. Everything we set out to do as a business, we said we're gonna build a platform which allows us to scale horizontally to any vertical industry and vertically to any size of the customer. We have done that. As a result of the modern age Biller Direct platform we have created, which not only brings companies live in the ecosystem, which is their direct ecosystem, but also through the IPN ecosystem we have created allows them to go to any endpoint. It is allowing us to bring customers on our platform at a faster clip than we had done before. In addition to that, we are also seeing tremendous excitement in the partnership ecosystem we have. You named some of the partners, and there are many other partners in the mix as well. We are seeing tremendous progress there. This clearly helps us continue to grow and maintain the momentum. You know, we're not raising our guidance. Our guidance is what it is. Not a day goes by that we are not looking at how can we accelerate that even more than what we are already forecasting. not changing the guidance, but at least from a overall perspective feeling about where our business is headed. Got it. Appreciate that, and thank you for taking all my questions. Of course. Thanks, Will. Thank you, Will. Our next question goes to Andrew Bauch with SMBC Nikko Securities. Andrew, your line is open. Please go ahead. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question and nice set of results here. I guess first off, Matt, I wonder if you could clarify some of your comments around the first quarter tailwinds around favorable mix and the pace of onboarding. I guess can you give us a better sense of what exactly those payment mix types, like what drove that benefit and why that wouldn't carry forward in subsequent quarters? Is the onboarding dynamic really just kind of a timing element or we would assume that if you're accelerating the rate of these onboards, that those tailwinds, you know, should continue? Yeah, thanks, Andrew. Appreciate the question. On the implementation onboarding, you know, when we lay out our model for the year, we assume based on all the information that we have from our own team, from the client, a certain go-live date for a particular client. Let's say for some of the accelerations we saw in Q1, they were clients that we had slated to go live, say at the end of Q1, but they went live in the middle of Q1. That means that we got an extra month and a half of revenue off of them. When it comes to Q2, we kinda had that revenue in Q2 all along, because they were gonna go live in our plan at the end of Q1 anyway. There's no incremental benefit to Q2 from that client going live earlier in Q1. That's what I was sort of referencing with Will's question is at this point in time early in the year, we don't wanna make assumptions that we'll be able to be successful with additional clients that are in the implementation pipeline being able to do that same thing because every client's different. All the facts and circumstances are different. It's great for Q1 that we were able to do that. We continue to work on doing that every day going forward, and our team is very focused on it. It's hard to make an assumption that that can continue through, depending on different facts and circumstances with different clients. On the mix type, really what I was referring to there is, we saw some movement, say from credit, higher cost type of payment to more cash-based, lower cost type of payment in Q1. We got the benefit of additional contribution profit from that. The main reason we said we're not anticipating that to continue is because Q1's a little bit of a different animal, as we talked about before, than the other quarters throughout the year in that it's kind of a high point of the year in what we see for our average payment amount, i.e., the bill payment amounts that are getting paid on our platform, you know, largely due to utility payments being higher in Q1 because of the cold winter months. This year, that was maybe even fueled a little bit more with some of the macro things we're seeing around energy costs. I think people may have paid more with different types of payment methods because the bills were higher. They may have split their bills and paid some with cash, some with credit, et cetera. Again, we're not making assumptions that that's gonna continue because Q1 has a little bit different profile with respect to the amount of payments we see and the behavior we see out of consumers just because those payment amounts are higher. I think if I may add a little bit to that, the quarterly dynamic Matt described so well is exactly why sometimes can be misunderstood that when we are guiding to the year, sometimes quarters tends to vary quarter to quarter. But the guidance for the year is what we are focused on as a whole. Got it. Very helpful. Then I follow up for Dushyant. I mean, if we're heading into, you know, an economic slowdown and potentially a prolonged recession, I mean, is this changing any of your conversations with billers that are looking for solutions to be able to, you know, better capture rate of payment and the like? Yeah. Gee, great question. I can take you back to the last time we saw a recessionary environment where it was like, 2010, 2011, 2012 and so on. What that transpired into an acceleration growth for us in some ways because, the business itself, as I talked about at the top of the call, that there's a resilience factor in here where, I still have to pay my bills as a consumer, including the businesses, that you have to keep your lights on, you have to pay your insurance, you have to pay your mortgage and so on. During these types of times, there's increased focus on improving the efficiencies while also trying to improve the customer experience so that it's easier to collect money from the customers. That actually shines even a stronger light or a brighter light on our platform and our capabilities. As a result, we start to get even more inbound inquiries than we would typically get. I'm not saying that a recession is actually beneficial to us and how there's a benefit to us, but what I'm saying is that the way we have designed our business and the way we approach the market, if there is a recession, because of the pricing model which we have created, it actually helps our case even stronger in many cases. I hope that answers the question. No, it does. As that collection rate definitely comes into greater focus for billers. Thank you for the color. Thanks, Andrew. Thank you, Andrew. Our next question is Ashwin Shirvaikar with Citi. Ashwin, please go ahead. Yeah. Thank you. Hey, good quarter, guys. I was hoping you could perhaps address sort of what we should expect with regards to cadence through the year. You know, you're obviously raising expectations. Is there a timeline one should expect in terms of just sort of the layout? Let me ask the second question that's there as well. You know, the expansion opportunities that you talked about, for example, rent payment opportunity and so on and so forth, is there any could you perhaps testify that any, you know, how that sort of flows through your system at the output end? Okay. Thanks, Ashwin. On the first one, I assume what you mean is, does it change anything, just to clarify for me on the quarterly cadence, does the fact that we had the you know kind of exceeded the expectations that you want and raised our guidance, does it change kind of our thinking for the rest of the year and how the quarters play out? Is that what the question was? Yes, that was what the question was. Okay. Got it. No, not really. I mean, as I said, I think the reason, you know, we had a strong Q1. Well, there were a lot of reasons we had a strong Q1. I would say the reason that we had a stronger than expected Q1 was the timing of certain implementations happening a bit faster, sooner than we expected, as well as some of the mix shift. It's early in the year. We don't, you know, because of the factors I mentioned, I think in the call for Andrew's session, we're not comfortable sort of carrying that through to the rest of the year at this point. I think the kind of underlying fundamentals for the year are consistent with what we expected and talked about going into Q4. You know, we've got, you know, as Dushyant sort of alluded to a second ago, we only provide guidance on an annual basis. The reason we do that is because there is quarter to quarter variability in our business. You know, when we get into the back half of the year, we've got, you know, some of the tough comparisons with some of the acquisitions we had in Q3 and Q4. But fundamentally, we still believe that we're a 30% grower and we're, you know, obviously our guidance reflects that. You know, I think nothing's gonna change that going into 2023. Yeah, I think that was the kind of covering the first one. The second one, could you just repeat the second question? I'm sorry. Yeah. I was just gonna, you know, obviously it's kinda similar to a previous question, but I was wondering if you could actually price some of these opportunities that you talked about, like for example, when you start rolling in rent payments, right? How does that add to your overall pie or was that already included in your overall pie? Great question, Ashwin. I mean, this is one of the key advantages of the platform, the way we have conceived it, the way we approach it, is that we are able to add, so the bill payment market, which is just B2C payment receivable market itself is, you know, as we talked about it's in trillions of dollars of household expense which goes through just for bill payments. B2B capabilities which we talk about is completely outside of that. It's significantly larger in many ways, just because of the type of amounts, the dollar amounts which are included in B2B invoicing process. Payouts is a pretty significant opportunity as well. They're both outside of what we are pursuing here. What we talked about in the 16 billion bill payments. We feel like that this is all of these things we have done, the hard work, the rails, the platform, the capabilities we have built, the workflows we have created, it's all setting a great foundation for us to continue to grow in the out years. The thing I would add to that, and totally agree with all that. The thing I would add to that is, we've kind of been thinking about it in a little bit of a two-prong way in the sense of, you know, when we talk about kind of being a 30% grower, we obviously were thinking about the Biller Direct business and the platform that we have and, you know, our six verticals, but also all verticals, right? We're obviously taking into account kind of all the different types of bills that can be on it. What I meant when I said a two-pronged approach is the more we can expand that pie and have more opportunities at different types of clients. That also applies to the bank network with Payveris. That also applies to some of the ATM stuff. The more kind of certainty you can put around that 30% number because it just gives us more opportunities from which to draw it from. If many of them hit, then I think it becomes incremental and kind of on top of that 30% number. It's kinda like we've got a wide net of things that we can draw from to get there. If we're successful in many of those different things, then it starts to go up from there, if that makes sense. As long as you have diversity. You said that much more succinctly than I did. Yes. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ashwin. Thank you, Ashwin. Our next question goes to John Davis from Raymond James. John, your line is open. Please go ahead. Hey, good afternoon, guys. Matt, I've heard you say a couple times you expect to continue this 30%+ contribution profit growth into 2023. That would seem a little bit of an organic acceleration given the modest impacts from the acquisitions that you've done. Just wanted to, you know, confirm that and just kind of understand what the drivers are to that potential accelerated growth in 2023. Yeah. Thanks, John. 2022 is not done yet, in the sense of, you know, like Dushyant said earlier, our guidance is our guidance. We're certainly working every day to try to, you know, continue to drive more in 2022. I mean, that's what we're here for and that's what we're paid for is to continue to try to drive more. With your point, based on our current guidance, I definitely understand your point. I think it's a result of all the things that we're, you know, Dushyant talked about that we're working to put in place now. It's, you know, additional partnerships. It's the expansion of opportunities around outside of our core six core verticals or industries that we're now getting into, like the rent payments opportunity. It's B2B, you know, potential that we've started off in and continuing to drive additional clients there. I think it's really just, you know, the bank opportunity with Payveris. We still, you know, are very excited about what that can bring and what inbound, you know, interest and conversations are happening on that front. Again, I think really to answer the question is the way I wrapped up with Ashwin's question, which is, you know, we've really widened the net out over the last, you know, 12-18 months. Just having more opportunities at more different, whether it's verticals, partners, banks, post payers, direct billers, you know, on and on, it just gives us more areas and more opportunities for which to drive additional business growth. Absolutely. On top of that, you know, we have a customer base. We have signed customers. We had you know last several quarters, including this most recent one, 60 deals to 60 deals is, you know, nothing to sneeze at. So all of these contribute to where we could be next year. So we're excited about the business. Like Matt said, the year is not done, but the year is also not done from a perspective of adding lots to the mix to make sure 2023 is a big year. Okay. No, that's super helpful. There are a lot of questions on inflation and trying to understand since you guys are a relatively new public company. Matt or Dushyant, maybe just get a second to explain or expand upon, you know, how inflation actually runs through. I know financially you guys take per bill, but some of your costs could be, you know, higher in an inflationary environment. I just really want to understand. Matt, you said that inflation's kind of neutral. Maybe just kinda give us a minute or so on explaining that and how inflation flows through to you now. Sure. The way we have engineered our business and the way we have engineered our agreements with the clients actually take care of this very issue and has done that for years now. One of the factors is if our clients actually, I don't wanna get too technical because it is a very technical question because there are payment methods involved. Different payment methods have different types of fee structures to them. Some of them are flat regardless of the form of payments if our cost structure is. In some cases, regardless of the payment amount, which is charged with inflation by the billing company, we still get our fair share. Our margins don't get affected. In some cases, there is a change where we are getting a flat fee and while on the back end our cost is variable, that's in a small percentage of those transactions. There as well, we have ability to raise the pricing and because it's very understandable by the clients themselves that if they are getting more benefit through the inflation, it's charging higher for their bills, we want the very company which is making that all happen, where they're able to collect the money, we want to be able to raise the rate as well, and we have those capabilities in the agreements already built in. That doesn't affect us as much as it will appear, actually. Okay. No, that's super helpful. Thanks, guys. Thanks, John. Thank you, John. Our next question goes to Jeff Cantwell with Wells Fargo. Jeff, your line is open. Please go ahead. Hey, thank you for taking my questions, and thanks for allowing me to join this call. You know, one thing that stood out on the positive side here, and this isn't being highlighted on this call, is raising the guidance, especially given how many, you know, other companies have sounded about the quarter. I guess given that you're at the real heart of the economy in many ways, given how many clients you have now, can you sort of give us your macro view as you see it? What I'm really trying to get at is what makes you confident here to raise the guide? Is it simply range or just something about the operational momentum this quarter? I just wanna see, you know, what you see coming that will help us understand what you're thinking about, as far as positives for the remainder of the year. Yeah. Thanks, Jeff. This is Matt, and welcome to the fold. Glad to have you as part of the group here. Thanks. Yeah. On the macro, I, you know, I think Dushyant Sharma hit on it a little bit earlier. Yeah, obviously, things have been a bit tough to start the year on multiple fronts in the macro. Because of the space that we're in and, you know, really focused on non-discretionary, essential recurring bill payments, it's a very resilient business. You know, we saw it kind of at the beginning of COVID when, you know, really the impact to our business at the beginning of COVID was a little bit of a slowdown in signing new business and getting customers live because everybody was focused on their own business. We did not see any slowdown at all to the payments flowing through our platform because people still had to pay their bills. They needed to keep the lights on. They needed to keep their insurance, their mortgages, et cetera. It is a very resilient model, and that's reflected in, you know, our results in Q1 and our guidance for the rest of the year that even though the macro may seem a little uncertain, one thing is constant, that people, you know, need to continue to pay their bills. I think as far as raising the guidance, for the year, it's reflected in that we have not seen any negative impacts. We don't expect to see any negative impacts from that. In addition to, you know, again, just keep pointing back to all the things that we've added and continue to announce our ability to execute internally on, getting clients, live and implemented. That's actually, you know, again, back to one of the earlier questions, kind of relates to our ability to continue that through the rest of the year or not, what we saw in Q1 and being able to do it faster. There's a huge reliance there on the client. We can't do it alone. We have to partner with them. It has to be within the bounds of kind of their internal priorities and projects, and they've all got a million things going on. You know, if it was completely within our control, I'd be like, you know, full speed ahead, we're gonna get them all live tomorrow and figure out how many people we need to hire to do that. But we also have to work within the bounds of our clients. You know, it's definitely a partnership aspect of it. But we you know, everything that we kinda see from you know, behavior of people paying their bills, from the things we put in place you know, we feel good about the rest of the year. If I may add to this, to your broader economic question, and speaking to the investor base, broadly. If for example, you're a private company today, and you were investors in our company, and you had 40 other companies in your portfolio, you will look at Paymentus and think about, boy, this is a company which is in recurring billing space. Bills you have to pay. These are essential bills. During, you know, turbulent times like these, businesses have even a stronger need to collect money and collect the money efficiently and also improve experience for the customers. Both of those things are what our platform is designed to provide. It actually allows you to sleep a little bit better, and you know, during we have gone through a couple of these things and during COVID, we continued to grow as a business. We had the same thing in, you know, the financial crisis. What I'm trying to really just say is that if you take the public market side of things aside, there's a little bit of uncertainty which we have all experienced. You know, the business inside, internally, the business is doing really well. Okay, that's great, Dushyant. Thanks very much, and congrats on the results. Thank you. Thanks, Jeff. Thank you, Jeff. Our next question goes to Tien-Tsin Huang with JP Morgan. Tien-Tsin, your line is open. Please go ahead. Thank you so much. I'm gonna build on John's question and ask you from a biller perspective, just the completion and whatnot. Are you seeing billers want to promote auto pay as a reason to accelerate or create a sense of urgency to want to work with you? I'm just trying to understand the biller side of how they're viewing the uncertainties that people have been asking about. It feels like it could be a perfect help. Yes. I think so if you look at it in situations like these and frankly COVID itself is a pretty recent memory. The billing companies are faced with situations like, you know, how do we make it easier for customers to collect, as well as make it, you know, make sure that they have ability to pay multiple times if they have to. The auto pay itself, if you can believe it, is for customers who they're least concerned about from a collectibility standpoint. It is the customers who are not on auto pay, where they will say, "Well, how do I reach to the customers at a faster pace than or broadly? Could I do it in a way that doesn't cost me a lot more money than it would have otherwise?" Everything our platform is designed for. For example, if you were the biller and I was coming up to you in a market like this, my pitch would be to take a look at our platform. It is designed for you to not have to change anything on your end. We will do all the work because we have this advanced integration framework in place, and we have hundreds of billing systems we are already integrated with. We can integrate with you while through the integration, we can reach all of the customers you're otherwise not being able to reach out to just because of the modern online shopping ecosystem we have built. All of that resonates extremely well to the, you know, to the customer and to the billing company. Therefore, with multiple payment options wherever the customers are and including giving them ability to pay, including at the last minute, it is very easy for the customers to pay. That's why there's a gravitation towards us in times like this. Makes sense. Thanks for going through that. Just a quick follow-up, if you don't mind. Just the reinvestments make sense. I know there's a lot of investing in this option, partners and variables. Just on the product side in general, have you changed your focus on product development given what's happening in the world? Just curious what's new from a product perspective maybe that you weren't talking about six months ago. You know, we continue to make investments in the product. We have, in some ways, set the tone for the industry as to how customer experience should take place and how a platform should really operate and what kind of capabilities it should provide to the billing companies, both from their own team's perspective, the staff of the billing company, but also the customers of the billing company. When you look at it from that perspective, it's a never-ending pursuit. You know, we exist for two specific goals. How do we improve the customer experience and how do we do it while lowering the cost to collect or cost to serve the customers from a billing company standpoint? All the advancements, all the investments we make are in that area. The other area we are actually heavily focused on is how do we improve the velocity of onboarding. I'll give you an example. You know, we have almost to match comments earlier, if we could actually onboard clients and it was entirely in our control, we could onboard them tomorrow. Like seventy, eighty percent of our clients, if maybe even more could be onboarded without making a single change anywhere in our system. However, it takes time for the clients to get comfortable and go through the process. What we are making investments in is for the remaining 10%-20% as well, to make sure that these complex enterprise-size deployments are also able to get done without making too many changes, as the workflows, the complex sophisticated workflows could be implemented to our platform without coding. We're making some changes there as well. You'll hear more and more about that as we go forward. Very good. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Thank you, Tien-Tsin. Our final question goes to David Koning with Baird. Dave, your line is open. Please proceed. Yeah. Hey, guys. Thanks so much. I just wanted to review contribution profit per transaction. I think you talked before about as you've gotten bigger clients, I know that's naturally gone down a little. It actually went down less this quarter than in a long time. I'm just wondering, A, is the mix of businesses that comes down coming in at a different trend like at different levels, like different verticals create kind of different yields. Then over time, are we at a point where it just starts to stabilize? Yeah. Thanks, Dave. I appreciate the questions, Matt. Yes, I think yes to both questions. You know, with the Q4, I can't remember if we said it on the call or maybe it was in some of the Q&A afterwards, but you know I said we saw a pretty good step down in Q4. There was a lot of questions about it. I said, you know, we expect it to stabilize for 2022 and be pretty consistent with where we saw Q4. There were a couple of reasons for that conclusion, and we're seeing them play out. One was, if you recall, the reason for the step down or a reason for the step down in Q4 was a couple of large clients going live at the end of Q3, early Q4 that had a little bit different profile. One was more B2B. One was included, some payouts which were all cash based. They had a different pricing profile than, say, our typical, Biller Direct clients have. We felt very good because they were very large clients with lots of transactions, and so we felt good in the overall economic profile of the client. It caused a step down, and we didn't see anything in our, implementation pipeline that looked or felt like those two did. We expected to stabilize. Also there is a kind of a terminal point you get to once you know, again, if you think about the progression of our growth as an organization, we kind of purposely started in horizon one with small and medium sized clients, and then we moved up to large size in horizon two and then the network effect in horizon three. There's a period of time where every new large client you add is pulling down the average just simply because of the nature of size in the total portfolio. You know, we're kind of reaching that point now where addition of a new larger client doesn't really have that big an impact on the average. It's gonna have some but the rate at which it's going down certainly will slow dramatically. The other factor is some of the IPN transactions that we've talked about, you know, that are don't have any interchange associated with them. They are priced at a level that's fairly consistent with sort of what our current contribution profit per transaction level is. So they're not gonna be detracting to that overall point. So that's kind of what's behind the scenes driving it. The comments I made, I think, in Q4 are still the same. Nothing's changed to change our thinking there, which is the remainder of 2022, we expect to be pretty consistent with Q4 and Q1 and kind of where we are right now. Gotcha. Maybe just a quick follow up. Sales and marketing the last few quarters has trended up a lot, and it's in correspondence with really good revenue growth. I get it. Is there a point where it starts to get levered a little bit going forward? Absolutely. We're, you know, I don't want to say we're at that point because, you know, we continue to invest in the business. What I will say is between taking on, you know, some of the sales and marketing costs of Payveris in particular, as well as we kind of purposely put some investment at the end of 2021, into sales and marketing, and you're seeing kind of the first full quarter of that in Q1. It was higher than what I would say our ongoing level of investment is gonna be. That was kind of a purposeful push of spend there. I expect from this point forward, you will definitely start to see it moderate out and get more leverage over kind of what we saw the last couple of quarters. Gotcha. Awesome. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Dave. Thank you, Dave. There are no further questions. That's the time to conclude the Paymentus's Q1 2022 earnings call. Thank you for your participation. You can now disconnect your line.