Okay, thank you everyone for attending the Jefferies 2025 FinTech Conference. Honored to be hosting Paymentus today at this one-on-one discussion. As many of you are aware, Paymentus is trading very, very close to their all-time high, and deservedly so. We'll go through that due to continued record results that they have. To my left is Dushyant Sharma, Founder, CEO, and President, and to Dushyant's left is Sanjay Kalra, the Chief Financial Officer here. I'd love to maybe turn it over to both Dushyant and Sanjay just to briefly introduce themselves, and perhaps either of them could give a brief overview on the company for the folks in the room. First of all, David, thank you for having us here. My name is Dushyant, Dushyant Sharma, CEO of Paymentus. We are, for those who are not familiar with us, a cloud-based bill payment service platform for non-discretionary billing companies like utilities, you know, for automating and modernizing those bills like utilities, insurance, government services, consumer finance, telecom, healthcare, and others. And over the years, we have built quite a substantial scale. Midpoint of our guidance exceeds over $1 billion. Last quarter, we processed about 175 million transactions. And we deal with collections of hundreds of billions of dollars for our clients, and obviously process hundreds of millions transactions a year. So pretty substantial scale, serving about 2,500 billers across all the verticals I mentioned and more. We are very excited to be here. Sanjay, you want— Thanks, David. This is Sanjay Kalra. I'm the CFO at Paymentus. Happy to be here with all of you. Dushyant covered the key highlights of what we do. I'll just add a few more things. We went IPO in 2021, and since then, we've seen significant growth. And even prior to that, when we were public, we've seen significant growth since the start of the company. We deal with many verticals, utilities being one of them, and utilities actually is around 50% of our revenue. There are many other verticals like insurance, government, banking, healthcare, and whatnot, which we deal with. And we are seeing growth in all the verticals. We are seeing growth in all the transactions. We processed millions and millions of payments, and our transaction volume is in billions as well. We have a significant TAM in which we operate. We have a minuscule share of that, around 3.5% of the total TAM, and we have a very good visibility in terms of where we are, and we feel great days are ahead of us, but we are very fortunate to be in this leading position where we are in the marketplace, in the business which we operate. Great. Thank you. For those that are a little less familiar with Paymentus' offering, can you talk a little bit about your value proposition, why customers sign up for the platform, and why they stay? Sure. So, if you think of it from the client's perspective, the billing companies, one of the key requirements they have is they have to send out the bills, and they have to send out the bills wherever the customers are. It used to be easier when the only way you were sending out the bills was through paper. At least you're just sending out to the addresses, if you will, the physical address. Currently, in the digital world, billing companies have increasing necessity to send communications to the consumers, and the businesses wherever they may be, connecting from. And similarly, you have to receive payments from those places. So, for example, I want to receive my information on my email. The other person wants to receive through text messages, and I want to use my mobile phone to do my payments and so on. So when you look at these complexities of dealing with customers across all channels, all different interactions, avenues, Paymentus' platform, which was designed from the ground up to be vertically agnostic, to be able to serve all verticals and customers of all sizes, but also an omnichannel multidimensional platform where regardless of whether you're communicating with the billing company through phone or vocal interaction channels or digital interaction channels, whether it's mobile or web, or it's physical interaction channels, all of these dimensions and channels we have inbuilt already right from the beginning. With one integration with Paymentus' platform, a billing company is able to access all of their customers. That is one of the key reasons why billing companies are choosing Paymentus. In addition to that, we simplified our business model very, very much for the billing companies where we said, "We will do all of the integration work and provide you the entirety of our platform suite, which allows you to communicate across all channels to your customers at no cost, but we will charge you on a per transaction basis," which aligns our interest directly with those of our clients because every CFO wants the ideal environment where they can get the monies quickly but don't have to pay a lot upfront to improve, to get the best ROI. From that perspective, we designed the best pricing model as well as the best platform, and once you have onboarded the clients on our platform, we become a central nervous system for all their digital engagement and collecting revenues, so we become a very important part. And so long as we continue to provide that quality of service, the clients tend to stay with us, but also they do more business with us as we go forward. You want to add, Sanjay? No. Excellent. Maybe to expand on that, what else do you do to differentiate from other competing solutions in the marketplace? Yeah, I think one of the things which happened to us right from the beginning was we said that we will do the hard work upfront because it's very difficult to change the DNA of the company. If you're taking shortcuts early on, that DNA stays with the company for long term. And it, you, the investors, as well as the management teams, and frankly, your customers pay a big price for that later on. So we chose to take the, which little bit longer, little bit harder path. We said we want to make our platform, right from the beginning to be, designed in such a way that it is one code base that will serve all customers of all sizes and all verticals. And any feature we are launching for our customers, it should be available to all of our customers. Now, that sounds rather simple, but if you think about when you have thousands of companies with different divisions, maybe thousands more divisions of those companies with their own business rules running on your platform, it's rather easy to get distracted and stray from that mission and say, "Let's just custom code something for the billing companies," and when you have that type of an approach, then what ends up happening is when a customer requires or asks you to deliver a certain feature, you are saying, "Well, that feature was delivered on that particular release for that particular customer. It will take me another six months or 16 months to get that all implemented for your environment." We did not do that. We built right from the beginning one code base. Now, why that becomes very powerful now is anytime a client is looking for certain features in their platform, and as frankly our average client size is increasing as we are signing more and more enterprise clients, one of the key things they are looking for is flexibility and control. And what that means is I, as a client, want to be able to do whatever I was always able to do through in-house systems. I want control of how my processing will take place, how my systems will work, how my collections will take place. But also, I want flexibility that I should be able to change my mind, if the regulations change or my business requirements change. I want to be able to do that very quickly. All of that has allowed Paymentus to be a very differentiated platform. And if you combine that with our instant payment network ecosystem, which we have built, it allows Paymentus a unique ability to offer to our customers an ability to reach their customers regardless of where they are. So if they're walking to a retailer store and making a payment, that payment can come through Paymentus' platform. If they are going to a bank and making a payment, which is enabled on IPN, that payment can take place in real time and get to the billing companies. So long term, not only now, but as we are building the business for the long term, we believe we have a pretty strong competitive moat. Excellent. The investors in this room, the ones walking around, they have too much cash in their pocket right now. So they want to invest in companies that have big, big addressable markets, TAMs. You, you serve over 25,000 customers or 2500 customers. You processed close to 600 million transactions last year. Could you give a sense, for the investors how, how big the market opportunity is for Paymentus? Yeah. Looking at the data from Datos, last year, 2024 full year, there are approximately 16 or 17 billion bills paid annually in the U.S. And last year, we processed around approximately 600 million payments. So we have like around 3.5% of the TAM as of now, and which is growing. And as new generations come into play to start paying the bills, there is a digital tailwind which will always be together as a part of the growth of the company. So the TAM is gonna keep expanding as well as the businesses grow. And our share is, which is actually already expanding, as I said, 3.5%. If you go a year before in 2023, I believe we were 2.8 or 2.9%, even though minuscule percentages, but the growth rates are pretty interesting. And we think we are gonna capture more and more market share. And not only the market share coming by large enterprise customers, but rather mix of multiple verticals, multiple size of customers, multiple geographies as well within the U.S., although we are substantially U.S., but we are getting more and more diversified into many areas as and when there are customers to pay the bills. Of a platform is available to help and provide them the latest features. And we are meeting a lot of market share, so we feel very good about the path on which we are and the progress we have made to date, and we have a great visibility as well. In fact, at the end of Q2, the most recent quarter, we are sitting on a very strong backlog. We've had very good quarters of bookings in past many quarters, which have accumulated a lot of backlog. We feel very good about the visibility and durability of our future. And I may also say to that, if you to your point about looking for right investment opportunities, if you think about it, 2021 is when we went IPO. Our revenues that year were just shy of $400 million. This year, four years later, our midpoint of our guidance is over $1.1 billion. So there's pretty sizable scale we have built. But if you look at it compared to the total addressable market, we're just getting it started. So we believe there's a lot of runway left for Paymentus to continue to grow our business and become a multi-fold larger than where we are right now. Excellent. Very good runway, it sounds like, for growth ahead and very good results. I mentioned earlier when we kicked off that you had record revenue again in the quarter. Sanjay, you just spoke about strong bookings and backlog you're seeing, which ultimately resulted in you raising guidance for the current year. Would you be able to talk about the key trends you're noticing? We are fortunate, very fortunate to see great trends in the past few quarters, giving us a lot of confidence, and the visibility in the periods to come. What we've seen is in the past few quarters, we've gained a lot of traction with large enterprise customers together with the non-enterprise customers, which we already have, and that's also growing. Whether a customer is small size, mid-size, or large enterprise, we are seeing growth, we are seeing strong bookings, whichever vertical it is, and the tailwinds are blowing in our direction. The numbers, as I earlier said, at the end of Q2, we are sitting on a very strong backlog, and we are continuing to book more. So the trends of the past are giving a lot of confidence, and the platform is resonating with every size and every nature of the customer. So that's what is kind of our growth pattern, and we feel very good where we are. Excellent. This next topic is so popular, my inbox is still smoking. It's growth because very few companies have posted 40% year-on-year growth like Paymentus. So wanted to see if you'd be able to talk about the main growth drivers for the business and what excites you when you look 12-24 months out. Yeah, I think, to Sanjay's point earlier, and we have made other public remarks on this, that a lot of the areas or the vectors that would be typical for a high-growth company are actually helping us, as well. So, for example, we continue to remain a very attractive platform for large enterprise customers across all verticals. We remain very attractive for the organizations of all sizes, not just the large ones, the mid-market across all verticals. As the market is entering mainstream, billing companies are no longer looking for a solution that is sort of retrofitted in any way. They are looking for the best because eventually, if you can relate to it, this is a central nervous system for revenue collections for a given organization. And that platform better be good, better be available, and better be simple and better offer all flexibility so that the collections can take place very quickly and in one time, the first time the customer is on the site or making a phone call. So it's a very important piece to the puzzle for any billing company's strategy. If whatever they have today doesn't meet that high standard, they are switching. And increasingly, they are selecting us. We are very fortunate that way. So from the front side of the bookings, the marketing and the lead generation, the go-to-market bookings, all of that remains very strong. But then the second piece is, as a result of that, we also are very fortunate to have a very strong backlog due to the bookings performance, which continues to give us visibility for this year. And we also talked about early visibility into 2026 as well on the last quarter's call. In addition to that, when you have a sizable customer base across different verticals, one of the other growth drivers is the same store sales. And we are seeing very strong trends there as well. As Paymentus has branched out and we are successfully executing against that strategy of bringing more verticals, the dimensions of growth have changed as well. Different organizations have different divisions. So we may be able to sign one division, then we can expand into other divisions. We may be able to have a part of the business and grow from there because the organizations, the enterprises are very large and they are even though they have decided to modernize the entirety of the enterprise, but they may start with one or two divisions and then expand to the remaining divisions in subsequent quarters or years, so as a result, we see tremendous same store sales as well, so all of those drivers are contributing to our growth algorithm. If I may just add, together with the excellent growth we have experienced and the great visibility we have, one of the mottos we have is not just to grow, but rather grow profitably. So it's important to us that we generate free cash flow. It's important to us that we generate good Adjusted EBITDA dollars. We have been doing so. Every deal we look at, any new opportunity we look at, before we sign any new customer, we make sure that this is gonna be accretive to the company. This is gonna be accretive to our investors. So we don't want to deliver growth at any cost, but rather growth at a profitable level. So maintaining a Rule of 40 is kind of a core value for us and has been for a long time. We take pride in terms of delivering great results and profitable growth. Very impressive. The growth with the profitability, very rare in the tech community, so congrats. I wanted to switch topics into a bit around the product and the innovation, and Dushyant, when you think about your product and platform, what are you most proud of? Thank you for the question. I would say for us, I think the way we designed our platform and built the ecosystem, including Instant Payment Network over the years, is actually helping and paying us dividends now. What we are very proud of is that we can service regardless of the size of the customer and regardless of the vertical, any customer, regardless of the complexity of the workflows or the level of sophistication their business rules require, we are able to accommodate a lot of those systems using our platform. Most of that could be accomplished without actually engaging in a lot of development work, which is pretty remarkable, being able to launch a pretty large enterprise customer without having to make major changes to your platform. As a result, that adds to tremendous operating leverage to the company. So to Sanjay's point earlier, we are able to take a look at profitable, profitable growth as a central theme for the business. And as we are looking, and that's what our clients want as well. If you think about from our clients' point of view, they are relying on Paymentus to be engaging with their customers, the most valued asset, and the second most valued asset is the money, which we are collecting from the customers. Both of those can only be relied upon if the customers themselves have a good feeling that this company is well-run, and is thoughtful in its execution. So when we are executing on a business plan where we are saying we are not growing at all costs, we are not cutting corners, we are actually trying to be a very thoughtful business, delivering very high-quality growth, but very high-quality earnings as well with a lot of cash flow, and have a very strong balance sheet, which all of that leads to tremendous confidence in our customer body to say, "Hey, I can actually continue, I can choose this platform for the next 10 years as a central nervous system for revenue collections." And that is sort of what is driving the growth. And that's what I'm very proud of as well. Excellent. It's impossible to talk technology in 2025 and not think about AI. What are the main impacts of AI, especially agentic AI in the bill payments industry, and how is Paymentus evolving to benefit from this? Sure. So I think, AI, you know, the reason it is a pretty interesting conversation is we have been an AI-forward company for a long period of time. And we were that committed to AI, if you can believe it, that we almost bought a company a few years ago, which was focused on AI and had an algorithm for chip design. So, the deal didn't work out, so we didn't make the transaction, but primarily because we thought that a lot of those things we'll be able to do ourselves. So AI has been part of Paymentus's DNA in some ways. As the market, that's one of the points I was trying to make in our last quarterly earnings call, that the world has moved in our direction in some ways where we are seeing that as the world moves more agentic and software in some ways starts to take a little bit of a backseat. The pricing models which in the past where you're charging a big license fee and a lot of implementation expenses to the customer and relying on those revenues to build your business, so to speak, leads to a lot of inefficiencies in the organization. Now, some of those organizations will have to relearn how to operate in an environment where customers will be demanding more pay-per-use model, which is what Paymentus' business is all about. So we did the hard part first, which is what I was talking about earlier. We said we are not gonna charge upfront anything of our platform or the software, which is one of the most sophisticated software platform in the industry. We're not gonna charge anything for it. So as the world is becoming more agentic, the business model right from the business model, our ability to operate business profitably and grow the business profitability with that pricing model gives us an edge. On top of that, we look at agentic AI not just as a way as most organizations are looking at, which is to reduce their cost to serve. We think of that as a revenue opportunity as well. A lot of clients, since we are already engaged in customer engagement, part of the revenue cycle, we are engaged in collections. We are engaged in notifying customers at the right time, to be able to get monies in the door for our clients. It actually allows Paymentus to be very creative in thinking through all the machine learning and agentic AI, how it can play a bigger role in helping customers serve their customers better and reduce their cost to serve. So, we believe our value proposition of improving customer experience while lowering the cost to serve holds true as, and frankly, becomes even truer in the new AI world. So we are very excited about both in terms of increased profitability as well as long-term revenue growth from, through AI. You heard it here first. To keep your job safe from AI, use AI to do your job better. We'll move on to capital allocation, just making sure everyone's awake in the room. Is M&A an area of focus for Paymentus? M&A is not our top priority today. Our top priority is to grow the business organically. That's where we are focused on, given the comments we made about such a massive TAM we operate in, and we are just getting started having a minuscule share. Our top priority is to expand our sales team and grow more organically, capture more of the TAM, capture more of the pipeline, convert that to bookings, and grow from there. That's where we have been devoted our efforts since last many years, and we have seen tremendous growth. We believe what we have delivered so far in so many years, it should be the basis for our investments and should be the priority for our capital allocation as well. That said, we have decent cash on our balance sheet, and there is an open market out there, and we do get a lot of teasers from a lot of banks, and we take a look at them. But there is nothing we are seeking right now. There is no technology gaps which we wanna fill. What we wanna do is we wanna be very opportunistic, when it comes to M&A discussions or thinking about M&A. Anything which makes sense to us, which we think is gonna be accretive to our shareholders and is grow the value of the company longer term and is gonna be a very good fit, that is something which we could consider. But that definitely is not our focus, so we want to stay opportunistic in that area. Understood. If that changes, there's a bank on the window here that would be good to consider using. But I also noted back in, I think it was 2021, you acquired Payveris there, and was curious how that helped you expand in instant payment networks or, you know, in that area. Yeah, I think that was a great acquisition and continues to be so and well integrated in all aspects of our business right now. Instant Payment Network will remain a central theme for Paymentus's growth. What we believe, in addition to our go-to-market strategy with Instant Payment Network, we believe it is in if you're looking at it plainly from an investment standpoint, this is creating a irreplaceable moat for the long term for the business. Visualize that Paymentus today has thousands of billing companies or at least 2,500 what we have reported. We have these companies on our platform as well as on Instant Payment Network. As we grow our business multi-fold from here on out, that number of customers also grows and number of endpoints also grow. This becomes a pretty unique opportunity. If anyone wants to have any interactions with these billing companies related to customer engagement or payments, Paymentus would be the network, and we would be the only network that has real-time connectivity to these customers, if you will. So it opens up tremendous opportunities as we look at other payment options that become available, whether it is stablecoin, whether it is FedNow, whether it is RTP, all of those types of options. They become an additional capability on top of our platform and the network. So as you're thinking about Paymentus, think about how big a platform and the ecosystem this could be in the long term and how unique this will be. We are very proud of that and we are building that. We have today hundreds of financial institutions on our platform who are originating payments. So, you know, you go to a bank and make your payments, all of your payments, and then some of them get delivered electronically and others get delivered by paper check, and very few, if any, have any real-time connectivity to the billing company. We have cracked the code of that, obviously, with Instant Payment Network, and we have several hundred financial institutions, banks, and credit unions who are using us for that capability. Coming back to the M&A piece, we believe that we have all of the capabilities today to continue to grow our business, but we'll be opportunistic and, although very selective, opportunistic, if we see something which is a creative, either top line or bottom line, ideally both. But it's not easy to find businesses like Paymentus. If anyone has some ideas, please send it to us. It's not easy to find them. Great. You touched on this in this past answer a little bit. Was curious with the new administration and do you see any regulatory changes that, you know, could be positive in the banking landscape over the coming years? We don't. We think actually, because of our focus on the local governments, primarily, we feel very good about how we are situated. On top of that, since we are part of the central nervous system for revenue collections, we are one of the key, even during COVID, most of our clients deemed us to be essential service. We have to be, because we are the only way to collect monies, at least digitally, for most of these organizations. So we are essential service. So we are not concerned about that. However, there is a positive tailwind as the oil prices or the energy prices continue to go down with this administration's focus on that. We feel good about what that could mean to us. Great. I was gonna wrap up with this last question that, if we were to speak again, hopefully at this conference next year, what would you have hopefully accomplished by then? I think great question, actually. Sanjay and I were talking about that, you know, that it is. We think that we would have achieved once again similar scale to how we have done over the last couple of years, where we believe that we would have very similar trends sitting here. We will be reporting that we are just getting it started, even though we'll be a larger company than we are today. The market is that big and the opportunity is that large that we believe that there's a lot of runway for us. So we'll be a larger business, but even more excited about the future, or just as excited about the future as we are today. I think, yeah, no, I'll just add very similar to what Dushyant said. I think if I forecast myself, like for our business one year from now, I think to summarize, I think we'll have a much stronger balance sheet, although it's already stronger than a year before, but I think it'll be much stronger, and we'll have a better cash flow. We'll have a better P&L. So, mainly, this is kind of a pure CFO view, but I think we'll, we'll have a strong, strong financial statements. That, that's great. Well, Dushyant and Sanjay, thank you very much for attending. It was a pleasure hosting you and, I hope, everyone has good meetings remaining part of the day. Thank you. Thank you.