CCC Intelligent Solutions Holdings Inc. (NYSE:CCCS) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Githesh Ramamurthy: Alexei, good to hear from you, and as I’ve said before, the opportunities and the complexities of what our payment solutions can solve, we are seeing that every day with customers. There’s a lot of complexity. It is — it will run, we think, at a slower pace compared to our other solutions for sure. And we don’t think — I think, towards the latter part of the year, we can hopefully give you more of an update on that. But we have continued to expand the capabilities of that solutions and a broader set of problems our customers want us to solve. So we’ve been continuing to work on that, but that’s where we are.

Alexei Gogolev: And Brian, could I ask you to elaborate a bit more on the sequential increase in stock-based compensation in the quarter?

Brian Herb: Yes, absolutely. So yes, stock-based comp did go up in the quarter versus where it’s been trending more recently. Q1 is the — we expect to be the high watermark for the quarter as a percent of revenue. We do expect it to step down and move down as we go through the year. As we get into 2025, it will look like a more normalized rate and be more like 12% to 14% of revenue. That’s what we expect kind of running from ’25 going forward. So we do expect the step-up that we saw in Q1 to moderate and to normalize when we get into next year.

Operator: And our next question will be coming from Josh Baer of Morgan Stanley.

Joshua Baer: Congrats on a strong quarter. Another question on the growth algorithm. Emerging solutions increasing contribution is definitely exciting. It’s a clear positive. I think it’s a key to the durability of growth. The question is on the rest of the parts of the growth algorithm, if emerging solutions was at 1 point contribution on 11% overall growth this quarter going to 2 points on 9% total. That’s several points of growth coming away. So just wondering where — where is that coming from? And why wouldn’t the growth in logos or established solutions be more durable?

Brian Herb: Yes, absolutely. So the way — maybe we started the long-term guide and then we can walk backwards because the way we frame the long term. So we talk about 7 to 10 organic revenue growth over time. We say 80% of that will be from existing clients with cross-sell, upsell and 20% from new logo. So that’s where we set the expectation as we’re moving towards where we are today, as you highlighted, we’re seeing about 30% growth from new logo. And then out of the remaining growth from cross-sell, upsell, high percentages from established. Over time, we just expect the emerging to become more to be a larger part of the equation going forward. So it’s more of a glide path than it is a hard cutover, but how we see it playing out over time.

Joshua Baer: Okay. I guess another way to put it on a more positive spin if new logo growth or established solutions held in a bit more durable over the next few quarters and you have confidence in the step-up in emerging solutions, that would be upside for the full year. Does that make sense?

Brian Herb: Yes, it does. I mean we’re always looking to deliver against the guide or outperform the guide that we have in the market. So we’re pushing on all sides of it, driving hard at the core and the established solutions, driving hard at new logos and continuing to remain strong and then building out the — getting the momentum behind the emerging. So we’re driving all 3 of those. So yes, that’s a good way of framing it.

Operator: And our next question will be coming from Dylan Becker of William Blair.

Faith Brunner: It’s Faith on for Dylan. If I could start with my first question being a more high-level industry trend that we’re seeing. So as we continue to see premiums increase, we’re also seeing an uptick in issues with drivers either being uninsured or underinsured. How is this playing into the overall level of complexity in the claims ecosystem? And how are you seeing the different stakeholders react to this?

Githesh Ramamurthy: Sure. A couple of things. We are seeing some variation state by state as well in that mix. So customers are noticing and have started to deal with that at both at first notice of loss and also in terms of how that makes its way into medical claims and a variety of other places. And it’s not had a material change on what our customers really pay for is the — is frequency times cost of claim. So it hasn’t impacted that number for our customers, but it has, like you pointed out, increased the complexity and essentially in something like Subrogation, how they recover those dollars, that is really where we’re seeing some specific differences in how you recover dollars, especially when your policyholders not involved, and that’s where we are seeing more complexity.

Faith Brunner: Okay. Cool. That’s helpful color. And then for my second question, throughout the call, there’s been a lot of talk about the different AI advancements between Inbound Subrogation and the IX Cloud. How are these all fitting together to kind of drive those better outcomes for the ecosystem? And what’s really ahead on the AI road map as more stakeholders are getting more comfortable with this technology and look to adopt it?

Githesh Ramamurthy: Yes. The short answer is yes. We’ve had the benefit of taking this industry from books, paper and pencil to write collision estimates to laptop computers to CD-ROMs to artificial intelligence. And so we’ve kind of continued to work closely with our customers. And if you look at, for example, adoption by various segments of our customer base, obviously, our OEM customers have very sophisticated needs and understanding. Our repair facility customers, I think we just said that we had over 5,000 of our repair facility customers adopt and use jump start which really allows them to take pictures, write an estimate in seconds and then augment that. So we are starting to get a comfort level from the repair facilities and obviously, for the last 2 to 3 years, we’ve had these solutions deployed with insurance companies, and we are seeing customers very carefully and thoughtfully continue to adopt.

And this is where transparency becomes really important and traceability of how those algorithms came about, all those things are really important. And the accuracy of what we can deliver also becomes extraordinarily important. So that comfort and confidence we can give to our customers that when we produce something, we also produce a confidence interval about how confident we are about an answer that then their people are using to make those decisions on. So the short answer is, yes, overall, we’re continuing to see very strong interest.

Operator: And our next question will be coming from Gary Prestopino of Barrington Research.