Ceridian HCM Holding Inc. (NYSE:CDAY) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Scott Berg: Hi, everyone. Nice results during the third quarter. Thanks for taking my questions. I want to start on the company’s involvement in its partner ecosystem. I think one of the things that’s come up really positively in my recent round of checks is outside of just bringing them more implementations, your engagement with them is, I guess, increased nicely over the last year, and I think they are more helpful in some of your deal opportunities. Can you help talk about kind of maybe what’s really gone right in your engagement with partners or what’s improved over the last couple of years, in particular? And how should we think about those opportunities as you go forward?

David Ossip: So thanks, Scott. What I would say about that is I think we have had a high degree of integrity in the conversations with our system integration partners. As you know, we’ve been developing in the SI channel for several years now. When we actually look at the number of deals kicked off within the quarter, I believe, Steve, we’re over 50% now. And when we actually go to market, we’re positioning the SIs first in terms of doing the actual implementation. To Mark’s question earlier, one of the reasons that you’re now seeing us increase on the EBITDA side is as the revenue shifts more towards the recurring revenue as opposed to the services side, you get into a higher profitability revenue stream. And remember, we are a cloud software company, not a cloud services company, which is, I think, very important to note.

In terms of the SIs, we’re very proud. If I look at insights and many of the people on the call here did attend insights. We had a record number of partners attending and very engaged. And if you went to the expo hall, you could see that their particularly exhibits were very, very busy with our customers and with our prospects, which bodes very well. We’re seeing them influence the actual deals in a very positive way, and we obviously are seeing some positive impact in terms of pipeline as well. And in terms of our global aspirations, it’s very, very important that we have the global reach of our SI partners which are both the Tier 1 partners who have global, if you like, employees, but also the local regional partners is also very helpful to our business.

Steve, anything you would add?

Steve Holdridge: Yes. I think the one thing, Scott, and David hit on it, is our design of the program was collaborative out of the gate. We have the opportunity that we didn’t have such a large dependency on that services revenue that we don’t compete, but we can collaborate. And in fact, in addition to recommending deals, we are putting together go-to-market strategies with our partners where we support them. Secondly, a significant investment in enablement of our partners, both in terms of sales enablement and enablement and product and their contribution of the road map. So I think if you talk to our partners, they will say that the program and the experience they have had with us surpasses what they have had with the other players in the industry.

Scott Berg: Understood, thank you. Very helpful. And then from a follow-up perspective, the largest survey in the HCM space recently had kind of talked about some slowing spend around additional module adoption just in the space as a whole. And it’s really more reflective of normalizing the pre-pandemic levels after seeing maybe a bolus last couple of years. You’re getting 50% of your new customers to attach the full suite today which is obviously an impressive number. But how do we think about kind of in the pipelines going forward, what you’re seeing maybe in the next couple, three, four quarters? Do you expect attach rates or cross-sell opportunity to be kind of in line with recent trends? Or are you seeing also a change that might be representative of what the survey highlighted. Thank you.

David Ossip: So Scott, we’re actually leaning into add-on sales towards the customer base as we go into next year. And remember, we’re certainly in place a structure for the business, not just to hit the $2 billion number, but really, we’re now beginning to target the planning and the structure we need in place to hit the $4 billion mark later on. And obviously, add-on sales and expansion of the actual platform has to be a big part of that. The modules that we see are being purchased are those that you would expect, which are more of the critical types of modules, so very high attachment rates around things like recruiting. Obviously, the compliance modules are always in high demand, and we are the leader in that regard. Steve, what would you add to that?

Steve Holdridge: Yes, I would agree. And in fact, in our go-to market next year with our sales plan, we are doubling down on attachment. We are putting specific motions around our talent suite. We are putting specific motions around other areas. And in fact, we think that there is white space for us to have increased the percentage of add-on sales to the customers.

Matt Wells: Our next question comes from Mark Murphy with JPMorgan. Mark, we can circle back later. Steve Enders with Citi.

Steve Enders: Okay. Great. Thanks for taking the questions here. I guess, so I was wondering if we could maybe get an update on the Canadian government opportunity? And if there is a – I guess, any changes there from the last earnings call update.

David Ossip: Thanks, Steve, we’re progressing quite nicely with the Canadian government, the results have all been very positive. We’re now in the waiting cycle for them to go through their internal procurement processes. Steve, what would you add?

Steve Holdridge: Yes. No, we continue to be very engaged with them. We’re in the planning of what a rollout would look like, and we continue to be very bullish on the opportunity. Obviously, we’re dealing with government and decision cycles that move at a certain pace, but everything continues to be positive.

Steve Enders: Okay. Great. Thanks for the update there. And then maybe coming off of your conference and all the AI announcements that you made there in other product announcements, I guess, what’s the feedback been from customers and prospects about how they are thinking about AI adoption and the kind of core use cases that they are targeting for it?

David Ossip: So I’ll start, and I’ll hand it off to Joe. There is just a tremendous amount of excitement. What I can say about insights and the products that we showed is that they are real and that we are doing delivery of generative AI with INSIGHT the product and it’s really pervasive across the entire platform. So in terms of leading, I think we’re way ahead of anyone else in the actual industry. Joe?

Joe Korngiebel: Thank you for the question. Without a question, we look at our brand promise, make work life better. And what we’re doing with AI in general, but specifically with generative AI, it’s starting to do that. What we highlighted at our user conference was the ability for your administrators to create reports instantly in a lot of enterprises, there is only a few people that can write reports to get the data out of your systems. And those reports come every other Friday because of backlogs in IT. What we’re starting to do with our customers is looking to them what’s going to make a meaningful difference in help with the efficiency and productivity of their people staff and things like are automatically generating reports and being able to give instant access to data, it’s providing value.