Fair Isaac Corporation (NYSE:FICO) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

But I will say that I’m very pleased that here we are in our 15th quarter, a very high growth for the platform and with no seeming signs of abatement. It’s — the uptake is tremendous. And certainly, our potential market, the potential use cases, very, very large. And so I don’t think that we have to — we’re not worried about law of large numbers yet.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of George Tong with Goldman Sachs.

George Tong: You now have several months under your belt from when you raised prices in Scores at the beginning of the year. Can you provide an update on customer receptivity to overall pricing actions this year? And what credit volume assumptions for fiscal 4Q are reflected in your full year guide?

William Lansing: Customer reaction, let me take that one first. I think that our customers find lots of value in the Scores and what they do and recognize that they’re a tremendous value. At the same time, no customer likes prices going up. And so as you can imagine, when we raised prices, we hear about it, and discussions go on. And I think that the numbers speak for themselves. Our customers are very happy with the offering, with the product and with what it does for them. That’s kind of how it goes. That’s how it’s gone for many years, and I don’t expect that to change. We don’t — we won’t share our assumptions for next quarter. I think — and honestly, George, I think I’ve talked about this before. The way we do this is we roll up all of our numbers and do a forecast and then haircut that with what we’re willing to guide.

So it’s as a percentage of the total number we come up with. So — and there’s a lot of things that go into that. So it’s like running a mining [indiscernible] simulation, right? So we don’t have 1 set of expectations for the next quarter. But again, we’re conservative with the way we guide to make sure that we’ll exceed.

George Tong: Got it. That’s helpful. And then on the software side, ARR growth was very strong at 20% this quarter. Can you talk a little bit more about what’s fueling that growth acceleration, particularly in this relatively tough macro environment? How much of the growth reflects large bank adoption of your platform solutions, increase in use cases, increase in usage or other factors?

William Lansing: We had some big deals with existing customers, and then we also added new customers. It’s really both.

Steven Weber: And on the nonplatform side, we had good volume. Obviously, those numbers look good, too, right, so the ARR on the nonplatform side. We had some good volumes on the CCS side and some strong numbers in the Falcon Fraud side as well. So it’s pretty much strength throughout the portfolio. And on the platform side, it’s just the continued expansion. We had some customers — big customers go live this quarter, and that’s just — it’s new revenue, essentially.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Meuler with Baird.

Jeffrey Meuler: Let me just pick up there. Is there some thought that the nonplatform business has some decent growth potential like you saw this quarter? And then if you could just maybe address if the license step-up in the large renewal was in platform or nonplatform.

Steven Weber: Yes. I mean, that’s hard to say. I mean, we — I think we had some pent-up volumes coming out of the pandemic, where there’s some more activity here. I don’t think the off-platform long term is probably going to be a significant growth driver for us. But it’s nice to see those numbers perform fairly well.

Jeffrey Meuler: And the license deal?

Steven Weber: The license — so the license deal was — that was a legacy business deal. That was not on the platform. That was a renewal of a legacy deal.

William Lansing: It’s probably worth noting that our legacy software is installed and it winds up having a very, very long life. And we just — we’d see things renewed kind of every 3 years, and it could be renewed 3x, 4x, 5x. And so I would expect that for our current book of business and on the legacy side, we expect continued renewals, and we expect to be supporting and seeing customer interest in those — in that software for a very long time to come, usually a decade. And we haven’t abandoned the software, just to be really clear, I mean, legacy has kind of a pejorative flavor to it, which it should not. I mean our legacy software is industry-leading. And it does what it does better than any other software in the market.