We’ve been stuck with this backlog number as you know from historical pieces. And there’s just a lot that goes into it as it’s a technical accounting number. But I would say broadly, again, thinking about it, came in around the $23 billion number accelerating off of September, the third quarter, and so feeling very good about it as it goes into 2024. But we’d love to give you something different and a little bit more meaningful as we come into Investor Day.
Dan Dolev: Yeah, that’s super helpful. And maybe, Stephanie, quick follow-up for you. On FedNow, you mentioned that we’re kind of maybe six months in. Like, have you seen any changes or beginning of changes, any meaningful behavior changes in how FedNow is implemented? That’d be it. Thank you.
Stephanie Ferris: Yeah. I think as I said, we’re seeing a large amount of pipelines. There’s a large demand from FIs and banks across the universe for it. I think the challenge for it is how it becomes adopted down-market and in the underlying customers of those banks. But the banks are definitely focused on enabling it and having it in their quiver in terms of things that they can offer in terms of money movement. TBD in terms of the underlying business moves and whether it becomes adopted faster than other ways to move money in the ecosystem. I think that remains to be played out.
Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. And that will come from the line of Vasu Govil with KBW. Your line is open.
Vasu Govil: Hi, thanks for taking my questions and all the good detail today. I guess just my first one, Stephanie, you talked a little bit about the new sales momentum. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about where you’re seeing traction between the two segments. And then, within the segments, whether it’s more core wins, more cross-sells, just some more color there would be super helpful.
Stephanie Ferris: Yeah. No, happy to. So, I think in the new sales momentum, where, as you know, we shifted, specifically, the team, so that they would sell more of our technology-enabled solutions. So, where I’m seeing momentum is really in the digital space and in the money movement space. So, as you think about what banks are focused on doing in order for them to deliver their products and solutions, the digital capabilities they have, whether it’s mobile, online, teller, et cetera, all need to be in sync and refreshed. And there’s a lot of demand there. So, seeing a lot of demand for our Digital One Studio, our Digital One business capabilities as banks are really looking to gather deposits. So, the digital capabilities are in high demand.
And then, as they — as banks think about really want to being the primary deposit account for those loans they’ve gathered over the last 10 years, they want — they need to make sure that they have the right money movement capabilities to deliver to be that primary bank. And so, we are seeing a lot of demand in digital and payments. I would say in Capital Markets — and spent a little bit of time talking about this in the prepared remarks, I think we’re seeing demand, really, across all three of our subsegments. Thinking about securities and processing, we’ve talked about our Clear Derivatives solution. It continues to be a market-leading solution, even outside the traditional broker dealers. So that’s been in high demand. Our commercial lending technology solutions really are getting adopted even outside the traditional financial institutions.
So, if you’re a sophisticated financial services corporate, so we talked a lot about auto dealers and other large, sophisticated financial services, they need a lot of capabilities. They are seeing high demand there. And then treasury. Our treasury solution is best of breed, and we see folks adopting that across the corporate landscape. And then, the other place that we’re seeing a ton of demand is in overall ESG. We have a fantastic ESG product. Every company that’s an SEC registrant company needs to have some sort of ESG reporting capability. So, see a lot of demand there.
Vasu Govil: That’s super helpful. And then just a quick follow-up for James. I think normalized EPS, if you exclude dis-synergies, is roughly low-teens. Is that a good way to think about the future trend line, all else equal? And if you could also give us something on just the timing of how we should model these dis-synergies to flow through the year?
James Kehoe: Well, I think we said it’s 5% to 7%, but it’s absorbing a significant dis-synergy impact. The reason why — so I wouldn’t necessarily add the two together to project forward, because we’ve really ramped up Future Forward this year to help offset the dis-synergies. And I think the level of — obviously, next year, there’s no year-on-year dis-synergy impact, but the level of contribution from Future Forward will go down from current levels. Let’s just wait till Investor Day. We want to bring you through a detailed walk on the earnings power of each business, the revenue growth, the total addressable markets, the margin potential, and we’ll come up with the algorithm together in a short couple of months.
Operator: Thank you. And we do have time for one final question, and that will come from the line of Ashwin Shirvaikar with Citi. Your line is open.
Ashwin Shirvaikar: Thanks. Hey, Stephanie. Hey, James. Good to hear from you. Stephanie, it was good to see you on stage with Charles Drucker…
Stephanie Ferris: Thanks, Ashwin.
Ashwin Shirvaikar: [indiscernible] sales conference. I guess, speaking of sales conference, right, you’ve mentioned in your comments, redirection of the sales force towards higher-yielding products and such. Is it primarily redirection or are you adding to the sales force? Could you give us some flavor of what’s going on with sales count, sales quotas and so on?
Stephanie Ferris: Yeah. So, it’s really all of the above. So, we took a look at how we were compensating the sales force and — at the beginning of last year, and all dollars at that point were considered equal. And so, what we did was change the incentive comp sales so that the higher-margin products would be compensated higher and specifically with respect to recurring revenue. That took hold in the beginning of last year. And we’re seeing the transition of those sales from the lower margin to the higher margin. In fact, I think over time from ’22 to ’23, we saw an 80 basis point increase in the mix of low-margin to high-margin. So, we’re definitely seeing it. I think the other thing that we did at the beginning of last year was really look at productivity across our sales teams and did a pretty significant look at how we wanted — what the sales productivity metrics we were expecting.
