i3 Verticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:IIIV) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Greg Daily: One of the things that we’re so excited about with this particular opportunity in all of our web native development is that everything’s being built in a highly scalable, configurable native applications. So it really reduces the amount of customization we do for projects and it enhances speed to market and it also reduces ongoing maintenance costs. So, you know, historically, if you’d look at that number, it will – the new products custom code that would be required is far less than the historic products.

Matt VanVliet: Very great. Thank you.

Greg Daily: And then Clay has made a note of, you know, that holds true in with some iterations of slight differences in water, gas, electric. It’s all the same fundamental model, just some different data attributes that have to be picked up.

Clay Whitson: It looks like the commercial off the chef [ph] application, the customized piece to it is vendor integrations by utility. Yes, that’s the difference.

Greg Daily: And then that gets augmented because we have standard methods of entry on our APIs that ease that process as well.

Matt VanVliet: Okay, very helpful.

Operator: And our next question is from Charles Nabhan with Stephens. Please proceed.

Charles Nabhan: Hey, guys, good morning and thank you for taking my question. I appreciate the color on the RemainCo outlook for ’25, but just wanted to get a little more color around the linearity of revenue as we think about the quarterly cadence. So you had mentioned high single digit growth. It sounds like there’s some license revenue that’s going to come through in the front half of the fiscal year. So that being said, I guess first is that high single digit, I assume that’s an average for the year. And secondly, are there any weightings towards any particular quarters that we should consider as we think about our model?

Greg Daily: There will be seasonality, particularly on the one time software line. I do believe. Manitoba, we believe is going to be more second half as opposed to first half because of the – we haven’t received the requirements yet. When it comes to utility license sales, which are the big ones that we see for ’25, it’s hard at this stage to predict which quarter that falls into. I think that line item is just going to be a variable going forward.

Charles Nabhan: Got it. Okay. Appreciate the color. Thank you.

Operator: The next question is from Rufus Hone with BMO Capital Markets. Please proceed.

Rufus Hone: Hey, guys, thanks. Good morning. Maybe I’ll ask about Merchant Services from another angle. I guess hard to not notice that you’re seeing decent revenue growth in that business. You’re now at $42 million of adjusted EBITDA over the last 12 months. That seems to be growing mid to high teens. Do you think prospective buyers are seeing the value of these assets? And I’m curious if you’ve adjusted your view of the valuation [ph] through this process. Thanks.

Greg Daily: It’s a good business, and we’ve never thought it was not a good business. And it’s been really steady eddy, for us ever since going public and even before that. Do you want to comment?

Clay Whitson: It’s an amazing team. Nice pipeline. They constantly executed. Can’t really comment about pricing on the transaction, but it’s a great opportunity for the buyer. It cleans up our story, makes us a software business, pays off our debt.

Rufus Hone: Okay, fair enough. And then I was wondering if you could help us quantify the size of the headwind you’re facing from the subsidized lunches? Thanks.

Greg Daily: We would, in a normal year, we would expect education to grow 10%. And coming into this year, on our Q4 call, which was our September call, we adjusted that down to 5% for fiscal year ’24. And I think once that anniversaries, we would expect to resume 10% growth in education.

Rufus Hone: Got it. Thanks very much.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Alex Markgraff with KeyBank Capital Markets. Please proceed.

Alex Markgraff: Hey, everyone, thanks for taking my questions. A couple, maybe one first, I think for Paul, just on some of the product level improvements, I think I heard you mentioned earlier, speed to market implementation timeline. Just curious if you could quantify some of those changes and some of the improvements as you work through some of these product initiatives?

Paul Christians: Sure. You know, when you’re doing – in the public sector in particular, there’s significant pent up demand, or it’s such a large, diverse market for a variety of enterprise solutions across the spectrum. And historically, when people have done that, it’s been a very long, elongated project where they’re basically trying to customize existing internal processes that they’ve done over decades. Those are pretty well set in place and pretty well configured, and there’s commonality amongst those. So as we – and we have deep domain expertise in particular areas. So as we are working to develop product, we are doing it, you know, with that domain expertise and in many times, concert [ph] with core customers to give us the capability to meet that as a, you know, more of a commercial, off the shelf component and also standardize integrations into the systems, which can be significant in large enterprise arrangements.