Chris Allen: Good morning, everyone. I wanted to ask about Mortgage Tech recurring revenue outlook. You noted some bright spots in your comments just in terms of some of the sales you’re seeing, the conversations you’re having with customers, but we’re seeing this continue to somewhat — to decline in terms of the pace of growth, albeit still at healthy levels. And coming into the mortgage slowdown, you kind of noted that the mortgage industry was have been very busy during the single upturn. Now that the downturn occurred, there was an opportunity set to improve efficiency there that it’s almost going to an acceleration of recurring revenue growth. So maybe you could kind of frame out the decline in the Mortgage Tech revenue growth outlook. What’s being driven just in terms of the overall dampening of the industry right now? What’s kind of the opportunity set in terms of further customer penetration going forward?
Benjamin Jackson: Thank you. Thank you for the question. Great question. And I always highlight, and it’s important to point out, that we’re looking to build this business and build some fundamental building blocks that enable this business to grow 8% to 10% over a long period of time. And you’re right. So we’ve made a very concerted effort. One of the big cornerstones of that strategy is a concerted move to move transaction revenue more and more towards subscription to make the business model much more predictable underneath that. And we feel good about the fact that we’ve been able to grow subscription revenue in the fourth quarter of 9% given the backdrop of an environment where volumes were down 60% and sequentially, they were down 20% approximately.
So in that environment, we’re still able to grow it. And I’ll be the first to highlight, the mortgage industry didn’t expect the downturn to happen as fast as it did or as rapidly and as deep as it did. So we have seen with some of our clients that are coming up for renewal. We’ve seen some clients consolidate, gone through M&A on true business. And so we’ve seen some cancellations due to those factors. That has created some headwinds into the business. But offsetting that, we’ve had a number of different items that have enabled us to grow and give us confidence in the ability to grow the business going forward. The first thing is that of the renewals we had last quarter, north of 60% of them renewed at higher subscription rates than they did at the beginning of the quarter due to our strategy to intentionally shift more transaction revenue towards subscription and also success in cross-selling more clients — more products to our clients.
The second is we had a very strong quarter and encompassed sales. In fact, the strongest quarter that we had of all of 2022 was in the fourth quarter. And we’ve seen that in a couple of different areas. So we saw it across all the different segments that we cover. So I think of banks, non-bank originators, brokers, credit unions. But we also saw a lot of new start-up companies coming to us. So with the unfortunate backdrop of people getting downsized in this mortgage environment, several of those impacted employees are becoming entrepreneurs, starting up their own mortgage shops. And we’re very well positioned to win that business, albeit it may be at a lower subscription fee to start, but we have the ability to grow with them as this mortgage market will snap back at some point in time.
