Sterling Check Corp. (NASDAQ:STER) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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And I think the growth rates that we shared on the call and in the slides, show that traction is really starting. So we tried to give you some color on that. In terms of post-hire monitoring, we continue to see some of these specialized areas that we’ve talked about before and I discussed in the script, the sanctions monitoring the MVR monitoring as being really attractive and now we’re really excited that we do have a true monitoring solution on the criminal side, that we have clients who actually are on and excited about, versus just doing these package re-screens that can be unpredictable and can be something that clients easily can choose to walk away from, or move any given year. This is a much more stable consistent stream as we’re successful in getting clients on there.

So I think we expect to see more from identity this year and more from monitoring kind of later in the year as we really get those clients going. And then your other question, which was on sort of the new business which I’ll let Peter give real color on, what I would say is we continue to see very consistent trends in our advance pipeline, in our close deals, in our revenue expectations from new clients. Peter I don’t know if you want to give a little color on it through the year.

Peter Walker: Yeah. So we are really proud that we believe we’ve got industry-leading new client growth and I think the numbers speak to that, right? So, for full year $57 million of revenue from new clients, which is 9% growth for the quarter, that was $12 million which is 7% growth. If it hadn’t been for some of the clients kind of pushing their onboarding of new business from the end of Q4 to Q1, you would have seen that higher. When we think about 2023, we believe we are going to hit our new growth target of 7% to 8%. We don’t believe that’s going to be uniform over the year as we mentioned, we expect to see a contraction in Q1 of organic constant currency rate currency revenue of 8% to 10% with that improving over the year, but we do believe for full year ’23, we’re going to be in that 7% to 8% range for new client growth.

Operator: The next question comes from Andrew Steinerman from JP Morgan. Andrew. Please go ahead, your line is open.

Alex Hassan: Yeah. Hi. This is Alex Hassan for Andrew Steinerman. Hope you’re all well. A quick question just for the record, it seems that the revenue from existing clients. So base growth, upsell, cross sell, minus churn was something like a negative 13% in 4Q. Any color there and then I want to follow up with a question on base growth, it seems like you’re implying for the full year 2023 that will be somewhat better than in 4Q ’22, and that seems to be somewhat at odds with what we’re hearing from some of your peers and laterals. If you could maybe elaborate on that as well would be great? Thank you.

Peter Walker: Yeah. Sure. Good morning. So reflecting back on Q4 what we shared with new client growth of 7%, existing client was a decline of 11%, the way you should think about that 11%, is cross-sell upsell of approximately 4% offset attrition of approximately 4%, so you kind of get to a net zero so that negative 11% is all attributable to base growth. We also shared in our prepared remarks that December we believe is a trough of base growth and we’re seeing improvement in January and February, and when you think about kind of our full year 2023 drivers, as I just shared, we believe, new business will be 7% to 8%, we believe that cross-sell upsell and attrition will both be around a positive 4% and a negative 4% netting each other, and the base growth will be 8% to 9%, there will be seasonality in 2023.

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