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

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Andrew Nicholas: Understood. Thank you. And then switching gears for my follow up, you talked quite a bit about identity as an opportunity for growth. I know you cited on the slide 250% increase in identity transactions this year between ID.me and Yoti, I’m just curious as we think about the cross and upsell growth target over the medium term, if continued acceleration there would mean upside to those numbers, it certainly seems like at the growth rates that you’re targeting there and as that becomes a bigger and bigger piece of the business that would be a possibility. Just kind of kind of wondering if that’s baked into your long-term target? Thank you.

Joshua Peirez: Yeah. Thanks. So it’s, Josh. Let me just start with again, I think that if you look at our 14% CAGR since 2018. The 19% growth that we put up in 2022, off the 41% that we had put up the year prior in 2021, a big part of that was our ability to cross-sell and up-sell in addition to all the other measures that you see. And I think that the reason I mentioned all those growth rate is with our overall business growing that way to keep that same mix we’ve talked about before of 90% of our revenue being driven by the pre-screen — the pre-hire screening and 10% by identity and monitoring the identity and monitoring obviously need to grow really, really fast. In order to keep just didn’t maintain that 10% given our overall growth rates.

We do think over time that identity presents us some really good breakout opportunities, we’re not changing our long-term targets today and our drivers, but it is something that we continue to be excited about and we think that if we are really successful with it does provide upsides to that cross-sell upsell number.

Andrew Nicholas: Great. Thank you. I appreciate the color.

Operator: The next question is from Toni Kaplan from Morgan Stanley. Toni. Please go ahead, your line is open.

Toni Kaplan: Thanks so much. A couple of times on the call, you had mentioned how your clients slowed post-Thanksgiving and into December and that it’s been better year-to-date. Is there any way that you could give, maybe it’s directionally or any sort of color on how much better the first two months have been and any reason like if January, February is usually not a — not a sort of large volume just confidence that this is a sort of sustainable trend upward? Thanks.

Joshua Peirez: Thanks, Toni. So again, I think first Peter did share our expectations for Q1, being the sort of low point for us in the year with minus 8% to minus 10% growth. So just to sort of start with that, what we said was that we saw an improvement in January and February from what we were seeing in December, particularly on that base growth line. So I think that that’s baked into those numbers. And in terms of how you think about it, there is always been seasonality in our business from the end of the year to the beginning of the year. So, we’re talking about it as in terms of what we’re seeing in a year-over-year basis. So, year-over-year December ’22 versus December ’21 year-over-year January and February ’23 versus January and February ’22, and we’ve seen an improvement, we’ve seen it pretty much remain there since January 1st right up through the end of February.

And so — and it’s consistent with what our clients told us coming into the year based on the plans they put in place.

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