Toast, Inc. (NYSE:TOST) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Aman Narang: Yes. Thanks for the question, Darrin. Look, we’re proud of the team’s progress over the past year with new brands like, if you just look at Choice and Caribou, which I talked about in my prepared remarks. Marriott in expansion with existing like Nothing Bundt Cakes and MTY. Just we start investing in enterprise business just a couple of years ago. It’s really great to see the progress we’ve made in a short period of time. And we’re also seeing really good health pipeline and inbound requests from customers. But you got to keep in mind, these are enterprise customers, these are long cycles, and we want to be balanced also in terms of which customers we partner with, does not distract our R&D teams where a single customer has custom work that can take over product roadmaps.

In terms of some of the capabilities in ARPU, I think — it starts by building out some of the core capabilities, enterprise config management, publishing security, compliance, data APIs. And over time, like if you look at the reasons SMB choose Toast, all the platform capabilities in terms of in-store and things like handheld, for example, mobile order and pay and kiosk. We believe over time, a lot of those will be applicable in the enterprise market as well. But you should expect this to be a gradual continued momentum upmarket as we expand TAM as opposed to a step function change in terms of how we’re gaining share.

Darrin Peller: That makes sense. Maybe just a very quick follow-up is on the competitive landscape, meaning more for the SMB side, we obviously continue to hear about other companies talking about a certain type of pause that could be applicable to the restaurant space. But obviously, given the customer adds, you still continue to show strong traction. You don’t notice in the competitive landscape as much. What are you, guys, seeing on that front the changes?

Aman Narang: Yes. Look, I think this has always been a competitive market, right from day 1 when we started this business, and we continue to believe what we see in our data is as we execute and get into more of the markets, restaurants are still local. And the more share we get, the more social proof we have, the more the flywheel effect it creates. That’s the most important trend that we see in our business. Our team obviously is tracking at win rates and competitive dynamics in the market. But that’s really — if you think of — we’ve been at this for so long, and it’s really — we’ve built this vertically integrated platform and expanded it over time, and that’s just really driving our growth. than anything else.

Darrin Peller: Yes. Okay. Thanks guys.

Aman Narang: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. We will now take our last question from the line of Dominic Ball with Redburn Atlantic. Your line is now open.

Dominic Ball: Hey guys. Thanks for the question. Great job on execution when it comes to location growth, winning market share being clearly very, very strong. My question is, since the summer, you have been, shall we say, strongly taking price increases. I just want to make sure we get to try in terms of, how do you approach doing this? Is it raising software prices on old or new merchants? Is it on payment rate? Is it monetizing existing free products? Any more color on this would be great. Thank you.

Aman Narang: Yes. Thanks Dominic for the question. Look, as I said earlier, it’s the last step then and look at the business, I think — it’s important to remember, pricing is an important lever, but it’s one lever. And we want to make sure we’re using it gradually as part of a broader strategy. One of the focus areas we continue to gain market share on scale is to look at opportunities where to continue to expand the terminal attach rates of the product that we have to drive ARPU is a really important driver of ARPU. In terms of the opportunity, specifically in pricing, you look at new customers that are joining our platform, what we see is across both SaaS payments, they’re paying us more than our base. And so we do see opportunity over time to go back and build it as an ongoing lever as part of our growth algorithm to complement in location growth as well as product attached.

And I think you should think, you should expect that to be gradual over time, starting with fintech this year and then SaaS in the out years.

Dominic Ball: Yes, that’s great. And just one more, if that’s okay. I mean, your answer to another question around a potential expansion to the retail vertical. It is — sort of that Toast for retail restaurant, is that a potential gateway in the future into certain retail merchants? Or is that — is this too far for now?

Aman Narang: Yes. As I said earlier, a lot of this was driven by our customer base. You’ve got our customers really pull us into these hybrid restaurant retail concepts because more and more of them offer not just the restaurant environment, but also they may offer packaged goods in a market, they may offer grocery, wine and so these lines are blurring. And the way our team thinks about, it is anywhere food to serve, we think that our platform that we built over the past decades offers us an opportunity to go create increments value for those customers and so we’re starting there. And then I think over time, we’ll look at where else Toast can be applicable.

Dominic Ball: Yes, thanks guys and again, well done. Cheers.

Aman Narang: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. That will conclude the Q&A session today. At this time, I will turn the call back over to the team for any final closing remarks.

Aman Narang: Yes. Thank you everybody for your time today.

Elena Gomez: Thanks everyone.

Operator: This concludes this conference call. You may now disconnect.

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