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Technology - Software - Application - NYSE - US
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$ 55.1 B
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110.62
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EARNINGS CALL TRANSCRIPT
EARNINGS CALL TRANSCRIPT 2014 - Q1
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Executives

Steven P. Weber - Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer William J. Lansing - Chief Executive Officer, President and Director Michael J. Pung - Chief Financial Officer, Chief of Investor Relations and Executive Vice President.

Analysts

Gregory Bardi - Barclays Capital, Research Division John Campbell - Stephens Inc., Research Division Kevin O'Keefe Matthew Galinko - Sidoti & Company, LLC.

Operator

Good morning. My name is Jeremy, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Fair Isaac Corporation Quarterly Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Steve Weber. You may begin..

Steven P. Weber Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Jeremy. Good morning, thank you for joining FICO's First Quarter Earnings Call. I'm Steve Weber, Vice President of Investor Relations, and I'm joined today by our CEO, Will Lansing; and our CFO, Mike Pung. Yesterday, we issued a press release that describes financial results compared to the prior year.

On this call, management will also discuss results in comparison to the prior quarter in order to facilitate an understanding of the run rate of our business. Certain statements made in this presentation may be characterized as forward-looking under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

Those statements involve many uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Information concerning these uncertainties is contained in the company's filings with the SEC, in particular, in the Risk Factors and Forward-looking Statements portions of such filings.

Copies are available from the SEC, from the FICO website or from our Investor Relations team. This call will also include statements regarding certain non-GAAP financial measures.

Please refer to the company's earnings release and Regulation G schedule issued for a reconciliation of each of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measure. The earnings release and Regulation G schedule are available on the Investor Relations page of the company's website at fico.com or on the SEC's website at sec.gov.

A replay of this webcast will be available through February 23, 2014. Now I'll turn the call over to Will Lansing..

William J. Lansing President, Chief Executive Officer & Director

Thanks, Steve. First, I'd like to thank everyone for joining us this morning. We're holding our call this morning due to travel schedules. We do expect to conduct our call next quarter at our typical time of 5:00 p.m. Eastern. Today, we announced the results for our first quarter and fiscal 2014.

I'll briefly recap those results and then talk about some of the exciting things we've been working on, and how we're measuring our progress. In our first quarter, we reported revenue of $184 million, a decrease of 3% over the same period last year.

On a GAAP basis, we delivered $17 million of net income and earnings of $0.47 per share for the quarter versus $23 million and $0.66 per share from the same period last year. We delivered $26 million of non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP EPS of $0.73 per share, decreases of 18% and 17%, respectively, from the same period last year.

These results were in line with our expectations as we had an exceptionally strong comparison with our fiscal 2013 fourth quarter. Mike will provide more detail on the numbers. But first, I'd like to update you on the progress we're making in the number of areas. We made significant progress with our cloud initiatives in the last quarter.

The first part of our cloud efforts has been focused on making our applications available on a SaaS basis. We now have new software-as-a-service versions of our key products. This quarter, we sold our first 2 Origination Managers SaaS deals and a large debt manager SaaS deal.

While SaaS deals don't generate upfront revenue in the quarter they are signed, they had recurring revenue in the future periods. Importantly, these deals did not cannibalize our legacy products. They were new customers that require SaaS delivery, providing early validation of our strategy of growth by exploiting new delivery channels.

Mobility has become an important component of our SaaS applications and represents a growth opportunity beyond our core applications. Our Mobility offerings built around our Adeptra acquisition have expanded the utility of both on-premise and new cloud offerings.

We have deployed new SaaS delivery infrastructure domestically and internationally, and we'll add to our infrastructure as demanded by the market. The second thrust in our cloud effort is to make our analytics IP available on a Platform as a Service.

Where traditionally our analytic tools were available only for on-premise use, today, we can offer the most sophisticated analytic tools in the cloud environment. We call this the Decision Management platform which includes, among other things, components for developing analytic models, optimization algorithms and decision services.

We also sold our first Retail Fraud Manager solution. Retail Fraud Managers are new FICO application that we developed in-house. It's targeted at retailers and key outsourcers for the retail industry, protecting them from the costly problems of returns, fraud, waste and abuse. I'm also happy to report on several developments in our Scores business.

First, we announced in November a renewed multiyear agreement with Equifax, which will continue reselling FICO Scores and provide FICO access to its consumer data so we can develop and market new analytics. As part of the new agreement, FICO will now be able to sell FICO Scores directly to lenders and third party resellers.

Consumers will continue to have access to their FICO Score based on Equifax credit data at myfico.com and on Equifax's consumer site. FICO Scores based on Equifax credit data will now also be made available to consumers through third parties.

We also introduced our FICO Open Access program, which allows any lender to share the FICO Score with their consumers at no additional score fee, the same FICO Scores used by participating banks to manage their accounts. In addition to their FICO Score, the standard measure of U.S.

consumer credit risk, these customers will see the 2 most important factors affecting their score, as well as FICO educational materials, to help them better understand credit scoring and what behavior impacts their FICO Score.

Currently, we have commitments from Barclaycard US, First National Bank of Omaha, Discover and others to roll the program out to more than 35 million U.S. consumers, and we expect more banks to follow in the coming months.

The program has been widely praised by consumer advocacy groups and regulators as a means to offer transparency to consumers looking to understand their credit situation. Participating banks have viewed it as a significant value add to the consumer.

The FICO Score is being used to drive higher consumer engagement, higher perceived value in the banking relationship and perhaps even better consumer management behavior.

We believe consumers benefit first by better understanding how lenders perceive them and second, through the extensive educational materials available to them through the Open Access program.

We think consumers also benefit by understanding how the FICO Score, the score that lenders use, differs from education scores that sometimes appear on the market. We expect all of our initiatives to bear fruit as we move through 2014. We're laying the framework with these long-term programs for FICO to grow and flourish in the years ahead.

We will continue to update you in the coming quarters and we'll be reporting new metrics to measure our progress, particularly as we see more SaaS customers coming on board. I'll now turn the call over to Mike for further financial details..

Michael J. Pung

revenue range from $763 million to $773 million, GAAP net income of $91 million to $94 million and corresponding non-GAAP net income of $125 million to $128 million, GAAP EPS of $2.50 to $2.60 per share and corresponding non-GAAP EPS of $3.46 to $3.56 per share. With that, I'll turn the call back to Steve for questions and answer..

Steven P. Weber Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Mike. This concludes our prepared remarks and we're ready now to take any questions. Jeremy, please open the lines..

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Manav Patnaik from Barclays..

Gregory Bardi - Barclays Capital, Research Division

This is actually Greg calling on for Manav. I'd like to start with the Scores, which you saw a nice quarter and you said a lot came from the large Lat Am contract.

Can you just talk to the momentum you've seen in credit cards and if your expectations have changed for the rest of 2014?.

William J. Lansing President, Chief Executive Officer & Director

Yes. Thanks, Greg, and good morning. We did have a large deal in Latin America. The first in the country that we signed a deal in. As it relates to the ongoing flow of the business, we had a strong pre-screen or acquisition score quarter, almost across the board compared to the prior quarter.

So we're continuing to see momentum now on acquisition scores that are being used for marketing purposes. That was somewhat offset by our higher valued online Originations score where fewer accounts were originated during the quarter. And as a result, the ongoing momentum of the business was down slightly from the prior quarter..

Gregory Bardi - Barclays Capital, Research Division

Okay.

And maybe a little bit on the M&A environment here, and I know you're about a year into integrating both CR Software and Adeptra, and what you're seeing and if there's any particular niches of interest that you're focusing on?.

William J. Lansing President, Chief Executive Officer & Director

Yes. So first, with respect to the acquisitions that we made, those are all fully integrated and running very smoothly and we're happy with all of them, have retained the management from those companies, and are really pleased about the way that goes on. In terms of M&A going forward, we're always evaluating M&A opportunity.

We would love to complement our organic growth efforts with acquired growth. That said, we continue to be value conscious. Markets are -- frothy's probably too strong a word, but valuations are high. And so we remain very disciplined in the way we evaluate these things. But we're absolutely active in evaluating. The strategy has not changed.

We focus on tuck-ins that extend our current core franchises. We're always open to adding a franchise if we can get it at the right value and with the right kind of growth prospects. And until that -- those are the kind of strengths that we use. Occasionally, we'll do a technology tuck-in like the Infoglide acquisition that we did.

But in general, we're pretty happy with our organic technology efforts. We really have a very, very strong development team, strong engineering team and I just have an absolute factory of innovation going on here. So that winds up not being quite as much a focus for M&A..

Gregory Bardi - Barclays Capital, Research Division

That make sense.

And maybe along those lines, as you're expanding your SaaS offerings and building up the analytic cloud, how much more investing do you think needs to be done there? And are there specific areas where there's additional focus that needs to be made?.

William J. Lansing President, Chief Executive Officer & Director

We will continue to focus there. I mean, we have been focusing there, you see it in the fact that our net income is not growing as fast as it has in prior years because we're taking that money and redeploying it into investment in our business. That's almost entirely a function of the opportunity set that we got.

We like investing in stock buyback, but when we see the opportunities that we have in developing products and services organically, they're really attractive. And so we continue to invest there. I don't see that stopping in the near future. At the same time, we don't see it ramping up dramatically.

I think that we're trying to strike a balance between continuing the stock repurchase, a lot of fiscal discipline, some level of investment in the business. Could we invest more in the business than we do today? We could. We could. But it would be at the expense of net income. And it would have a P&L impact that we're not happy about.

So we don't do that. We're disciplined about how much we invest. But it's not going to stop either. This isn't a onetime shot and then we're done. You can expect continued investment. I mean we're building a business for the long haul here..

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Brett Huff from Stephens Inc..

John Campbell - Stephens Inc., Research Division

This is John Campbell, in for Brett Huff.

Just for the EPS guide, are you guys going with a particular tax rate, or does the low end of that range assume that 44% tax rate and then just the high end assume that 33%?.

Michael J. Pung

No. We're using about -- right down in the middle of it, between 33% and 34% now that the R&D credit was not renewed by the Congress..

John Campbell - Stephens Inc., Research Division

Okay.

And then, are you guys able to break out what percent of rev currently is categorized as SaaS, and then maybe if you could just talk about how that trends over time?.

Michael J. Pung

Yes. So we typically haven't broken out what percent is SaaS, but let me give you little order of context around our business. So over the years, we've had lines of business that we have offered on a hosted basis for our customers. And we are now supplementing those hosted long-term deals with new cloud offerings.

So if you lump both our hosted business and our cloud business together, on an annual basis last year, we had just over $150 million of revenue of that nature.

And it's concentrated in a couple of areas, particularly in our Marketing Solutions business where we host for almost all of our customers and in our Adeptra business which, of course, is a SaaS offering for all of our customers. Outside of those 2, then we have several smaller product lines where we host or provide a SaaS offering.

Kind of outside of our environment, of course, we have long had the national processors host and run our TRIAD and broad products for us. And there's another $80-or-so million of business that's being hosted in a cloud, not by FICO for our customers, but by our partners, the processors.

So we have a fairly extensive experience in this area through our legacy hosted businesses..

John Campbell - Stephens Inc., Research Division

Okay, great. And then just last one for us. The CapEx kind of came in, I guess, relatively light this quarter.

Is that anything to read into the rest of the year?.

Michael J. Pung

No, not really. Our CapEx is typically around $20 million to $25 million a year. And it ebbs and flows with the investments that we make internally in the technology. And we would anticipate our full year CapEx to be pretty similar to what it was last year. It's more of the timing..

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Kevin O'Keefe from Brown Advisory..

Kevin O'Keefe

Just to follow up on the SaaS point that the previous caller was making, is there any way you can quantify what the dollar impact you had anticipated going forward from the deals that you signed this quarter?.

Michael J. Pung

Yes. So Kevin, thanks for calling in. This is Mike. So we haven't been, right now, quantifying our SaaS deal separately. This is the first quarter we signed deals both on the Originations side and the Debt Manager side. They basically are compiled as part of the bookings right now and rolled forward in the guidance that we provided.

The size of these deals are in the $1 million plus range over a multiyear period of time. And so we don't expect this to have a material impact -- these 3 deals to have a material impact for us.

We would anticipate as we start to grow the book of business that is SaaS, as the market starts to migrate for us into that direction, that we'll be providing more specific information on the legacy business in comparison to the SaaS business.

But right now, it's not large enough for us to break out and not meaningful enough for the investors to trend forward..

Kevin O'Keefe

Got you. And we all appreciate that additional break out. The reason I ask is -- on the application side, 2 of your 3 businesses did outstanding this quarter. But the upside, I feel like we've been waiting a few quarters for a large number of deferred contract revenue.

I think following the CR and the Adeptra acquisitions, we would have expected higher rouse flowing through on the upside. And since your guidance is unchanged.

It seems like it's still kind of in the cards, but I'd love to hear if -- kind of what's driving lower revs right now and what the outlook is moving forward?.

William J. Lansing President, Chief Executive Officer & Director

I think that it still is in the cards. I think it's safe to assume that Applications business will look a little bit stronger. But the deals on that side, their license deals, they tend to be lumpier. The timing is a little bit trickier. The sales cycle is long, and so I wouldn't read too much into one quarter..

Kevin O'Keefe

So you anticipate the deals that have been on hold dating to the last summer still in the pipeline, it's not that they haven't closed and -- or they have closed and other business deteriorated, they just had the sales cycles been extended?.

William J. Lansing President, Chief Executive Officer & Director

Yes. I would -- I think that's a fair summary..

Kevin O'Keefe

Okay. And just one more if you don't mind, we're really pleased to see you guys back in the market buying your stock back. And I think prior indications have been, in the absence of acquisitions, your preference is to use cash flow to buy in your stock.

I'm just curious, how much capacity you have if you did happen to see an acquisition that you found attractive.

Could you do it? Or would you -- do you need to replenish your cash on your balance sheet before you think about other acquisitions?.

William J. Lansing President, Chief Executive Officer & Director

We could do it. We have capacity with our line and with cash on hand and with cash from operations to do a reasonably significant acquisition. And I would say never say never if using paper, although it's -- you know how we feel about it. We value it so much. We're busy buying it in.

So it would have to be something reasonably remarkable for us to issue paper to do. But we have the capacity without -- to do a pretty meaningful acquisition without issuing any stock..

Kevin O'Keefe

That's great to hear.

And so -- if I think about your thoughts on capital management, is it safe to say that you think about free cash flow as the engine to purchase in stock, and then you have the flexibility at this point to do a deal and lever up modestly if you have to?.

William J. Lansing President, Chief Executive Officer & Director

That's exactly right..

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Matthew Galinko from Sidoti..

Matthew Galinko - Sidoti & Company, LLC

So I'm just curious if you could show anymore color around the cloud bookings in terms of the duration of those.

Is it -- can you say if it's greater than sort of the overall bookings term or less?.

Michael J. Pung

Slightly greater, Matthew. The overall booking term was about 2 years. This is -- the SaaS offerings in here were slightly longer than that..

Matthew Galinko - Sidoti & Company, LLC

Okay.

And can we sort of read into that being moving up then in the future or not necessarily the case?.

Michael J. Pung

Well, our objective is we're taking these products to market, is to line up a multiyear deal, much like we do with our other on-premise products. And be able to build in a ratable revenue streams that are -- that come along with these product lines.

Customers may react differently but because of the nature of a lot of our products, we don't believe it'll be unusual for many of them to have multiyear periods. Though I'm quite certain there'll be customers who will go by year-to-year. So the market will begin to dictate that for us as we further penetrate it..

Matthew Galinko - Sidoti & Company, LLC

Okay. And then, another question is around the Open Access move.

How do you sort of view that in terms of opportunity versus cannibalization of the B2C Scores business?.

William J. Lansing President, Chief Executive Officer & Director

We see it as -- we have not seen any cannibalization. We don't anticipate cannibalization there. We think there's a lot of opportunity. Obviously, it raises consumer awareness of the FICO Score.

As you all know, there are a lot of non-FICO Scores with similar score ranges that are being sold out in marketplace that are most typically not the scores being used by lenders to make their credit decisions. It causes confusion. And frankly it's not great for the FICO brand.

And so, the Open Access program lets us really put the FICO brand front and center, in front of the consumer. It lets -- the banks use the same score that they're using to make a better decision. It lets them disclose that with no additional cost to the consumer. And we think that raising that awareness has long-term benefits for us.

One, it keeps the banks happier with using FICO Scores, but that's kind of the obvious one. Well, we also think that in the long run, it's going to create opportunities for us in our consumer Scores business. And so we do hope over time to capitalize on the broader consumer awareness..

Operator

And we have no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call back over to Mr. Weber..

Steven P. Weber Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Jeremy. This concludes our call today. Thank you all for joining..

Operator

And this concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect..

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