Bill Com at Goldman Sachs Conference: Strategic Growth and AI Focus

On Wednesday, 10 September 2025, Bill Com Holdings Inc. (NYSE:BILL) presented at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025. CEO René Lacerte outlined the company’s robust growth strategy, emphasizing AI-driven enhancements and market expansion, while addressing stock-based compensation concerns. The conference call offered a balanced view of the company’s strategic initiatives and challenges.

Key Takeaways

• Bill Com has grown 15 times in the last six years and doubled in the last three.
• The company announced a $300 million share repurchase authorization.
• New partnerships and the launch of the Embed 2.0 platform are pivotal to growth.
• AI enhancements aim to improve customer onboarding and operational efficiency.
• Stock-based compensation is set to decrease, supporting GAAP profitability goals.

Financial Results

• Revenue has doubled over the past three years.
• Profitability improved by 19 percentage points on a non-GAAP basis during the same period.
• The recent $300 million share repurchase authorization reflects confidence in long-term growth.
• Equity grants are being reduced to lower stock-based compensation over the coming years.

Operational Updates

• Bill Com is focused on simplifying the customer experience and accelerating onboarding through its integrated platform.
• The launch of the Embed 2.0 platform has led to significant partnerships, including one with Paychex.
• The company is enhancing its platform with AI to transition from a "do-it-with-you" to a "do-it-for-you" model.
• Supplier Payments Plus is targeting the top 10,000 suppliers on the network.
• There is a 40% growth in cross-selling within the spend and expense business.

Future Outlook

• Emphasis is placed on the first 90 days of customer engagement to increase retention rates.
• AI will automate tasks such as document collection, coding, and payment scheduling.
• Bill Com is expanding into international markets, adding 17 countries and 5 currencies.
• The company aims to increase the adoption of Supplier Payments Plus for managing various payment types for large suppliers.
• Expected net customer additions range from 4,500 to 5,000 per quarter, focusing on larger clients.

Q&A Highlights

• The embedded strategy focuses on meeting SMBs where they are with trusted partners.
• Embed 2.0 offers a comprehensive suite of services tailored to partner needs.
• Bill Com targets customers with up to $50 million in revenue, with mid-market clients as a key focus.
• Over 10 different products contribute to diverse revenue streams, with instant transfer growing 37% year-over-year.

In conclusion, Bill Com’s presentation highlighted a strategic commitment to growth through innovation and market expansion. For a complete understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:

Will: All right, we are going to kick it off. Next up, we are very fortunate to have René Lacerte here, CEO of BILL. René founded BILL back in 2006, and we are very happy to have you at the conference for I don’t know how many years running. Thanks for joining us again.

René Lacerte, CEO, BILL: You bet. Glad to be here, Will. Thank you.

Will: OK, so look, just to kick things off, the last four to five years have been a bit of a journey. You have continued to grow the customer base very consistently across both the accounts payable automation and the spend and expense management side of the business. Our pool dynamics have been much more choppy, and I would say that’s largely due to the macro dynamic. We’ve seen spending pullbacks across the customer base, as well as some of the monetization trends on payments slowing down during the kind of choppier macro. I’d love to hear your perspective on when you split out sort of the structural growth in the business versus some of the more recent cyclical impacts.

Where do you kind of draw that line, and what adjustments have you made to how you’re thinking about the business from what we’ve lived through over the past couple of years?

René Lacerte, CEO, BILL: Yeah, thank you. I think the first thing I’d just start with is that we just see a massive opportunity in front of us. We see any of the things you’re talking about being more cyclical and external than actually anything else. For us, the cyclical things that have happened: supply chain constraints, recession fear, pace of public policy changes, more cost-conscious large suppliers, these are all kind of external factors. When we see the business, it’s 15x in the last six years. It’s doubled in the last three years. We just have a broad portfolio of payment products. When we think about how we can control the future, it’s going to be to leverage the broad portfolio of payment products we have, to leverage the customer acquisition vehicles we have. We just have tremendous assets on both fronts.

When we think about the customer acquisition and the capabilities we have there, the ecosystem that we’ve built, the direct capabilities, the accounting channel, when we think about the payment capabilities, everything from international payments to our most recent product, Supplier Payments Plus, to allow suppliers to participate. We see just a lot of opportunities for us to kind of continue to enhance and combat, if you will, the cyclical experience with all the things that we’re doing inside the company to grow the business. That’s why I pointed out that, hey, in the last three years, it has doubled. The revenue has doubled. We have actually continued to make great progress in the operating margins of the business. In the same time frame, we’ve increased profitability by 19 points on an on-the-cap basis. Lots of opportunity.

We’ll take the external things, and we’ll manage that with adding more capabilities on the platform to bring more customers into the experience and bring more capabilities for them to optimize their financial operations.

Will: That’s great. Last week, BILL announced the $300 million share repurchase authorization. You also had a press release where you committed to delivering shareholder value to all shareholders and considering the board recommendations of a large shareholder. Can you provide any color on the discussions you’ve had so far and what’s being considered to accelerate shareholder value?

René Lacerte, CEO, BILL: Yeah, I can’t and won’t get into any specific conversations with any investor of ours. What I can say and what I share is that the board is actively and has always actively thought about shareholder value and how you create more shareholder value. The challenge of any company is how you balance the internal growth versus profitability and the opportunity to return capital to shareholders with a share buyback or to do acquisitions. These are all things that are part of the board conversation. I would just really focus that the growth opportunity is real. That’s why I kind of started with, hey, in the last three years, we’ve doubled the revenue. We have significant opportunities to increase both the penetration of our payment products across our customer base, to increase payment products, and to increase customer growth.

We’ve announced some interesting, exciting embed opportunities, which I’m sure we’ll get to. From our perspective, the first thing is let’s make sure that growth happens, and let’s make sure we drive efficiency. The way we’ve been able to drive efficiency, like I just mentioned, is that we have been able to actually drive increased investment on the growth initiatives that we think are important while increasing non-GAAP profitability on a consistent basis over the last few years. When we think about shareholder value, those are the two most important things to do. Any of the conversations we have with any investor are really about that balancing of those two factors. We’re always open to engage and hear what investors think. We’ll continue to use that to figure out what we think is best for the business.

Will: That’s great. We’re looking forward to hearing more about that over time. I’m going to pivot here and focus the rest of the conversation on the business and look forward to discussion on the initiative in the company. All right, kicking off on the investment priorities, you just started your new fiscal year. Can you reflect on the investment priorities for the upcoming year?

René Lacerte, CEO, BILL: Yeah, we’ve got kind of three things that we are focused on. One is to drive growth from the integrated platform. The next is to expand our addressable market. The third is to really enhance the platform with an AI capability, agentic capability. On the first, when we talk about really driving the integrated platform, we are doing a bunch of work on simplifying the customer experience, front-end modernization, if you will, and thinking about how we accelerate efforts to drive the onboarding process to a smaller time window. We know, when we talk about our customer retention on a consistent basis, that once a customer uses us, once an SMB uses us, meaning they’ve been on the platform 90 days, let’s say, our retention is very, very sticky. It’s that first 90 days that we need to actually drive more engagement faster.

When I get back to the third point on AI, we’ll talk about how we think that can help. That faster engagement we think will be important. We think the continued integration now, the platform does have spend and expense, AR and AP, and cash flow insights and forecasting as part of it. There’s more we can do to create more touch points across all those experiences inside of the platform. That’s going to be something that we think is super important. Ultimately, this maybe is not so much the third point on AI, but leveraging AI inside the company when you think about optimizing go-to-market, when you think about optimizing service for our customers, when you think about the capabilities you have from a data perspective, we can do more to create those touch points, make them more seamless, which will create a better customer experience.

Ultimately, a better customer experience brings more customers and gets them excited about spending more and getting more value out of the platform. The second thing I talked about was really expanding our addressable market. I think I started the first comment on that. We have a massive opportunity. We define this category. We’re the leaders in this category. We’ve got 3% to 4% penetration, depending on how you count the number of businesses in the country. We think of them as employers. There’s nobody close to our size, hundreds of thousands of businesses on our platform, spending north of 1% of GDP and spending that GDP across over 10 different payment products. There’s nobody doing all of that.

The opportunity that we have is to take all of that and bring more customers in with the efficiency both from the capabilities of the platform as well as the efficiencies in the go-to-market. One of the things that we think about on go-to-market is we have this ecosystem. We have direct. We have accounting. We have partners. On the direct side, we’ve focused more as we’ve been pulled up market into larger businesses. We’re very focused there in helping create value there. On the accountant side, what we’ve learned, and this is, I think, super exciting for us, over 9,000 firms on the platform. That’s a lot of firms.

Roughly 10% of the firms that do this type of work for accountants, for SMBs, those firms now have, if not tens, maybe hundreds, some even thousands of clients on their platform, which means they’ve got lots of people internally working with all of their clients on BILL’s platform. We’re creating those tools so that the firms can actually better engage with their teams inside their firm so they can better engage with the clients. That creates an opportunity to create more value, more efficiency, and an opportunity for them to bring more clients in. That’s a real opportunity. That’s why it’s one of the growth initiatives this year. The second part of the addressable market that we’ve talked about is the embedded capabilities. If you look at the embedded capabilities over time, we had a customizable API that resulted in what the FIs did.

What we’ve announced with the 2.0 platform is the ability to have off-the-shelf APIs, which people are taking and building on and going to market with, as well as a white-label full solution. That’s something that we have partners that are taking both of that. We think that enables us to get to more SMBs. These are trusted partners of the SMB. They’re now trusting us. That trust is contagious. It’s something that we think is super important. The third area, the third focus area this year is on agentic AI. One of the things I’m very, very happy with at the company is that last year, we did a lot of investment around the platform, around payment products. We had great results. We exceeded all of our expectations in the fourth quarter. At the same time, we didn’t tell everybody about this because this was plumbing work.

We built an entirely new agentic AI platform for the teams to build off of. We didn’t just say, let’s go launch an agent. We said, no, we want to launch dozens of agents. What’s the platform need to be? That platform is standing up. We have products that are, if you will, in alpha right now with our customers. We’ll have an opportunity in Q2 to be able to talk about those forward. Our belief, and this is super important, our belief is that as we move the platform from a do-it-with-you approach to a do-it-for-you approach, that will bring many more SMBs into the platform. That’s something we’re super excited about. Those are three big initiatives for the year. Very happy about where we’re going with them. I look forward to get them out.

Will: Yeah, let’s stick with that. I do want to come back to the embedded channel in a second because there’s lots to talk about today on that. Sticking with the topic of agentic payments, you had some very powerful commentary on the earnings call. I think you reiterated some of it just now around the opportunity to leverage agentic AI to shift, what you just said, doing the work with you to doing the work for you. Where do you see some of the nearer-term opportunities to meet customers where they are today? How should we be thinking about the modernization opportunities from your AI initiatives down the road?

René Lacerte, CEO, BILL: Yeah, I think the, and I’ve done this a couple of times, payroll and now the financial operations of AP and AR, there’s a transition where you go do it yourself. You go back, whatever timeline, people just have to do it themselves. Think about washing dishes. You used to have to do it yourself. Now there’s a dishwasher that’s a do-it-for-you. There are things in between. Our approach with our platform was to say, let’s use technology to have it be a do-it-with-you. That’s what we have today. The do-it-for-you is going to be taking all the things that customers have to do and just taking it off their plate. The example of this on the AP side would be we collect all sorts of documents. How do we get those documents?

They typically either are directly emailed in from a supplier, or they’re emailed to our customer, or the customer actually takes a picture of the document. We could actually have an agent do all of that work and get all those coded and routed for approval and actually schedule to be paid based on the payment timing. That’s what the AI will be able to do versus having the customer drive all of that. On the AR side, you could have this similar experience where we understand that you invoice this customer on a consistent basis. Let’s just recreate that invoice for you. We know what you did last month. Let’s just get it started and prompt the person, the customer of ours, to actually continue that process. The do-it-for-you actually is like, no, we’re going to take control. We’re going to drive that.

We think it’s a big game changer for the SMB. We have the expertise from a workflow perspective that nobody else has. The reason I say that is that we’re already, because we are the expert in the do-it-with-you approach today, we already know all the workflows that businesses are having to do. We know them better than anybody else. We know how to optimize them. We’re super confident in our ability to kind of leverage the data we have, the knowledge of expertise on the workflow, and the capabilities of the platform to continue to enhance the experience. That’s, I think, going to be a big opportunity for us to help customers get on. Maybe particular to your question, it’s really about those first 90 days that we’re very focused on. How do we get customers on the platform, using the platform, engaged with the platform?

We know we’ll have more to do, obviously, after that. That is the opportunity that is keeping us from getting more businesses on the platform, more than any other right now.

Will: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. OK, I do want to come back to the embedded opportunity. Not too long ago, you launched your Embed 2.0 platform, and that’s resulted in several large partnerships that you highlight on the earnings call, one of which you announced this morning with Paychex. Could you talk about what the Embed 2.0 platform is bringing that’s new? What do you think kind of cinched the deal with Paychex? How are you thinking about the embedded strategy longer term?

René Lacerte, CEO, BILL: Yeah, maybe I’ll answer the last question first. The embedded strategy long term is this is about meeting SMBs where they are and with people they trust and the companies they trust. Paychex, hundreds of thousands, if not quite a million, but hundreds of thousands of businesses trust Paychex to actually manage their payroll every day. That’s a financial operation process. For us to be embedded inside of the experience that they’re going to go to customers with, saying this is how you should kind of look at this holistically, is super exciting. That’s exciting that we have a go-to-market opportunity there. What I’m excited about from an experience perspective is that we’re taking all the learning that we had from the first dozen years or so with FIs, which all of those partnerships and deals really were customized APIs.

We would start with an API off the shelf that every bank typically would get to, well, I want it to do this, and I want it to do that. It ended up being customized. That meant that as we evolved our platform, as we iterated on the platform, made capabilities, added payment products, they weren’t ready and able to take advantage of that. Embedded 2.0 is like, no, this is the package. Take it off the shelf and use it. We still have the Embedded 2.0 for a customized experience if they want that, but that’s not what we expect to be the growth driver. The opportunity inside of Paychex is the white-label experience off the shelf. The other partner that we’ve talked about, which we’ll name when they announce in the coming quarter here, that opportunity is around large mid-market companies.

They’re taking the API approach off the shelf and creating real experiences inside of their application, which touches, like I said, trillions of dollars of spend on a consistent basis inside their platform. Real opportunities. The other thing I’ll say is, again, the payment products are part of the conversation day one. It’s not an afterthought. We believe there’ll be strong penetration of TPV and opportunities to continue to monetize those opportunities with our customers.

Will: You touched on some of the way that the approach is different with the prior embedded strategy. When we think about kind of prior renditions of this program with Intuit, with some of the bank partners, and then with the recent Xero partnership as well, and their acquisition of Melior, how has your thought process changed about just the importance of the embedded strategy and what part of the market will consume the services that BILL offers through an embedded partner versus an accountant or going direct to BILL?

René Lacerte, CEO, BILL: Yeah, I mean, the 3% to 4% of the market penetration that we have is still a massive opportunity, right? There’s 96% still to go get. We see the opportunity as, again, being where SMBs are and making sure they have a choice about how they do their financial operations. We think the expertise we developed is unique. One of the things I would say about the Xero partnership, it was the Embed 2.0 platform. We went from essentially an idea to customers within a year. That’s very powerful because that’s a lot faster than what we’ve done with FIs. I think we’ll be able to continue to do that type of fast, rapid deployment with these partners that are coming on. The importance here is, it is, again, it’s different because it is the full suite that is available for the partner to choose when they get started.

That’s something that we’re excited about. I think what we’ll see is that the consumption of our Embed 2.0 will differ depending on the partner and what confidence they have in their particular solution to actually reach. These are big deals that have lots of money being spent on those platforms. That’s something I’m proud of that they’re coming to us to do that.

Will: Congratulations to you and the team for announcing that.

René Lacerte, CEO, BILL: Thank you.

Will: On the move up market, I think I view this as kind of an evolution. I think you’ve been talking about this for a longer time, the incremental customer on the spend and expense side getting larger, the move towards larger and larger customers on the AP side. You kind of underlined that commentary this past quarter. It is interesting to see some of the statistics on the mid-market growth. It seems like it should be supportive of higher ARPUs over time. Just maybe talk through what’s driving the shift in the target customer up market and how you think about the trajectory of monetization over time as that occurs.

René Lacerte, CEO, BILL: Yeah, when I started the company, one of the focus areas was to make sure that we could serve all SMBs. Now, SMBs depends on how you define enterprise companies. I think the fact is somewhere when you get to $50 million in revenue, there’s only like 100,000 businesses over that, roughly. Pretty much if there’s 6 million employers in the country, they’re pretty much all SMBs. For us, the mid-size, the mid-market, that’s part of that. Our target customer will go up to a couple hundred, not necessarily the sweet spot of the overall business. Building a platform to actually serve, let’s say, that $0 to $50 million was paramount. It was something that we really wanted to do. As we did it, we started getting pulled up. Part of that is the acquisition of Divvy, BILL Spend and Expense, has some larger customers.

Part of that is actually our accounts bring us kind of both ends. They bring us very small ones. They bring us some very big ones. Part of that’s our own direct efforts. Our ability to actually serve them already meant that they started saying, you know what? There’s other things I need. I want procurement. I want multi-entity. I’ve got multiple locations, multiple divisions. I want mass payments because I’m paying 1,000 payments in a month, not 100 payments in a month or not 10 payments in a week or whatever. I need these capabilities. I want internationalization in a way that they haven’t had before. These are all things that now that we have a customer base and they’re asking for it, it’s much easier to say, so this is how you want us to build it.

The thing that I think that people sometimes forget is they’re already on the platform. They came to us because we already were providing so much value that that was valuable to them. To your point, as we get these features out, get them in hands, and create the value, there’s an opportunity to drive subscription revenue for those features. Our goal right now is to get them in the hands, get them used, have high satisfaction, and to work on the monetization as that continues to evolve for us.

Will: Yeah, no, that makes sense. Maybe just jumping to the net ad outlook, you talked about this as an order of magnitude smaller group of customers, but much, much larger in size. When we think about the $4,500 to $5,000 range of net ads per quarter, it’s been pretty consistent over the last several years. Is the implication that that’s going to continue to be the right range in terms of absolute numbers, but then the underlying size internally is just larger?

René Lacerte, CEO, BILL: Our general belief is that we have a strong opportunity in front of us. What we see this year is that it’s going to be the four to five with some quarterly fluctuations, which we have seen in the past. The emphasis will continue to be on getting the right customer. We want to make sure that if an accountant wants small customers, fine, we’ll take them. If we have an opportunity with a mid-market customer, we want to get them. We want to drive value, higher revenue, both from a transaction and a subscription perspective. We do have more focused go-to-market efforts on the accounts that can bring us many and on the mid-market customers that tend to be larger. That’s one of the evolutions of the business, just understanding where we can add value from a go-to-market to help the onboarding process, to help the sales process.

That’s something that we saw success this past year, and we talked about that. I think with accounts, it was 24% growth year over year on the net ads. A lot of opportunity there, which I’ve talked about, and a lot of opportunity on the mid-market. We saw a consistent ability for us to drive that type of adoption across the base as well.

Will: Got it. OK, let’s pivot over to payments, monetization, and some of the supplier initiatives. The trajectory of take rates has been, I would say, in question over the last couple of years as the macro environment weighed on some of the different payment modalities, such as virtual cards. I think since then, the company’s really doubled down on the payment strategy, made a big hire to run your payments operations. Can you talk about, and then obviously you rolled out the new Supplier Payments Plus platform recently, can you talk just about the most important initiatives you have on the payment side of the business?

René Lacerte, CEO, BILL: Yeah, so it’s great having Mary Kay on board and part of the team. I think just to set the stage, there’s over 10 different products that drive revenue streams for the company, and that’s going to continue to grow. There’s opportunities there for us to do more. Having a leader, having a team that’s kind of focused on how do we actually drive value for our customers, which will drive value for the business, that’s the number one thing that we’re focused on. Part of that is creating choice. You have always heard from us that when it comes to payment, we want suppliers to be a choice. We want customers to be a choice. We’ve created a choice, and we’ve created opportunities.

Now, I think the job is how do we continue to package isn’t the right word, but kind of present is probably the right word, present all those choices so that they’re clear and easy for businesses to understand, whether you’re the buyer or the supplier. That’s the work that’s at hand. One of the examples that I’ll talk about is we create a choice for suppliers that are international in how they want to receive payments. Do they want U.S. dollars, or do they want FX if only the business can do the FX, their customer and our customer do the FX? Or do they want choice the moment the payment happens? A year ago, we extended our network into the international community. We had Canada, and we had the UK. We saw that giving those suppliers choice drove up FX adoption.

It didn’t drive it to 100%, but there are times when they definitely want FX that the U.S. business had just put dollars in, and they were getting dollars. This was an opportunity for us to drive our FX experience value for both sides. That experience now has been extended to another 17 countries, another five currencies total. That’s a unique opportunity. There’s more to go do. There’s obviously more countries, and that’s an opportunity for us to create choice. That’s kind of the premise of how we think about payments. You think about instant transfer. This is one of the emerging markets, which has grown overall. Sorry, emerging Avalon vehicle that we have. Overall, we said that was 37% year over year. Instant transfer on the supplier side, it’s not used all the time by a supplier, but it’s used much of the time.

They will use it when they need it, and that choice matters. Same with invoice financing. Same with pay by card. They don’t use it, and that’s inside our company, inside the customers. All these choices matter. What we’re doing is making sure that the choices are presented clearly so businesses can have them, and that will drive the take rate and Avalon penetration up over time.

Will: Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe we can touch on Supplier Payments Plus. I think you previously referred to this as an advanced ACH product. Rolling this out, I think it addresses the vast majority of the spend that currently goes over check and ACH. What’s the primary value prop or customer experience here? In your words, what’s the incremental choice that you’re giving customers here to drive more adoption?

René Lacerte, CEO, BILL: Yeah, so this is really interesting. You think about the size and scale. So 1% of GDP goes through BILL. $270 billion of that is going to be a check or an ACH transaction. If you’re a large business, and we think Supplier Payments Plus is targeted at the top 10,000 suppliers on our network, if you’re a large business and you’re getting checks, you’re getting payments from BILL, you’re getting a check sometimes, you’re getting an ACH sometimes, and you’re getting a virtual card sometime. That’s more work for them to reconcile. By the way, these large businesses have multiple people that are doing accounts receivable for them. Those people change jobs and move around the company. They need a console. They need a software platform to be able to manage all those interactions with any BILL customer. That’s what we’ve created with Supplier Payments Plus.

We’ve created this opportunity for the supplier not just to be at choice, but to also have a tool to kind of manage. The other thing that we’ve created is a go-to-market opportunity for us to talk to the suppliers saying, you’re getting this much spend from BILL customers. It’s coming to you in many different ways, which you’re not able to just control and manage your processes. How about you work with us, and we’ll manage that. What we’re experiencing so far, it’s the early days, is that, one, they take the call. They always want to talk. Two, they’re willing to pay. Three, they understand that there’s going to be multiple payment types. They don’t want checks, but they understand there’s going to be ACH, and they understand there’s going to be card payments.

They just want to understand how to manage that and work with us on it. We have a lot of belief and confidence that this is going to be a significant opportunity for us to continue to enhance value on the platform because our small business customers can never have that relationship with that large supplier. We can. That’s going to create value. That’s going to be a really unique opportunity for us.

Will: You started talking about this a couple of years ago about starting to treat suppliers like customers. I guess it’s a new motion inside the company. How are you thinking about kind of the resources needed to maintain the other side of the two-sided network?

René Lacerte, CEO, BILL: Yeah, I mean, it’s one of the reasons the name of the company is BILL because one person’s BILL is another person’s BILL, and they mean debit and credit, but that’s not what people say. It’s super important for us that we always have created that network advantage. To have 8 million in a network, I think the opportunity for us, we’re talking about the large suppliers. We’ve also done work, actually, the stuff on international I’m talking about. That would be the small suppliers. That’s just a small design shop in, I don’t know, let’s say in the UK. That’s just them having choice. We have an opportunity to create choice and services and agentic services around invoicing in that network, which we think is going to be quite valuable around cash flow in that network, and obviously AP and spend and expense.

I think all of this is just starting to come together in a meaningful way because of the things we’ve been working on the last few years.

Will: That’s great. OK, let’s pivot over and talk about the spend and expense business. You talked last year about seeing increased traction with larger customers. I referenced that earlier. You’ve also continued to make inroads on the cross-sell initiatives to the AP customer base. What’s the outlook for spend and expense, and how do you think about the mix in terms of new customer acquisition versus cross-sell?

René Lacerte, CEO, BILL: Yeah, I mean, the 40% growth in cross-sell over the last year is great. There’s still a lot of opportunity inside of the BILL base. We have hundreds of thousands of businesses on the platform, and that’s going to continue to grow. We believe there is very strong value in having both together. We see that. We don’t believe that. We see that with our customers. They value being able to manage all their spend in one place. They value the reporting they can get, the cash flow insights they get around that. There are more opportunities for us to bring that together, and we will do that from the touch points perspective. Inside of SME, we continue to actually see very strong adoption and interest from those, let’s say, the medium to mid-market customers. We’ve been able to refine the go-to-market to kind of bring that to life more.

At the same time we’ve been doing that, we’ve also been driving increased efficiency or effectiveness across credit and fraud and risk and all the things that matter. I think sometimes people kind of forget that that’s a really important part of the business. 1% of GDP, we take it seriously. We manage it well. We’re able to do this and get better at it all the time. We’re applying AI into that aspect of the business as well so we can increase those abilities. Obviously, as we increase those abilities, it gives us an opportunity to reach more customers. We see a lot of key things to work on around driving this synergistic experience across APAR around really an SME and really driving more opportunities to save businesses significant time because of the platform we’ve built.

Will: That’s great. I guess sticking with spend and expense, unlike the AP business, where you made a pretty good case that you are the largest and most scaled player in that ecosystem, there is more competition on the SME space. You’ve got the incumbents like AMEX and the big banks, as well as some very well-funded private competitors. What are you seeing from a competitive perspective? Just how do you think about BILL’s right to win in this space?

René Lacerte, CEO, BILL: This is a massive market. From a competitive perspective, on the fringe, we sometimes cross competition, but for the most part, it is truly a new territory, if you will, for SMBs. I can tell you why we win. We win because we have the best, broadest platform that does all these things. We have the ability to do great AP with workflow and document management and sync with the ERP, the accounting solution, and using AI across that to supply the work. We have the channels, obviously, with accountants and Embed that others don’t have. We have the opportunity to really create insights based on the years of learning from the data we have. The data is a significant asset when it comes to serving the customer as well as building new products for the customer.

From serving the customer, having the ability for us, and this is something that is a lot of our platform that doesn’t, it’s not sexy, but moving 1% of GDP and not being a financial institution, which means those funds are not our funds until we actually execute on the transaction, that takes expertise. We’ve always leveraged data to be able to do that well. That is something that we think is unique to be able to offer services for the customer. It also gives us an opportunity from the data perspective to understand how do you create agentic capabilities based on that data. The millions of documents that come in every month, the millions of payments that get made every month, the billions of dollars that get made every week, these are things that give us an advantage that we think is unique.

I think I already said this, but the ecosystem, the accounts, 9,000 firms, it’s a unique advantage. We just had our Accountant Advisory Council. We had roughly 40 accountants come. You tell them all the features we’re doing, and they start clapping and cheering. They’re just so excited about what we’re going to be able to bring to them. Their trust with us is real. We talk a lot about trust. We move money. It matters. If you can’t trust us when you move money, then you can’t do business with us. Accounts understand that more than anybody. They really trust BILL because of relationships we built over the last, actually, for me, three decades. That matters. I think that’s a unique advantage that I don’t see the competition having.

Will: That’s great. OK, we’ve got a couple of minutes left here. As a broad market observation, I think over the past five years, investors have been on this journey down the income statement when we think about valuation for public companies, particularly growth companies. In the most recent quarter, you called out enhancing your focus on GAAP profitability and specifically some changes to the stock-based compensation plans at the company. Can you talk a little bit more about that, the motivation for why now, and how investors should think about kind of the enhanced approach to profitability?

René Lacerte, CEO, BILL: I think the first thing I’d want investors to know is that the DNA of the company is, I was an accountant. I understand profit. We’ve always designed everything so that we could grow and be profitable. It’s just a dial, and it’s just an equation that we have a conversation with, like, OK, what’s right at this point in time? SBC right now, because for a number of reasons not to get into, but I think everybody knows where the stock price was, that’s led to an overhang. We got to address that, and we understand that. We did make a significant adjustment this year. The equity grants this year are roughly half of what they’ve been in prior years. That’s a significant adjustment in order for us to get on a path to bring this down over a couple of years.

It’s not going to be snap the fingers and we get SBC where we all want it to be. We wanted to make sure that investors understood that we are paying attention. The board is paying attention. I’m paying attention. The management team is paying attention. We care about this. We also are doing this with love and care for our employees, making sure that they’re taken care of. This is a hard thing to balance. We feel very good about the path and our ability to be able to drive this to where we know it should be and where we’ll be in the next few years.

Will: That’s great. René, I think we’re just about out of time. Thank you so much for spending the time with us today. I really appreciate the conversation. Congrats again on the Paychex announcement today.

René Lacerte, CEO, BILL: OK, thank you very much, Will. Take care.

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