Bill.com at Jefferies Public Technology Conference: Strategic Growth Amid Challenges

On Wednesday, 28 May 2025, Bill.com (NYSE:BILL) participated in the Jefferies Public Technology Conference, where CFO and President John Reddick discussed the company’s strategic direction. While highlighting growth opportunities through AI and multi-product adoption, Reddick also acknowledged the challenges posed by economic uncertainty affecting small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Despite these hurdles, Bill.com remains committed to expanding its financial management platform.

Key Takeaways

• Economic uncertainty is causing a slight pause in SMB spending, impacting transaction volumes.
• Bill.com focuses on expanding its platform with AI to enhance efficiency and customer tools.
• The accountant channel is a significant growth driver, with a 60% increase in adds in Q3.
• The company is balancing growth investments with a cautious approach to profitability.

Financial Results

• TPV and Spend: SMBs are reducing discretionary spending due to economic uncertainty, with transaction volumes per customer decreasing to 70 in March from 73 a year ago. A slight increase is expected in Q4 due to seasonal effects.
• Take Rate: The take rate grew to 16.2 basis points in Q3, driven by AdVal products and reduced FX losses. Price increases on ACH and check payments are expected to benefit fiscal year 2026.
• Customer Growth: Bill.com added approximately 9,000 net new customers for its APAR services and 1,500 for its spend and expense business, with significant growth from the accountant channel.
• Margin and Profitability: Operating income margin expanded from a loss of 3% in Q3 ’22 to 15% in Q3 ’25, with a free cash flow margin of 25%.

Operational Updates

• Customer Base: Bill.com serves about 500,000 customers, with half using the AR product, Invoice2Go.
• Ad Valorem Products: The focus is on increasing the penetration of products like pay by card and instant transfer, enhancing supplier solutions.
• Multi-Product Adoption: Joint customers using both the bill AP solution and Divvy charge card increased to 11,000.
• Embedded Solutions: Investments in the embed 2.0 platform aim to integrate software and payments, highlighted by a partnership with Xero for AP payments in the US.
• Spend and Expense: Strength noted in the travel and retail categories, supported by a new warehouse facility.

Future Outlook

• Platform Expansion: Over the next 3-5 years, Bill.com plans to broaden its platform capabilities, offering enhanced insights and control over cash flow.
• AI Integration: AI is set to automate processes and improve internal efficiency, with early successes in customer support.

Q&A Highlights

• SMB Spending Trends: Economic uncertainty leads SMBs to pause spending, reducing discretionary expenditures.
• Impact of Currency Fluctuations: Currency strength affects demand for FX payments, with proactive steps taken to mitigate FX losses.
• Accountant Channel: Significant investment in the accountant channel resulted in a 60% increase in customer additions in Q3.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a more detailed understanding of Bill.com’s strategies and outlook.

Full transcript - Jefferies Public Technology Conference:

Samad, Analyst: Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us. For this segment, I have the CFO and President of Bill.com, John Reddick, with me. John, it’s great to see you here, and we appreciate you attending as always. I wanna maybe just jump right in from the top, given the amount of questions that investors have and that we have.

Just with the the world kind of changing every day, You guys have seen TPV fluctuate over the last year. You’ve now seen some stabilization, some quarters where there’s been more pressure. Can you talk about what trends you’re seeing at SMBs and what your expectations are for the rest of this year?

John Reddick, CFO and President, Bill.com: Sure, it’s a great place to start, Samad. So just at the highest level, we’ve seen some clear signs that small businesses are reacting to the environment that they’re operating in. There’s uncertainty, and that’s starting to translate into some form of spend pause. So it doesn’t feel like expansion mode. There’s some impacts from trade uncertainties, policies, executive orders, interest rates.

There’s just enough uncertainty that small businesses are in a little bit of a wait and see mode. We see that show up in two ways. One is slight reductions in discretionary spend, so where they have an option to lower spend per transaction or pause on some transactions, they’re doing that. Some industries are more challenged than others. An example would be the nonprofit sector is pulling back a little bit more, just given some of the uncertainties that exist there and wanting to preserve cash runways.

On the AP side for us, we saw a slight reduction in the number of transactions per customer in the last quarter, in the March, so 70 versus 73 a year ago, down from 76 in the December. And there were similar trends at the beginning of the pandemic, obviously not as significant or severe, but that’s an indication that small businesses are adjusting to the environment they’re in. Wholesale trade, real estate, payroll, PEO, these are all categories with slight reductions in spend. Our expectations for Q4 was that we’d have low single digit declines year over year in TPV per customer, up slightly quarter to quarter just given the seasonal effect for June. And overall, we’re just a little bit cautious given what we’re seeing from small businesses.

Samad, Analyst: I think that’s a great starting point. I appreciate that color. I know you mentioned some specific verticals where you’re seeing different trends, but I wanted to maybe double click on customer size and geo respectively. Right? So if I start with maybe customer size, I know that Bill accounts for, I think Renee’s quote is usually 1% of GDP.

So you see a lot of economic activity. If you think about the spectrum of SMBs, not all SMBs are created equally. So if you maybe looked into your install base, anything by customer size that you can stratify and how they’re performing? Or are you seeing this pretty consistently regardless of size?

John Reddick, CFO and President, Bill.com: Yes, we have 500,000 customers, roughly about half of which are with our AR product, Invoice2Go. They’re really small. Those are small businesses, some of them freelancers, not even multiple employees in the organization, and they’re continuing to operate at low volumes. The rest of the bill and spend expense base skews a little bit larger, particularly on the spend and expense side. And we’re seeing probably a little bit more pullback in discretionary or variable spending categories for those larger businesses.

I think they have more discretionary budgets, and they’re quicker to react, and we’re seeing that play through. Beyond that, it’s pretty consistent across the board, and we don’t see any alarming trends or anything like that. It’s just moderated spend and a lack of growth across pretty much all industries spend categories.

Samad, Analyst: Great. Maybe let’s switch gears and get into the core of the businesses, I think about the take rate side, right? And I think that that’s viewed as probably the biggest opportunity is that ongoing monetization of that payments philosophy inside of the ecosystem. Can you maybe walk us through some of the factors influencing the take rate and recent trends there and how that maybe has evolved over the course of this fiscal year?

John Reddick, CFO and President, Bill.com: Yeah, so stepping back for a second, take rate is the combination of two variables. One is the mix of our ad valorem products as a percentage of overall TPV versus fixed fee products. And then the second is the individual pricing or the yield that we get on those products. And I’d say to the to the latter point, the yield is very consistent across our Advil and our fixed fee products, so we don’t see significant price changes in those products. It’s very stable.

About 80% of the bill payment volume is across ACH and check payments. So by definition, that’s monetizing at a very low rate, let’s call it roughly three basis points. The much smaller percentage of payment volume is on these Adval products, much higher monetization and much higher growth rates. So we’re seeing individual products within that Adval portfolio perform very well. In the most recent quarter, we obviously saw an expansion in take rate and that was driven by these AdVal products.

Samad, Analyst: And I know you mentioned expansion in the most recent quarter. I think it’s been a little bit choppy, the take rate, right? And I think that you guys are expecting kind of flat for the fiscal fourth quarter. Maybe help us think about what is driving that? What would be normal seasonality?

What’s driving maybe your current assumptions on it being flat? And and if I just step back, actually, I’ll stop there. I don’t want make this a 10 part question, classic sell side mistake, I apologize. We will stop at just what’s embedded in that flat expectations for F4Q.

John Reddick, CFO and President, Bill.com: Okay, so just rewinding a little bit. In the second quarter, December quarter, we were at 15.6 basis points down 0.5. We had indicated throughout the year that we expected expansion in the second half of the fiscal year. The March, we saw that a 0.6% increase to 16.2% on the back of strength with the emerging Advel products with lower FX losses for our international payment products. And then ultimately, less of a seasonal impact in the March than we see in the December.

As we looked at the fourth quarter, we’ve dialed back those expectations to be similar to Q3 in terms of monetization, so not expansion as we were originally planning. The main driver of that is the uncertainty that is existing around international payments for certain customer segments and certain corridors. So there’s a shift in volume, we saw some pull forward in a couple of quarters in a couple of corridors in the December and March period. And so we’re not expecting expansion in monetization or volume for international payments in the June. At the same time, we’re expecting a slightly lower level of TPV per customer, and that also translates into a softer take rate environment.

At the end of the day, we do have many levers at our disposal to expand monetization over time, and so we still think the opportunities are significant there, but in the very short term, I think we’re taking a little bit more of a cautious point of view on that take rate expansion.

Samad, Analyst: Just on the international, I wanna follow-up on on that. I I wasn’t originally gonna ask this, since you mentioned it, got triggered in my brain. What we’ve seen a lot of FX volatility. The US dollar’s obviously gotten a lot weaker this year, which stinks because I’m going to Europe in a few weeks. It’s bad for my for my own personal wallet.

How does that impact how a customer may think about their decisions on the international payment side? Does volatility or the direction of the currency impact your business, and help us think about that.

John Reddick, CFO and President, Bill.com: Yeah, so the strength or weakness of the dollar does tend to have an impact on the demand for FX versus US dollar payments. The rate of change and how quickly FX prices change also impacts the exposure that we have to currencies, and you’ve seen in times of rapidly increasing dollar strength, more FX losses that we’ve had, which flows through revenue for us. And then we’ve been making a lot of proactive investments to reduce cycle times, reduce exposure, hedging, moving money faster and things like that. It’s a better customer experience, number one, but two, it reduces the exposures that we have associated with FX volatility, and we were very successful in that. In the March, we reduced losses on a quarter to quarter basis by over 60%.

And so we haven’t necessarily seen any recent changes with the decline in the US dollar, but there is normally some change in demand that comes from that currency fluctuation.

Samad, Analyst: Understood. Maybe kind of zooming out, if we think about AdVolorm, I know we’re spending a lot of time on it, but it has such an important impact on your business. What are the steps the company is taking? Or what are the levers you’re pulling to drive more adoption of the ad valorem offerings that you have in the portfolio?

John Reddick, CFO and President, Bill.com: Well, think it’s twofold. First, we are continuing to iterate and drive penetration on the emerging set of products that we have. So think pay by card, instant transfer, working capital solutions, all of which address both sides of a transaction, buyers and suppliers. We’re just making these products easier, faster, and creating more value on both sides of the equation. And then the working capital portfolio we think is a really big opportunity.

We’re not currently pointing to that as a huge growth driver in the near term, because we’re still relatively early in proving out adoption, demand, risk models, things of that nature. And then the other big thing that we’re doing is enhancing our solutions for the supplier side of the equation. So we’ve done a lot to create value for small businesses through automation of the AP cycle from a buyer perspective, and now we’re making investments and iterating on our product portfolio to increase the value for suppliers. We think that over time leads to more demand for faster payments for Advil products and creates the two sides of the network that I think will help us expand monetization over time.

Samad, Analyst: And then maybe on the other side of that question, what are where have SMBs expressed the most interest, right? Like what it where in the ad valorem portfolio are they showing that? And then where do you think that the opportunities for expansion are within that?

John Reddick, CFO and President, Bill.com: So from an SMB perspective, there’s always demand for cash flow solutions. So where they can create more liquidity, that means either getting paid faster or taking more time to pay, either from insights or using a product like a pay by card, where they’re extending their float by three or four weeks and things like that. So generally there’s demand for cash flow solutions, which is either getting paid fast or stretching out payments through working capital solutions. On the supplier side, the same is true. So our real time payments products, instant transfer, there’s more demand for a product like that in an environment like this.

For largest suppliers, it’s all about automation and speed of reconciliation and removing human intervention and manual activities.

Samad, Analyst: Maybe just last on payments or take rate side. Just you recently increased the price on ACH and check, which you said accounts for a pretty significant portion of volume. Why now and what’s the uplift on the take rate that you’re expecting?

John Reddick, CFO and President, Bill.com: It’s been north of two years since we’ve made price adjustments, so it was more of a timing thing. This is I’d say a tactical shift in pricing. If you look at the actual rate changes, it’s between 1520% stated price change. We typically yield less than that effective price increases, and so we’re not expecting that kind of change. These are low monetizing products to begin with, so there shouldn’t be an impact the current quarter.

The price changes went into effect for new customers in March, existing customers in May. I’d say in FY ’26, there’s a small positive benefit from that. But the rationale for increasing prices regardless of the timing is that as we evolve the platform, we create more value, we move money faster, we’re creating a better payment experience, and feel like there should be periodic price adjustments to account for that.

Samad, Analyst: Great. Maybe as I think about the earlier, you mentioned half a million customers across the different parts of the business. How should we think about growing that base? How should we think about net adds? And what are the key factors that you think could drive acceleration of net add growth?

John Reddick, CFO and President, Bill.com: Yeah. So we’ve been pretty consistent at delivering between 9,000 net new adds in the recent history. That’s a good near term range. That’s on the bill, APAR side, roughly 1,500 for the spend and expense business. And the most important levers that we have are first and foremost, the accountant channel is one of our big investment priorities in this current fiscal twenty twenty five, where we’re doubling down on creating value for accountants and we’re seeing a really good return on that increased focus.

In Q3, we had a 60% increase in ads from our accountant channel versus a year ago, and we believe there’s a lot more to do, both in terms of penetrating that market and driving higher attach from the existing accountants that we’re working with. On the S and E side, we’re probably more focused on volume and size of customer than we are the absolute number of customers. How they use the product, their overall level of spend, their utilization of the lines is a much more important driver of our business than the absolute number of customers. And so that’s a big focus for us. And I think on the embedded side, we’ve obviously had success over years with the financial institution channel.

We’re now working to extend that into the software world. And that’s where our strategy has shifted to attract the smallest businesses by working through partners, versus our direct resources, demand gen and salespeople. Those are very much more focused on larger businesses now.

Samad, Analyst: I want to pull on those threads. If I just step back for a second, Bill has evolved a lot since the IPO, right, where you’ve gone to your platform now for, let’s call it, the the CFO’s office. Where are we on multiproduct adoption across the business? And and how do you think about continuing to build multi product adoption? And how do you see that opportunity?

John Reddick, CFO and President, Bill.com: Yes, the best example is with our SNE product, the Divvy charge card. Our last update, we reported 11,000 joint customers. So customers using both our bill AP solution and the Divvy charge card. And that was up from about 7,000 joint customers in Q4 of twenty twenty three. So we think there’s a long way to go given the upper half of the bill customer base by size are really good candidates for the SNE card, which means there’s tens of thousands of customers that are still possible.

Beyond SNE though, as we continue to build out the surface area of the platform, we’re doing more in the financial back office such as a recent announcement around procurement and purchase orders. We think this motion is something that will ultimately lead to much stronger multi product adoption, not just for our subscribers, but also for our network members. And that’s sort of an untapped area where most network members are receivers of payments. They may be paying for those payments, but they’re not necessarily leveraging tools, and we think by introducing more value creation opportunities and products into the network, that will drive more multi product adoption across the entire base. That obviously translates into a stickier customer base, higher retention and ARPU expansion over time.

Samad, Analyst: Understood. Earlier you mentioned the embedded channel opportunity. I’ve seen it, I cover a lot of companies that are using some embedded solutions. And so can you tell us what you’re doing there and what steps you’re taking to drive adoption, and maybe what are some of your key partnerships in Embedded?

John Reddick, CFO and President, Bill.com: Yeah, so our Embedded of one point zero era was when we worked closely with financial institutions, large banks, to embed our solutions, which were really around automating processes. Yes, we have payments as well, but it’s really helping banks get closer to the day to day financial operations of their customers versus being the last to know. We’ve now invested in a new embed two point zero platform, which is API based widgets, other white label capabilities to really drive the convergence of software and payments. So there’s many companies across all categories, as you know, who are interested in extending the value creation opportunities in their platforms by attaching payments. Most of them aren’t going to do that by building their own payment capability.

So that’s where the partnership opportunity comes up. We recently announced GA, going live with Xero, and this is for their US customers to be able to do AP payments inside of their platform leveraging bill tools. One of the main points of differentiation between what we do for software companies and what we’ve historically done for financial institutions is that all of our payment products are available. So we sell in a portfolio of solutions, and we enable partners to drive adoption within their customer base. And we think over time that’s going to create a much stickier solution, much higher monetizing versus what we’ve historically done with financial institutions, and allow us to tap into the market.

Samad, Analyst: I want to switch gears and talk about the spend and expense part of the business. You’d mentioned it briefly earlier. Are you seeing different trends in that customer cohort in terms of either TPV or spending versus what you’re seeing in maybe the traditional bill.com base?

John Reddick, CFO and President, Bill.com: In the March, I’d say we saw strength in both T and E and retail, and we have a little bit higher exposure to those categories with the charge card versus the core bill AP business. And so that was an area of strength that we weren’t necessarily expecting. We’re also a little bit cautious on both those categories as we look ahead, airlines being an example of potential weakness of that whole T and E category. But generally speaking, as you know, the overall S and E card spend is still growing rapidly and well above what we see on the bill side.

Samad, Analyst: I hope this is not a curveball, but I saw actually a headline earlier that you guys, I think there’s a factoring deal that was announced on the S and E side of the business. If I’m misspeaking, tell me. But I’m just curious if you think that that’s an opportunity in that part of the business as well, maybe how we should think about that.

John Reddick, CFO and President, Bill.com: So is the credit facility

Samad, Analyst: going So

John Reddick, CFO and President, Bill.com: we announced this week a new warehouse facility, which is in direct support of our S and E product. So our capital strategy for that product is to leverage warehouse facilities, balance sheet cash and then eventually other tools like forward flow purchase agreements and securitization as we get bigger. So think of that as a capital diversification strategy. It increases our capacity to continue to grow that business without consuming more of our balance sheet cash. So it’s I think an important next step in support of future growth for S and E.

Samad, Analyst: Great. Maybe jumping ahead, just as I think about the margins have really shined in the business over the last couple of years. I think it’s been a focus of the company. How are you thinking about maybe balancing growth investments and continuing to give margin expansion? How are we thinking about maybe going forward?

How are you driving efficiency while balancing growth?

John Reddick, CFO and President, Bill.com: Yes. So we’ve taken a balanced approach to growth and profitability historically, as you know. At the same time, we’ve created significant operating leverage as we’ve grown in Q3 of twenty twenty two. Our non GAAP operating income was a loss of about 3%. In Q3 of ’twenty five, just the quarter we just ended, we had a margin about 15%.

So significant expansion over a couple of years combined with a free cash flow margin of 25%. So we’ve done a good job at identifying areas of potential leverage as we’ve grown the business. There’s more to do there for sure. Our bias is to invest for multi year growth. That continues to be something you saw us do in fiscal twenty five as we announced some incremental investments in payments and supplier experience and accountants and those things.

And we think the market is still evolving. It’s not mature yet, and that bias makes sense. But at the same time, we’ll monitor the external environment closely, and to the extent there are more challenges to reaccelerating growth, we’ll obviously lean in more on the margin and profitability side. But over time, we focus on strong ROI, short payback period and an annuity stream from the products that we’re rolling out to customers. AI is a good example of this.

We’ve talked, I think on our earnings call and Q and A around that, about a lot of customer facing tools and products, but we’re also investing for internal efficiency and capabilities. We’re already seeing that show up in operating leverage around customer support. We’ll see it in other parts of the business, and that’ll be an important element to our multi year journey to expand margins.

Samad, Analyst: I’ll put you on the spot. You’re a CFO. Efficiency, I’m sure, matters a lot to you. And you mentioned AI for internal use. Is there a tool you don’t have to name the vendor if you don’t want that you found particularly impactful as a CFO of a public company that’s an AI tool as a user?

John Reddick, CFO and President, Bill.com: So we have tested a lot of tools within the finance function. And I think there’s been tremendous progress over the last year, eighteen months, about leveraging AI and technology to replace manual activities. We have some success stories around internal controls, process walk throughs, documentation that we’re really excited about. And those are small scale projects at the moment, but they have the potential to really help us grow our capabilities through leveraging AI.

Samad, Analyst: Great. And maybe we’ll end it at this. I like to ask you this question. When you look beyond the current cycle that we’re in, how should we think about Bill over maybe a three to five year horizon?

John Reddick, CFO and President, Bill.com: Well, we’ve obviously grown up in the AP automation space. We’ve added AR over time. We have a large network. We added spend and expense and other insights capabilities, all still centered around the financial operations and transaction layer for small businesses. So as you look ahead three to five years, imagine a much broader set of capabilities and much more of an intelligent platform that enables SMBs to do financial management.

So beyond the transaction, beyond the financial operations, how do they have much better insights, much better control and levers around managing their cash flow? We think the products that we have now will be a part of that. We think additional products, including contractors and payroll and procurement and working capital will play into that as well. And then this is obviously an area that AI will have a big influence on. There’s a lot of jobs that small businesses need to do, whether they like it or not.

Our platform over time has helped small businesses automate those processes, those jobs, but it’s still a human operating those levers. Over time, we’re going to see agents operating those levers and free up even more time for small business owners and their finance teams to invest in scaling their business.

Samad, Analyst: Great. Well, John, we’ll leave it there. We appreciate you joining us as always, and wish you guys the best of luck.

John Reddick, CFO and President, Bill.com: Thanks,

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