Intuit at Morgan Stanley Conference: Strategic Growth and AI Focus

On Tuesday, 04 March 2025, Intuit Inc. (NASDAQ: INTU) presented at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. The company shared a strong performance narrative, with significant growth in its small business and mid-market segments, despite challenges in Mailchimp. The focus on AI and productivity enhancements was prominent, highlighting both opportunities and hurdles in Intuit’s strategic path.

Key Takeaways

• Intuit reported strong Q2 results, with significant growth in its ecosystem and mid-market segments.
• The company is leveraging AI to enhance productivity and customer experience across platforms.
• Mailchimp faces challenges, but Intuit is implementing strategies to drive double-digit growth.
• The tax business is focusing on competitive pricing and AI-driven customization.
• Intuit remains optimistic about expanding operating margins through technology and efficiency.

Financial Results

• Ecosystem Revenue Growth:

- Total ecosystem revenue increased by 21%.

- Core small business revenue saw an 18% rise.

- Mid-market revenue surged by 40%.

• Credit Karma:

- Revenue grew by 36%, with AI contributing to over 60% of this growth.

• Small Business Trends:

- Revenue increased by 1% to 3% year-over-year, with a 9% profitability boost.

- Cash reserves grew by 3%.

• Intuit Enterprise Suite (IES):

- QBO Advanced and IES saw a 40% growth rate.

• Desktop Business:

- Expected to grow in low single digits, with QuickBooks Enterprise Suite driving growth.

Operational Updates

• Mid-Market Expansion:

- Intuit targets 880,000 potential customers for IES, with improved sales productivity and higher close rates.

• Mailchimp:

- Efforts are underway to revitalize Mailchimp’s growth, including new leadership and a focus on small customer engagement.

• AI Integration:

- Intuit Assist enhances productivity by converting unstructured data and automating tasks like invoice reminders.

• Tax Strategy:

- Focused on competitive pricing and AI-driven solutions to enhance customer experience.

Future Outlook

• Small Business:

- Continued growth expected, driven by entrepreneur resilience.

• Mid-Market:

- Digitization and consolidation are expected to propel growth.

• Mailchimp Turnaround:

- Improvement anticipated in upcoming quarters.

• AI Monetization:

- Plans to enhance conversion rates, solution adoption, and pricing power.

• Margin Expansion:

- Opportunities exist for operating margin growth through technology and efficiency.

Q&A Highlights

• Small Business Confidence:

- Data shows ongoing momentum despite consumer confidence concerns.

• Payments:

- Bill Pay is performing well with new features.

• Desktop Business:

- Expected to grow modestly, led by QuickBooks Enterprise Suite.

• Tax Business:

- Addressing ARPU with targeted pricing and improved attach rates.

- Simplification of the tax code viewed positively by Intuit.

For a deeper dive into Intuit’s strategy and performance, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference:

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Excellent. Thank you everyone for joining us. My name is Keith Weiss. I run The U. S.

Software equity research franchise here at Morgan Stanley and very pleased to have with us from Intuit, CFO, Sandeep Ujala. Sandeep, thank you so much for joining us.

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: Thank you for having me.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Excellent. Good to be here. Before we get started for important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. Excellent.

So coming off of a solid Q2 print from Intuit, particularly, I would say, on the small business side of the equation, Credit Karma performed really well, probably a little bit too early to say on the tax season. Maybe just from your perspective, can you walk us through some of the key developments in terms of progress Intuit is making in some of the core bets that you guys talked to us about at Analyst Day and what we’ve seen thus far from that when we think about Q2 results?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: Yes. We had an amazing quarter. And what was so great about it, Keith, it was a quarter where we achieved phenomenal results doing what we said we were going to do, connecting to what we talked about Investor Day. Made solid progress on our business platform, 21% all in ecosystem revenue growth, 18% growth in the core small business and 40% growth in the mid market as we continue to have our offering product and a go to market resonate with the mid market customer. So that was great to see the attraction.

We’re still in the early stages. I see massive runway ahead for us to continue to scale that business. On our tax platform, we took the learnings from last year, both what worked exceptionally well and areas where we could have been better and came back this year focused on winning with the simple and the complex follows across both DIY and assisted tax, had a great start to the season, both doing better on our results vis a vis the guidance on both how the units came in, but also how we are monetizing those customers that come into the franchise. And lastly, on Credit Karma, we had shared that that’s the smallest part of the company, but the one that’s most exposed to macro. And what we focus on there is generating management alpha.

And that business delivered 36% growth. And the majority of that, over 60% of that came from our team’s relentless focus on delivering what matters most to our partners and to our customers, including using AI that’s getting our offers to have better take risks and better monetization. So across the board, what feels really good about the momentum we have, the increased confidence we have in the full year guide and continue to deliver is that the results are driven by exactly the areas that we said we were focused on and that we were going to make progress on.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. So a lot to unpack there. I want to start on the small business side of the equation. Us as a research shop, we were excited about small business coming into calendar ’twenty five. We saw small business confidence starting to improve, administration that is more kind of conducive and sort of open for business.

And I think that small businesses are reacting to that. We put out a product we call the small business SMB heat map. And the indicators were looking positive, including indicators that you had talked about in terms of some of the stuff that you’re seeing in your spending patterns. Over the past couple of weeks, I think some of that confidence has been a little bit shaken, right? You’re seeing consumer confidence start to come down a little bit.

But what are you seeing in sort of the data sets that you have access to in terms of the trends that you’re seeing with your customers in terms of the health of that underlying small business?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: Yes. I always remind myself that these small business owners are consumers who have chosen to be entrepreneurs. So they are affected by the same noise that you see out in the media that we all are hearing as consumers. But what I do to cut through the noise is look at the data. And what we are seeing is that across the board, we’re seeing higher revenues year over year for these businesses to the tune of 1% to 3% depending on where they are across the board.

On the profitability, it’s up 9% across the entire segment and in certain areas like IT services, real estate is up in the high teens. The biggest indicator also is the cash reserves, which are up 3% year over year. We also look at how are the employees and the demand for labor, which is up around seven percent year over year. So putting aside the noise, which I think is easy to get wrapped up in, the data is pointing to continued momentum in small business. And on top of that, what I’ll add is in my nearly ten years at Intuit, I’ve always been amazed at the resilience and the core optimism that these entrepreneurs have.

So I continue to feel good about where that business is heading.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. And now you guys are focusing on market. So you’re going into more of like a mid market customer. Any sort of divergence in the trends you see with small customers versus mid market customers? Or is that perhaps maybe even firmer?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: The mid market customers tend to be doing even better. And similar to the small businesses, their revenues, their profitability is up. But what they’re also focused on is increasingly starting to digitize because they are seeing the business continue to do well and they’re seeing how can actually accelerate this even more. And we are seeing them looking to consolidate the number of offerings, add a platform capability that digitizes more of their workflows. That’s where we come in.

And it’s just been a, in essence, a momentum builder for us, just given what they’re seeing in the overall industry and how our products directly connect to connect to their needs.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. So in the most recent quarter, we saw 40% growth in QBO Advanced and the Intuit IES enterprise suite. Those moves upmarket. Second quarter or this year, a 40% plus growth. Equally, it may be even perhaps more important is that we saw the acceleration in the online services ex Mailchimp.

So is that is what we’re seeing an indication of what you’re just talking about? Are you starting to see the improving attach rates, the affinity of these higher end customers to take on a broader set of the solution?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: So when we talk about higher end customers looking to bring everything onto one platform to digitize their offering, that’s showing up in their payroll and payments attached rates being higher. They’re about twelve and nine points respectively higher vis a vis the small business customer, the rest of the platform. They are also bringing in not just higher catchers, but they’re bringing more volume because inherently they are larger in size and they are doing better. So those volumes also growing at a faster rate. So it’s all laddering up into the results you’re seeing.

The other thing to keep in mind is some of the changes we made internally as a company. We are no longer operating, for example, as a money in, money out, capital payroll shop. We are operating as a one holistic money offering because this business think of money in, money out access to capital as one shop. And we have made sure that we have a segment leaders that’s focused on that and a technology leader that’s focused on that end to end. Similarly, on the mid market go to market side, we have built out a sales motion that did not exist prior to August 2024, a mere six months ago.

And that is scaling up nicely as well. We shared that the productivity of those sales people is up 60% over the last couple of months. The close rates are 2x higher than they were circa November 2024. So again, this just speaks to the momentum we had. You just saw the initial inklings of that in Q2.

And I’m looking forward to how we continue to build on that.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. And within that motion, IES, the Intuit Enterprise Suite is the newer part of that solution portfolio. And you talked to us at Analyst Day about, I would say, two kind of core value propositions. One is sort of a consolidation of some of those larger customers that would have multiple instances, and there’s an opportunity just in sort of connecting those. The second one being taking down the graduation rates, like giving people a longer runway on the Intuit platform before they have to go to a much more expensive platform with a broader ERP suite.

How is those two avenues performing versus your expectations? You saw some good indications out of the gate at Analyst Day, but that was very early. Has it been sustaining?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: It’s so let me set a little bit of the context. What excited us about this opportunity is where QuickBooks ended and where the next ERP solution started, they were just massive unaddressed space for us to go after. And when we looked at what were some of the things that was causing people to leave is that they were successful. They had multiple entities, could be a restaurant owner who has five restaurants running on five different QuickBooks subscriptions and seeking to just get the end to end visibility. That capability is resonating exceptionally well.

The feedback we get from our customers is, wow, I had no idea that I was leaving so much money on the table. In essence, what helps us get this product in the handle the customers is that they’re seeing ROI that the product is basically paying for itself by the level of insights they’re able to get. Secondly, as a company, we are very much focused on driving the productivity of our customers. They’re looking to digitize. They were buying a bunch of offerings or apps that they weren’t using fully.

They are now on one platform. They’ve taken our IES offering. Many of them take our payments offering, payroll offerings, Mailchimp offerings. Now they’re running the end to end platform, sorry, end to end business of one platform, getting the level of visibility and access to insights that they didn’t have before, it’s resonating. And again, that’s just the initial chapters of it.

Now we’re building upon that since the conversation we had last time at Investor Day. For example, if you’re project based business, let’s say you’re a contractor, we give you project level profitability analysis. So you could see if the house you’re building in city A is doing better than house you’re building in city B. That helps you adjust your workforce. It helps you get smarter, but next time you do the bidding because you would evaluate why that is the case.

So again, just continue to build upon the success we’ve had.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. So when we think about that move into the mid market, you’ve talked a lot about the opportunity. I think you mentioned 880,000 customers within the base that you think are appropriate for IES. But you also have the direct sales motion that you’re building out. You talked about the 60% improvement in terms of productivity there.

Do you get to leverage the accounting channel in the same way when you go into that mid market customer as you did for the small businesses?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: Yep. Accountants are a core partner to us and they’re a super valuable partner to us. They have been a core partner in the small business area and equally so in the mid market. They are the mid market owners listen to the accountants in terms of adopting the services and offerings, how to make smarter business decisions, are they ready for a upgrade to IES or are they ready for migration to an even higher end ERP. So we are very much focused on making sure that the accountants continue to feel that partnership and we are working with small, medium, large accounting firms to make sure that they feel that partnership and they continue to be a very strong net promoter for us across QuickBooks as well as Advance and IES.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Got it. I want to talk a little bit about payments, another strong quarter for payments in Q2. You talked about TPV growth of 18%. We were talking a lot about Bill Pay a year ago.

We’re not talking about it as much today because there’s other initiatives, but how is Bill Pay doing? How’s the monetization side of the equation going against that TPV growth?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: Yes. So keep in mind, we have about twenty minutes to give you remarks at the quarterly earnings call. So we have to focus on a limited few, but we can see

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: I’m not hearing about it as much in investor conversations either. So it’s gotten a little quieter overall.

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: Yes. Bill Pay is going quite well. We continue to add to those capabilities, including new payment types, better risk underwriting, things such as taking a paper based invoice, scanning it in using IntuitAssist, having that show up as a automatic bill pay, same day bill payment. So that business continues to scale well. It’s just that the broader money portfolio is doing exceptionally well.

So we have we’re talking about the broader money portfolio, but the momentum in BuildPay is strong.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. I want to touch on Mailchimp. It’s been a drag on overall growth when it comes to the small business segment. The industrial logic made a ton of sense, right? Your customers a lot of your customers are using, I would say, almost incorrectly using QBO as a poor man CRM system.

There’s a lot more they can do with a proper CRM system. It sounds like something went a little awry, particularly with the product market fit for those smaller customers. What went awry with Mailchimp? What’s the fix? And sort of how long is it going to take for that to become the contributor that you guys were expecting when you first made the acquisition?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: One of the things and you know this, but for your audience as a company, we are very transparent when things are not going well and why they’re not going well. And the reason we bought Mailchimp, the exceptionally strong brand name, the scale of the business, how well it resonates with the small customers out there, how they have 50% of the revenue internationally purely by happenstance and how they were not even addressing the mid market and we saw the opportunity there. All that strategically still holds.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: The myth was purely execution based. And let me unpack that

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: a bit more. We translated the product new communication avenues such as SMS, WhatsApp, etcetera. We made the product much more sophisticated to where you could do sophisticated customer segmentation. You could import large customer lists. We made it so that you could have assisted onboarding as a mid market customer.

That all paid dividends in better funnel as well as mid market customers growing in the teens. But what we took the eye off the ball was on the small customers that was the bread and butter of the business. That small customers first time use went down way too quickly. And where first time use comes in is as a company, whether it’s QuickBooks, whether it’s Mailchimp, there are two to three tasks that we want to get the customer to do in the first ten to fourteen days. Once they complete that task, we know we have a nice hook in the customer and they start seeing the value from the product.

That’s what we focus on now for the core bread and butter small customers. We just hired a new leader who was previously the CEO at WhatsApp, has experienced leading the team across product and go to market, has experienced addressing multiple customer segments. We’re giving him the time to diagnose and come up with a work plan to address the goals that he’s been given, returning the business to solid double digit healthy growth rates. And we think we will get there in the coming quarters.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. So I mean, you guys have a plan in place, but it sounds like investors are going to have to be a little bit patient to see that turnaround. It’s going to take a couple of quarters at least to start to see sort of the improvement there.

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: We’re seeing several quarters and we just want to give Matt, who’s the new leader, the time to come up with a work plan. And once we have the work plan, we will, of course, tighten up the timeline.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. So one last kind of segment within small business, frankly, I need your help with, right, is the desktop business. There’s been a lot of changes that have taken place in terms of desktop, in terms of the accounting around desktop, in terms of there’s been $50,000,000 of revenues that kind of spread out throughout the year that we hadn’t seen historically because of the product cadence. There’s end of life dynamics going on with the non enterprise SKU. How should we think about sort of the durability of growth for desktop on a go forward basis?

Is this still an area that you think can be a grower? Or at some point, does this become a sort of a diminishing asset as more and more people just shift into the online assets?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: Sure. Let me give you some context on the desktop business and address the exact question you had. It’s a phenomenal business with a very sticky and loyal customer base and very high margins, right? That business, when we looked at that, when I was in the Global Business Solutions group before my current role, we realized that those there was a big price arbitrage where desktop was priced and where online was priced. And secondly, these customers were on a license base as well as a subscription based model.

So that’s a transition we went through and it used to be a three year license. And so it was a three year transition process that completed last fiscal year. So this fiscal year, you have some quarterly noise, depending on how the revenue recognition works, how much you recognize upfront when we ship out new product offerings and we get to recognize the revenue. So this quarter this year quarter to quarter is a little bit noise, but for the full year, this business is going to grow in the low single digits, let’s say. And in terms of going forward, within desktop, the QuickBooks Enterprise Suite should be a grower in terms of both number of customers as well as revenue.

The broader desktop will be a declining customer number, but a steady low single digit kind of a grower. So in terms of thinking about the desktop model, think about it as a lower customer base, high margin customer base and a single digit grower. Okay.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: That’s super helpful. Within the small business group, the AI opportunity, to me seems robust. It seems like a if we think about one of the core value proposition in generative AI is accelerating expediency for the user, right? And your core customer is a business owner, small business owner who has to understand working capital, but they’re not a CFO, right? They have to understand marketing attribution, but they’re not a CMO.

It seems like there’s a real space for Intuit to step in and provide that proficiency vis a vis Intuit Assist vis a vis generative

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: AI.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Where are we in terms of building out those solutions? Where are we in terms of you guys being able to well address that potential opportunity?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: The level of progress that I have seen in Intuit Assist in the business solution over the last few months has been a step function change in my optimism about what’s possible here. At its core with Intuit Assist, we are laser focused in driving productivity, productivity of our customer, productivity of our accounting partners, productivity of our employees, productivity of our broader ecosystem of people we serve. And that’s going to show up net in the EBIT line, both across how our revenues scale as well as how our costs get more efficient. You asked a question on the revenue side. So let’s go there.

As a small business owner, I’m trying to make sure that I am using my limited most limited resource, which is time to maximize the growth in my business. We help the customer do that by taking unstructured data, notes written on a pad while the customers sorry, while our customer is walking through a job site and we’re taking notes and turning those into estimates and automatically sending it out to the end customer. By giving them insights, as you mentioned, that, hey, you’re about to run out of cash, because the appeal due this Friday and most of your invoices aren’t going to get paid till next week, which you like through one click instant access to capital, giving them insights such as your invoices are running past you, would you like to send automated reminders? And that’s leading to 10 points higher conversion rate in terms of people getting paid. So across all these areas, what we’re seeing is that we are increasing a customer’s productivity, helping them be more successful and that’s resonating with our customer base.

And now it links into how do you monetize that. So let me unpack that a bit. The first and foremost is getting people to easily onboard into our offering and adopt more of our services across the board. QuickBooks is still relatively complex to onboard into. But incorporating Intuit Assist, we’re seeing better conversion rate when new customers come in.

They link their bank account, they link their website to give us a few additional points of information. We do most of the onboarding for them. By giving them contextually relevant times to attach payments of payroll, as an example, Keith, you have eight invoices and three of them are past due. Would you like to send a reminder and make them pay enabled because those we see tend to get paid faster, x percent more success rate, that’s driving higher adoption for services. Think of this as Google being able to do target advertising versus driving on one on one and just seeing a billboard with that advertisement.

So that’s getting better. And lastly, as we are driving the productivity of our customers, we’re earning pricing power. When I was in the business and we did this work about five years ago, so the numbers have only gone up since then. A small business owner values their time at about 75 an hour. Let’s just use a super simple hypothetical example.

These numbers are relatively low because I don’t want to embarrass myself in front of a large audience doing complex math. But let’s say we save these customers an hour a month, And 10% of them use that offering. Now added $7.5 of value to my customer. If I take up the price of the SKU by $5 I’ve actually to you and others might feel like a like for like price increase. To my customer, that’s actually us increasing the value and taking a slice of that value.

So these are the areas where we see the opportunity for AI to increase the monetization potential for the company.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. So better funnel conversion in terms of getting customers on board, better attach of additional solutions because you’re showing them kind of where to attach that and better pricing power.

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: Better pricing power. And over time, you could have a stand on SKU. You could have a treasury agent as an example.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. And just to double click, you mentioned that the developments you’ve seen over the past couple of

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: months

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: have really bolstered your confidence in these generative AI solutions. Is that somewhat related to sort of the headcount reduction that you did last summer? You guys talked about it in terms of upskilling, if you will, of bringing in the right people to be able to sort of advance the solution. Is this some of the early gains of that?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: That’s in addition to you. Okay. So let me share where the confidence came from. When you outtake iterating on a product, you sometimes find that click and you just think just start jiving and you just start seeing faster adoption and repeat usage as an example, going up 50% over the last couple of months because the offering just resonating and we’re seeing the value it’s adding in the life of our end customer. That gives us confidence that we could start unlocking some of those monetization levers quicker.

The second area where you shared is, we had a hiring plan that we had aligned on as the at the end of our last fiscal year for this year’s plan. And as we were looking through the progress we’re making across the company, we saw that we were able to hire people faster. For every time when you hire, you say it’s going to take X number of weeks to get an offer in someone’s hand and our conversion rate on offer to person joining is X percent. The company has made such strong progress building a brand and a place that employees want to come work across both of those items, the funnel did much better. Secondly, we hadn’t hired all the way back to where we had expected to hire, but we were seeing that company was very productive, getting the input goals that we wanted to get done at the rate we want to get done.

And we started unpacking that. We realized it’s coming back to laser focus on productivity that are employed across all the functions were way more productive. Our developers are able to code up to 40% faster. Our customer success people are able to get ramped up faster. Our finance and HR functions, they would be more effective using AI.

So it’s our sales team. So we just realized we don’t need as many employees as we previously thought, which is why at the last call, I don’t know if it was to your question, someone else’s question, I shared that now we expect the headcount to be flat to maybe slightly up this year versus historically we thought it will be up this year.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Right. Got it. Got it. And within that, does that relate to I think you gave a number of like $90,000,000 in annualized savings on customer success. Is that part of those productivity gains?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: It is. And that’s just customer success. Right. Because customer success, particularly level one success is so rules based is the easiest for us to comprehend AI helping. But on top of that, we have sales where we’re using AI, developers in tech and all other functions across the company.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. I want to shift gears and talk about tax. The it’s not an understatement to say that the level of investor apprehension about tax is high, right? And we kind of know where it came from. Last season, tax underperformed.

This season, you guys have put into place a different strategy, and investors are yet to be convinced. So can you talk to us a little bit about what happened in tax last year and how you look to kind of course correct for that this year to get units driving better, but still be able to sustain kind of good monetization of those units?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: Yes. And I have noticed that tax is about 30% of the company’s revenue and 60% of the questions I’m getting right now. So let me unpack that a bit more. When we looked at our game tape from last year, we saw that many things had gone well and some things had not gone as well. And namely the area that we were constructively dissatisfied is that we lost customers on the DIY side, and particularly about 1,500,000 customers that were simple filers.

And there were learnings that came out of that, that informed our strategy this year, which is focused on delivering phenomenal experience at a competitive price and speed of getting the taxes done and getting money in their pocket. So with that, the strategy this year is about using AI to deliver a very customized almost a bespoke solution. We have 90% of the information that goes into getting a tax return done, not coming in through over 200 partners.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Last year,

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: that was 68%. So step function improved. Once the engine takes that information, it delivers a very bespoke experience based on that information. Secondly, last year, we realized that you’re the step from going from free to the deluxe offering at $100 was a bit too steep and we needed something in between. So we had a very surgical AI based approach to where we get to know the customer.

We have different weights on the model and the model would then spit out what the right lineup is for the customer. It could be for the right segment, we offer $29 30 dollars standard SKU. So this jump isn’t so steep for them. That’s resonating. Thirdly, we are being disrupted such as the $0 mobile offer we ran through February 28 for people who had not used our tax offering the prior year.

One of the most interesting things about the tax business is it has 77% repeat year to year. You can almost model this business as a SaaS business. So for people who didn’t do their taxes last year, we get them to come in, do the taxes on a mobile app. It’s a limited channel and do it for free. What we saw is that a higher percentage of those people than what we had expected were attaching order defense, engaging with a live expert, engaging to get access to the refund faster.

So monetization of those customers actually ended up being quite healthy. And now I get to price them at a full price next year because 77% of them are likely going to come back. So across the DIY segment, that’s what worked. Let me now also touch on the assisted segment, which is about $35,000,000,000 addressable market and we’re just getting started. So learning last year is once we have a customer in our funnel and we get them engaged with the right expert, there’s 82% conversion rate for them getting their taxes done.

And when they get their taxes done, they gave us an 84 product recommendation score. To put that in context, companies do backflips when a product recommendation scores in the 60s, ’80 ’4 is exceptionally great. So we became relentlessly focused on less feed the funnel at the top. And to that, we went after three areas. One is we realized that 30% of the assisted customers make the decision how they’re going to get the taxes done before December 25.

Historically, TurboTax advertisement started December 26. So we pulled in advertisement starting early and we lean into being disruptive of price with a beat your price campaign. Secondly, we weren’t showing up in the 6,000,000 searches on Google for tax preparer near me. Now we are showing up in about 80% of that market. And lastly, we have over 40,000,000 monthly active users on Credit Karma.

A majority of them are getting their taxes done in an assisted way and not with us. And last year, about only 5% of them could seamlessly come from credit card or TurboTax. That number this year is up to 70%. So across the assisted category and those three dimensions, we are feeding the funnel in a healthy way. And as the funnel continues to hold at the bottom, we should see very strong results.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. If I may, can we vet through some of like the bear cases that I hear? Of course. The easiest way to kind of get through them. One, in terms of sort of the core DIY business, you guys are introducing lower price points, you have some free offerings.

There’s the concern that that’s going to bring down overall ARPU. But it sounds to me like the sort of other side of the equation is you’re being very targeted about where you put those offerings. So should we be concerned about overall ARPU coming down this tax season?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: Here’s how you should think about it. One is we’ve been very surgical about where we’ve put the line up in. We’re not just plastering it on the website. Go to the website, you won’t see it unless you have to go to incognito mode and we happen to be running a small test, right? So that’s one.

Two is we’re seeing healthier attach rates on the back end, more people engaging with AI powered human expert, more people taking attach offerings such as audit defense of getting access to the refund up to five days early. That was giving us a confidence on units and ARPU side.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Second bear case I hear is, large language models, perhaps cannibalizing the TurboTax Live offering. TurboTax Live is fundamentally a help offering. Like you have you get stuck, you press the button, someone’s going to come and help you. Why doesn’t that get done for free vis a vis an LLM?

So should we be worried about cannibalization of LLMs to that TurboTax Live offering?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: I think it’s going to be a long time before AI complete displaces humans. The way to think about this is we don’t live in a static market environment. As AI continues to get better and better, yes, we will be able to serve more complex need cases through AI, but that also allows us and we are doing it, apply AI in the hands of our AI powered experts to where they can serve increasingly more complex customers, right? So you just have to keep in mind that it’s a dynamic environment. I think folks think it’s a static environment and there’s only going to be downward pressure.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. And then the third one I hear a lot is Doge, right? And there’s some parts of Doge that should help because they are deprecating their direct file solution after this year. But the concern is that we’ll see a broader kind of simplification of the tax code, which would devalue kind of DIY overall. How do you guys think about that potentiality?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: Couple of things here. We as a company have been pushing on simplification of the tax code for years and years, regardless of the political environment we are in, because we think it’s actually in the right interest of the citizenry and we think we’ll be net beneficiary of it. The biggest thing that people worry people have when they do the taxes is fear, uncertainty and doubt. If you simplify it, more people will be comfortable coming to a DIY category, get their taxes done. Guess who has over 80% of the dollar share of that market and will be a massive net beneficiary of that.

So I don’t actually see that as a negative bear case on us. But now let me also put a little bit of pragmatism in there. In The U. S, as you know, the tax code is a key avenue to deliver many benefits to the citizens. And I think it’s a bit oversimplification that U.

S. Will be able to get to a overly simplified tax code anytime. I’ll even venture to say anytime in our lifetime.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Yes. I agree with that. And the last one I want to touch on is just in terms of marketing spend. In the first half of the year, you guys have seen good expansion of operating margins. There’s a concern that as we get into the meat of the tax season, because you’re looking to drive units, marketing spend spikes and that’s going to drag on margins in the back half of the year.

How should we think about sort of the cadence and the linearity of the marketing spend this tax season press versus like prior tax season?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: Frankly, I think capital allocators get overly fixated on quarter to quarter noise because we are always testing and learning. For example, this year we pulled in marketing earlier because we realized 30% of the assisted category makes a decision before December 25. Last year, we won marketing as much in Credit Karma because that business was in a decline given the macro environment. Our Global Business Solutions group was experiment with a different marketing timing lineup. So the way that you should continue to hold us accountable is that we are getting solid ROI on the marketing spend, which as we have shared previously, we hold to 3x L2D CAC.

In the tax business, we hold ourselves to in year paybacks. And I continue to feel good about that. This whole is going to be puts and takes. But marketing, we continue to be very disciplined in how we’re applying our marketing and making sure it’s getting us

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: a solid ROI. Got it. Got it. And then the when it comes to the marketing and the earlier marketing spend that you did around the full assist category, which you guys have talked about is it’s $35,000,000,000 category that you’re trying to kind of break into. How is the efficacy of that early marketing spend been as it had the desired effect of getting those relationships started earlier?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: The intent of the marketing spend was to get head lifters to come in and engage with us. And it was very successful in that. It got people to come and engage with the product funnel. And now most of the assisted customers, Assisted seasonality runs from around now in early March to April 15 and we’re seeing good engagement from those customers coming into our funnel. So I feel pretty good about the efficacy of that spend.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Okay, got it. And interest, squeeze one last one in five seconds. Operating margin expansion has been a solid part of the Intuit story for years now. You guys have done a really good job of consistently expanding margins. Is there room to go in that effort?

Is there kind of more upside in terms of where Intuit could take the overall operating margin profile of the company?

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: Short answer is yes. Now let me unpack that a bit more. I see significant opportunity for us to continue to lean into technology. Remember my statement about laser focus on productivity that extends to employee base as well across technology, across customer success, across marketing. An example in marketing, we were able to do over 50 videos using AI avatars that in the past might have cost 8 figures in production costs, right.

So across every dimension of the company continues the opportunity for us to get increasingly efficient. Then the question comes down to how much of that do you reinvest into the growth areas and how much of that you flow to the bottom line. I remain committed to flowing margin expansion to the bottom line, in line with our principle of growing expenses lower than revenue. And we’ll always continue to be prudent in how we’re investing in the growth areas and the ROI that we’re getting out of those.

Keith Weiss, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Outstanding. Unfortunately, that takes us into our time. But Sandeep, thank you so much for joining us.

Sandeep Ujala, CFO, Intuit: Thank you, Keith. Thank you all.

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