Vertex at Goldman Sachs Conference: Strategic Moves in E-Invoicing and AI

On Thursday, 11 September 2025, Vertex (NASDAQ:VERX) participated in the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference. The company discussed its strategic plans, addressing both challenges and opportunities. While Vertex lowered its revenue guidance due to slower customer growth, it emphasized investments in e-invoicing and AI as key drivers for future growth.

Key Takeaways

• Vertex reduced its revenue guidance by $12 million, citing slower customer growth and elongated ERP migration cycles.
• The company is focusing on achieving 100% country coverage for e-invoicing, a potential $100 million revenue opportunity by 2028.
• Investments in AI and e-invoicing are expected to enhance margins and drive competitive advantage.
• Vertex’s gross revenue retention stands strong at 95%, with net revenue retention at 108%.
• The company is facing competition primarily from Thomson Reuters in SAP opportunities.

Financial Results

• Revenue guidance was lowered by $12 million at the midpoint due to softer entitlements, true-ups, and slower demand generation.
• True-ups contribute $1-2 million in the first three quarters and $3-4 million in the fourth quarter.
• Gross Revenue Retention remains robust at 95%, while Net Revenue Retention is at 108%.
• Increased R&D spending, currently at 21% of revenues, is focused on expanding e-invoicing country coverage.
• Margin expansion is anticipated to accelerate in the latter half of next year.

Operational Updates

• Vertex has launched SmartCat, an AI-powered product categorization tool, and is leveraging AI to improve internal efficiencies.
• The company acquired AI startup Kintsugi to address market disruptions in smaller companies.
• E-invoicing is a requirement in 58 countries, and Vertex aims to capitalize on this "land-grab" opportunity with full country coverage.
• Win rates for SAP deals are between 70% and 75%, with Thomson Reuters as the primary competitor.

Future Outlook

• Vertex plans to achieve 100% country coverage for e-invoicing and explore AI applications in ERP systems.
• The company expects revenue trends to continue throughout the year, with significant activity anticipated in the fourth quarter.
• Investments in AI and e-invoicing are expected to drive margin expansion by mid-next year.

Q&A Highlights

• Vertex addressed concerns about AI-native competition, emphasizing the complexity and audit traceability required in tax solutions.
• The company highlighted the challenges AI faces in replicating their expertise due to non-public tax regulations and customer-specific exemptions.
• RFP drivers include business changes, regulatory changes, and platform transformations.

For a detailed understanding, readers are invited to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference:

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: All right. Great. Thanks so much to everyone for being here on day four of Communicopia. My name’s Adam Hotchkiss and I cover the emerging software space here at Goldman Sachs. Really thrilled to have the Vertex team with us. David and John, thanks so much for being here.

David, Vertex: Happy to be here. Thank you for having us.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: Great.

John, Vertex: Thank you.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: For those in the audience who might be a little bit less familiar with Vertex, what you provide for your customers, and maybe a little bit of company history, David, maybe just give a brief overview of what you’re trying to build with the company.

David, Vertex: Sure. Indirect tax is the largest form of corporate tax paid. It covers probably three times the amount of tax revenue collected by state and local governments around the world compared to income tax. It is the primary source of revenue that governments build their budgets on, which I think is important because of its predictability. It is based on transactions happening in a jurisdiction as opposed to income that’s residing in a jurisdiction. What the company has done over the last 47 years is build out the interpretation of the rules and requirements in every jurisdiction. There are 10,000 in the United States alone, another probably 10,000 around the world that our customers have to comply with. They will be regularly audited on. We build software capabilities that integrate into the large ERP systems that they run their business on. Our target market is larger enterprises.

Typically, a typical customer is going to be $500 million of revenue and above. We do deal with some in the mid-market, but our core market is going to be that $500 million and above. We’re providing them the software that integrates into their large ERP system. It provides the monthly update that is required on all the tax regulations so that that customer can file in real-time compliant information and then ultimately survive the audit process that ensues for large corporations.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: That’s great. This is a business that’s been around for decades.

David, Vertex: It has.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: You have weathered the storm of a lot of technology change, not only weathered that storm, but still created and maintained very large Fortune 500 relationships. How has the company been able to do that? Where do we stand on that technology evolution today at Vertex?

David, Vertex: I think part of the survival is the gift that keeps giving, as regulations keep changing and governments are always looking for more revenue, which means they’re always creating more complexity. They create complexity in a way that actually allows us to create new products, therefore grow wallet share of a customer. A great example, which I’m sure we’ll talk about, is around e-invoicing, where it’s a new regime of requirements that customers are now having to comply with. We never were in that space. Now we’re getting demand driven to us to actually solve that problem. From a pure driver of the sustainability of the business, it’s really driven off of government’s continual thirst for revenue, number one.

Number two, from a technology perspective, what we’ve done is we’ve actually evolved the company from an on-prem, as you can imagine, back in the 1990s and 2000s to being a cloud-based business. Now 95% of all of our new logos are sold in the cloud. We continue to move existing customers as they slowly work through their migration process. We’re seeing a lot of that now between Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, and SAP, all pushing their customers to move to latest cloud platforms. That creates a nice transactional opportunity for our customers too. We’ve kind of evolved our technology. I’m sure we’ll talk about AI in a few minutes, but that we are now layering in where AI fits across the platform as well.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: That’s great. I want to touch on a lot of things you just said.

David, Vertex: Sure.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: Before I do that.

David, Vertex: I figured that was a setup for a lot of good questions.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: I almost wanted to jump over you, John, but we’ll go to you. I want to just touch on the most recent quarter because I think we’ve been getting a lot of questions about it. Revenue was in line. You lowered the full-year outlook, and you cited a couple of factors, right? You cited softer entitlements and true-up revenues. Maybe explain what that is for folks, and then some elongation in ERP migration cycles.

David, Vertex: Yep. Yep.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: If you could maybe just explain what happened, and then parse out for folks.

David, Vertex: For sure.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: What those components look like.

David, Vertex: Yep. Definitely. I think on an overall basis, we took down the revenue guide about $12 million at the midpoint. It’s really broken down into three pieces. You just called them out: entitlements, true-ups, and demand gen. The first two really are about existing customer growth in the environment that they have. The first one was additional entitlements. This is customers that are buying more of the same product that they had from us in the prior year. This is a customer that is growing through their usage of our product. We price based on revenue bands. As those revenue bands, as they grow, they’re going to grow through a revenue band. We will bill them at a higher price next year. What we saw this year is typically the way that this works is that a salesperson will go to the customer about 60 days before the renewal.

They’ll come in. What’s the usage? Based on the usage, OK, you’re going to renew at a higher band. They will then price them out at that higher band. We will then bill them at the higher rate. When you look at that, we didn’t see the activity coming through. Give me one sec.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: Yeah, please take your time.

David, Vertex: We didn’t see the customer activity going through the bands as high as we have in the past, and because of that, we’re not getting the additional revenue that comes with that renewal. That’s an important piece of it. In addition, what also happens is when the customer goes through that band, there’s a true-up aspect, and that’s for the old period. That true-up is immediate revenue in the period. We did not, I apologize.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: No, no problem.

David, Vertex: We did not see that come through either in a similar way that we had in the past. Typically, true-ups are $1 million to $2 million, quarter 1, 2, 3, and then $3 million to $4 million in the fourth quarter. We took that down because we said, listen, we didn’t see it in May, June, and early part of July. We said, we better knock this. We better slow this down in the back half of the year, especially in the fourth quarter where it’s $3 million to $4 million. We took the guidance down to reflect that. That’s a big piece of that, $3 million for additional entitlements, about $3 million to $4 million for additional entitlements, $3 million for true-ups. Finally, the last piece really is just the slower demand volume. We weren’t seeing, we were seeing activity, top of the funnel is growing.

Our customer win rate is still really strong. What we saw was that it was taking a little bit longer to get deals through the pipeline. Because it was taking longer for that, it was slowing things down. A customer that I thought I would get in, that I thought I might get in April, if I don’t get it till June, or till August, I’m going to lose four months’ worth of revenue. We need to take revenue down for that. They were the real three big drivers.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: Can I just put a hair of color on that?

David, Vertex: Yeah.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: I think it’s important to note, it’s not a GRR issue. If you look at GRR, it’s been 95% every quarter, which is really the strength of our existing customers. It’s just the customers didn’t grow through bands. We saw this during COVID. When COVID happened, we saw a little bit of a slowdown in the same exact issue. The difference was e-commerce exploded. It basically covered it up in terms of we were able to meet our guidance, so it didn’t impact things. The difference was in the current cycle. By the way, when that happened in 2022 and 2023, we saw sort of an acceleration of companies growing through these bands. Remember, this is their growth rate growing through our price bands that automatically just creates a bump or a benefit in our renewal price. We saw sort of that snap back in 2022 and 2023.

Given my tenure, 26 years now, I see this more as like a timing issue that I would expect somewhere either 2026 or 2027, we will have that re-acceleration of customers growing. We haven’t given guidance yet. Fundamentally, they will just be going back to their normal pacing of, you’ve got hundreds of customers renewing every quarter. They will have grown through a band, and that will just sort of come back naturally for us.

John, Vertex: Is there something about the end market that you’re exposed to that’s driving this? Or is it so broad-based that this is more a comment on just like growth in the economy? What do you leverage when it comes to those entitlements?

David, Vertex: Yeah, because the economy is growing, I don’t think it’s growth. Tax is a horizontal. I wouldn’t say it. Manufacturing and retail are probably our largest two verticals, but they still collectively only make up maybe 22% or 23% of the total revenue. It’s a nice horizontal that actually protects us from economic volatility on the downside. I think it’s more like they just didn’t grow at the pace that we normally see, the handfuls that grow through and give us these six and seven-figure increases of renewal pricing that we just didn’t benefit from.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: Maybe just quickly, and then we can get into the business and some of the bigger themes. Just on that deal signing point and the lower guidance from that, I think that’s a little bit, we had heard some of your peers in other areas of the office, so the CFO mentioned that earlier in the year. A lot of that tone had softened. I think you guys were one of the few that brought that up again. Brought that up for the first time, actually.

David, Vertex: That’s an important thing.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: We hadn’t actually seen that. What’s different this time? You had been relatively insulated from this whole trend for the last number of years. What’s different this time?

David, Vertex: Yeah, I think we saw some of the cloud migration that had started where we would normally, we typically are going to get invited to an opportunity. The way opportunity works, typically most of our competition is the in-house solution a customer has built on their own that is no longer viable for them. That creates an opportunity for a software vendor to come in. I think what we saw was the deals that we had started, they were top of funnel, as John said. We’re not moving to a solution because they were slowing down some of their activity. They may have said, hey, we’ve got a finite budget. There’s some tariff uncertainty. We’ve got other AI investments in other parts of our business that are using up investment bandwidth. We are slowing down our own individual cloud migration. I think you saw that in some of the announcements.

Oracle recently slower. Financial Services, SAP, had announced in Q2 a slower uptick in cloud migration. I think that process slowed down a little. We saw, as we’ve talked in August on our call, we saw some of that come back already. We already saw some of that elongation pick up. You just can’t make up the revenue in the, once you’ve lost it radically, you’re not going to make it up for the period.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: OK, let’s talk about the flip side of this. Because what we have been hearing alternative to that is that tax is growing as a priority within the broader ERP transformation cycle and upgrade cycle.

David, Vertex: Yeah.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: Talk about why that is and how that’s impacted numbers.

David, Vertex: Yeah, I think why that is, and I think that’s why top of funnel remains encouraging, is that I think it’s because the regulatory environment is getting more complex. The recent tax bill passed by the federal government, what you saw were two important things that impact our business. The first is that they’re slowing down the federal government from giving less money to states for food stamps and Medicaid, two critical things for the citizens of each local economy. Guess what? They’re going to have to make, the local government’s going to have to make that up. The way they’re going to make that up is indirect tax. They’re going to increase regulations. They’re going to increase rates, all of which creates demand and therefore customer pain and customer thinking about tax becoming more prevalent.

When you add to that for the larger multinationals, this e-invoicing issue that’s emerging, which I’m sure we’ll talk about, that’s a new requirement that is bringing deeper scrutiny to tax compliance and tax effectiveness inside a corporation. I think those are examples of why we’re seeing this become a bigger issue for companies in terms of their whole ERP as they’re going through the ERP migration to want to make tax a priority decision.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: OK, David, we’ve heard from a number of LLM providers at this conference. I think one of the questions we’ve increasingly been getting is this question of a depth of SaaS from large language models and applications from those LLMs. What is sort of the rebuttal from the Vertex perspective of how you are going to remain competitive? What is it about the indirect tax ecosystem for large corporations that you think is moated from all of the disruption from the AI native?

David, Vertex: Sure. I think one of the biggest things really important to understand is the difference in who the buyer is and why the buyer is so different. If you go to an SMB company, a $30 million company, they’ve got 80 employees. They don’t have a tax department. They have a controller. They want what I would call a good enough solution. The bottom end of the market just wants indirect tax, sales and use tax solved at the lowest cost, the simplest way. The reality is they’re not going to be audited. AI as a core capability is a probabilistic technology. It is not deterministic. Tax is a very deterministic world. You’ve got to put a 1 or 0. You need audit traceability to that. You need confidence in that.

At the low end of the market, you’re OK with the issue of it’s going to be probably right because you’re not going to be audited. You move up to a large multinational. They might have 50 people in their indirect tax department. The accuracy requirements that they have and the traceability of how they reach that accuracy is far more important. A lot of our customers might have 30 to 50 audits a year going on in different jurisdictions of the 10,000 in the U.S. alone. That’s number one reason it’s incredibly challenging for AI in the upper end of the market. I think the other reason is a significant number of the rules and regulations that we have to interpret and put into the software that our customers expect each and every month are not published. AI can’t even access that information.

You add to it, a lot of our customers have negotiated special exemptions and special rules. They may have sales tax holidays based on their business located in a jurisdiction that they negotiate. That’s all customized. We can handle that in our software. AI can’t handle that. There are significant reasons why AI can’t replace what a large, complex customer does. By the flip, the reason we made the investment in Kintsugi, which was an AI startup, is because I firmly believe at the bottom end of the market, there’s going to be material disruption to anybody who’s a provider of companies that are doing tax software for the $30, $50, $60 million revenue companies. I think that’s highly disruptible over the next three years.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: OK, let’s talk a little bit about outside of Kintsugi, what are you using AI for internally? I know you made a recent acquisition of, I guess it’s not no longer recent, but Ryan LLC’s AI capabilities.

David, Vertex: Yeah.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: What can you do? What does that maybe, John, do for you financially, either on the revenue or the cost side?

David, Vertex: I’ll talk to AI that side. John will talk to the financials. AI is absolutely an enabler that will add certain value and capability. We’re looking at it in a few dimensions. The first is, again, if you’re a large multinational, you may have thousands, if not millions, of SKUs. You are constantly adding new SKUs and eliminating SKUs. The tax department cares deeply about that because each one of them can be taxed differently. They have to be set up properly. Categorization of all your products is significant. Let me give you a quick example. A bottle of water could be taxed one way in a jurisdiction. If you sell it in a pack of 24, it could be taxed a different way. Just the way the company packages up a product they’re selling is a different SKU, and it could have different tax treatment.

You have some jurisdictions that, believe it or not, if I buy this bottle of water at a retail store, it’s not taxable, but if I buy it from a vending machine across the street, it’s taxable. That’s the nature of Byzantine rules that exist in indirect tax. Categorization matters dramatically. The SmartCat product we bought was to begin to help our customers leverage AI, where we can create a tool that, and we’re educating the tool on how the product is, all the elements of it, so that over time, it will help them categorize and take it. What we designed it in, back to my traceability and expertise requirements, is we’re designing the product to only go, if I use a football metaphor, from the goal line to like the 10-yard line. There will be a human-in-the-loop expert that’s still required.

AI still won’t even solve that problem because the tax department will not want to let go of that decision authority that it was set up properly. One piece is around smart categorization. The second piece that we’re excited about is we host enormous amounts of data going through our system. You think about every line item of every transaction going through the system that we’re a part of. We have millions upon millions of transactions that touch our software every moment in some company situations because of the volume that they’re putting through. AI becomes incredible tools on that data to provide analytics and important, valuable information back to the company. We’re definitely looking at how data can be turned into analytics and a value prop to the customer. We’re working on a number of things in that.

The final area that, to me, I think in the long run could be very attractive to us is the whole agent-to-agent, agentic world where you see these large ERPs like Oracle, SAP, Microsoft setting up agents inside of their ERP capabilities, whether it be on Dynamics or it be on S/4, and having the Vertex agents who are dealing with tax workflow communicate directly with the agents. That would enrich the customer’s experience and actually cut down on their workflow requirements today. I think those are the big three we’re putting money into. SmartCat is the first product we’ve launched in the market, and we’re starting to take on early adopters. It’s early days in terms of the economics. That, to me, is where we’re headed as a strategy, AI-wise.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: OK. On the financials, John?

John, Vertex: On the financials, as David said, you know, we’re in L.A. right now for SmartCat. That’s going to play itself out.

David, Vertex: Limited availability.

John, Vertex: Apologies.

David, Vertex: Limited availability.

John, Vertex: Yeah. So that’s going to, we’re in that right now. We’re excited about what that’s going to bring to us. Again, that’s an opportunity for revenue as we think kind of next year, year after, etc. That’s the first AI product we’re going to charge for, so that’s exciting. I think when I think about the cost structure, we’re leveraging AI on the cost side of the house for a lot of different things. Certainly, the engineering teams are very focused on really getting the most out of they can, out of their programmers, and out of the efficiency with which they can create product and get things moved along. We’re very excited about that. As we’ll talk about, I’m sure, later, we’re in the midst of an investment phase right now with our business, investing in additional country coverage for e-invoicing, investing in a lot of go-to-market and e-invoicing.

We’re investing in a number of different things right now that is causing our R&D expense to be up and elevated at levels a little higher than it’s been in the past. We’re right now operating at about 21% of revenues on a quarterly basis. That number has been about 18% or 19%. A lot of that’s because of the investment activity we’re doing around getting this extra country coverage. When that slows down, when we get back to the right country coverage, which I’ll explain in a little bit, we’re going to see leverage come out of that, come out of that 18% to 19%. That’s going to drop down because of the activity we’re seeing and the throughput we’re seeing going through there. We’re very excited about it. Certainly, from an engineering standpoint, that’s where I get most excited because I think that’s a great opportunity there.

We’re also leveraging it across the rest of our business. When I think about our acceleration of margin activity that’s going to begin next year, those margins are going to come through again. R&D, as I just mentioned, but selling and marketing and G&A are certainly right up. They’re going to be fast followers because of the leverage we’re seeing already.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: OK, great. David, I want to just quickly touch back on the analytics point you made. I feel like that is a big opportunity. There is a lot of competition in the space for just doing analytics on transactional data. What do you think your moat would be around analytics on transactional data that someone else who maybe has similar access to transactional data might?

David, Vertex: I think you just answered your own question. Access to the tax data.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: The tax data.

David, Vertex: Is going to be unique inside of our system because if it isn’t the right tax data, they’re not going to have confidence in the output. Because that’s in our source system, that’s, I think you answered your own question. Sorry.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: No, all good.

David, Vertex: I mean, I kind of don’t know if that was a layup question or yours.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: The point you’re saying is it’s because it’s the tax-specific data. You’re not talking about like broader core financial data.

David, Vertex: No. I think it’s important to realize that tax data is very different than financial data. It’s its own, there’s an indirect tax close that occurs every month separate from the corporate tax close. It’s its own unique body because you’re not doing it, you have to do it based on legal entity. You’re not doing it based on line of business. The mindset is very different in terms of what you need because of the compliance requirements.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: OK, great. What drives an RFP for a customer? What is it that happens internally at a customer that says?

David, Vertex: There are three big funnels of demand that we can benefit from. The first is something changes fundamentally in their business. They make a large acquisition, which, again, large multinationals are often making acquisitions. They can evolve into launching a new, let’s say they launch e-commerce as a new platform to do business in some jurisdictions. Something about the business model has changed that from the tax department’s perspective, they can’t keep up with or they can’t solve for at the pace the business needs. They’ll look for a third-party vendor. That’s part one. Part two is the regulatory environment. This has two flavors. The regulatory environment is new regulations are introduced into the market, like in e-invoicing.

Now behind the recent federal tax bill, there’s going to be a lot of new regulations around the world that’ll put pressure on the way a tax department was working to solve their compliance problem. The second will be audit. Audit related to regimes that have introduced new regulations, typically one to three years afterwards, will start to get after, all right, we’ve got a data set now. Are we getting our fair share from what we thought was going to increase our budget in some way? Audit pressure will uncover a company that thought it was following the new rules properly and found out it wasn’t. Brazil has now gone through a situation where Brazil, which is the most complex indirect tax jurisdiction in the world, is introducing a new phased-in 10-year revamp of their entire tax system.

It’s phased in, so companies are actually dealing with the fact that some rules apply in the old regime, some rules apply in the new regime. It’s creating enormous consternation about how they comply across both regulations. Audit. The third is something about the platform that the company runs on is being transformed. I was running ECC, and now I’m going to S/4. I was running JD Edwards, and now I’m going to Fusion. Whatever is the migration to the cloud. Most of our competitive situations are, I built something that works internally, and now I’m going to a new platform. The custom solution I built for my business doesn’t work in the new environment, and I’m going to need a third party. Those are the three drivers of RFPs.

I will tell you, for Vertex, probably 9.5 out of every 10 deals we work on are run through some form of an RFP process because the buyer wants to make sure they understand all the landscape of competitors and how they can solve their problem. Our relationships with those vendors or those providers, the Big Four, et cetera, is an enormous part of our business.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: How should we think about your win rates and who you compete with?

David, Vertex: I would say for most deals that we get an opportunity inside of SAP, we talk about 70% to 75% of those deals we’re going to win at the enterprise market. Our typical competitor is going to be a division of Thomson Reuters. That’s our primary competitor in that market.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: OK. I want to talk a little bit about just the stability of growth and the growth algorithm. I think this is going to segue into an NRR conversation with you, John. Just how do you think about the typical customer lifecycle once you land them in adding product SKUs and then adding new geographies? How does that flow through to the stability of your net revenue retention?

David, Vertex: Yes. I’ll start and then jump in.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: Yeah.

David, Vertex: We focus on what we call scaled customers. Scaled customers are customers that pay us over $100,000 in license. The reason why we do that is they’re complex businesses that are always going to be changing. One of those three big macro drivers that I talked about are going to impact that business in the future. It’s important to understand when we land an account, we are typically landing them in one part of the business. No company is going to say, hey, I’ve got five operating divisions around the world. I want you to come in and do my sales tax, my use tax, and my VAT in every jurisdiction I do business. That is far too disruptive to the tax department.

More importantly, and we’ve had this conversation, the dirty secret about our business is nobody who bought tax software grew their top line or improved their bottom line. What they did is they got more compliant. That’s a big issue if you have a compliance problem. Otherwise, that’s the demand driver of our business. I say that because our land-and-expand motion is foundational to our growth algorithm. We get 70% of our new deals every quarter. Our new revenue is coming from existing customers buying more. We bought sales tax from you two years ago. You’ve proven out your capabilities. We’ve got a problem over in VAT. We want to buy your VAT solution. We bought VAT. Now we need you for use tax here in the United States, whatever it is. That’s a big component of our growth algorithm. It’s buying more.

To John’s point, it’s buying more of the same where your usage just increases. We keep adding products. We’ll add something now like e-invoicing. You didn’t have to deal with this in the past, but now you need a third-party provider for e-invoicing. We do your sales and use tax. You want us to be your global provider for e-invoicing. It could be new products. It could be cross-sell of existing products. That really drives the primary algorithm of our growth. Those new logos, the balance, that 30% to 35% is going to come from things like e-invoicing or cloud migrations where we didn’t have the account. That’s our land in before we can expand. Hopefully helpful.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: Yeah, I would just say that GRR to NRR walk, our GRR is at 95%, our NRR is at 108%. About 50% of that makeup is what David described as cross-sells and migrations. That cross-sell activity is about 50% of that. The next 25% comes from those additional entitlements that I spoke about earlier. The last 25% is really price increase. We have a very mature renewals team that works with our customers and thoughtfully determines what our price increase is going to be every year. That’s been a really strong algorithm in terms of how that’s played out over the last bunch of years.

John, Vertex: How do you think about pricing power in this business, just at a high level?

David, Vertex: Yeah, I’ll start. How about this? I think it’s always been something that we’ve taken into consideration. We’ve been around for 45 years, and we have to be very thoughtful about it. As much as I want to make sure that we’re, it’s certainly going to be more than inflation is going to be. As much as I want to, I recognize the position that I’m in in some of my customer systems and so invasive into their ERP systems, I have the ability to be, I have the ability to do things, potentially unnatural things. We want to be very thoughtful about balancing the price increase that we’re going to get with the potential for that future revenue opportunity, as David talked about.

That 70% of new revenue opportunities coming from existing customers, I’d rather get a shot at a use tax opportunity at a customer I don’t have or at a customer that I’m not doing it at than hit an extra 2% or 3% in the price increase. I don’t know your thoughts.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: Great. On e-invoicing, we haven’t talked in detail about this yet. Big opportunity for you. I think you said at your recent Investor Day, $100 million revenue opportunity by 2028. You’ve now integrated the acquisition you made in the space, ECOS, with a broader Vertex.

David, Vertex: With the cloud platform.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: You’re on the cloud platform. Maybe talk to us about the opportunity and your offering.

David, Vertex: Just to level set everybody, e-invoicing is a requirement in about 50-plus countries around the world, 58 countries around the world, where you have to transmit your invoice in real time to the government. The government now electronically has an EDI version of your invoice. At the end of the period, when you file your tax return, they can actually compare, did I get all of the information that I was, did I get my fair share of dollars? Basically, it’s going after what’s called the VAT gap, which is estimated to be in the $80 billion to $100 billion a year range from what governments think they should be getting in VAT and what they are getting. That was the reason. It is the only legislated compliance requirement that has to use a third party. That’s important to us. Our number one competitor is normally in-house solutions.

You can’t use an in-house solution to solve for e-invoicing. You have to transmit the data to the government via a third-party certified provider. When we bought ECOS, they had 20-some countries around the world covered. The problem is, competitively, we need to be selling in every jurisdiction that requires e-invoicing. That’s the part of the investment cycle we’re in, to make sure we can handle all the jurisdictions that our multinationals are requiring. One would say, yeah, but EDI as a basis is somewhat of a commodity. The truth of the matter is it is. Where the value comes in is we have the bookends around it. This is what our suite for our multinationals is so attractive. We offer the VAT determination engine that would give them confidence in the invoice data they give to the government. They’ll even calculate that, right?

More importantly, the complexities of reconciling all of your invoice data to what do I file for my VAT return, we do all seamlessly on our platform. There are lots of e-invoice providers out there. Coupa, Tungsten, they all offer e-invoice. They don’t do the bookends. They don’t do the tax side of it. What has transformed is as more countries, big economies like France, Germany, et cetera, are coming online with e-invoice requirements, companies are pulling back and saying, I want a global provider, which starts to limit the number of companies that actually can compete for that business. I want to think about it holistically. I don’t want to think about it just on the EDI transmission part. Our large multinationals who have enormous invoice volume in many of the countries that are requiring this are saying, I’m looking for a global provider.

By the way, Vertex, you do all of my sales and use tax in North America. You can do my VAT and my e-invoice and my VAT compliance all on the same platform. That’s the real strategic opportunity. In the early days of our launch of the product, we’re already seeing companies come in. The buying behavior is this: they’re going to say, hey, look, I’m going to give you the first three countries because I want you to prove your solution. Then I’ll give you the other 10 that I didn’t have. We’re already seeing customers come back to us who we sold for the immediate requirements to say, hey, I’m going to want you for more. That will support NRR. It will just be land-and-expand again in terms of the foundation of our business model.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: That’s great. Thanks so much, David. John, on the financials, just one on the revenue and one on the margins.

David, Vertex: Sure.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: How should we think about your latest thinking on the pacing of some of those deal pushes closing? On the margin front, what are the biggest priorities for you to really get margin expansion ramped back up? I know you said you’ve made a lot of investments in AI and e-invoicing. When should we expect that inflection?

David, Vertex: Yeah, a couple of things. Just on the revenue pacing, again, I think we’ve seen this quarter continue to play out the way that it did previously. We’re going to continue to see that develop through the rest of the year. Obviously, we’re, like many software companies, back-end loaded towards what happens in the fourth quarter. We feel very good in the level of guidance that we set and the way that we set it. To pull it back somewhat, we feel like we’re de-risking the business appropriately for the back half. In terms of leverage for our business, we’re in the midst of an investment cycle right now, as David has talked about. It really relates to two acquisitions, both of which were done last year. The first is ECOS, really getting that country coverage and go-to-market where we need it, and that’s $4 to $5 million a year.

The second is the other.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: $4 to $5 million a quarter.

David, Vertex: $4 to $5 million a quarter. My apologies. The other one was the SmartCat product, which is about $9 million for the year. When I look at those specific items, those investments have time periods. The SmartCat largely is done this year. When I think about the stuff with ECOS, that’s going to go into the middle of next year. I feel very good about sort of the timelines that we have in place. I think we’ve demonstrated with a prior investment cycle that we’d run that when we get to the end, we see immediate leverage coming out of it. I talked a little bit about it earlier. We’ll see it coming through in R&D for the country coverage activity that’s going on. We expect to see a good amount of leverage really coming through G&A and then selling and marketing for the opportunities that are there.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: Back half of next year.

David, Vertex: Basically, net-net, that cycle all kind of times out to end of.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: End of June.

David, Vertex: End of second quarter, whatever, end of second quarter. Then we’ll start to see that pick up.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: That’s just what you did in 2023. It was right at that time of year, right?

David, Vertex: We didn’t mean it that way, but it actually worked that way. Yes. Yes, if you look back at our track record, we announced that the cycle would end in the middle of 2023, and you look at our quarter cash and margin increase that followed right after it, it accelerated nicely.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: Yep. Hey, we have about a minute left here. Question for both of you. What are you most focused on over the next 6 to 12 months? What’s most important for you to execute on? What are you most excited about over a three to five-year time frame?

David, Vertex: E-invoicing, clearly, 100% country coverage, dealing with that. This is a land-grab moment. We don’t get many of those in our industry, where companies are making the decision of who they want to use as a global provider. We have to have that right. That is mission critical. I am intrigued by some of the compelling work we’re starting to do in AI around this agentic to agentic. I think that could be a very interesting differentiator. It’s early days. I don’t want to mislead. The ERPs themselves are figuring out what the economic models are going to be doing around that. I think it will actually disintermediate the risks of, at some point in the future, way out, everybody’s going to go to cloud. That’s way, way out. When it happens, it changes. APIs are going to be, everybody can interface the same way.

Agentic will be actually the differentiated way you’ll come back. I answered longer than I should have. I do think that’s where it’s going to be exciting three to five years out.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: John, for you on the finance side?

John, Vertex: Listen, e-invoicing is our focus. I think getting, as David said, for the reason that land grabs out there. I want to make sure that we’ve got that leverage continuing to come from the business. Managing the business, managing that cost side and those investments to get us even faster than we want some of that product and that country coverage into play.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: OK.

David, Vertex: Yeah.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: David, John, thanks so much for being here with us today.

David, Vertex: Thank you.

John, Vertex: Appreciate that.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: Thank you.

David, Vertex: Thanks, John.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: Thank you.

John, Vertex: Appreciate it.

David, Vertex: Thank you.

Adam Hotchkiss, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs: Great stuff.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.