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Q4 2025 nCino Inc Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Harrison Masters; Director, Investor Relations; nCino Inc

Sean Desmond; President and Chief Executive Officer; nCino Inc

Gregory Orenstein; Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer; nCino Inc

Saket Kalia; Analyst; Barclays Capital

Terry Tillman; Analyst; Truist Securities

Alex Sklar; Analyst; Raymond James

James Fawcett; Analyst; Morgan Stanley

Koji Ikeda; Analyst; BofA Securities

Ryan Tomasello; Analyst; Keefe, Bruyette & Woods

Cris Kennedy; Analyst; William Blair & Company

Aaron Kimson; Analyst; Citizens

Alex Markgraf; Analyst; KBCM

J.R. Herrera; Analyst; Piper Sandler. Brent

Ken Suchoski; Analyst; Autonomous Research

Presentation

Operator

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to nCino's fourth quarter fiscal year 2025 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions). I would now like to hand the call over to Harrison Master's Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Harrison Masters

Good afternoon, and welcome to nCino's fourth quarter fiscal 2025 earnings call. With me on today's call are Sean Desmond, nCino's Chief Executive Officer; and Greg Orenstein, nCino's Chief Financial Officer. During the course of this conference call, we will make forward-looking statements regarding trends, strategies, and the anticipated performance of our business.
These forward-looking statements are based on management's current views and expectations entail certain assumptions made as of today's date and are subject to various risks and uncertainties described in our SEC filings and other publicly available documents, the financial services industry, and global economic conditions. nCino disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.
Further, on today's call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP metrics that we believe aid in the understanding of our financial results. A reconciliation to comparable GAAP metrics can be found in today's earnings release, which is available on our website and as an exhibit to the Form 8-K furnished with the SEC just before this call. as well as the earnings presentation on our Investor Relations website at investor.ncino.com.
With that, I will turn the call over to Sean.

Sean Desmond

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to discuss nCino's fourth quarter and fiscal 2025 financial results. As many of you know, this is my first time addressing you as CEO, and I want to start by saying how honored and excited I am to take on this responsibility.
nCino is a remarkable company, one that pioneered and built a strong foundation in cloud banking software. Now my focus is on taking this great company and making sure it is a great long-term business, one that executes with urgency and precision, delivers sustainable and profitable growth and fully capitalizes on the sizable opportunities ahead to deliver strong returns to all of our stakeholders.
As we delivered on the promise of being the worldwide leader in cloud banking in the company's first chapter, I am here to lead nCino's evolution to be the worldwide leader in AI banking. We are marshalling the energy of the company to capitalize on the vertical AI opportunity to drive efficiency into the financials of our customers as well as into our own bottom line.
For those of you who have been following the company, you are aware that we have been very focused on leveraging data, analytics, and AI for the past five years. In addition to our commercial pricing and profitability, auto spreading and portfolio monitoring solutions, we have been steadily developing banking adviser functionality and plan to launch numerous new capabilities at our nSight User Conference in May. For those of you joining us at nSight, you will hear directly from early banking adviser customers about the meaningful efficiency gains they are already realizing with this AI technology.
Seeing the market catch up to our strategic vision is very exciting and reinforces the unique competitive position we have. I know firsthand just how significant this opportunity is. I have spent almost 30 years in the software industry in nearly 12 at nCino, most recently, as Chief Product Officer and before that, as Chief Customer Success Officer.
During that tenure, I've had approximately 2/3 of the company's employees in my reporting chain and have worked closely with every function of our global business. I've also worked alongside our customers, including sponsorship of sales opportunities, ensuring successful project deliveries, compliance with our SLAs, adoption of our user experiences and realization of our committed business outcomes. I understand exactly what our diverse customer base, which includes banks, credit unions, independent mortgage bankers, and nonbank lenders needs to run their business more efficiently and effectively.
I have also overseen the development of the very products that serve as the system of record for our customers' banking operations. Over the past two quarters, I've spent time in our offices in Wilmington, North Carolina; Lehi, Utah; London, England; Sydney and Melbourne, Australia; Auckland, New Zealand; and Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa.
On each of these visits, I've spent time not only with our employees, but with our customers and partners in our ecosystem, listening intently. These experiences give me deep conviction in our strategy, the strength of our platform and the product portfolio and the highly differentiated value we provide to financial institutions.
I firmly believe that the next decade holds far more growth and opportunity for nCino to innovate and transform the financial services industry than the previous decade. There is no doubt that financial institutions across the globe continue to struggle with inefficiencies caused by legacy infrastructure. Too many of them still rely on fragmented tech stacks and siloed data, making critical processes far too slow and cumbersome.
We are reimagining these processes and delivering world-class experiences to name just a few, onboarding complex commercial clients proactively and continuously monitoring small business and commercial loan portfolios, providing frictionless account opening experiences and efficiently scaling mortgage lending with AI-powered document, validation and processing.
nCino is uniquely positioned to solve all of these problems. We are the only cloud-based SaaS provider that enables financial institutions around the world to seamlessly manage lending, onboarding, account opening and portfolio management across multiple lines of business connected on a scalable platform powered by AI.
We are the enabler of our customers' most critical operations, and we have a broad, diverse, and sizable customer base across more than 20 countries. This global reach, combined with our broad and deep product capabilities provides us with a competitive moat that nobody can match.
Since our IPO in 2020, we have delivered strong revenue growth, significantly increased our operating margin, expanded our customer base, extended our geographic presence, and build out the breadth and depth of our solutions. But while our scale has increased, I don't believe our execution has kept pace with the full extent of the market opportunity.
I think it's important not only to be a cheerleader for nCino, but also to be pragmatic and realistic. Importantly, we need to consistently execute at a level that reflects the strength of our market position and the ambitions we have for this business.
Of course, our ability to execute over the past couple of years was significantly impacted by macroeconomic headwinds beyond our control. The rapid rise in interest rates in 2022 caused banks to pull back on spending and the liquidity crisis in early 2023 led to even greater cost and around large-scale technology investments. These external factors certainly dampened our sales momentum and new bookings growth.
But there were also challenges within our control. As we expanded beyond our commercial banking routes into consumer lending, we ultimately brought to market a product capable of leapfrogging our competitors, but not as quickly as we originally planned.
We also saw customers pause their onboarding buying decisions this past year until we completed our highly anticipated platform integration of the intellectual property we acquired in our acquisition from DocFox.
With the benefit of hindsight, we were also too optimistic in expecting a drop in interest rates to drive an increase in mortgage activity. Additionally, our sales execution and sense of urgency in certain international markets, most notably Europe, was not as crisp as it needed to be.
Some of these challenges created compounding headwinds that further impacted our new bookings momentum in fiscal '25 and our chief contributors to our fiscal '26 revenue outlook, which is below our expectations.
The good news is that we have already taken decisive action to address these challenges that have impacted us, and I am confident they are squarely behind us. During my tenure as Chief Product Officer, we did bring to market a best-in-breed consumer lending product last year, which helped us outperform our internal expectations for sales of that solution in fiscal '25.
Leveraging our best-in-breed digital mortgage technology, we are bringing to market full omnichannel capabilities across our consumer solutions at Insight. This consistent experience for bankers and their customers alike, whether digital or in branch will help us further accelerate bookings of our products in fiscal '26 and beyond. In addition, we plan to release our fully integrated onboarding solution that leverages the technology acquired in the DocFox acquisition in the second quarter, unlocking numerous pent-up opportunities.
On the personnel front, we have made key leadership changes in our European operations with the hiring of Joaquin de Valenzuela, a seasoned software sales executive with a great track record on the European continent as our EMEA General Manager to sharpen our execution.
Joaquin has been aggressively assembling his go-to-market team to capture the full potential of the EMEA SAM beyond just the UKI, where we've had a strong presence to date. We have also added several other key leaders across our sales and marketing organizations, hardening our product marketing and credit union posture, and we just appointed an AI catalyst Chief Technology Officer, Will Jung, to our product development and engineering organization.
All of our new leaders and restructured teams are laser-focused on increasing and accelerating our sales momentum and gross bookings. Operating with a keen sense of urgency and purpose, we are well positioned to reaccelerate new bookings growth although we expect it will take a few quarters for consistent momentum to build.
As Greg will discuss when he reviews the financials, we expect improved gross bookings growth as the year progresses. This will result in subscription revenue growth reacceleration in fiscal '27 as we get back on track to achieving our double-digit long-term growth ambitions.
Not surprisingly, one of the most exciting areas of opportunity ahead for nCino is our ability to help financial institutions better connect their data so they can meaningfully harness AI. Specifically, we continue to build generative and Agenetic AI-powered solutions and embed them throughout the nCino platform.
Because nCino serves as a system of record for our customers' banking operations, we sit at the heart of their most critical financial processes. That means we are in a unique position to help them leverage their data to operationalize AI efficiently, automate and eliminate workflows and to deliver better customer experiences.
I touched upon banking adviser earlier in my comments, but it's worth reinforcing that the capabilities within our AI-driven banking adviser suite of skills have already reduced complex banking processes from days to seconds. And this is just the beginning.
Take, for example, document validation in US mortgage, which with AI verifies that customers have uploaded the correct documentation, avoiding an approval delay for the borrower and saving the loan officer about 40 minutes per loan.
Our continuous credit monitoring functionality eliminates hours of manual work, gathering data to assess a client's borrowing position. And tax statements 3.0 uses a large language model trained in-house to process tax statements, avoiding 15 minutes to 20 minutes of manual work per statement.
As we lead this charge, our customers are validating that they ultimately prefer Agentic capabilities embedded in a platform they already trust with their data. The data is fundamental to our strategy, and we are leaning into our acquisition of Sandbox Banking to complete a unified API layer that becomes the access point or gateway for financial institutions globally. Thus, our AI strategy is to deepen our moat by expanding banking adviser skills, mobilize agents and manage the gateway.
Clearly, we believe that AI, both generative and agentic and the unique data set we have to fuel AI will be key drivers of growth for nCino, powerful differentiators across our entire platform that will further enhance our market leadership position and accelerate platform adoption as we continue to evolve the company and lead the vertical AI movement in bank.
Beyond AI, we have been hard at work strengthening our core business, and we believe these improvements will drive solid bookings trends in the quarters and years ahead. One of the most powerful aspects of our competitive moat is the reputation we have built through our success in commercial banking. We are recognized as the gold standard in this space, and that credibility is opening doors as we drive deeper into consumer, small business, and mortgage opportunities.
As a reminder, over 70% of our global SAM is outside of commercial lending and more than half of our bookings in fiscal '25 came from solutions other than commercial lending. We are leveraging our reputation and track record of success to demonstrate our solutions to new customers and to deepen our existing relationships with current customers as the nCino ecosystem adopts more of our products.
Turning nCino from a great company into a great long-term business requires discipline, focus and relentless execution. That means making sure our product road map aligns tightly with market needs, driving strong top line growth while maintaining financial discipline and making thoughtful capital allocation decisions. It means being sharp in how we position ourselves in the market and ensuring that every experience we serve up to customers is truly best-in-class.
I am maniacally focused on these execution tasks and firmly believe the team will exceed my expectations. To that end, we are seeing signs that the changes we have made are driving results. Our fiscal '25 ACV growth accelerated to 9% organically from 8% in fiscal '24 on a constant currency basis. On a reported basis, this ACV year-over-year growth was 8% organically or 13%, including ACV from acquisitions.
Our expansion on the European continent is seeing signs of traction as well, with our largest new logo by ACV in Q4 and -- coming from CSOB, a top three bank in the Czech Republic, and we also had another major win in Japan. And while it took longer than we originally expected, our consumer lending business is seeing momentum.
The $200 billion asset bank we discussed winning in late fiscal '24 is now live on nCino consumer lending. And we added over 20 new consumer lending deals in Q4, including two large banks with $80 billion and $50 billion in assets, respectively.
On the M&A front, we are very excited about the four acquisitions we closed over the past year and expect each of them to be strong, positive contributors to our future financial performance. Our DocFox and FullCircl acquisitions expanded our SAM in the onboarding arena and provided our sales teams unique and highly desirable solutions to cross-sell to a very happy customer base.
Allegro is an important addition to our consumer lending offering, delivering on the need for indirect lending functionality, particularly as we expand more aggressively into credit unions. In fact, leveraging nCino's established market-leading portfolio analytics solution, which serves up approximately 40% of the United States credit union market, we have visibility into over $600 billion in assets across more than 800 credit union customers.
We are leaning into this unique and powerful data set and our acquisition of Allegro and have launched a dedicated credit even go-to-market team and are developing new solutions to bring to this market, including financial product performance and pricing models and peer analysis products for competitor insights.
Finally, on the M&A integration front, Sandbox Banking is a highly strategic acquisition that reaches far beyond core integration capabilities. nCino customers will quickly realize the benefit of customer data alignment and system operability with a unified API layer and integration hub for the platform. I am also energized by the AI first culture and DNA of the talent that accompanies these acquisitions.
That said, while we, of course, remain alert to potential future M&A where we see compelling value in accelerating our technology, profitable growth or addressable market, we expect our focus for fiscal '26 will be on realizing the planned synergies and expected investment returns from these completed transactions as opposed to pursuing any additional M&A.
In summary, this is an extraordinary time for nCino and with the vertical AI opportunity, there has never been more excitement in this intersection of technology and banking. The secular growth in front of us which is helping financial institutions truly modernize their operations is massive.
The ability to accelerate this transformation through our scalable, tested, and trusted platform with intelligence embedded throughout our solutions makes it even more exciting. And the improvements we have made in our product functionality and international operations sets us up for success.
Additionally, while there is currently volatility in the financial markets, the macro headwinds that specifically challenged us and our customer base over the past couple of years have eased quite a bit. Our customers, by and large, have healthy balance sheets and are forecasting growth in their loan portfolios, deposit positions and earnings per share.
Our US customers are also telling us that the potential for deregulation could free up capital, streamline decision-making and enable them to further adopt best-in-class technology solutions. Our sales teams are aggressively pursuing bookings in fiscal '26 that we expect will drive reacceleration in subscription revenue growth in fiscal '27, and we are investing accordingly with a plan to drive sustainable, long-term revenue growth and further margin expansion.
While Greg will walk you through our financial guidance in more detail, just a reminder that our revenue growth is a lagging indicator of our bookings growth. While we are forecasting lower year-over-year revenue growth in the second half of the year, we believe this is temporary and due to trailing factors that have now been addressed as well as to difficult year-over-year second half comparisons that Greg will elaborate on.
I have tremendous confidence in our team, our technology, and our market position. This confidence is supported by the $100 million stock repurchase program our Board of Directors authorized that we announced this afternoon.
The foundation is in place, and now it's all about execution. Pierre was the visionary who built this company, and I deeply respect the impact he had. My role is to take that vision and turn it into durable, scalable, and long-term profitable growth.
We are not selling a dream in nCino, we are committing to execution. To that end, the metrics I am laser focused on are growth in gross bookings achieving our rule of targets and over time, free cash flow. On behalf of the entire nCino team, I want to thank you for your continued support. I am incredibly energized by what lies ahead and look forward to delivering results and building credibility with our shareholders.
With that, I'll turn it over to Greg to walk through the details of our quarter and outlook.