BLACKLINE, INC. — Call Transcript 2026

All right. We'll kick it off here. Good morning, everyone. Thank you guys for joining the BlackLine session today. I'm Pat McIlwee. I'm a Research Analyst here at William Blair, covering software, as a part of which I cover BlackLine. I am required to inform you that a complete list of disclosures and conflicts of interest are available at our website at williamblair.com. With that, we're very excited to have the BlackLine team back at our conference this year, including Chair and CEO, Owen Ryan, and CFO, Patrick Villanova. For those not familiar, BlackLine provides a cloud-based software that automates and modernizes accounting and finance operations, particularly around Financial Close reconciliations and Intercompany workflows. That's my brief two-liner on the business, but it'd be helpful to hear it from your perspective. Owen, can you just start us off by describing BlackLine's product and service offering as you see it, what that toolkit looks like, and how the platform has developed over time? Okay. Well, thank you. Yeah. Good to be here again, and look forward to the conversation. We actually celebrated our 25th anniversary yesterday. Not many software companies live that long, so it was nice to be able to accomplish that milestone. You've talked a little bit about what it is that we do. I would say, probably more than anything else, we believe we're probably the most mission-critical system for the office of the CFO. If you sit there today, if you just take our public companies that we serve, they run about $54 trillion of market cap runs through BlackLine every day. We're very important to sort of making sure financial statements can be produced, management can opine on them, auditors and the regulators can sign off on them and be comfortable with what's out in the capital markets. Our business started with sort of simple solutions like recs and tasks that has expanded the complete Financial Close all the way up through consolidation now and some level of reporting. We also have a vibrant, growing Invoice-to-Cash business. Importantly, we've always been sort of cloud-based. One of the things that's really shifting in our business, and it's been accelerating, we have a solution that's part of our platforms called Studio 360, which allows sort of a CFO and controller to have a complete view. I think the term people often talk about is a control tower, see everything going on within the Financial Close. That's always been important, but that's become even increasingly important, from a governance perspective, with the acceleration of adoption of AI in the marketplace. Now so many companies are trying to build additional agents to work with BlackLine, and making sure the CFO and Controller have good line of sight as to what's being built, that it works, it's reliable. Importantly for us, one of the things we do spend a fair bit of time on in our business is working with the world's largest accounting and auditing firms to make sure we meet all the regulatory and accounting standards, that they have to fulfill auditing standards. Increasingly, helping to speak with the PCAOB and the SEC and other global regulators about how to think about AI in this world for the registrants that files public statements. That's probably a little bit of it. We've got about 4,400 customers in almost every major market in the world, certainly in the G7 countries. We typically have at least half of the larger public companies running on BlackLine. Great. Yeah, thanks, Owen, and I think that's a good kind of segue into my next question. Your product's already used by 70% of the Fortune 100. It's what you have in your investor deck. I think roughly three-quarters of that ARR comes from enterprise clientele. Can you help us frame how you think about your growth levers? Is it deeper penetration within that enterprise opportunity, your deeper penetration within your existing customer base, new lands for the downmarket, or just in general, how do you think about the mix of new business versus existing account expansion? Patrick and I have become pretty good at tag teaming, we'll do that on this question as well. I think, first of all, we still have plenty of white space in our existing customer base. If you look at some of our most successful customers, they could be 10x as large as some of their peers. You could take our best oil and gas companies from $5 million, one of their competitors would be $500,000. We're trying to get those customers to expand using much more of BlackLine across their whole organization. We still have plenty of large companies to pursue. We have about 60% of the Fortune 500, think of it this way, there's still 240 large companies there. In all the global markets, there continues to be plenty of opportunity. We have recently been building out our FedRAMP capabilities. You're starting to see some good traction with that. Obviously, it's a little bit we'll expect to see this year in the third quarter, the so-called killing season in the FedRAMP marketplace. I'm not sure I like that terminology, but that's what they call it, and then certainly more in 2027. Strategically, we're aligning to places where SAP has been very successful, and because of the SAP BlackLine partnership, trying to invest in those markets. For example, Saudi Arabia seemed like a good idea last year. It still is a good idea despite some of the challenges in the marketplace, but that will work out very well for us as we move forward. Those are some of the bigger things, but you've got a whole list that you go through. You hit on a lot of them, Owen, but maybe you want to double-click on our existing customer base and the opportunities that present there. Owen used an example, but, without putting precise numbers behind it, some of our top, best-adopted, best-implemented customers spend millions of dollars a year with us. Customers of a similar size, also in the Fortune 50, Fortune 25, spend a couple hundred thousand dollars. There is an opportunity there with those customers that are spending a couple hundred thousand dollars to bring them to the level of adoption, the level of implementation, the level of automation that some of our top customers have. How are we going to go about doing that? How are we doing that? Maybe to put some maybe math behind what Owen, where he kicked this off, we have four solutions overall as an organization. Where we started with Financial Close, and then we expand it into Intercompany, and then further into Invoice-to-Cash, and then finally, Financial Reporting & Analytics. That's how we serve the entire office of the CFO. Historically, as recently as two years ago, they were four independent solutions. What we rolled out last year is our platform, Studio 360. Think of it as it's a connective fiber between all four of our solutions, linked by a single data layer. What does that mean? It's a single source of truth. All the data organically flows between our solutions, and that opens the doors up for rapid expansion into our customer base. It breaks down barriers between our four solutions. It turns four solutions into one platform. That's great for a CIO when you're having that conversation. I'm part of the GTM motion a lot. I'm a user, as a former CAO, now I'm the CFO. A CIO loves to hear, this is one platform that he or she has to maintain, not four independent solutions. You pivot and have the same conversation with a CFO or a controller. They love to hear, and I can personally attest to this, you just want one single source of truth. You don't want APIs. You don't want connectors between our four solutions. You want one source of truth where you can release technology into that and feel good about the accuracy of the data flowing from solution to solution. This is opening up rapid cross-sell opportunities within our base. The second phase of this, which is probably where this conversation is leading, we are now releasing agents. We have designed agents. As we become more of an AI-native company, AI-led company, we're leaning into that. For an agent to work in our world, it has to work off one data source. These companies that might be designing their own agents and have 50 ERPs or a financial ecosystem with 100 systems, that agent's going to return 50-100 different answers. In BlackLine, when you release an agent into our ecosystem, it's one data source. It responds with one answer, and that answer is right because the input, the data we know is accurate, reconciled, and SOX compliant. That was a long answer, I'm personally very excited about the opportunity, where we're going as an organization, product-led with innovation into our own customer base. Yeah. That's great. Thank you both for the color there. I think that leads nicely into another key concern in the software sector right now, which is pricing models. As you guys have evolved into a truer platform with Studio 360, you've made some changes to your pricing model, with platform pricing now growing as a portion of the overall revenue base. Can you just talk through how that dynamic works as you evolve into this platform? Yeah. Platform pricing, think of it very simply. There are three monetization levers that we're seeing with platform pricing, and I touched on a couple of them there. First and foremost, if you want access as a customer or a new customer, existing customer, to the agents I just referred to, agents that are bringing levels of automation to the industry and to this company never seen before, you have to be on our platform. You have to be on Studio 360. This is a product-led initiative. When you move to the platform, what we're experiencing or seeing, and we have data points to prove this out, we're seeing about a 10%-40% uplift in your baseline subscription right out of the gates, day one. 13% of our ARR, eligible ARR, is already on platform, so we have a pretty good sample size proving out customers are willing to pay substantially more just to have access to this. The second monetization event that happens after you move to the platform is actually attrition mitigation. What does that mean? For the 25 years of our history, our number one source of attrition has been user reductions. The better customers get at using our product, the less accountants, the less finance professionals they need on our product. It's kind of counterintuitive. The better customers get, the less users they need. By moving onto the platform, you have unlimited users. Your fee is fixed. It's no longer seat-based. We're moving away from that, and we're moving aggressively. That takes away a source of attrition, which was our top headwind for revenue growth in this company's history. Third, what I just mentioned earlier, and this is the biggest piece of this, of these three monetization levers. The agents are going to be performing accounting and finance functions on a transaction basis. The more transactions they perform on your behalf, fingers off the keyboard, the more your price goes up. It's more revenue for us. It's a higher ROI to the customer. It removes more finance and accounting professionals from doing the rote manual work. It drives efficiency, it drives accuracy, and it's literally hands off the keyboard. It starts with a day one uplift, then user attrition mitigation, and then eventually the third lever is consumption, and that's how our pricing model works, and it's a notable tailwind too, to our overall growth story. Patrick, have you guys framed how substantial that uplifts can be from the seat base to the platform, and then whether or not there's any way to quantify platform to consumption? As a note, we're seeing 10%-40% uplift just to get access to this technology, and that's right out of the gates. It's early, we are seeing that rapidly increase. We released these agents into the platform during the second half of last year. Something to take note of, we give you a sample of agents for free, transactions for free as part of the uplift. That enables a customer to test them Make sure that that agent is doing exactly what an accountant or a finance professional would do to make sure that internal and external audits sign off on the work performed by that agent to make sure that agent is compliant with that company's internal policy and procedures. That, typically, in a public company setting, takes a couple quarters to validate. Once you prove that agent is doing the identical work that normally done by a human or normally done manually, that's when the hands-off-the-keyboard begins. You take the work out of the human, you put it into the hands of the agent, proverbially speaking, and then that's when transactions increase. We're seeing that increase now, and that represents the biggest opportunity in our AI roadmap. Okay, great. Typically, we have more of a generalist audience here at the Growth Stock Conference. BlackLine has been a longstanding partner of SAP. Can you just help everyone understand what that relationship looks like and how it has evolved over time? If their cloud transition, the cloud transitions of these large ERP players as a whole, if that has any implications for your business? Yeah. We've had a longstanding relationship with SAP. We have a special relationship, what they call their Solution Extension or SolEx partnership with them. We do about 26% of our revenue comes through working with them together in the marketplace through the SolEx relationship. Now, we do have other SAP customers that are not SolEx. What do we do together? There's a couple things that are critical. One is we do a lot of product roadmap together. If you go on the SAP website, you'll see something called the Golden Architecture, and almost right in the center of the SAP ERP world is BlackLine. What goes on in the ERP, then where the transactions are processed, then eventually it has to be reconciled, matched, and things of that nature and controlled, and that's where BlackLine then fits in together with all that. That's one piece. The second way is we have a good large joint go-to-market team. Within BlackLine, we call it our SAP Catalyst team. The folks are dedicated to working with SAP in the marketplace. We also have joint customer success teams that work together. That's something relatively new, where the SAP professionals and the BlackLine professionals work together and are incented to make sure that the right kind of adoption takes place of the BlackLine platform within SAP. One of the reasons we had to do this is if you're an SAP, you got a big bag of things you can carry, and a lot of times the rep didn't necessarily care whether it was BlackLine or something else, as long as they had revenue. Sometimes they would switch out products, and so they weren't as focused on getting BlackLine as well implemented. That's all changed. There's really good, strong top-to-top relationships. I think over the next four to six weeks, we have three or four more product roadmap meetings, again, to sort of figure out the way forward. We have a joint approach to AI so that SAP has something called Joule, we have something called Verity. We've been working together through a memorandum of understanding how we develop our AI solutions in the marketplace. That works pretty well. The swim lanes are relatively clear. It doesn't mean that there's not some overlap at periods of time. The critical thing is we work really well together to work through those issues to make sure that we're focused on what the customer is looking for. It's a great partnership. We're the only partnership they have in the office of the CFO that does this, and we are going to continue to invest and support that because it's a great relationship from our vantage point. Okay. Any notable implications of this cloud transition? Does that increase the amount of RFPs in the market? It's helped. I mean It's helped the scales. Listen, I think as SAP is sort of shutting down its on-prem capabilities, there's obviously going to be a migration. I think one of the things where it's a benefit to BlackLine, and we certainly saw this at ExxonMobil, where if you just move from on-prem to the cloud in your ERP, there's not a whole lot of value that comes out of that. It's a big number, it's a cost, but there's not necessarily a tremendous benefit. I think what we figured out jointly is if you start with finance first, if you start with BlackLine, there's much more of an uplift. It's about a year ago when the CFO of ExxonMobil talked on her earnings call about the implementation of BlackLine as part of the SAP migration and how much value they achieved as an organization. I couldn't have had a better commercial from that, and Delta was another world-class example of that. Yes, there is uplift. I think it's very real. It never seems to happen as quickly as we would like, because today, if you're going to spend $100 million or $1 billion migrating your ERP, you better be able to show that you can get a real good return on investment. It will be interesting as SAP closes that window of no longer supporting on-prem, whenever that might be. That certainly should be even more of a catalyst. Okay, great. As we think about those large customers, we look at the numbers a little bit more. You guys have been driving really impressive growth across your size cohorts with customers over $1 million in ARR growing nearly 20% last year, and they grew faster than customers over $250K in ARR, and so forth. My question is, what specific products or capabilities are resonating with those large customers and supporting that growth at the high end? How, if at all, have you optimized your sales motion to do that? I think Patrick and I will tag team on this one again because he's in the market almost as much as I am talking with customers. I think a lot of this has been around client selection. In the past, I would've said we would've sold software to anybody, anywhere, anytime. We've been paying for that in some of the lower, mid-market churn and attrition over the last couple of years as we pulled away from that. We do a much better job of having upfront qualifying the customer and truly understanding, are they willing, are they committed to a digital finance transformation journey? If the answer to that is yes, then we can sell to them and deliver that much more value across the platform. I think what you see, and I think we reported in the first quarter, 90+% of our new customers went right out with the platform, right out of the box. In those conversations, it's very clear what they're trying to accomplish, and they recognize that BlackLine is the right customer to go on that journey with. I think as you look at the traditional products for some of our existing customers who are going through some level of transition to the platform, they're still at, sometimes, buying additional parts of the suite versus buying the whole thing at this particular point in time. Mostly that's just because of their own bandwidth, and how quickly they think they can go through the transition. You're living with the product team quite a bit, and the go-to-market team as well, what are you seeing? Playing off my answer that I said before, what I'm personally seeing out there is what I talked about, the momentum that we're seeing in the market, the excitement that we have in our growth story. Studio 360 has really broken down those barriers from having four independent solutions to having one platform. That's huge. If you're using just one BlackLine solution, in all likelihood, you're probably not a seven-figure customer. Probably not. If you're using three or more solutions, you're almost guaranteed to be a seven-figure customer. That cross-sell motion that I mentioned earlier, the growth that was just mentioned in terms of our million-dollar customers plus, that's largely being driven by cross-sell. Customers that are not just using Financial Close, but they're pairing it with our Intercompany solution and our Invoice to Cash solution. They're seeing more value from that. It's covering more of the office of the CFO. Invoice-to-Cash is more operational. Intercompany is tax and treasury. Financial Close is like core accounting. It's covering more of the overall office of the CFO footprint, higher ROI for our customers, more revenue for us. That's what we're seeing evolve as our technology is joined by a single data layer and Studio 360. Okay. Owen, you touched on this a little bit with your answer there, but as you make this transition to a focus on these larger customers, you've seen some smaller customers churn off the platform, and we've seen that a little bit in the recent retention rates. Can you just talk about how you see that cohort, how long that effect might be in play, and when we might see a kind of an inflection in the retention rates? Yeah. Strategic. I'm sitting in this chair just a little bit over three years now, and one of the things that our Founder and my Co-CEO at the time, we were looking at the customer base, and we had just sold software to companies where we probably shouldn't have. It was like people bought a Ducati, and they needed a tricycle. It just wasn't a good match. We made the conscious decision in probably August or September of 2023 that we would sort of wind down that part of the portfolio. Many of those customers had three-year deals. You're starting to see the fall-off of that now. We expect to see that lower middle market attrition be substantially done by the end of the year. Over the last couple of years, we've done a much better job of those customers that were coming on the platform, making sure they were getting value out of BlackLine. We're working our way through it. It is a drag a little bit on customer count, but, and Patrick or Matt will keep me honest here, but the size of new customers is substantially larger than customers that are going out the door, which is good, because then we can invest in the relationship, support them the right way, work with their partner, their implementation partner, to really drive expansion of those accounts over time. As BlackLine continues to innovate, and we're innovating more now than we ever have as a company, there's that much more for our customers that they'll be able to do. I was telling one of the groups this morning, we're in business 25 years. As of the end of the year, we had written about 20 million lines of code in our first 24 years and seven months. In the last five months, we've written 5 million lines of code. Now, you can imagine how that's happening, right? It's all through our engineers now using AI in a different way, but it's just accelerating that much more that we can bring to the marketplace. And most of our innovation is done with our customers. We know it's not on a whim. We know it's what the marketplace wants, which we're very excited about. Okay. Great. It wouldn't be a complete discussion if we didn't touch a little bit more on AI. Patrick touched, I think, a little bit on the upside in terms of the Verity offering and how that's supporting growth within the platform. Can you talk about any of the real or perceived risks that AI poses to the platform and any way you'd like to address that in particular? Yeah. Look, I think, first of all, we have the large language models that are out there, and you see they, in theory, do everything. Probably not true. We have to answer those questions for our customers, and we could get questions like, "Well, I have a contract with," pick your favorite large language model, "and why can't I just build my agent there versus having to run on BlackLine?" We walk them through a very thoughtful, here is a build versus a buy, and then here's all the things that you might not necessarily understand, because it's great, and Patrick will tell you, anybody can produce a model, a reconciliation one time through an agent. It's the ability to get that done 1 million times, correctly, 1 million times with the right kind of control environment that the auditors are going to sign off on, that the regulators are going to accept. When you start to walk customers through that, I joke, but tokenization has become a four-letter curse word for many CFOs because they're spending tons of money, not getting a lot of ROI. Pretty quickly, people then begin to say, "Hey, we should go with the purpose-built software where we have a great partner that will help us through some kind of forward-deployed advisor to continue to innovate."What is different in the market now, you have a lot of the system integrators, the BPOs, who are all feeling pressure on their own business models like, "Hey, why can't we too create agents for you?" One of the things that will be different for us is opening up our platform even more than we have to those partners and BPOs that they can build on BlackLine. It's going to feel like if you go to the App Store. Before anything gets on an App Store, it's got to meet all the rigorous standards. That's what we're starting to explore with our partners and BPOs now. How do we go through that model? When you have a FinOps operating system agent that works with BlackLine that you know is going to be reliable, trustworthy, that the auditors can accept it, and things of that nature. There'll be noise. You've got obviously some native AI startups that can reconcile a checking account. That's great, but that's not the market that we serve. I think it'll put more pressure, candidly, on the lower end of the middle market than it will on our customer base any time soon. That said, we're going to keep an eye on that. There's one thing that, coming out of a consulting background, that I've always learned is if you didn't create it, you should be a really fast follower, if it makes sense. We have our eyes and ears on the marketplace, seeing what's happening in the market, what are our customers telling us, what are they asking for, to make sure we're either being responsive, proactive, or even better, being anticipatory as we move forward. Okay, great. As we wrap things up, you guys have been alluding to re-acceleration in the top line for a little while now, and we just talked through a lot of the growth levers that fall within that thought process. Whether it's the platform pricing, the enterprise opportunity, the opportunity to upsell with Verity. As a whole, can you just wrap things up and tell us why you have confidence in that re-acceleration in the top line, all those things considered? Yeah. Again, we'll probably tag team this just a little bit, but for me, there's a couple things I'm looking at that give me confidence. One is we've got seven or eight quarters now in a row where our pipeline just continues to increase. We see the interest from our customers. It's nice to have pipeline growth. What I'm looking at is when you start to have five, six, 10 meetings with enterprise customers and they bring 10, 15, 20 people to a meeting, you know they're serious, right? Because they're not doing that just for fun. That's one of the things we really look at that gives me a lot of confidence. The other thing that I focus on is RPO. You don't implement BlackLine and go, "I'm done." Because it's a constant journey of continuing to innovate and evolve. One of the things that I've been very encouraged by is the growth in our RPO, which shows the commitment that our customers are having to go to longer duration deals because they're signing up for the transformation. They like what they're seeing from an AI perspective. They know we're really reliable as an organization from a customer support, customer success, product innovation. Those are the two things that give me the greatest confidence. The last piece, which you may or may not agree with, is one of the things I track is regrettable turnover. Who's leaving my organization that I don't want to leave? Our benchmark is 5%, and that's been running 2%-3% now for the last couple of years. That tells me that the people we want to stay in the organization are committed. I said on one of the earnings calls, we have 1,800 people roughly stagnant over the last three years. 70-plus% of those people are new, and 25% of them are in now low-cost jurisdictions. We've completely changed the profile of the people in the organization, and the people we have here are the people we want and are sticking with it, and that to me is a pretty good testament. Those are the three things. You like that answer? I do. Okay. I think it's spot on. Consider my answer. Yeah. I could put numbers behind it, but yeah. Look, just real quickly, we saw a pipeline generation spike in the second half of 2024. The rate of that growth indicated that our bookings over the next year would probably grow by 20+%. That's exactly what happened in 2025. Throughout 2025, our pipeline build continued at that same rate, which then builds even more confidence that at even equal conversion rates, which are improving, we're going to grow 20-plus% in bookings for 2026. That all yields a revenue growth rate in 2027 in the low teens. To Owen's point, RPO is huge. This whole AI narrative really started to evolve at the end of last, well, probably summer of last year. In Q4, our RPO grew 23%. In Q1, it grew 18%. There's this narrative out there that AI is going to do X, Y, and Z, yet our customers are signing up at rates for longer contracts, more revenue durability. Our RPO is over $1 billion for the first time in history. That's guaranteed revenue and guaranteed future revenue. Putting real factual finance data points behind our company's performance is why we feel confident in the growth model. Awesome. Well, we are at time. We went over, yeah. Sorry about that. No, that's great. Thank you guys so much. Good to be with you again. Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for coming out. Congratulations on the new role. Thank you.

Speaker 2: All right. We'll kick it off here. Good morning, everyone. Thank you guys for joining the BlackLine session today. I'm Pat McIlwee. I'm a Research Analyst here at William Blair, covering software, as a part of which I cover BlackLine. I am required to inform you that a complete list of disclosures and conflicts of interest are available at our website at williamblair.com. With that, we're very excited to have the BlackLine team back at our conference this year, including Chair and CEO, Owen Ryan, and CFO, Patrick Villanova. For those not familiar, BlackLine provides a cloud-based software that automates and modernizes accounting and finance operations, particularly around Financial Close reconciliations and Intercompany workflows. That's my brief two-liner on the business, but it'd be helpful to hear it from your perspective. All right. all right We'll kick it off here. we'll kick it off here Good morning, everyone. good morning everyone Thank you guys for joining the BlackLine session today. thank you guys for joining the blackline session today I'm Pat McIlwee. i'm pat mcilwee I'm a Research Analyst here at William Blair, covering software, as a part of which I cover BlackLine. i'm a research analyst here at william blair covering software as a part of which i cover blackline I am required to inform you that a complete list of disclosures and conflicts of interest are available at our website at williamblair.com. i am required to inform you that a complete list of disclosures and conflicts of interest are available at our website at williamblair.com With that, we're very excited to have the BlackLine team back at our conference this year, including Chair and CEO, Owen Ryan, and CFO, Patrick Villanova. with that we're very excited to have the blackline team back at our conference this year including chair and ceo owen ryan and cfo patrick villanova For those not familiar, BlackLine provides a cloud-based software that automates and modernizes accounting and finance operations, particularly around Financial Close reconciliations and Intercompany workflows. for those not familiar blackline provides a cloud-based software that automates and modernizes accounting and finance operations particularly around financial close reconciliations and intercompany workflows That's my brief two-liner on the business, but it'd be helpful to hear it from your perspective. that's my brief two-liner on the business but it'd be helpful to hear it from your perspective Owen, can you just start us off by describing BlackLine's product and service offering as you see it, what that toolkit looks like, and how the platform has developed over time? Owen, can you just start us off by describing BlackLine's product and service offering as you see it, what that toolkit looks like, and how the platform has developed over time? owen can you just start us off by describing blackline's product and service offering as you see it what that toolkit looks like and how the platform has developed over time

Speaker 1: Okay. Well, thank you. Okay. okay Well, thank you. well thank you

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. yeah

Speaker 1: Good to be here again, and look forward to the conversation. We actually celebrated our 25th anniversary yesterday. Not many software companies live that long, so it was nice to be able to accomplish that milestone. You've talked a little bit about what it is that we do. I would say, probably more than anything else, we believe we're probably the most mission-critical system for the office of the CFO. If you sit there today, if you just take our public companies that we serve, they run about $54 trillion of market cap runs through BlackLine every day. We're very important to sort of making sure financial statements can be produced, management can opine on them, auditors and the regulators can sign off on them and be comfortable with what's out in the capital markets. Good to be here again, and look forward to the conversation. good to be here again and look forward to the conversation We actually celebrated our 25th anniversary yesterday. we actually celebrated our 25th anniversary yesterday Not many software companies live that long, so it was nice to be able to accomplish that milestone. not many software companies live that long so it was nice to be able to accomplish that milestone You've talked a little bit about what it is that we do. you've talked a little bit about what it is that we do I would say, probably more than anything else, we believe we're probably the most mission-critical system for the office of the CFO. i would say probably more than anything else we believe we're probably the most mission-critical system for the office of the cfo If you sit there today, if you just take our public companies that we serve, they run about $54 trillion of market cap runs through BlackLine every day. if you sit there today if you just take our public companies that we serve they run about $54 trillion of market cap runs through blackline every day We're very important to sort of making sure financial statements can be produced, management can opine on them, auditors and the regulators can sign off on them and be comfortable with what's out in the capital markets. we're very important to sort of making sure financial statements can be produced management can opine on them auditors and the regulators can sign off on them and be comfortable with what's out in the capital markets Our business started with sort of simple solutions like recs and tasks that has expanded the complete Financial Close all the way up through consolidation now and some level of reporting. We also have a vibrant, growing Invoice-to-Cash business. Importantly, we've always been sort of cloud-based. One of the things that's really shifting in our business, and it's been accelerating, we have a solution that's part of our platforms called Studio 360, which allows sort of a CFO and controller to have a complete view. I think the term people often talk about is a control tower, see everything going on within the Financial Close. That's always been important, but that's become even increasingly important, from a governance perspective, with the acceleration of adoption of AI in the marketplace. Our business started with sort of simple solutions like recs and tasks that has expanded the complete Financial Close all the way up through consolidation now and some level of reporting. our business started with sort of simple solutions like recs and tasks that has expanded the complete financial close all the way up through consolidation now and some level of reporting We also have a vibrant, growing Invoice-to-Cash business. we also have a vibrant growing invoice-to-cash business Importantly, we've always been sort of cloud-based. importantly we've always been sort of cloud-based One of the things that's really shifting in our business, and it's been accelerating, we have a solution that's part of our platforms called Studio 360, which allows sort of a CFO and controller to have a complete view. one of the things that's really shifting in our business and it's been accelerating we have a solution that's part of our platforms called studio 360 which allows sort of a cfo and controller to have a complete view I think the term people often talk about is a control tower, see everything going on within the Financial Close. i think the term people often talk about is a control tower see everything going on within the financial close That's always been important, but that's become even increasingly important, from a governance perspective, with the acceleration of adoption of AI in the marketplace. that's always been important but that's become even increasingly important from a governance perspective with the acceleration of adoption of ai in the marketplace Now so many companies are trying to build additional agents to work with BlackLine, and making sure the CFO and Controller have good line of sight as to what's being built, that it works, it's reliable. Importantly for us, one of the things we do spend a fair bit of time on in our business is working with the world's largest accounting and auditing firms to make sure we meet all the regulatory and accounting standards, that they have to fulfill auditing standards. Increasingly, helping to speak with the PCAOB and the SEC and other global regulators about how to think about AI in this world for the registrants that files public statements. That's probably a little bit of it. We've got about 4,400 customers in almost every major market in the world, certainly in the G7 countries. Now so many companies are trying to build additional agents to work with BlackLine, and making sure the CFO and Controller have good line of sight as to what's being built, that it works, it's reliable. now so many companies are trying to build additional agents to work with blackline and making sure the cfo and controller have good line of sight as to what's being built that it works it's reliable Importantly for us, one of the things we do spend a fair bit of time on in our business is working with the world's largest accounting and auditing firms to make sure we meet all the regulatory and accounting standards, that they have to fulfill auditing standards. importantly for us one of the things we do spend a fair bit of time on in our business is working with the world's largest accounting and auditing firms to make sure we meet all the regulatory and accounting standards that they have to fulfill auditing standards Increasingly, helping to speak with the PCAOB and the SEC and other global regulators about how to think about AI in this world for the registrants that files public statements. increasingly helping to speak with the pcaob and the sec and other global regulators about how to think about ai in this world for the registrants that files public statements That's probably a little bit of it. that's probably a little bit of it We've got about 4,400 customers in almost every major market in the world, certainly in the G7 countries. we've got about 4,400 customers in almost every major market in the world certainly in the g7 countries We typically have at least half of the larger public companies running on BlackLine. We typically have at least half of the larger public companies running on BlackLine. we typically have at least half of the larger public companies running on blackline

Speaker 2: Great. Yeah, thanks, Owen, and I think that's a good kind of segue into my next question. Your product's already used by 70% of the Fortune 100. It's what you have in your investor deck. I think roughly three-quarters of that ARR comes from enterprise clientele. Can you help us frame how you think about your growth levers? Is it deeper penetration within that enterprise opportunity, your deeper penetration within your existing customer base, new lands for the downmarket, or just in general, how do you think about the mix of new business versus existing account expansion? Great. great Yeah, thanks, Owen, and I think that's a good kind of segue into my next question. yeah thanks owen and i think that's a good kind of segue into my next question Your product's already used by 70% of the Fortune 100. your product's already used by 70% of the fortune 100 It's what you have in your investor deck. it's what you have in your investor deck I think roughly three-quarters of that ARR comes from enterprise clientele. i think roughly three-quarters of that arr comes from enterprise clientele Can you help us frame how you think about your growth levers? can you help us frame how you think about your growth levers Is it deeper penetration within that enterprise opportunity, your deeper penetration within your existing customer base, new lands for the downmarket, or just in general, how do you think about the mix of new business versus existing account expansion? is it deeper penetration within that enterprise opportunity your deeper penetration within your existing customer base new lands for the downmarket or just in general how do you think about the mix of new business versus existing account expansion

Speaker 1: Patrick and I have become pretty good at tag teaming, we'll do that on this question as well. I think, first of all, we still have plenty of white space in our existing customer base. If you look at some of our most successful customers, they could be 10x as large as some of their peers. You could take our best oil and gas companies from $5 million, one of their competitors would be $500,000. We're trying to get those customers to expand using much more of BlackLine across their whole organization. We still have plenty of large companies to pursue. We have about 60% of the Fortune 500, think of it this way, there's still 240 large companies there. In all the global markets, there continues to be plenty of opportunity. We have recently been building out our FedRAMP capabilities. Patrick and I have become pretty good at tag teaming, we'll do that on this question as well. patrick and i have become pretty good at tag teaming we'll do that on this question as well I think, first of all, we still have plenty of white space in our existing customer base. i think first of all we still have plenty of white space in our existing customer base If you look at some of our most successful customers, they could be 10x as large as some of their peers. if you look at some of our most successful customers they could be 10x as large as some of their peers You could take our best oil and gas companies from $5 million, one of their competitors would be $500,000. you could take our best oil and gas companies from $5 million one of their competitors would be $500,000 We're trying to get those customers to expand using much more of BlackLine across their whole organization. we're trying to get those customers to expand using much more of blackline across their whole organization We still have plenty of large companies to pursue. we still have plenty of large companies to pursue We have about 60% of the Fortune 500, think of it this way, there's still 240 large companies there. we have about 60% of the fortune 500 think of it this way there's still 240 large companies there In all the global markets, there continues to be plenty of opportunity. in all the global markets there continues to be plenty of opportunity We have recently been building out our FedRAMP capabilities. we have recently been building out our fedramp capabilities You're starting to see some good traction with that. Obviously, it's a little bit we'll expect to see this year in the third quarter, the so-called killing season in the FedRAMP marketplace. I'm not sure I like that terminology, but that's what they call it, and then certainly more in 2027. Strategically, we're aligning to places where SAP has been very successful, and because of the SAP BlackLine partnership, trying to invest in those markets. For example, Saudi Arabia seemed like a good idea last year. It still is a good idea despite some of the challenges in the marketplace, but that will work out very well for us as we move forward. Those are some of the bigger things, but you've got a whole list that you go through. You're starting to see some good traction with that. you're starting to see some good traction with that Obviously, it's a little bit we'll expect to see this year in the third quarter, the so-called killing season in the FedRAMP marketplace. obviously it's a little bit we'll expect to see this year in the third quarter the so-called killing season in the fedramp marketplace I'm not sure I like that terminology, but that's what they call it, and then certainly more in 2027. i'm not sure i like that terminology but that's what they call it and then certainly more in 2027 Strategically, we're aligning to places where SAP has been very successful, and because of the SAP BlackLine partnership, trying to invest in those markets. strategically we're aligning to places where sap has been very successful and because of the sap blackline partnership trying to invest in those markets For example, Saudi Arabia seemed like a good idea last year. for example saudi arabia seemed like a good idea last year It still is a good idea despite some of the challenges in the marketplace, but that will work out very well for us as we move forward. it still is a good idea despite some of the challenges in the marketplace but that will work out very well for us as we move forward Those are some of the bigger things, but you've got a whole list that you go through. those are some of the bigger things but you've got a whole list that you go through

Speaker 3: You hit on a lot of them, Owen, but maybe you want to double-click on our existing customer base and the opportunities that present there. Owen used an example, but, without putting precise numbers behind it, some of our top, best-adopted, best-implemented customers spend millions of dollars a year with us. Customers of a similar size, also in the Fortune 50, Fortune 25, spend a couple hundred thousand dollars. There is an opportunity there with those customers that are spending a couple hundred thousand dollars to bring them to the level of adoption, the level of implementation, the level of automation that some of our top customers have. How are we going to go about doing that? How are we doing that? Maybe to put some maybe math behind what Owen, where he kicked this off, we have four solutions overall as an organization. You hit on a lot of them, Owen, but maybe you want to double-click on our existing customer base and the opportunities that present there. you hit on a lot of them owen but maybe you want to double-click on our existing customer base and the opportunities that present there Owen used an example, but, without putting precise numbers behind it, some of our top, best-adopted, best-implemented customers spend millions of dollars a year with us. owen used an example but without putting precise numbers behind it some of our top best-adopted best-implemented customers spend millions of dollars a year with us Customers of a similar size, also in the Fortune 50, Fortune 25, spend a couple hundred thousand dollars. There is an opportunity there with those customers that are spending a couple hundred thousand dollars to bring them to the level of adoption, the level of implementation, the level of automation that some of our top customers have. customers of a similar size also in the fortune 50 fortune 25 spend a couple hundred thousand dollars. there is an opportunity there with those customers that are spending a couple hundred thousand dollars to bring them to the level of adoption the level of implementation the level of automation that some of our top customers have How are we going to go about doing that? how are we going to go about doing that How are we doing that? how are we doing that Maybe to put some maybe math behind what Owen, where he kicked this off, we have four solutions overall as an organization. maybe to put some maybe math behind what owen where he kicked this off we have four solutions overall as an organization Where we started with Financial Close, and then we expand it into Intercompany, and then further into Invoice-to-Cash, and then finally, Financial Reporting & Analytics. That's how we serve the entire office of the CFO. Historically, as recently as two years ago, they were four independent solutions. What we rolled out last year is our platform, Studio 360. Think of it as it's a connective fiber between all four of our solutions, linked by a single data layer. What does that mean? It's a single source of truth. All the data organically flows between our solutions, and that opens the doors up for rapid expansion into our customer base. It breaks down barriers between our four solutions. It turns four solutions into one platform. That's great for a CIO when you're having that conversation. I'm part of the GTM motion a lot. Where we started with Financial Close, and then we expand it into Intercompany, and then further into Invoice-to-Cash, and then finally, Financial Reporting & Analytics. where we started with financial close and then we expand it into intercompany and then further into invoice-to-cash and then finally financial reporting & analytics That's how we serve the entire office of the CFO. that's how we serve the entire office of the cfo Historically, as recently as two years ago, they were four independent solutions. historically as recently as two years ago they were four independent solutions What we rolled out last year is our platform, Studio 360. what we rolled out last year is our platform studio 360 Think of it as it's a connective fiber between all four of our solutions, linked by a single data layer. think of it as it's a connective fiber between all four of our solutions linked by a single data layer What does that mean? what does that mean It's a single source of truth. it's a single source of truth All the data organically flows between our solutions, and that opens the doors up for rapid expansion into our customer base. all the data organically flows between our solutions and that opens the doors up for rapid expansion into our customer base It breaks down barriers between our four solutions. it breaks down barriers between our four solutions It turns four solutions into one platform. it turns four solutions into one platform That's great for a CIO when you're having that conversation. that's great for a cio when you're having that conversation I'm part of the GTM motion a lot. i'm part of the gtm motion a lot I'm a user, as a former CAO, now I'm the CFO. A CIO loves to hear, this is one platform that he or she has to maintain, not four independent solutions. You pivot and have the same conversation with a CFO or a controller. They love to hear, and I can personally attest to this, you just want one single source of truth. You don't want APIs. You don't want connectors between our four solutions. You want one source of truth where you can release technology into that and feel good about the accuracy of the data flowing from solution to solution. This is opening up rapid cross-sell opportunities within our base. The second phase of this, which is probably where this conversation is leading, we are now releasing agents. We have designed agents. I'm a user, as a former CAO, now I'm the CFO. i'm a user as a former cao now i'm the cfo A CIO loves to hear, this is one platform that he or she has to maintain, not four independent solutions. a cio loves to hear this is one platform that he or she has to maintain not four independent solutions You pivot and have the same conversation with a CFO or a controller. you pivot and have the same conversation with a cfo or a controller They love to hear, and I can personally attest to this, you just want one single source of truth. they love to hear and i can personally attest to this you just want one single source of truth You don't want APIs. you don't want apis You don't want connectors between our four solutions. you don't want connectors between our four solutions You want one source of truth where you can release technology into that and feel good about the accuracy of the data flowing from solution to solution. you want one source of truth where you can release technology into that and feel good about the accuracy of the data flowing from solution to solution This is opening up rapid cross-sell opportunities within our base. this is opening up rapid cross-sell opportunities within our base The second phase of this, which is probably where this conversation is leading, we are now releasing agents. the second phase of this which is probably where this conversation is leading we are now releasing agents We have designed agents. we have designed agents As we become more of an AI-native company, AI-led company, we're leaning into that. For an agent to work in our world, it has to work off one data source. These companies that might be designing their own agents and have 50 ERPs or a financial ecosystem with 100 systems, that agent's going to return 50-100 different answers. In BlackLine, when you release an agent into our ecosystem, it's one data source. It responds with one answer, and that answer is right because the input, the data we know is accurate, reconciled, and SOX compliant. That was a long answer, I'm personally very excited about the opportunity, where we're going as an organization, product-led with innovation into our own customer base. As we become more of an AI-native company, AI-led company, we're leaning into that. as we become more of an ai-native company ai-led company we're leaning into that For an agent to work in our world, it has to work off one data source. for an agent to work in our world it has to work off one data source These companies that might be designing their own agents and have 50 ERPs or a financial ecosystem with 100 systems, that agent's going to return 50- 100 different answers. these companies that might be designing their own agents and have 50 erps or a financial ecosystem with 100 systems that agent's going to return 50- 100 different answers In BlackLine, when you release an agent into our ecosystem, it's one data source. in blackline when you release an agent into our ecosystem it's one data source It responds with one answer, and that answer is right because the input, the data we know is accurate, reconciled, and SOX compliant. it responds with one answer and that answer is right because the input the data we know is accurate reconciled and sox compliant That was a long answer, I'm personally very excited about the opportunity, where we're going as an organization, product-led with innovation into our own customer base. that was a long answer i'm personally very excited about the opportunity where we're going as an organization product-led with innovation into our own customer base

Speaker 2: Yeah. That's great. Thank you both for the color there. I think that leads nicely into another key concern in the software sector right now, which is pricing models. As you guys have evolved into a truer platform with Studio 360, you've made some changes to your pricing model, with platform pricing now growing as a portion of the overall revenue base. Can you just talk through how that dynamic works as you evolve into this platform? Yeah. yeah That's great. that's great Thank you both for the color there. thank you both for the color there I think that leads nicely into another key concern in the software sector right now, which is pricing models. i think that leads nicely into another key concern in the software sector right now which is pricing models As you guys have evolved into a truer platform with Studio 360, you've made some changes to your pricing model, with platform pricing now growing as a portion of the overall revenue base. as you guys have evolved into a truer platform with studio 360 you've made some changes to your pricing model with platform pricing now growing as a portion of the overall revenue base Can you just talk through how that dynamic works as you evolve into this platform? can you just talk through how that dynamic works as you evolve into this platform

Speaker 3: Yeah. Platform pricing, think of it very simply. There are three monetization levers that we're seeing with platform pricing, and I touched on a couple of them there. First and foremost, if you want access as a customer or a new customer, existing customer, to the agents I just referred to, agents that are bringing levels of automation to the industry and to this company never seen before, you have to be on our platform. You have to be on Studio 360. This is a product-led initiative. When you move to the platform, what we're experiencing or seeing, and we have data points to prove this out, we're seeing about a 10%-40% uplift in your baseline subscription right out of the gates, day one. Yeah. yeah Platform pricing, think of it very simply. platform pricing think of it very simply There are three monetization levers that we're seeing with platform pricing, and I touched on a couple of them there. there are three monetization levers that we're seeing with platform pricing and i touched on a couple of them there First and foremost, if you want access as a customer or a new customer, existing customer, to the agents I just referred to, agents that are bringing levels of automation to the industry and to this company never seen before, you have to be on our platform. first and foremost if you want access as a customer or a new customer existing customer to the agents i just referred to agents that are bringing levels of automation to the industry and to this company never seen before you have to be on our platform You have to be on Studio 360. you have to be on studio 360 This is a product-led initiative. this is a product-led initiative When you move to the platform, what we're experiencing or seeing, and we have data points to prove this out, we're seeing about a 10%-40% uplift in your baseline subscription right out of the gates, day one. when you move to the platform what we're experiencing or seeing and we have data points to prove this out we're seeing about a 10%-40% uplift in your baseline subscription right out of the gates day one 13% of our ARR, eligible ARR, is already on platform, so we have a pretty good sample size proving out customers are willing to pay substantially more just to have access to this. The second monetization event that happens after you move to the platform is actually attrition mitigation. What does that mean? For the 25 years of our history, our number one source of attrition has been user reductions. The better customers get at using our product, the less accountants, the less finance professionals they need on our product. It's kind of counterintuitive. The better customers get, the less users they need. By moving onto the platform, you have unlimited users. Your fee is fixed. It's no longer seat-based. We're moving away from that, and we're moving aggressively. 13% of our ARR, eligible ARR, is already on platform, so we have a pretty good sample size proving out customers are willing to pay substantially more just to have access to this. 13% of our arr eligible arr is already on platform so we have a pretty good sample size proving out customers are willing to pay substantially more just to have access to this The second monetization event that happens after you move to the platform is actually attrition mitigation. the second monetization event that happens after you move to the platform is actually attrition mitigation What does that mean? what does that mean For the 25 years of our history, our number one source of attrition has been user reductions. for the 25 years of our history our number one source of attrition has been user reductions The better customers get at using our product, the less accountants, the less finance professionals they need on our product. the better customers get at using our product the less accountants the less finance professionals they need on our product It's kind of counterintuitive. it's kind of counterintuitive The better customers get, the less users they need. the better customers get the less users they need By moving onto the platform, you have unlimited users. by moving onto the platform you have unlimited users Your fee is fixed. your fee is fixed It's no longer seat-based. it's no longer seat-based We're moving away from that, and we're moving aggressively. we're moving away from that and we're moving aggressively That takes away a source of attrition, which was our top headwind for revenue growth in this company's history. Third, what I just mentioned earlier, and this is the biggest piece of this, of these three monetization levers. The agents are going to be performing accounting and finance functions on a transaction basis. The more transactions they perform on your behalf, fingers off the keyboard, the more your price goes up. It's more revenue for us. It's a higher ROI to the customer. It removes more finance and accounting professionals from doing the rote manual work. It drives efficiency, it drives accuracy, and it's literally hands off the keyboard. It starts with a day one uplift, then user attrition mitigation, and then eventually the third lever is consumption, and that's how our pricing model works, and it's a notable tailwind too, to our overall growth story. That takes away a source of attrition, which was our top headwind for revenue growth in this company's history. that takes away a source of attrition which was our top headwind for revenue growth in this company's history Third, what I just mentioned earlier, and this is the biggest piece of this, of these three monetization levers. third what i just mentioned earlier and this is the biggest piece of this of these three monetization levers The agents are going to be performing accounting and finance functions on a transaction basis. the agents are going to be performing accounting and finance functions on a transaction basis The more transactions they perform on your behalf, fingers off the keyboard, the more your price goes up. the more transactions they perform on your behalf fingers off the keyboard the more your price goes up It's more revenue for us. it's more revenue for us It's a higher ROI to the customer. it's a higher roi to the customer It removes more finance and accounting professionals from doing the rote manual work. it removes more finance and accounting professionals from doing the rote manual work It drives efficiency, it drives accuracy, and it's literally hands off the keyboard. it drives efficiency it drives accuracy and it's literally hands off the keyboard It starts with a day one uplift, then user attrition mitigation, and then eventually the third lever is consumption, and that's how our pricing model works, and it's a notable tailwind too, to our overall growth story. it starts with a day one uplift then user attrition mitigation and then eventually the third lever is consumption and that's how our pricing model works and it's a notable tailwind too to our overall growth story

Speaker 2: Patrick, have you guys framed how substantial that uplifts can be from the seat base to the platform, and then whether or not there's any way to quantify platform to consumption? Patrick, have you guys framed how substantial that uplifts can be from the seat base to the platform, and then whether or not there's any way to quantify platform to consumption? patrick have you guys framed how substantial that uplifts can be from the seat base to the platform and then whether or not there's any way to quantify platform to consumption

Speaker 3: As a note, we're seeing 10%-40% uplift just to get access to this technology, and that's right out of the gates. It's early, we are seeing that rapidly increase. We released these agents into the platform during the second half of last year. Something to take note of, we give you a sample of agents for free, transactions for free as part of the uplift. That enables a customer to test them As a note, we're seeing 10%-40% uplift just to get access to this technology, and that's right out of the gates. as a note we're seeing 10%-40% uplift just to get access to this technology and that's right out of the gates It's early, we are seeing that rapidly increase. it's early we are seeing that rapidly increase We released these agents into the platform during the second half of last year. we released these agents into the platform during the second half of last year Something to take note of, we give you a sample of agents for free, transactions for free as part of the uplift. something to take note of we give you a sample of agents for free transactions for free as part of the uplift That enables a customer to test them that enables a customer to test them Make sure that that agent is doing exactly what an accountant or a finance professional would do to make sure that internal and external audits sign off on the work performed by that agent to make sure that agent is compliant with that company's internal policy and procedures. That, typically, in a public company setting, takes a couple quarters to validate. Once you prove that agent is doing the identical work that normally done by a human or normally done manually, that's when the hands-off-the-keyboard begins. You take the work out of the human, you put it into the hands of the agent, proverbially speaking, and then that's when transactions increase. We're seeing that increase now, and that represents the biggest opportunity in our AI roadmap. Make sure that that agent is doing exactly what an accountant or a finance professional would do to make sure that internal and external audits sign off on the work performed by that agent to make sure that agent is compliant with that company's internal policy and procedures. make sure that that agent is doing exactly what an accountant or a finance professional would do to make sure that internal and external audits sign off on the work performed by that agent to make sure that agent is compliant with that company's internal policy and procedures That, typically, in a public company setting, takes a couple quarters to validate. that typically in a public company setting takes a couple quarters to validate Once you prove that agent is doing the identical work that normally done by a human or normally done manually, that's when the hands-off-the-keyboard begins. once you prove that agent is doing the identical work that normally done by a human or normally done manually that's when the hands-off-the-keyboard begins You take the work out of the human, you put it into the hands of the agent, proverbially speaking, and then that's when transactions increase. you take the work out of the human you put it into the hands of the agent proverbially speaking and then that's when transactions increase We're seeing that increase now, and that represents the biggest opportunity in our AI roadmap. we're seeing that increase now and that represents the biggest opportunity in our ai roadmap

Speaker 2: Okay, great. Typically, we have more of a generalist audience here at the Growth Stock Conference. BlackLine has been a longstanding partner of SAP. Can you just help everyone understand what that relationship looks like and how it has evolved over time? If their cloud transition, the cloud transitions of these large ERP players as a whole, if that has any implications for your business? Okay, great. okay great Typically, we have more of a generalist audience here at the Growth Stock Conference. typically we have more of a generalist audience here at the growth stock conference BlackLine has been a longstanding partner of SAP. blackline has been a longstanding partner of sap Can you just help everyone understand what that relationship looks like and how it has evolved over time? can you just help everyone understand what that relationship looks like and how it has evolved over time If their cloud transition, the cloud transitions of these large ERP players as a whole, if that has any implications for your business? if their cloud transition the cloud transitions of these large erp players as a whole if that has any implications for your business

Speaker 1: Yeah. We've had a longstanding relationship with SAP. We have a special relationship, what they call their Solution Extension or SolEx partnership with them. We do about 26% of our revenue comes through working with them together in the marketplace through the SolEx relationship. Now, we do have other SAP customers that are not SolEx. What do we do together? There's a couple things that are critical. One is we do a lot of product roadmap together. If you go on the SAP website, you'll see something called the Golden Architecture, and almost right in the center of the SAP ERP world is BlackLine. What goes on in the ERP, then where the transactions are processed, then eventually it has to be reconciled, matched, and things of that nature and controlled, and that's where BlackLine then fits in together with all that. That's one piece. Yeah. yeah We've had a longstanding relationship with SAP. we've had a longstanding relationship with sap We have a special relationship, what they call their Solution Extension or SolEx partnership with them. we have a special relationship what they call their solution extension or solex partnership with them We do about 26% of our revenue comes through working with them together in the marketplace through the SolEx relationship. we do about 26% of our revenue comes through working with them together in the marketplace through the solex relationship Now, we do have other SAP customers that are not SolEx. now we do have other sap customers that are not solex What do we do together? what do we do together There's a couple things that are critical. there's a couple things that are critical One is we do a lot of product roadmap together. one is we do a lot of product roadmap together If you go on the SAP website, you'll see something called the Golden Architecture, and almost right in the center of the SAP ERP world is BlackLine. if you go on the sap website you'll see something called the golden architecture and almost right in the center of the sap erp world is blackline What goes on in the ERP, then where the transactions are processed, then eventually it has to be reconciled, matched, and things of that nature and controlled, and that's where BlackLine then fits in together with all that. what goes on in the erp then where the transactions are processed then eventually it has to be reconciled matched and things of that nature and controlled and that's where blackline then fits in together with all that That's one piece. that's one piece The second way is we have a good large joint go-to-market team. Within BlackLine, we call it our SAP Catalyst team. The folks are dedicated to working with SAP in the marketplace. We also have joint customer success teams that work together. That's something relatively new, where the SAP professionals and the BlackLine professionals work together and are incented to make sure that the right kind of adoption takes place of the BlackLine platform within SAP. One of the reasons we had to do this is if you're an SAP, you got a big bag of things you can carry, and a lot of times the rep didn't necessarily care whether it was BlackLine or something else, as long as they had revenue. Sometimes they would switch out products, and so they weren't as focused on getting BlackLine as well implemented. That's all changed. The second way is we have a good large joint go-to-market team. the second way is we have a good large joint go-to-market team Within BlackLine, we call it our SAP Catalyst team. within blackline we call it our sap catalyst team The folks are dedicated to working with SAP in the marketplace. the folks are dedicated to working with sap in the marketplace We also have joint customer success teams that work together. we also have joint customer success teams that work together That's something relatively new, where the SAP professionals and the BlackLine professionals work together and are incented to make sure that the right kind of adoption takes place of the BlackLine platform within SAP. that's something relatively new where the sap professionals and the blackline professionals work together and are incented to make sure that the right kind of adoption takes place of the blackline platform within sap One of the reasons we had to do this is if you're an SAP, you got a big bag of things you can carry, and a lot of times the rep didn't necessarily care whether it was BlackLine or something else, as long as they had revenue. one of the reasons we had to do this is if you're an sap you got a big bag of things you can carry and a lot of times the rep didn't necessarily care whether it was blackline or something else as long as they had revenue Sometimes they would switch out products, and so they weren't as focused on getting BlackLine as well implemented. sometimes they would switch out products and so they weren't as focused on getting blackline as well implemented That's all changed. that's all changed There's really good, strong top-to-top relationships. I think over the next four to six weeks, we have three or four more product roadmap meetings, again, to sort of figure out the way forward. We have a joint approach to AI so that SAP has something called Joule, we have something called Verity. We've been working together through a memorandum of understanding how we develop our AI solutions in the marketplace. That works pretty well. The swim lanes are relatively clear. It doesn't mean that there's not some overlap at periods of time. The critical thing is we work really well together to work through those issues to make sure that we're focused on what the customer is looking for. It's a great partnership. There's really good, strong top-to-top relationships. there's really good strong top-to-top relationships I think over the next four to six weeks, we have three or four more product roadmap meetings, again, to sort of figure out the way forward. i think over the next four to six weeks we have three or four more product roadmap meetings again to sort of figure out the way forward We have a joint approach to AI so that SAP has something called Joule, we have something called Verity. we have a joint approach to ai so that sap has something called joule we have something called verity We've been working together through a memorandum of understanding how we develop our AI solutions in the marketplace. we've been working together through a memorandum of understanding how we develop our ai solutions in the marketplace That works pretty well. that works pretty well The swim lanes are relatively clear. the swim lanes are relatively clear It doesn't mean that there's not some overlap at periods of time. it doesn't mean that there's not some overlap at periods of time The critical thing is we work really well together to work through those issues to make sure that we're focused on what the customer is looking for. the critical thing is we work really well together to work through those issues to make sure that we're focused on what the customer is looking for It's a great partnership. it's a great partnership We're the only partnership they have in the office of the CFO that does this, and we are going to continue to invest and support that because it's a great relationship from our vantage point. We're the only partnership they have in the office of the CFO that does this, and we are going to continue to invest and support that because it's a great relationship from our vantage point. we're the only partnership they have in the office of the cfo that does this and we are going to continue to invest and support that because it's a great relationship from our vantage point

Speaker 2: Okay. Any notable implications of this cloud transition? Does that increase the amount of RFPs in the market? Okay. okay Any notable implications of this cloud transition? any notable implications of this cloud transition Does that increase the amount of RFPs in the market? does that increase the amount of rfps in the market

Speaker 1: It's helped. I mean It's helped. it's helped I mean i mean

Speaker 3: It's helped the scales. It's helped the scales. it's helped the scales

Speaker 1: Listen, I think as SAP is sort of shutting down its on-prem capabilities, there's obviously going to be a migration. I think one of the things where it's a benefit to BlackLine, and we certainly saw this at ExxonMobil, where if you just move from on-prem to the cloud in your ERP, there's not a whole lot of value that comes out of that. It's a big number, it's a cost, but there's not necessarily a tremendous benefit. I think what we figured out jointly is if you start with finance first, if you start with BlackLine, there's much more of an uplift. It's about a year ago when the CFO of ExxonMobil talked on her earnings call about the implementation of BlackLine as part of the SAP migration and how much value they achieved as an organization. Listen, I think as SAP is sort of shutting down its on-prem capabilities, there's obviously going to be a migration. listen i think as sap is sort of shutting down its on-prem capabilities there's obviously going to be a migration I think one of the things where it's a benefit to BlackLine, and we certainly saw this at ExxonMobil, where if you just move from on-prem to the cloud in your ERP, there's not a whole lot of value that comes out of that. i think one of the things where it's a benefit to blackline and we certainly saw this at exxonmobil where if you just move from on-prem to the cloud in your erp there's not a whole lot of value that comes out of that It's a big number, it's a cost, but there's not necessarily a tremendous benefit. it's a big number it's a cost but there's not necessarily a tremendous benefit I think what we figured out jointly is if you start with finance first, if you start with BlackLine, there's much more of an uplift. i think what we figured out jointly is if you start with finance first if you start with blackline there's much more of an uplift It's about a year ago when the CFO of ExxonMobil talked on her earnings call about the implementation of BlackLine as part of the SAP migration and how much value they achieved as an organization. it's about a year ago when the cfo of exxonmobil talked on her earnings call about the implementation of blackline as part of the sap migration and how much value they achieved as an organization I couldn't have had a better commercial from that, and Delta was another world-class example of that. Yes, there is uplift. I think it's very real. It never seems to happen as quickly as we would like, because today, if you're going to spend $100 million or $1 billion migrating your ERP, you better be able to show that you can get a real good return on investment. It will be interesting as SAP closes that window of no longer supporting on-prem, whenever that might be. That certainly should be even more of a catalyst. I couldn't have had a better commercial from that, and Delta was another world-class example of that. i couldn't have had a better commercial from that and delta was another world-class example of that Yes, there is uplift. yes there is uplift I think it's very real. i think it's very real It never seems to happen as quickly as we would like, because today, if you're going to spend $100 million or $1 billion migrating your ERP, you better be able to show that you can get a real good return on investment. it never seems to happen as quickly as we would like because today if you're going to spend $100 million or $1 billion migrating your erp you better be able to show that you can get a real good return on investment It will be interesting as SAP closes that window of no longer supporting on-prem, whenever that might be. it will be interesting as sap closes that window of no longer supporting on-prem whenever that might be That certainly should be even more of a catalyst. that certainly should be even more of a catalyst

Speaker 2: Okay, great. As we think about those large customers, we look at the numbers a little bit more. You guys have been driving really impressive growth across your size cohorts with customers over $1 million in ARR growing nearly 20% last year, and they grew faster than customers over $250K in ARR, and so forth. My question is, what specific products or capabilities are resonating with those large customers and supporting that growth at the high end? How, if at all, have you optimized your sales motion to do that? Okay, great. okay great As we think about those large customers, we look at the numbers a little bit more. as we think about those large customers we look at the numbers a little bit more You guys have been driving really impressive growth across your size cohorts with customers over $1 million in ARR growing nearly 20% last year, and they grew faster than customers over $250K in ARR, and so forth. you guys have been driving really impressive growth across your size cohorts with customers over $1 million in arr growing nearly 20% last year and they grew faster than customers over $250k in arr and so forth My question is, what specific products or capabilities are resonating with those large customers and supporting that growth at the high end? my question is what specific products or capabilities are resonating with those large customers and supporting that growth at the high end How, if at all, have you optimized your sales motion to do that? how if at all have you optimized your sales motion to do that

Speaker 1: I think Patrick and I will tag team on this one again because he's in the market almost as much as I am talking with customers. I think a lot of this has been around client selection. In the past, I would've said we would've sold software to anybody, anywhere, anytime. We've been paying for that in some of the lower, mid-market churn and attrition over the last couple of years as we pulled away from that. We do a much better job of having upfront qualifying the customer and truly understanding, are they willing, are they committed to a digital finance transformation journey? If the answer to that is yes, then we can sell to them and deliver that much more value across the platform. I think Patrick and I will tag team on this one again because he's in the market almost as much as I am talking with customers. i think patrick and i will tag team on this one again because he's in the market almost as much as i am talking with customers I think a lot of this has been around client selection. In the past, I would've said we would've sold software to anybody, anywhere, anytime. i think a lot of this has been around client selection. in the past i would've said we would've sold software to anybody anywhere anytime We've been paying for that in some of the lower, mid-market churn and attrition over the last couple of years as we pulled away from that. we've been paying for that in some of the lower mid-market churn and attrition over the last couple of years as we pulled away from that We do a much better job of having upfront qualifying the customer and truly understanding, are they willing, are they committed to a digital finance transformation journey? we do a much better job of having upfront qualifying the customer and truly understanding are they willing are they committed to a digital finance transformation journey If the answer to that is yes, then we can sell to them and deliver that much more value across the platform. if the answer to that is yes then we can sell to them and deliver that much more value across the platform I think what you see, and I think we reported in the first quarter, 90+% of our new customers went right out with the platform, right out of the box. In those conversations, it's very clear what they're trying to accomplish, and they recognize that BlackLine is the right customer to go on that journey with. I think as you look at the traditional products for some of our existing customers who are going through some level of transition to the platform, they're still at, sometimes, buying additional parts of the suite versus buying the whole thing at this particular point in time. Mostly that's just because of their own bandwidth, and how quickly they think they can go through the transition. You're living with the product team quite a bit, and the go-to-market team as well, what are you seeing? I think what you see, and I think we reported in the first quarter, 90+% of our new customers went right out with the platform, right out of the box. i think what you see and i think we reported in the first quarter 90+% of our new customers went right out with the platform right out of the box In those conversations, it's very clear what they're trying to accomplish, and they recognize that BlackLine is the right customer to go on that journey with. in those conversations it's very clear what they're trying to accomplish and they recognize that blackline is the right customer to go on that journey with I think as you look at the traditional products for some of our existing customers who are going through some level of transition to the platform, they're still at, sometimes, buying additional parts of the suite versus buying the whole thing at this particular point in time. i think as you look at the traditional products for some of our existing customers who are going through some level of transition to the platform they're still at sometimes buying additional parts of the suite versus buying the whole thing at this particular point in time Mostly that's just because of their own bandwidth, and how quickly they think they can go through the transition. mostly that's just because of their own bandwidth and how quickly they think they can go through the transition You're living with the product team quite a bit, and the go-to-market team as well, what are you seeing? you're living with the product team quite a bit and the go-to-market team as well what are you seeing

Speaker 3: Playing off my answer that I said before, what I'm personally seeing out there is what I talked about, the momentum that we're seeing in the market, the excitement that we have in our growth story. Studio 360 has really broken down those barriers from having four independent solutions to having one platform. That's huge. If you're using just one BlackLine solution, in all likelihood, you're probably not a seven-figure customer. Probably not. If you're using three or more solutions, you're almost guaranteed to be a seven-figure customer. That cross-sell motion that I mentioned earlier, the growth that was just mentioned in terms of our million-dollar customers plus, that's largely being driven by cross-sell. Customers that are not just using Financial Close, but they're pairing it with our Intercompany solution and our Invoice to Cash solution. They're seeing more value from that. Playing off my answer that I said before, what I'm personally seeing out there is what I talked about, the momentum that we're seeing in the market, the excitement that we have in our growth story. playing off my answer that i said before what i'm personally seeing out there is what i talked about the momentum that we're seeing in the market the excitement that we have in our growth story Studio 360 has really broken down those barriers from having four independent solutions to having one platform. studio 360 has really broken down those barriers from having four independent solutions to having one platform That's huge. that's huge If you're using just one BlackLine solution, in all likelihood, you're probably not a seven-figure customer. if you're using just one blackline solution in all likelihood you're probably not a seven-figure customer Probably not. probably not If you're using three or more solutions, you're almost guaranteed to be a seven-figure customer. if you're using three or more solutions you're almost guaranteed to be a seven-figure customer That cross-sell motion that I mentioned earlier, the growth that was just mentioned in terms of our million-dollar customers plus, that's largely being driven by cross-sell. that cross-sell motion that i mentioned earlier the growth that was just mentioned in terms of our million-dollar customers plus that's largely being driven by cross-sell Customers that are not just using Financial Close, but they're pairing it with our Intercompany solution and our Invoice to Cash solution. customers that are not just using financial close but they're pairing it with our intercompany solution and our invoice to cash solution They're seeing more value from that. they're seeing more value from that It's covering more of the office of the CFO. Invoice-to-Cash is more operational. Intercompany is tax and treasury. Financial Close is like core accounting. It's covering more of the overall office of the CFO footprint, higher ROI for our customers, more revenue for us. That's what we're seeing evolve as our technology is joined by a single data layer and Studio 360. It's covering more of the office of the CFO. it's covering more of the office of the cfo Invoice-to-Cash is more operational. invoice-to-cash is more operational Intercompany is tax and treasury. intercompany is tax and treasury Financial Close is like core accounting. financial close is like core accounting It's covering more of the overall office of the CFO footprint, higher ROI for our customers, more revenue for us. it's covering more of the overall office of the cfo footprint higher roi for our customers more revenue for us That's what we're seeing evolve as our technology is joined by a single data layer and Studio 360. that's what we're seeing evolve as our technology is joined by a single data layer and studio 360

Speaker 2: Okay. Owen, you touched on this a little bit with your answer there, but as you make this transition to a focus on these larger customers, you've seen some smaller customers churn off the platform, and we've seen that a little bit in the recent retention rates. Can you just talk about how you see that cohort, how long that effect might be in play, and when we might see a kind of an inflection in the retention rates? Okay. okay Owen, you touched on this a little bit with your answer there, but as you make this transition to a focus on these larger customers, you've seen some smaller customers churn off the platform, and we've seen that a little bit in the recent retention rates. owen you touched on this a little bit with your answer there but as you make this transition to a focus on these larger customers you've seen some smaller customers churn off the platform and we've seen that a little bit in the recent retention rates Can you just talk about how you see that cohort, how long that effect might be in play, and when we might see a kind of an inflection in the retention rates? can you just talk about how you see that cohort how long that effect might be in play and when we might see a kind of an inflection in the retention rates

Speaker 1: Yeah. Strategic. I'm sitting in this chair just a little bit over three years now, and one of the things that our Founder and my Co-CEO at the time, we were looking at the customer base, and we had just sold software to companies where we probably shouldn't have. It was like people bought a Ducati, and they needed a tricycle. It just wasn't a good match. We made the conscious decision in probably August or September of 2023 that we would sort of wind down that part of the portfolio. Many of those customers had three-year deals. You're starting to see the fall-off of that now. We expect to see that lower middle market attrition be substantially done by the end of the year. Yeah. yeah Strategic. strategic I'm sitting in this chair just a little bit over three years now, and one of the things that our Founder and my Co-CEO at the time, we were looking at the customer base, and we had just sold software to companies where we probably shouldn't have. i'm sitting in this chair just a little bit over three years now and one of the things that our founder and my co-ceo at the time we were looking at the customer base and we had just sold software to companies where we probably shouldn't have It was like people bought a Ducati, and they needed a tricycle. it was like people bought a ducati and they needed a tricycle It just wasn't a good match. it just wasn't a good match We made the conscious decision in probably August or September of 2023 that we would sort of wind down that part of the portfolio. we made the conscious decision in probably august or september of 2023 that we would sort of wind down that part of the portfolio Many of those customers had three-year deals. many of those customers had three-year deals You're starting to see the fall-off of that now. you're starting to see the fall-off of that now We expect to see that lower middle market attrition be substantially done by the end of the year. we expect to see that lower middle market attrition be substantially done by the end of the year Over the last couple of years, we've done a much better job of those customers that were coming on the platform, making sure they were getting value out of BlackLine. We're working our way through it. It is a drag a little bit on customer count, but, and Patrick or Matt will keep me honest here, but the size of new customers is substantially larger than customers that are going out the door, which is good, because then we can invest in the relationship, support them the right way, work with their partner, their implementation partner, to really drive expansion of those accounts over time. As BlackLine continues to innovate, and we're innovating more now than we ever have as a company, there's that much more for our customers that they'll be able to do. Over the last couple of years, we've done a much better job of those customers that were coming on the platform, making sure they were getting value out of BlackLine. over the last couple of years we've done a much better job of those customers that were coming on the platform making sure they were getting value out of blackline We're working our way through it. we're working our way through it It is a drag a little bit on customer count, but, and Patrick or Matt will keep me honest here, but the size of new customers is substantially larger than customers that are going out the door, which is good, because then we can invest in the relationship, support them the right way, work with their partner, their implementation partner, to really drive expansion of those accounts over time. it is a drag a little bit on customer count but and patrick or matt will keep me honest here but the size of new customers is substantially larger than customers that are going out the door which is good because then we can invest in the relationship support them the right way work with their partner their implementation partner to really drive expansion of those accounts over time As BlackLine continues to innovate, and we're innovating more now than we ever have as a company, there's that much more for our customers that they'll be able to do. as blackline continues to innovate and we're innovating more now than we ever have as a company there's that much more for our customers that they'll be able to do I was telling one of the groups this morning, we're in business 25 years. As of the end of the year, we had written about 20 million lines of code in our first 24 years and seven months. In the last five months, we've written 5 million lines of code. Now, you can imagine how that's happening, right? It's all through our engineers now using AI in a different way, but it's just accelerating that much more that we can bring to the marketplace. And most of our innovation is done with our customers. We know it's not on a whim. We know it's what the marketplace wants, which we're very excited about. I was telling one of the groups this morning, we're in business 25 years. i was telling one of the groups this morning we're in business 25 years As of the end of the year, we had written about 20 million lines of code in our first 24 years and seven months. as of the end of the year we had written about 20 million lines of code in our first 24 years and seven months In the last five months, we've written 5 million lines of code. in the last five months we've written 5 million lines of code Now, you can imagine how that's happening, right? now you can imagine how that's happening right It's all through our engineers now using AI in a different way, but it's just accelerating that much more that we can bring to the marketplace. it's all through our engineers now using ai in a different way but it's just accelerating that much more that we can bring to the marketplace And most of our innovation is done with our customers. and most of our innovation is done with our customers We know it's not on a whim. we know it's not on a whim We know it's what the marketplace wants, which we're very excited about. we know it's what the marketplace wants which we're very excited about

Speaker 2: Okay. Great. It wouldn't be a complete discussion if we didn't touch a little bit more on AI. Patrick touched, I think, a little bit on the upside in terms of the Verity offering and how that's supporting growth within the platform. Can you talk about any of the real or perceived risks that AI poses to the platform and any way you'd like to address that in particular? Okay. okay Great. great It wouldn't be a complete discussion if we didn't touch a little bit more on AI. it wouldn't be a complete discussion if we didn't touch a little bit more on ai Patrick touched, I think, a little bit on the upside in terms of the Verity offering and how that's supporting growth within the platform. patrick touched i think a little bit on the upside in terms of the verity offering and how that's supporting growth within the platform Can you talk about any of the real or perceived risks that AI poses to the platform and any way you'd like to address that in particular? can you talk about any of the real or perceived risks that ai poses to the platform and any way you'd like to address that in particular

Speaker 1: Yeah. Look, I think, first of all, we have the large language models that are out there, and you see they, in theory, do everything. Probably not true. We have to answer those questions for our customers, and we could get questions like, "Well, I have a contract with," pick your favorite large language model, "and why can't I just build my agent there versus having to run on BlackLine?" We walk them through a very thoughtful, here is a build versus a buy, and then here's all the things that you might not necessarily understand, because it's great, and Patrick will tell you, anybody can produce a model, a reconciliation one time through an agent. Yeah. yeah Look, I think, first of all, we have the large language models that are out there, and you see they, in theory, do everything. look i think first of all we have the large language models that are out there and you see they in theory do everything Probably not true. probably not true We have to answer those questions for our customers, and we could get questions like, "Well, I have a contract with," pick your favorite large language model, "and why can't I just build my agent there versus having to run on BlackLine?" We walk them through a very thoughtful, here is a build versus a buy, and then here's all the things that you might not necessarily understand, because it's great, and Patrick will tell you, anybody can produce a model, a reconciliation one time through an agent. we have to answer those questions for our customers and we could get questions like "well i have a contract with," pick your favorite large language model "and why can't i just build my agent there versus having to run on blackline?" we walk them through a very thoughtful here is a build versus a buy and then here's all the things that you might not necessarily understand because it's great and patrick will tell you anybody can produce a model a reconciliation one time through an agent It's the ability to get that done 1 million times, correctly, 1 million times with the right kind of control environment that the auditors are going to sign off on, that the regulators are going to accept. When you start to walk customers through that, I joke, but tokenization has become a four-letter curse word for many CFOs because they're spending tons of money, not getting a lot of ROI. Pretty quickly, people then begin to say, "Hey, we should go with the purpose-built software where we have a great partner that will help us through some kind of forward-deployed advisor to continue to innovate."What is different in the market now, you have a lot of the system integrators, the BPOs, who are all feeling pressure on their own business models like, "Hey, why can't we too create agents for you?" It's the ability to get that done 1 million times, correctly, 1 million times with the right kind of control environment that the auditors are going to sign off on, that the regulators are going to accept. it's the ability to get that done 1 million times correctly 1 million times with the right kind of control environment that the auditors are going to sign off on that the regulators are going to accept When you start to walk customers through that, I joke, but tokenization has become a four-letter curse word for many CFOs because they're spending tons of money, not getting a lot of ROI. when you start to walk customers through that i joke but tokenization has become a four-letter curse word for many cfos because they're spending tons of money not getting a lot of roi Pretty quickly, people then begin to say, "Hey, we should go with the purpose-built software where we have a great partner that will help us through some kind of forward-deployed advisor to continue to innovate." What is different in the market now, you have a lot of the system integrators, the BPOs, who are all feeling pressure on their own business models like, "Hey, why can't we too create agents for you?" pretty quickly people then begin to say "hey we should go with the purpose-built software where we have a great partner that will help us through some kind of forward-deployed advisor to continue to innovate." what is different in the market now you have a lot of the system integrators the bpos who are all feeling pressure on their own business models like "hey why can't we too create agents for you?" One of the things that will be different for us is opening up our platform even more than we have to those partners and BPOs that they can build on BlackLine. It's going to feel like if you go to the App Store. Before anything gets on an App Store, it's got to meet all the rigorous standards. That's what we're starting to explore with our partners and BPOs now. How do we go through that model? When you have a FinOps operating system agent that works with BlackLine that you know is going to be reliable, trustworthy, that the auditors can accept it, and things of that nature. There'll be noise. You've got obviously some native AI startups that can reconcile a checking account. That's great, but that's not the market that we serve. One of the things that will be different for us is opening up our platform even more than we have to those partners and BPOs that they can build on BlackLine. one of the things that will be different for us is opening up our platform even more than we have to those partners and bpos that they can build on blackline It's going to feel like if you go to the App Store. it's going to feel like if you go to the app store Before anything gets on an App Store, it's got to meet all the rigorous standards. before anything gets on an app store it's got to meet all the rigorous standards That's what we're starting to explore with our partners and BPOs now. that's what we're starting to explore with our partners and bpos now How do we go through that model? how do we go through that model When you have a FinOps operating system agent that works with BlackLine that you know is going to be reliable, trustworthy, that the auditors can accept it, and things of that nature. when you have a finops operating system agent that works with blackline that you know is going to be reliable trustworthy that the auditors can accept it and things of that nature There'll be noise. there'll be noise You've got obviously some native AI startups that can reconcile a checking account. you've got obviously some native ai startups that can reconcile a checking account That's great, but that's not the market that we serve. that's great but that's not the market that we serve I think it'll put more pressure, candidly, on the lower end of the middle market than it will on our customer base any time soon. That said, we're going to keep an eye on that. There's one thing that, coming out of a consulting background, that I've always learned is if you didn't create it, you should be a really fast follower, if it makes sense. We have our eyes and ears on the marketplace, seeing what's happening in the market, what are our customers telling us, what are they asking for, to make sure we're either being responsive, proactive, or even better, being anticipatory as we move forward. I think it'll put more pressure, candidly, on the lower end of the middle market than it will on our customer base any time soon. i think it'll put more pressure candidly on the lower end of the middle market than it will on our customer base any time soon That said, we're going to keep an eye on that. that said we're going to keep an eye on that There's one thing that, coming out of a consulting background, that I've always learned is if you didn't create it, you should be a really fast follower, if it makes sense. there's one thing that coming out of a consulting background that i've always learned is if you didn't create it you should be a really fast follower if it makes sense We have our eyes and ears on the marketplace, seeing what's happening in the market, what are our customers telling us, what are they asking for, to make sure we're either being responsive, proactive, or even better, being anticipatory as we move forward. we have our eyes and ears on the marketplace seeing what's happening in the market what are our customers telling us what are they asking for to make sure we're either being responsive proactive or even better being anticipatory as we move forward

Speaker 2: Okay, great. As we wrap things up, you guys have been alluding to re-acceleration in the top line for a little while now, and we just talked through a lot of the growth levers that fall within that thought process. Whether it's the platform pricing, the enterprise opportunity, the opportunity to upsell with Verity. As a whole, can you just wrap things up and tell us why you have confidence in that re-acceleration in the top line, all those things considered? Okay, great. okay great As we wrap things up, you guys have been alluding to re-acceleration in the top line for a little while now, and we just talked through a lot of the growth levers that fall within that thought process. as we wrap things up you guys have been alluding to re-acceleration in the top line for a little while now and we just talked through a lot of the growth levers that fall within that thought process Whether it's the platform pricing, the enterprise opportunity, the opportunity to upsell with Verity. whether it's the platform pricing the enterprise opportunity the opportunity to upsell with verity As a whole, can you just wrap things up and tell us why you have confidence in that re-acceleration in the top line, all those things considered? as a whole can you just wrap things up and tell us why you have confidence in that re-acceleration in the top line all those things considered

Speaker 1: Yeah. Again, we'll probably tag team this just a little bit, but for me, there's a couple things I'm looking at that give me confidence. One is we've got seven or eight quarters now in a row where our pipeline just continues to increase. We see the interest from our customers. It's nice to have pipeline growth. What I'm looking at is when you start to have five, six, 10 meetings with enterprise customers and they bring 10, 15, 20 people to a meeting, you know they're serious, right? Because they're not doing that just for fun. That's one of the things we really look at that gives me a lot of confidence. The other thing that I focus on is RPO. Yeah. yeah Again, we'll probably tag team this just a little bit, but for me, there's a couple things I'm looking at that give me confidence. again we'll probably tag team this just a little bit but for me there's a couple things i'm looking at that give me confidence One is we've got seven or eight quarters now in a row where our pipeline just continues to increase. one is we've got seven or eight quarters now in a row where our pipeline just continues to increase We see the interest from our customers. we see the interest from our customers It's nice to have pipeline growth. it's nice to have pipeline growth What I'm looking at is when you start to have five, six, 10 meetings with enterprise customers and they bring 10, 15, 20 people to a meeting, you know they're serious, right? what i'm looking at is when you start to have five six 10 meetings with enterprise customers and they bring 10 15 20 people to a meeting you know they're serious right Because they're not doing that just for fun. because they're not doing that just for fun That's one of the things we really look at that gives me a lot of confidence. that's one of the things we really look at that gives me a lot of confidence The other thing that I focus on is RPO. the other thing that i focus on is rpo You don't implement BlackLine and go, "I'm done." Because it's a constant journey of continuing to innovate and evolve. One of the things that I've been very encouraged by is the growth in our RPO, which shows the commitment that our customers are having to go to longer duration deals because they're signing up for the transformation. They like what they're seeing from an AI perspective. They know we're really reliable as an organization from a customer support, customer success, product innovation. Those are the two things that give me the greatest confidence. The last piece, which you may or may not agree with, is one of the things I track is regrettable turnover. Who's leaving my organization that I don't want to leave? You don't implement BlackLine and go, "I'm done." Because it's a constant journey of continuing to innovate and evolve. you don't implement blackline and go "i'm done." because it's a constant journey of continuing to innovate and evolve One of the things that I've been very encouraged by is the growth in our RPO, which shows the commitment that our customers are having to go to longer duration deals because they're signing up for the transformation. one of the things that i've been very encouraged by is the growth in our rpo which shows the commitment that our customers are having to go to longer duration deals because they're signing up for the transformation They like what they're seeing from an AI perspective. they like what they're seeing from an ai perspective They know we're really reliable as an organization from a customer support, customer success, product innovation. they know we're really reliable as an organization from a customer support customer success product innovation Those are the two things that give me the greatest confidence. those are the two things that give me the greatest confidence The last piece, which you may or may not agree with, is one of the things I track is regrettable turnover. the last piece which you may or may not agree with is one of the things i track is regrettable turnover Who's leaving my organization that I don't want to leave? who's leaving my organization that i don't want to leave Our benchmark is 5%, and that's been running 2%-3% now for the last couple of years. That tells me that the people we want to stay in the organization are committed. I said on one of the earnings calls, we have 1,800 people roughly stagnant over the last three years. 70-plus% of those people are new, and 25% of them are in now low-cost jurisdictions. We've completely changed the profile of the people in the organization, and the people we have here are the people we want and are sticking with it, and that to me is a pretty good testament. Those are the three things. You like that answer? Our benchmark is 5%, and that's been running 2%-3% now for the last couple of years. our benchmark is 5% and that's been running 2%-3% now for the last couple of years That tells me that the people we want to stay in the organization are committed. that tells me that the people we want to stay in the organization are committed I said on one of the earnings calls, we have 1,800 people roughly stagnant over the last three years. 70-plus% of those people are new, and 25% of them are in now low-cost jurisdictions. i said on one of the earnings calls we have 1,800 people roughly stagnant over the last three years 70-plus% of those people are new and 25% of them are in now low-cost jurisdictions We've completely changed the profile of the people in the organization, and the people we have here are the people we want and are sticking with it, and that to me is a pretty good testament. we've completely changed the profile of the people in the organization and the people we have here are the people we want and are sticking with it and that to me is a pretty good testament Those are the three things. those are the three things You like that answer? you like that answer

Speaker 3: I do. I do. i do

Speaker 1: Okay. Okay. okay

Speaker 3: I think it's spot on. I think it's spot on. i think it's spot on

Speaker 1: Consider my answer. Consider my answer. consider my answer

Speaker 3: Yeah. I could put numbers behind it, but yeah. Look, just real quickly, we saw a pipeline generation spike in the second half of 2024. The rate of that growth indicated that our bookings over the next year would probably grow by 20+%. That's exactly what happened in 2025. Throughout 2025, our pipeline build continued at that same rate, which then builds even more confidence that at even equal conversion rates, which are improving, we're going to grow 20-plus% in bookings for 2026. That all yields a revenue growth rate in 2027 in the low teens. To Owen's point, RPO is huge. This whole AI narrative really started to evolve at the end of last, well, probably summer of last year. Yeah. yeah I could put numbers behind it, but yeah. i could put numbers behind it but yeah Look, just real quickly, we saw a pipeline generation spike in the second half of 2024. look just real quickly we saw a pipeline generation spike in the second half of 2024 The rate of that growth indicated that our bookings over the next year would probably grow by 20+%. the rate of that growth indicated that our bookings over the next year would probably grow by 20+% That's exactly what happened in 2025. that's exactly what happened in 2025 Throughout 2025, our pipeline build continued at that same rate, which then builds even more confidence that at even equal conversion rates, which are improving, we're going to grow 20-plus% in bookings for 2026. throughout 2025 our pipeline build continued at that same rate which then builds even more confidence that at even equal conversion rates which are improving we're going to grow 20-plus% in bookings for 2026 That all yields a revenue growth rate in 2027 in the low teens. that all yields a revenue growth rate in 2027 in the low teens To Owen's point, RPO is huge. to owen's point rpo is huge This whole AI narrative really started to evolve at the end of last, well, probably summer of last year. this whole ai narrative really started to evolve at the end of last well probably summer of last year In Q4, our RPO grew 23%. In Q1, it grew 18%. There's this narrative out there that AI is going to do X, Y, and Z, yet our customers are signing up at rates for longer contracts, more revenue durability. Our RPO is over $1 billion for the first time in history. That's guaranteed revenue and guaranteed future revenue. Putting real factual finance data points behind our company's performance is why we feel confident in the growth model. In Q4, our RPO grew 23%. in q4 our rpo grew 23% In Q1, it grew 18%. in q1 it grew 18% There's this narrative out there that AI is going to do X, Y, and Z, yet our customers are signing up at rates for longer contracts, more revenue durability. there's this narrative out there that ai is going to do x y and z yet our customers are signing up at rates for longer contracts more revenue durability Our RPO is over $1 billion for the first time in history. our rpo is over $1 billion for the first time in history That's guaranteed revenue and guaranteed future revenue. that's guaranteed revenue and guaranteed future revenue Putting real factual finance data points behind our company's performance is why we feel confident in the growth model. putting real factual finance data points behind our company's performance is why we feel confident in the growth model

Speaker 2: Awesome. Well, we are at time. Awesome. awesome Well, we are at time. well we are at time

Speaker 1: We went over, yeah. Sorry about that. We went over, yeah. we went over yeah Sorry about that. sorry about that

Speaker 2: No, that's great. Thank you guys so much. No, that's great. no that's great Thank you guys so much. thank you guys so much

Speaker 1: Good to be with you again. Good to be with you again. good to be with you again

Speaker 3: Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, appreciate it. yeah appreciate it Thank you. thank you

Speaker 2: Thanks for coming out. Congratulations on the new role. Thank you. Thanks for coming out. thanks for coming out Congratulations on the new role. congratulations on the new role Thank you. thank you