Csg Systems International Inc Q4 FY2021 Earnings Call

Gentlemen. Thank you for standing by and welcome to the CSG Systems International Inc. Fourth Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. All lines have been put on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. Thank you. John Rea, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin your conference.

Thank you, Operator, and thanks to everyone for joining us. Like last quarter, we will be working from a slide deck, which can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website. Please take a moment to locate these slides. Today's discussion will contain a number of forward-looking statements. These include but are not limited to statements regarding our projected financial results, our ability to meet our clients’ needs through our products, services, and performance, and our ability to successfully integrate and manage acquired businesses in order to achieve their expected strategic operating and financial goals. While these risks reflect our best current judgment, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially. Please note that these forward-looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to revise or publicly release any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new or future events. In addition to factors noted during this call, a more comprehensive discussion of our risk factors can be found in today's press release, as well as our most recently filed 10-K and 10-Q, which are all available in the Investor Relations section of our website. Also, we will discuss certain financial information that is not prepared in accordance with GAAP. We believe that these non-GAAP financial measures, when reviewed in conjunction with our GAAP financial measures, provide investors with greater transparency to the information used by our management team in our financial and operational decision making. For more information regarding our use of non-GAAP financial measures, we refer you to today's earnings release and non-GAAP reconciliation tables on our website, which will also be furnished to the SEC on Form 8-K. With me today on the phone are Brian Shepherd, Chief Executive Officer, and Hai Tran, Chief Financial Officer. With that, I'd like to now turn the call over to Brian.

Thanks, John. For those using our slides today, please join us on Slide 4. Over the past year, I've highlighted how we will strive to win big in the market and consistently outperform by investing in our culture, investing in our talents, and investing in our future-ready software platforms. These investments combined with our customer-obsessed values are elevating every part of CSG. Our Q4 and full-year results prove that our strategy is working. 2021 was an exciting year for CSG, as we surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue for the first time ever. We achieved this milestone by growing revenue 5.6% year-over-year, ending the year with $1.046 billion in revenue. We also delivered our fastest organic revenue growth in over a decade. Our 2021 business highlights also included the exciting six-year contract renewal and significant expansion with our largest customer, Charter Communications. This deal is the largest deal in company history and makes CSG the BSS provider of choice for all 32 million Charter customers, supporting residential and small to medium business for high-speed broadband video and voice. And this giant win proves that CSG has the right SaaS platforms, the right industry leadership, and the right talent to win meaningful market share away from our competitors. Furthermore, on the customer renewal front, we announced an exciting renewal with DISH Networks, our third largest customer. The contract extends our relationship with DISH for four and a half more years with contractual guarantees, and it paves the way to celebrate our 30th anniversary as we help this innovative leader achieve greater success. So, what does all this contract renewal success and expansion mean? It means that these renewals become the springboard for CSG's continued organic revenue growth in 2022 and beyond. Additionally, when combined with our large, healthy sales pipeline with more late-stage deal value than ever, it also means that CSG is increasing our 2022 revenue guidance, which I will share the details on shortly. Turning to Slide 5, I will provide some updates on five strategic objectives that will continue to increase our velocity. At this point, these themes should be familiar to everyone who has been following our progress the last few quarters. CSG aspires to more than double our long-term organic revenue growth rate in the 2% to 6% range, which we proudly achieved at the upper end of 2021. We aim to add operating scale and expand our operating leverage by growing to at least $1.5 billion in revenue by year-end 2025, with a stretched goal of $2 billion in revenue, which is ambitious, but not out of the realm of possibility. We also strive to be the number one SaaS provider of choice for global CSPs by providing the most value-adding technology solutions and by being easier to do business with than our competitors. We plan further revenue diversification as we expand in big, faster-growing industry verticals with more direct sales and channel partner success in retail government, financial services, healthcare technology, and more. And finally, we will complement our accelerated organic revenue growth with disciplined, value-enhancing M&A to turbocharge the value we bring our customers. Starting on Slide 6, let's get into a little more detail on each. First, with respect to doubling our organic growth. Our 2021 results prove that we're delivering on this commitment. We reported $1.046 billion in total revenue, resulting in 5.6% year-over-year growth. Even better, our full-year adjusted revenue was $980 million, representing 6.2% year-over-year growth. Both are the fastest organic annual revenue growth for CSG in over a decade. I want to take a moment to thank our 5,000-plus CSGers all around the world for the big impact you all made in 2021. Your dedication, your excellence, and your continued obsession to wow our customers each and every day are what's powering CSG's resurgence. Thank you, everyone. On the right-hand side of Slide 6, second, we committed to boldly elevate our market aspirations, and this is exactly what we're doing and we'll continue to do. Last quarter, we unveiled CSG's $2 billion and beyond growth strategy, so let me re-share some of the details. By 2025, we aspire to gain scale in the markets where we compete to exceed $1.5 billion to $2 billion annual revenues. We aspire to expand CSG's operating leverage and use our strong, healthy balance sheet to deliver EPS growth that outpaces revenue growth. And we aspire to consistently deliver better business results so that our shareholders are rewarded with the trading multiples that they deserve when they invest in a purpose-driven, faster-growth, multi-industry vertical SaaS platform company like CSG. The question we keep getting is how will CSG get there? $2 billion revenue, EPS growth that outpaces revenue, in a true SaaS trading multiple sounds ambitious. You're right, it is an ambitious plan, yet this management team absolutely believes that we can deliver against it, with the same discipline and high integrity that consistently defines CSG. Our disciplined strategic plan includes a base case component and a stretched component. Our base case we aspire to exceed $1.5 billion in revenue, which means even if we come up a little short against our stretched case ambitions, CSG will still grow revenue by over 50% and add over $500 million in profitable recurring revenue by 2025 to reach the $2 billion stretched case revenue aspiration over the next five years. We will continue to allocate capital to its most productive and value-added use and to eventually close bigger scale acquisitions that become even more transformational for both CSG and the industries that we serve. On the last point, I would like to reinforce a key point shared on many analyst and investor calls. This management team is laser-focused on creating shareholder value, not building empires. We will hold ourselves accountable to adding scale, accelerating growth, expanding our operating leverage, and deploying capital to its highest and most productive use, all with a focus on rewarding our shareholders, just like we work hard every day to delight our customers and our employees. Turning to Slide 7, we are committed to being the number one technology provider of choice for communication service providers globally. And our continued sales success with both North American and Global CSPs proves that we're executing well against this strategic priority. In the cable market, we have long-term guaranteed contracts to be the BSS provider of choice for all 65 million combined Comcast and Charter subscribers, the two largest cable providers, with CSG having migrated tens of millions of subscribers off of both Amdocs and NetCracker over the last six years. We plan to build on this market share success in the years ahead. Working hand-in-hand with talented colleagues at Charter, CSG also successfully migrated over 5 million subscribers in the Ohio, Wisconsin, and Kansas City market in 2021, including completing over 4 million migrations in the second half of 2021. While the timing could still vary a little, we anticipate migrating all remaining Charter customers over the next nine to 15 months, and CSG's success is not limited to North America. In the global telecom market, we continue to grow with new wins and contract extensions with leading telecom operators all around the world. In early 2021, we signed an exciting new deal with Mobily, the second-largest wireless operator in Saudi Arabia with nearly 14 million customers. Mobily was looking for a partner to future-proof their business, accelerate innovation, and improve their customer experience. Demonstrating our strength as a technology leader in wireless, CSG was selected as the prime systems integrator to deploy our full revenue management platform for this digital leader. We expect big growth to continue in our Middle East and Africa telecom business. Another exciting global telecom win is TalkTalk, the UK's leading value for money connectivity provider. CSG's cloud-based end-to-end SaaS platform enables TalkTalk to launch the country's first-ever Netflix subscription outside of a traditional TV bundle. With CSG's marketplace solution at the heart of its entertainment operations, TalkTalk has the scalability to add new content providers and evolve its offering to keep pace with the ever-changing consumer demands. And finally, in May, we announced a multi-year contract expansion with MTN South Africa, the largest mobile network operator in Africa, with over 30 million consumers. As part of this agreement, we are advancing and enhancing MTN's digital ecosystem, which includes migrating MTN's enterprise and consumer customers to a new technology platform that will drive future growth and enable rapid delivery of innovative new products and services. We look forward to continuing our journey with MTN as we help them digitally transform their business. Turning to Slide 8, I shared that CSG would continue diversifying our industry vertical revenue. And we did exactly this in 2021 as we grew revenue coming from large, faster-growing, and new industry verticals. Since 2017, CSG has grown revenue from exciting new industry verticals, like retail government, financial services, and healthcare, from $55 million or 7% of total revenue to more than $250 million or 24% of total revenue this year. Being a partner of choice for some of the biggest brands in higher growth industry verticals where CSG helps them digitize and modernize their customer engagement and their cloud payments is a game changer for CSG. During the year, we won and expanded many exciting new deals with leading brands in faster-growing industry verticals. We won, and later in 2021 expanded deals with two of the largest drugstore chains in the U.S. and one of the largest retailers in the world, to also elect CSG software to power their retail and clinic customer engagements. Our solution is increasingly important to all three of these large customers, given the unprecedented number of inbound requests that healthcare providers, retail pharmacies, and government agencies are getting related to COVID vaccinations, appointments, and prescriptions. We also expanded our relationship with one of the largest software companies in the world, as they continue to unlock value in different parts of their business by leveraging CSG's innovative conversational AI, SaaS platform. We also expanded our penetration in the fitness market by signing a good deal with 24 Hour Fitness, a leading fitness center chain, to digitize their customer engagement. And finally, we closed the deal with a leading insurance provider to also digitize their customer engagement. This important win adds another great brand to our enterprise-grade customer engagement software platform, which also serves the property and casualty insurance market. In the payments market, we continue to see positive signs that post-COVID growth is beginning to return with strong industry vertical sales results, propelled by our industry-leading recurring revenue SaaS payment platform. CSG's Forte provides award-winning full PayFac capabilities for over 81,000 active merchants and ISV partners who need ACH credit, payment gateway, and payment processing capabilities, serving a wide range of recurring revenue industry verticals. During 2021, we signed key wins in the government and healthcare ISV markets to further extend our payments leadership in these critical biller direct recurring revenue industry verticals. As a leader in ACH processing, we continue to add scale by signing ISV partners in fast-growing industry verticals like Property Management. Looking ahead, we built an exciting sales pipeline across multiple verticals in payments that are contributing to both sequential quarter-over-quarter and Q4 year-over-year organic revenue growth, which bodes well for our return to double-digit organic growth in the payments market. Fifth, we told you that CSG would be a disciplined, strategic acquirer of SaaS platforms, which is exactly what we did in 2021. We expanded our offering in the digital customer engagement market with the purchase of Kitewheel, a SaaS-based recurring revenue company that supports real-time interaction management through omnichannel journey orchestration and journey analytics. I'm pleased to report that the post-merger integration is progressing well, as we added and integrated fantastic new talent and SaaS capabilities. A few months ago, we unveiled CSG Xponent, a bold and innovative new multi-vertical market offering that combines CSG's proven digital engagement SaaS platform with our new journey-as-a-service capabilities that Kitewheel brings to the table. This new microservices-based SaaS platform drives differentiated digital experiences that are proactive, predictive, and personalized, as CSG is helping leading brands compete and win with great customer experience all around the world. Our second-half sales performance in the digital customer engagement market was also encouraging, as we signed an extended deal with a number of leading brands in financial services and retail. We couldn't be more excited about our digital customer engagement growth opportunities in 2022 and beyond. In revenue management, we made two value-adding acquisitions this year. First, we acquired Tango Telecom, a leading supplier of convergent policy control and messaging solutions. The acquisition was a combination of a long-standing relationship that delivers end-to-end digital monetization and 5G solutions to some of the world's largest and most successful CSPs. Second, we announced in October that CSG acquired DGIT Systems, a configure price and order management technology platform that has a strong presence and adoption in the global telecommunications market. DGIT is recognized by TM Forum as a leading multi-cloud microservices platform, which has won 11 major industry awards since 2015, including TM Forum's most innovative use of assets award, Excellent Award for Open APIs, and Outstanding Architecture. As we look ahead, we will remain laser-focused on winning more and more bigger deals in these exciting new arenas, and unlocking even greater value from existing and new acquisitions that will help CSG grow and elevate even more. As I wrap up on Slide 9, across all five strategic priorities, the results speak for themselves. CSG is building meaningful business momentum that we fully expect will fuel our continued long-term growth and transformation. We hope you see the same things we do when we analyze our business. CSG's purpose is bold and inspiring. Our strategic vision and our daily execution are focused and disciplined, and we are elevating our culture, our diversity, and our global talent. And on this note, I'm thrilled to introduce Hai Tran, CSG's new CFO. Hai and I have been working together now for several months, and I couldn't be more excited by what he brings to the table. He has a proven track record as a strategic, growth-oriented executive with deep public company technology and global SaaS experience, making the perfect fit for CSG at this transformative moment in our history. With that as an introduction, I will turn it over to Hai to provide more detail on Q4 and full-year 2021 financial results prior to digging deeper into our 2022 guidance.

Thank you, Brian, for the kind introduction. Before I get into my slides, I wanted to take a moment to say how excited I am to join CSG at this truly transformational time in the company's history. I'm passionate about helping companies grow and I believe CSG has all the critical ingredients for accelerating growth, including a robust strategy focused on being a purpose-driven SaaS platform company that helps the biggest and best brands monetize and engage their customers in a digital world. A strong balance sheet coupled with long-term customer relationships, passionate leadership, and an empowering culture. In fact, CSG's guiding principles and mission resonate deeply with our new customers and employees at the center of everything we do, which will drive long-term and sustained value creation for all of our stakeholders. And now, let's review our financial performance and jump right into Slide 11. We generated $275 million of revenue and $258 million of non-GAAP adjusted revenue during the fourth quarter. These results represent 5.6% and 5.9% year-over-year growth respectively, which were both substantially driven by organic growth. For the full year, both our revenue and non-GAAP adjusted revenue were up approximately 6% year-over-year. The year-over-year increase in revenue and non-GAAP adjusted revenue was driven primarily by the continued growth of our revenue management product platforms, where we serve many of the largest communication service providers in the world. In addition, we're seeing healthy growth in our customer engagement offerings, where we serve customers in large high-growth industry verticals. While our revenue growth was primarily organic, inorganic growth through acquisitions is an important component of our overall growth strategy, focused on providing us access to and/or increased penetration into multiple industry verticals where we can help our customers navigate and execute on their digital road map. Throughout 2021, you have seen us execute on that strategy as we closed multiple new acquisitions including Tango Telecom, Kitewheel, and DGIT Systems. As we accelerate our inorganic revenue growth in the quarters ahead, we will remain disciplined by focusing on the strategic, financial, and cultural integration fit, with an appropriate risk-return profile for each acquisition we pursue. Our fourth-quarter non-GAAP operating income was $40 million, or 15.6% of non-GAAP adjusted revenue, as compared to $43 million or 17.7% in the same prior year period. Our Q4 2021 result was impacted by elevated one-time severance expenses associated with changes intended to strengthen our growth-oriented executive leadership team, which totaled approximately $2 million. We do not anticipate this elevated level of severance expense to recur in 2022. For the full year, our non-GAAP operating margin as a percentage of non-GAAP adjusted revenue was 16.5%, consistent with our longer-term target range of between 16% and 18%. Our non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA was $66 million for the fourth quarter, or 21.7% of non-GAAP adjusted revenue as compared to $57 million or 23.3% in the same prior year period. For the full year, our non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA was $221 million or 22.6% of non-GAAP adjusted revenue. For the full year, our non-GAAP EPS was $3.35, a 7.4% increase from the same prior year period. We are proud to be accelerating top-line revenue growth, and we are equally excited to deliver strong EPS growth for our shareholders, where our bottom line grew even faster than our top line. Turning to Slide 12, I will go through the balance sheet, our cash flow generation, and shareholder returns for the quarter and full year. Our fourth-quarter 2021 cash flow from operations was $52 million as compared to $67 million in the prior year period. Further, we generated non-GAAP free cash flows of $48 million in Q4 of 2021 as compared to $52 million in Q4 of 2020. For the full year, we delivered $114 million in free cash flow, which as we expected, was a decrease from the previous year's $144 million. As we mentioned on our Q4 2020 earnings call, our recorded 2020 results benefited from 1. strong accounts receivable collections that were well in excess of historical trends and did not repeat in 2021, and 2. certain costs that were incurred in 2020 that were paid in 2021. Including separation costs related to the departure of our former CEO, a company-wide COVID-related cash bonus of $500 that was given in the first year of the COVID pandemic and COVID-related deferred tax payments. Additionally, the aforementioned elevated severance expenses of $2 million in Q4 2021 was detrimental to our Q4 and full-year cash flow. The combination of these one-time and timing-related items shifted the working capital impact between 2020 and 2021. That said, our full-year cash flow generated from operations before working capital improved from $164 million in 2020 to $179 million in 2021, a 9.1% year-over-year increase in cash flow from operations, which is the highest it's been in over a decade. Moving on, we ended the fourth quarter with $234 million of cash in short-term investments. That, along with our outstanding debt at quarter-end, results in a $144 million in net debt and a net debt leverage ratio of 0.6. As a reminder, we refinanced our existing term bank debt and revolving credit agreement in September. This transaction had multiple benefits, including extending the tenure of our debt, lowering our burn comp, and increasing our capabilities. We are continually reviewing ways to opportunistically enhance our capital structure. During the fourth quarter of 2021, we declared $8 million in dividends. In addition, we repurchased $16 million of common stock under our stock repurchase program. Looking ahead, we expect our 2022 share repurchases to offset the expected dilution from employee stock options. Moving on to Slide 13, I'll conclude with 2022 guidance and some key takeaways. We are pleased to increase our revenue range by $10 million, with 2022 revenue expected to range from $1.07 billion to $1.11 billion and our non-GAAP adjusted revenue to range from $1 billion to $1.3 billion. As a reminder, our revenue generation is slightly back-end weighted. We have historically generated more revenue in the second half of any given year versus the first half. We expect that prior to more revenue coming in mid to later 2022, as our new sales bookings get implemented and revenues recognized. As such, the 2% of our 2022 revenue generation is expected to occur during the second half of the year. Similar to 2021, we also expect our non-GAAP adjusted operating margin percentage to range between 16% and 18%. We anticipate our non-GAAP EPS to range between $3.44 to $3.68 based on a non-GAAP tax rate of 27.4%, and a share count of 32.0 million shares for the year. Non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA is expected to range between $225 million and $236 million. Finally, we expect the range of free cash flow would be $115 million to $125 million based on expected operating cash flows of $150 million to $170 million with CapEx expected to come in between $35 million to $45 million. The driver for our increased CapEx range year-over-year is additional plant monetization investments, to drive improved efficiencies, and to a lesser extent, towards buying IT-related equipment. And finally, I want to leave you with a few concluding thoughts. 2021 was a very strong year for CSG. We believe that the momentum we are creating in the market, the results that we are generating, and the laser focus that this leadership team has on executing against our strategic priorities positions us well in the marketplace, accelerating our revenue growth and diversifying our industry verticals. This includes closing and integrating disciplined, value-adding acquisitions. We believe this investment in our future strategic growth, combined with our consistent capital distribution in the form of both dividends and share buybacks, will serve our shareholders well. With that, I'll turn it over to the operator to facilitate the question-and-answer session.

Your first question comes from Maggie Nolan with William Blair. Your line is open.

Thank you for taking my questions. Hi, thanks for that color on what the revenue first half versus second half would look like. I'm wondering if there's anything qualitatively you can share with us about what margins will look like over the course of the year. And then any other puts and takes on margins going into 2022 that we should be thinking about outside of that one-time payment that you referenced?

Yes. I mean, I would suggest that margins would improve throughout the year as well. Maggie, once again, as I said, part of the drivers of the spreading of the revenue is just a timing issue, right? We have discounts that are hitting us January one that everybody knows about, and then we had new business that takes some time for us to ramp up and contribute meaningfully over time. So, we do expect the margins in the back half of the year to be better than margins in the first half of the year.

That's great. Thank you. And then Brian, could you give a little bit more color on some of the overall sales pipeline across your solution areas? And specifically, within CX and payments would be helpful. Thank you.

No thanks, Maggie. I appreciate the questions. So yeah, across the board, as we've been discussing over the last several quarters, our pipeline has never been bigger. We've never had more significant deals in the pipeline, and the number of late-stage opportunities is also at an all-time high. We have a six-stage sales pipeline and are pleased with what we see in terms of deal progression across all areas of our business, especially in the digital customer engagement space. We are excited about the number of deals and larger brands we are partnering with in these new verticals, and it’s just about continuing to execute on sales. We recently launched CSG Xponent around journey orchestration and journey-as-a-service capabilities, which offer a predictive and proactive experience. This has resonated well and led to some great deals in recent quarters. It allows us to replicate success and expand with other brands and verticals. In the payments sector, we have observed steady progress in our sales bookings, particularly with the PayFac payment gateway and payment processing. Sometimes, there is a slight delay in activating and onboarding transaction volumes. We are seeing many of the deals we closed in prior quarters starting to activate now. This has led to increased optimism about returning to double-digit growth. We liked what we saw in the fourth quarter and are pushing towards achieving double-digit organic growth. Additionally, we are pleased with the acceleration of our ISV channel sales with partners. While we do direct sales, we also collaborate with ISVs and partners. CSG’s Q4 tape platforms have been competitive against some of the largest players in the industry, boasting the best API and payment gateway, which are appealing for ISVs that can integrate our solutions and potentially handle sales for us, leading to increased volume as they grow. We are very optimistic about these aspects of our business.

Thank you, and congrats on the strong year.

Thank you very much, Maggie. We appreciate it.

Your next question comes from the line of Tom Roderick with Stifel. Your line is open.

Stan, thank you for taking my questions. Welcome aboard and congratulations on a great first quarter. Brian, I want to start with you and discuss the ambitious billion and a half base case target for 2025 and the two billion stretch goal. The base case suggests a compounded growth rate of around 13 to 14%, while the stretch goal might approach 25%. I’m interested in understanding how much of this growth will come from organic sources versus mergers and acquisitions. Regarding M&A, how attractive is it to consider moving beyond core telecom markets into areas like financial services, technology, and especially healthcare and life sciences, given the potential for customer engagement and payment solutions?

Thank you for the question, Tom. I hope you are doing well. Regarding reaching the $1.5 billion target with a 50% growth in revenue, we still anticipate an organic growth range of 2% to 6%. As you may have noticed, this year we achieved the upper end of that range. We aim to consistently hit the midpoint to upper end of that range and improve continuously. We have made what we believe are both smart and disciplined investments in direct sales, brand awareness, lead generation, and channel partner sales, particularly in high-growth areas like digital customer engagement solutions related to payments. We hold ourselves accountable to ensure these investments yield a return and also maintain our leading SaaS platform capability to support strong organic sales. You're correct in noting that aiming for growth of 13% or 14% aligns with our targets. Achieving or exceeding our organic sales goals means we have earned the right to grow, which we accomplish through consistent quarterly performance. Additionally, we focus on finding high-growth SaaS opportunities that are suitable for cable or telecom customers, as well as sectors that can serve multiple industries. This combination will help us reach the $1.5 billion goal while remaining disciplined in creating value for our customers. This value not only benefits our clients but also drives value for our shareholders. That’s why we have discussed top-line growth alongside bottom-line growth over the years. In our core business, it’s crucial that we continue to gain market share. We appreciate having a high level of recurring revenue and strong customer retention with our revenue management solutions. We believe we can continue to capture market share as we have in recent years. Our recent deal with Charter exemplifies our efforts in both the cable and global telecom sectors, as we strive to increase value, simplify transactions, and close more deals, encouraging our customers to serve as references for our newer initiatives. On the topic of revenue diversification, we’ve mentioned before that we’ve reached 24%, and we aim to grow that to 30% from financial services, retail, and healthcare. By successfully serving our major clients, we can expand our reach within those sectors and impress other brands in similar industries both in the U.S. and internationally. This approach reflects our commitment to continually growing our global sales.

Yeah, that's fantastic context. I mean, if I think about the goal to grow EPS faster than revenue, and conceptualize that with some of the acquisitions you've made, obviously, they've got to work well, right? They have to integrate well, and then the technical integrations have to pan out over time. Perhaps you could talk about that in the context of Kitewheel and DGIT. I know it's a little bit early on both of those, but as you look at the proof points from customers that are leaning into the core platform and then adopting Kitewheel and perhaps DGIT or Forte on the payment side, what do those technical integration proof points look like? How much work have you had to do in the backend, and how does that scale go forward?

Yes, there is a lot to discuss. I'll break it down into a few key points. Firstly, we view our business at CSG as diverse rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. We have segments that are growing quickly and focus on multi-vertical solutions, and we've established clear strategic targets for our investments and expected returns. Ultimately, our priorities involve expanding the sales pipeline, improving our sales success rate, and accelerating revenue growth. There are units within CSG that are achieving strong double-digit growth and nearing our established benchmarks, and we are committed to ensuring these units perform consistently well. We base this on our sales success rates and the results they deliver. Secondly, we are optimistic about our larger, more established sectors, which we believe will continue to grow at healthier organic revenue rates. These businesses can scale effectively and enhance their operational efficiency, allowing us to secure the renewal discounts needed from our customers while still increasing earnings per share and operating margins in 2022. This growth enables smart investments in our expanding units, along with returning value to our shareholders through buybacks and dividends. Regarding the acquisitions you've mentioned, such as Forte, we have made substantial investments to enhance their AWS cloud platform, improved their capabilities, and implemented auto provisioning. Our technology and operations teams at Forte have done excellent work, which has also increased our brand presence in sales and marketing. We’re applying the same disciplined strategy with Kitewheel and DGIT for their rollout. Recently, we launched CSG Xponent in Q4 and introduced a new product related to the Digit solution for enterprises on the telecommunications side. We continue to invest in R&D to provide greater value to our customers, which helps accelerate our sales success rate.

Fantastic. Thank you for the details. I'll jump back in the queue. Appreciate it, Brian.

Thanks, Tom.

Your next question comes from the line of Greg Burns with Sidoti and Company. Your line is open.

Good afternoon. What percent of North American cable subscribers are currently on your BSS platform?

Great question. Hey, Greg, I hope you're doing well. I will follow up. I don't have the precise number. I want to say it's the vast majority. I would say it's approaching 70% to 80%, maybe even higher, but we'll get you the exact percentage.

Okay. Given that you already hold a significant portion of the market, when considering the remaining 25 or so subscribers, have the discussions in any way shifted? Now that you've finalized the Charter deal and demonstrated your ability to transition a substantial number of customers efficiently, have the conversations evolved, and have you identified any opportunities to target the remaining business?

Yeah, I mean, nothing that I can comment on specifically, but I would just say even prior to the Charter we tried to be active in all of the large customers in North America, but also not limited to North America in terms of value if we can deliver fantastic value to Comcast, Charter, DISH, and many of the other cable providers in North America and globally, we can do the same for them. What we've always found is that there needs to be a combination or there's something that's going on with the business, or maybe more functionality, they may not be pleased with their incumbent. They need to improve the speed and agility at which their platforms can support their business or they can bring more cost-effective best. So usually there is a trigger that causes a customer to stick their head up and say, now is the time to really look at that. What we're doing in all of our sales calls is continuing to tell the story of what we think the value-add is, why it's a low-risk move. We've proven that with our successful conversions at the two margins, Comcast and Charter. So, lots of dialogue, nothing that I could comment on specifically beyond that at this stage.

Okay. And then when we look at the revenue split between Charter and Comcast. I think Comcast has more subscribers on your billing platform, but Charter has higher revenue. So what services is Charter consuming that Comcast didn't? Is there any opportunity to maybe upsell more into Comcast?

I mean, with all of our business objectives and sales targets for the teams managing the accounts, they consistently aim to expand and grow with each of our customers. We don’t make limited adjustments at all. What we’ve observed with Charter is that there are some similarities, but in certain areas, they relied on us more. Some of our customers, like Comcast, prefer to build some of the edge systems and handle some of the integration themselves, which really depends on their strategy. Do I believe there’s room for growth with both accounts? Given how large and successful those two customers are, there’s always plenty of opportunity, and we just have to work diligently to introduce innovative ideas, demonstrating the value of transferring more of their business to CSG and what we provide. This remains a focus for every one of our customers globally.

Okay. Maybe to that point, we are looking at the really strong growth in Charter year-over-year. Where is that growth coming from? Is that from broadband subscriber growth, or is it from incremental services? Can you just maybe touch on that a little bit?

Yes. It's from all of the above. Obviously, the nice broadband has benefited us in a significant way and because we price on a per-subscriber basis, regardless if that number of services are rich services vacate. We've been benefiting from that. We've also been benefiting as we just bring them more value, bringing innovative ideas instead of doing it in-house or using someone else provide some of those solutions. They turned to CSG for more small product sales, it can be more services, it can be customizing things that we do for them that build within to our SaaS platform. It's all of the above.

Okay. Great, thank you.

Thanks so much, Greg.

There are no further questions at this time. I'll turn the call back over to Brian Shepherd for closing remarks.

Thank you for taking the time to join us on the call today. It's important to highlight that we have a strong focus on our vision, and we are excited about the developments within the business. We appreciate our global leadership team and all our employees. We aim to deliver improved results each quarter, as we understand that is what our shareholders expect from us, and we are committed to meeting that expectation. I look forward to connecting with you in the upcoming quarters. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.