Raymond James 47th Annual Institutional Investors Conference

All right. Good morning, everyone. My name is Alex Sklar. I'm one of the application software analysts here at Raymond James. Very pleased to have Workiva again back with us this year. We've got Barbara Lawson, who's the new chief financial officer, Mike Ross, chief strategy officer, and we've also got Yogi Shah in the audience from the CorpDev and investor relations team. We're going to do this as a fireside chat. If there's time at the end, I'll open up the questions from the audience. But thank you both for coming today. Thanks for having us. So we do have a large makeup in the audience that's a little bit more generalist, new to the story in general. So it would be helpful maybe just first to level set what Workiva does, maybe your financial profile broadly. And I know you do have some medium-term targets out there. So maybe as part of the financial outlook, kind of talk about what you all have spoken to from a target perspective.

Thanks, Alex. And thanks, everybody, for joining today. Just to kick it off on who we are. We are a cloud software platform that provides capabilities around financial reporting, governance risk and compliance, and sustainability reporting, and a number of different vertical solutions as well. So when you look at Workiva, we've been in market for the last 15 years with a cloud platform, and 6,600 customers trust us with their data. and think about what we deliver, many of our use cases center around regulatory reporting and disclosure, which means that that is very trusted data, some of those valuable data organizations have. Many of those processes go through an audit process, so it's not only about the data, it's about what happens with it after it leaves the hands of those internal users and ultimately gets disclosed to some external party. So a great example of that would be SEC reporting. About half the companies on the NASDAQ and NYSE utilize our platform for doing their Qs and Ks, or what's called the 34-act reporting. So we power a lot of what drives the economy and are a very, very sticky use case, you know, with 97% gross retention, most recently reported 113% net retention on our metrics. With that, maybe, Barbara, I'll throw to you on some of them. maybe our most recent metrics in Q4 and some of our targets.

Yeah, absolutely. So from a customer perspective, we have over 6,600 customers. For 2025, our revenue growth that we reported was 20% year-over-year growth, free cash flow of about 15.5%, and then our guidance for 2026. So this fiscal year is just over a billion. So at the high end of our guide, it's $1,040,000, reflecting 18% year-over-year growth and free cash flow margin of 19%. You've spoke to the durability of our model, 97% gross revenue retention and 113% net revenue retention. We've got a lot of momentum in terms of our larger customers. So for customer contracts that are greater than 100,000, our growth was 22%, greater than 300,000, growth was 42%, and then greater than 500,000 is 37% growth for the most recent year. So a lot of momentum in terms of expanding our portfolio with existing customers. And then just from a long-term perspective, we have put medium-term and long-term targets out there. So medium-term, top line of essentially, I just forgot, top line is?

One point, sorry, for?

For medium-term, which is 2027.

Is 1.1 to 1.2 billion.

1.1 to 1.2, thanks, Mike. and then a margin target of 18% and then for 2030, 1.8 to 2 and a margin target of 24%. So those are the aspirational targets that we put out there, but feel very confident in those.

Yeah, great. So maybe just one more higher level one just in terms of the platform. So when you think about a broader compliance platform, what does that actually mean in practice for a customer that's using, if you think about the value propositions and maybe for you kind of related, Barbara, You used Workiva at prior companies you've been at. You're coming now in-house to Workiva. You've seen all the ways that you all use it internally. What do you think, how would you describe kind of what's available from a value proposition standpoint as you think about a compliance platform?

Yeah, maybe just to start off, and this really gets more to the heart of, you know, so what does our software do? So you think about many of our use cases involve a lot of data and document assembly. And you say, well, Mike, wait a minute. The ERP exists out there. You know, people have all this financial data. Can't they just, you know, push a button and all of a sudden it turns into their 10Q every quarter? And, yes, there are numbers that we will take from an ERP system. For example, we'll take the trial balance from anyone's financial system. But if you really think about what's also included in the Q or a K, right, it is all the narrative. it is the footnotes, it is other exhibits that exist around that, and equally important is all the supporting evidence that that company needs to provide to their external auditor or legal counsel or all the other ones that sign off on said report, right? So that pattern of activity plays its way out across our different use cases, right? So, for example, for financial reporting, we help organizations with investment reporting, right? Whether it's a mutual fund prospectus, a mutual fund report, you know, investor fact sheet, it has a similar pattern of, you know, yes, it's data, but there has to be some assembly with multiple people and validating and informing all of those numbers that end up in that. If I look at an insurance actuary report or a bank, you know, risk regulatory report, right, some of these reports can be, you know, upwards of 10,000 or more pages if I look at it from a banking perspective, right? So we support all that collaborative activity gets into that data and document assembly and the audit process and the final disclosure of that. So that's, you know, one example of that. So it's really bringing all those people around there. When I look at risk and compliance, same concept, right? If you look at internal controls, it is multiple constituents across the organization collaborating on the same amount of data or similar amount of data and coming up with some end product that has to go through an audit.

And just from a user perspective, so the last two companies I was at prior to Workiva, a big SEC reporting user. So have used the platform. You know, the most recent company I was at, we were looking at expanding it to not just SEC reporting, but GRC and sustainability as well. And I think the one thing that was a little eye-opening for me when I joined Workiva is just how much the team is using it for financial reporting or management reporting. So I've never been at a company where the FP&A team is actually using it for their management reporting. And so that's been real eye-opening for me. So I think there is, you know, definitely a lot of opportunity beyond just the SEC reporting and, you know, and more into the financial reporting side of things, too. And it really actually helps keep accounting and FP&A all singing from the same song sheet because they're using the same platform to do not just external reporting, but internal reporting as well.

Yeah. So you hit on this in terms of some of the Q4 results in last year, but the companies delivered a real clear inflection in profitability. We're still keeping up kind of 20% plus bookings growth. Just as you kind of walk through, can you walk through maybe some of the intentional changes that you've made at Workiva as you think about kind of that profitable growth framework and kind of lay out how that's embedded in kind of the outlook going forward? Yeah, so the company's

made a lot of progress. So in 2025, margin of just under 10% for the year, that was about 560 basis points of expansion year over year. And it was well ahead of what was guided at the start of year. I think it was about 440 basis points. So a real focus on, I mean, the number one priority is growth. So a continued focus on growth, but also doing that while driving operating leverage at the same time. And 2026, basically, you know, more the same. And as we're looking at driving leverage, it's not just one place. It's really across the company and, you know, with a real priority on driving efficiency and sales and marketing as well. Great. So obviously, AI has

been probably the most topical area for you all for software companies broadly in the last year plus or so. I wanted to hit on it a couple different ways with you all, but you kind of already talked about kind of broader compliance platform. What do you think is kind of the most underappreciated moat with Workiva and the platform from a future AI kind of as a competitor

standpoint? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a couple things. You know, first off, you know, there is this broader, I guess, thesis and narrative out there, you know, on SaaS right now. And I think, you know, where we see ourselves as seeing opportunity is a couple of things. First thing is, on our pricing and packaging model, we have not been seat-based. We are not seat-based and have not been seat-based licensing model for seven-plus years, right? So even today in our platform, you know, whether it's a human or an agent, right, you know, we are indifferent to that. So we do not see ourselves maybe at the same risk as some others, based on how we've been selling our software for the past seven years. You know, second is, you know, part of our moat, you know, part of where we believe we have, you know, some stickiness and some advantage is, we have 6,600 customers, we have this large base of organizations that trust us with their most valuable data, their pre-release financial information, their highly sensitive regulatory information, and we've been doing this for 15 plus years. As it relates to AI, we also have been very AI forward. We have had AI as part of our platform for more than two years now and have some core capabilities that every one of our customers can take advantage of. We leverage three of the large LLM models as part of that core capability in our platform. And at the same time, we are monetizing AI through some of our premium tiered offerings as well. So core offering, everybody has access if they sign the license to have AI as part of the platform, as well as advanced features for AI. So yes, we are very AI forward and believe that we have the right mix of supporting existing workflows as well as leading to AI heavily that make us very relevant in the future.

So you just alluded to it, but 30% of customers, the new stat on the Q4 call, you said 30% of customers, I guess, have signed that addendum to opt-in to one of your AI core platform tier. What does that look like in practice? What are the customers using you for in terms of where you're embedding AI into the existing product and workflows today?

Yeah, so I think, you know, the productivity that we see, gains that we see with our customers, it's, you know, I would say it's a lot of the AI capabilities that many of you utilize, you know, maybe off of your own consumer model, right? We have, you know, think about our processes, right? When you're authoring a regulatory report, authoring a 10K or 10Q, there is a lot of narrative. There is a lot of writing, right? So whether it's the initial authoring of, I need to put a new risk factor into my 10K and hey, can you go give me a draft of what an AI risk factor might be? Or is it taking some text you might already have received from your outside counsel on that and having it rewrite it and make it better or shorter or bulleted, all those things that you see happening are core capabilities that exist in our platform today. It could be outside research, right? I can give you a great example of, from an IR standpoint, when the 13Fs come out and I look at our new roster of institutional investors, I bring that into a spreadsheet. I then have AI go do research on all the net new investors, right? What are the assets under management? What is their investment profile? Things like that. That is just a simple prompt for me to go do that. When I go look at risk and compliance, we see a lot of our customers leveraging it for the evidence or the attached documentation that goes around testing and control. What used to be a very manual process of, at one point, looking at paper or at some point looking at PDFs, I can now have AI go through that from an evidence inspection perspective. So, yeah, a lot of valuable capabilities that we see people utilizing today.

And you also touched on kind of your new tiering packaging where you've got kind of, I'll simplistically call it the good, better, best system. I know you call it, have a different name, Advanced. But how should we think about kind of with those AI embedded opportunities, monetization broadly? What's the strategy around monetization? How early are you still today in terms of trying to monetize some of those new tierings and some of those new capabilities you brought to market?

Yeah, I mean, I think first thing when I think about monetization, it's not only price. It is also, you know, quantity. Are we winning more? Are we attracting new customers? Are we retaining customers? And yes, because we have more AI capabilities than others out there that we compete with, that does help us in that win rate side of things. Second piece of that is, yes, we have different tiers of our products now. So a great example is we have our SEC standard solution, and we have SEC advanced. When you move to SEC advanced, you get enhanced capabilities for data management, for design reporting, some additional capabilities, and also our SEC intelligence, which is an advanced AI capability. So SEC intelligence includes a curated data set where you as a user can then benchmark yourself against other publicly listed companies with a trusted curated data set of SEC filing data. So in that context, if I'm, again, going back to doing a new risk factor, not only can I go edit that risk factor, if I have SEC intelligence, I can then benchmark myself against other tickers to say, hey, how are other people writing this new risk factor related to AI as part of their 10K? So a nice value and enhancer. And that's not going up to the Internet just grabbing some random untrusted piece of data. It's going after a curated data set so you can trust the benchmark.

So we've talked a lot about some of the new product and packaging. I kind of want to pivot and talk about go-to-market, and you're in the process, I think it started about 18 months ago, kind of a go-to-market evolution. Maybe talk about what you're doing on the go-to-market side, both from increasing your capacity of sellers but also trying to get more efficient. Talk about the strategy there on the go-to-market side.

Yeah, maybe I'll start there. So, you know, one thing on go-to-market, we just recently hired a new chief revenue officer. So Michael Pinto joined us in December. I've been partnering closely with him. He comes with a ton of SaaS experience, having been at Databricks prior to Workiva, as well as Amazon and prior to that, SAP. And as we look at 2025, some of the things we were very focused on is really a crop. Well, number one is growth. And so that's something that Michael and I talk a lot about. That is our first priority in driving growth. And then in terms of evolving the sales model, you know, we'll continue to fine-tune that. 2025, some of the areas that we were focused on are really across structure, staffing, and strategy. On the structure side, you know, do we have opportunity to have a more efficient sales model? And some of the things we're looking at is, you know, reducing our overlays. You know, that's one area. really leaning into our partners. And then, of course, we've got a much broader portfolio to sell. On the staffing side, really looking at quotas, increasing quotas. Of course, that has to go hand-in-hand with improving or having better enablement for the sales team, refining our sales plays, and, of course, leveraging AI to actually enable our sellers. And then from a capacity perspective, that really goes back to the strategy. And so as we look at our more mature markets, where do we see opportunity to move more to a hunter-farmer model? We did some of that in 2025, continuing that in 2026. And then where do we see opportunity to really lean in with additional sales capacity and drive growth in some of our emerging markets like EMEA, Asia-Pac, and Latin America?

Perfect. And obviously through the lens of with margin expansion as well as you've kind of laid out earlier, which is I think what most investors in the audience are looking for, that profitable growth combo. One of the things that I think has been one of your biggest success stories the last couple of years now is the growth in multi-solution adoption. So you give a stat on kind of the, at the investor day around multi-solution adoption, you have just your quarterly KPI where it's got the 100,000, 300,000 cohorts. You still have over 50% of your base that's only taking one solution from you. What's kind of this go-to-market strategy? How have you been converting those customers? What's the playbook to kind of get them to become a multi-solution and really adopt the platform broadly?

Yeah, I mean, we see a lot of opportunity, right? And you referenced our September Investor Day. That presentation is out there. You can see some more detailed metrics on that. You know, we believe that even if we didn't land one new logo, that there is a 3x, you know, multiple opportunity here on our current, you know, ARR that we are selling to our customers, right? We believe that every one of our customers, you know, has, you know, the ability to purchase and the need to purchase, you know, up to five of our solutions, if not more. And as you referenced, you know, many of our customers, you know, only have one. So our focus on the go-to-market side, yes, is on account expansion. You know, we believe that, you know, 60-plus from our revenue will come from there, and that's a meaningful growth vector. You know, how are we going about doing that? You know, it comes through, you know, creating awareness of everything that we have out there. It's being very deliberate that on renewal that we are focused on making sure we understand the current mix of a customer's, you know, solution portfolio. And well in advance of that, that we are having those conversations. It's about, you know, being relevant and having the right capabilities, including AI to differentiate ourselves. And as companies are looking to consolidate their vendors, you know, that is still a meaningful thing happening with a lot of companies as they're looking to have less vendors than more. We think that plays into our platform approach on those side of things. So all these things are part of a mix. And ultimately, it comes down to execution. We have the opportunity. We have, you know, plenty to sell and plenty of people to sell to. We have to go execute on that, and, you know, it's convincing CFOs like Barbara that not only can you utilize this for SEC reporting, but mandatory reporting and multi-entity reporting and risk compliance. And as you said, a lot of that is awareness. A lot of that's awareness.

Well, another force multiplier on the go-to-market side is the partner channel. And I remember, Mike, when you oversaw that, you know, seven, eight years ago now. But the evolution of the partner channel has been pretty impressive to watch. Maybe talk about the success in 2025 on how much deals kind of partners post-sold or brought, how incremental that was, and then what's kind of the outlook still for the partner channel to grow from here.

Yeah, so we're about six years into working with partners. I can tell you, you know, going back to even, you know, this time 2019, we were low, low, low, single-digit percent with partner-related revenue and significantly higher than that and gave a number of stats at our investor day. When we talk about partners, our motion is primarily with the big four and regional advisory firms. These are the trusted advisors of our customers. And we work with them where they will either source deals for us or co-sell deals with us. You know, the advantage to them, again, you think about advisory firms, their business models are relatively simple, right? They are looking for billable service hours, and when our partners work with Workiva, there's a couple really strong advantages for their business. First off is, yes, they're going to do some setup and consulting work around our solutions, but many of our use cases, they wrap around their higher margin advisory work as well, so it's good billable revenue for them. Second thing is, because we have this platform and a couple dozen solutions, there is always another project for them to work on. So we see many of our multi-solution opportunities being influenced by our partners because they are in there creating that vision for the companies they are working with. And, oh, yeah, by the way, when they drag additional solutions, they also drag, you know, and have the advantage of additional service opportunities. So our motion is really to make our partners successful in their revenue models, which ultimately brings, you know, additional revenue to Workiva through additional solutions. I would say, you know, in a baseball sense, we're probably maybe bottom of the third inning with our partners, right? We think we have a lot of opportunity to still expand that and get greater leverage out of that channel.

So maybe with that, I'll kind of pivot to the 2026 outlook and maybe the longer term targets. But just in terms of starting with the partner aspect of it, is there any opportunity being third inning right now where those could be more incremental to the growth algorithm going forward? are we kind of at a point where you're happy with the contribution coming from the partner channels and now it's just about maturing and kind of growing from there? How much more do you think in terms of incrementality do you think that channel could bring?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's more. I mean, it is an important part of our, you know, our four-pronged strategy. When we talk about strategy, it's platform solutions, partners, and global. And partners is still a critical part of that. And yeah, I think there is a lot of opportunity for more.

So the 2026 outlook factor, another You just had 20% plus bookings. I think you're guiding to, you said, 18% plus top-line growth. Yeah, revenue growth. What's kind of embedded in that growth outlook from this year in terms of a demand standpoint, contribution from that 113 NRR expansion motion? What kind of goes into the building blocks of that outlook for this year?

It's actually really, really broad-based. Mike talked about it. but a big opportunity is expanding with our existing customers. And so the metric that we typically provide is what percent of our incremental revenue comes from new logos versus existing customers. And new logos has been about 40%. Existing has been about 60%. That's what it was for 2025. And that's really how we're thinking about it for 2026. So very balanced, but a lot of opportunity to basically go back and sell into our existing customer base. And then, you know, on new geographies, new markets. I touched on international, like today in 2025, revenue outside of the U.S. was 27% of our total revenue. If you compare us to our peers, you know, we're well below where our peers are. So we see we have a lot of opportunity to go and sell into kind of new customers internationally. We've got, you know, additional solutions as well with private markets as well as verticals, so financial services, even oil and gas. So very broad-based in terms of how we think about our growth for next year.

So new verticals or some of the existing verticals you already have, new geographies, private company. It's pretty broad in terms of where the new customer growth could be coming from. How important is kind of capital markets activity to that new customer growth formula and kind of what are you seeing right now in terms of activity in the pipeline related to capital markets?

Yeah, so capital markets. Last year, we actually saw some really good momentum in Q3. We saw that moderate a little bit in Q4 with the government shutdown. And then, you know, we're optimistic about potential activity in 2026. But the market changes, the market changes every every day. And so cautiously optimistic about that opportunity. You know, we definitely, we do think it will grow, but we haven't had any, you know, significant growth that we built into our guidance right now for capital markets. So just being very balanced and thoughtful about that opportunity as well. But it's a growth driver.

So obviously the software space has faced a little bit of dislocation in the past year from a broad number of concerns out there. but you did just re-up your buyback, and I'm kind of curious how you're thinking about kind of the current environment. Is that changing your thoughts on capital allocation at all? What's kind of the outlook in terms of how you're thinking about uses of cash this year?

Yeah, so we had a $100 million share repurchase authorization. We executed about $72 million in terms of share repurchases in 2025, And then, as you noted with our last earnings, we just expanded that share repurchase program by another $250 million. So generating strong free cash flow, our free cash flow margin in 2025 was, you know, about 15%. We're guiding to 19% this year. So we definitely feel like we've got the strong free cash flow profile to be able to return capital to shareholders and, you know, really focused on how do we offset the impact of stock-based comp dilution and then being very thoughtful and opportunistic, especially in light of the market conditions we see today.

Maybe just a wrap-up question, and I don't know if you each want to take a stab at this, but as you look at the next 12 months, what are you most excited about for WorkEva, the growth opportunity, maybe the margin opportunity that you think investors still underappreciate in your conversations?

Yeah, I mean, I think from an opportunity standpoint, right, again, we say this word broad-based, we look at our opportunity, account expansion, right, there's a lot of vectors for our growth. We have this wide portfolio of solutions to go sell into. So for us, it's just all about that opportunity. And can AI actually be a catalyst for this? AI is disrupting things. But one of the things that's disrupting is people have half the software out there for a lot of companies is still on-prem. And AI is driving people to look for AI-enabled things. We think that's an opportunity for us to take advantage of that.

And I just think there's a huge opportunity within our existing customer base. so I think it's underappreciated just how much opportunity is there. I think you even mentioned it, like more than 60% of our customer base is less than 100K, and so they probably only have one or two solutions. So based on our broad platform, we just have a big opportunity to go back and sell. And then I just think overall the management team's commitment, someone being new, coming in, and just the commitment that the management team has to growth as well as profitable growth and really getting behind that. I think there's still more opportunity for us to expand margins.

And I think you all have talked about this, but not just small companies in that single solution. There's some Fortune 100. It's pretty broad-based in terms of the opportunity to go back to that installed base. But Barbara and Mike, thank you very much for your time today. Thanks, everyone in the audience.

Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Alex.