Pushpay beats $100m annualised revenue target

Chief executive Chris Heaslip says the company has focused on signing up fewer but larger customers. Picture / Dean Purcell

Pushpay Holdings exceeded its target of US$100 million in annualised committed monthly revenue and will move forward its US listing date as it continues to target bigger churches.

ACMR, the company's preferred metric which measures total billings through merchants that Pushpay collects fees from, was US$106.4 million ($148.6m) in the three months ended December 31, 2017, from US$57.9m in the December 2016 quarter. Average revenue per customer rose to US$1,233 per month in the quarter, from US$785 per month a year earlier.

The company, which announced it had hit the US$100m ACMR target on the first trading day of the year, said its medium-term goal is US$10 billion in annualised monthly payment transaction volume, or 10 per cent of annual giving. It wants to engage more than 50 per cent of the medium and large church segments, which it says would mean US$1 billion in annual GAAP revenue.

Pushpay's app has gained traction in the US faith sector, where its services are used by 2 per cent of the estimated 340,000 churches, including 12 of the 20 biggest churches in the US and 50 of the top 100 churches, according to its market update today. Some 57 per cent of its ACMR came from large customers in the latest quarter, from 51 per cent a year earlier.

The company expects ACMR to dip in the current quarter due to seasonal effects, before steadily growing over the rest of the calendar year.

On an investor call this morning, Chris Heaslip, chief executive and co-founder, said the US$10b transaction volume and US$1b GAAP revenue targets were aspirational, "but we would like to think we can continue the pace of growth over the next few years to get to the targets as quickly as possible".

"We have focused on signing up fewer but larger customers," Heaslip said. "The efficiency is greater, the value they get is greater, the growth potential is greater as well, so we feel like it's the right move for the business. The customer numbers will continue to stay down for a bit and over the coming few quarters here we expect that to grow."

Pushpay also said it will pursue a US listing by the end of this calendar year, slightly earlier than the previous guidance of listing within 15 months which would have meant listing by February 16, 2019. It says it is committed to remaining listed on the NZX and ASX.

Chief business development officer James Maiocco said Pushpay had been in talks with Apple since the middle of last year, when Apple changed guidelines for its App Store to prohibit apps being generated from a template.

In December, Apple clarified and lifted that prohibition following US Congressional pressure to mitigate the impact on small businesses and publishers, and Pushpay has now begun using its consolidated app, he said.

"We have been working closely with Apple to agree upon plans to transition our customers to a consolidated app," Maiocco said. "We've been doing this and we debuted this at the end of last quarter, so ultimately these changes should have no impact upon our core strategy. It will enable us to deliver innovations to market more quickly and improve customer onboarding."

The company's shares, which joined the NZX 50 Index when Xero left late last year, rose 0.5 per cent to $4.37, and have risen 133 per cent in the past 12 months.