Pushpay meets FY18 guidance as revenue doubles

Pushpay chief executive Chris Heaslip. Photo / File

Pushpay Holdings, the mobile payments app company, narrowed its net loss as it doubled revenue in 2018, in line with forecasts.

The Auckland-domiciled, US-headquartered company's net loss was $23.3 million in the year ended March 31, from $25.3m a year earlier, while revenue rose to $70.2m from $34.3m in the prior year, in line with its forecast.

Pushpay's app has gained traction in the US faith sector, where it is now in use in 54 of the top 100 churches, and has transactions of US$3 billion ($4.3b) based on annualised monthly figures.

Annualised committed monthly revenue, which has historically been the company's preferred metric and measures total billings through merchants that Pushpay collects fees from, jumped to US$86.4m from US$58.8m a year earlier.

However, in the company's last quarterly update in April, it said it is moving away from focusing on ACMR and will now focus on GAAP revenue as its preferred metric.

The company had said its strategic focus is on medium and large churches, and the proportion of those churches amongst its total customers rose to 51.1 per cent in the 2018 year from 45.4 per cent in 2017.

"We have found that larger customers invest more in implementation and are therefore more likely to implement correctly and successfully (leading to greater adoption), are easier to service long term, are less likely to churn than smaller customers, and typically generate increased subscription and processing revenues over time," Pushpay said.

Looking forward, Pushpay said it expects to see a continued increase over the current year in subscription fees added from new customers, with a lower average sales headcount than last year.

"Given seasonality, we expect ACMR and ARPC (average revenue per customer) to steadily grow over the calendar year to 31 December 2018. We also expect customer unit churn to decrease and customer numbers to steadily grow over the calendar year," it said.

"In the long term, Pushpay is targeting over 50 percent of the medium and large church segments, an opportunity representing over US$1b in annual revenue."

On a conference call to investors and media, chief executive Chris Heaslip said the company would expect to see the number of deals it's closing and the deal size to accelerate over the next year.

"Revenue of course has kind of a lagging effect - once those customers sign, they implement perhaps up to a quarter, maybe slightly longer than that after they've signed, and then there's a ramp that follows that until they start getting to some type of peak maturity and have transferred all of their recurring givers across," Heaslip said.

"In the near term we see the leading indicators around the number of deals that we're closing, which then take some time to flow into revenue and continue to drive up ACMR."

Pushpay is still aiming for a US listing by the end of calendar 2018, and today reiterated its expectations of reaching US$100m in ACMR by December 31 and break even on a monthly cash flow basis by the end of calendar 2018.

This month, the company released its dynamic homescreen product, which it says delivers a dynamic feed to app users similar to social media apps like Twitter or Facebook.

Heaslip said the product was a first step."The goal of that is to get some basic information, a stream of recent events, activities, podcasts, videos that you can see in chronological order. It's a flagship product that's going to truly differentiate us."

New customers have the product included in their contracts, while older customers will need to upgrade to access the feed. Heaslip said the company doesn't expect that to ramp up in the next quarter or two, but it will make a large public announcement at its planned keynote in North Carolina in August, and will start working on its customers to move across at that point.

The shares recently traded lower, down 0.7 per cent to $4.06.