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Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Alchemy Technology third quarter 2026 financial results conference call. At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Steve Calk. Steve, you may begin.

Thank you, operator. With me on today's call are Alex Shootman, Chief Executive Officer, and Cassandra Hudson, Chief Financial Officer. During today's call, we may make forward-looking statements about guidance and other matters regarding our future performance. These statements are based on management's current views and expectations and are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Our actual results may be materially different. For a summary of risk factors, please refer to today's press release in the sections in our latest 10-K entitled Risk Factors and Forward-Looking Statements. Good afternoon.

and thank you for joining us today. In the third quarter, Alchemy again delivered revenue growth and profitability ahead of our expectations. Our end market continues to invest in modernization, which gives us a consistent pipeline of opportunity. And the journey our market has taken from the chat GPT moment at the end of 2022 to Opus 4.6 in February supports our DSSP strategy and creates new product possibilities. I'll come back to that later in the call. In the third quarter, we signed five new digital banking relationships, three banks and two credit unions. Two of the five also contracted for DSSP, our digital banking, account opening and data and marketing products together. This brings our year-to-date total to 16 digital banking new logos compared with an average of 21 through the third quarter since becoming a public company. Our digital banking pipeline is consistent with historical norms. However, we believe speculation about Alchemy's future ownership created uncertainty for customers and prospects and has been an overhang on our new logo business. Providing clarity to our end market was an important reason we publicly communicated the conclusion of our strategic review in September. The results of that review was a unanimous decision by the Alchemy Board that executing our long-range plan as an independent public company was the best path to maximize shareholder value. With this behind us, we believe the business has the potential to return to its normal cadence. Along with the digital banking new logos, we signed 14 new Mantle clients, five additional clients contracted for DSSP, bringing the number of clients contracted for all three DSSP products to 60. We also now have 544 unique clients contracted for digital banking or mantle, including 86 contracted for both platforms. Core conversions are an example of the high impact work we deliver. A core conversion is when an existing client switches their core banking system. We completed seven this year, a record, including six of our largest clients representing more than 3.5 million digital users. Next year, we will nearly double that. In Q3, we brought 10 digital banking clients and 26 mental clients live, and over the last 12 months, we added 2.8 million users to our digital banking platform. Last week, we launched four digital banking clients in a single day, a record for Alchemy. Five more follow, which will be nine launches and 12 business days. From 2020 through the end of Q3 this year, we've brought 229 financial institutions onto our digital banking platform, along with their 8.4 million account holders. I'm proud of our ability to execute critical client projects. When the real competitor is staying on a legacy platform, what changes an institution's mind is confidence that the migration will work. I'm hearing much more clarity from our clients about where AI matters to them. People will still save, spend, borrow, move money, and open accounts. Those jobs have been the same for 100 years. What changes is who does them. Today, the account holder navigates menus and completes each task. In the AI era, they'll describe a goal in plain language, and the software will work out the steps and ask for permission to act. That shift shows up in two places and we're building for both. The first is inside the institution's own app. Alongside the digital banking experience more than 24 million users rely on today, we're building an agentic conversational experience. It will spot a cash shortfall before a bill is due, suggest a safe amount to move into a CD, or line up a card pay down that won't put rent at risk. These experiences need all three parts of DSSP. The agent reasons over the data and acts inside digital banking. Opening the account or originating the loan depends upon the institution's policy and where they want it, a human approval. The second is outside the app because many account holders will also use general purpose AI assistance. I think those assistants will be excellent at conversation and limited at banking. To move money, open an account, or approve a loan, an agent needs government access, identity, entitlements, limits, approvals, and the systems of record underneath all of it. Alchemy runs that layer. We're building connectors into the leading AI assistants so that our clients' account holders can bank through whichever one they use. All of this comes back to control. Our clients want to decide which agents are allowed in, what those agents can do, and where a person has to sign off. Across more than 300 live clients, I hear the full range. Some want read-only access and nothing more. Others see agentic action with controls as the thing that lets them compete with a megabank. Even the enthusiasts move in stages. Assist first. then recommend, then prepare an action for someone to approve. Acting inside rules they set will come last. Here is why I think Alchemy is positioned for this. We run a single code-based multi-tenant SaaS platform. Every institution on it configures roughly 4,000 policy settings of its own across approximately 25 systems of record that are integrated into Alchemy. We built that so our clients could each run their own bank on shared infrastructure. It's also what an agent needs, one place to ask, one set of permissions to respect, and a record of every action taken. We're doing this now. There are three agents in Beta Insider onboarding and account opening platform built for the people who run the institution. A KYC agent summarizes a manual review and recommends a disposition against the institution's own policy. A document review agent reads borrower documents, flags mismatches with the application, and coaches the applicant on what to upload. Then an MCP server lets a financial institution ask a question from an AI assistant and get an answer grounded in their own application and account data. The main conversation we are having with all of our clients is that every generation's front door to the bank has changed. It was a branch, became a drive-thru, Then in ATM, the internet, and mobile devices. The next generation's front door will be an agent, and it will interact with digital banking the way the internet and mobile do today. Beyond deciding how agents interact with their customers, our clients share two other priorities. The first is their own transformation through the application of AI technology. As I mentioned on our last call, we built an internal platform in daily use by more than 100 people across our company. It understands roles and skills, protects sensitive data, carries company context, works across teams, and optimizes across models. In our target market, financial institutions average fewer than 200 employees. We're already running our internal platform inside a company several times their size, and some are asking if they can use ours as their AI-powered enterprise workspace. The second is new agentic applications. With SaaS, we build apps on rented infrastructure. With AI, we build apps on models. Our clients don't just want a helper agent stitched to our SaaS application. They want an AI app built on a foundation model that solves a problem SaaS applications can't solve. An example is the combination of data analysis and workflow optimization necessary to fight fraud. Roughly 10% of our revenue today comes from AI products already in our portfolio, including fraud management. So this is an extension of something that already works. Both client priorities will shape where we invest in 2027, which we will discuss on our Q4 call early next year. In closing, Since our founding 17 years ago, Alchemy has proven itself as an industry innovator while driving sustainable growth and expanding profitability. Our next chapter builds on that foundation as we become the technology partner of choice for regional and community financial institutions. I'll now hand the call to Cassandra to discuss our financial results.

Thank you, Alex. For the third quarter, we outperformed our guidance across revenue and adjusted EBITDA, enabling us to raise full-year targets for both metrics. Our recurring revenue model continues to drive compounding expansion throughout our customer portfolio, translating into strong margin progression while continuing to invest strategically to support durable shareholder value creation. I'll start with our outlook. For the fourth quarter of 2026, We expect revenue of $139.7 million to $141.2 million, representing growth of 15.6 to 16.9%, and adjusted EBITDA of $30 million to $31 million, or a 21.7 margin at the midpoint. Our fourth quarter guidance reflects the timing of one-time revenue that benefited the third quarter and will not recur in the fourth. It also reflects slightly higher third-party costs based on the mix we saw in Q3. Those items are why our Q4 outlook is slightly below where some of you may have modeled it. They don't change our view of the year, which is why we are raising our full year outlook. For the full year, we now expect revenue of $530.5 million to $532 million, representing growth of 19.6% to 19.9%. Adjusted EBITDA of $98 million to $99 million, or an 18.5% margin at the midpoint. and stock-based compensation of less than 14% of revenue. Our revenue outlook reflects a heavier fourth quarter launch schedule, continued cross-sell momentum and mid-single digit ARPU growth. For the year, we continue to expect over 500 basis points of margin expansion driven by operating leverage and cost discipline while we continue to invest in product innovation and AI. Alex's remarks on our future reinforce our path to Rule of 45 by 2030. which assumes gross margin approaching 70%, roughly 300 basis points of annual adjusted EBITDA margin expansion in stock-based compensation falling below 10% of revenue. We will provide our full 2027 outlook with our fourth quarter results. We are sharpening our focus on profitability and we expect that focus to drive margin expansion in 2027. AI is also changing how we build products, support our platform, and serve our customers. We expect those efficiencies to show up across our cost structure in 2027. Our 2027 plan will be built on the momentum we see today. 19% live ARR growth this quarter, a backlog of approximately 56 million of ARR that we expect to mostly go live over the next 12 months, and continued ARPU growth driven by strong cross-sell and sustained interest in our DSSP offer. Now turning to third quarter results. Revenue was $134.9 million, up 19% year-over-year and above the high end of our guidance. Subscription revenue grew 20% and represented 96% of total revenue. Our year-over-year growth was primarily driven by new customers going live and expansion within existing customers. Growth also benefited from an easier prior year comparison and from higher third-party and core conversion revenue than expected. We increased live ARR by 19% to $533 million. Our $56 million ARR backlog represents 31 new clients and roughly 1 million digital users, and the majority is expected to go live over the next 12 months. As Alex noted, the strategic review created some uncertainty for customers and prospects this year. With the review concluded, our teams are fully focused on winning new business and executing for our clients. Our strategy is increasingly centered on expanding value per client, and our results reflect continued progress. In the third quarter, average ARR per client reached approximately 1.7 million, and we now have 56 clients at or above 2 million in ARR, up from 18 at the end of 2021. This illustrates the central premise of our long-term model. As megabanks and fintechs continue to innovate, our clients adopt more of the platform. We continue to see strong momentum with DSSP, which makes our clients more competitive and drives higher quality, long-term revenue for Alchemy. We exited the quarter with 323 live digital banking clients and 24.4 million registered users, an increase of 2.8 million users, or 13% year-over-year. Over the past 12 months, we implemented 36 clients supporting 1.4 million digital users and existing clients increased their digital adoption by 1.5 million users. Digital user growth has been higher than we expected this year and our clients continue to grow faster than the overall market. This is a testament to how our product helps our clients grow. Our digital banking contracts provide strong visibility into attrition, typically several quarters in advance. Over the past three years, we have churned less than 1% of our digital banking ARR annually, usually resulting from a client merger. ARPU increased to $21.88, up 5% year-over-year. Growth was driven primarily by cross-sell execution, increased user adoption among existing clients, and the increase in live banks, which tend to onboard at higher ARPUs given the commercial-to-retail mix. Remaining performance obligations were approximately $1.7 billion, or 3.2 times live ARR, providing strong visibility into long-term revenue. Third quarter gross margin was 63.1%, below our expectations, and driven primarily by higher third-party product costs. Our cost of revenue includes third-party product costs, which fluctuate with product mix, hosting costs to run our platform, and the cost to implement and serve our customers. Roughly a third of our revenue is third-party products that are fully integrated into the Alchemy platform so gross margin can move with mix. We remain committed to expanding gross margin as we scale and improve the efficiency of hosting, implementation, and client support. We expect AI to contribute to those improvements over time with the benefits building gradually. Third quarter operating expenses were $59.4 million or 44% of revenue, representing approximately 600 basis points of year-over-year improvement. That improvement was driven by personnel cost efficiencies as we achieved new levels of scale, and it was realized across all areas of operating expense. Adjusted EBITDA was $26.3 million, above the high end of our expectations, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 19.5% and an expansion of over 530 basis points year-over-year. Revenue grew faster than cost of revenue and operating expenses, which drove the expansion. In the third quarter, we generated operating cash flow of nearly $22 million, driven by improved profitability and disciplined working capital management. We ended the quarter with $85 million in cash and marketable securities. We also repurchased $10 million of stock for a total of $20 million through September 30, 2026. We remain committed to a disciplined and balanced approach to capital allocation across acquisitions, debt reduction, and opportunistic share repurchases funded by free cash flow. In closing, our third quarter reflects the strengths of our client base, disciplined execution, and a clear focus on profitability. Our clients' growth is driving ours, and we are building on that momentum as we convert growth into margin and create long-term value for our shareholders. We are excited about what lies ahead. With that, operator, please open the line for questions.

Thank you, and ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press a star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press a star followed by the number two. With that, your first question comes from the lineup. Chris Kennedy with William Blair, please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. New sales activity was very stable throughout the year, but Alex, you did mention some uncertainty kind of pressured new logo wins. Can you just provide a little bit more color on that and the pipeline?

One moment, please, as we reconnect the speaker line. Ladies and gentlemen, please continue to stand by as we reconnect the speaker line. and many more.