Enfusion - Q4 2022
March 7, 2023
Transcript
Operator (participant)
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Enfusion's fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. Following the speaker's remarks, we will open the lines for your questions. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to hand you over to our host, Ignatius Njoku, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Ignatius Njoku (Head of Investor Relations)
Good morning, thank you, Operator. We welcome you to Enfusion's fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Hosting today's call are Oleg Movchan, Enfusion's Chief Executive Officer, and Brad Herring, Enfusion's Chief Financial Officer. Please note our quarterly shareholder letter, which includes our quarterly financial results, have all been posted to our IR website. I'd like to remind you that today's call may contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, including those set forth in our filings with the SEC, and are available in the investor relations section in our website. Actual results may differ materially from any forward-looking statements we make today. These forward-looking statements speak only as of today, and the company does not assume any obligation or intent to update them following today's call, except as required by law. In addition, today's call may include non-GAAP measures.
These measures should be considered as a supplement to, and not as a substitute for, GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation to the nearest GAAP measure can be found in today's quarterly shareholder letter, which is available on the company's website. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Oleg to begin.
Oleg Movchan (CEO)
Good morning. Thank you all for joining us today to discuss our fourth quarter 2022 results. I'm happy to be here, and I'm honored to be addressing you today formally as Enfusion's CEO. I would like to first thank all of my colleagues for the warm welcome that I received in this new role. I'm looking forward to leading Enfusion, and I'm energized by the opportunity set that Enfusion is facing today. I'm also thrilled to welcome Brad Herring as our Chief Financial Officer, who brings a long and impressive track record as a public company CFO. I look forward to working with him to position Enfusion for scale as we go through the next stage of our growth. 2022 was a successful year for Enfusion, despite market volatility and changing demand environment.
We ended the year in a position of strength, demonstrating that Enfusion continues to be a unique combination of high growth and profitability within the vertical SaaS space. We delivered strong revenue growth, maintained our focus on profitability and margins, expanded into new adjacent markets, and won numerous mandates from marquee hedge fund managers, institutional investment managers, and asset owners. We refocused capital allocation toward technology, product, and client services to prepare the company for scale as we continue our global expansion towards larger and more complex institutional opportunities. Our fiscal discipline in the second half of the year resulted in margin expansion and enabled the company to generate positive Adjusted Free Cash Flows. These outcomes underscore the durability of our business model and demonstrate our ability to deliver exceptional value for our shareholders.
With this momentum, getting into 2023, we plan to maintain and enhance revenue growth and deliver a stable and expanding margin profile. We remain laser-focused on delivering exceptionally positive client outcomes powered by the best-in-class software and services offering. Let's turn to fourth quarter results. We're pleased with this quarter's performance, delivering strong growth driven by disciplined capital allocation. Revenue grew 27% to $40.5 million, reflecting ongoing healthy demand and solid execution. Adjusted EBITDA was $6.8 million and represents a margin of 16.7%. This outcome reflects our progress in further improving the company's margin profile and our focus on returning Enfusion to its historical profitability. We generated ARR of $165 million or a 30% growth year-over-year. We continue to see strength in new sales across all our products and services.
Excluding involuntary churn, Net Dollar Retention was 115.4% as we continue to have meaningful commercial expansion within our existing client base. Including involuntary churn, the NDR remained at a healthy rate of 111.5%. We signed 39 new clients in the quarter. Ended the quarter with a total of 819 clients. Conversions accounted for 51% of new client wins as we saw slight uptick in win rate for hedge fund launches, though launches remained overall down from previous year. Let us move to client wins that highlight the powerful value proposition we deliver to the global investment management community. In the Americas, revenue again grew 19% year-over-year, driven by ongoing client demand in the region. One of our new clients we're excited about is a North Carolina-based university endowment.
This asset owner is seeking to replace its outdated legacy system with a more efficient end-to-end platform that supports all asset classes and reduces total cost of ownership. By partnering with Enfusion, the investment manager improves its manual workflow and compliance capabilities. In EMEA, revenue grew 54% year-over-year. We had a record bookings level for the region and expect this positive momentum to continue in 2023 as well. I'm pleased to announce that Enfusion won an EMEA-based multi-billion dollar long/short equity hedge fund. This new hedge fund launch is a spin-off from one of the biggest well-known global hedge fund platforms. The manager was seeking a robust cloud-native platform which would allow them to accelerate the go-live process and support anticipated AUM growth, as well as increased complexity. Enfusion was chosen for its flexible, comprehensive, and modern technology stack, coupled with end-to-end managed services.
In addition, this client was particularly interested in our robust reporting framework and API technology to provide them with flexibility to integrate with third-party vendors. I'm also excited to announce that we partnered with a newly launched hedge fund based in the Middle East. This investment manager is supported by a notable sovereign wealth fund and will employ multiple strategies, including equity, fixed income, and global macro. The fund selected Enfusion because of its global reach and differentiated software and services, particularly our cloud-native end-to-end platform, single data set, and robust API technology stack. Together, Enfusion will enable this fund manager to scale and deploy efficient workflows. This win is significant because it demonstrates our success in expanding into the Middle East, an important destination for both capital allocators and hedge fund managers. Now, turning to APAC.
We grew revenue by 36% year-over-year, as we see healthy demand in the region. I'm thrilled to announce that we entered into an agreement with a multi-billion dollar Tokyo-based alternative investment manager. This client was seeking to modernize their efficient on-premise technology stack, which consisted of disparate, outdated, and common capabilities. The investment manager selected Enfusion because of our fully integrated end-to-end platform and our deep understanding of region-specific functional requirements that continue to drive our success in APAC. Enfusion will replace their manual, error-prone infrastructure with our OMS data analytics and accounting capabilities. As a direct product of such digital transformation, the client significantly reduced the need for internal technology and operational resources and compressed total cost of ownership.
This exciting global win further validate our ability to move upstream across all regions, win more conversions, and expand into new adjacent markets, all during times of significant market uncertainty. Let's talk briefly about a new customer that went live on our platform in the fourth quarter, which is PanAgora Asset Management. With over $30 billion of assets under management, PanAgora is a quantitative investment manager that deploys multiple strategies, including active equity and multi-asset quantitative investment strategies. After extensive due diligence, PanAgora selected Enfusion to replace their long-time OMS vendor with an objective to reduce their in-house technology footprint and improve the functionality of the growing business. Enfusion and PanAgora partnered during the onboarding to streamline legacy workflows and enhance the Enfusion API capabilities.
Now live on the Enfusion platform, PanAgora benefits from frictionless upgrades and a scalable technology that will afford flexibility to continue evolving their business in the years to come. Turning to product and technology. Innovation is the key pillar for our success, and we're committed to deploying new products and next-generation solutions by listening closely to client demands and moving steadily through the adjacent portion of our total addressable market. During the quarter, we rolled out new enhancements and features across our platform to continue improving stability and scale and expand functionality. For example, we released a self-service General Ledger posting workflow, so the clients have control over closing their books at their own discretion. We're also continuing to develop APIs to allow our clients to quickly and easily integrate with our platform.
For instance, we have made a series of enhancements to our API capability suite to support creating and updating many trade types within our platform. The API enhancements were made over the last two quarters have brought our API capability more in line with our UI capability and support our systematically inclined clients to really drive scale and efficiency through the platform at large volumes. Another notable enhancement launched this quarter is the new framework for handling bank debt and credit facilities, as well as support for initial drawdown logic for revolvers. Now Enfusion is one of the few platforms that truly models the loan asset class properly, from the global amount down to the positions, and we can support many of the complex edge cases, including, but not limited to delayed count, cost of carry, drawdowns and paydowns, both pro rata and non pro rata.
In aggregate, we're well-positioned to support our clients' trading and leverage credit strategies. This has been driving our success in this segment. All in all, we deployed 361 enhancements and new features across our platform during the quarter, further demonstrating our ongoing innovation. Moving to market dynamics. The macroeconomic uncertainty has driven multiple trends to play out in the market. First, we continue to see global asset managers embracing our fully integrated, cost-effective, and robust capabilities. The industry is increasingly shifting away from on-premise sets of disparate pieces of software, either homegrown or stitched together by competitor acquisitions. Asset managers are focused on outsourcing both middle and back-office operations and trading. This is where Enfusion comes in.
With our cost-effective and operationally efficient front-to-back scalable technology, coupled with a best-in-class client services, we believe our business is well positioned not only to weather the ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty, but also benefit from it. On one hand, the reduction in the number of hedge fund launches and delays in purchase decisions by existing investment firms could reduce our opportunity set and elongate sales cycle. On the other hand, in terms of the upside, large alternative investment platforms and traditional asset managers are optimizing their cost structures by converting their legacy system to Enfusion software and relying on our services to support their business. The upside scenario is what we typically saw throughout the history of the firm, and our seeing now as we continue to win conversions in competitive situations.
Importantly, we'll continue to see capital shifting away from hedge fund launches and smaller hedge funds toward larger multi-manager platforms and separately managed account structures as investors are looking to attain better performance, reduce operational and key person risks, and access diversified portfolio of alternative strategies. This is where we see our current multi-strategy and multi-manager clients growing rapidly and where we see outside demand to remain strong in the near future. As such platforms continue to spin off and feed various teams that have been successful internally, Enfusion continues to benefit from such backdoor launches as technology familiarity and operational transition become natural. Let me turn to our key focus areas for 2023. We plan to build on our momentum to create value for our clients, partners, and shareholders. We focus our capital allocation on technology, product, and client service organization.
Core to our competitive advantage is driving innovation and responding to our client technology needs in a timely and thoughtful way. By investing in our technology stack and expanding our product portfolio and system functionality, we're able to deliver new capabilities and services, enhance our competitive moat, capture more market share, and drive upsell opportunities. Next, Enfusion's best-in-class client service underpins our overall strategy to win new clients. We're focused on enhancing our onboarding and implementation process to improve conversion experience. Additionally, we'll work on making our account management and managed services teams more operationally efficient by investing in the related technologies. This will enable us to support larger and more complex investment firms while improving our margins. This investment will bolster our competitive stance, and will continue to position Enfusion to deliver high-quality software and a service to our clients.
As importantly, we're also committed to maintaining Enfusion's path towards margin expansion and operational efficiency, as witnessed by this quarter's result. High margins coupled with high growth rates have been a staple of our business model, and the management team is focused on the bottom line more than ever. In summary, we're pleased with our execution in the fourth quarter and how the company is set up for success in 2023. Every new customer, every new technology capability, every new feature in our system, and every support ticket resolved by our team only reinforce the magnitude of the opportunity set in front of Enfusion and our unique positioning. I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge our talented employees globally for their hard work and selfless focus on execution. Our results this quarter are simply a reflection of the caliber of our team.
Their passion, dedication, and creativity continue to solve the most challenging problems our customers face and enable our clients to generate superior risk-adjusted returns for their investors. Before I turn over the call to Brad, I would like to highlight the steps we made to further strengthen our board with the addition of two new independent directors. We're pleased to welcome Deirdre Somers, who sits on the Audit Committee and the Nominating and Governance Committee, and Michael Spellacy, who was appointed our Board Chair. I will now turn the call over to Brad to discuss our financial results in more detail.
Brad Herring (CFO)
Thanks, Oleg. Thanks to everyone for joining us today. I'm happy to speak with you today in my new role as the CFO of Enfusion. I look forward to working with Oleg, the executive team, and all of our employees here to help lead Enfusion to its next stage of growth. On to the numbers. In the fourth quarter, we generated revenue of $40.5 million, an increase of 27% over the same quarter last year. Growth was driven by continued share wins and client demand for our comprehensive solution. Fourth quarter adjusted gross profit, which excludes stock-based compensation, increased by 25% year-over-year to $27.5 million. This represents an adjusted gross margin of 68%.
It's worth noting that these results were impacted by a change in cost allocation methodology, which lowered Q4 adjusted gross margin by approximately 150 basis points. Excluding this methodology change, adjusted gross profit would have been 69.5%. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $6.8 million, up 112% year-over-year. Against in-quarter revenues, this represents an Adjusted EBITDA margin of 16.7%, up 670 basis points from the same period a year ago. Year-over-year margin expansion was the result of the scalability of our SaaS model combined with prudent cost discipline in the quarter. One of the changes we're making in our earnings discussion is the inclusion of an Adjusted Free Cash Flow metric. A reconciliation of Adjusted Free Cash Flow is included in the appendix of our shareholder letter.
For the fourth quarter, we generated Adjusted Free Cash Flow of $3.6 million compared to a negative $3.1 million in the same period a year ago. Current quarter results represent a 53% conversion rate against our Adjusted EBITDA. Free cash conversion was slightly higher than expectations due to the deferral of some CapEx items that will push into 2023. We exited the fourth quarter with an ARR of $164.7 million, up 30% year-over-year. The healthy ARR growth reflects ongoing strength of our customer additions and our ability to win share despite a challenging 2022 for our customers. Net Dollar Retention, excluding involuntary churn, was 115.4%, down 120 basis points quarter-over-quarter.
The sequential decline is driven by ongoing volatility in the market as the sector increasingly focuses on rightsizing their cost structure. Net Dollar Retention, including involuntary churn, was 111.5%, relatively flat from a year ago period. We signed 39 new logos in the fourth quarter, ending the quarter with 819 total clients. It's worth noting also that the average size of our customer has increased approximately 13% compared to the same period last year as we continue to execute on our strategy to move upmarket. Net income for the fourth quarter was $788,000, which includes $4.2 million of stock-based compensation. We ended the year in a strong cash position with approximately $63 million in cash and cash equivalents and no debt.
We believe the strength of our balance sheet gives us considerable flexibility to execute on our long-term strategy. Now on to guidance. Before we get too deep, I want to comment on a change we're making to our guidance practices. After discussions between Oleg, myself, and our Board, we have decided to shift from forward quarter guidance to providing annual guidance with updates during each of our quarterly earnings calls. Where relevant, I will also be providing insights on the anticipated pacing of our results throughout the year. This change was based on two distinct factors. First, we wanted to improve the alignment between our financial practices and the philosophies we use to run the business. Our approach has always been to deploy capital to create long-term value for our shareholders, and the practice of discussing quarterly guidance is not aligned with that philosophy.
Second, given the combination of macro level uncertainty and the current scale of our business, the practice of providing quarterly guidance is simply not prudent. While we are removing our forward quarter guidance, we are adding information in our quarterly earnings materials that we feel will be more relevant. Notably, you will see in our recently revamped Form 8-K filing the addition of Adjusted Free Cash Flow and cash flow conversion metrics. All that said, let's turn to our outlook for 2023. I'll start with making a few comments to position the year. As mentioned earlier, our clients faced considerable challenges in 2022, with underlying markets down significantly and sustained volatility within financial markets. Given these dynamics, combined with macroeconomic uncertainty, we anticipate that asset managers will continue to look for opportunities to right-size their cost structures into the first half of 2023.
This has several short-term impacts on our business. First, it provides us with considerable market advantage to gain share by providing the market with a premium solution with a lower total cost of ownership. Second, we expect new fund launches will continue to lag historical levels until markets stabilize. Finally, we anticipate continued volatility in our Net Dollar Retention rates as our current customers continue to monitor their spend in the backdrop of the uncertainties I've mentioned. With regards to our cost structure in 2023, we are investing in two prime areas in support of our overall growth strategy. First, we are making investments in our client services function to provide a scalable and sustainable servicing model that meets our customers' high expectations.
Second, we are adding R&D capacity to our product and software development teams to both strengthen our current market-leading position as well as open up new addressable market segments. Combined, these investments will put slight short-term pressure on margins. However, we feel that funding these initiatives supports our growth trajectory and positions the business for improved margin expansion going forward. Based on all these inputs, we are introducing full year 2023 revenue and Adjusted EBITDA outlook as follows. We expect revenue to be in the range of $185 million-$190 million, which at the midpoint represents year-over-year growth of 25%. Referring back to my comments on the uncertain market conditions facing the segment, we anticipate revenue growth rates to be slightly higher in the second half of the year.
We expect Adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $32 million-$34 million, which at the midpoint of our ranges represents an Adjusted EBITDA margin of 18%. We project Adjusted EBITDA margins to be lowest in the first quarter before steadily expanding throughout the year and exiting 2023 at approximately 20%. For modeling purposes, we project stock-based compensation of approximately $12 million for the full year. In summary, we completed 2022 with strong results despite headwinds in the segment. Moving on to 2023, we are building on that foundation to enhance our market-leading cloud-based end-to-end investment management platform by making strategic investments in both our product and servicing capabilities. I have great confidence in the long-term trajectory of our business and our ability to deliver strong revenue growth while continuing to expand margins and grow free cash flow.
With that, I'd like to open up the call to questions. Operator, please go ahead.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If for any reason you'd like to remove your question, it is star followed by two. As a reminder, if you are using a speakerphone, please remember to pick up your handset before asking your question. Again, it is star one to register your question. Our first question comes from the line of James Faucette of Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
James Faucette (Executive Director of Equity Research)
Thanks very much. firstly, we appreciate all the disclosure you provided in the shareholder letter. Really helpful to... On the conversion statistic you gave in the deck, how should we think about what appears to be a little bit of slowing conversion momentum, given that the statistics look to be around 50% relative to 60% last quarter and 64% a year ago period. Is that indicative of that slower pace of decision making at some of your larger clients? Should we expect that kind of sales cycle to persist?
Oleg Movchan (CEO)
Hi, Jim. This is Oleg. Appreciate the question. Actually, it's twofold from my perspective. The, this particular number is not indicative of any trend that we expect to pursue going forward as far as our business is concerned. You know, we believe we can easily be at, you know, what we've seen historically over the last couple of years, we're shooting for probably something like 60%-65% on conversion side on average. As far as delay in purchasing decisions, I don't think this is something that will impact that rate of our wins as % of the overall book. Overall, that definitely has an impact on, you know, It could have an impact on the overall growth. As far as percentage of our overall book, I think we will continue to see, very stable to increase in share of our business in, conversions.
James Faucette (Executive Director of Equity Research)
Got it. Got it. Then, you know, I know you touched about Net Dollar Retention kind of being volatile, et cetera. It's really pretty constructive, at least from our perspective, to see you still be able to deliver strong revenue performance even when we saw a little bit of a decline there. How should we think about the drivers of Net Dollar Retention and where should that metric be, at least from your perspective, in the next one, three and five years? I guess as part of that, I know you're not guiding to specifically NDR, but, you know, what's the level that you think you roughly need to be at in order to achieve your revenue outlook? Thanks.
Oleg Movchan (CEO)
Sure. I think a couple of things, so tactically and strategically. Let me answer this the following way. The volatility that we expect, you know, it is driven by the current macroeconomic environment, right? As you know, our formula allows us to scale in and out with the clients. You know, clients come in and they reduce number of licenses, then they come in, you know, and they increase number of licenses. That's part of, you know, you wanna call it downgrades and then upgrades. It's something that we've typically, you know, seen in our business, and that actually from our perspective increases stickiness of our clients because it's not binary, right? They don't just have to cancel the relationship. They just stay with us and scale in and out of this relationship.
Our gold standard historically being 120% NDR. This is what, from my perspective, long term, I don't know, one year, three years, four years, I think that's on us as a company, both in terms of technology capabilities and client services to get there, right? That's what I hold myself accountable to, and this is what I'm holding my team accountable to. I think this is best in class platform, and our customers deserve nothing less than world-class customer service in addition to the technology. In terms of drivers, that you asked about, I think there will be a balance between sort of this, you know, call it downgrade and people trying to scale out and be a little more conservative with, what I mentioned in my prior remarks related to the actual growth in institutional, market segments, growth from our perspective, and growth within multi-manager and multi-strategy platforms.
We're already seeing some green shoots of our ability to expand our relationship with the clients commercially very deeply, which I think historically, we haven't really done a good job at. This is something we're paying very close attention to, looking at, you know, our client base very carefully and creating value, and expanding that footprint.
James Faucette (Executive Director of Equity Research)
Got it. Thank you very much.
Oleg Movchan (CEO)
Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Our next question comes from the line of Kevin McVeigh of Credit Suisse. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Kevin McVeigh (Managing Director)
Great. Thanks so much. Just to follow up on that question, Oleg, again, congratulations on the results. Really, good outcome. Is there any way to think about kind of, like dormant clients in terms of is there a certain percentage of clients that are, you know, active at different times of the year? Or, you know, is it just head count? Any way to think about maybe a lower end of the range, where that is today and where that's been historically, and does that flex back up just so we get a sense of, you know, where the optionality sits maybe within existing accounts, if there's a way to frame that?
Oleg Movchan (CEO)
I don't know if there is any seasonality to it. I will say that, you know, some of the volatility that, you know, Brad mentioned in his remarks, you know, definitely, you know, clients are coming off, you know, the whole industry is coming off of a difficult year. I mean, the, you know, both equities and bonds are down, you know, dependent on, you know, which currency and country you're looking at, anywhere between 20% and 25%. AMs are down accordingly, management fees are down accordingly. People are not even talking about performance fees in many cases. There's just the economics of the business are changed, right? It's not about like time of the year, right? It's about where the industry is in the cycle, so to speak.
As I mentioned, there is this balance, right? We do see some, you know, slowdown in decision-making and people reducing the number of licenses. However, you know, as you can see from our financial results and from our guidance, you know, that's what I call downside convexity in this business. This is what we're seeing playing out today. On one hand, you know, people are, you know, reimagining and trying to reexamine what, you know, tech debt they're sitting on today. You know, $10 million-$20 million budgets, you know, 100 people staff that's supporting the disparate legacy systems, and they're coming to us to help, and this is where we come in.
You know, the sort of hedge funds, so smaller hedge fund launches, we've seen counterbalanced with some of the capital, actually a significant amount of capital that is going into multi-strategy funds and multi-manager platforms. This is where we find, you know, our sweet spot. We're good with servicing these clients, scaling as they scale, and then subsequently as they spin off and cede managers that have attained success on their platforms, we're right there to catch them as they launch, as I would what I call backdoor launches. Again, just to summarize, it's not about seasonality, so to speak, or dormancy. It's really about, like, us getting through this little trough related to 2022, which is again, arguably, you know, worst performance year for core asset classes in 40 years and positioning ourselves for, you know, further growth for this business.
Kevin McVeigh (Managing Director)
No, it makes a lot of sense. As you think about the low end versus the high end of the range on the revenue and EBITDA, any thoughts, puts and takes, what gets you to that high end above the range? Is it kind of client wins or just any thoughts around the guidance, which obviously looks really, really good.
Brad Herring (CFO)
Hey, Kevin, this is Brad. I'll take that. Yeah.
Kevin McVeigh (Managing Director)
Great.
Brad Herring (CFO)
You know, we felt like the guidance was a good balance. You know, I think there's a couple of things that'll play out over the course of the year. We've talked a couple of times about kind of the condition of the segment. You know, obviously some better stability in the markets I think could push us up toward the high end of that. You know, that tends to drive some of the hedge fund launches we talked about that have kind of slowed down a little bit. We think that could pick back up with stability coming to the market.
We also think, you know, some of the product capabilities we're gonna be putting out in the next, you know, three to six months put us in positions where we could, you know, get higher bookings this year. It doesn't have a huge in-year impact, but certainly the sooner we get those out, that puts revenue on the table for the current year. Just quickly moving to the expense side. You know, we've got a lot of levers to pull. You know, we're certainly gonna be watching the revenue environment closely, as kind of prudent spenders of our capital. We're gonna make sure that, you know, we time that well. We've got some opportunities for some consolidation. We've got some opportunities for, you know, some enhanced tools that improve our scalability.
I mentioned that in our expense efforts on client services. A lot of that has to do with spending some money in 2023 to create some very strong scalability in the next year. There could be some in-year impacts for that as well.
Kevin McVeigh (Managing Director)
Very helpful. Thanks so much.
Oleg Movchan (CEO)
Thanks, Kevin.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Dylan Becker of William Blair. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Dylan Becker (Research Analyst)
Hey, good morning, guys. Congrats on the results here. Maybe, Oleg, starting with you, there was a lot of talk around kind of the software and the service evolution in the shareholder letter. I was wondering if you could elaborate again on how you see that kind of client service piece benefiting not only the overall adoption framework, its efficiency in these models, but how that can speak to maybe what Brad was just talking about on kind of the pipeline innovation as well, fueling that R&D momentum.
Oleg Movchan (CEO)
Yep. Great question. I'm afraid I might bastardize the whole call talking about this topic. So a couple of things here. You know, Brad would say that we ended up in the, you know, managed services business, and I just want to make the difference between the client service as a whole, which is, you know, us supporting the clients on an ongoing basis and, you know, resolving issues and customizing the technology and all of that with, you know, managed services as a business of, you know, doing things for clients on an ongoing consistent basis like trade affirmations, confirmations, you know, racks and things like that. As far as overall client service is concerned, that's just, you know, as you know, it's one of the things that I've done.
The first thing when I came in is really revamp and restructure that part of our business to make sure that it aligned much better with our sales process and it's aligned much better with how each client experiences Enfusion, right? As one of our recent clients said last week, and I will never forget that, is, you know, what's the point of having good software if your client services is not good? You know, I'm taking this to heart, and this is just way more important for us now than ever because historically, you might remember, we've been really focused on smaller and simpler players, and they supported themselves effectively, right?
Software has been so powerful and still so powerful, customers really loved using it and kind of torturing it and customizing it, so that we did not actually have to do much, right? Which actually, as a result, drove economics. Now, as we go upstream and, you know, service much larger and complex managers, by default, they're looking at us as extension of their operating teams. They actually expect many of them, especially larger one, they expect some kind of white glove service. We're designing our business to actually accommodate that. You know, we feel it's just it has to happen, number one, we have to make sure we have the team aligned. Number two, we make sure this team is operationally efficient. We actually use technology to scale and maintain economics of the business.
Our gross margins are, you know, 70% plus. This is our target. Our net margins as a result are conforming to what we think this business could be long term. The second part is, you know, here I will quote Brad, you know, managed services business. You know, we ended up in this business, by default rather than by design. We're currently looking at that very carefully and see if we can really position it in the marketplace as a separate line of business, which is, you know, where our clients, our incumbent client base is coming to us and asking us to do that for them, right? As an extension of our relationship today, right? The question for us is, what can we do? What should we do?
How we price it properly so that we deliver value to the client, and we create value for the shareholders as well. You know, we have right now about 820 clients and roughly 120 clients today actually using managed services. It's a huge portion of our, you know, entire client base actually using that part of our capability. It's, you know, it behooves us to, you know, look deeply and see if we can actually expand that relationship. Again, this is this duality between, you know, pure SaaS model and software and the service model where, you know, we go and service, you know, institutional clients, like I just mentioned, PanAgora, where, you know, there is this assumption it's a partnership, and they expect us to provide, A, certain level of service as a support, right, as a partnership on ongoing basis.
Two, other clients expect us to perform or asking us to perform, you know, ongoing daily tasks like managed services, any managed services organization would. You know, there is some interest in economic opportunities for us there. I hope it makes sense.
Dylan Becker (Research Analyst)
Yeah, it makes total sense, and appreciate the depth and color there. Maybe another kind of interesting one, I guess thinking higher level too, Oleg. How should we be thinking about some of the recent proposed changes from the SEC relative to settlement cycle compression and other areas as potential drivers of back office investment automation as the industry moves kind of more towards real-time processing capabilities? Thanks.
Oleg Movchan (CEO)
Right. Again, this is one of those, you know, big opportunities for us, right? We have a lot of conversations on the subject. You know, the, you know, clients are kind of actually looking to contribute to the discourse. We were kind of internally, we're looking at different ways to address it. I think we are very well positioned to do so given our software capabilities. All these regulatory changes before, you know, market microstructure changes, you know, MiFID before compliance, you know, which is another area of great importance, both in terms of, you know, software functionality on OMS side as well as regulatory reporting. You know, this is where we think, you know, we are responding pretty well to the market demand. Of course, we will definitely be there to accommodate.
Dylan Becker (Research Analyst)
Perfect. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Koji Ikeda of Bank of America. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Koji Ikeda (Managing Director of Equity Research)
Hey, Oleg and Brad. Thanks for taking the questions. first one for me is as you head into 2023, how are you thinking about your go-to-market strategies and focus? maybe either from a geography or product perspective that could be different this year when compared to last year.
Oleg Movchan (CEO)
you know, there's I don't think there's any difference. we do want to refocus our effort, for example, on regional, competitive advantages that we have. You know, I will just actually highlight EMEA as an example where, the business is getting to the point where, it's become an actually relative or I expect it to become relatively stable, you know, 20% of our overall revenue mix. There is a ton of opportunity I highlighted before. We're seeing a lot of opportunity in the Middle East. You know, that part we're doing a lot of work on the subject. Just like any other region in the world, it has its own nuances, right? It has its own operating nuances, it has different nuances related to trading and risk functionality that are specific to the region. In fact, this is how we historically won in APAC.
We had different capabilities within our software that clients actually valued and, you know, we did it exceptionally well, head and shoulders above our competition, and that's how we won. It's not just, you know, overall generic value proposition, the fact that it's sort of a traditional position in where cloud-native, you know, front to end integrated software, but really thinking about how we can differentiate ourselves, taking into account, what I would call local or localized competitive advantages. That's what we're thinking as far as global expansion is concerned. We won also the client that I mentioned, one of the largest Japanese hedge funds. We've had some success in Australia, and of course, you know, Hong Kong and Singapore continue to be, you know, relatively active both as far as launches and conversions are concerned.
You know, U.S. is, you know, this is where we see most of the larger institutional asset managers are, and we're continuing to position the business, you know, in that segment in a more aggressive way. A testament to that, our recent wins in, for example, the endowment that we recently closed and a couple of other interest in multi-strategy, multi-manager funds that, you know, again, take into account and capture the very essence of what Enfusion is all about, which is ability to bring together front end OMS with portfolio management, with risk management, with the back end, and create a framework where, you know, people just worry about trading people, about, you know, worry about risk and capital allocation, and they don't worry about technology or operations.
The go-to-market strategy, I would say there is no really, you know, there is some overarching position and messages, you know, that I would send to the market and say, you know, it remained the same with more focus and continued focus on larger institutional complex clients. As far as actual nuance, I would highlight, you know, really figuring out what actually works for that particular local market and really zeroing in on that and executing against that relentlessly and winning on that basis.
Koji Ikeda (Managing Director of Equity Research)
Got it. No, that is super helpful, Oleg. Thank you. I wanted to ask a follow-up question on Net Dollar Retention. You know, it sounds like with the commentary from Brad that the involuntary revenue churn was about 4.5%, but customer churn might have been a bit higher than that. Is that the right characterization on how customer retention shaked out in Q4? Then just thinking more forward, you know, how should we be thinking about involuntary revenue churn and customer churn assumptions that are embedded in the 2023 guidance? Thanks, guys.
Brad Herring (CFO)
Yeah. Hey, Koji, this is Brad. I'll take that. Your numbers and presumptions on churn are right. You know, as I kind of mentioned at the back half of 2023, we did see churn pick up slightly. You know, you think about how we projected 2023 to play out. We've anticipated a little bit of a residual into 2023 off of those same numbers. We do think it's gonna improve back to kind of more normal levels by, you know, call it midyear. That's, that's a by-product of the conversation I had a minute ago around, you know, the stability that comes into the market that kind of dries up that churn. You know, we expect a little bit of increased churn for the first half, but we do think it returns back to normal for the back half.
Koji Ikeda (Managing Director of Equity Research)
Got it. Thanks so much, Brad. Thank you guys for taking the questions.
Oleg Movchan (CEO)
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Koji.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Parker Lane of Stifel. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Matthew Kikkert (Equity Research Associate)
Hi, this is Matthew Kikkert on for Parker. Thanks a lot for taking my questions. To start, what have you learned a successful go-to-market pitch looks like with a larger scale fund conversion? Are these customers landing with just portfolio management system? Are they adding a whole suite of solutions up front as well?
Oleg Movchan (CEO)
What have we learned? Definitely the holistic approach. I mean, we have seen some situations where, you know, we are successful in land and expand sort of thing in terms of just, you know, selling piece of functionality and then expanding into overall overall stack. We're also, you know, more naturally fitting into what you would call multi-asset strategies or liquid alts that those large institutional players actually offer on their platform. As, as you I'm sure know, in the recent, I don't know, 10, 15 years, the trend has been to become sort of the supermarket of different strategies. Any institutional manager of substantial size, they're trying to offer everything from, you know, S&P 500 index tracking ETF for 2 basis points or 1 basis point to very complex strategies from quant to, you know, global macro CTA, and real estate and private equity.
We typically fit into that bucket where they actually offer liquid alts and, you know, some systematic and quantitative strategies. As we build more footprint within the organization that manages, I don't know, $150 billion-$200 billion, we expand that relationship in a lot of other things. Some of the functionality I can highlight to you is just from product, you know, from product-driven expansion or product-driven growth perspective, some of our product initiatives include creating capabilities around benchmarks and enabling the managers to rebalance their portfolios either to match the benchmarks or to take active risk with respect to benchmarks as, you know, as those investors are trying to beat those.
Some of those things related to portfolio construction, on one hand and then translating those active bets or hedging strategies into actual trades and closing that loop, sending that vector of trades or orders into our OMS and then going back and rinse and repeat, this is where we think the strength of our offering will really shine. You know, this is a high-level comment, but as far as that particular market segment, we still have a lot of wood to chop. You know, complexity of their business is very high and almost I can say like if you think about hedge fund universe, you can sort of stratify it and think about every segment and within every segment, those funds are more or less similar. They're not, of course, the same, but they're similar. When it comes to those large organizations, every one of those is unique.
You know, we learn quickly and we adapt and we see what they need from workflow perspective. Some of them are very, very different from what hedge funds are actually doing, both in terms of how OMS and compliance works, in terms of what they're looking for on the back end, in terms of risk requirements. We're actually looking to expand that offering as well, where, you know, almost all of our institutional clients want some kind of a, not just the par for the course, but relatively sophisticated, risk management and risk analytics capability.
Matthew Kikkert (Equity Research Associate)
Got it. Understood. That's great color. Secondly, how large do you envision scaling your managed solution segment over the next year? What impact do you foresee this having on your ability to simultaneously expand margins?
Oleg Movchan (CEO)
Right. You sort of asked two questions in one, and that's going to be the second part of your question is going to drive the first. As I mentioned when, you know, with Paul, when Dylan asked the question, you know, we ended up in this position where we have created a large portion of our business in managed services, and I keep highlighting that. This is one of those under, you know, from my perspective, underappreciated assets that this business is sitting on. We have very similar economic relationship, relationships with other firms that are providing managed services, and we sell our software to them, right?
We're looking at this sort of position and both tactically and strategically trying to figure out how to expand our footprint there and be there, again, quoting Brad, you know, by design as opposed to by default. The, the trick is in that second, from our perspective, the trick is in that second part of your question, which is how to do that without diluting margins. That's a big deal. We actually have done it before. We did identify some product gaps and functionality requirements that we actually need to execute on to continue to grow that business without diluting the pure SaaS gross margin, so to speak. I'm absolutely convinced it's possible. You know, everybody is challenging me on that.
We have a lot of conversations both externally and internally on the subject. Everybody sort of knows that managed services as a standalone business is lower margin than pure SaaS business. I'm also aware of that, but this is where we, I think we will win because if we figure out the formula that actually has been driving Enfusion's growth, you know, all these years prior to the IPO and enabled the company to be not just a Rule of 40 company, but a Rule of 80 company, I believe it's going to create a key to profitability of the managed services business.
One more thought I would offer in conclusion is what we have seen actually in competitive situations is that managed services becomes a sort of final icing on the cake where when we replace the sort of this piecemeal technology stack, which is our sort of bread and butter conversion setting, and, you know, we replace a competitor up front where, for example, where our portfolio management system, we replace OMS complex, we replace back end, and then all of a sudden, you know, we own that entire stack. So they, for example, in this, in this case, they actually use another managed services organization to support that former legacy disparate stack with fault lines in between. Once we replace it, who is best company to actually service and support that technology stack that is Enfusion other than Enfusion?
What happens is we actually have won. When as we win, competitively those technology replacements. It's a natural extension of the business to actually supplement it with managed services. If this set of economics works, what happens as a side effect, the stickiness of the clients also increases, and that's right back to the NDR questions that Koji and Dylan asked. Does it make sense?
Matthew Kikkert (Equity Research Associate)
Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks for answering my questions, and congrats on the quarter.
Oleg Movchan (CEO)
Thank you.
Brad Herring (CFO)
Thanks, Matt.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Our final question comes from the line of Gabriela Borges of Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Callie Valenti (Equity Research Associate)
Hi, this is Callie Valenti on for Gabriela. First one for me is just looking at the average contract value growth of 13% in the quarter and the NRR of 115%, how should we think about the impact that NRR is having on that average contract value versus the impact of new customers?
Brad Herring (CFO)
This is Brad. I'll take that. I think, you know, we'll talk about the growth in the customer size first, and that's completely a by-product of what Oleg just walked us through in terms of as we move up market, you know, and that whole stack becomes available, that's obviously gonna increase contract value, especially as we move up market into bigger asset managers. You know, as it translates into NDR, I think there's a couple of key points there. One is that entire management services discussion we had. I think that was a really key point to make in terms of how that plays into contract size, also it has a ripple effect into NDR, and I think that kind of facilitates Oleg's goal standard of 20% of NDR.
Some of that is gonna come from things like adding managed services to that stack. I think they're very intertwined, but they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. You know, we've also got scenarios where we go out, into upmarket and our initial contracts may not include the full stack, but because the asset managers are in the much larger scale size, you're still gonna see an overall increase in contract size.
Oleg Movchan (CEO)
Just want to complement that. You know, we don't want to make it sound like, you know, managed services is the only way for us to expand the relationship with the client. I mean, we recently have done a lot of work, I cannot give enough credit to our technology team to actually sort of in real time expand our, you know, product portfolio and respond to client demands as a result, expand commercial relationship with the client. This is not just, you know, managed services driven. You know, to Brad's point, those in some sense, those are the two on one hand, two sides of the same coin, and those two drivers of NDR and stickiness of the business are, number one, us getting into, you know, larger clients just because the ticket sizes are bigger, and two, going deeper within the current client base.
And, you know, and just really creating value for the customer. I mean, there's still situations, frankly, where, you know, customers are using some other capability, that, you know, it's not that we don't have it, but they just don't know that we do. And then they just, you know, and it makes me, you know, makes my blood boil in those situations, right? This is what we really like, 2023 is really about that focus. It's about, you know, not just focusing on the outside, not just being aggressive in growing the business. It's not just about bookings. It's not just about going to, you know, whatever, name it, Sydney or Dubai or Tokyo.
It's about really, really making sure that every single client that we serve today is referenceable, making sure that we create value every day, making sure that, you know, even clients that we do not hear from, are happy and continue to proactively engage with the current client base and create value and capture some of it.
Callie Valenti (Equity Research Associate)
Okay, thank you. Then just as a follow-up, any nuances to the environment that you've seen in the start of 2023? We've heard some companies talking about a stronger January and February. yeah, curious how you've seen at the start of the year customers?
Oleg Movchan (CEO)
Yeah. Again, I mean, this is. I will defer to Brad to comment, you know, from his perspective what he sees quantitatively. Just from qualitative perspective, this is just a technical thing, right? I mean, we're walking into 2023 with a very low base. You know, all asset markets, you know, aside from cash, we think cash in this case U.S. dollar, are down above and beyond their historical norms, right? From that base, the fact that asset, excuse me, the fact that risk assets have been behaving well in the last, you know, couple of months, you know, makes people feel better, makes people breathe better. That's fine. I know we don't have a crystal ball. We don't know where the markets are gonna go today or, you know, whatever, in two years.
You know, we definitely see. So the behavioral change, you know, that I mentioned, on one hand, people are just in this wait and see mode sometimes. On the other hand, they're just being active. In some interesting sense, you know, for us, you know, this uncertainty is okay, but when it does resolve on either side, right? That actually is what where we really come in with this sort of convected strategy. If things are really not as good as people expect, this is, you know, sort of cost optimization and repositioning. If things are great, you know, we will see more launches and more expansion and more budgets being allocated to, you know, to our customers, right? You know, we're not thinking about our business, you know, within the time horizon of couple of months, right?
The focus is, you know, long-term shareholder value creation, and we're just simply tactically well positioned to capture whatever opportunities will be created in 2023.
Brad Herring (CFO)
Right on. Yeah, I'll just add to that, kind of getting very specific on your question. We're seeing certainly some slight improvements coming out of Q4, as the segment kind of corrected itself in the Q3, Q4 timeframe. We anticipated, like I mentioned in my pre-recorded remarks, those trends to extend a little bit into Q1. We're seeing that continue about what we thought. At the same time, we're also seeing things like our pipeline pick up. Our pipeline has improved significantly from where we were a couple of months ago. To Oleg's point, I think it's a natural diversification in this business. If times are great, we do well. If times are tough, we do well as well. I think it's just a great hedge that's kind of built into the inherent business.
Callie Valenti (Equity Research Associate)
All right. Thank you, and congrats so much on the momentum.
Oleg Movchan (CEO)
Just one more. Not to bastardize this, you know, question on this call, just one more real quick addition. You know, we will see some balance in, you know, as we go further into loan-only strategies. You know, there might be some potentially, you know, additional data in this business, if you will. Typically, you know, we have seen, you know, performance, as far as performance degradation of our clients, right? We are seeing, you know, that hedge fund managers in our platform are actually doing really well, given the volatility, right? Some are not doing so well, some are doing well, right? Also, interestingly enough, because of this compression of risk premia, right, oftentimes people are redeeming from the funds that they can, not from the funds that they should.
You know, typically, you know, you have situations when somebody used to manage $10 billion or $15 billion, and now they manage $3 billion or $4 billion, right? All of a sudden, you know, the economics of the business, especially sometimes given high-water marks, are different. You know, the decision regarding us at that point becomes almost a no-brainer.
Callie Valenti (Equity Research Associate)
All right. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
As there are no additional questions waiting at this time, I'd like to hand the conference call back over to the management team for closing remarks.
Oleg Movchan (CEO)
Well, thank you, thank you all for great questions. We, of course, are always available in real time, for any additional questions. Thank you for the challenge. Thank you for your trust. You know, we will continue to work relentlessly on behalf of our shareholders.
Operator (participant)
Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes Enfusion's fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Have a great day ahead. You may now disconnect your lines.