Item 1. Business
Item 1. Business
Overview
Our mission is to transform the global financial services industry through innovation, reputation and speed.
nCino is a leading global provider of cloud-based software for financial institutions. We empower banks, credit unions, and independent mortgage banks with the technology they need to meet ever-changing client expectations and regulatory requirements, gain increased visibility into their operations and performance, replace legacy systems, and operate digitally and more competitively. Our solution, the nCino Bank Operating System ® , digitizes, automates, and streamlines inefficient and complex processes and workflow and utilizes data analytics and artificial intelligence and machine learning ("AI/ML") to enable banks and credit unions to more effectively onboard new clients, make loans and manage the entire loan life cycle, open deposit and other accounts, and manage regulatory compliance. Additionally, with our acquisition of SimpleNexus, LLC ("SimpleNexus") in January 2022, we offer a digital homeownership platform which unites people, systems, and stages of the mortgage process into a seamless end-to-end journey. We serve financial institution customers of all sizes and complexities, including global financial institutions, enterprise banks, regional banks, community banks, credit unions, new market entrants, such as challenger banks, and through SimpleNexus, independent mortgage banks. Our customers deploy and utilize our technology, which can be accessed anytime, anywhere and from any internet-enabled device, for mission critical functions across their organizations.
Built as a single, multi-tenant SaaS platform, the nCino Bank Operating System transforms the way banks and credit unions operate, go to market, and interact with their clients, while delivering measurable return on investment by enabling them to:
• digitally serve their clients across commercial, small business, and retail lines of business,
• improve financial results,
• operate more efficiently,
• manage risk and compliance more effectively, and
• establish a data, audit, and business intelligence hub.
We were founded in a bank with the goal of improving that institution’s operations and client service. Realizing the problems we were addressing were endemic to virtually all banks and credit unions, we were spun out as a separate company in late 2011 with the vision of providing a comprehensive solution to onboard clients, originate any type of loan and open any type of account on a single cloud-based platform. We initially focused the nCino Bank Operating System on transforming commercial and small business lending for community and regional banks. We introduced this solution to enterprise banks in the United States ("U.S.") in 2014, and then internationally in 2017, and have subsequently expanded across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific ("APAC"). Throughout this market expansion, we broadened the nCino Bank Operating System by adding functionality for retail lending, client onboarding, deposit account opening, analytics and AI/ML. This holistic solution enables us to provide a single digital banking platform for banks and credit unions of all sizes on a global basis. We work with some of the world’s leading SIs to help implement this solution, which has increased our capacity to deliver and deploy the nCino Bank Operating System and enabled us to scale more quickly.
As a native cloud platform that utilizes a single code base regardless of the size and complexity of the financial institution, the nCino Bank Operating System is highly scalable and configurable for the specific needs of each customer. Once implemented, this solution becomes deeply embedded in our customers’ business processes, enabling mission critical workflow across the financial institution on a single platform and allowing our customers to serve their clients without locality or access constraints. The nCino Bank Operating System connects the front, middle, and back-office employees of a financial institution with clients and third parties across lines of business. We deliver data analytics and AI/ML capabilities through our nCino IQ ("nIQ") application suite to provide our customers with automation and insights into their operations, such as tools for analyzing, measuring, and managing credit risk, as well as to improve their ability to comply with regulatory requirements. Fundamental elements of the nCino Bank Operating System are built on Salesforce (the "Salesforce Platform"), which allows us to focus our product development efforts on building deep vertical functionality specifically for banks and credit unions while leveraging Salesforce's global infrastructure, reliability, and scalability.
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We generally offer the nCino Bank Operating System on a subscription basis pursuant to non-cancellable multi-year contracts that typically range from three to five years, and we employ a “land and expand” business model. Our initial deployment with a customer generally focuses on implementing a client onboarding, loan origination, and/or deposit account opening application in a specific line of business within the financial institution, such as commercial, small business, or retail. The nCino Bank Operating System is designed to scale with our customers and once this solution is deployed, we seek to have our customers expand adoption within and across lines of business. The nCino Bank Operating System leverages common data sets and functionality across applications, which optimizes and accelerates its deployment throughout a financial institution.
On January 7, 2022 (the "Acquisition Date"), we acquired SimpleNexus, a leading cloud-based mobile-first homeownership software company in the United States, for an aggregate purchase price of $933.6 million. In connection with the acquisition, nCino, Inc. (formerly Penny HoldCo, Inc., and herein, “nCino”) became the parent of nCino OpCo, Inc. (formerly nCino, Inc.) and SimpleNexus. See Note 1 "Organization and Description of Business" and Note 7 "Business Combinations" of the notes to our consolidated financial statements included in Part II, Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for additional information.
Our business has achieved rapid growth since its inception. We plan to continue investing in expanding the breadth and depth of our solutions and expanding internationally. We believe our product development and global expansion initiatives will continue to drive revenue and customer growth. For instance, the acquisition of SimpleNexus provides significant cross-sell opportunities to banks and credit unions in the United States. Our total revenues were $138.2 million, $204.3 million, and $273.9 million for fiscal 2020, 2021, and 2022, respectively, representing a 40.8% compound annual growth rate. Our revenues for fiscal 2022 include $3.9 million in revenues from SimpleNexus from the Acquisition Date. We had recurring, subscription-based revenues of $103.3 million, $162.4 million, and $224.9 million for fiscal 2020, 2021, and 2022, respectively, representing a 47.6% compound annual growth rate. Our subscription-based revenues include $3.7 million from SimpleNexus from the Acquisition Date. For fiscal 2020, 2021, and 2022, we had subscription revenue retention rates of 147%, 155%, and 133%, respectively, which excludes any impact from SimpleNexus as they were not part of our prior year results. Net losses attributable to nCino for fiscal 2020, 2021, and 2022, were $27.6 million, $40.5 million, and $49.4 million, respectively. Our net loss for fiscal 2022 includes $3.6 million in net losses from SimpleNexus from the Acquisition Date.
Benefits of the nCino Bank Operating System ®
The nCino Bank Operating System is a single, multi-tenant cloud platform that digitizes client onboarding, loan origination, and deposit account opening across commercial, small business, and retail lines of business. This solution streamlines employee, client, and third-party interactions and drives increased profitability, efficiency, transparency, and regulatory compliance across a financial institution. The nCino Bank Operating System was designed by bankers who understand how financial institutions operate and delivers a significant and measurable return on investment by enabling them to:
• Digitally Serve Their Clients Across Commercial, Small Business and Retail Lines of Business. The nCino Bank Operating System delivers a seamless experience across devices, channels, and products, enabling a unified digital relationship between a financial institution, its employees, clients, and third parties, such as appraisers, lawyers, and regulators. This empowers financial institution employees to be more efficient and effective and enhance relationships with their clients. Additionally, because nCino is cloud native, these employees are able to work from the office or remotely 24/7/365, which is a particularly attractive feature given COVID-19 limitations faced by certain of our customers.
• Improve Financial Results. Our customers leverage nCino’s capabilities to drive revenue growth by digitally expanding their brand presence and reach, increasing access and convenience for their employees and clients, delivering new products to grow client wallet share, and improving client satisfaction and retention. Our SaaS platform can reduce total cost of ownership by eliminating redundant legacy systems and simplifying our customers’ internal information technology landscape. The nCino Bank Operating System increases transparency at all organizational levels across lines of business, enabling our customers to measure their operations and performance more effectively.
• Operate More Efficiently. Utilizing the nCino Bank Operating System’s automation, workflow, and digitization capabilities allows financial institutions and their employees to focus on value-add work, reduce time spent on clearing exceptions, reduce duplicative data entry and data rekeying, help eliminate manual processes, decrease the use of paper files, and accelerate document collection.
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• Manage Risk and Compliance More Effectively. The nCino Bank Operating System helps banks and credit unions reduce regulatory, credit, and operational risk through workflow and automation, data reporting, standardized risk rating calculations, and financial modeling. For example, the content management, automated workflow, and digital audit trail and snapshot functionality within the nCino Bank Operating System helps our customers more effectively and efficiently prepare for regulatory examinations.
• Establish a Data, Audit and Business Intelligence Hub . With an open application programming interface ("API") technology framework and integrations with third-party data sources, banks and credit unions can use the nCino Bank Operating System to augment their client and operational data and create a paperless centralized data hub that enhances data-driven decision-making. This centralized hub enables data to be more easily accessed, modeled, and analyzed to help deliver greater operational, portfolio, and financial intelligence, a more complete client view, improved compliance monitoring and metrics, as well as the opportunity to more successfully leverage AI/ML.
How the nCino Bank Operating System Works
The nCino Bank Operating System connects financial institution employees, clients, and third parties on a single, cloud-based platform, eliminating silos and bringing new levels of coordination and transparency to the institution. By utilizing a single platform across business lines, processes, and channels, banks and credit unions are able to leverage the same data and
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information across their entire organization. This unified platform provides all of the functionality necessary to complete mission-critical workflow, enabling client onboarding, loan origination, deposit account opening, analytics, and compliance.
nCino Bank Operating System Applications
Client Onboarding. Built into the nCino Bank Operating System is client onboarding functionality that supports the front, middle, and back office onboarding process, allowing banks and credit unions to effectively evaluate the risk of doing business with a client while providing clients an efficient and personalized user experience. Clients are able to upload documents directly into the nCino Bank Operating System, complete identity verification, and provide information about themselves and their business, providing transparency to the financial institution that enables regulatory compliance, such as Know-Your-Customer (“KYC”). With enhanced onboarding reporting tools, banks and credit unions can generate customized reports and use real-time analytics and data from government watchlists and other third-party systems to achieve a holistic client view, enabling our customers to provide more value-added services and custom-tailored offerings.
Loan Origination. The loan origination functionality embedded within the nCino Bank Operating System combines an innovative and intuitive framework with automated workflow, checklists, document management, analytics, and real-time reporting to provide a complete, end-to-end loan origination system from application, to underwriting, to adjudication,
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to document preparation, to closing. In one view, all stakeholders have visibility into where the loan process stands and what data is needed to complete the process. Post-closing, the nCino Bank Operating System provides a view into loan performance and tools for portfolio management, providing financial institution employees the ability to utilize information to maximize efficiency. Each stakeholder in the loan process works from a single digital loan file allowing clients to apply for loans and upload documents, third parties, such as appraisers, lawyers, and regulators, to access and review loan files, and employees to seamlessly manage the entire loan process efficiently and compliantly.
Our loan origination functionality supports a wide range of lending products across commercial, small business, and retail lines of business. The nCino Bank Operating System can facilitate the origination of an institution’s most complex commercial lending products, including syndicated loans, commercial and industrial loans, commercial real estate loans, and construction loans, while also supporting the depth required for specific products such as agriculture lending, asset based lending, SBA loans, and leasing. This solution also supports the speed and convenience required for small business and consumer loans across products, such as home equity lines of credit, home equity term loans, uncollateralized lines of credit, automobile loans, and credit cards, while providing the tools needed to address regulatory compliance, including fair lending and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act.
Deposit Account Opening. The nCino Bank Operating System’s deposit account opening application optimizes the process for opening checking, savings, debit/ATM cards, money market, certificates of deposit, and retirement accounts. Financial institutions can utilize the intuitive, scalable, and flexible workflow to open retail, commercial, or small business accounts efficiently while maintaining individual account processes and requirements. Seamlessly embedded within the account opening experience, the nCino Bank Operating System provides the new client onboarding capability to collect KYC related information to meet compliance standards. The deposit account opening application allows clients to open a deposit account digitally, across any device, in a branch, or through a call center, with speed and flexibility.
nCino Bank Operating System Platform
The client onboarding, loan origination and deposit account opening applications are built on the nCino Bank Operating System platform, which contains common data sets and functionality including:
• Business process automation that provides workflow to define, streamline, and connect the business processes associated with a financial institution’s front, middle, and back office operations. Within the nCino platform, framework components use workflow to initiate and complete tasks in an efficient, reliable, and effective manner which includes the ability to support complex processes and calculations across client onboarding, loan origination, and deposit account opening, such as underwriting and automated decisioning.
• Compliance and risk management tools that provide financial institutions with audit, analytics, and snapshot capabilities to more effectively manage internal regulation and risk, the examination process, and overall compliance standards. The nCino Bank Operating System helps establish baseline performance metrics and sets standards and goals to achieve regulatory requirements and institution specific risk thresholds including with respect to Current Expected Credit Losses ("CECL"), Allowance for Loan and Lease Losses (“ALLL”) and fair lending. Because the nCino platform is highly configurable, it can adjust as regulations and the institution's risk requirements evolve.
• An intelligent enterprise content management system that includes a standardized filing system across applications, providing instant and ongoing access to digital documentation and checklists to help ensure that compliance and credit requirements are met. For example, client documents are associated with a unique identifier eliminating the need for repeat document collection and duplicative data input.
• A 360-degree client view and reporting capabilities that provide financial institutions the ability to break down internal business line silos and have visibility into the entire client banking relationship, making it easy to connect individuals and businesses to their accounts and products. The reporting capabilities in the nCino platform provide a view into a financial institution’s portfolio and pipeline to more effectively manage and measure operational performance and forecasting. Reports can be set to instantly display everything from loan, deposit and branch information to relationship data offering banks and credit unions greater transparency into their operations.
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nIQ
Enhancing the nCino Bank Operating System, nIQ leverages AI/ML and analytics to empower financial institutions with true data-driven insights and intelligent automation. Through nIQ’s Automated Spreading feature, banks and credit unions can streamline manual data entry processes throughout the underwriting process and automatically capture more data, reducing the time it takes to spread and process documents, enabling bankers to devote more time to insightful financial analysis and building better relationships with their clients. By combining newly available data from digitized processes with sophisticated profitability models, nIQ’s Commercial Pricing and Profitability functionality delivers targeted pricing insights at the point of decision, helping relationship managers intelligently price loans and win the right deals. Financial institutions can also leverage the data visualization and predictive analytics capabilities of nIQ’s Portfolio Analytics solution to maintain a holistic view of portfolio trends, discover new lending opportunities, and proactively address risk within different segments.
By embedding insights and automation into the loan lifecycle, nCino empowers financial institutions to accelerate revenue growth, improve operational efficiency, and more effectively satisfy customers.
Open APIs
By leveraging open APIs and productized integrations, the nCino Bank Operating System creates an open ecosystem that brings together disparate data sources and systems, acting as a data hub that integrates with core systems, credit reporting agencies, and other third-party applications to centralize a financial institution’s data, creating an actionable single data platform and warehouse.
SimpleNexus
SimpleNexus offers, on a single, multi-tenant SaaS platform, a suite of products that enables loan officers, borrowers, real estate agents, settlement agents and others to easily engage in the homeownership process from any internet-enabled device.
With Nexus Engagement ™ , financial institutions can collaborate with borrowers and real estate partners from the pre-application phase, offering relationship-building tools like payment calculators, integrated home search, and instant chat that help convert more leads into closed loans.
Nexus Origination ™ ’s mobile-first toolset improves productivity and reduces cycle times by enabling loan officers to manage pipelines, run pricing, order credit reports, send pre-approval letters, sign disclosures, and review automated underwriting system findings from anywhere while providing customers with a simple and modern journey to homeownership. Through integrations, Nexus Origination ™ connects with mortgage loan origination systems, pricing engines, credit ordering systems, CRMs, appraisal management systems, and other mortgage industry-related systems.
Nexus Closing ™ streamlines each financial institution’s preferred closing workflow, from traditional mortgage closings where documents are wet-signed in person to fully digital eClosings with remote online notarization. Once a loan has closed, CompenSafe ™ automatically calculates associated incentive compensation for loan officers, processors, and operations staff for improved accuracy, transparency, and compliance that reduces financial institutions’ administrative burden.
Throughout each phase of the homeownership journey, Nexus Vision ™ provides business intelligence ("BI") that improves visibility and increases productivity across financial institutions’ lending operations. Nexus Vision’s visual dashboards, role-based scorecards, contextual comparisons, and detailed drill-downs help financial institutions forecast revenue, identify and resolve production bottlenecks, prioritize loan teams’ activities, and evaluate individual and branch performance with just a few clicks.
Our Competitive Advantages
We believe our position as a leading global provider of cloud banking software for financial institutions is built on a foundation of the following strengths:
• Built by Bankers for Bankers. Our company was started by banking professionals who recognized the need for a single cloud platform to address the endemic challenges faced by financial institutions. This heritage is the foundation of our deep banking domain expertise, which differentiates us and continues to drive our
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strategy to design software that addresses the unique challenges of our financial institution customers globally.
• Cloud Banking Technology Pioneer and Market Leader. The nCino Bank Operating System was developed from inception as a native cloud application and we believe our over 10-year track record of technology innovation in digitally transforming financial institutions distinguishes us in the market. As a first mover in this sector, we have developed trusted relationships and a reputation for successfully implementing our solutions with financial institutions of all sizes in multiple geographies.
• Single SaaS Platform. We deliver a single SaaS platform that spans business lines and replaces point and other legacy technology solutions for client onboarding, loan origination, and deposit account opening. This approach allows banks and credit unions to leverage common data sets and workflow across lines of business, providing a consistent and engaging digital experience for their employees and clients and a more comprehensive view of client relationships.
• Measurable Return on Investment. The nCino Bank Operating System provides quantifiable results for our customers, including increased client growth and retention, loan volume and efficiency and reduced loan closing times, policy exceptions and operating costs. We enable our customers to digitally serve their clients across products and channels, providing increased client engagement, enhanced communication, and increased opportunities to grow wallet share. The nCino Bank Operating System allows our customers to operate more efficiently by increasing employee accountability and productivity and shortening the time it takes to onboard a client, make a loan, and open an account. This solution empowers our customers with data driven, real-time insights into their business performance, enabling them to better measure and manage their operations.
• Empowering the Intelligent Enterprise. Through our nIQ applications, we leverage analytics and AI/ML to help financial institutions become more predictive, personalized, and proactive. nIQ automates data extraction and analysis, allowing our customers to focus on more value-add activities, and employs predictive analytics to, for example, assist in understanding risk and fair lending compliance. nIQ drives personalized experiences by embedding actionable information throughout the nCino Bank Operating System, which enables our customers to make more informed decisions in real time at the point of production.
• Award-Winning Culture . We are in the business of fundamentally changing the way financial institutions operate. To transform an industry, we believe it is essential to have a company culture that not only empowers its employees to challenge the status quo, but also emboldens them to drive change and have a passion for customer success. For these reasons, we have built nCino with a cultural foundation based on our six core values: Bring Your A-Game, Do the Right Thing, Respect Each Other, Make Someone’s Day, Have Fun, and Be a Winner! We believe our culture is the foundation for the successful execution of our strategy and, as a result, is a critical strength of our organization. In recognition of our continued focus on employee engagement, satisfaction, and culture, we have received numerous awards, including being named one of the Highest-Rated Public Cloud Computing Companies To Work For in 2021 by Battery Ventures and in the top 3 for Best Companies for Career Growth in 2021 by Comparably.
How nCino Will Grow
We intend to continue growing our business by executing on the following strategies:
• Expand Within and Across our Existing Customers. We believe there is a significant opportunity to further expand within our existing customer base both vertically within business lines and horizontally across business lines, including cross-selling SimpleNexus. Our revenues from existing customers continue to grow as additional users are added, creating strong customer cohort dynamics.
• Expand our Customer Base. We believe the global market for cloud banking is large and underserved. With financial institutions needing to replace legacy point products with more efficient technology and banking services continuing to shift to digital, we believe there is a significant opportunity to deliver our solutions and expand our customer base to financial institutions of all sizes and complexities around the world. Currently deployed in 16 countries, we have made significant investments to expand our presence in EMEA and APAC, and the nCino Bank Operating System can currently support over 120 languages and over 140 currencies. We
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promote sales in North America out of our offices in the United States and Canada, in APAC out of our offices in Australia and Japan, and in EMEA out of our office in the UK.
• Continue Strengthening and Extending our Product Functionality. We plan to extend the depth and breadth of the nCino Bank Operating System, including our client onboarding, loan origination and deposit account opening functionality across lines of business, while further enhancing its international capabilities. Additionally, we plan to continue to develop our portfolio analytics and credit modeling capabilities as well as our AI/ML capabilities through automation, predictive analytics, digital assistant services, and data source integration. These innovations will further reduce the human resources required for routine but time-consuming tasks, allowing our customers to spend more time on value creating activities. By continuing to expand the functionality of the nCino Bank Operating System, we can further help our customers improve financial results, operate more efficiently, manage risk and compliance more effectively, and establish a data, audit, and business intelligence hub. We also plan to continue to expand the depth and breadth of functionality of the SimpleNexus digital homeownership platform.
• Foster and Grow our SI and Technology Ecosystem . We have developed strong relationships with a number of leading SIs, including Accenture, Deloitte, PwC, and West Monroe Partners, that increase our capacity to onboard new customers and implement the nCino Bank Operating System, extend our global reach, and drive increased market awareness of our company and solutions. To date, over 2,500 trained SI consultants have completed our training program to implement the nCino Bank Operating System. Through the open architecture of the nCino Bank Operating System, an increasing number of third-party technology partners, including DocuSign, Equifax, Experian, TransUnion, IDology, LexisNexis, OneSpan, and The Risk Management Association, are integrated with this solution.
• Selectively Pursue Strategic Transactions. In addition to developing our solutions organically, we may selectively pursue acquisitions, joint ventures, or other strategic transactions. We expect these transactions to focus on innovation to help strengthen and expand the functionality and features of our solutions and/or expand our global presence. For example, in fiscal 2020 we acquired Visible Equity, LLC ("Visible Equity") and FinSuite Pty Ltd ("FinSuite") as part of our strategy to build out our nIQ capabilities and we established our nCino K.K. joint venture to facilitate our entry into the Japanese market. Additionally, in January 2022, we completed our acquisition of SimpleNexus which expanded our capabilities to the U.S. point-of-sale mortgage market.
Our Customers
nCino has a diverse customer base ranging from global financial institutions, such as Bank of America, Barclays, Santander Bank, and TD Bank, to enterprise banks, such as KeyBank, Allied Irish Bank, First Horizon Bank, and Truist Bank, to regional and community banks, like Huntingdon Valley Bank and ConnectOne Bank to credit unions, such as Corning Credit Union, Navy Federal Credit Union, SAFE Credit Union, and Wright-Patt Credit Union, to new market entrants, such as challenger banks like B-North, Recognise Financial, and Judo Bank, to, through SimpleNexus, independent mortgage banks like Synergy One Lending and Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation. These companies represent a cross-section of financial institutions across asset classes and geographies and each of these customers represent a substantial level of Annual Contract Value ("ACV") in its respective category.
As of January 31, 2022, we had over 390 financial institutions that have contracted for the nCino Bank Operating System for client onboarding, loan origination, and/or deposit account opening, of which 271 each generated more than $100,000 in subscription revenues in fiscal 2022. In addition, we have over 1,000 financial institutions that have contracted for our Portfolio Analytics solution that we acquired with the Visible Equity acquisition in fiscal 2020 and over 400 customers that have contracted with SimpleNexus. In total, we had over 1,750 customers as of January 31, 2022. No single customer represented more than 10% of total revenues in fiscal 2022.
Our Relationship with Salesforce
From our inception, we built the nCino Bank Operating System on the Salesforce Platform to leverage its global infrastructure, reliability, and scalability. Building on the Salesforce Platform has allowed us to benefit from Salesforce’s investment in the continual improvement of the Salesforce Platform. We believe we have a mutually beneficial strategic relationship with Salesforce.
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Salesforce Ventures, an affiliate of Salesforce, made investments in our common stock in January 2014, March 2015, July 2017, January 2018, and September 2019. As of January 31, 2022, Salesforce owned less than 5% of shares of our common stock.
Pursuant to our agreement with Salesforce (the "Salesforce Agreement"), when we sell our client onboarding, loan origination, and/or deposit account opening applications, we include a subscription to the underlying Salesforce Platform and remit a subscription fee to Salesforce. In exchange, Salesforce provides the hosting infrastructure and data center for these applications, as well as configuration, reporting, and other functionality within the Salesforce Platform. In addition, under the Salesforce Agreement, we are an authorized reseller of Salesforce’s CRM functionality to certain financial institutions in the United States. Our original agreement with Salesforce was entered into in December 2011. On June 19, 2020, this agreement was superseded and replaced by the Salesforce Agreement which expires on June 19, 2027 unless earlier terminated by either party in the event of the other party’s material breach, bankruptcy, change in control in favor of a direct competitor, or intellectual property infringement. The Salesforce Agreement automatically renews for additional one-year periods thereafter unless notice of termination is provided.
Sales and Marketing
Our sales team includes business development representatives, account executives, field sales engineers, and customer success managers. These teams are responsible for outbound lead generation, driving new business, and helping to manage account relationships and renewals, further driving adoption of our solutions within and across lines of business. These teams maintain close relationships with existing customers and act as an advisor to each financial institution to help identify and understand their unique needs, challenges, goals, and opportunities.
Our marketing teams oversee all aspects of the nCino global brands including public relations, digital marketing, social media, product marketing, graphic design, conferences, and events. Our marketing efforts are focused on promoting direct sales, inbound lead generation, and brand building. We leverage online and offline marketing channels by sponsoring customer conferences, participating in trade shows, and using webinars, digital marketing, and social media.
Customer Success
Once a customer contracts for the nCino Bank Operating System, we either directly or working with SIs, provide configuration and implementation services to assist the customer in the deployment of this solution. Configuration and implementation engagements typically range in duration from three to 18 months, depending on scope. For enterprise financial institutions, we generally work with SIs such as Accenture, Deloitte, and PwC. For regional financial institutions, we work with SIs such as West Monroe Partners, and for community banks we work with SIs such as Enforce or we perform configuration and implementation ourselves. Where we work with SIs, we generally field a small team of advisory consultants alongside the SIs to help ensure the success of the engagement. For SimpleNexus, we directly provide configuration and implementation services in the deployment of this solution which engagement duration is typically three months.
We support our customers with 24/7 access to engineers and other technical support personnel, outcome based support offerings, release management, managed services, and also offer technical support via online chat. To help our customers achieve success with the nCino Bank Operating System, we offer in-depth change management workshops, classroom and virtual end user and administrator training, consultative functionality adoption services, and best practices. The nCino Customer Success Management team is the customer’s central touch point, whose primary job is to manage the long-term health and success of each customer.
Over 44,000 of our customers’ employees, representing over 97% of our financial institution customers utilizing our client onboarding, loan origination, and/or deposit account opening applications, participate in our online nCino User Community. In the nCino User Community, users can access over 8,800 product guides and technical documents, engage and share best practices with other users and nCino subject matter experts through over 35 unique user groups, suggest and vote for future product development ideas, and access training videos, materials and product certifications.
Research and Development
Our research and development organization is responsible for the design, development, and testing of our solutions. We utilize Agile software development methodologies and industry best practices, such as continuous integration/continuous deployment, automated testing, and distributed version control, to develop new functionality and enhance our existing solutions. We provide opportunities for innovation through hackathons and new technology pilots, and we encourage customers
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to participate in our Product Design Programs to provide us with input on our product development roadmap. Our research and development spend was $79.4 million or 29.0% of total revenues in fiscal 2022.
Competition
The primary competition for our solutions has historically been point solution vendors and systems internally developed by financial institutions. We believe our ability to provide client onboarding, loan origination, deposit account opening, analytics, and AI/ML on a single platform across commercial, small business, and retail lines of business, our deep banking domain expertise, our mobile-first homeownership platform, our reputation for high-quality professional services and customer support, and the culture of our company distinguish us from our competition. We believe our success in growing our business will depend on our ability to demonstrate to financial institutions that our solutions provide superior business outcomes to those of third-party vendors or internally developed systems. In this regard, we are likely to be assessed on a number of factors, including:
• breadth and depth of functionality;
• ease of deployment, implementation and use;
• total cost of ownership and return on investment;
• level of customer satisfaction;
• brand awareness and reputation;
• cloud-based technology platform and pricing model;
• quality of implementation and customer support services;
• capability for configurability, integration, and scalability;
• domain expertise in banking technology;
• security and reliability;
• ability of our solutions to support compliance with legal and regulatory requirements;
• ability to innovate and respond to customer needs quickly; and
• ability to integrate with third-party applications and systems.
We believe we compete favorably with respect to these factors but we expect competition to increase as existing competitors evolve their offerings and as new companies enter our market. Our ability to remain competitive will depend on our ongoing efforts in research and development, sales and marketing, professional services, customer support, and our business operations generally. For additional information, see the section titled “Risk Factors—The markets in which we participate are intensely competitive and highly fragmented, and pricing pressure, new technologies or other competitive dynamics could adversely affect our business and results of operations.”
Intellectual Property
Our success depends in part on our ability to protect our core technology and innovations. We rely on federal, state, common law, and international rights, as well as contractual restrictions, to protect our intellectual property. We control access to our proprietary technology by entering into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements with our employees and contractors, and confidentiality agreements with third parties. We seek patent protection for certain of our key innovations, protocols, processes, and other inventions. We pursue the registration of our trademarks, service marks, and domain names in the United States and in certain other locations. These laws, procedures and restrictions provide only limited protection and the legal standards relating to the validity, enforceability, and scope of protection of intellectual property rights are uncertain and still evolving. Furthermore, effective patent, trademark, copyright, and trade secret protection may not be available in every country in which our products are available.
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As of January 31, 2022, we had 12 issued U.S. patents as well as one patent application pending in the U.S. We file patent applications where we believe there to be a strategic technological or business reason to do so. Although we actively attempt to utilize patents to protect our technologies, we believe that none of our patents, individually or in the aggregate, are material to our business.
Human Capital Management
We are in the business of fundamentally changing the way financial institutions operate. To transform an industry, we believe it is essential to have a company culture that not only empowers its employees to challenge the status quo, but also emboldens them to drive change and have a passion for customer success. For these reasons, we have built nCino with a cultural foundation based on our six core values: Bring Your A-Game, Do the Right Thing, Respect Each Other, Make Someone’s Day, Have Fun, and Be a Winner! We believe our culture is the foundation for the successful execution of our strategy and, as a result, is a critical strength of our organization. In recognition of our continued focus on employee engagement, satisfaction and culture, we have received numerous awards, including being named one of the Highest-Rated Public Cloud Computing Companies To Work For in 2021 by Battery Ventures. nCino was also presented with 15 workplace-focused awards by Comparably, a leading workplace culture and compensation monitoring site, in 2021, including Best Company for Diversity, Best Company Culture, Best Career Growth, Best Work-Life Balance and Best Company Happiness.
As of January 31, 2022, we had 1,681 employees, of which approximately 86% were in the United States and 14% were in other locations around the globe. We believe our employee engagement and experience remain strong.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Community
nCino’s core values reflect our culture of humanity and humility; providing a place for us to be who we are, appreciate one another, and succeed together. To demonstrate a commitment to a culture of inclusiveness, nCino proudly sponsors an employee-led Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion Council as well as Employee Affinity Groups focused on our Veteran, LGBTQIA+, Latinx, AAPI, Black/African-American, and Women employee populations.
In 2021, nCino hired a full-time Diversity, Community, and Inclusion leader to champion these initiatives, education, and programs, with support and oversight from nCino’s CEO and Human Resources leadership. As a result, nCino has been able to support many causes and initiatives in the community, such as sponsoring the local Martin Luther King, Jr. march, volunteering with veteran's organizations that aid military personnel in their transition back to civilian life, and being a premier sponsor of an all-girls middle/high school that focuses primarily on STEM education. These activities are achieved through nCino's philanthropic and community service team, nVolve. Through nVolve, nCino prioritizes giving back to our communities and volunteering time by providing all global employees paid volunteer days separate from regular leave or holidays to support organizations and causes that are important to them.
nCino is rooted in building a diverse, equitable and inclusive workforce. Our Company culture values broad backgrounds, thoughts, opinions, and perspectives. Our talent acquisition strategy includes relationships with diverse professional organizations and minority colleges and universities.
Total Reward, Well-being & Experience
nCino believes that productivity is driven by employees who are actively engaged, both by their connection to our purpose and their certainty that the company cares about their well-being. We therefore invest in their financial, social and physical wellness as well as the communities where they work.
nCino’s future success is dependent on our ability to attract and retain highly qualified personnel. nCino offers competitive compensation, opportunities for equity ownership, and generous, country-specific benefit packages. Our retirement plans help employees invest in their future. In addition, we offer competitive parental leaves, holiday pay, and vacation time. nCino supports healthy employee lifestyles and wellness by offering office step challenges, complimentary healthy snacks, financial education, mental health initiatives, cycle to work programs, on-site flu shots, recreational outings and more.
These offerings demonstrate a commitment to our employees’ well-being and play a critical role in engaging and retaining the talented individuals that comprise our organization.
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Available Information
Our website is located at www.ncino.com and our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), and all amendments to these filings, can be obtained free of charge from our website as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file or furnish such materials with the SEC. The SEC maintains an Internet site that contains reports, proxy and information statements, and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC at www.sec.gov. The contents of these websites are not incorporated into this filing. Further, the Company’s references to the URLs for these websites are intended to be inactive textual references only.