Intuit Inc. (INTU) Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference (Transcript)

Intuit Inc. (NASDAQ:INTU) Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference March 5, 2024 4:20 PM ET

Company Participants

Sandeep Aujla - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Keith Weiss - Morgan Stanley

Keith Weiss

Excellent. Thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. My name is Keith Weiss. I run the U.S. software research practice here at Morgan Stanley, and very pleased to have with us, I think, for the first time at the TMT Conference. Sandeep Aujla, CFO of Intuit. Thank you so much for joining us.

Sandeep Aujla

Thank you. It's my first time at the TMT Conference as a company, but I started my career at Morgan Stanley. So, I've been before...

Keith Weiss

Used to be an M&A banker, right?

Sandeep Aujla

Yes. Nice to be back. Nice one.

Keith Weiss

That was a long time ago though.

Sandeep Aujla

That was a long time ago, a couple of decades now.

Keith Weiss

Excellent. Before we get started, a brief research disclosure for important disclosures. Please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/research there. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. And I'm sure Intuit has some really great disclosures on your IR website as well.

Sandeep Aujla

We absolutely do.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q - Keith Weiss

Excellent. So again, thank you for coming to the conference. I want to start out with Q2 results reported two weeks ago. Can you walk us through some of the like key developments going on at the company? Because I know there's a lot of strategic investments you guys are making, but also give us the backdrop of the spending environment that this is all taking place in.

Sandeep Aujla

Sure. Absolutely. Talking about Q2 and just the progress so far, I could not be more about the amazing work that the team is doing and delivering for our customers. Everything we do is based in serving our customers' most critical needs. And with that, we had a pretty solid Q2. We continue to make progress with Intuit Assist. We had our Intuit Innovation Day where

And historically, Intuit has been exceptional in acquiring at scaled to small business side customers in the 1,2 or 10 employees like the truly small business, and one of the growth catalysts we have is how do we go mid-market, and the progress we're making there in terms of implementing those sales motions, making those product innovations. Those are -- feel pleased with the progress that the team is doing there.

And then finally, is tax season. And it's my first tax season as the CFO and just learning the ins and out and our focus on executing the playbook we have to win in DIY category, do it yourself taxes, but really disrupting that $30 billion opportunity we have in the assisted tax category, where we right now have a 0% market share. And the teams are executing lights out on that playbook right now as we enter the last six weeks of tax season. So, feel good about all the progress.

Keith Weiss

That's perfect. And particularly when it comes to the small -- we'll dig in on tax. But when it comes to the small business side of the equation, how are you feeling about the overall spending environment? It's definitely something investors are concerned about.

Sandeep Aujla

Yes. It's one of those things where when I look at the small businesses, I'm always amazed at the release of the small business. They are in a better position where they were a year ago -- sorry, pre-pandemic of our cash balances are down about 11% versus a year ago. They're still up pre-pandemic. They're having an easier time recruiting, retaining talent. Inflation is more stable. So, when you look at the data, they're in a pretty good position. But we continue to be cognizant of the fact that the sentiment is still there looking ahead and seeing how that plays out with all the changes we have in the macro environment, with the elections coming up.

So, it's something that we are watching carefully, which is one of the reasons we took a pretty prudent approach to guidance this year. But when I look at the data, when we look at the behavior of the small business, we feel pretty good about the environment that they're operating in.

Keith Weiss

Got it. That's good to hear. I'm going to sneak one in. Kim is going to get mad because I didn't put this in the script. But you talked about Intuit Assist. You talked about a lot of the innovation that has been driving out. Someone who's been watching into it for a long time. It feels to me the pace of innovation is accelerating there, that we're seeing more product come out, more innovation come out. And especially when it comes to the generative AI, kind of working to the promise of what Sam was talking to us all about when he acquired Credit Karma, when he acquired Mailchimp. This is all about the data and bringing it all into one platform.

Can you talk to us a little bit about the work that you guys have been doing behind the scenes in terms of creating the data platform, creating the AI platforms, the developer environment that's enabling you guys to really step on the gas a little bit and increase the pace of innovation.

Sandeep Aujla

Absolutely. Keith, if I can add a little bit of context, going back a few years, we have been on this journey from being a very stable, solid high single-digit grower to actually being a growth software company. And one of the catalysts for that was us declaring our strategy to be an AI-driven expert platform, circa late 2018, early 2019, a whole four years before most in the sector actually appreciated the opportunities that existed with AI. I think that really came to the forefront with the ChatGPT reveal in November 2022. But by that point, we had a four-year head start in terms of the investment to make around knowledge engineering and machine learning, around AI, that's situated us pretty well to entering into the era of gen AI.

And when you step back, you talk about the pace of innovation, we have been on this journey of growth. When you unpack growth, it has three ingredients. One, do you have opportunity to grow into? Well, we have a $300 billion addressable market where we are just 5% penetrated. I see plenty of runway for multiple years for us to grow into that.

Second, do you have a strategy to go after that opportunity? We declared with boldness our strategy, an AI-driven expert platform in late 2018, early 2019. I remember being in many meetings when folks would ask me to unpack what that meant. Now everyone asks starts -- every meeting starts with, well, what are you doing in AI? What we've been doing it for many years.

And the third is execution. Execution is about focus. We have focused the organization on the critical five big bets. Execution is by clarity of what success looks like. For each of those big bets, we have a clear indication of successes. We expected and we evaluate and we have those discussions with the teams.

And finally, it's about velocity. When you are unlocking growth, when you're going into new areas, you're going to make mistakes. It's about how quickly are you testing learning and iterating. So, it's almost like those wobbles, you'll feel like a straight line. So, it's actually been a very deliberate focus across the company on unlocking velocity, which very much connects into your point that, yes, the pace of innovation and improve across the company.

Keith Weiss

So, from an investor perspective, a lot of that comes to fruition in the AI, like the innovation day you guys hosted last year. We got a chance to see sort of how some of this is coming into the product. What is some of the initial customer reaction been? What have been sort of the pluses and minuses, if you will, in terms of what customers have seen -- and then secondarily, the big question that investors always ask is the monetization avenues. And so how should we think about the potential to monetize this further as we go forward?

Sandeep Aujla

Yes, let me take in the sequence that you asked the question. In terms of learning, we have to keep in mind that here in the Bay Area and in the industry that we all operate in, is somewhat of a bubble. There's about probably in the teens, the percentage of the U.S. population that has exposure to AI. So, one of the learnings that we had was how do we actually showcase the experiences to our customers say was that like, okay, do you want to go engage with the experience, but build it into the work that they were doing? So, it was basically very made incorporation into the experience as opposed to a new AI workflow. That was like the first learning.

The second learning was giving them a degree of control. to say, here's a proposal, Here's the rationale for it. Do you want to go down this approach or not? Like here's what to be created from e-mails and I can impact that more. And this word looks like, here's the total amount here, the line items that we put on there, does this look right on that to give them some degree of control.

And third was just to continue to iterate on it. And the teams are making good progress on that. We have incorporated in our TurboTax offerings, we're in tax season, and we're getting feedback that the helpfulness of our AI experiences is 1.5x better than before, and we were pretty solid before as well. So, on MailChimp, we are getting good experiences that the automation and the marketing campaigns were driven through AI are resonating. We're getting good adoption and repeat usage.

So, we feel good about the progress, and the teams are continuing to iterate. Your second question was on monetization. And modernization is something that we have a three-pronged approach on. Our first opportunity is that we feel that AI has a significant opportunity to unlock the growth funnel for us. If you go to any of our properties, there's nothing of entertainment value on TurboTax or QuickBooks properties. People come there with intent to engage. Yet only a fraction of the people that come there actually end up engaging with the product because our products are just harder to onboard into you.

So as our teams are learning into you, how do we make onboarding into QuickBooks almost seamless to where we can deliver you that first benefit almost instantaneously that now you come in, you tell us what your website is, you link your bank account. You answered a couple of questions we could get you onboarded into an experience that is relevant to you. So, you're like, okay, I can do this. And then you're on the field, you're sending your e-mailing back and forth of the client, and you forward that e-mail onto your QuickBooks e-mail arrest and QuickBooks auto categorize it? And when you're in quick books, you're seeing the e-mail you said what QuickBooks had turned it into an estimate or an invoice, right?

And what we know is that small businesses who are the first to deliver the invoice are 21 times more likely to win the job, even if they're not the lowest bid. So, these are areas where we are unlocking the traffic to start to ongoing benefit to retention funnel. That's the first prong.

The second prong is we want to make sure that there are no dead ends with AI. AI at its core is the wait and interface to get answers in a very easy format. But when you're doing your taxes, when you're making decisions that are in your business, the name of the game is getting to 100% confidence. And for that, sometimes you want to have a conversation with an expert that has contextual awareness of your situation.

So, we are making sure in our AI experiences with one click, you seamlessly get connected to an expert, a human expert who could answer any questions you have, so you could follow your taxes and make the business decision with 100% confidence that is an upsell opportunity.

And third, finally, is our long-standing tenant to price for value. As we incorporate AI benefits into our products, we earned the right to price for the value that we're delivering. And at the same time, in parallel, we continue to experiment and learn from, could we do bolt-on stand-alone. As an example, in Malta, could we do a SKU for you to run your marketing campaign and let us run for you using AI and you pay us a bolt-on price for that. So those are the three prongs about amortization.

Keith Weiss

But just to be clear, the price for value today would be, in AI functionality, more Intuit is being in higher-level SKUs and getting that kind of upsell motion within the base?

Sandeep Aujla

Right now, in the MailChimp offering, it is in the higher-level SKU. In TurboTax, it's throughout. So, it's getting the traffic to start to complete.

Keith Weiss

TurboTax is more than points one and two.

Sandeep Aujla

Exactly. Okay. Got it. That's clear.

Keith Weiss

I want to shift gears and dig into the tax business, considering we're heading into tax season. I got to be honest with you. I used to track the IRS data on taxes like every week, it would come out, do my year-on-year compares and try to normalize. And last year, I just gave up, right? Not only was nobody reading my reports, it wasn't indicative of it.

Sandeep Aujla

I read them religiously.

Keith Weiss

Okay. I appreciate that. So, there's one person reading it just hasn't been indicative of anything recently. So, I guess the fundamental question is, like how do you guys get confidence in the tax season? And what's going on? What's going on with the tax filer that like just these past three years have been so anomalous.

Sandeep Aujla

Let me share my learning as I got into the seat. So, I spent most of my career into it in the small business group, which is largely a subscription-based business. Coming into the tax business, you have about 16, 17 weeks to execute. So, it's kind of like going into the Super Bowl or the Olympics. You got to have your playbook. You got to wargame all the different things that could happen and basically going. And every tax is unique. I used to think that was kind of hyperbole, and I've kind of learned as history of our business that every year is unique.

And what -- I don't know why it continues to surprise us is that American populus ability to procrastinate on their taxes. So, as we look at the data, and you saw that we had a late start than last year to IRS returns. You had a slower start. Now the IRS released their public data last week, they're starting to catch up. But these are all things that we had, well, if X happens to do XYZ, if this happens -- so these are all part of our playbook that the teams are executing against. So just know that these are part of the spectrum of events that we thought could have happened and we have game plans laid out to play against these.

Keith Weiss

Got it. So, if we start to build up kind of from the bottom, the way you guys present your guidance on tax season is very programmatic. For the past two years, we've actually seen declines in the number of IRS returns. It seems like there was some normal factors that led to that. You guys have confidence that's going to return to flat to up 1%. Can you help us understand like where you garner that confidence from?

Sandeep Aujla

So, one thing to keep in mind as you look at the last couple of years of tax returns is we had unique situations where you had COVID-related tax breaks or tax credits that required people to fill their taxes to get those. So, you had people come in and file their taxes that typically won't do their taxes. And that was the event that happened over the last couple of years. Now this last year, there was no unique COVID or other related item or credit in the tax code. So that is one item that gives us confidence that we have a clean comp.

Second thing is when you look at the history of IRS tax returns, you have not had any period when you had three consecutive years of decline. So those are the two indicators we're leaning into to say that this will be a flat to slightly up year.

Keith Weiss

Got it. So, the other part of the equation, there's units’ part of the equation in there, there's ARPU side of the equation. And three years back about, you guys shifted the equation between kind of units and ARPU a little bit to lean more heavily on the revenue per return side of the equation, now expecting that to grow 6%, it used to be 4%. And I think investors sometimes get a little bit too focused on the absolute taking price of raising prices versus sort of other mechanisms to driving ARPU. How do you think -- how do you guys think about that construction of 6%? Like what's that going to rely more on?

Sandeep Aujla

Sure. When you step back and look at the tax addressable market, it's about a $35 billion market. the due to yourself a category is about $4.5 billion. And we make $4-plus billion in our TurboTax business, which is largely DIY, right? So that gives you a limited runway there. So where is the opportunity? The opportunity is in assisted tax, which is a $20 billion, $21 billion, thereabouts market with 87 million filers, and 13% of that market comes up for add-back every year. So, we just have to win a fraction of the add back to continue to have the growth continue. And an additional 10% -- sorry, 10 billion is in business tax.

In QuickBooks, we are helping people get all the way to a clean set of books where they know what the revenue looks like. They know what the expenses look like. Just one more click to get them to file their taxes as well. So, your question was on ARPC. To use ballpark numbers, do it yourself tax is around $60. Assisted tax ARPC is $250 million to $300 million. and business tax is 850 to 1,000, right? So that's where that 6% ARPC lift comes from because we are focused on going into assisted and business tax categories.

Keith Weiss

Got it. So, the -- it's much more about mix shift than it is about absolutely taking price.

Sandeep Aujla

It is. It is for us.

Keith Weiss

Got it. So, let's dig into the TurboTax opportunity, big market opportunity, limited penetration. This has been building up over the past couple of years. Last year, there was an offering in the marketplace, but it was more limited. There's been some enhancements to the product, both in terms of sort of the location specificity, right, that helps on the search side of the equation as well as the supply side. So, if you dig into those two, what are those enhancements and why that gives you more confidence that the system is going to be a bigger part of the tax season this year?

Sandeep Aujla

Sure, absolutely. When you're trying to drive the transformation of the business from having a software perspective to having a services perspective, your historical success could at times be a hindrance to progress. And I'll share, we had a very software-focused approach to our go-to-market. So, what we didn't realize is that when people go to the website, they don't necessarily look at what's the best tax software as they look for tax prepared near me, and we weren't showing up. And when we looked at our data, around 80% of the tax filers had a live agent within a 10-mile radius of them. So, we said, how do we show up in Yelp and Google Searches? And we lean into that, and we introduced TurboTax independent pro that allows us to show up.

And the beauty of this is -- many folks get the confidence that, hey, this person is local, but they actually don't show up to the branch. They still are comfortable doing a virtual. So that was one. Two was in a product we jokingly call it our revenue prevention department, which is that the customers say like, hey, I want to go and engage with live agent. We're like, hey, are you sure? Because we can help you and do these taxes yourself. Customers was willing to be upsold into the product. We would just adding the friction to do the upsell. We unlock that as well.

So those are a couple of things that I would point to that's giving us confidence that teams are executing on. Now there are a platform of other things that we are learning and iterating on as we execute that playbook this year. But we are very focused that we know assisted taxes the growth catalyst for us going forward. So, we are focused on having the team learn, engage and pivot as needed to make sure we unlock this opportunity.

The other thing to highlight, again, the challenge of the historical course, 70% of the population doesn't even realize that TurboTax offers an assisted tax category because we're so well known for do it yourself taxes. So, one of the metrics we have internally that Sasan and I talked to the teams about is what are the head lifters we're getting? Because we just got to get people to lift their head and say, oh, TurboTax connect do my taxes for me. So, these are all opportunities that we know we can solve. Take some time to solve it, but that's what the teams are focused on unlocking.

Keith Weiss

Got it. Does the assisted, like the full assist product, is that going to be cannibalistic to the TurboTax Live product? Like how should -- are they trying to solve different sort of problem sets for the tax filer?

Sandeep Aujla

Yes. Just for everyone's context, so there's TurboTax do it yourself. And then you can get TurboTax Live. Or if you have a question or two, you could call in and ask the question. This is a fully assisted where you just upload your documents. You hand over documents and we do your taxes for you. We don't think it's a -- we think the market opportunity is so significant and that the 87 million people who get their taxes done and are paying $20 billion, $21 billion to get the tax done through the fully -- in the fragmented inefficient fully full-service assisted tax category that our market penetration is zero, that cannibalization isn't top of mind. What I'm focused on -- concern. It's really unlocking this assisted tax category. So, we don't think it's going to be a big canalization issue.

Keith Weiss

I'm going to ask a more pointed question. You saw a slowdown in TurboTax Live last year. It went from 30% growth in FY '22 to 17% growth in FY '23. Still pretty early days for that solution. Like why -- like what was the reasons behind that slowdown in your view?

Sandeep Aujla

And as we have diagnosed that what the team is what we were realizing is when people were coming in and find these taxes to get those tax credits -- some of them are also engaging with the live offering. So those -- these are all intertwined in terms of what was driving the reductions in the DIY category because the live product is, in essence, is bought on to the DIY to get some questions addressed. So, there was some related tandem movement down or impact from that.

Keith Weiss

Okay. Got it. So, with investors, we always think about software as high-margin business and services as low-margin business. But you guys have made -- you've had a commentary in the past that, that's not really the case when it comes to like TurboTax Live or full service, that it's not necessarily a negative margin impact into it. I correct in saying that? And two, like how are you guys able to do that? How are you able to bring a person in to bear at the same type of margin profile you could bring software?

Sandeep Aujla

Sure. So, a couple of things to keep in mind. One, I'll take you back to where we started the conversation. We've been investing in data engineering, in knowledge, engineering and machine learning for the last five-plus years. So that means in terms of getting your data in, in terms of helping our live agents be efficient in getting their getting tax return turned. They're not sitting there and tapping in the 1099. They're not sitting in typing in all the trades, the machines that you're pulling the data from the Morgan Stanley’s of the world and populating that. These are all capabilities allowing us to take down the customer service time. It's a measure that we watch carefully to look at the unit economics of the business.

So that's -- and plus our investments in gen AI and AI capabilities, that's all giving us confidence that we could continue to drive the cost to serve down while penetrating the assisted tax category. The other thing I would add, this is a structural change we made to the company about five years ago, is historically, the small business group had is on technology and customer success division. The consumer group had is owned technology customer success division. Now we run technology customer success and marketing as an ecosystem across the entire company.

So that means when we build data in capabilities in one part of the business, we can leverage them in the other parts. When we build live capabilities in one-part business, we can leverage in other parts. We recruit agents in one part of the business, they just could work in other parts of the business or we take those learnings to make agent acquisition more efficient. Is that structural advantage in how we are operating that allows us to continue to gradually increase margin while keeping pace with our revenue growth.

Keith Weiss

Got it. That makes sense. One last one on the tax side equation -- really two. On business tax, new opportunity for you guys. It makes a ton of sense, right? Like one of the primary reasons, I think small businesses using accounting platforms to get organized and be able to do their taxes in an efficient way. But there's also like a little bit of a rub because it's usually the accountant that's recommending that accounting platform that's doing their taxes. So, one, what's the incremental opportunity for Intuit? And how do you do this without sort of making your accounting channel feel disaggregated from what's going on here?

Sandeep Aujla

Sure. One of the learnings we had across not just tax, but the entire life platform is that even internally, some folks within our own company were over worried about the potential friction with the accountants. So many accountants don't do taxes, right? So, this was like, okay, instead of you having relationships with two different individuals, you have relationship with me and QuickBooks.

So, there isn't that friction there. And even on the life side, the accounts are viewing our services as being synergistical to what they are doing. And one of the things that we watch very carefully is our relationship with the accountants. So, we have what we call accounted panel. These are the more counters across the U.S., across the U.K., the geographies that we operate in. And we invest time learning from them, sharing with them our product road map, and the feedback that we are getting is that the contrary see what the common wisdom might tell you that they'll be friction.

They actually are excited about the opportunity that this gives them to now move more upmarket, so they could charge higher for their offerings and have a very synergistical relationship with the QuickBooks product.

Keith Weiss

Got it. And just a tactical question. The business tax revenues, is that going to show up under a small business? Or does that show up under consumer?

Sandeep Aujla

That is a -- it's not an easy answer to that. Depending on the front door. So, they came in through the QuickBooks side, it shows up on the QuickBooks side. If they came in through TurboTax, sales show up on the TurboTax side. And we'll work with that accounting teams to make sure how we...

Keith Weiss

Sort that out. So, there could be benefits on kind of both side of the equation. All right. So, let's segue a little bit to the segue to the small business side of the equation. So, you guys have laid out a formula for durable 15% to 20% growth in the QBO business, and this 10% to 20% growth in ARPU, 10% to 20% growth in subscribers. Does that lean in one direction more than the other? Like that's a little bit of a loaded question because it seems like it's leaning a little bit on the p-side and a little bit less on the Q side of the equation. And the focus goes a little bit further upmarket.

Sandeep Aujla

Don't hesitate to ask me or questions on that. So, let's go back to our strategy. Our strategy is to move mid-market. Our strategy is to drive cross-sell of our offerings, drive adoption of our payment offerings, drive adoption of our payroll offerings, drive adoption of our offering ARPC is 2x that of QuickBooks. So, what we expect is that the equation will lean more towards ARPC because we just see so much opportunity for us to scale in that area.

Now that doesn't mean we're taking the eye of a growth, right? That's still a lever we'll lean into, and we're focused on how do we make sure we have the right product that helps smaller, small business, what we call solar peers. These are small businesses that don't have an employee onboarding our product and make our product more relevant to them. We are focused on penetrating the international market. So, I don't want you to take it as we are taking the eye of the customer growth, but just the way that we are -- what we focus on executing, ARPC becomes a bigger component.

Keith Weiss

So, the move upmarket, a lot of that is behind the advanced solution. They grew 35% in FY '23, pretty stable growth versus the 40% you saw in FY '22, despite a relatively soft macro environment, what's enabling that sort of durability in QBO Advanced growth?

Sandeep Aujla

So, one area that I would slightly adjust your question is for us, mid-market is much bigger than just advanced. It's exciting that the customer went from being having an essential SKU, which is $60 a month to an advanced SKU that's $200 a month. Again, the extra $140 a month isn't the size of the price. The size of the price is that they have 10 to 100 employees that we can service through a payroll offering that they're running a lot more payment volume. So, when we look at the lifetime value of our mid-market customer, the majority of that is in the services uptake.

So that's what -- so that was excited there. And in terms of what we are seeing and what we are -- what's driving the growth of advanced, when are account management teams reach it out to our mid-market customers -- let me step back and share that when we think about mid-market.

For us is those with 11 to 100 employees. Most of the world will still think of those as small businesses, but we define those as mid-market and our ambitions are to move well beyond 100 all the way up to 1,000. But right now, we are building the muscle to go after those with 10 to 100 employees. When our teams are calling up, these 1.7 million mid-market customers, half of them are already using QuickBooks they're realizing that upsell into advance is super easy because many of these customers bought QuickBooks many years ago, and they never went back to the page to see what the new lineup looked like when new introductions came in.

So, they upsell them into advance that's driving that growth. then we start talking about, hey, we have payroll offerings. It's not just payroll new capital management, we have benefits, et cetera. We have payment offerings, money in, money out, accounts payable, accounts receivable. So those are some of the factors that's driving the advanced growth that you pointed to, but also what excites us about the opportunity to drive the bigger mid-market pie that we're excited about.

Keith Weiss

Got it. So, you mentioned within QBO Advanced in that mid-market opportunity -- the, bigger part of the opportunity in terms of lifetime value of the customers on the online services. Can you give us any sense of where those attach rates are today in terms of payroll and payments? We'll start with those two sorts of core services like where those are today and what that kind of upward potential is for those?

Sandeep Aujla

Sure. While we don't publicly disclose the attaches, I'll give you...

Keith Weiss

Feel free if you'd like to.

Sandeep Aujla

I appreciate the offer. Here's how I would think about it. When you think about a typical small business, not all of them have employees, definition, mid-market have employees to assume an attachment to be better than for the regular SMBs. And then they are similarly on payments, they all need payment needs, so their attach rates, we would necessarily expect title better, but the payment volumes are higher. But let me step back and share what is exciting about this opportunity, the uplift in the services revenue from the mid-market are 3% to 4% even more on the mid-market side than they are on the SMB side. Your net revenue retention because they've already gone to mid-market, they are more successful. They have higher survival probability.

All those things are more attractive economically on the mid-market. So those are the flywheel that excites us and why we are looking forward to putting the upfront investment in account management, getting these customers onboarding on to our services because we see a long tail of how we could continue to drive value from them over multiple years.

Keith Weiss

Got it. That makes sense. I want to talk a little bit about the desktop side of the equation. That's been the engine that just keeps on giving, if you will, in terms of adding growth to the overall small business equation. But it sounds like we're starting to get towards the point where the cloud transition is actually going to be a cloud transition that there's going to be more focus on trying to get the desktop customers over to QBO Advanced. Can you talk to us about kind of where we are in that desktop life cycle?

Sandeep Aujla

Sure. And for everyone's benefit, our desktop business historically used to be a license-based business. As you know, we will ship out of disk and you would have a three-year license. And what we realized is that many of those customers wouldn't want to move online, and as we started evaluating it, we found two primary reasons. One was they were on a license model versus a subscription model. It's going to buy versus lease, right? They had to get over that block.

Two, there was, quite frankly, pricing arbitrage where the online offering was and where the desktop offering was. So, we went on a multiyear journey to move the desktop business to a subscription model, and that's a three-year journey that will end at the end of this fiscal year. And we also started pricing the product for value. We still have opportunity to continue to price that for value.

So, what I would say is that did drive adoption of our online platform. The customers who are left now, some of them are on QuickBooks Enterprise, and they love that product. That desktop product is still growing in the high single digits. And the others who are on the non-enterprise version of desktop, which we are going to stop selling at the end of this fiscal. Those customers are happy there. They are paying us on a subscription model, so they're stopping the product stops working. We have the opportunity to continue to price that for value. And we are not looking to do a stick approach to like trying to move them to online. If they're happy, they're paying us. And quite frankly, our margins are really solid on the desktop side. We have very few engineers working on that product. So, we're happy with those customers continue to...

Keith Weiss

So, it's going to continue to be the care. It's just about having more functionality in QBO event. A lot of the Intuit Assist functionality is going to go in there. versus the desktop product.

Sandeep Aujla

The strategy is that as we continue to execute and innovate on the online platform, that's where you really see the power of everything working together. You see a money in, money out transactions. You have the ability to interact with Intuit Assist or a live expert to say, hey, can I take on this new job and us to be able to provide you a very objective wise, yes, but you need access to capital, would you like to get access to QuickBooks Capital loan through one click. Those are things that are online. So, we continue to highlight the product benefits of the online, and when those customers are ready to move online, we will be waiting to transition them efficiently.

Keith Weiss

I'm going to open up for questions from the audience in a second, but as the micro runners get ready. On the MailChimp side of the equation, that's the other big attach opportunity, obviously, very new for you guys. Last year, you talked a lot about getting the product market fit, right, getting innovations or sort of better integrations into the product. As we head into calendar '24, are we ready to roll now, if we will. Are we ready to put more marketing behind it and put more of a push to getting that attached motion going?

Sandeep Aujla

Yes. We had three thesis when we did the acquisition and are confident that thesis is stronger than they've ever been. One is better together with QuickBooks. tells you how your marketing campaigns performing, QuickBooks tells you how your unit economics are, which your margin is all that. You combine that, you get the end-to-end picture of your marketing campaigns. And who your most profitable customers that's something no other competitor can do. So that's one. Two is option market. MailChimp historically would celebrate when customers would graduate from MailChimp to move on to a competitor. We're like, no, we want to retain those customers. So, we made investments in mid-market. We're seeing good results in better ARPC better retention rates, given some of the changes the teams have made.

And the third one was it was a delighter when we were going to diligence that we found out that half the revenue is international and they've never focused on it. It was purely by stance. And we are realizing that MailChimp is a low compliance product, and that has the ability to penetrate international markets much more efficiently, so we're using that as the tip of the spear to drive our international expansion. All those three areas are once we're looking forward to continue to execute on, and we are leaning even harder in the coming year.

Keith Weiss

Got it. Any questions from the audience? All right. I'll keep on going. Let's touch on -- going to have three minutes left. Let's touch on credit card real quick and then on margins. Credit Karma has gone from an acquisition that out of the gate really outperformed expectations. We got into a weaker macro environment at tighter credit conditions, and it's something that we're hoping to derisk on a go-forward basis. What's the path to Credit Karma coming back to being additive to the story?

Sandeep Aujla

Yes. I think it's always helpful to keep in mind that Credit Karma is about 10%, 15% of our company's revenue depending on which year you look at and is the one most exposed to the economic cycle, but that's an opportunity that we are -- we're very appreciative of. Here's how I think about Credit Karma. What we are focused on right now is the management team generating what I call management alpha, is that innovation taking share of our partner spend, Lightbox, as an example, are more partners adopting it? And does it have a higher share of the partner spend.

Are we making progress going into new verticals? Credit cards and personal as are still the biggest vertical and the team making progress going into insurance as an example, and other mortgage and those. Are we opening up the segments we serve, prime, right? The team, thanks to all the amazing work that our tech team has done in four months, built a net worth capability in the CardiKarma app to now it is attractive to the prime customers, which are much higher ARPC than the nonprime customers.

So those are all things that are giving us confidence that as the economy comes back into a normalized mode, that Credit Karma is going to come out of the gate even stronger than what it was in the prior expansion environment.

Keith Weiss

Got it. And I want to close up on operating margins. First half of your fiscal year, you guys have done an outstanding job on margins outperformed significantly 200 basis points plus and I think in both Q1 and Q2. Can you talk to us a little bit about what's driven that margin outperformance? And then secondarily, is there more left in the tank, if you will? Is this still going to be a margin expansion story probably less on to the back half of the year given a guide? But if we think about FY '25 and FY '26.

Sandeep Aujla

So, we feel very good about our guidance to expand margins this year. I feel good about our much your guidance to have expenses growth slower than revenues, hence implying gradual margin expansion over time. And really, what is driving this is that at Intuit, we are very focused on running the business efficiently. We are continuously looking at finding operating leverage, being efficient, everything from how we structure the company, how we get our work done. And that is just something that's in the DNA and something that I don't think you should expect us to steer away from.

Now you asked about the last couple of quarters. In any given quarter, you could have expenses slip out. The IRS opened a week later. That means we don't have to start marketing campaigns to ramp up as quickly as we thought. That means we don't need live agents to ramp up as quickly as we thought. We can have other expenses shifted out. CDW could ship us our computers a week later and the expense goes from one quarter to another. So, I would urge you not to focus on any single quarter, but look at our track record over the course of the year, and I feel pretty thought about our ability to expand margin this year as well as three years ago.

Keith Weiss

Outstanding. Unfortunately, that comes to the end of our time. Sandeep, I still have about half of my questions left to ask. So, you're going to have to come back next year, so we can finish up the question list.

Sandeep Aujla

I look forward to it. Thank you. Thank you.