BlackLine Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
August 4, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Underlying demand remained strong, with RPO rising 17% to more than $1.1 billion, current RPO up 11%, average deal size up 24%, and 56% of renewals involving multi-year commitments.
  • Negative Sentiment: Approximately $8 million of expected Q2 opportunities slipped because enterprise AI, security, data-sovereignty, and governance reviews are lengthening sales cycles by roughly 40–45 days; management said the delays are concentrated among larger customers.
  • Positive Sentiment: AI adoption is accelerating, with about 3,000 customers actively using AI and quarterly AI feature actions up more than 220% sequentially. Platform ARR reached over 17% of eligible ARR, tracking toward the company’s 25% year-end target, and management expects platform and agentic adoption to add at least two points of revenue growth next year.
  • Positive Sentiment: Profitability and cash generation were solid, with a 23.3% non-GAAP operating margin and $36.5 million of free cash flow; BlackLine expects full-year free cash flow growth of approximately 20% and increased its buyback authorization by $100 million to roughly $280 million.
  • Neutral Sentiment: BlackLine maintained full-year revenue guidance of $765 million to $769 million, implying 9.2%–9.8% growth, while absorbing an additional roughly $1 million of expected foreign-exchange headwinds. Management expects to exit 2026 at double-digit growth, with further acceleration in 2027 as delayed deals close and platform adoption scales.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
BlackLine Q2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

Transcript Sections

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Operator

Good day. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Matt Humphreys, SVP of Investor Relations.

Matt Humphreys
Matt Humphreys
SVP of Investor Relations at BlackLine

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today. With me on the call are Owen Ryan, Chief Executive Officer of BlackLine, as well as Patrick Villanova, Chief Financial Officer. For the Q&A portion of today's call, we'll also have Jeremy Ung, BlackLine's Chief Technology Officer, join us. Before we get started, I'd like to note that certain statements made during this conference call that are not historical facts, including those regarding our future plans, objectives, and expected performance, in particular our guidance for Q3 and full year 2026, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements represent our outlook only as of the date of this call.

Matt Humphreys
Matt Humphreys
SVP of Investor Relations at BlackLine

While we believe any forward-looking statements made during the call are reasonable, actual results could differ materially as these statements are based on our current expectations as of today and are subject to risks and uncertainties, including those stated in our periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, in particular our Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. We do not undertake and expressly disclaim any obligation to update or alter our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by applicable law. All comparisons we make on the call today relate to the corresponding period of last year, unless otherwise noted. Unless otherwise stated, our financial measures disclosed on this call will be non-GAAP.

Matt Humphreys
Matt Humphreys
SVP of Investor Relations at BlackLine

A discussion of these non-GAAP financial measures and information regarding reconciliations of our historical GAAP versus non-GAAP results is available in our earnings release and presentation, which may be found on our investor relations website at investors.blackline.com or in our Form 8-K filed with the SEC today. Now, I'll turn the call over to BlackLine's Chief Executive Officer, Owen Ryan. Owen?

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Thank you, Matt. Good afternoon, everyone. I want to start this quarter with a short overview of the financial results before Patrick does a deeper dive. I also want to walk through the deal timing dynamics that shaped this quarter and then give you a sense of the period we have just lived through, because I believe the first half of 2026 is likely the most consequential period in this company's 25-year history. This was a good quarter on the measures that matter for discipline and durability. Revenue grew 9.2%, non-GAAP operating margin came in at 23.3%, and we generated $37 million of free cash flow. On deal timing, it has become harder to predict this year. AI has put every finance organization in the position of reevaluating what they spend on and why, and that evaluation takes longer. Here is an example.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

We were recently selected for our first ever sovereign cloud opportunity with a large European company whose security and data requirements are among the most stringent in the world. We won the competitive evaluation and cleared the legal, security, and technical reviews, and we are now working through the final details to close on this five-year, eight-figure deal. Even with both sides aligned and committed to a June 30th close, a deal of this size and complexity simply takes longer to get across the line than either party would like, which is exactly the dynamic I am describing. This elongated timeline shows up mostly in our mega enterprise pursuits. Customers are evaluating more than just software now. They are also going much deeper into BlackLine's AI governance model, our product roadmap, and how we sit inside their control environment before they sign.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

That pulls even more security, risk, compliance, and IT professionals into the room alongside finance. Everything is simply taking longer. More of these conversations have become formal build versus buy assessments. Buying is beginning to come out far ahead. That clarity does not shorten the evaluation itself. The timeline stretches even when the outcome is clear. In total, approximately $8 million of opportunities we expected to close in the second quarter slipped for similar reasons. This business has not been lost. We have already closed half of it, and we are making solid progress on the rest. There is a second dynamic we are seeing, which is expected. Our platform pricing offers unlimited users. As more of our base moves to platform, we're seeing less lift from user adds. We are making that trade on purpose.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Usage and value over seat count. It means near-term growth will understate actual demand until platform and AI adoption reach scale. We are winning long-term strategic relationships. RPO grew 17% to over $1.1 billion, clear validation that underlying demand is strong. Nearly 90% of net new business this quarter landed directly on platform pricing. New deal sizes are up 24%. Multi-year commitments were 56% of this quarter's renewal book, up from 45% a year ago. This is a customer base making bigger, longer commitments. Platform adoption is broadening across the base too. Eligible ARR on platform crossed 17%, up from 13% last quarter, and current RPO, the piece we will recognize over the next 12 months, grew 11%. That is the near-term picture. To the period we have just lived through.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

AI is going to be a multi-year transformation in the office of the CFO. I will walk through it in four parts. The context, our platform strategy, the validation showing up with customers, and what we are seeing across the market. On context, the pace of AI, our own product development, and the time we have spent in market has been more intense than anything that ever came before it. Over the past two quarters, we have had hundreds of meetings with CFOs, CAOs, and CTOs, met with capital markets regulators, accounting standard setters, and the leadership of the seven largest global audit firms. We also met with the CEOs of adjacent office of the CFO companies, large European enterprises focused on data sovereignty, BPO firms reinventing themselves, and the frontier labs building the models everyone is working to deploy responsibly.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Those conversations reinforce our confidence in BlackLine's direction and the pace at which we are building. On platform strategy, across these conversations, the same theme kept surfacing. When AI scales, governance must scale with it. Studio 360 is our platform layer for the office of the CFO, and we have embarked on its next evolution to meet that need. We call what it enables agentic financial operations, a model where humans and AI work inside the close, equally visible and equally governed. Here is why this matters. Gartner expects the average Fortune 500 company to be running more than 150,000 AI agents by 2028, up from fewer than 15 last year, and fewer than one in five companies believe they have the governance to manage that scale. That is the gap Studio 360 closes in accounting and finance.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

In June, we unveiled Finance Control Console, the control and governance plane for the office of the CFO. Every agent, regardless of who built it, runs from a single registry, must be BlackLine certified before acting in a live process, and operates inside a policy layer no customer can override. Every action and every human decision writes to an immutable audit trail, so any close can be reconstructed exactly as it happened, working alongside the deterministic rule-bound workflows underneath. That combination is what management teams, auditors, audit committees, and regulators are asking for. The deterministic engine means that all already runs multiple autonomous close workflows simultaneously. Because the governance layer is built independent of any single model, our customers' investment in it only grows more valuable as foundation or open source models change and improve.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

That is what extends our lead over anyone building this from scratch, why BlackLine is the long-term partner for this transformation. We hear this directly. We are in the room with the Big Four audit firms, the standard setters for internal auditors and the regulators who matter most, and their message is consistent. AI cannot be a black box. Every step has to be evidenced. Our models are tested for bias and failure modes and signed off before reaching production, with humans reviewing, approving, overriding, or halting the process at every stage. AI proposes, people decide, and is covered by the same internal controls over financial reporting framework as everything else in the close. That is the kind of trust the CFO requires from the partner behind the financial statements they personally attest to, and that trust takes years to earn. That trust does not happen by assertion alone.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

I want to be clear about where that friction still sits. It is in adoption, not the product. Customers are careful about trusting AI inside close critical accounting processes. Security and risk teams are getting involved earlier in the sales cycle, partly because many regulators still have not finalized guidance for AI. We are not waiting for this to resolve on its own. We expect AIUC-1 certification in September, an independent third-party standard built for AI agent security and reliability. I am proud to say we helped shape this standard as a member of the consortium. That gives customers real upfront validation about BlackLine's trustworthiness. We will go much deeper on all of this at our BeyondTheBlack conference in November. On the validation, here is what our customers are telling us and doing. The Studio360 platform is what our AI runs on, and adoption across our base is now measurable.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Roughly 3,500 of our eligible customers, above 90% of that base, are AI-enabled today, and roughly 3,000, about 77%, are actively using AI in their financial operations. Feature usage reached nearly 13 million actions in the quarter, up over 220% sequentially. Customers are embedding these capabilities into how they close the books every day inside the same controls and audit trails they have trusted us with for years and validating the results through parallel testing. This usage is already showing up in revenue. Verity Prepare alone has been a key lever in more than $20 million of platform ACV to date. A growing number of customers now pay for it directly as a standalone product. That is driving further platform upsell with over 80% of that interest tied to our maturing Verity suite as the primary reason.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Because full access to Verity requires platform pricing, this is exactly why platform ARR is tracking to our 25% full-year target with mega enterprise already above 21%. Platform adoption drives agent adoption, and together, we expect these to contribute at least two points of incremental revenue growth next year on top of the acceleration already visible in our contracted backlog. On the breadth of what is driving growth, we started by embedding generative AI capabilities across the platform, and we have since built a full suite of agentic capabilities natively into that foundation. This suite is a set of complex multi-agent systems working across a customer's full set of accounts. As they run, they are servicing new use cases, hundreds already, with more emerging every month. Each one is a further opportunity to monetize our AI. That surface spans both record to report and invoice to cash.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

New business is where this becomes concrete. Two of our agentic offerings, Verity Accruals and Verity Prepare, show the clearest evidence. This quarter, we closed multiple Verity Accruals deals, including with a multi-billion-dollar U.S. hospital system, a global consumer technology company, and a leading cybersecurity company, alongside a steady stream of mid-market wins. This is one product adopted across every tier of our customer base. Verity Accruals is expanding quickly. We are adding new agents for payroll and prepaid accruals this year, extending into two of the most manual, judgment-heavy parts of the close. Early customers are already closing up to three days faster and spending 80% less time on accruals work. Verity Prepare coordinates a team of specialized agents that ingest documentation, identify reconciling items, and assemble a complete audit-ready package for human sign-off, delivering up to 94% reductions in preparation time.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Customer count grew nearly four-fold quarter-over-quarter. Revenue is not yet material, but growing nicely. The pattern we expect is emerging as customers start narrow and then expand use cases as their confidence builds. Three examples show why this is resonating. One of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world tested whether they could build its record to report workflows on a general purpose LLM. They learned quickly that a model generating suggestions cannot coordinate a full workflow the way our multi-agent architecture does, with the transparency auditors require built in from the start, so the company chose to go deeper with BlackLine instead. Another top-tier pharmaceutical company already live on our intercompany platform is deepening its use of Verity because it is built on a real accounting logic and compliance.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

A major healthcare company converted to platform pricing this quarter to gain full access to capabilities that already seem to work as an early adopter. Three companies, three different reasons, one conclusion. A customer does not need to build a new governance framework to deploy AI in finance because BlackLine already is that framework. Platform pricing is a gate customers pass through to access our agentic capabilities. That is why deepening agent adoption inside an already converted customer is a natural driver of expansion revenue, proof of value that extends platform adoption across that customer's business. Verity Match makes the same case elsewhere in the close. It is in early adopter testing with general availability expected soon. Our rules-based matching solution already resolves most transactions automatically, but the remaining exceptions, a small share of volume, take up a disproportionate amount of time as each one requires manual investigation.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Verity Match targets that tail directly. Running at production volumes with our early adopter customers, it brings total matched transactions, automated and AI resolve combined, to 90% while cutting manual investigation time by roughly 2/3. The same governance model extends into invoice to cash as well. Verity Collect is our multimodal agentic collections offering that is being tested by customers currently. Verity Remit, our agentic remittance agent, is cutting manual effort by more than 95% for our best-performing customers. Verity Remit is on track for general availability this quarter and Verity Collect in the fourth quarter. Our largest partners, such as Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte, EY, and KPMG, have had strong years with BlackLine, building record practice revenue. They see the opportunity to build an evergreen business on our controls layer instead of trying to build their own.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Our relationship with SAP is deepening too, with two milestones expected in the third quarter. We are working to enable platform pricing for SolEx customers, and we expect Verity Accruals and Verity Prepare to retrieve SAP premium qualification. Finally, on the market, the clearest signal is that the largest, most complex enterprises in the world are standardizing on BlackLine as their control layer for finance. And this quarter's wins prove it. We won new customers, including Vodafone and the leading global market data platform. We also expanded major relationships with Royal Dutch Shell, a mega German healthcare company, and a large private telecommunications company. Subsequent to quarter end, we also closed two of the top six largest U.S. banks, both who signed long-term seven-figure deals with BlackLine. Net new business has been a bright spot in the first half.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Verity adoption has been growing across every segment. Platform adoption is scaling fastest with net new business, where customers are landing directly on platform pricing from day one. Platform conversion inside our existing base is moving on each customer's own timeline. Customers are timing their move, often with their renewal date. Many customers want additional proof points before moving, more time in market for our new agentic offerings, a referenceable peer they can point to, and support from their audit committees and auditors. We are now putting our own professionals inside customer environments, building a working proof of concept on the customer's data to overcome reticence. That same conviction in the enterprise extends to the middle market, where our agentic offerings are built for faster time to value with less implementation overhead.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

We are refreshing how we package and price for this segment to match how mid-market companies are evaluating and buying. We also see real opportunity in new markets. Public sector has been a strong area of progress with new deals closed and multiple proofs of concept underway with civilian and defense agencies. In the Middle East, the war has slowed our progress, though we still see it as an attractive market given our infrastructure investments, the depth and breadth of our go-to-market partner network, and continued interest from prospects. To close, I believe this has been the most consequential period in our history. Our agentic financial operations strategy is rapidly maturing. The proof is showing up in real product, real adoption, and real new business. The market has tested us with more scrutiny than ever, scrutiny we are built to meet.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

We are responding with speed, our position is strong. We believe the opportunity for BlackLine is larger now than what we described last year. With that, let me now turn it over to Patrick Villanova.

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

Thank you, Owen. Our second quarter results reflect a business with strong profitability and cash generation, healthy underlying customer economics with a quarter shaped by the deal timing you just walked through. Going a bit deeper on the financials this quarter. Total revenue was $187.8 million, up 9.2%, with subscription revenue growth of 9% and professional services revenue growth of 11%, reflecting strength in go live activity and early AI deployment with customers. ARR grew to $719 million, up 6%, or approximately 7% excluding an approximate one-point FX headwind. Calculated billings grew 6% in the quarter, with trailing 12-month billings growth of 7%. Two factors explain the gap between these metrics and our subscription revenue growth rate. One is timing, tied directly to the deal dynamics Owen just walked through. A number of large strategic deals moved past quarter end, several of which have now closed.

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

The other is tied to our success with platform pricing. As more of our base moves to platform, which is unlimited users, we see less organic lift from user expansion than we've historically experienced. That effect persists until platform and AI adoption scale enough to offset it. Remaining performance obligations, or RPO, which captures the full value of multi-year contracts we are signing, was over $1.1 billion, growing 17%, well ahead of both revenue and ARR growth. Current RPO, the portion we expect to recognize over the next 12 months, grew 11%, also ahead of revenue and ARR. Both are being driven directly by the same dynamic Owen described, larger deal sizes and a higher mix of multi-year renewals. Bigger, longer contracts capture their full value in RPO immediately, while ARR reflects only a single year regardless of contract length.

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

RPO naturally grows faster as deal size and duration increase. Current RPO growth is the best leading indicator we have of where revenue is headed, since it reflects the business already under contract converting over the next 12 months. We expect at least two points of incremental growth from platform conversion and agentic adoption, and that is the mechanics behind our view of exiting this year at double-digit growth, with further acceleration in 2027. Platform ARR as a percentage of eligible ARR grew to over 17%, continuing to track toward our full-year target of 25%, with even stronger traction in the mega enterprise segment, where that figure is now over 21%. Our SolEx channel and broader SAP relationship continue to contribute, and we see further opportunity as platform pricing and premium qualification of our agentic offerings open new avenues into SAP's installed base. SAP was 26% of revenue.

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

Turning to retention and renewal trends. Dollar-based net revenue retention was 102.4%, or approximately 104% normalizing for FX, driven by platform migration and cross-sell of invoice to cash, matching, and journals, offset by lower levels of user adds. Our enterprise revenue renewal rate remains strong at 95%. Middle market logo count this quarter reflected the tail end of a lower mid-market cohort we've discussed in prior quarters. It's tracking as we anticipated, and we expect that to ease further from here. Now let me turn to profitability and cash flow. Non-GAAP gross margin was 80.4%, with non-GAAP subscription gross margin of 83%, continuing to expand as we sunset legacy private data centers and drive further efficiencies in cloud spend. Structural improvements that keep compounding rather than one-time gains.

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

Non-GAAP operating margin was 23.3%, up from 22.1% in the second quarter of last year, driven by disciplined execution and the operating leverage we are building across the business, including efficiency gains from our own use of AI in internal operations. Non-GAAP net income attributable to BlackLine was $42.9 million, with adjusted earnings per share of $0.61. We delivered operating cash flow of $45 million and free cash flow of $36.5 million. We expect stronger free cash flow margins in the second half, resulting in full-year free cash flow growth of approximately 20%. We ended the quarter with approximately $528 million in cash equivalents, and marketable securities versus $667 million in debt. We repurchased 1.2 million shares in the quarter for $38 million, ending the quarter with approximately $180 million of capacity remaining under our existing program.

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

Today, we announced that our board approved an additional $100 million increase in our stock buyback program, bringing our total available capacity to approximately $280 million. Outside of M&A, we expect to use approximately 100% of free cash flow for repurchases over the remainder of the year, generally in line with our pace through the first half. Looking to the back half of the year, several of the deals that slipped out of the second quarter have already closed, and the current RPO growth I just described tells you the underlying contract business continues to convert on schedule. Our pipeline continues to mature with larger, more strategic deals moving through it. Platform conversion and strategic products remain two of the biggest drivers of incremental growth. Several product releases also land in this window.

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

Verity Match reaching general availability, new payroll and prepaid accrual agents, and SAP premium qualification for Verity Accruals and Verity Prepare, along with platform pricing availability for SolEx customers. On FX, back in May, we called out a modest revenue headwind of $1 million-$2 million for the year. Exchange rates have moved further against us since, and we now expect roughly another $1 million on top of that, concentrated in the back half of the year. Even so, our third quarter and full year revenue guidance ranges still imply exiting this year at double-digit growth with this incremental headwind absorbed. Now onto guidance for the third quarter. We expect total GAAP revenue to be in the range of $193 million-$195 million, representing 8.3%-9.4% growth. We expect non-GAAP operating margin to be in the range of 24.5%-25.5%.

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

We expect non-GAAP net income attributable to BlackLine to be in a range of $45 million-$47 million, or $0.62 to $0.65 on a per share basis on approximately 74.5 million diluted weighted average shares. For the full year 2026, we are maintaining our range for total GAAP revenue of $765 million-$769 million, representing 9.2%-9.8% growth. We expect non-GAAP operating margin to be in the range of 24.1%-24.6%. We expect non-GAAP net income attributable to BlackLine to be $177 million-$182 million, or $2.47-$2.54 on a per share basis on approximately 74 million diluted weighted average shares. Operator, we are ready for questions.

Operator

Thank you. At this time, we will conduct the question and answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Chris Quintero of Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Chris Quintero
Chris Quintero
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Hey, Owen. Hey, Patrick. Thanks for taking the questions here. I wanted to ask about the friction in adoption that you all called out. Makes a lot of sense given this is very important software touching financial systems and data. From your perspective, what do you think you can do or have been doing to help speed up some of the adoption on your end?

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Yeah, I think, Chris, first of all, good to hear you. I think the short thing is if you go back and who we're talking with, right? We're working with the audit firms, we're working with the regulators, we're working with the internal audit standard setters. Obviously, we're working with our customers, working with implementation partners, and then working with the customers themselves on what they need to move forward. When I said in the prepared remarks, the amount of time we're really spending in the market with all those different constituencies, because all of them have their interests aligned to some degree, but they all have different responsibilities in how they fulfill those responsibilities.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

For us, what's been critical is being in the room, really showing, and Jeremy's been the one driving that along with Patrick, how our AI works and how it doesn't need to be a black box. We can show all that transparency through what we call a glass box, so that you can see the human in the loop. You can see the chain of thought. You can see the tens of thousands of transactions we keep running to show that we can get to the same answer over and over under different scenarios. I think that's what's really trying to prove the comfort and confidence that our customers are looking for.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

I think the thing that we're seeing is a building belief in the reliability of what BlackLine can provide and control for our customers and the various constituencies that need to sign off on the financial statement. That's it at its core.

Chris Quintero
Chris Quintero
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Got it. That's helpful, Owen. Then on those deal elongations that you're seeing, can you remind us what a typical deal cycle looks like for you all, and how does the new deal cycle look like today? How much more elongated is it versus your prior ones?

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Yeah. Chris, I mean, we typically, in the enterprise space, we talk about nine months to a year

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

These are not the most precise numbers, but you could say that the deal cycle is elongated by another 40, 45 days based upon the work we're seeing. That's just an average, but some of them could be longer, some of them could be a little bit quicker. Again, really what's driving it is, more than anything else, you have, in essence, a new technology in the marketplace and all the people on the buy side from the customer, there's people asking new kinds of questions truly around how do we govern our AI? How do we use the different models? How do we protect their data? How do we think about sovereignty as they cross borders? How do we think about if there's political disruption where models can't be used in certain geographies?

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

There's more questions now about the vulnerability because of AI-enabled hacking and how are our defenses and security around all that. The good thing is these are things we're well built to answer and respond to, but it does take more time as customers are asking those questions. The big deal that we described, that we're just still working through the final terms on, is a perfect example. We literally had a war room put together with the customer and ourselves trying to work through everything through June 30. It's now August 3 and we still got a few things that we're working our way through, and everybody wants to get it done, but there's just safety protocols everybody's sort of thinking about. I don't think this is permanent, by the way. I just think that there's a learning experience that customers are going through.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

We certainly have learned a lot. We're equipping our teams with responses that they can bring to the market to sort of short-circuit some of these additional questions that are coming through because we now know what the issues are. Quite frankly, even if the customer doesn't know what the issues are, we're trying to bring those more front and center so that they know what they should be asking about and thinking about, and then why BlackLine is very reliable and trustworthy in that process.

Chris Quintero
Chris Quintero
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Excellent. Appreciate the color, Owen.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Steve Enders of Citi. Your line is now open.

Steve Enders
Steve Enders
Analyst at Citi

Okay, great. Thanks for taking the questions here, and maybe just kind of following on the prior questions from Chris, but I guess, as we think about the year coming together and the deal delays, I guess, how do you kind of have confidence in the challenges on the deal side, maybe stabilizing or improving and that we're not at a time where the deals keep on slipping? I guess, in your conversations, what gives confidence in that maybe being stable now?

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Look, Steve, I wish I could tell you we know exactly it's stable. That's why we said predicting things is just a little bit harder. That said, I think, again, when we look at our pipelines at third quarter and the fourth quarter, the lessons we learned, where we are in the stages of closing those deals, and then the bottoms-up review that Stuart Van Houten and his team run on every deal across all segments of the business around all geographies and by industries, it gives us a pretty good confidence of what we expect to happen on the back half of the year. I think we're seeing some good things around our customers' interest in our AI capabilities.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

You can sort of see some of the additional confidence, and I know, I think when I was reading one of your notes where you've got some proof points that you've seen in the market, but our customers are really responding positively. Our implementation partners have really been invaluable in helping us continue to iterate and improve what we're bringing into the marketplace. I think that's all showing up really well in what our customers are looking for. I do think you're starting to see a little bit more confidence in firms like BlackLine and what we bring, and I don't want to say that the fever's completely broken, where everybody wanted to build something themselves that we saw in the first half of the year, but the fever has come down dramatically more.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

I think as we, certainly for us, can articulate our value proposition on a build versus a buy, that shows up pretty well. I think we feel pretty good about what we're trying to do in the back half of the year. Patrick, anything you want to add to that?

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

I guess, to put some data behind that too, Steve, and it's good to hear from you. Even looking back in March at some of the deals that slipped then and the time it took to close them subsequent to March, and then looking again at June 30 at a different list of slipped deals, and we've already closed half of them. We're all collectively, to Owen's point, getting smarter about this. We're getting more diligent. We're short-circuiting some of the, to use his words, some of the questions that are coming. While we're still seeing some deal slippage, we're getting better at closing them after the quarter, and that window is shortening, that timeframe is shortening.

Steve Enders
Steve Enders
Analyst at Citi

No, that's very clear there. Maybe just in terms of top of funnel and opportunities coming through, how is that maybe progressing? I guess as we think about the AI opportunity and people assessing, went through those assessments, does that have any impact in terms of the opportunities that you might be seeing coming through at this time?

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Yeah. I don't have the July data, but through the end of June, our pipeline has never been more robust. It's skewing more towards mega enterprise and enterprise than it is mid-market. That's more of a global phenomena than just, say, a North American phenomena from what I've seen. You're starting to continuing to see things moving through the pipeline. I think we feel really good and confident about the top of the funnel. I think for us, again, now is the issue in the back half of the year is to continue to find ways to accelerate those close dates.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

I think the team is doing all the things that they should be doing. Obviously, it takes a few people to work through this on the customer side as well. I think from a pipeline perspective, the positioning we have, particularly in the enterprise and the mega enterprise space, we like where we're at. Again, I think gives us quiet confidence as we head into the back half of the year.

Steve Enders
Steve Enders
Analyst at Citi

Okay, perfect. Good to hear. Thanks for taking the questions.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Thanks, Steve.

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

Thanks, Steve.

Operator

Our next question comes from Rob Oliver of Baird. Your line is now open.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Hey, Rob.

Rob Oliver
Rob Oliver
Analyst at Baird

Great. Hey, guys. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. I had two. Patrick, I'll start with you. On the overall RPO number, definitely a really nice leading indicator there on deal activity. I know you said that agents are going to deliver, I think you said a couple of points, in the growth going forward. As you're looking at those longer-term contracts coming in here, particularly with new customers where you're having a lot of success with the new model, how are you accounting for the agentic elements? How are customers accounting for those consumption-based elements around some of your products and how do you get comfort around that contribution? And then I have a follow-up for Owen.

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

Rob, thank you. I appreciate the question. Rob, you're absolutely right. The RPO story right now, 17% year-over-year growth is a great story. It's not just indicative in terms of that we're landing larger deals, that our average deal size is up 24% year-over-year, but we're landing longer-term deals as well. Customers want to be part of the finance transformation. Existing customers that have been with us for years, they're renewing for longer periods of time. They're inspired, they're interested, they're intrigued by the product offerings that we have out there. I can say this, that in that 17%, there's not a material amount, in terms of future agentic revenue. All of our customers that are signing new right now, we are discussing that with them.

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

As we said in the prepared remarks, we saw a 4x increase in the number of customers on Verity, and we have now proof points in terms of the monetization of our agentic revenue. That only represents a tailwind for us, and that RPO number will only grow with that tailwind into the future.

Rob Oliver
Rob Oliver
Analyst at Baird

Great. That's helpful. Okay, thanks. Owen, this could be for you or for Patrick, bit of a follow-up. Clearly new customers are embracing the new model here. You guys have done a really good job, I think, of showcasing the value to new customers. There still appears to be some tension around existing customers. I think part of that is clearly because of the SAP SolEx, which could be a potential unlock here for existing customers. I know you said you're not forcing customers onto the new model, so a lot of cajoling happening. Can you maybe talk a little bit about, as you're meeting with customers, you've got some very loyal long-term customers. What some of the pushback points are right now? Are those renewals or negotiations being brought to RFP?

Rob Oliver
Rob Oliver
Analyst at Baird

Are there any additional tensions that are coming in around that process with some of your strong multi-year customer relationships as they consider the new model? Thanks.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Yeah, thanks, Rob. I think Patrick and I will tag team this a little bit. No, we don't have our customers going out for RFP, so that's not really the issue. You're right that there is some things around SolEx that make this a little bit unique, but we try to sort of talk about the eligible pool for going to platform versus the part that's not. I think there's a couple things that certainly come out. One is, our customers, if they're pretty well adopted, there's always this push of, well, how much more am I going to get out of this? Show us more proof point on your roadmap, show us other examples. They're sometimes just taking a little bit longer to win over their hearts and minds, if you will, from what we've seen.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Sometimes it's just where these customers are on their own journey and all their other competing priorities. Even though they might want to increase their commitment to BlackLine, because of some of the other things they're doing in their technology shop, they're not going to take advantage of that yet. They're just sitting there saying, "We don't need this right now." While I don't love that answer, I respect and understand that that's some of the things that they think through. Patrick, you're also dealing with this every day with Stuart and the team as well. Anything to add?

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

Yeah, Rob, I would add, in terms of our existing customer base, and the uptake of the platform, that headwind was more of a 2025 story, and we saw that dissipate by the end of 2025. Right now, as the story has gone from unlimited users to product led, the level of intrigue and interest is increasing notably. That's why we feel so confident that we're going to get to 25% of eligible ARR by the end of this year, and we're exactly where we want to be as of June 30. The model is holding together, the forecast is holding together. It's proving out to be true, and we continue to see that acceleration in the existing base as Jeremy and his team release more and more products, solutions, and agents within the platform that our customers are interested in, our existing customers.

Rob Oliver
Rob Oliver
Analyst at Baird

Very helpful. Thank you both.

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

Thanks.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Patrick Walravens of Citizens. Your line is now open.

Patrick Walravens
Patrick Walravens
Analyst at Citizens

Oh, great. Thank you. Owen, can you talk a little bit more about what exactly you guys mean by a sovereign cloud?

Patrick Walravens
Patrick Walravens
Analyst at Citizens

I mean, it was a company, not a country, right? Just what are the requirements there and how many of these kinds of opportunities are out there?

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Yeah, I'm going to let Jeremy take the lead on this one. Go ahead, Jeremy, please.

Jeremy Ung
Jeremy Ung
CTO at BlackLine

Sovereign cloud really refers to the need to have data sovereignty. Customers we're increasingly seeing wanting their data to be fully within the borders of a country. Sovereign cloud deployments allow us to deploy our solution into that environment, ensure that no data leaves, ensuring that AI solutions and other software are fully hosted in that environment. You can think of it like FedRAMP and other federal markets, but for other countries and other regions of the world.

Patrick Walravens
Patrick Walravens
Analyst at Citizens

Okay. Are there a lot of these?

Jeremy Ung
Jeremy Ung
CTO at BlackLine

I would say the appetite has increased due to geopolitical events, and so you're seeing increasing desires to have control over data. It has been a trend over several years. That has been increasing over several years. The other is around AI models. AI model selection, which is why we are model agnostic, has also been a topic for discussion where people want to be able to understand where their data is used, ensure it doesn't leave their country to meet compliance requirements in other areas. You'll see this in a lot of regulated industries.

Patrick Walravens
Patrick Walravens
Analyst at Citizens

All right. If I could follow up, and hopefully this is related, but in the prepared remarks, there's a comment about meeting with lots of CEOs and there was a comment there about the Frontier labs building the models.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Yes.

Patrick Walravens
Patrick Walravens
Analyst at Citizens

What's the nature of those meetings and conversations?

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Well, it's basically, if you think about it, when you're thinking about the conversations around build versus buy, obviously the Frontier labs, they provide the tokens, the opportunity to build things, and what we bring, obviously, is all the institutional knowledge of how this works. I think we're seeing the opportunity to help drive more speed to value for customers, the ability to reduce risk as customers are trying to do this, helping them figure out the best way to get the best return in the most cost-effective way. I think as the Frontier labs think about what they do, is they provide that sort of raw material that can be used in creating of agents.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

What we do is help create the right way to build those agents in a very controlled and governed way and do that with customers directly as well as with our large system integrator partners, and we expect as well to be doing with our BPO partners. That's just part of it. Jeremy and I've been doing these conversations together. Jeremy, anything you want to add?

Jeremy Ung
Jeremy Ung
CTO at BlackLine

Yeah. I think a large part of where AI adoption going is really in finance and accounting, there are critical workloads that need to have controls, governance, and auditability. You need to be able to reproduce those outputs on requests for auditors. They need to be immutable. I think if you look at what these Frontier models provide, they provide part of that equation, but they don't provide the auditability. They don't provide the governance, they don't provide those controls, and that's where we come in. Those partnerships are critical to unlock more AI adoption in the office of the CFO in finance and accounting.

Patrick Walravens
Patrick Walravens
Analyst at Citizens

Okay. That's helpful. Thank you.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Thanks, Pat.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Alex Sklar of Raymond James. Your line is now open.

John Kloecker
John Kloecker
Analyst at Raymond James

Thanks for taking the question. This is John on for Alex. I know it has been touched on quite a bit, but maybe, Owen, on the sales cycles, what do you think can change heading into the second half to maybe close some of those deals? I know you just called out broader complexity leading to the elongation, but any more commonality, maybe geographical differences or customer size dynamics that you are seeing differences in elongation with sales cycles? I have a quick follow-up.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

The elongation is definitely concentrated higher up in the market. The bigger the company, the more people in the room, the more questions, the more checks and hurdles that we are working our way through. As I think about whether it is North America, Europe, Japan, the rest of Asia Pac, I am not sure that we are seeing anything really different materially. Certainly between Japan, Europe, and North America, I think those standards are continuing to be very high as to what we have to meet. I think a lot of this, Alex, is us continuing to work and educate the buyers about how, again, it works within BlackLine. Then us just getting smarter to accelerate our ability to respond to those questions, both holistically, whether it is by industry or geography, to your point, or comparable size.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

I mean, there is just a whole bunch of things that we are learning each and every time. As we learn things in the field, we bring it back to the center and then try to get it back out to our teams so they can be that much more effective and efficient as they are working with prospective customers and existing customers.

John Kloecker
John Kloecker
Analyst at Raymond James

Great. Thanks. That was a helpful call there. I wanted to ask on the mid-market headwinds you have been facing, are we getting close to a point where those dynamics begin to reverse? Can you remind us what is sort of embedded in the outlook, and do you still expect to be through this dynamic as we exit 2026? Thanks.

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

Alex, just you cut out briefly there, you're referring to the mid-market?

John Kloecker
John Kloecker
Analyst at Raymond James

The mid-market.

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

Yeah. Alex, everything is playing out as we expected, as it relates to the mid-market, the lower mid-market. Just to be clear. We tracked that cohort of customers very carefully over the last three years. We see that built into the outlook, or it is built into the outlook for the remainder of 2026, and we see that rate of churn amongst the lower mid-market dissipating or slowing down as we exit 2026. It is playing out as we forecasted or as we have been monitoring it, that is built into the guide and for next year and beyond.

John Kloecker
John Kloecker
Analyst at Raymond James

Thank you very much.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Thanks, John.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Lucky Shriner of D.A. Davidson. Your line is now open.

Lucky Shriner
Lucky Shriner
Analyst at D.A. Davidson

Great. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask about acquisition of WiseLayer and how we should think about how their more complex agent capabilities and able to handle those more challenging judgment-based tasks are trending so far with customers, given your commentary around AI scrutiny from customers in terms of the deal cycle, and how we should think about that moving forward. Thanks.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Just a couple of things. Again, Jeremy and I are tag-teaming this. First of all, I don't think we could be any more pleased with the acquisition of WiseLayer. I think their team has been a phenomenal addition to the organization. I think on the go-to-market side of this, I'll ask Jeremy to talk about the product side. It takes a couple cycles to work your way through learning what the customers are looking for. I know one of the big improvements we wanted to make was linking the accruals capabilities to our journal solution, which was very important, we learned, in the enterprise space as we were moving forward.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

The pipeline for that part of our business has grown quite nicely in the second quarter as our own teams get more comfortable with its capabilities, but also as the WiseLayer team has a little bit of time to breathe and get out in the market and do some of the things that we were asking them to do. Net, we have a board meeting this week. I think we're going to tell the board we're very pleased with the acquisition so far. Not satisfied with what we think we can still do, but overall positive. Jeremy, you want to talk about the product side?

Jeremy Ung
Jeremy Ung
CTO at BlackLine

On the product side, the WiseLayer team has been a great catalyst, being able to seed those agentic AI capabilities and expand them throughout our portfolio. They have helped us accelerate that, not just in the capabilities themselves, but in also how we work and how we write code. In terms of their capabilities, it's also been great to be able to marry up their agentic capabilities in the accrual space with our mature capabilities and controls like journaling. Those two combined give people the confidence that these agentic capabilities can be done safely, provide real ROI, but we also get the benefit of fast time to value from accruals and those agentic implementations, in addition to the existing mature BlackLine capabilities that we've now integrated them together with.

Lucky Shriner
Lucky Shriner
Analyst at D.A. Davidson

Great. I appreciate that. Maybe the last one from me, just on the enterprise renewal rate ticking down slightly to 95%. Was that mainly just from the push to deals? Were there some FX headwinds in there? With some of those deals now closing, should we expect that to bounce back next quarter? Thanks.

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

No, that metric, just to be clear, is not impacted by FX, the 95% renewal rate. There's a little bit of rounding there, 95 versus 96, but we have modeled that out over the next year, and we feel very confident that it'll be at the mid to upper 90s for the foreseeable future. We feel very confident in that metric. We like where it is. Just to be clear, the slipped deals would impact DBNRR, but would not impact GRR or the revenue renewal rate.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Thanks, Patrick.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Tomer Zilberman of Bank of America. Your line is now open.

Tomer Zilberman
Tomer Zilberman
Research Analyst at Bank of America

Hey, guys. Maybe wanted to ask a similar question along the lines of the deal slippage. I think you said earlier that half of the deals that slipped in Q2 now closed in Q3. If I look at the guidance for Q3 and the implied guide for 4Q, the results are largely in line with street expectations. I guess the question is, what's the timing between the closing of the deals and when you actually see them start showing up in the results? Do you think that as you continue to close the other half of the deals, that that could provide potential upside to back half expectations this year? Or would that be more of an opportunity for 2027?

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

Thanks for the question. The story there in terms of the guide for Q3 and the remainder of the year is largely FX. Back in May, when we were bridging to our original guide that we laid out at the beginning of the year in February, we calculated or identified about a $1 million-$2 million revenue headwind. Since May, based upon where FX rates were at the end of the quarter, there's about another $1 million FX headwind as a result of the strengthening of the U.S. dollar, given several market factors. Our guide that we laid out in February was able to absorb that FX headwind, which is a testament to our underlying performance and what we're doing in the market.

Patrick Villanova
Patrick Villanova
CFO at BlackLine

To your question, there is an element there that these slipped deals, whether they're a month or two months or so, you do lose a month or two of revenue. That is a subset or a minor part of the story as compared to FX. Lastly, as these deals close throughout the remainder of 2026 in Q3, that absolutely is a tailwind for 2027 because you get the full revenue impact next year.

Tomer Zilberman
Tomer Zilberman
Research Analyst at Bank of America

Thank you.

Operator

I am showing no further questions at this time. I would like to now turn it back to Owen Ryan, Chief Executive Officer of BlackLine.

Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan
CEO at BlackLine

Thank you, operator, and thank you, everybody, for listening today. We truly appreciate your interest in BlackLine, and we look forward to talking to you soon. Take care. Thank you.

Executives
    • Matt Humphreys
      Matt Humphreys
      SVP of Investor Relations
    • Owen Ryan
      Owen Ryan
      CEO
    • Patrick Villanova
      Patrick Villanova
      CFO
    • Jeremy Ung
      Jeremy Ung
      CTO
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