BlackLine, Inc. Common Stock Citi’s 2026 Global TMT Conference

Good to go? Oh, wow.

Yeah. Thanks, Steve. We have been on a rapid journey to transform the business. Three years ago, roughly, when I stepped into the role, we did a complete refresh of our strategy, where we wanted to go, focus on certain parts of the market to really be more selective about the customers we chose to do business with, the industries, the geographies, the ERP partners, the system integrators. We did a lot of what I would call choices in and choices out. That served us pretty well as we moved through the last couple of years. We really got our innovation back in motion when we brought our founder back into the business, who drove a lot of that, including stuff around Studio360 and then expanding the platform to be even more complete around financial close.

I think we were smart that we had some insight as to the possibilities of AI and what that could bring for us. In some ways, we were ahead of the curve. In other ways, the market's moved so quick, we're still trying to make sure that we're the relevant player in that. Importantly, one of the big things that we'll be sharing at our BeyondTheBlack conference in November, and we've sort of hinted at it already a little bit, is our Finance Control Console, which will really provide sort of complete governance around AI in the office of the CFO, which is something that our customers and our partners and the BPO partners have been talking to us about.

Like how can we help to orchestrate and manage all that workflow, not only for what BlackLine builds, but for what maybe some of our partners and our customers also build. So that's some big things that are coming. We've got a lot to share. But we feel pretty good about the position that we have in the marketplace.

There's a lot to unpack there.

Yeah. First of all, our pipeline's never been more robust.

And our pipeline is more robust at the upper end of the market. So mega enterprise, upper end of the mid-market, which are the places that we're really trying to drive our success. So we feel good about the situation with opportunities. Our deal cycle has always been relatively long. 12 months is not uncommon for what we do. It has elongated in the first 7-plus months of the year. Part of that was driven first by build versus buy. All of a sudden, everybody had bought a lot of tokens last year at the end of the year, and they were trying to figure out, "Well, can I just buy code, my financial close, preparation of my financial statements?" And so there was a lot of what do we do around that.

For us, we spent more time with CIOs and CFOs, controllers, and their teams talking about the pros and cons of trying to build versus buy. You have now seen a lot more in the marketplace around when you should build versus when you should buy, which stacks up well for us because you shouldn't really be trying to build financial close and consolidation capability. That certainly was a big piece. The other thing that's really happened is companies are afraid of AI at a certain level. They want to embrace it, but they're also a bit unsure of how to unleash it in their organization. CIOs certainly played a bigger role. Chief legal officer is much more involved in conversations beyond the normal sort of agreements that we get into.

We have run into a number of bigger companies now have AI czars who are trying to figure out what that role is. We have been asked to provide much more clarity around our own AI governance, how we build things, and making sure that we're not going to build something that gets unleashed in our customer's systems and goes crazy. All that has added to the complexity of getting deals done. What do we do to try to respond to that, right? In the first quarter, we were sort of, "Okay, what does this all mean?" We did a lot of work educating our people on build versus buy. The second quarter, which is really now into the third quarter, much more work around talking to our customers early on like, "Hey, here's what we're seeing.

Here's the questions you should be asking." So we have the answers for it, right?