Alkami J.P. Morgan TMC Conference Takeaways

Research evidence excerpt

Alkami J.P. Morgan TMC Conference Takeaways

alone MANTL (~3-year contracts). Management said that the company

would not change the 2-3% forecast even after sustained outperformance.

Hudson directed investors to ARR growth (22% in Q1 2026) as the cleaner metric,

unaffected by termination fee noise or MANTL timing , and confirmed it is what

the go-to-market organization manages to internally.

• AI enthusiasm coupled by rising AI costs. CEO Alex emphasized that digital

banking is the system of record that captures each institution's interpretation of

regulatory requirements, money movement rules, and risk decisions, creating a

layer of codified, institution-specific business logic that cannot be replicated by

a public LLM. The average customer spends ~$800K/year on digital banking,

equivalent to 2-4 employees, making it economically irrational for institutions to

vibe-code their own system. Customers are thinking of AI in terms of making

more loans, attracting more deposits, reducing backend costs, and improving

fraud detection, not in terms of rebuilding digital banking. The company has built

several AI products including a prompt-driven code generator trained on 8

million lines of customer-created SDK code. Management noted high customer

enthusiasm at the recent user conference, but willingness to pay has been a

challenge as institutions balk at $10-20K/month pricing for capabilities that

superficially resemble what they can access for free via ChatGPT, even though

Alkami's product is trained on proprietary platform code. CEO Alex highlighted

that the industry is currently paying approximately 2% of the true cost of tokens,

and expressed concern about what happens to margins if customers adopt at scale.